The Scapegoat

Damn traitor. Then Tomas wanted to die and he couldn’t. He told me so. It was the only thing he ever asked of me. Like the water, you see. Because I felt sorry for him I gave him the cup. And to her.

Because I had no use for her. But Tomas hated me. He hated me every day. He talked to me because I was all he had to talk to, he would say. Nothing stopped his heart. Until the woman called him traitor. And then his heart stopped, though it went on beating. I only helped. He thanked me. And damned me to hell. And wished me health with his drink.

“Dammit, elf.”

“I tried to ask him what hell was. I think it means being still and trapped. So we fight.”

(“He’s very good with words,” someone elsewhere says, leaning over near the monitor. “He’s trying to communicate something, but the words aren’t equivalent. He’s playing on what he does have.”)

“For God’s sake,” says deFranco then, “is that why they fling themselves on the barriers? Is that why they go on dying? Like birds at cage bars?”

The elf flinches. Perhaps it is the image. Perhaps it is a thought.

“Fear stops the heart, when fear has nowhere to go. We still have one impulse left. There is still our anger. Everything else has gone.

At the last even our children will fight you. So I fight for my children by coming here. I don’t want to talk about Tomas any more. The birds have him. Youare what I was looking for.”

“Why?” DeFranco’s voice shakes. “Saitas—Angan—I’m scared as hell.”

“So am I. Think of all the soldiers. Think of things important to you. I think about my home.”

“I think I never had one. —This is crazy. It won’t work.”

“Don’t.” The elf reaches and holds a brown wrist. “Don’t leave me now, deFranco.”

“There’s still fifteen minutes. Quarter of an hour.”

“That’s a very long time… here. Shall we shorten it?”

“No,” deFranco says and draws a deep breath. “Let’s use it.” At the base where the on-world authorities and the scientists did their time, there were real buildings, real ground-site buildings, which humans had made. When the transport touched down on a rooftop landing pad, guards took the elf one way and deFranco another. It was debriefing: that he expected. They let him get a shower first with hot water out of real plumbing, in a prefabbed bathroom. And he got into his proper uniform for the first time in half a year, shaved and proper in his blue beret and his brown uniform, fresh and clean and thinking all the while that if a special could get his field promotion it was scented towels every day and soft beds to sleep on and a life expectancy in the decades. He was anxious, because there were ways of snatching credit for a thing and he wanted the credit for this one, wanted it because a body could get killed out there on hillsides where he had been for three years and no desk-sitting officer was going to fail to mention him in the report.

“Sit down,” the specials major said, and took him through it all; and that afternoon they let him tell it to a reg colonel and lieutenant general; and again that afternoon they had him tell it to a tableful of scientists and answer questions and questions and questions until he was hoarse and they forgot to feed him lunch.

But he answered on and on until his voice cracked and the science staff took pity on him.

He slept then, in clean sheets in a clean bed and lost touch with the war so that he waked terrified and lost in the middle of the night in the dark and had to get his heart calmed down before he realized he was not crazy and that he really had gotten into a place like this and he really had done what he remembered.

He tucked down babylike into a knot and thought good thoughts all the way back to sleep until a buzzer waked him and told him it was day in this windowless place, and he had an hour to dress again—for more questions, he supposed; and he thought only a little about his elf, hiself, who was handed on to the scientists and the generals and the AlSec people, and stopped being his personal business.

“Then,” says the elf, “I knew you were the only one I met I could understand. Then I sent for you.”

“I still don’t know why.”

“I said it then. We’re both soldiers.”

“You’re more than that.”

“Say that I made one of the great mistakes.”

“You mean at the begi

“It could have been. Say that I commanded the attacking ship.

Say that I struck your people on the world. Say that you destroyed our station and our cities. We are the makers of mistakes. Say this of ourselves.”

“I,” the elf said, his image on the screen much the same as he had looked on the hillside, straight-spined, red-robed—only the ropes elves had put on him had left purpling marks on his wrists, on the opalescing white of his skin, “I’m clear enough, aren’t I?” The trooper accent was strange coming from a delicate elvish mouth.

The elf’s lips were less mobile. His voice had modulations, like singing, and occasionally failed to keep its tones flat.

“It’s very good,” the scientist said, the man in the white coveralls, who sat at a small desk opposite the elf in a sterile white room and had his hands laced before him. The camera took both of them in, elf and swarthy Science Bureau xenologist. “I understand you learned from prisoners.”

The elf seemed to gaze into infinity. “We don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Neither do we. Is this why you came?”

A moment the elf studied the scientist, and said nothing at all.

“What’s your people’s name?” the scientist asked.

“You call us elves.”

“But we want to know what you call yourselves. What you call this world.”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“To respect you. Do you know that word, respect?”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Because what you call this world and what you call yourselves isthe name, the right name, and we want to call you right. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense. But what you call us is right too, isn’t it?”

“Elves is a made-up word, from our homeworld. A myth. Do you know myth? A story. A thing not true.”

“Now it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Do you call your world Earth? Most people do.”

“What you call it is its name.”

“We call it Elfland.”

“That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“I’ve said that.”

“You learned our language very well. But we don’t know anything of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’d like to learn. We’d like to be able to talk to you your way. It seems to us this is only polite. Do you know polite?”

“No.”

A prolonged silence. The scientist’s face remained bland as the elf’s. “You say you don’t want to fight anymore. Can you tell us how to stop the war?”

“Yes. But first I want to know what your peace is like. What, for instance, will you do about the damage you’ve caused us?”

“You mean reparations.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Payment.”

“What do you mean by it?”

The scientist drew a deep breath. “Tell me. Why did your people give you to one of our soldiers? Why didn’t they just call on the radio and say they wanted to talk?”

“This is what you’d do.”

“It’s easier, isn’t it? And safer.”

The elf blinked. No more than that.

“There was a ship a long time ago,” the scientist said after a moment. “It was a human ship minding its own business in a human lane, and elves came and destroyed it and killed everyone on it. Why?”

“What do you want for this ship?”

“So you do understand about payment. Payment’s giving something for something.”

“I understand.” The elvish face was guileless, masklike, the long eyes like the eyes of a pearl-ski

“You mean you don’t think our word for it is like your word for it?”