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“Dammit, I don’t understand why you can’t understand why a man’d give you a drink of water. Not to hurt you. Not to prove anything. For the love of God, mercy, you ever learn that word?
Being decent, so’s everything decent doesn’t go to hell and we don’t act like damn animals!”
The elf stares long and soberly. His small mouth has few expressions. It forms its words carefully. “Is this why you pushed us so long? To show us your control?”
“No, dammit, to hang onto it! So we can find a place to stop this bloody war. It’s all we ever wanted.”
“Then why did you start?”
“Not to have you push us!”
A blink of sea-colored eyes. “Now, now, we’re understanding.
We’re like each other.”
“But you won’t stop, dammit, you wouldn’t stop, you haven’t stopped yet! People are still dying out there on the front, throwing themselves away without a thing to win. Nothing. That’snot like us.”
“In starting war we’re alike. But not in ending it. You take years.
Quickly we show what we can do. Then both sides know. So we make peace. You showed us long cruelty. And we wouldn’t give ourselves up to you. What could we expect?”
“Is it that easy?” DeFranco begins to shiver, clenches his hands together on the tabletop and leans there, arms folded. “You’re crazy, elf.”
“Angan. My personal name is Angan.”
“A hundred damn scientists out there trying to figure out how you work and it’s that damn simple?”
“I don’t think so. I think we maybe went off course again. But we came close. We at least see there was a mistake. That’s the important thing. That’s why I came.”
DeFranco looked desperately at his watch, at the minutes ticking away. He covers the face of it with his hand and looks up. His brown eyes show anguish. “The colonel said I’d have three hours.
It’s going. It’s going too fast.”
“Yes. And we still haven’t found out why. I don’t think we ever will. Only you share with me now, deFranco. Here. In our little time.”
The elf sat, just sat quietly with his hands still tied, on the open hillside, because the acting CO had sent word no elf was setting foot inside the bunker system and no one was laying hands on him to search him.
But the troopers came out one by one in the long afternoon and had their look at him—one after another of them took the trouble to put on the faceless, uncomfortable armor just to come out and stand and stare at what they had been fighting for all these years.
“Damn,” was what most of them said, in private, on the com, their suits to his suit; “damn,” or variants on that theme.
“We got that transport coming in,” the reg lieutenant said when she came out and brought him his kit. Then, unlike herself: “Good job, Franc.”
“Thanks,” deFranco said, claiming nothing. And he sat calmly, beside his prisoner, on the barren, shell-pocked hill by a dead charcoal tree.
Don’t shake him, word had come from the CO. Keep him real happy—don’t change the situation and don’t threaten him and don’t touch him.
For fear of spontaneous suicide.
So no one came to lay official claim to the elf either, not even the captain came. But the word had gone out to Base and to HQ and up, deFranco did not doubt, to orbiting ships, because it was the best news a frontline post had had to report since the war started.
Maybe it was dreams of leaving Elfland that brought the regs out here, on pilgrimage to see this wonder. And the lieutenant went away when she had stared at him so long.
Hope. DeFranco turned that over and over in his mind and probed at it like a tongue into a sore tooth. Promotion out of the field. No more mud. No more runs like yesterday. No more, no more, no more, the man who broke the Elfland war and cracked the elves and brought in the key—
—to let it all end. For good. Wi
He looked at the elf who sat there with his back straight and his eyes wandering to this and that, to the movement of wind in a forlorn last bit of grass, the drift of a cloud in Elfland’s blue sky, the horizons and the dead trees.
“You got a name?” He was careful asking anything. But the elf had talked before.
The elf looked at him. “Saitas,” he said.
“Saitas. Mine’s deFranco.”
The elf blinked. There was no fear in his face. They might have been sitting in the bunker passing the time of day together.
“Why’d they send you?” DeFranco grew bolder.
“I asked to come.”
“Why?”
“To stop the war.”
Inside his armor deFranco shivered. He blinked and he took a drink from the tube inside the helmet and he tried to think about something else, but the elf sat there staring blandly at him, with his hands tied, resting placidly in his lap. “How?” deFranco asked,
“how will you stop the war?”
But the elf said nothing and deFranco knew he had gone further with that question than HQ was going to like, not wanting their subject told anything about human wants and intentions before they had a chance to study the matter and study the elf and hold their conferences.
“They came,” says deFranco in that small room, “to know what you looked like.”
“You never let us see your faces,” says the elf.
“You never let us see yours.”
“You knew everything. Far more than we. You knew our world.
We had no idea of yours.”
“Pride again.”
“Don’t you know how hard it was to let you lay hands on me?
That was the worst thing. You did it again. Like the gunfire. You touch with violence and then expect quiet. But I let this happen. It was what I came to do. And when you spoke to the others for me, that gave me hope.”
In time the transport came skimming in low over the hills, and deFranco got to his feet to wave it in. The elf stood up too, graceful and still placid. And waited while the transport sat down and the blades stopped beating.
“Get in,” deFranco said then, picking up his scant baggage, putting the gun on safety.
The elf quietly bowed his head and followed instructions, going where he was told. DeFranco never laid a hand on him, until inside, when they had climbed into the dark belly of the transport and guards were waiting there— “Keep your damn guns down,” deFranco said on outside com, because they were light-armed and helmetless. “What are you going to do if he moves, shoot him? Let me handle him. He speaks real good.” And to the elf: “Sit down there. I’m going to put a strap across. Just so you don’t fall.” The elf sat without objection, and deFranco got a cargo strap and hooked it to the rail on one side and the other, so there was no way the elf was going to stir or use his hands.
And he sat down himself as the guards took their places and the transport lifted off and carried them away from the elvish city and the frontline base of the hundreds of such bases in the world. It began to fly high and fast when it got to safe airspace, behind the defense humans had made about themselves.
There was never fear in the elf. Only placidity. His eyes traveled over the inside of the transport, the dark utilitarian hold, the few benches, the cargo nets, the two guards.
Learning, deFranco thought, still learning everything there was to learn about his enemies.
“Then I was truly afraid,” says the elf. “I was most afraid that they would want to talk to me and learn from me. And I would have to die then to no good. For nothing.”
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Die. Just by wanting to.”
“Wanting is the way. I could stop my heart now. Many things stop the heart. When you stop trying to live, when you stop going ahead— it’s very easy.”
“You mean if you quit trying to live you die. That’s crazy.” The elf spreads delicate fingers. “Children can’t. Children’s hearts can’t be stopped that way. You have the hearts of children. Without control. But the older you are the easier and easier it is. Until someday it’s easier to stop than to go on. When I learned your language, I learned from a man named Tomas. He couldn’t die. He and I talked—oh, every day. And one day we brought him a woman we took. She called him a damn traitor. That was what she said.