Jack McDevitt: A Talent for War

"Alex." Her tone had changed. "You’d better get back up here. We’re getting visitors."

I looked up, as though it might be possible to see something. "Who?"

"Looks like a mute warship. But I’m damned if I can understand what’s going on."

"Why?"

"It’s on a rendezvous course. But the damned thing’s coming in at relativistic speed. No way it can stop here."

"I NEED A few minutes here. How much time do we have?"

"About a half hour. You can’t make it back by then anyway. But I don’t see what difference it makes. Only thing he can do is wave as he goes by. It’s going to take him several days to get turned around and come back."

"Okay." I was more interested in the shelf just then. "Keep him on the scopes."

I had no extra boots, and the sun was heating up the rock. I pulled on a pair of socks, and advanced on the dome.

It was discolored by weather, streaked in some places, faded in others. Falling rock had creased it, and earth movements had pulled it askew.

Christopher Sim’s tomb.

The shelf was so very like the one on Ilyanda, where he had suffered a death of another kind. It was not a very elegant end, on this granite slab, under the white star of the ship that had carried him safely through so much.

The door was designed to function, if need be, as an airlock. It was closed, but not sealed, and I was able to lift the latch, and pull it open. Inside, the sun filtered through four windows and a skylight to illuminate living quarters that appeared surprisingly comfortable, in contrast to the sterility of the dome’s exterior. There were two padded chairs of starship design anchored to the floor, several tables, a desk, a computer, a stand-up lamp. One of the tables was inlaid for chess. But there was no sign of the pieces.

I wondered whether Tarien had come on this long flight out from Abonai, whether there had been a last desperate clash, perhaps in this room, between the brothers! Had Tarien pleaded with him to continue the struggle? It would have been a terrible dilemma; men had so few symbols, and the hour was so desperate.

They could not permit him to sit out the battle (as Achilles had done). In the end, just before Rigel, Tarien must have felt he had no choice but to seize his brother and dismiss the crew with some contrived story. (Or perhaps an angry Christopher Sim had done that himself, before confronting Tarien.) Then the conspirators had invented the legend of the Seven, concocted the destruction of Corsarius, and, when the engagement was over, they’d brought him and his ship here.

I stood in the doorway and wondered how many years that tiny space had been his home.

He would have understood, I thought. And if, in some way, he could have learned that he’d been wrong, that Rimway had come, and Toxicon, and even Earth, he might have been consoled.

There was nothing on the computer. I thought that strange; I’d expected a final message, perhaps to his wife, perhaps to the people he had defended. But the memory banks were empty. And in time I felt the walls begin to close, and I fled the place, out onto the shelf that had defined the limits of his existence.

Chilled, I walked the perimeter, skirting the slabs at the north end, striding in the shadow of the wall, and returning along the edge of the precipice. I tried to imagine myself (as I had on the island a couple of nights before) marooned in that place, alone on that world, a thousand light years from anyone with whom I could speak. The ocean must have seemed very tempting.

Overhead, Corsarius flew. He could have seen it moving among the stars, hurtling across the skies like an errant moon every few hours.

And then I saw the inscription. He had cut a single line of letters into the rock wall, just above eye level, at one end of the shelf. They were driven deep into the limestone, hard-edged characters whose fury was clear enough (I thought), though I could not understand the language in which they’d been written:

"Chase?"

She was slow to answer. "I’m watching."

"Can we get a translation?"

"Trying. I’m not sure how to enter a visual into the computer. Give me a minute."

Greek. Sim had remained a classicist to the end.

My heart hammered against my ribs, as I contemplated what his final days, or years, must have been. How long had he endured this shelf, beneath the ecliptic of the endlessly circling link with home?

It would have been a reflexive choice, when the Tenandrome flashed its news to Fishbowl and Rimway, to keep it quiet. I could imagine the hurried meetings of high-ranking officials, already burdened with a disintegrating government. Why not? What good could come of such a revelation? And the men on the Tenandrome, themselves shaken by what they’d seen, had readily agreed.

"Alex. The computer thinks it’s classical Greek."

"Good. What else?"

"That’s it. It says there are only a few languages in its library, and all of those are modern."

"The last word," I said, "looks like Demosthenes."

"The orator?"

"I don’t know. Maybe. But I can’t imagine why he’d go to the trouble to carve the name of a dead Greek on a wall. In these circumstances."

"Makes no sense," said Chase. "He had a computer available in the dome. Why didn’t he use that? He could have written whatever he wanted. Why go to all the trouble to carve it in rock?"

"The medium’s the message, as someone once said. Maybe an electronic surface wouldn’t express his feelings appropriately."

"I have a link with the computer on Corsarius. There are only two references to Demosthenes. One is the old Greek, and the other was a contemporary wrestler."

"What’s it say about him? The Greek, I mean."

"384-322 B.C. Old Style. Greatest of the Hellenic orators. Said to have been born with a speech impediment which he overcame by placing pebbles in his mouth and speaking against the sea. His orations persuaded the Athenians to make war against Macedonia. The best known were the three Philippics and three Olynthiacs. All dating from around 350 B.C., give or take a few years. The Macedonians won despite Demonsthenes' efforts, and he was driven into exile. Later, he died by his own hand."

"There’s a connection," I said.

"Yes. Tarien was an orator too. Maybe it’s a reference to him."

"I wouldn’t be surprised," I said. I’d noticed another inscription on the rock, at its base, in letters of a different sort: Hugh Scott, 3131. Cut with a smaller laser.

"That’s Universal time," said Chase. "It equates to either 1410 or 1411, Rimway." She sighed. "At the end, Sim might have forgiven his brother. Maybe he even realized he was right."

"Considering the circumstances, that would take a lot of forgiving." My feet hurt. The socks weren’t all that much protection, and I had to keep moving to prevent being burned. "Where’s our visitor?"

"Still coming. Still accelerating. They’re really piling it on." The air was still. "Alex?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think she found him? In time, I mean?"

"Leisha?" I’d been thinking about little else since I’d set down. Tanner had hunted for years. Candles’s lost pilot. And Sim.

Who walks behind the stars.

On far Belmincour.

"She didn’t have the resources of the Machesney Institute. My God, she must have been out here all that time, taking pictures and running them through computers, trying to recreate that constellation."

"What do you think?"

"I don’t know. But I suspect that’s that question that haunts Hugh Scott."

I’d resisted the temptation to cut my name in the rock alongside Scott’s, and wandered back toward the capsule. I was climbing into the cockpit when Chase’s voice took on a note of urgency. "Alex," she said, "I hate to break in with bad news, but there’s another one! And it’s big!"