War Games. Brian Stableford
“Maybe,” he replied. He had no real reason for evading the question, but his immediate reaction was always to keep his intentions to himself.
“Do you talk his language, too?”
“I know the language of the clans,” he replied, keeping his voice low and his tone guarded. “What’s it to you?”
“In Omer,” she said, “we don’t find it easy to talk to the clansmen in their own language. They live to keep us at a distance. It’s their way of preserving some kind of superiority even while we rip them off. I just wondered whether things were different here.”
“No,” he told her. “They’re no different.”
She looked at him sharply. “So what does that make you? A clansman by adoption?”
“In a way,” he answered, deliberately going no further.
She kept looking at him, and smiled in a slightly wolfish manner.
“What do you do for sex, Remy?” she demanded.
He was surprised, but kept his features rigid without effort.
“After all,” she said, “you can’t have seen a human woman in ten years. The sioconi aren’t built for it, so it must be the veich. A clanless veich cast out of her protectorate would sleep with anything I guess—especially something that could stand eye-to-eye with a Calvar clansman. Or has Ziarat got more exotic pleasures to offer?”
Remy breathed out slowly. “Who are you with?” he countered, his voice relaxed and slow. “Scapaccio or Delizia? Or maybe Andros?”
She laughed, the implied insult bouncing off without threatening her composure in the least.
“Delizia’s a pacifist,” she said. “He doesn’t approve of me. The same goes for Garstone—that he doesn’t approve of me, I mean. He’s anything but a pacifist.”
“That still leaves a lot of choices,” Remy pointed out.
“I like a lot of choices,” she replied. “Garstone doesn’t approve of you, either—but I wouldn’t worry about it. I think I do.”
“That’s all right,” said Remy. “I promise not to worry about that, either.”
Abruptly, he turned his horse and rode away toward the other group of wagons.
* * * *
When they stopped for noonday the ribbon of green that marked the end of the Syrene was clearly visible in the south. There was a cool wind blowing from the east, where there was also green land, though it was temporarily shielded from view by a tall ridge. Away to the east, however, the desert stretched to the horizon, pock-marked with patches of scrub and dappled with the dark green grass that was its most prolific vegetation. The soft grayish sand had been rippled by the wind into dunes, and wherever it accumulated the grass took a firmer hold, capping the drifts with tangled tufts of spiky leaves.
Remy sheltered in the lean shadow of one of the wagons while he ate cold meat and crumbling dry bread and sipped water from his canteen. Virtually all of Scapaccio’s party had chosen to remain inside the wagons, shading out the sunlight with opaque screens that covered the translucent plastic of the cupolas, but Remy preferred the brightness of the sun to the stifling heat of the wagons.
He was about to roll out his bedding in order to take his rest when Ramon Delizia approached, sidling along in the shadow.
He stopped beside Remy and glanced out toward the desert. “Can we cross it?” he asked.
“If you want to,” said Remy. “The season’s about right for it. By the time we get into the heartland the rain should be due in the mountains. That’ll fill up the rivers that flow out of the range, and will give us all we need in order to get back again without dying of thirst. There are two or three permanent water holes between Ziarat and the mountains. The er’kresha move about in the wasteland without too much trouble. The dust is bad, though—the er’kresha are used to it but you’re not.”
He nodded. “I know about the dust,” he said.
“Tell me then,” said Remy. “I don’t.”
“We think that Azreon was a casualty of the war,” said Delizia slowly. “The war between the mapirenes and the cascarenes, that is.”
“You mean that’s when the middle of the continent became a desert?”
“That’s right. This plain never recovered. Once the soil was eroded to sand and dust, it couldn’t be reclaimed. For the coastal regions it was different, and most of the hill country. But the Syrene is probably very little different today from its appearance twenty-five thousand years ago. For thousands of years before that there wouldn’t even have been the grass. Nothing could live here then—nothing at all. The cascarenes dusted the heartland of the continent with short half-life radioactives. Not bombs—they just sowed the atmosphere with small particles. That’s how they took out the second mapirene base.”
“Why didn’t they just hit it with a particle beam, the way they smashed up the other?” asked Remy.
“That’s a matter for pure conjecture,” replied Delizia.
“Have they figured out who won the war yet?” asked Remy. “Ten years ago, we didn’t even know that.”
“We suspect that the cascarenes won it,” Delizia said. “But we don’t know for sure. Both species disappeared rather abruptly, in terms of our dating techniques. We don’t know why, but the prevailing opinion is that the cascarenes finally wiped out the mapirenes in an all-out fight in which they took such heavy losses that they couldn’t recover. Their war had been going on for well over a thousand years. The supposition is that one side or the other finally threw aside all constraints and went in with everything they had left—some kind of doomsday maneuver. Just the way our war with the veich looks like it’s going.”
Remy squinted up at the small man, remembering that Justina Magna had described him as a pacifist.
“I thought we were winning the war against the veich,” he said.
“We are. Slowly. It could drag on for hundreds of years, though, at our current rate of progress—and it’s escalating all the time. We keep looking around for a new advantage to press on a little harder, and the veich keep producing new technology that slows us down again. You’ve seen Andros; you know how far the war mentality has progressed. If we could turn creatures like that out of factories by the billion, then we’d do so. We’re already busy tailoring plagues to kill veich without affecting humans...but that’s not easy, because we’re too much alike physiologically.”
“I take it that your own mentality isn’t very warlike?” said Remy.
“Is yours?” countered Delizia.
“It’s gotten to the point where I couldn’t see much merit in the way it was being fought on Haidra,” agreed Remy. “I didn’t think that it needed me any longer, and I certainly didn’t need it. It thought I might do better on my own.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Delizia said, “I’m branded as a kind of deserter myself. Worse, in a way. My training didn’t take—my phobic responses wouldn’t yield to suppression. I scare easily.”
Remy didn’t reply. He had already reached this conclusion, and the confession was therefore unnecessary as well as ill-mannered.
“Sometimes,” said Delizia, “I wonder how effective the training really is, in general. And what happens when the repression breaks down.”
Still Remy said nothing. But his memory dutifully called forth images: images of a man named Pavese, who had indeed broken down. Remy had known him for years, and had never known him to show the least sign of fear of apprehension. Indeed, he had seemed unusually cold-blooded in every aspect of his being. Through the brief war that followed the initial landings he had come unscathed,