Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

“But that’s not what he meant! That’s not what he meant!”

He shook his head. “Mr. Olyn, I can’t leave you in such delusion.”

I stared at him, for it was sympathy I saw in his face. For me.

“It’s your own blindness that deludes you,” he said. “You see nothing, and so believe no man can see. Our Lord is not just a name, but all things. That’s why we have no ornament in our churches, scorning any painted screen between us and our God. Listen to me, Mr. Olyn. Those churches themselves are but tabernacles of the earth. Our Elders and Leaders, though they are Chosen and Anointed, are still but mortal men. To none of these things or people do we hearken in our faith, but to the very voice of God within us.”

He paused. Somehow I could not speak.

“Suppose it was even as you think,” he went on, even more gently. “Suppose that all you say was a fact, and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No.” Jamethon’s voice rose. “Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me”—his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me—“that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me!”

He stopped speaking and turned about. I watched him walk across the room and out the door.

Still I stood there, as if I had been fastened in place—until I heard from outside, in the square of the compound, the sound of a military air-car starting up.

I broke out of my stasis then and ran out of the building.

As I burst into the square, the military air-car was just taking off. I could see Jamethon and his four hard-shell subordinates in it. And I yelled up into the air after them.

“That’s all right for you, but what about your men?”

They could not hear me. I knew that. Uncontrollable tears were running down my face, but I screamed up into the air after him anyway.

“You’re killing your men to prove your point! Can’t you listen? You’re murdering helpless men!”

Unheeding, the military air-car dwindled rapidly to the west and south, where the converging battle forces waited. And the heavy concrete walls and buildings about the empty compound threw back my words with a hollow, wild and mocking echo.

I should have gone to the spaceport. Instead, I got back into the air-car and flew back across the lines looking for Graeme’s Battle Command Center.

I was as little concerned about my own life just then as a Friendly. I think I was shot at once or twice, in spite of the ambassadorial flags on the air-car, but I don’t remember exactly. Eventually I found the Command Center and descended.

Enlisted men surrounded me as I stepped out of the air-car. I showed my Credentials and went up to the battle screen, which had been set up in open air at the edge of shadow from some tall variform oaks. Graeme, Padma and his whole staff were grouped around it, watching the movements of their own and the Friendly troops reported on it. A continual low-voiced discussion of the movements went on, and a steady stream of information came from the communications center fifteen feet off.

The sun slanted steeply through the trees. It was almost noon and the day was bright and warm. No one looked at me for a long time; and then Janol, turning away from the screen, caught sight of me standing off at one side by the flat-topped shape of a tactics computer. His face went cold. He went on about what he was doing. But I must have been looking pretty bad, because after a while he came by with a canteen cup and set it down on the computer top.

“Drink that,” he said shortly, and went off. I picked it up, found it was Dorsai whisky and swallowed it. I could not taste it, but evidently it did me some good, because in a few minutes the world began to sort itself out around me and I began to think again.

I went up to Janol. “Thanks.”

“All right.” He did not look at me, but went on with the papers on the field desk before him.

“Janol,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“See for yourself,” he said, still bent over his papers.

“I can’t see for myself. You know that. Look—I’m sorry about what I did. But this is my job, too. Can’t you tell me what’s going on now and fight with me afterward?”

“You know I can’t brawl with civilians.” Then his face relaxed. “All right,” he said, straightening up. “Come on.”

He led me over to the battle screen, where Padma and Kensie were standing, and pointed to a sort of small triangle of darkness between two snakelike lines of light. Other spots and shapes of light ringed it about.

“These”—he pointed to the two snakelike lines—“are the Macintok and Sarah Rivers, where they come together, just about ten miles this side of Joseph’s Town. It’s fairly high ground, hills thick with cover, fairly open between them. Good territory for setting up a stubborn defense, bad area to get trapped in.”

“Why?”

He pointed to the two river lines.

“Get backed up in here and you find yourself hung up on high bluffs over the river. There is no easy way across, no cover for retreating troops. It’s nearly all open farmland the rest of the way, from the other sides of the rivers to Joseph’s Town.”

His finger moved back out from the point where the river lines came together, past the small area of darkness and into the surrounding shapes and rings of light.

“On the other hand, the approach to this territory from our position is through open country, too-narrow strips of farmland interspersed with a lot of swamp and marsh. It’s a tight situation for either commander, if we commit to a battle here. The first one who has to backpedal will find himself in trouble in a hurry.”

“Are you going to commit?”

“It depends. Black sent his light armor forward. Now he’s pulling back into the high ground between the rivers. We’re far superior in strength and equipment. There’s no reason for us not to go in after him, as long as he’s trapped himself—” Janol broke off.

“No reason?” I asked.

“Not from a tactical standpoint,” Janol frowned at the screen. “We couldn’t get into trouble unless we suddenly had to retreat. And we wouldn’t do that unless he suddenly acquired some great tactical advantage that’d make it impossible for us to stay there.”

I looked at his profile.

“Such as losing Graeme?” I said.

He transferred his frown to me. “There’s no danger of that.”

There was a certain change in the movement and the voices of the people around us. We both turned and looked.

Everybody was clustering around a screen. We moved in with the crowd and, looking between the shoulders of two of the officers of Graeme’s staff, I saw on the screen the image of a small grassy meadow enclosed by wooded hills. In the center of the meadow, the Friendly flag floated its thin black cross on white background beside a long table on the grass. There were folding chairs on each side of the table, but only one person—a Friendly officer, standing on the table’s far side as if waiting. There were the lilac bushes along the edge of the wooded hills where they came down in variform oak and ash to the meadow’s edge; and the lavender blossoms were beginning to brown and darken for their season was almost at an end. So much difference had twenty-four hours made. Off to the left of the screen I could see the gray concrete of a highway.