Tanner had been conducting a comparative ethics class when the first reports arrived. Discussing the good and the beautiful she comments sadly, while the children of Plato and Tulisofala cut one another’s throats. The target was assaulted by a force of several hundred ships that swept its hastily constructed defenses aside. Collapse had followed within hours. And that night, while most of us concentrated on our steak and wine, the damned fools compounded the felony by shooting some hostages. How can a race of telepaths misjudge so completely the nature of their enemy?
Tanner’s images of the time are unbearably poignant: an enraged citizenry demanding war; a pompous university president leading a community prayer; an exchange student from the fallen world fighting back tears; and her own pangs of guilt at the perverse way of such things, in which those of us who argue for a rational course, appear so cowardly.
Again and again, she put the question to her journal, and eventually, I suppose, to us: How does one account for the fact that a race can espouse the ideals of a Tulisofala, can compose great music, and create exquisite rock gardens, and still behave like barbarians?
She doesn’t record an answer.
Elsewhere in her journals, on a similar occasion (the collapse of the defenders at Randin’hal, I believe), she refers angrily to the Bogolyubov Principle.
I looked that up too. Andrey Bogolyubov lived a thousand years ago on Toxicon. He was an historian, and he specialized in trying to convert history into an exact science, with the predictability that is the hallmark of all the exact sciences. He never succeeded, of course.
His primary area of interest was the process by which reluctant powers become entangled in conflict. His thesis is that potential antagonists engage in a kind of diplomatic war dance, with specific articulable characteristics. The war dance phase creates a psychology which ultimately guarantees an armed clash, because it tends to take over the momentum of events. This is particularly true, he says, in democracies. This process, once begun, is not easily interrupted. Once the first blood is spilt, it becomes almost impossible to draw back. Original ambitions and objectives get lost, each side comes to believe its own propaganda, economies become dependent on the hostile environment, and political careers are built around the common danger. Consequently the cycle of war-making tightens and will not stop until one side or the other is exhausted.
Unless leaders emerge simultaneously on both sides who recognize the situation for what it is, and possess the character and the internal support to act, there can be no solution other than a military one. Unfortunately, political systems are seldom designed to produce policymakers capable of even conceiving, much less implementing, a strategy of disengagement. The odds against two such persons stepping forward at the moment of crisis are, to say the least, rather high.
It’s hard from this distance to understand the dismay that accompanied the fall of the City on the Crag, which for us is only a symbol of lost greatness, an Atlantis. But among the inhabitants of the Frontier worlds two centuries ago, she was a living force: in a sense they were all her citizens; her music and her artists and her political theorists belonged to everyone; and the blow struck against her was an attack against all. Tanner reports Walford Candles’s remark that we’ve all sat at her sun-splashed tables on wide boulevards sipping expensive wine. It must have been painful to think of that lovely place under the whip of a conqueror.
Several of Tanner’s students announced their intention to leave school, and to join the war. Her friends were deeply divided. He walked out of his class yesterday afternoon, she reports of Matt Olander, a middle-aged physicist, whose wife and daughter had died two years earlier on Cormoral. For several hours, we didn’t know where he was. The security people found him just before midnight, slumped on a bench in Southpool This morning, he told me he’s going to offer his services to the Dellacondans. I think he’ll be okay when he’s had a chance to calm down.
Bannister tried to point out the dangers of intervention yesterday during a meeting of one of the various war committees that we have these days. "Stand firm," he told them. "Give way to mob emotions now, and Khaja Luan will not survive two weeks." They stoned him.
Olander never did calm down. He submitted his resignation, took Tanner to dinner a few nights later, and said goodby. She gives no other details of the departure.
But Khaja Luan, despite everything, held onto its neutrality. Unrest continued, usually intensified by war news or the occasional reports of volunteer citizens who’d died alongside the Dellacondans. It was a wrenching period, and Tanner’s anger mounted against both sides, whose intransigence kills so many, and threatens us all.
The small circle of faculty friends dissolves in bitterness and dispute. Walford Candles wanders the grim nights, a cold, familiar wraith. The others speak and write for or against the war and each other.
Occasionally, there is word from Olander.
He sits atop a rail, somewhere, on a wooden pier, framed against sails and nets. Or he stands beside a vegetative growth that is maybe a tree and maybe not. Always, there is a bottle in his hand, and a woman at his side. It is never the same woman, Tanner observes, with a trace of regret.
(The transmissions from Olander were not, of course, modern interactive sponders. He simply talked, and everyone listened.)
I was sorry she hadn’t preserved some of the Olander holos. I’ve learned since that Walford Candles (who twenty years earlier had fought against Toxicon, and so knew firsthand about combat conditions) was so struck by them, by the contrast between Olander’s cheerful generalities on local liquor, theater, and mating habits, and the grim reality of the war, that he began writing the great poetry of his middle period. That first collection was named for Olander’s dispatches: News from the Front.
His references to the long struggle (Tanner reports), were always vague. "Don’t worry about me," he’d say. "We’re doing all right." Or: "We lost a few people the other day."
Occasionally, he speaks of the ships: of the Straczynski and the Morimar and the Povis and the others: sleek, deadly, remorseless, and the affection in his voice and in his eyes chilled us all. Sometimes I think there’s no hope for any of us.
As time and the war dragged on, and early hopes that the Ashiyyur would bow to the first serious resistance faded, a little reality slipped through the stern brickwork of the warrior he had become: there were bleak portraits of the men and women who fought with him. "When we are gone," Tanner reports his saying, "who will take our place?"
It’s a question to which she responds in a spasm of rage and grief: Nobody I Nobody, because it’s a damn fool war that neither side wants, and the only reason the Ashiyyur are conducting it at all is that we have challenged them!
"She may have been correct," observed Jacob. "After all, we were on Imarios by their leave to begin with; and the revolt by that colony was not really justified. One has to wonder what the course of history would have been had Cormoral not intervened."
There’s no record that any of the witnesses on Khaja Luan responded to Matt Olander. One assumes they must have done so, but there is no direct evidence. It leaves me to wonder whether Leisha Tanner ever voiced those angry sentiments to him…
Candles, whose masterpieces at this time lie just before him, begins to retreat often to the Inner Room. Tanner comes under pressure from interventionists to restructure her courses in Ashiyyurean philosophy and literature. Students and faculty members take up silent stations outside her classroom to protest the content of her programs. She receives death threats.