"The phrasing bothers me," I said. " Disarmed and made safe. It’s a redundancy. Sim is usually very precise. What does one do after disarming a sun weapon to make it safe?"
We looked at one another, and I think it struck us both at the same instant. "He’s talking about security," Chase said. "No one is to know they have the weapon."
"Which means they have to explain the evacuation." I sat down in Sim’s command chair. It was a bit tight for me.
"Wasn’t it fortunate," she said quietly, "that the mutes acted so untypically at Point Edward. It saved Sim from having to answer so many questions."
She looked at me a long time. And I understood, finally, why there had been an attack against the empty city. And who had conducted it.
I found more log entries further on. Sim and the Corsarius were plunged again into engagements in a dozen different places across the Frontier. But he had changed now, and I began to read, first in his tone, and then in his comments, a despair that grew in proportion with each success, and each subsequent retreat. And I heard his reactions to the defeat at Grand Salinas, and the loss, one by one, of the allied worlds. It must have seemed as though there was no end to the black ships. And eventually, there came the news that Dellaconda, too, had fallen. He responded only by breathing Maurina’s name.
Through all this, there was no further mention of the sun weapon.
He railed against the short-sightedness of Rimway, of Toxicon, of Earth, who thought themselves safe by distance, who feared to rouse to wrath of the conquering horde, who perceived each other with deeper-rooted jealousies and suspicions than those with which they regarded the invader. And when he paid for his victory at Chapparal with the loss of five frigates and a light cruiser manned by volunteers from Toxicon, he commented that We are losing our finest and bravest. And to what point? The remark was followed by a long silence, and then he said the unthinkable!: If they will not come, then it is time to make our own peace!
His mood grew darker as the long retreat continued. And when two more ships from his diminished squadron were lost at Como Des, his anger flared: There will be a Confederacy one day, he says wearily, but they mil not construct it on the bodies of my men! It is the same voice that indicted the Spartans.
XXIII.
Solitude holds the mirror to folly. One cannot, in its cold reflection, easily escape truth.
WE RETURNED TO the Centaur for a meal, and some sleep. But the sleep came late: we talked for several hours, speculating on what had finally happened to the captain and crew of the Corsarius. Had the Tenandrome found remains on board? And possibly conducted a funeral service? A ritual volley, report home, and forget it? Pretend none of it ever happened?
"I don’t think so," said Chase.
"Why not?"
"Tradition. The captain of the Tenandrome would have been bound, if she took such action, to have closed out the Corsarius’s log with a final entry." She looked out at the old warship. Its running lights glowed white and red against the hard sky. "No: I’d bet they found her the same way we did. She’s a dutchman." She folded her arms tightly across her breast as though it were cool in the cabin. "Maybe the mutes captured the ship, spirited away the crew, and left it here for us to find and think about. An object lesson."
"Out here? How would they expect us to find it?"
Chase shook her head, and closed her eyes. "Are we going back over?"
"We don’t have any answers yet."
She moved in the dark, and soft music crept into the compartment. "There may not be any over there."
"What do you think Scott’s been looking for all these years?"
"I don’t know."
"He found something. He went through that ship, the same as we did, and he found something."
While we talked, Chase took us out another few kilometers, smiling ruefully, but admitting that the derelict made her nervous.
I could not get out of my mind the image of a Christopher Sim in despair. It had never occurred to me that he, of all people, could have doubted the eventual outcome of the war. It was a foolish notion, of course, to assume that he’d had the advantage of my hindsight. He turns out to be quite human. And in that despair, in his concern for the lives of his comrades, and the people whom he tried to defend, I sensed an answer to the deserted vessel.
There will be a Confederacy one day; but they will not construct it on the bodies of my men.
Long after Chase had gone to sleep. I tried to tabulate everything I could recall or guess about the Ashiyyur, the Seven, Sim’s probable state of mind, and the Rigellian Action.
It was difficult to forget the guns of the Corsarius turning in my direction during the simul. But that, of course, was not how it had happened: Sim’s ploy had worked. Corsarius and Kudasai had succeeded in surprising the attacking ships. They’d done some serious damage before Corsarius had been incinerated in its duel with the cruiser. That at least was the official account.
It obviously hadn’t happened that way either. And I wondered, too, why Sim had changed his strategy at Rigel. During his long string of successes, he’d always led the Dellacondans personally. But on this one occasion, he’d preferred to escort Kudasai during the main assault, while his frigates drove a knife into the flank of the enemy fleet.
And Kudasai had carried the surviving brother to his death only a few weeks later at Nimrod. But Tarien lived long enough to know that his diplomatic efforts had succeeded: Earth and Rimway had joined hands at last, had promised help, and Toxicon had already joined the war.
The Seven: somehow it connected with the tale of the Seven. How did it happen that their identities were lost to history? Was it coincidence that the single most likely source of their names, the log of the Corsarius, was also mute on the subject, and in fact mute on the battle itself? What had Chase said? It could not have happened!
No: it could not.
And somewhere, along the slippery edge of reality and intuition that precedes sleep, I understood. With a clear and cold certainty, I understood. And, had I been able, I would have put it out of my mind, and gone home.
Chase slept fitfully for a couple of hours: When she woke, it was dark again, and she asked what I intended to do.
I was beginning to grasp the quandary of the Tenandrome. Christopher Sim, however he might have died, was far more than simply a piece of history. We were embroiled with the central symbols of our political existence. "I don’t know," I said. "This place, this world, is a graveyard. It’s a graveyard with a guilty secret."
Chase looked down at the frosty, cloud-swept rim of the world. "Maybe you’re right," she said. "All the bodies are missing. The bodies are missing, the names are missing, the log entries are missing. And the Corsarius, which should be missing, is circling like clockwork, every six hours and eleven minutes."
"They intended to come back," I said. "They put the ship into storage. That implies someone expected to come back."
"But they didn’t," she said. "Why not?"
During the entire history of Hellenic civilization, I know of no darker, nor more wanton crime, than the needless sacrifice of Leonidas and his band of heroes at Thermopylae. Better that Sparta should fall than that such men be squandered. "Yes," I said, "where are the bodies?"
Through a shaft in the clouds, far below, the sea glittered.
The Centaur’s capsule was designed to permit movement from ship to ship, or from orbit to a planetary surface. It was not intended for the sort of use I proposed to put it to: a long atmospheric flight. It would be unstable in high winds, it would be cramped, and it would be relatively slow. Still, it could set down on land or water. And it was all we had.