Simulations of the major actions of the Resistance were available there. The Spinners. Vendicari. Black Adrian. Grand Salinas. The Slot. Rigel. Tippimaru. And finally Triflis, where, for the first time, the human race drew together.
After two centuries, they were still names to conjure by. The stuff of legend.
I checked out five: Eschaton, Sanusar, the Slot, Rigel, and the Spinners. The latter, of course, is the classic raid that some say turned the course of the war.
On the way home, drifting lazily over the capital, I wondered what it had been like to live in a world of organized mayhem. There was still tension, and occasional shooting, but it was remote, far-off: it was hard to imagine an existence incorporating active everyday institutionalized slaughter. And it struck me that the last conflict fought exclusively among humans had occurred at the height of the Resistance. While the series of critical battles were being fought in the Slot, Toxicon, whose powerful fleets Sim desperately needed and courted, had seized the opportunity to attack the Dellacondan ally, Muri. Later, Sim would call it the darkest hour of the war.
Today, for perhaps the first time in history, there is no man living who knows from personal experience what it is to make war on his brothers. And that happy fact is the real legacy of Tarien and Christopher Sim.
Though no one realized it at the time, the attack on Muri might have been the best thing that could have happened, because it so outraged public opinion on Toxicon that, within a year, that world’s autocratic government collapsed. The interventionists, heartily supported by a rare alliance between the general population and the military, seized power, broke off the assault against their embattled victims, and promptly announced an intention to support the Dellacondans. Tragically, Toxicon’s ringing declaration of war was followed within hours by news of Christopher Sim’s death off Rigel.
I went home to a leisurely dinner, and drank a little more wine than usual. Jacob was quiet. It had turned cold outside, and blustery. The wind shook the trees and the house.
I wandered from room to room, paging through Gabe’s books, old histories and archeology texts mostly, accounts of excavations on the twenty-five or thirty worlds whose settlements had occurred deep enough in the past to allow for the collapse and interment of cultures.
There were some biographies, a few manuals on planetary sciences, a scattering of mythological texts, and a few general reference books.
Gabe had never shown much interest in literature for its own sake. He’d read Homer before we went to Hissarlik, Kachimonda before Battle Key, and so on. Consequently, when I came across additional volumes of Walford Candles in a remote corner of the house, I pulled them down, and stacked them alongside the material I’d brought from the Archive, added the volume of Rumors of Earth that had been in Gabe’s bedroom, and retreated with everything to the upstairs study.
I didn’t know much then about Candles’s literary reputation. But I was learning quickly. He was preoccupied with fragility and transience: passions too easily dissipated; youth too easily lost in the trauma of war. The most fortunate, in his view, are those who die heroically for a principle. The rest of us are left to outlive our friends, to watch love cool, and to feel the lengthening winter in our vitals.
It made for a depressing evening, but the books were well thumbed. Eventually, I went back and reread the "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.
Rigel had only one association: Sim’s death. But what did the rest of it mean? The notes suggested that the poet had considered the work completed. And there was no evidence that the editors found anything baffling about it. Of course, one almost expects to be puzzled by great poetry, I suppose.
According to the introduction to Dark Stars, the first volume of the series, Walford Candles had been a professor of classical literature, had never married, and was not appreciated in his own time. A minor talent, his contemporaries had agreed.
To us, he is a different matter altogether.
The poignancy of the sacrifices required by the men and women who fought with Christopher Sim shines everywhere in his work. Most of the poems in Dark Stars, News from the Front, and On the Walls purport to have been written in the Inner Room on Khaja Luan, while he waited to hear the inevitable about old friends who had gone to help the Dellacondans. Candles himself claimed to have offered his services, and been refused. No usable skills. Instead of fighting, his part became merely
To stand and count the names of those
Whose dust circles the gray worlds of Chippewa
And Cormoral.
Candles watches from a dark-lit corner while young volunteers hold a farewell party. One raises an eye to the middle-aged poet, nods, and Candles inclines his head in silent salute.
On the night that they learned about Chippewa, a prosperous physician who had never before been seen at the Inner Room, enters, and buys drinks for all. His daughter, Candles learns, has been lost on a frigate.
In "Rumors of Earth," the title work from his fourth volume, he describes the effect of reports that the home world is about to intervene. Who, then, he asks, will dare stand aside?
But it does not happen, and despite Chippewa, despite a hundred small victories, the battered force is pushed relentlessly back, into the final, fatal trap at Rigel.
The poems are dated, and there is a gap beginning at about the time of Sim’s death, extending for almost a year, during which Candles appears to have written nothing. And then comes his terrible indictment of Earth, and Rimway, and the others, which had delayed so long:
Our children will face again their silent fury,
And they will do it without the Warrior,
Who walks behind the stars
On far Belmincour.
"There is no Belmincour listed in the catalogs," said Jacob. "It is apparently a literary reference, which might mean enthusiastic war, or beautiful place of the heart. Difficult to be sure: human languages are not very precise."
I agreed.
"Several towns on various worlds," he continued, "and one city on Earth, share the name. But it is not likely the poet refers to any of these."
"Then what?"
"It has been a subject of dispute. Taken within its context, it appears to refer to a kind of Valhalla. Armand Halley, a prominent Candles scholar, argues that it is a classical reference to a better past, the world where Sim—in his words—would have preferred to live."
"Seems odd to use a place name, or a term, that no one understands."
"Poets do it all the time, Alex. It allows the reader’s imagination freer play."
"Sure," I grumbled. We were beginning to get some light in the east. And I was weary. But every time I closed my eyes, questions jabbed at me. Olander’s name rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember where (or if) I’d heard of him before.
And always, the supreme puzzle: what had Hugh Scott and the men of the Tenandrome seen?
I picked idly through the crystals I’d brought back from the Conciliar Library, selected one, and inserted it into Jacob’s reader.
"The Spinners, sir?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "Scott was supposed to have gone to Hrinwhar. Let’s see what it looked like to Sim."