A Talent for War Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a moment. You understand that I’m scanning all this myself while we’re talking?”

  “Okay.”

  “Yes. Well, you should also be aware that she’s an obscure figure, and there’s not much on her.”

  “Okay. What are you leading up to?”

  “She apparently returned from the war in a deep state of depression.”

  “Nothing unusual about that.”

  “No. I would react that way myself. But she did not improve for a long time. Years, in fact. There is also an indication that she visited Maurina Sim about 1208, the year after Christopher Sim died at Rigel. No record that I can find on what they talked about. Now the odd thing is that Tanner tended to drop from sight for long periods of time. On one occasion, for almost two years. No one knows why.

  “This went on until about 1217, after which there are no more reports of unusual behavior. Which of course is not to say there was none.”

  I gave up for the night. I had a snack, and picked out a room on the second floor. Gabe’s bedroom was on the same floor, at the front of the building. I went in there, perhaps out of curiosity, but ostensibly because I was looking for comfortable pillows.

  There were photos everywhere: mostly from the excavations, but there were also a couple of me as a child, and one of a woman he had once, apparently, loved. Her name was Ria, and she had died in an accident twenty years before I’d come to live with him. I’d forgotten about her during my long years away, but she still held her honored place on a table between two exquisite vases that were probably middle-European. I took a moment to study the image as I had not done since I was a child, and had never done with mature eyes. She was almost boyish in aspect: her frame was slim, her brown hair was cut short, and she sat with her hands hugging her knees to her breast in a pose that implied uninhibited exuberance. But her glance suggested deeper waters, and caused me to linger a long time. To my knowledge, Gabe had never been emotionally involved with another woman.

  There was a book on the side table: a volume of poetry by Walford Candles. The title was Rumors of Earth, and though I’d never heard of it, I knew Candles’s reputation. He was one of the people that no one really reads, but that you were supposed to if you were going to call yourself educated.

  The book aroused my curiosity though, for several reasons: Gabe had never shown much inclination toward poetry; Candles had been a contemporary of Christopher Sim and Leisha Tanner; and, when I picked it up, the book fell open to a poem titled “Leisha”!

  Lost pilot,

  She rides her solitary orbit

  Far from Rigel,

  Seeking by night

  The starry wheel.

  Adrift in ancient seas,

  It marks the long year round,

  Nine on the rim,

  Two at the hub.

  And she,

  Wandering,

  Knows neither port,

  Nor rest,

  nor me.

  Footnotes dated it 1213, two years before Candles’s death, and four years after the war’s end. There was some discussion of style, and the editors commented that the subject was “believed to be Leisha Tanner, who alarmed her friends by periodically dropping out of sight between 1208 and 1216. No explanation was ever advanced.”

  III.

  They sent a single ship across the rooftops of the world. And when they saw that the Ilyandans had fled, a terrible anger came over them. And they burned everything: the empty houses and the deserted parks and the silent lakes. They burned it all.

  —Akron Garrity,

  Armageddon

  I SPENT THE night at the house, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, and retired afterward to the big armchair in the study. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and Jacob announced that he was pleased to see me up and about so early. “Would you like to talk politics this morning?” he asked.

  “Later.” I was looking around for a headband.

  “In the table drawer,” offered Jacob. “Where are you going?”

  “The offices of Brimbury and Conn.” I tried the unit on, and it slid down over my ears.

  “When you’re ready,” he said drily, “I have a channel.”

  The light shifted, and the study was gone, replaced by a modern crystalline conference room. There was a background of soft music, and I was able to look through one wall at Andiquar from a height that far exceeded the altitude of any structure in the city. The woman from the transmission, tall, dark and now of oppressive appearance, materialized near the door. She smiled, approached with aggressive cordiality, and extended her hand.

  “Mr. Benedict,” she said. “I’m Capra Brimbury, the junior partner.” That provided my first inclination that Gabe’s estate was worth considerably more than I had imagined. I was beginning to feel it was going to be a pretty good day.

  Her tone was hushed and confidential. An attitude one adopts with a person who is temporarily an equal. Her manner throughout the interview was one of studied enthusiasm, of welcoming a new member to an exclusive club. “We’ll never be able to replace him,” she observed. “I wish there were something I could say.”

  I thanked her, and she continued: “We will do everything we can to make the transition easier for you. I believe we can get a very good price on the estate. Assuming, of course, that you wish to sell.”

  Sell the house? “I hadn’t considered it,” I said.

  “It would bring quite a lot of money, Alex. Whatever you choose to do, let us know, and we will be happy to handle it for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We have not yet been able to set a precise value to the estate. There are, you understand, a number of intangibles, artwork, antiques, artifacts and whatnot, which complicate the equation. Not to mention fairly extensive commodity holdings, whose worth fluctuates from hour to hour. I assume you will wish to retain your uncle’s investment broker?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Good.” She made a note, as though the decision were a matter of little consequence.

  “What about the burglary?” I asked. “Have we learned anything?”

  “No, Alex.” Her voice trailed off. “Strange thing that was. I mean, you don’t really expect that sort of behavior, people breaking into someone else’s home. They actually used a torch to cut a hole in the back door. We were outraged.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “So were the police. But they are looking into it.”

  “What exactly was stolen?” I asked.

  “Difficult to say. If your uncle kept an inventory, it was lost when the central memory banks were erased. We know they took a holo projector and some silverware. They may also have got some rare books. We’ve had a few of his friends look at the property and try to make a determination. And maybe jewelry. There’s simply no way to check his jewelry.”

  “I doubt if he had much,” I said. “But there are some extremely valuable artifacts in there.”

  “Yes, we know. We compared them with the insurance listings. They are all accounted for.”

  She steered the conversation back to financial matters, and in the end I complied with her wishes pretty much down the line. When I asked for the security code, she produced a lockbox, of the sort that destroys the lock when it is opened. “It’s voice-operated,” she said. “But you need to tell it your birthday.”

  I did, lifted the lid, and extracted an envelope. It was signed by Gabe across the flap. Inside, I found the security code. It was thirty-one digits long.

  He was taking no chances.

  “I leave everything to you, with confidence.”

  It was a hell of a way to treat a worthless nephew.

  Gabe had been disappointed in me. He’d never said anything. But his early satisfaction at my interest in antiquities had given way to reluctant tolerance when I failed to pursue a career in field work. He’d shown up at the graduations, had dutifully encouraged me, and had been openly enthusi
astic about my academic “achievements.” But beneath all that, I knew what he thought: the child who’d camped with him by the shattered walls of half a hundred civilizations was, in the end, more at home in a commodities exchange. Worse yet, the commodities were relics of a past which, he argued, grew constantly more vulnerable to our heat sensors and laser drills.

  He had damned me for a philistine. Not in so many words, but I’d seen it in his eyes, heard it in the things he had not said, felt it in his gradual withdrawal. And yet, despite the existence of a small horde of professionals with whom he’d dug his way through countless sites, he’d turned to me with the Tenandrome discovery. I felt good about that. I even felt a vague sense of satisfaction that he’d played fast and loose with security, and allowed the Tanner file to be taken. Gabe was no less fallible than the rest of us.

  I went next to the police station, and talked to an officer who said they were hard at work on the case, but that there was no progress to report as yet. She assured me they’d be in touch as soon as they had something. I thanked her, feeling no confidence that there would be any movement by the authorities, and was reaching for my headband, about to break the link, when a plump short man in uniform hurried through a double door, and waved in my direction. “Mr. Benedict?” He nodded, as though he understood I was in severe difficulty. “My name’s Fenn Redfield. I’m an old friend of your uncle’s.” He took my hand, and pumped it vigorously. “Delighted to meet you. You look like Gabe, you know.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Terrible loss, that was. Please come inside. Back to my office.”

  He turned away, and retreated through the double doors. I waited for the data exchange. The light shifted again, brightened. Heavy sunshine fell through grimy windows. I was seated in a small office, riddled with the smell of alcohol.

  Redfield dropped into a stiff, uncomfortable-looking couch. His desk was surrounded by a battery of terminals, monitors, and consoles. The walls were covered with certificates, awards, and official seals of various sorts. There were some trophies, and numerous photographs: Redfield standing beside a sleek police skimmer; Redfield shaking hands with an important-looking woman; Redfield standing oil-streaked at a disaster site, with a child in his arms. That last one held center stage. The trophies were all grouped off to one side. And I decided I liked Fenn Redfield. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to do more,” he said. “There really hasn’t been much to work with.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  He waved me to a chair, and seated himself in front of the desk. “It’s like a fortress,” he chuckled. “Puts people off. I’ve been meaning to get rid of it, but it’s been with me a long time. We did find the silver, by the way. Or at least some of it. We can’t be certain, but I have a feeling we’ve got it all. Just this morning. It’s not in the system yet, so the officer you spoke with had no way of knowing.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In a creek about a kilometer from the house. It was in a plastic bag, pushed back out of sight in a place where the watercourse goes under a gravel footpath. Some kids found it.”

  “Strange,” I said.

  “I thought so too. It’s not extremely valuable, but it would have been worthwhile holding on to. It suggests that the thief had no way to dispose of it, and no easy way to hold onto it.”

  “The silver was a blind,” I said.

  “Oh?” Redfield’s eyes flashed interest. “What makes you say so?”

  “You said you were a friend of Gabe’s.”

  “Yes. I was. We used to go out together when our schedules permitted. And we played a lot of chess.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about his work?”

  Redfield regarded me shrewdly. “Now and then. May I ask where we’re headed, Mr. Benedict?”

  “The thieves made off with a data file. Just took one, which happened to be a project that Gabe was working on when he died.”

  “And I take it you don’t know much about it?”

  “That’s right. I was hoping you might have some information.”

  “I see.” He pushed back in his chair, draped one arm over the desk, and drummed his fingers nervously against its surface. “You’re saying that the silver, and whatever else they took, was intended to distract attention from the file.”

  “Yes.”

  He raised himself from the chair, circled the desk, and went to the window. “I can tell you that your uncle’s been preoccupied during the last three months or so. His game went to hell, by the way.”

  “But you don’t know why?”

  “No. No, I don’t. I didn’t see much of him recently. He did tell me he was engaged in a project, but he never said what it was. We used to get together regularly once a week, but that stopped a few months back. After that, he just didn’t seem to be around much.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Redfield thought about it. “Maybe six weeks before we heard that he’d died. We got an evening of chess in. But I knew something was bothering him.”

  “He looked worried?”

  “His game was off. I hammered him that night. Five or six times, which was unusual. But I could see his mind wasn’t on what he was doing. He told me to enjoy myself while I could. He’d get me next time.” Redfield stared at the floor. “That was it.”

  He produced a glass of lime-colored punch from somewhere behind the desk. “Part of my regimen,” he said. “Would you like some?”

  “Sure.”

  “I wish I could help you, uh, Alex. But I just don’t know what he was doing. I can tell you what he talked about all the time though.”

  “What was that?”

  “The Resistance. Christopher Sim. He was a nut on the subject, the chronology of the naval actions, who was there, with what, how things turned out. I mean, I’m as interested as anybody, but he’d go on and on. It’s tough in the middle of a game. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He wasn’t always like that.” He filled a second glass and handed it to me. “You play chess, Alex?”

  “No. I learned the moves once, a long time ago. But I was never any good at the game.”

  Redfield’s features softened, as though he had recognized the presence of a social disability.

  At home, I caught up on the news. There were reports of another clash with the mutes. A ship had been damaged, and there’d been some casualties. A statement was expected from the government any time.

  On Earth, they were conducting a referendum on the matter of secession. The voting was still a few days away, at last word, but apparently several political heavyweights had thrown their support behind the movement, and analysts now concluded that approval was likely.

  I scanned the other items to see if there was much of interest, while Jacob commented that the real question was what the central government would do if Earth actually tried to secede. “They couldn’t simply stand by and let them go,” he observed, gloomily.

  “It’ll never happen,” I said. “All that stuff is for home consumption. Local politicians looking tough by attacking the Director.” I opened a beer. “Let’s get to business.”

  “Okay.”

  “Query the main banks. What do they have on Leisha Tanner?”

  “I’ve already looked, Alex. There’s apparently relatively little on Rimway. There are three monographs, all dealing with her achievements in translating and commenting on Ashiyyurean literature. All three are available for your inspection. I should observe that I’ve reviewer them, and found nothing that would seem to be helpful, although there is much of general interest.

  “You’re aware that Ashiyyurean civilization is older than our own by almost sixty thousand years? In all that time, they have produced no thinker to surpass Tulisofala, or at least none who possesses her reputation. She appeared quite early in their development, and formulated many of their ethical and political attitudes. Tanner was inclined to assign her the place that Plato hol
ds for us. She has, by the way, drawn some fascinating conclusions from this parallel—”

  “Later, Jacob. What else is there?”

  “Two other monographs are known, but they are no longer indexed. Consequently, they will be difficult to locate, if indeed they exist at all. One apparently concerns her ability as a translator. The other, however, is titled ”Diplomatic Initiatives of the Resistance.’”

  “When was it published?”

  “1330. Eighty-four years ago. It went off-line in 1342, and the last copy I can trace disappeared about 1381. The owner died; the estate went up for auction; and there’s no record of general disposition. I’ll keep trying.

  “There may be other off-line materials available locally. Esoteric collector’s items, obscure treatises, and so on, frequently never make the index. Unfortunately, our record-keeping procedures are not what they could be.

  “Some journals and memorabilia have been maintained on Khaja Luan, where she was an instructor before and after the war. The Confederate Archives have her notebooks, and the Hrinwhar Naval Museum owns a fragmentary memoir. They’re both located on Dellaconda, by the way. And the memoir, according to my sources, is exceedingly fragmentary.”

  “Named after the battle,” I said.

  “Hrinwhar? Yes. Wonderful tactic, that was. Sim was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”

  Next day, I visited half a dozen universities, the Quelling Institute, the Benjamin Maynard Historical Association, and the meeting rooms of the Sons of the Dellacondans. I was naturally interested in anything connecting Tanner with Talino or, more broadly, the Resistance. There wasn’t much. I found a few references to her in private documents, old histories, and so on. I copied everything, and settled in for a long evening.

  Little of the material seemed to have much to do with Tanner herself. She appears peripherally in discussions of Sim’s staff, and of his intelligence gathering methods. I found only one document in which she could be said to be prominent: an obscure doctoral thesis, written forty years before, discussing the destruction of Point Edward.