Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

Stinks and gritty skin, heaped refuse and open water glimpsed from ramparts: immaterial perceptions, electrons are too crude to trace. Why are words finer than particles, which are older than anything? The meaning of Sumerian myths elude us, but not because their tablets are fragmentary or our grip on their language infirm. Every word sprouts wings, turns metaphor, and flits off at an angle we hadn't seen. These angles are not ours, they disregard our geometry. This unbeget-ting language, spoken by no one, is hardware that only ran thoughts now incomprehensible, their myths a food our minds cannot digest.

No single stuff of myth, then, no wellspring feeding every people. To work in the digital realm is to accept this: the sentences you construct do not pretend to be transcriptions of spoken words, nor do your images seek validity as representations of nature, judged by their fealty to something. Music—always disconcertingly itself, especially when not giving tune to words—still plays while you play, but no longer serves only as dramatic accompaniment. Word, image, and tone alike emerge from the difference between 0 and 1, the contrast between fields of force that needs, can have, no touchstone.

Game-players don't know this; they blithely enter these regions (paying for admission), thinking them flat, directional. Assume our forest is merely your path; cheer yourselves after walking its length. Contention is stranger than you know, gamers, who strain at the lines we draw round you, roar at the points we dole out, and imagine yourselves at play in the fields of the board.

Trent frequently checked the online news outlets, a practice he justified on the grounds that it kept him at his desk instead of sending him into the living room to turn on the radio. Some days he merely glanced for new headlines; others he read to the bottom of what stories were available, searching for hints of the attack that was surely coming. He knew that Leslie was doing the same from work, and sometimes imagined them sharing a second in the pages of msnbc.com/news or www.bush-watch.net, invisibly present to each other.

When it came, the websites gave it headlines, although there was nothing more than reports of rocket bombardments. "It has begun," he said aloud. What someone had told him a dozen years ago, coming out of a late movie to students gathered on the sidewalks and word that Baghdad was under attack.

They ate dinner before the TV news: few facts, much commentary.

"Word from halfway round the world," Leslie murmured, her thoughts on a different track than Trent's. "How long have most people waited for news of distant battles?"

"We're not getting much," he replied. Anchormen, bleating helplessly, were being replaced one by one with roundtable discussions. Trent cycled through the channels once more, then left it on public television.

"True; I was thinking of information reaching the strategic command, not the sorry populace. Do you think reporters will make it in before they flatten everything?" "Afghanistan isn't Kuwait," Trent replied. "It's a big country, mountainous; far from the sea. You can't pulverize it from aircraft carriers."

"I don't know," said Leslie. She was sick with hatred for the Taliban, whose recent demolition of two immense Buddhas seemed their only assault upon something not living. But George W Bush had declined to distinguish between them and al Qaeda, as though playing to a constituency that would regard such nicety as treason. His demands had been provocative and insulting, impossible to meet although the Taliban seemed to have tried. Yet had the Western nations invaded Afghanistan in the spring, she would have cheered.

"Is the President our foe?" Megan asked while Leslie was loading the dishwasher.

"In what sense?" she said, startled.

"I just heard Daddy on the telephone, and he was talking about our 'foe president.'"

On his desk Leslie noticed a photocopied page, with several sentences highlighted and scribbled dates and numbers in the margin. She squinted at the text, calling upon her grad school French. II y eut une attaque. Les villages insoumis . . . There was an attack. The unsubdued villages illuminated themselves in turn, marking the progress of conquest, like the little flags in commercial cafes.

A shadow from the other side darkened the sheet, which she turned over to find a sentence in Trent's handwriting. The resisting villages burst alight one after another, illuminating the path of Ivhctory, like the ?snaj?ping banners of a streetside cafe. The photocopy had been made with their scanner, his usual practice when he wanted to mark a passage from a library book.

"I hear you likened our President to Dario Fo," she said as they were getting ready for bed.

"I did?" He thought about it, then laughed. "He could be played by Dario Fo."

Reaching to turn off the light, she saw a book on the floor and turned it over to see the title. Her lips quirked: there was nothing to smile about, but confirmation of her husband's nature prompted an odd comfort. The photocopy had pleased her more than the notation of his daily progress, as though the assignment he had sought were a ditch to be measured in linear feet dug. He should have been writing books all along—books that encompassed history and literature, like the biography he had begun, rather than novelizations, mixing non-history with non-literature as though he was afraid to pull free of this world well lost. Could that last tug hurt as much as Trent seemed to fear?

She spoke of Trent when reluctant to speak of herself, her therapist had once noted, but wasn't she supposed to voice her cares? Trent had moved on, getting tech work and even a small grant, but privately raged, rejected (at least in his own mind) by a profession he should have rejected. It was only after tearing free, Leslie explained, that the wound could begin to heal.

"Do you think he is still suffering from that 'wound'?" her therapist asked.

"I'm sure he does." Leslie shifted slightly in the armchair, away from the view of Long Island Sound, and let her gaze rest on the pottery lining the book case. "It gnaws at him, that some people believe it, and that others won't declare they don't."

"Do you believe it?"

"No." This time she spoke firmly. "I've met her, remember? The whole industry is full of misshapen people who design games because they don't have the social skills to work in other environments. I mean—" she laughed— "I've got computer nerds reporting to me; I know about badly socialized people. But my guys don't claim creative temperaments. He shouldn't have been working for someone who lived with her boss, however stable she seemed."

"Does the fact that you believe him offer some solace?"

"You'd think it would." Leslie thought. "I guess it does, but not enough. He wanted to write a book called Complicity, a study of why people side with their peers' oppressors. I told him to stop it."

"And this was when Tobias was ill?" "Right before he was born. It was still going on, afterward. Maybe that's . . ." She shrugged, her eyes suddenly stinging.

"That was four years ago," her therapist observed delicately. "This dispute may have exacerbated matters for Trent, since it struck directly at his role as a family man." She was reminding Leslie that she is not Trent's therapist. "That might explain his continued anger over professional problems that, by now, are ancient history." Four years ago Leslie had been in bad shape, and the return of what she now recognized as clinical depression threatened to wash away the ground gained since. She began doing things only when she had to, and didn't pick up Ancient Mesopotamia at the library until they threatened to send it back. Trent made oblique comments on her list-lessness, and even word that a Florida newspaper office had been contaminated by a rare form of anthrax—another grotesque intrusion from the world of techno-thrillers—failed to jar her out of numbed and ringing stillness.