So, it became a game. Pitting my wits against yours, against everyone. I studied the Narn ambassadors who came to patronise and mock us. I gathered blackmail information on all of them. I never used it, it was just an intellectual exercise. I studied the records of your people. I gathered as much information as I could. Oh, it was woefully incomplete, at least it was until we captured you, but.... I didn't care what we did with it.
Every night I went home to my dead apartment, and slept in the bed that still smelled like her. Sometimes I went for long walks, unable to sleep, unable to care. I saw people, I saw humanity, and I wondered why we bothered trying to save them at all. Let your ships come. Let them blow us apart. What did it matter?
I began to wonder just why my companions in the Government were bothering. It didn't take me long to find out. Crane had been elected before the war had even begun, and still in some sense believed she was leading the same people as she had then. Hague was fighting because it was all he knew how to do and because he knew he couldn't turn that burden over to anyone else. Takashima.... well, all my opinions on her were wrong. At the time I thought she was the only idealistic and genuine person among us, but a couple of years ago I found out she had a secondary personality and was doing whatever Bester told her to.
Ah.... strange as it sounds, I like being wrong sometimes. It adds variety. But most of the time, it's just annoying.
And Clark.... He took it all as a personal insult. He was ambitious, and always had been. He wanted power to.... well.... to put things right. That's according to his definition of 'right', of course. There's a blanket assumption that all dictators are evil, megalomaniacal madmen who just want power for its own sake. I've never met or heard of anyone like that. Most of them, I think, just want to put things right.
Take your Sinoval, for example. Not that I've ever met him, but from my reports....
Sorry, digressing again.
Clark had been in politics all his life. Ever since he was a child he'd dreamed of gaining power, of using it wisely, of being so much smarter, so much more adept than the people in charge at the time. In a very scary way he might have been me, except I didn't care, and he did.
And then you came along, just when he was beginning to get somewhere. He could have been right at the top in ten years, maybe fifteen. But then you came, and threw everything upside down. He shot up faster than he'd planned, but not because he was smarter, or better, or more astute, or more popular. He shot up because most of the people above him were dead. Anyone can rise that way. What kind of intelligence does that require?
You'd made it easy for him, and that cheapened him in some way. Also, it sort of undervalued his position. When he finally did get to power, it was by poisoning Crane, by the way. Oh yes, I knew all about that. When he did get to be President, what was the point? He couldn't fix anything, because it would take him his whole lifetime just to clean up the mess you'd left him. Oh, he enjoyed doing what he could.... you should have seen him blackmail the Narns.... but that wasn't the way he'd dreamed of it happening. He wasn't the leader of a powerful young race, ready to take its place in the galaxy. He was the last leader of a pathetic people, clinging on to survival by their fingernails, with half of them ready to let go and drop into the abyss.
He blamed you for all of that, and after a while he blamed us as well.
Until the Vorlons came along. That, I didn't know. I knew he was acting strangely, but by that time I wasn't thinking straight. Just like all those years ago, when I first saw Vicky, my life had been turned upside down — although just like with Vicky, I wasn't to realise it for some time, almost too long.
That was meeting you, of course.
Corwin knew he should have moved forward, should have done something, but he didn't. There was nothing to do, nothing to say, nothing even to think.
Delenn.
He had not seen her much since she had been found in Sector 301, at the place where she had died and been reborn, a place that had become a shrine to her, in a way he found both disturbing and strangely comforting. It was ironic, perhaps, but Sector 301 seemed to be coming out of the chaos better than anywhere else on Proxima. Perhaps the Shrine of the Blessed Delenn had something to do with that, but Corwin put it down to human industry and endeavour.
Then.... he didn't want to think about that now. He wanted to think about his friend.
The General put down the bottle and sighed. "I was so sure," he whispered. "I was so goddamned sure. I mean, I'm a soldier. It seems I've been a soldier forever. A soldier lives off his instincts.... you know that. I've acted on instinct thousands of times, and never been wrong before.
"But there.... I was just so sure." He shook his head. "How could I have been so wrong?"
Corwin had a theory of his own, but he did not want to put it into words. He was having enough difficulty coming to terms with recent revelations concerning the Vorlons without having to voice them to another, least of all someone in a condition as.... fraught as the General's.
"It doesn't matter now," Corwin said finally. "Delenn's here. She's alive. She's safe. You're.... you're together. It doesn't matter any more."
The General chuckled, the mirthless laugh of someone who knows the joke everyone else is laughing at isn't funny. "Doesn't matter? Oh.... yes it does. It matters a lot. If I hadn't left her there....
"She was pregnant. My baby. Our baby.
"They killed him. The people here killed our baby."
"What?" Corwin breathed out and almost choked. He'd never heard.... he hadn't known.... Good Lord! Surely people couldn't have done that to her.... to an unborn child. "How.... Why? Why, for God's sake?"
"Some.... political game, I think. I don't know. Probably just because they could. They did it badly, too, really messed her up. Hell, they damn near killed her, even before that mess in three-o-one. She's not going to be able to have any more children."
"Oh, God...." There really was nothing to say.
"She's tried to tell me otherwise, but we both know the truth.... It's my fault. I should never have left her there...."
"No, it's not your fault."
"Yes, it damned well is, and you know it!" Corwin shrank back, momentarily surprised by the sheer anger in the General's voice. The light surged up around him, blazing and flashing, tendrils of lightning shooting from his eyes. "Of course it's my fault!
"It's my fault for daring to think I could do something other than fight a war! For deluding myself there was anything else I could do other than kill people! It's so easy to take lives, isn't it? So damned easy, especially when you rationalise it to yourself. I'm a soldier. This is war. It doesn't matter who they are.
"Delenn's seen that. She's done that, and she managed to break free. So why the hell can't I? Face it, I'm not a soldier, I'm a murderer, and I just murdered my unborn son!"
"It's not your fault," Corwin said again, desperately trying to get through. Where was this coming from? John had seemed.... better recently. Changed. The discovery that Delenn was alive....
"No? If not mine, then whose? The people who did it? I don't know who they are. Besides, they were only following orders. You can't blame anyone for just following orders, no more than you can blame yourself or your crew for doing what I tell you to.