Rehab Section C came in from its two-hour speed march in the typical wild closing gallop, with Varlik, as usual, bringing up the rear. If there was just some way to market sweat, he thought as he stood in ranks again, chest heaving, waiting for dismissal while wiping his forehead.
It wasn't until after they'd been dismissed that he noticed the Red Scorpions' regimental area had been reoccupied; the regiment was back.
Or what was left of it. Walking between the rows of squad tents to the showers, he found about one in three occupied. Subconsciously he'd known it would be like this, would have said so if asked in advance, but seeing it was like being slugged in the gut.
The troopers seemed not to feel that way. The returnees and the men of the rehab sections greeted each other cheerily, some even exuberantly, and asked about others who might simply be elsewhere at the moment or dead. And as Varlik soaked this in, it so disjointed his sense of the appropriate that his initial depression became something different—a low grade, ill-defined resentment.
"Varlik!"
It was Kusu; the big sergeant stepped from a tent as Varlik was returning from the showers. The surgeons hadn't returned his chin to its old profile, had rebuilt it more roundly than before, but he was easily recognizable.
"So you are back from Tyss!" He stood back and looked the Iryalan over, reading Varlik's discomfort, and in response toned down his own high cheer. "Fit again, too," he added. "Apparently the physical differences between Iryalan and T'swi are more complexion than constitution."
Somehow Varlik wasn't able to reply.
"May I walk along with you?" asked Kusu.
"If you want." Varlik's tone was almost surly.
"There aren't many of us left, are there?" Kusu said calmly. "There's been a lot of recycling going on. Recycling tends to come a lot earlier among warriors than among others." His chuckle was barely audible. "Newsmen, for instance. I suspect most newsmen grow old and gray and watch their grandchildren grow up."
Varlik said nothing.
"What rehab section are you in?" Kusu asked.
"C."
"Then you are almost ready to join a unit, if that is what you plan. You told me once that you have a wife, and intended to have children."
Varlik answered without expression. "That's right."
"Fine." The T'swi slowed. "Maybe we'll talk sometime. I would enjoy hearing what you thought of Tyss." Then he turned back the way they'd come, and Varlik walked the last hundred feet alone to his tent.
What's the matter with you? he asked himself. He's a friend. He was glad to see you. And you acted like a complete and utter ass.
He wondered if Kusu had been offended, then rejected the idea. The man, the T'swa in general, seemed immune to that kind of emotion. But that didn't make it all right to act offensively toward him, to reject his friendliness.
Varlik hung his towel over the foot-frame of his cot, put on his off-duty uniform and fresh boots, then looked at his watch. They wouldn't serve supper for ten minutes, but he might as well do his waiting at the mess hall.
As he left, the rifle rack at the end of the tent caught his eye. He'd checked, and the rifles all had serial numbers, as rifles should; it was the only way to tell yours from the others. And he realized what was bothering him, had been bothering him since they'd been dismissed after training and he'd found the regiment back from the south. It was not just that the regiment—his regiment—was being shot to pieces bit by bit. It was that tied together with his suspicion that some T'swa faction was the source of this war, was supporting the other side—the Birds—and that the regiments were being sacrificed to duplicity.
But you don't know that, he argued. All you have is circumstantial evidence. There could be various other explanations that haven't occurred to you.
Yeah? Name one. Think of one.
He shook off the spiral of questions and, walking slowly, put his attention outward, on the visual: actually seeing the tents, duckboards, black bodies striding tentward from the showers, green-trousered troopers ambling toward the mess hall; blue sky, fluffy white cumulus, a high-soaring hawk riding an updraft.
In this way, by the time he'd walked the hundred yards to the mess hall he'd banished his upset—for the time being: The roots still were there. The regiment was decimated, on Tyss he'd seen what he'd seen, and all the anomalies, ambiguities, strangenesses in the situation remained.
On the mustering ground, something over five hundred veteran T'swa stood in ranks, at ease, in faint morning steam as the newly risen sun evaporated a thunder shower of the night before. There were five hundred forty-six troopers—four under-strength companies—most of what was left of the two regiments. Their regimental commanders stood facing them, each flanked by his exec and his sergeant major. Somewhere out of sight of Varlik Lormagen, a bird trilled, some songster of the Orlanthan prairie, intruded upon but not far displaced by the black mercenaries. It or others like it, Varlik thought, would be here when the regiments, and the army, were long gone.
It was Biltong, as the "senior" colonel, who spoke, using only his big voice unamplified. His Tyspi was almost as easy for Varlik to follow now as Standard would have been.
"T'swa," said Biltong, "we have a new assignment: We are to strike the Orlanthan headquarters and take prisoners—assuming that we succeed in locating it. Several reconnaissance teams are in the candidate areas now, in the equatorial jungle, and we can presume they'll find it."
Biltong went on to describe the plans in some detail, and Varlik listened in near shock. It sounded suicidal. Finally, Biltong finished. "Ground-model briefings will be made when the area has been identified and the ground described. You all know the enemy and his fighting qualities, so you see the challenge we face. It will almost surely be a battle of highest quality, and may prove to be our final action. Colonel Koda and I will be there with you, of course."
He turned and said something quietly to Koda, who shook his head as he answered. Then Biltong turned again to the troopers.
"Regiments dismissed!"
The troopers broke ranks and began walking to breakfast, and it wasn't until then that Varlik became aware of a deep and powerful something that had risen in them. They weren't saying much, but there was a sense of anticipation; he could almost hear their deep psychic chuckling, and it made his hair stand up.
In the mess hall at breakfast, a regimental clerk announced that Varlik Lormagen should report to Colonel Koda at 06.00. He was there minutes early—right after breakfast—and the sergeant major motioned him into the colonel's office. Varlik entered and, for some reason unknown to him, saluted.
"Sit down, Lormagen."
He sat. Koda looked at him, seemingly into him, through large black eyes.
"I want to thank you for the excellent job you've done as publicist. I believe you'll find, when you arrive back on Iryala, that you've succeeded equally well for your other employer." He smiled. "The one that pays well."
Varlik nodded without smiling back.
"You were in ranks this morning," Koda continued, "so you know what our next action will be. And it seems to me that for you, the risks this time outweigh the benefits. Perhaps it would enhance your reputation to die in the jungle, but I question whether death in battle was part of your purpose when you entered this lifetime.
"So I called you in this morning for two reasons. One, the army wants this action kept secret until it happens. I want your word that you'll say nothing till it's over."
Again Varlik nodded.
"I have your word, then?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. And secondly, I'd like you to give me your resignation as T'swa publicist."
Varlik stared at the colonel from a viewpoint at which time seemed to have stopped, seeing the face more clearly than he ever had before—the strong bone structure; heavy jaw muscles; wide thin-lipped mouth that somehow was not in the least severe, seemed just now actually kind; the steady eyes that were neither shallow nor deep, their dimension being outward.
Time restarted when Koda spoke again. "I'm not insisting on your resignation, you understand. I do not know your deepest purpose."
It occurred to Varlik that he didn't know it either. "What are the odds of your actually getting the prisoners you're after?" he asked. "And the information?"
"Perhaps five to one that our search teams will find and report the Orlanthan headquarters. If they don't, of course, the action cannot take place. If they do, I would guess the odds to be roughly even that we bring out useful prisoners."
"And the odds of bringing out most of your troops alive?"
The eyes never withdrew. Most men, Varlik would think afterward, could scarcely have discussed the weather with such total equanimity.
"Call it one to two," Koda answered. "Understand though that in war, one cannot know the script; that is part of its charm."
Its charm. Varlik could only stare.
"You don't have to decide now," the colonel said. Then he turned away, picking up a folder, Varlik dismissed from his attention. The Iryalan got up and left.
That evening after supper, Varlik asked Kusu if they could talk somewhere privately. Kusu suggested one of the empty squad tents, but Varlik wanted more privacy than that, so they walked out of camp across darkening prairie. Insects buzzed and chirped, keened and stridulated, and overhead, like some feathered projectile, an insectivorous bird dove with a piercing and protracted "keeeeee" at the edge of human hearing. A veil of stars had crept up the sky from the east, over the vault of heaven, sending scouts after the departed sun to explore a silvery western horizon.
It occurred to Varlik that Kettle was a beautiful planet. Why had technite been found here? Why couldn't it have been on an uninhabited world? Why had the Rombili decided to use slave labor? Gooks! Gooks weren't really people; that had been the rationale. Gooks were a resource, like their worlds.
You'd think, he told himself almost bitterly, you'd think the T'swa would refuse an assignment like this one. You'd think they'd sympathize with other gooks. Except the T'swa didn't think of themselves as gooks. Probably no one did. Gooks were always other people.
Kusu interrupted Varlik's silent soliloquy. "What did you wish to talk about?" he asked.
"About the T'swa. And the regiment."
"All right."
"You're being killed. Inside a dek or two there'll hardly be any of you left." He peered at the T'swi through thickening dusk. "A lot of you will die just in this action alone."
"Quite probably."
"Is that the goal of a warrior? To die?"
"The goal of a T'swa warrior is to play at war, skillfully and with joy. Death is a common accompaniment."
"But . . . it's such an empty life!"
"Is it?"
Varlik stopped. "Isn't it?"
"It would be for someone who wanted to raise a family, or paint fine pictures, or"—Varlik could see the eyes turn to him in the near night—"create with words."
"And you kill people!"
"True again."
"Even if they have a new life afterward, the way you believe, you take away from them what they want desperately to keep."
"That too is true, more often than not. But ask yourself who it is we kill."
"What do you mean?"
"We kill those who, knowingly or not, choose to put themselves into battle with us."
"These Birds didn't choose to put themselves into battle with you!" Varlik snapped. "They're just trying to end the slavery they've been subjected to. I'm surprised you aren't helping them, instead of fighting them. That would be the ethical thing to do."
"Would it?"
"Wouldn't it?"
"That would not solve their problem, and it would worsen the problem the Confederation faces here while putting Tyss at war with the Confederation.
"Besides, we T'swa do not fight. For us, war is a form of play, and we play most skillfully at it. And true play does not have problems, but challenges and opportunities.
"Problems, you see, are a matter of attitude; one being's problem might be viewed by another in the same situation as an opportunity, perhaps for a game or a war. With the attitude of play, you may see a situation and decide you will create a different situation in its place, without any determination that you must succeed. What you think of as success has no part in play. You do it for the doing.
"Think of play as a journey in which the place you have chosen to travel to is far less important than the traveling."
Varlik groped for his indignation, and somehow couldn't find it. At one level he felt as if he'd been had, snowed by sophistries he couldn't get a grip on—as if someone had told him that solid wasn't solid, that the obvious was fallacy. Yet somehow—somehow, he felt distinctly better than he had minutes before. He let go of the matter, and smiled at Kusu, not widely.
"You're something," Varlik said. "You know that? All of you are."
"Thank you, Varlik. You are something, too."
For just a moment that stopped Varlik. Then a chuckle welled up in him that grew to a laugh, long and hard. The powerful T'swi kept him company in a rumbling bass until they gripped hands and shook on it.
Varlik had been sitting at a table in the work room of the army's media quarters. Not that he had anything to send to Central News. After making another letter cube for Mauen, he waited for Konni, idly browsing, admiring old field cubes. After a bit it was lunch time, and Konni hadn't appeared. Iryala Video had sent two new teams to Kettle, both at Beregesh today, and she was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. Varlik wanted to talk to her before she left.
Surely she'd show for lunch, he told himself, and got up to leave for the officers' mess. He hadn't reached the door when it opened, and Konni came in.
"What's up?" she asked. "Did you finally make up your mind to go home?"
"Not home. Not yet. The T'swa, both veteran regiments, have a new assignment. The word came in this morning confirming it; we'll be going next Fourday."
She stared at him. "What kind of assignment?"
"They're going to hit the Birds down in the equatorial zone, then blast enough of a hole in the jungle that floaters can come in and take them out."
"And you're going along on that?" Her fists were on her hips. "Varlik, you had to be crazy to go out on the last operation. This sounds twice as bad."
"It's five times as important, and I want to be close to it."
"Important how? What's it about?"
"It's confidential. I've already said more than I should."
Her brows drew down angrily. "Are you saying you don't trust me? After the information we've both kept to ourselves?"
"I trust you. But I had to give my word," he added unhappily.
She looked at him, her anger dying.
"It shouldn't be as dangerous for me as the last one," he went on. "For one thing, it's a single quick raid—land, strike, and leave. And I'll be in the least dangerous part of the operation. But, of course, there's always that little chance. So I wanted to tell you that if I'm killed, you're free to do whatever you want with what we recorded on Tyss."
Briefly her eyes tried to pry him open. "You're going to get yourself killed," she said at last.
He didn't answer, just shook his head.
"I'd have propositioned you deks ago," she continued, "but you were married. The reason I didn't was my respect for your wife. But if you're not going to get back to her anyway . . ."
"No, I'll be back. I don't know why I feel so confident, but I'll be back here when it's over—not even wounded this time."
Konni backed off. "Maybe you're right. I hope so." She grinned then, unexpectedly. "Anything I can do for you?"
He grinned back. "Sure. You can have lunch with me."
"You've got a date," she said, and took his arm.