And a terrible fear crept through me: I could still carry out his intention, and I wondered whether I didn’t owe it to him, to someone, to reach out and strike the blow they had prepared. But in the end I walked away from it, into the dawn.
The black ships that escaped at Ilyanda went on to take a heavy toll For almost three more years, men and ships died. Christopher Sim continued to perform legendary exploits. His Dellacondans held on until Rimway and Earth intervened, and, in the heat of battle, the modern Confederacy was born.
The sun weapon itself was never heard from. Whether, in the end, it wouldn’t work, or Sim was unable afterward to lure a large enough force within range of a suitable target, I don’t know.
For most, the war is now something remote, a subject for debate by historians, a thing of vivid memories only for the relatively old. The mutes have long since retreated into their sullen worlds. Sim rests with his heroes, and his secrets, lost off Rigel. And Ilyanda still entrances tourists with her misty seas, and researchers with her curious ruins.
Matt Olander lies in a hero’s grave at Richardson. I cut his name into the stone with the same weapon I used to kill him.
And I: to my sorrow, I survived. I survived the attack on the city, I survived the just anger of the Dellacondans, I survived my own black guilt.
The Dellacondans: they came twice following the murder. There were four of them the first time, two men and two women. I hid from them, and they left. Later, when I’d begun to suspect they would not come again, a lone woman landed on one of the Richardson pads, and I went out in the sunlight and told her everything.
I expected to be killed; but she said little, and wanted to take me to Millennium. But I couldn’t face that, so I walked away from her. And I lived outside the ruined city, in Walhalla where perhaps I should have died, pursued by an army of ghosts which grew daily in number. All slain by my hand. And when the Ilyandans returned at the end of the war, I was waiting.
They chose not to believe me. It may have been politics. They may have preferred to forget. And so I am denied even the consolation of public judgment. There is none to damn me. Or to forgive.
I have no doubt I did the right thing.
Despite the carnage, and the fire, I was right.
In my more objective moments, in the daylight, I know that. But I know also that whoever reads this document, after my death, will understand that I need more than a correct philosophical stance.
For now, for me, in the dark of Ilyanda’s hurtling moons, the war never ends.
XVI.
What bleak thoughts carried him high onto that windy rock, we never knew—
IN THE MORNING, when we sat over breakfast in the penthouse restaurant, warmed by a bright sun, it all seemed a little unreal. "It’s a fraud," said Chase. "They couldn’t count on having that ship materialize inside a planetary system, let alone inside a sun. It wouldn’t work."
"But if it were true," I said, "it answers some questions. And maybe the big one: what’s out in the Veiled Lady."
"The bomb?"
"What else?"
"But if the thing worked, why didn’t it get passed on? Why put it out in the woods someplace?"
"Because the Dellacondans thought the Confederacy wouldn’t survive the war, even if they won. Once the Ashiyyur were driven off, the worlds would go back to squabbling. And Sim may not have wanted that kind of weapon loose. Maybe not even among his own people.
"Maybe toward the end, when things were getting desperate, he saw only two options: destroy it, or hide it. So he hid it. But everyone who knew was killed off. And the entire business was forgotten."
Chase picked up the thread: "So now, two hundred years later, the Tenandrome comes along and stumbles on it. And they classify everything!"
"That’s it," I said. "Has to be."
"So where’s the weapon? Did they bring it back?"
"Sure. And right now, we’re putting it into production. Next year at this time, we’ll be threatening the mutes with it."
Chase was shaking her head. "I don’t believe it," she said. "How would the Tenandrome recognize the thing for what it is?"
"Maybe it comes with an instruction book. Listen, it’s the first explanation we’ve got that makes sense."
She looked skeptical. "Maybe. But I still don’t think it’s possible. Listen, Alex, star travel is extremely approximate. If I take a ship that’s in orbit around this world, and jump into hyper—"
"—and come right back out, you might be a few million kilometers away. I know that."
"A few million kilometers? I’d be damned lucky if I could jump back into the planetary system at all. Now how the hell are they going to be so good that they can hit a star? It’s ridiculous."
"Maybe there’s another way to do it. Let’s check out what we can. See if you can find an expert, a physicist or somebody. But stay away from Survey, and tell them you’re doing research for a novel. Right? Find out what happens if we inject a load of antimatter into the core of a star. Would it really explode? Is there any theoretical way to accomplish the insertion? That sort of thing."
"What are you going to do?"
"Some sightseeing," I said.
Ilyanda has changed since Kindrel’s time. No fleet of shuttles and cruisers and interstellars could hope to sneak in now and evacuate the global population. The old theocratic Committee that governed in Point Edward still exists, but it is now vestigial. The doors have long since opened to settlers, and Point Edward is now only one of a network of cities, and by no means the largest. But it has not forgotten its past: the Dellacondan Cafe stands on Defiance Street across from the Matt Olander Hotel. Without looking hard, one can find Christopher Sim Park, Christopher Sim Plaza, and Christopher Sim Boulevard. The orbiting terminal has been renamed for him, and his picture appears on various denominations of Bank of Ilyanda credit serials.
And Matt Olander: a bronze plate bears his likeness and the legend "Defender" in the archway through which one enters Old City, the four-square-block tract of shattered buildings and gaping permearth which has been left untouched since the attack. Visitors stroll silently through the memorial, and usually stop to see the visuals.
I spent some time in the dromes myself, watching the holos of Sim’s shuttles, during that desperate week when the Ashiyyur were coming, moving in and out of Richardson on silent magnetics. It was rousing stuff, complete with anthems and stern-eyed heroes and the sort of subdued commentary one expects with the portrayal of mythic events. My blood began to pound, and I was gradually caught up again in the drama of that ancient war.
Later, in a sidewalk cafe flanked by frozen trees, I thought again how easily one’s own tides rise at the prospect of combat in a cause, even one whose justice may be suspect. The company of heroes: if Quinda was affected by it, so were we all. Our glory and our downfall. Embrace the terrible risks of war; drive home the spear (for all the proper reasons, of course). I sat that morning, watching crowds that had never known organized bloodshed, and wondered whether Kindrel Lee wasn’t right when she argued that the real risk to us all comes not from this or that group of outsiders, but from our own desperate need to create Alexanders, and to follow them enthusiastically onto whatever parapets they may choose to blunder.
Who was the lone woman who had visited Kindrel Lee? Was it Tanner? Lee had described her as Dellacondan, but she was expecting Dellacondans.
It was easy to see why the Dellacondans might have lied about the manner of Olander’s death: they would not have wished to reveal the existence of the sun weapon. So they’d simply made a hero out of the unfortunate systems analyst who’d stayed behind to ensure success and had thereby savaged Sim’s plans. But anyone who knew the truth must have hated him. How many had eventually died because of Olander’s act?