War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  I looked at three sets of mapped data. One, my multi-dimensional analysis of Vaults A through D, was comprehensive and detailed. My second set of data was clear but had a significant blank space. The third set was only suggested by shadowy lines, but the overall shape was clear.

  “Sir?”

  “Sergeant, can you set up two totally encrypted commlink calls, one to the Scheherezade and one by ansible to Sel Ouie University on 18-Alpha? Yes, I know that officially you can’t do that, but you know everybody everywhere . . . can you do it? It’s vitally important, Ruhan. I can’t tell you how important!”

  Lu gazed at me from his ruddy, honest face. He did indeed know everyone. A Navy lifer, and with all the amiability and human contacts that I lacked. And he trusted me. I could feel that unaccustomed warmth, like a small and steady fire.

  “I think I can do that, sir.”

  He did. I spoke first to Dalo, then to Forrest Jamili. He sent a packet of encrypted information. I went back to my data, working feverishly. Then I made a second encrypted call to Dalo. She said simply, “Yes. Susan says yes, of course she can. They all can.”

  “Dalo, find out when the next ship docks with the Scheherezade. If it’s today, book passage on it, no matter where it’s going. If there’s no ship today, then buy a seat on a supply shuttle and—”

  “Those cost a fortune!”

  “I don’t care. Just—”

  “Jon, the supply shuttles are all private contractors and they charge civilians a—it would wipe out everything we’ve saved and—why? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t explain now.” I heard boots marching along the corridor to the vault. “Just do it! Trust me, Dalo! I’ll find you when I can!”

  “Captain,” an MP said severely, “come with me.” His weapon was drawn, and behind him stood a detail of grim-faced soldiers. Lu stepped forward, but I shot him a glance that said Say nothing! This is mine alone!

  Good soldier that he was, he understood, and he obeyed. It was, after all, the first time I had ever given him a direct—if wordless—order, the first time I had assumed the role of commander.

  My mother should have been proud.

  Her office resembled my quarters, rather than the vaults: a trapezoidal, low-ceilinged room with alien art etched on all the stone walls. The room held the minimum of furniture. General Anson stood alone behind her desk, a plain military-issue camp item, appropriate to a leader who was one with the ranks, don’t you know. She did not invite me to sit down. The MPs left—reluctantly, it seemed to me—but, then, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she could break me bare-knuckled if necessary.

  She said, “You made two encrypted commlink calls and one encrypted ansible message from this facility, all without proper authorization. Why?”

  I had to strike before she got to me, before I went under. I blurted, “I know why you blocked my access to the meteor-deflection data.”

  She said nothing, just went on gazing at me from those eyes that could chill glaciers.

  “There was no deflection of that meteor. The meteor wasn’t on our tracking system because Humans haven’t spent much time in this sector until now. You caught a lucky break, and whatever deflection records exist now, you added after the fact. Your so-called victory was a sham.” I watched her face carefully, hoping for . . . what? Confirmation? Outraged denial that I could somehow believe? I saw neither. And, of course, I was flying blind. Captain Susan Finch had told Dalo only that yes, of course officers had access to the deflection records; they were a brilliant teaching tool for tactical strategy. I was the only one who’d been barred from them, and the general must have had a reason for that. She always had a reason for everything.

  Still she said nothing. Hoping that I would utter even more libelous statements against a commanding officer? Would commit even more treason? I could feel my breathing accelerate, my heart start to pound.

  I said, “The Teli must have known the meteor’s trajectory; they’ve colonized 149-Delta a long time. They let it hit their base. And I know why. The answer is in the art.”

  Still no change of expression. She was stone. But she was listening.

  “The answer is in the art—ours and theirs. I ansibled Forrest Jamili last night—no, look first at these diagrams—no, first—”

  I was making a mess of it as the seizure moved closer. Not now not now not in front of her . . .

  Somehow I held myself together, although I had to wrench my gaze away from her to do it. I pulled the holocube from my pocket, activated it, and projected it on the stone wall. The Teli etchings shimmered, ghostly, behind the laser colors of my data.

  “This is a phase-space diagram of Ebenfeldt equations using input about the frequency of Teli art creation. We have tests now, you know, that can date any art within weeks of its creation by pinpointing when the raw materials were altered. A phase-state diagram is how we model bifurcated behaviors grouped around two attractors. What that means is that the Teli created their art in bursts, with long fallow periods between bursts when . . . no, wait, General, this is relevant to the war!”

  My voice had risen to a shriek. I couldn’t help it. Contempt rose off her like heat. But she stopped her move toward the door.

  “This second phase-space diagram is Teli attack behavior. Look . . . it inverts the first diagrams! They attack viciously for a while, and during that time virtually no Teli creates art at all . . . Then when some tipping point is reached, they stop attacking or else attack only ineffectively, like the last raid here. They’re . . . waiting. And if the tipping point—this mathematical value—isn’t reached fast enough, they sabotage their own bases, like letting the meteor hit 149-Delta. They did it in the battle outside 16-Beta and in the Q-Sector massacre . . . you were there! When the mathematical value is reached—when enough of them have died—they create art like crazy but don’t wage war. Not until the art reaches some other hypothetical mathematical value that I think is this second attractor. Then they stop creating art and go back to war.”

  “You’re saying that periodically their soldiers just curl up and let us kill them?” she spat at me. “The Teli are damned fierce fighters, Captain—I know that even if the likes of you never will. They don’t just whimper and lie down on the floor.”

  Kai lanu kai lanu . . .

  “It’s a . . . a religious phenomenon, Forrest Jamili thinks. I mean, he thinks their art is a form of religious atonement—all of their art. That’s its societal function, although the whole thing may be biologically programmed as well, like the deaths of lemmings to control population. The Teli can take only so much dying, or maybe even only so much killing, and then they have to stop and . . . and restore what they see as some sort of spiritual balance. And they loot our art because they think we must do the same thing. Don’t you see—they were collecting our art to try to analyze when we will stop attacking and go fallow! They assume we must be the same as them, just—”

  “No warriors stop fighting for a bunch of weakling artists!”

  “—just as you assume they must be the same as us.”

  We stared at each other.

  I said, “As you have always assumed that everyone should be the same as you. Mother.”

  “You’re doing this to try to discredit me, aren’t you,” she said evenly. “Anyone can connect any dots in any statistics to prove whatever they wish. Everybody knows that. You want to discredit my victory because such a victory will never come to you. Not to the sniveling, back-stabbing coward who’s been a disappointment his entire life. Even your wife is worth ten of you—at least she doesn’t crumple under pressure.”

  She moved closer, closer to me than I could ever remember her being, and every one of her words hammered on the inside of my head, my eyes, my chest.

  “You got yourself assigned here purposely to embarrass me, and now you want to go farther and ruin me. It’s not going to happen, soldier, do you hear me? I’m not going to be made a laughing stock by you again, the way I was in every
officer’s club during your whole miserable adolescence and—”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I went under, seizing and screaming.

  It is two days later. I lie in the medical bay of the Scheherezade, still in orbit around 149-Delta. My room is locked, but I am not in restraints. Crazy, under arrest, but not violent. Or perhaps the General is simply hoping I’ll kill myself and save everyone more embarrassment.

  Downside, in Vault D, Lu is finishing crating the rest of the looted Human art, all of which is supposed to be returned to its rightful owners. The Space Navy serving its galactic citizens. Maybe the art will actually be shipped out in time.

  My holo cube was taken from me. I imagine that all my data has been wiped from the base’s and ship’s deebees as well, or maybe just classified as severely restricted. In that case, no one cleared to look at it, which would include only top line officers, is going to open files titled “Teli Art Creation.” Generals have better things to do.

  But Forrest Jamili has copies of my data and my speculations.

  Phase-state diagrams bring order out of chaos. Some order, anyway. This is, interestingly, the same thing that art does. It is why, looking at one of Dalo’s mutomati works, I can be moved to tears. By the grace, the balance, the redemption from chaos of the harsh raw materials of life.

  Dalo is gone. She left on the supply ship when I told her to. My keepers permitted a check of the ship’s manifest to determine that. Dalo is safe.

  I will probably die in the coming Teli attack, along with most of the Humans both on the Scheherezade and on 149-Delta. The Teli fallow period for this area of space is coming to an end. For the last several months, there have been few attacks by Teli ships, and those few badly executed. Months of frenetic creation of art, including all those etchings on the stone walls of the Citadel. Did I tell General Anson how brand-new all those hand-made etchings are? I can’t remember. She didn’t give me time to tell her much.

  Although it wouldn’t have made any difference. She believes that war and art are totally separate activities, one important and one trivial, whose life lines never converge. The General, too, will probably die in the coming attack. She may or may not have time to realize that I was right.

  But that doesn’t really matter any more, either. And, strangely, I’m not at all afraid. I have no signs of going under, no breathing difficulties, no shaking, no panic. And only one real regret: that Dalo and I did not get to gaze together at the Sistine Chapel on Terra. But no one gets everything. I have had a great deal: Dalo, art, even some possible future use to humanity if Forrest does the right thing with my data. Many people never get so much.

  The ship’s alarms begin to sound, clanging loud even in the medical bay.

  The Teli are back, resuming their war.

  Have You Any Wool

  Alan DeNiro

  You killed your first wolf when you were fifteen. You were a cabiner aboard the Queen’s Gambit Declined, a cutter that wended among the Li Po islets. The craggy shorelines were always curtained in cold fog. The fog would whisper about a dead past. The archipelago wasn’t safe for trappers and fishers. Cutters tried to make them safe. The thought of families settling down, building homes and living amidst the shoals and tall firs, was ludicrous to you. You understood that most of the worlds were unassailable to civilization.

  You served meals, cleaned guns, inventoried supplies. But that wasn’t why the crew tolerated you, and the captain prized you.

  Queen’s Gambit Declined had a guardian. A shepherd, if you will. A narwhal that the crew had nicknamed Jetty—but you knew that its real name was Arborfeint. An intuition of yours, that name. You had a concord with Arborfeint, spoke in its tongue, transmitted the creature’s scrimmed language back to the captain. It was unclear why the narwhal tagged along, but one thing was clear—it hated wolves, and told you so in prophetic tones. When it spoke to you of wolves, it would thrash furiously in the icy water and its spiraled horn would, to your eyes, burn bright in the whitecaps. When you squinted into the waves, you weren’t entirely sure what was real and what was not.

  The crow-boy noticed with his binoculars a freshly ruined settlement, in a frail clearing about a half-kilometer in the interior of a nearby island. It was called Archangel. It was still smoldering; the wolf tracks would be fresh. Some might have even still been rummaging through the supplies, trying to figure out what they could use.

  You were surprised when the captain requested your presence on the reconnaissance. She ignored the hue and cry and chose only two others, twins named Pasiphae and Kyrie from New Scythia, who were ambidextrous and good with alien knives. The captain trusted them, and apparently trusted you too.

  Arborfeint skittered around the gray rowboat as it was lowered from the Queen’s Gambit Declined, into the chop and salt of the tide. The twins began rowing. The quartz-strewn coast of Archangel swarmed with legions of black flies large as your thumbnail. Thousands of black thumbnails hovered. You could see them a ways off, sparkling like coal, waiting for you, so you cinctured your cloak tighter.

  You were fifteen, after all.

  The War With Wolves revolved around a series of metonymous parallaxes and chiads. The contours of the conflict, over the course of ninety years and more than fifty worlds both within the Parameter and without, were more lyrical than narrative. The reckoning of casualties, however brutal, was always a graceful disaster. For example, five thousand telepaths in the destruction of New Scythia pulled their minerva cloaks tighter to create a planet-wide song, and still perished. The destruction of worlds were antecedent to the lamentation of that destruction. The territories mattered less than the maps.

  This is not an implication that the lyric imagination is somehow less cruel, less taxing, or less demanding of its participants than a narrative turn of mind. Perhaps the opposite is true. The truth has to wallow in the obscure recesses of peoples’ hearts in order to be seen as truth.

  That is a hard burden for those whose parents and children die. Yet these were the wolves’ terms. The Parameter and its allies were forced to abandon what it thought it knew, and embrace what it had no way of ever knowing, if it had any hopes of survival.

  The shepherds warned of this, spoke of these frayed contingencies. The shepherds, to an extent, protected their sheep.

  The wolves, however, had only two uses for sheep—slaughter or wool.

  It didn’t surprise you all that much when Arbor transmuted into an owl. Suddenly the owl was there. It made sense. Your journey into the unknown interior was slotted for wood, not water. No one saw it happen, not even you. The captain was skeptical about your claim, and the twins were skittish. The four of you followed a threadbare trail towards Archangel’s knoll. But the owl swooped and kept close by, and told you about the ravaged encampment, down to the minute details: where the shadows fell, what the rancid wolverine pelts, knotted and hard like armor, smelled like. The captain was astonished at the level of significant detail you provided: the turgid poetry of surroundings you couldn’t see. You were too frightened to acknowledge the compliment. Arborfeint told you that there were live wolves, four of them, rooting through the smokehouses and the corpses for tech to destroy.

  Why didn’t you tell the captain this? She trusted you. Were the wolves already fettering you out with their enchantments? Unclear. It was hard to think in those breakneck conditions. Galleons of mist descended as the stony ground steepened. The twins coughed in unison. Ahead, you heard the flapping of Arbor’s wings. The captain stopped and pointed, drew a flintlock with her other arm. A dirty, orange smudge of campfires. A sunset’s ashes.

  You tried to open your mouth to tell your companions of the danger, of the no-doubt pounce.

  A wolf, you knew, was not a wolf in the way people used to think of wolves. The resemblance was minimal. The wolves you knew were much more dangerous. The name, however, stuck when people living in the archipelagos realized they were prey, hearkening back to childhood stories of predators that might have been right
, might have been wrong. It was hard to tell. Wolves—the old wolves—were crafty yet vague memories from a faraway place.

  These wolves, like memories, were also spirited and tricky and from a faraway place.

  The captain shook down her fiery locks, started to creep towards the ruins. The twins charged, knives slicking.

  Then the tenebrae came. You shouted. The owl dove to save you.

  Wolves are not the wolves of popular imagination and nursery rhymes and genome reclamation parks. They, like shepherds, were created from archipelagos of perceptions.

  Cryptic and nonemotive, yet drawn to humankind, shepherds make interstellar travel possible by surrounding spaceships that accelerate to ten percent of the speed of light, transporting those ships through wherespace to worlds that prove ideal for human settlement. Three worlds, Li Po, Mirabai, and Blake, discovered in a time when politicians foolishly let poets name planets. The false taxonomy of “shepherd” proved convenient, pacifying.

  Only telepaths—rare, carefully culled and protected—could share concord with shepherds, guide them to destinations across light years, but even they were never able to glean all that much from the inscrutable syntaxes of shepherds.

  It was more, or less, benign. Less because the Parameter realized, when it accidentally made contact with another alien race that the shepherds were also shuttling between wholly different, discrete worlds, that the shepherds were keeping its flocks separate. Black sheep from the white? Hard to tell. Hard to know until the dam burst open, until the shepherds were caught in their bluff and relented their secrets. More than three hundred other sentient species were found to be using the shepherds as free passage to interstellar pastures. A panoply. Everything thought as right before was wrong.

  The analogy proved useful in another way. Shepherds, the human ones from antiquity, lived in houses, not in the fields. Their inner lives were unknowable to sheep. And yet they offered protection from wolves.