He couldn’t possibly be human. No human being could calculate the odds that far in advance.
“The rest fell into place,” George said. “The poisoning was a wild card, but it worked in our favor. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have poisoned you, Dina. It was too risky. I need you for the final act to this drama, and I am genuinely fond of you. For all my ruthlessness, my friends are very dear to me. That’s why I have so few. I try not to form friendships.”
“Because you might have to kill people you know?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
A thick root slid out of the opening in the floor, wrapped in a network of thinner shoots. I let it rise about three feet and opened the bag. A round white jewel sat inside, as big as a soccer ball and rippling with all the fire of a diamond. The thinner roots bent toward it, scooped up the gem, and pulled it to the main shoot, wrapping tightly around it, forming a cocoon. The psy-booster was in place. Hopefully Gertrude Hunt would bond with it in the next few hours.
“I understand the Khanum, Robart, and Nuan Cee.” I shook my head. “I still don’t understand you.”
George sighed, his handsome face resigned. “Very well. I owe you that much.”
He raised his walking stick and gently tapped it on the floor. A huge projection burst out of the top of the cane, curving in front of us, taking up almost an entire half of the ballroom. Jagged mountains thrust through the barren brown and green soil, their yellow cliffs reflecting the light of a green sickly sun, puncturing the sky like an infected wound. Nexus. Hot during the day, cold at night, ugly at all times, yet hiding immense mineral wealth just beneath its crust.
“I was five when my grandfather died,” George said. His voice was hollow. “He was a pirate, a swordsman, and a vagabond. He told great stories. He was the best grandfather a child could have. Our mother was dead, our father had abandoned us, so it was just my older sister, Jack, me, and my grandparents. So when he died, I was very sad.”
On the screen George walked into the desolation of Nexus. He wore plain pants and a simple white shirt. His loose blond hair streamed around him. His face was serene and so beautiful… He was almost angelic, a strange haunting mirage conjured up by a planet wishing for something other than a wasteland.
George’s voice was soft, intimate, the kind of voice that reached deep into your soul. “I was so sad that I called him back to life. Everyone thinks the dead rise as mindless monsters. It is always that way for necromancers. The dead rise without the burdens of their past lives, without a mind, and without pain.”
I sensed what was coming and braced myself.
“The thing that came back wasn’t my grandfather. It had claws and fangs. It devoured stray dogs. But it could speak and it knew my name. It remembered me. It remembered how the man it used to be died. It remembered the pain of his passing and it mourned the love he had lost.”
The other George kept walking. The jagged cliffs parted and a vast valley, its floor rough and uneven, stretched before him. He was utterly alone.
“When the Office of Arbitration gave this assignment to me, I reviewed all the files and found I couldn’t understand this war. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of strategy and tactics could see that it was unwinnable by any of the factions. It devoured resources, time, and lives, and the longer it went on, the weaker everyone involved became. Why would these three nations, all pragmatic, all used to weighing the odds in battle and in trade, hurl themselves at each other, dying for years in a war they couldn’t win? Why continue this senseless slaughter at such a terrible cost? It made no sense.”
On the projection George stopped. His blue eyes blazed with a pure white light. He raised his right hand, his fingers pointing up like claws.
“I couldn’t understand it, so I went to Nexus.”
A wind stirred his hair, growing stronger, tugging at his clothes.
“You see,” he said, his intimate voice filled with regret, “the living lie. They can’t help it. They lie out of kindness, necessity, and self-interest. But the dead always tell the truth.”
On the screen the ground broke around George’s feet, as if the dry crust of Nexus’s desert turned liquid.
“So I went to Nexus and I asked them.”
Bodies rose, some rotting, some skeletal, but all reaching to him, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, their limbs held out as if pleading, and then I heard it, a muted, desperate wail, coming from hundreds of creatures at once, so terrible I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and run.
“They say the dead have no memories and know no pain.” George’s voice was barely above a whisper, but somehow it was louder than the pleas of the corpses. “It’s not that way for me.”
The dead cried out, louder and louder, grabbing at George’s clothes, begging. George stood in the center of this maelstrom, his eyes brimming with pain. Tears wet his face. He wept and the dead cried with him.
“I understand them now. They fight because they cannot stop,” he said, his voice somehow reaching me despite the wails. “They have buried their friends and lovers in that ground. It is watered with their blood, and they have nothing to show for it. The idea that those they lost died for nothing is too painful and frightening to contemplate. It’s not a war of the living, Dina. It’s the War of the Dead. Trust me when I say this: the dead do not care. I can call on their last memories and feelings, but they’re not the same beings they were during their lives. They are echoes of the dying minds. They have no soul.”
On the screen white lightning tore out of George. The corpses fell as one. He stood alone.
“Those who remain have forgotten they are alive. They think they have more in common with their fallen than with their enemy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know the difference between life and death. Two live beings from the opposite boundaries of the galaxy have infinitely more in common with each other than the living and the dead from the same family.”
The real George, the one next to me, touched his cane, and the projection vanished.
“The war on Nexus has to stop,” he said. “It won’t be ended by noble means, because if good intentions, compassion, and meaningful dialogue could’ve solved this, peace would’ve been reached already. Sometimes to stop something this terrible, you have to do something equally terrible in return at a great personal cost, and that terrible thing can’t be done by one of the principals in this conflict. They must be able to walk away clean, united and guiltless, or the peace won’t last. Someone must remind them that they are still alive. Someone must bear the blame and the rage that will bring. I am that someone. I take full responsibility for tomorrow. I forced it to happen. I’m sorry that you must also be involved. It is unfair that I used you. Nobody will ever know what you have done or what it will cost you. Your name and mine will be forgotten quickly, but we will both know and remember what we have done and why it had to be done. The psy-booster runs on magic. I will fuel it for you tomorrow.”