“Law.”
“Right from wrong. Morality. For God’s sake, killing’s wrong.”
“Then you’ve done a lot of wrong. You have your mistake too.
DeFranco. You’re a soldier like me. You know what your life’s value is.”
“You’re damn right I know. And I’m still alive.”
“We go off the course. We lose ourselves. You’ll die for war but not for peace. I don’t understand.”
“7 don’t understand. You think we’re just going to pick some poor sod and send him to you.”
“You, deFranco. I’m asking you to make the peace.”
“Hell.” He shook his head, walked away to the door, colonel-be-hanged, listeners-be-hanged. His hand shook on the switch and he was afraid it showed. End the war. “The hell you say.”
The door shot open. He expected guards. Expected—
—It was open corridor, clean prefab, tiled floor. On the tiles lay a dark, round object, with the peculiar symmetry and ugliness of things meant to kill. Grenade. Intact.
His heart jolted. He felt the doorframe against his side and the sweat ran cold on his skin, his bowels went to water. He hung there looking at it and it did not go away. He began to shake all over as if it were already armed.
“Colonel Finn.” He turned around in the doorway and yelled at the unseen monitors. “Colonel Finn—get me out of here!” No one answered. No door opened. The elf sat there staring at him in the closest thing to distress he had yet showed.
“Colonel! Colonel, damn you!”
More of silence. The elf rose to his feet and stood there staring at him in seeming perplexity, as if he suspected he witnessed some human madness.
“They left us a present,” deFranco said. His voice shook and he tried to stop it. “They left us a damn present, elf. And they locked us in.”
The elf stared at him; and deFranco went out into the hall, bent and gathered up the deadly black cylinder—held it up. “It’s one of yours, elf.”
The elf stood there in the doorway. His eyes looking down were the eyes of a carved saint; and looking up they showed color against his white skin. A long nailless hand touched the doorframe as the elf contemplated him and human treachery.
“Is this their way?”
“It’s not mine.” He closed his hand tightly on the cylinder, in its deadliness like and unlike every weapon he had ever handled. “It’s damn well not mine.”
“You can’t get out.”
The shock had robbed him of wits. For a moment he was not thinking. And then he walked down the hall to the main door and tried it. “Locked,” he called back to the elf, who had joined him in his possession of the hall. The two of them together. DeFranco walked back again, trying doors as he went. He felt strangely numb. The hall became surreal, his elvish companion belonging like him, elsewhere. “Dammit, what have you got in their minds?”
“They’ve agreed,” the elf said. “They’ve agreed, deFranco.”
“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 Finn stared past the occupants of the office for a time. Tears came seldom to her eyes. They were there now, and she chose not to look at the board of inquiry who had gathered there.
“There’s a mandatory inquiry,” the man from the reg command said. “We’ll take testimony from the major this afternoon.”
“Responsibility’s mine,” Finn said.
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 winning side. I died at the hand of Angan Anassidi, and he died at mine, for the peace; and we were friends at the end of our lives.
Elves— suiltiwas one name they called themselves—came to this place and laid gifts of silk ribbons and bunches of flowers—flowers, in all that desolation; and in their thousands they mourned and they wept in their own tearless, expressionless way.
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 Finn, in their own way and for their own dead, in front of an alien shrine.