A Talent for War (15 page)

"Don't bother," I said.

I'd gone there hoping to find an expert of some sort, take him aside, and get a fresh point of view on the problem. But in the end I could think of no way to formulate a question. So I settled for picking up some off-line material, copied it into a blank crystal, and added it to Jacob's pile.

Jacob reported no progress yet on the first batch. "I am processing at a slow rate, to allow better perception. But it would help if you could define the parameters of the search."

"Look for suggestions of a lost artifact," I said. "Preferably a puzzle for which we might
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reasonably expect Dr. Machesney to have had a solution. Or something that got lost, that we might consider an artifact."

I became something of an expert myself on Rash Machesney. He risked everything in that war.

The scientific community blackballed him; his home world conducted criminal proceedings and sentenced him in absentia to two years in prison. The peace movement blasted him, one of its spokesmen declaring that his name would be linked with Iscariot. And the Ashiyyur denounced him as a prostitute, using his knowledge to create advanced weaponry. That was a charge he never denied.

He was also accused of being a crank, a womanizer, and a man who enjoyed his liquor. I acquired a distinct affection for him.

But I got nowhere, and gave up after several nights. There were no indications of anything valuable missing, and no connection with the Veiled Lady. That nebula was far from the scene of the war. It was a site for no battles, and no targets hid within its winding folds. (Strategic interest in the Veiled Lady was a creature of relatively recent development, springing from the expansion of the Confederacy into that region. During Sim's time, there would have been no point in advancing through the nebula because there were easier routes into the heart of the Confederacy.

Today, however, matters were different.)

Chase offered to help. I accepted, and she got a sack of reading and viewing material. It didn't matter very much.

When the Ludik Talino Society held its next monthly meeting at the Collandium, I was there.

Jana Khyber was right: it was to be a social rather than an academic evening. The conversation in the lobby was good-humored, full of laughter, and everyone was clearly prepared for a party.

It felt a bit like going to the theater. People were well-dressed, waving to one another, mixing easily. Not at all the sort of crowd you might have expected at a gathering, say, of the local historical society, or the Friends of the University Museum.

I wandered inside, traded a few trivialities with a couple of women, and secured a drink. We were in a series of connected conference rooms, the largest of which was set up to seat about three hundred. It was just adequate.

There was money in the establishment: thick carpets, paneled walls, crystal chandeliers and electric candles, carved bookshelves, paintings by Manois and Romfret. Talino's image was displayed on a banner in the main room. And Christopher Sim's harridan device had been mounted on the podium.

There were exhibits of relevant works by the members: histories, battle analyses, discussions of various disputed details of that much-disputed war. Most had been privately produced, but a few bore the imprint of major publishers.

Above the speakers' platform, Marcross's Corsarius appeared again.

An agenda was posted. Panels would evaluate the validity of assorted historical documents, examine the relationship between two people I'd never heard of (they turned out to be obscure women who might have known Talino, and, in the opinion of many of those present, had quarreled over his favors), and look into some esoteric aspects of Ashiyyurean battle tactics.

On the hour, we were gaveled to order by the president, a large, hostile woman with a stare like a laser cannon. She welcomed us, introduced a few guests, rambled on about old business, accepted the treasurer's report (we were showing a pretty good profit), and introduced a red-faced man who moved to invite an Ashiyyurean "speaker" from the Maracaibo Caucus.

I whispered into my commlink and asked Jacob what the Maracaibo Caucus was.

"It's composed of retired military officers," he said. "Both ours and Ashiyyurean, and dedicated to keeping the peace. It's one of the few organizations in the Confederacy with alien members.

What's going on there anyway? What's all the racket?"

The audience was voicing its discontent with the suggestion. The red-faced man shouted
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something above the noise, and was roundly hooted. I wondered whether there was any place in the Confederacy where feelings ran more strongly against the Ashiyyur than in the inner sanctum of the Ludik Talino Society.

The president reasserted herself, and the red-faced man turned away in disgust and descended into the crowd. A cheer went up, followed swiftly by laughter, and a hoisting of glasses. It was a game. Or a ritual.

The president quieted the audience with a cautionary glance, and launched into an introduction of the first speaker of the evening, a tall, balding man seated beside her, who was trying not to look impressed with the traditional flow of compliments. When she'd concluded and announced his name—it was Wyler—he ascended to the lectern, and cleared his throat.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to be with you tonight." He lifted his jaw slightly, and struck a pose that he must have assumed to be one of considerable dignity. In fact, he was an ungainly individual, all elbows and odd angles, with wiry eyebrows and a nervous tic. "It's been a good many years since I've been in these rooms. A lot has changed. I wonder, for one thing, whether we're not closer to war. We're certainly closer to destabilization. Every place I go, there's talk of independence." He shook his head, and thrust one hand forward, waving it all away. "Well, it doesn't matter, really. Tonight, we're all here together, and I suspect whatever happens out there, the Talino Society will continue to serve as a bulwark of civilization!" His eyes brightened, and he jabbed a finger at the chandelier. "I remember I was sitting right over there— " I glanced in

the direction he pointed, looked back toward the speaker, and realized suddenly that I'd seen someone I knew.

When I looked again, when I focused on the woman whose face had drawn my attention, I saw only a stranger. Yet there was something familiar in the graceful curve of throat and cheekbone, or perhaps in the almost introspective expression, or the subtle grace with which she lifted her glass to her lips.

I knew the face. But I could not give her a name, and she was far too attractive to have forgotten.

"... I was quite a young man when I first came to Rimway. I was even then fascinated by the puzzles surrounding the life and death of Ludik Talino.

"Here was a man who had fought for the Dellacondans against Toxicon, and before that against Cormoral, and before that against the Tuscans. He had received damned near every award for valor that his world could offer. He had nearly been killed on at least two occasions, and had once cast himself from the open hatch of a disabled ship to assist an injured comrade.

With no assurance that help would come in time for them.

"Do you have any idea what it means to be adrift out there, with nothing between you and the void but the thin fabric of a pressure suit? No tether to home but the weak signal of a helmet radio? Believe me, it isn't the act of a coward."

Across the room, the woman was aware of me: she concentrated her attention on the speaker, and looked occasionally to her right, but never in my direction. Who the hell was she?

"How, I asked myself, could such a man have abandoned his post at so critical a moment?

The only answer was that he could not. There had to be another explanation.

"So, as a young graduate student I was excited to have the opportunity to come here to look for that explanation in the place where Talino had spent most of his life, to study the documents firsthand, to walk where he had walked, to get a sense of what he must have felt during those final years. You won't be surprised to know that, on my first day in Andiquar, I visited the Hatchmore House where he died."

He fumbled behind the podium momentarily, found a glass, and filled it with ice water. "I can remember standing outside the second-floor bedroom, where they have cordoned it off, and thinking I could almost feel his presence. Which shows you what imagination will do. I've had a
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lot of time since then to look at the truth of matters. And the truth is that the man who died on Rimway a hundred and fifty years ago, proclaiming his innocence, was not Ludik Talino."

The audience stirred. The woman, possibly startled by the statement, looked directly at me.

And I, irritated by an assertion I knew to be untrue, suddenly realized who she was! She'd been a girl, not quite arrived at adolescence when I'd last seen her. Her name was Quinda, and she used to come with her grandfather to visit Gabe.

Wyler pressed on: "He was in fact Jeffrey Kolm, an actor. Kolm had, in his day, guarded the throne in Omicar, played an emissary who was murdered almost the moment he set foot on stage in Caesar and Cleopatra, and delivered the critical message in Trinity. It could not have been a very satisfying career, and it was certainly not lucrative. Kolm held down a variety of jobs, mostly state-sponsored positions for people without skills. And it is therefore not difficult to suppose that he was looking for some more subtle challenge, some role that would perhaps yield a substantial profit.

"He found that role in Ludik Talino.

"Think of it: after Rigel, there was only confusion. Sim was dead, the Dellacondans scattered, the war apparently lost. No one knew precisely what had occurred, nor what might happen next.

The worlds of the Confederacy, and the neutrals whom they'd been protecting, were scrambling diplomatically and militarily to survive, and no one was paying much attention to the details of what had happened at Rigel.

"It was chaos. People thought Tarien had died with his brother, and there were some among the Dellacondans who were trying to make peace with the Ashiyyur. What more critical moment for a new hero to step forward?"

Wyler did not use notes. His voice had dropped, and he spoke with cool certainty, waggling the fingers of his right hand at his audience to emphasize each point. "Remember that no one knew yet that Sim had been betrayed."

The lights dimmed, and two holographic faces appeared behind and above the speaker. They were dark, handsome, blessed with the sort of features that you might almost think of as noble.

One was bearded, one clean-shaven; there was about fifteen years difference between the two.

Still, the resemblance was striking. "Talino is on the right. The other man is Kolm. It's a publicity still, and shows him as he appeared in The Deeps." Both images faded, to be replaced by a third: this one was also bearded, but there were streaks of gray now in the black hair, and the eyes were troubled. "And this," Wyler said, "is from a holo of Talino made after Rigel. Which of the two men is it?" He drummed his fingers against the podium.

I momentarily forgot Quinda.

"Kolm may well have recognized the need of the times. And the opportunity to play a bona fide hero in a real life role must have appealed to him. So he stepped forward, presenting himself as Talino the lone survivor, somehow blown clear of the Corsarius in those final moments."

He chuckled. "It must have come as a terrible surprise when the story of the betrayal surfaced.

Sim's crewmen had fled. And what more natural for the general public to assume but that the man who claimed to have miraculously survived was in fact a liar? Particularly when that man's account of events varied so considerably from the official version. So Holm, expecting to enjoy the fruits of another man's heroism, instead found himself in the role of a miscreant."

He shrugged, and held up his hands, palms out. "So why did he continue? Why not go back to his old life?

"We'll never really know. Talino could easily have been allowed to vanish, and none would have ever known. But he stayed on, continued to play the part, addressed after-dinner groups. It might have been that it was more profitable to play the disgraced hero than to return to the anonymity of an unsuccessful acting career.

"But Iwish to propose an infinitely stranger possibility: that Holm played Talino so well,
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identified with him so closely, that he literally became Talino. That he felt driven to defend the name he had adopted.

"Whatever the explanation, Ludik Talino lived on.

"And if his bitter denials that he had abandoned his captain ring so convincingly in our ears, it is because they are the cries of a man who was indeed innocent."

Briefly, he summed up the evidence. There wasn't much: inconsistencies in statements attributed to TalinoIKolm, the disappearance of the actor at about the same time that the Rigel action was fought, two statements by persons who had known Kolm maintaining that he had indeed masqueraded as Talino. And so on. "Individually," the speaker observed, "none of these amounts to much. But taken as a whole, they point clearly to one conclusion."

He looked around for questions. "What happened to Talino himself?" asked a young woman in front.

Quinda turned as casually as she could, and glanced in my direction. She appeared deep in thought.

"I think we can argue," Wyler said, "that of all the crewmen, only he remained loyal. It's my opinion that he died with his captain."

"I don't believe a word of it," I remarked in the general direction of some people who were standing in front of me. One of them, a tall white-haired man with carefully honed diction and the bearing of a philosophy department chairman, turned and fixed me with a disapproving stare.

"Wyler is a solid researcher," he said solemnly. "If you can demonstrate an error, I'm sure we'd be happy to hear from you." He laughed, jammed his elbow into the ribs of one of his companions, and finished off his drink with a flourish.