Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

"Kita, what is it that Davidge thinks I ought to understand about his cave?"

"The answer is less important than what you learn finding the answer." She holds her hands up, indicating the cave. "The answers are in here." She reaches out a hand and touches the side of my head with her fingertips. "And in here."

After she leaves, I look around at the blackened walls, the fireplace, the remains of the chairs, the beds, the firewood glued together with melted explosive. There are crudely made pots and plates, baked to a light red color. I see eating utensils carved from wood. The covers and branches that made Davidge’s bed are nothing but ashes, but Haesni’s was not touched by the flames, The covers, though, are spread with the residue of the burning igniter’s smoke.

I take off my coat, hang it from a blackened peg, and turn back to the bed. I pull back the top cover and see its underside, untouched by the residue. The cover is made from long colorful strips of soft, pliable snakeskin, each strip carefully stitched into the cover. There is a small tear in the cover exposing the insulating medium that fills the layers. I pull some out and see that it is composed of seeds, each seed carrying a soft crown of delicate white fibers. The seeds tell me there is indeed a season on Friendship when the ice is gone and things grow. Seed pods are gathered, opened, and the fluff-covered seeds quilted into layers of snakeskin for a coming winter.

So much cold and ice, the winds strong and frightening. What the heart must feel when the spring comes. The ice melts, the first growing thing shows life, the first animal who hides from the cold is seen emerging from the dark. It must have taken endless hours collecting the seed pods, catching and skinning snakes, curing and softening the skins, stitching them together.

I look more closely. The thread is handmade from some kind of plant fiber. I do not doubt that in Davidge’s cave the needles that were used were made as well.

In the center of winter’s intolerable cold, what must it be like to sleep upon such a bed, warm beneath such a quilt? Everything worn, eaten, slept on and beneath, hunted with, and used is something that was fashioned with mind-driven hands. No child could do all of this without knowing that it matters, that the work it does has value, that personal responsibility is a survival tool.

Forty-one Drac children had been brought to adulthood in caves with Davidge. In the cave’s primitive surroundings these children learned self reliance, teamwork, trust, to look beyond appearances at an individual’s character, how to work, how to adapt, how to improvise, how to endure. By becoming one with this icy horror of a planet, they turned it into a home. The Jeriba Estate with its extravagant luxuries is only a stopping place for Davidge’s students, all of whom are as just as comfortable in cave or castle. There is no work beneath them, no challenge too exalted or too frightening to try.

Most of all, such children become grateful for the many gifts of existence that others take for granted. I understand a little of how Davidge’s students become complete beings, able to become successful at whatever they choose to do, even if that choice is to become a meditative monk living in isolation and deprivation on Earth.

What then for Yazi Ro, one who can find dark on a star’s burning surface? If I do not have it and cannot take it, I do without and use this to make my dark darker still. When I made or repaired something with which to prolong my existence on Amadeen, I was not grateful or congratulatory for the means of survival. Instead I cursed the circumstances that made such survival necessary.

I look at the boots Haesni made. The tops are made of the same snakeskin, double layered and filled with seed down. The soles are made from many layers of snakeskin adhering to each other, glued together with some substance harvested from the land or sea. The residue from the smoke begins to affect my fingers, the skin burning. The back of my throat burns, as well.

I leave the boots on Haesni’s bed and walk toward the entrance to listen to the sea. The night brings no new storms, but the winds are still strong. At the door, my arms wrapped about me against the cold, Davidge’s first words to me make me smile.

I close the door, turn to look at the sea, and, staying well back from the edge, let the winds wash my face. For a moment I am caught in my thoughts, envisioning myself part of this harmony of being and universe wrought by an accident of war. As I am about to go back in the cave to retrieve my coat, far out over the sea I notice a point of light. Except for the overcast, I would think it a star. It grows brighter and brighter until I am driven back to my senses and run. Four, five steps and I jump for the path to the top of the cliff for cover as a shrieking roar races behind me followed by an erupting inferno that flings me against the rocks.

Half conscious, my arm covering my face, I turn to see a column of flames explode from the cave’s entrance. First red and orange, it rapidly becomes blue-white, the roar of it deafening. Ice, rocks, and frozen clods of dirt fall about me and I see another column of fire shoot from the top of the cliff toward the sky. Almost as soon as it comes to life, it dies. The stream of flame from the entrance weakens and sputters out, leaving an orange glow from the super-heated rock.

There is a sound behind me and I see Davidge and Kita in the rocks above sliding down the path. When he reaches me, Davidge goes down on one knee and studies my face by the remaining glow of the rock. His left cheek is scratched and a cut above his left eye is bleeding freely. Kita slides to a stop beside him. She appears unharmed but frightened. Satisfied with my state of health, Davidge slumps back and sits beside me. "I guess someone finally figured out how to set off that Thermex."

I look out to the sea, amazed that I am still alive. I wonder how much longer a reasonable person could expect this condition to continue.

Instead of slowing us down, the rocket attack speeds things up. Placing Kita in charge of the Timan investigation, Sanda removes itself from the expedition to head up the search for the missile-launching aircraft on Friendship, while that night the rest of us make for the First Colony Port and the Aeolus, ahead of schedule.

As we are secured in our suspension pods, the first of The Talman stories begins. I see the others, clad in their skintight blue vapor suits entering their pods. I let my gaze linger a moment on Estone Falna, then tear it away to watch the crew check seals and read monitors. Captain Eli Moss looks upon everything with contempt and mistrust, which to my mind makes him someone hard to trust. As Davidge’s agent, Ty purchases what trust there is by paying Moss half in advance. Why this arrangement satisfies the others I cannot say. Loyalty that is purchased is not loyalty.

When I bring the subject up to Davidge, he tells me not to worry about it and to make certain I have my pod programmed with The Talman. As the steward, the one nicknamed Reaper, punches in the program, he makes comments about holy joes, salvation, and the illusion of illusion.

Once in the slot, as our pilot put it, the jump behind us, the pods are locked and the cooling fields engaged. The fluid entering my body through the needle in my leg is supposed to protect me from the cold, but I begin feeling the cold and, after one last look at Falna, I remember just in time to close my eyes.

The program is already running and the distraction of the suspension process causes me to lose track. I think for the start and it begins to play from the beginning.

"Sindie was the world.

"And the world was said to be made by Aakva, the God of the Day Light…"