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"They're out of their minds."
"One door still closes, doesn't it? You can protect your life."
"You still bent on suicide?"
"You'll be safe."
"Damn them!"
The elf gathered his arms about him as if he too felt the chill. "The colonel gave us a time. Is it past?"
"Not bloody yet."
"Come sit with me. Sit and talk. My friend."
"Is it time?" asks the elf, as deFranco looks at his watch again. And deFranco looks up.
"Five minutes. Almost." DeFranco's voice is hoarse.
The elf has a bit of paper in hand. He offers it. A pen lies on the table between them. Along with the grenade. "I've written your peace. I've put my name below it. Put yours."
"I'm nobody. I can't sign a treaty, for God's sake." DeFranco's face is white. His lips tremble.
"What did you write?"
"Peace," said the elf. "I just wrote peace. Does there have to be more?" DeFranco takes it. Looks at it. And suddenly he picks up the pen and signs it too, a furious scribble. And lays the pen down. "There," he says. "There, they'll have my name on it." And after a moment: "If I could do the other—O God, I'm scared. I'm scared!"
"You don't have to go to my city," says the elf, softly. His voice wavers like deFranco's.
"DeFranco—here, here they record everything. Go with me. Now. The record will last. We have our peace, you and I, we make it together, here, now. The last dying. Don't leave me. And we can end this war."
DeFranco sits a moment. Takes the grenade from the middle of the table, extends his hand with it across the center. He looks nowhere but at the elf. "Pin's yours," he says. "Go on. You pull it, I'll hold it steady."
The elf reaches out his hand, takes the pin and pulls it, quickly.
DeFranco lays the grenade down on the table between them, and his mouth moves in silent counting. But then he looks up at the elf and the elf looks at him. DeFranco manages a smile.
"You got the count on this thing?"
The screen breaks up.
The staffer reached out her hand and cut the monitor, and Agnes Fi
"There's a mandatory inquiry," the man from the reg command said. "We'll take testimony from the major this afternoon."
"Responsibility's mine," Fi
It was agreed on the staff. It was pre-arranged, the interview, the formalities. Someone had to take the direct hit. It might have been a SurTac. She would have ordered that too, if things had gone differently. High command might cover her. Records might be wiped. A tape might be classified. The major general who had handed her the mess and turned his back had done it all through subordinates. And he was clear.
"The paper, Colonel."
She looked at them, slid the simple piece of paper back across the desk. The board member collected it and put it into the folder. Carefully.
"It's more than evidence," she said. "That's a treaty. The indigenes know it is." They left her office, less than comfortable in their official search for blame and where, officially, to put it.
She was already packed. Going back on the same ship with an elvish corpse, all the way to Pell and Downbelow. There would be a grave there onworld.
It had surprised no one when the broadcast tape got an elvish response. Hopes rose when it got the fighting stopped and brought an elvish delegation to the front; but there was a bit of confusion when the elves viewed both bodies and wanted deFranco's. Only deFranco's. And they made him a stone grave there on the shell-pocked plain, a stone monument; and they wrote everything they knew about him. I was John Rand deFranco, a graven plaque said. I was born on a space station twenty light-years away. I left my mother and my brothers. The friends I had were soldiers and many of them died before me. I came to fight and I died for the peace, even when mine was the wi
For their enemy.
One of their own was on his way to humankind. For humankind to cry for. I was Angan Anassidi, his grave would say; and all the right things. Possibly no human would shed a tear. Except the veterans of Elfland, when they came home, if they got down to the world—they might, like Agnes Fi
THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
A shuttle landed on Aneth, third of the three which daily landed on the world's surface. There was a stir about this arrival as there generally was not, whatever the rank of those who attended the shrine. These were Shantrans, off the powerful high-tech world of An Shant . . . the last major power which resisted the amphictyony of the shrine.
With appropriate ceremony, the Shantrans paused in the Hall of Arrivals long enough to sign the Pact and join the Amphictyony, the Neighbors of the Shrine. They did so with frowns and hesitations enough to indicate a displeasure in principle; An Shant made few agreements. But this signature was the sole and indispensable condition of consultation with the Oracle . . . a militarily harmless accord. The Shantrans read it in detail and failed to find fault in any pact so easily broken, so lacking in enforcements.
That they bar none from access to the Anethine Oracle, it read, on pain of being barred themselves in future; to come to the aid of the shrine with armed force should any attempt to gain entry by force.
They walked away openly smiling, for they were not believers in the Oracle. They had come, nevertheless, to consult it, for reasons which were their own.
And the Anethines hastened to make them welcome, making themselves as agreeable as they showed themselves to all comers, believers or not.
Aneth desired above all to please.
Visions . . . and patterns . . . endless questions.
A tapestry of patterns, interwoven. . . . The mythic fates were weavers too, lives their thread, empires their pattern, uncaring patterners, heedless who or why; the pattern was all, had ever been, and all was pattern.
To perceive . . . to know . . . the ultimate design which shifted between thread and colors, almost to grasp—the Whole. . .
Time to cease.
There was a danger, a point past which huma
There was a point past which . . . not, not at all.
Maranthe tired of waking, and dulled her senses deliberately; began the withdrawal from life to shadows.
"Maranthe," the Voices began, reminding her of humanity, which she chose to forget. They persisted. A cup came to her lips; she drank, obedient. When the Shadows took her in their hands she walked, moved, performed necessary functions. At their whispering reminder, she ate, and they bathed her and laid her in her bed.
Then was utter dark. She did not dream.
She did not wake until the morrow, when she sat again with hands outstretched over the cold plates of the machine . . . and the Vision resumed.