Poul Anderson: A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

“Why?” said Aycharaych. The armored men gave him scant notice. His form glimmered miragelike in the gloom under that vaulted roof, where sullen sunlight barely reached. “You have discovered we have nothing to resist you.”

You’re bound to have something, Flandry did not reply. A few missiles or whatever. You’re just unwilling to use them in these environs. Where are you yourself, and what were you doing while your specters held us quiet?

As if out of a stranger’s throat, he heard: “Those weren’t straightforward audiovisuals like yours that we met, were they? No reason for them to put on a show of being present, of being real, except that none of them ever were. Right? They’re computer-generated simulacrums, will-o’-the-wisps for leading allies and enemies alike from the truth. Well, life’s made me an unbeliever.

“Aycharaych, you are in fact the last Chereionite alive. The very last. Aren’t you?”

Abruptly such anguish contorted the face before him that he looked away. “What did they die of?” he was asking. “How long ago?” He got no answer.

Instead: “Dominic, we share a soul, you and I. We have both always been alone.”

For a while I wasn’t; and now she is; she is down in the aloneness which is eternal. Rage ripped Flandry. He swung back to see a measure of self-command masking the gaunt countenance. “You must have played your game for centuries,” he grated. “Why? And … whatever your reason to hide that your people are extinct … why prey on the living? You, you could let them in and show them what’d make your Chereionites the … Greeks of the galaxy—but you sit in a tomb or travel like a vampire—Are you crazy, Aycharaych? Is that what drives you?”

“No!”

Flandry had once before heard the lyric voice in sorrow. He had not heard a scream: “I am not! Look around you. Who could go mad among these? And arts, music, books, dreams—yes, more, the loftiest spirits of a million years—they lent themselves to the scanners, the recorders—If you could have the likenesses to meet whenever you would … of Gautama Buddha, Kung Fu-Tse, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus the Christ, Rumi … Socrates, Newton, Hokusai, Jefferson, Gauss, Beethoven, Einstein, Ulfgeir, Manuel the Great, Manuel the Wise—would you let your war lords turn these instruments to their own vile ends? No!”

And Flandry understood.

Did Aycharaych, half blinded by his dead, see what he had given away? “Dominic,” he whispered hastily, shakily, “I’ve used you ill, as I’ve used many. It was from no will of mine. Oh, true, an art, a sport—yours too—but we had our services, you to a civilization you know is dying, I to a heritage I know can abide while this sun does. Who has the better right?” He held forth unsubstantial hands.

“Dominic, stay. We’ll think how to keep your ships off and save Chereion—”

Almost as if he were again the machine that condemned his son, Flandry said, “I’d have to lure my company into some kind of trap. Merseia would take the planet back, and the help it gives. Your shadow show would go on. Right?”

“Yes. What are a few more lives to you? What is Terra? In ten thousand years, who will remember the empires? They can remember you, though, who saved Chereion for them.”

Candle flames stood around a coffin. Flandry shook his head. “There’ve been too many betrayals in too many causes.” He wheeled. “Men, we’re returning.”

“Aye, sir.” The replies shuddered with relief.

Aycharaych’s eidolon brought fingers together as if he prayed. Flandry touched his main grav switch. Thrust pushed harness against breast. He rose from the radiant city, into the waning murky day. Chill flowed around him. Behind floated his robot-encased men.

“Brigate!” bawled Vymezal. “Beware!”

Around the topmost tower flashed a score of javelin shapes. Firebeams leaped out of their nozzles. Remote-controlled flyer guns, Flandry knew. Does Aycharaych still hope, or does he only want revenge? “ Chives,” he called into his sender, “come get us!”

Sparks showered off Vymezal’s plate. He slipped aside in midair, more fast and nimble than it seemed he could be in armor. His energy weapon, nearly as heavy as the assailants, flared back. Thunders followed brilliances. Bitterness tinged air. A mobile blast cannon reeled in midflight, spun downward, crashed in a street, exploded. Fragments ravaged a fragile facade.

“Shield the captain,” Vymezal boomed.

Flandry’s men ringed him in. Shots tore at them. The noise stamped in his skull, the stray heat whipped over his skin. Held to his protection, the marines could not dodge about. The guns converged.

A shadow fell, a lean hull blocked off the sun. Flames reaped. Echoes toned at last to silence around smoking ruin down below. Vymezal shouted triumph. He waved his warriors aside, that Flandry might lead them through the open lock, into the Hooligan.

Wounded, dwindled, victorious, the Dennitzan fleet took orbits around Chereion. Within the command bridge, Bodin Miyatovich and his chieftains stood for a long while gazing into the viewscreens. The planet before them glowed among the stars, softly, secretly, like a sign of peace. But it was the pictures they had seen earlier, the tale they had heard, which made those hard men waver.

Miyatovich even asked through his flagship’s rustling stillness: “Must we bombard?”

“Yes,” Flandry said. “I hate the idea too.”

Qow of Novi Aferoch stirred. Lately taken off his crippled light cruiser, he was less informed than the rest. “Can’t sappers do what’s needful?” he protested.

“I wish they could,” Flandry sighed. “We haven’t time. I don’t know how many millennia of history we’re looking down on. How can we read them before the Merseian navy arrives?”

“Are you sure, then, the gain to us can justify a deed which someday will make lovers of beauty, seekers of knowledge, curse our names?” the zmay demanded. “Can this really be the center of the opposition’s Intelligence?”

“I never claimed that,” Flandry said. “In fact, obviously not. But it must be important as hell itself. We here can give them no worse setback than striking it from their grasp.”

“Your chain of logic seems thin.”

“Of course it is! Were mortals ever certain? But listen again, Qow.

“When the Merseians discovered Chereion, they were already conquest-hungry. Aycharaych, among the ghosts those magnificent computers had been raising for him—computers and programs we today couldn’t possibly invent—he saw they’d see what warlike purposes might be furthered by such an instrumentality. They’d bend it wholly to their ends, bring their engineers in by the horde, ransack, peer, gut, build over, leave nothing unwrecked except a few museum scraps. He couldn’t bear the thought of that.

“He stopped them by conjuring up phantoms. He made them think a few million of his race were still alive, able to give the Roidhunate valuable help in the form of staff work, while he himself would be a unique field agent—if they were otherwise left alone. We may never know how he impressed and tricked those tough-minded fighter lords; he did, that’s all. They believe they have a worldful of enormous intellects for allies, whom they’d better treat with respect. He draws on a micro part of the computers, data banks, stored knowledge beyond our imagining, to generate advice for them … excellent advice, but they don’t suspect how much more they might be able to get, or by what means.

“Maybe he’s had some wish to influence them, as if they learned from Chereion. Or maybe he’s simply been biding his time till they too erode from his planet.”