War Without End
Una McCormack
"As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history." —Walter Benjamin
Liberation +40 years
Roby's sun was behind them. The planet itself gleamed dimly against the black, pocked and marked like a target. The jump here had been swift but pitiless, and Shard had been violently sick. His constitution—his strength— was not what it once had been. Now he sat limp and passive in his seat, his cheek resting clammily against the cold porthole, directing all his will towards heading off the tremors that coursed through his body and threatened him with further indignities.
Beside him, Lowe rattled on about arrival times, departure times, transportation to the city, agendas . . . At some point, Shard thought, this trip would end. At some point, by extension, Lowe would stop talking. Shard pointed his fingertips at the world below, aimed, fired . . . The shuttle banked and he missed. Roby was gone from view—but it was still there, he knew. It had always been there. Shard snapped, "I'm not so far gone I can't remember what you've told me three times already."
Lowe stopped, perplexed rather than cowed. He was a careful young man, well-informed and attentive to detail, untroubled by any broader passions, making up in precision what he lacked in perception. Usually Shard preferred it that way; not now.
"On arrival at the port," Shard said, "a car will be waiting to take us to the capital, where accommodation has been arranged for the duration of our stay in the fourth tower. Tomorrow morning—eighth hour, free standard— another car will take us to the Archive. After which—" this said bitterly, "—I'm on my own."
"Exactly so." Lowe, content, returned to his briefings, with no apparent appreciation of Shard's irony. Shard's hatred peaked—then passed, like his nausea, like all things.
It all unfolded much as Lowe had sketched, with the single notable exception of the protest that was waiting for them between the port and the first of the promised cars. Under siege in the arrival hall, Shard looked out to see upwards of fifty people, few of them old enough to remember the war, carrying banners executed with an otherwise uplifting degree of competence and literacy, chanting their complaint with no small grasp of rhythmic structure. Their unifying theme was their hatred of Shard. The local police watched affably from the side and showed no particular interest in moving them. Grimly, Shard said, "Now this wasn't in the itinerary."
Lowe did not reply. He was deep in the grip of that paralysis that overwhelms functionaries when their best-laid plans prove susceptible to simple human irrationality. He was not, Shard saw, going to be any use.
After thorough consideration of the terrain, the nature of the enemy, and the men and materiel at his disposal, Shard was in a position to offer a professional appraisal of their situation. "I suggest, Mr. Lowe, that we make a run for it." Seeing Lowe baulk, he hastened to explain. "All we have to do is get through the crowd and across the road."
"That's all?"
"The passenger doors are on this side of the car, see? You make for the front and I'll head for the back. Keep your head down and your forearms up—like this, see? Don't stop. It's me they're after, anyway."
Lowe was not measurably comforted. Shard took hold of his elbow and marshalled him through the doors, into the hard light and cold air of Roby, amongst the signs and voices calling him evil and butcher and murderer.
The doors closed behind them. Shard surveyed the mob and the mob stared back. Then it moved in, with a single purpose.
Battle was joined. Shard lost hold of Lowe within seconds. In the crush and the chaos, he stumbled, falling forwards with a gasp, an old man on his knees. Somebody laughed. Just before he hit the ground, the police intervened, swooping in as if to relieve a falling city. Two of them gathered up the visitors, while the rest formed a barrier to let them pass, calling to the crowd that it was over, that they had had their fun.
They deposited them on the far side of the road and would not accept thanks. In the sanctuary of the car, Lowe inspected the marks on his arm which would shortly become bruises. "I had not anticipated that."
Shard was too busy trying to slow his heart rate to be able to point out that such was Lowe's entire purpose. By the time he had his breath back, the moment had passed, but he was able to communicate enough silent fury to penetrate even Lowe's thick skin. They journeyed to the capital in silence. Shard brooded on his reception. It was the youth of his assailants that troubled him most; how long this hatred had lasted, how deep it must still run, down even to this generation, which had not been born when he was last here and could only know him through the medium of history lessons, propaganda. Was there to be no end?
Full darkness had fallen by the time the car landed at their accommodation. Shard's room was functional but clean. By this point all he cared about was the bed. "Marshal," Lowe said, "we should go through the agenda for tomorrow."
It was too much. Shard—sick in heart and body, wearied almost beyond relief from the journey, from the events of the day, from all that had brought him back here so late in life—snapped. He strode over to the door and threw it open. "Get out! You bloody halfwit! Get the hell out!"
Lowe, bewildered, blinked twice and then withdrew. With peace of a kind restored, Shard could devote himself again to throwing up, in privacy if not in comfort. This done, he drew the curtains, blocking out any sight of the city beyond. Then he lay down on his bed and returned to that solitary contemplation of our mortality which is the nightly pursuit of many, not simply sick old men, and in which we should all on occasion be indulged— even those of Shard's stripe.
Liberation +39.5 years
When the message arrived from the Archive, Shard was raking over the leaves in his garden. Autumn had come early to this part of Mount Pleasant. Soon it would be too wet to work outside on a daily basis, but Shard had a bonfire planned first, an innocent and agreeable pleasure. Shard could be found in his garden most days. He liked the nature of the tasks, which required total attention and absorption, and to which he was entirely committed. His dedication over the years had reaped rewards: his lawn was smooth and uniform, and his flowerbeds triumphant in competition. Moreover, as he liked to say, the exercise kept him fit.
There was a low wall at the far end of the lawn, separating the more cultivated part of the garden from a patch of ground that Shard had left deliberately untouched, for the sake of spring's unruly spread of bright wild flowers. On the wall stood a portable comm: Shard usually brought one out with him to listen to while he worked. All morning, it had been peacefully burbling out news and other nonsense.
A soft chord interrupted the flow, signalling the arrival of a message. With a short puff, Shard stopped work. A few joints cracked. He removed his gardening gloves and wiped his forehead. "Play," he said, and walked over to the comm.
A woman was speaking; an old woman, talking as if from a pre-prepared script. "Marshal," she said. "My name is Ines de Souza. I am the co-ordinator of the Archive of Public Memory on Roby. Next year will be the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation. Gaps remain in our records—as they always will and always must—and yet I remain curious that you have never given an interview about your time on Roby." He heard a rustling of papers, like the crackle of flames, and then the woman sighed. "We grow old, Marshal. Time passes, not much remains—for us, at least. Whatever contribution the former commander of the Commonwealth's forces would be willing to make, the Archive will most gladly receive it."
The message ended. Shard stared down at the comm. His heart had begun to pound and his face was burning. The message began to repeat, as he had it set to do. "My name is Ines de Souza. I am the co-ordinator of the Archive of Public Memory on Roby—"
With a roar of untrammelled rage, Shard kicked the comm off the wall. It soared high into the air, free as a bird in flight, coming to land deep, deep into the wilderness he had made. That finished him for the day. He retreated indoors. Mid-afternoon it rained, heavily, and all his plans came to nothing.
Once upon a time, Shard had believed in loyalty. By this point in his life he still believed in discretion, and for this reason he did not reply to de Souza's message. What purpose would it serve? What could he say about Roby that had not been said already, by both sides? Why pick over the corpse? But during the winter he had no work and few distractions. Instead, he looked out at his modest garden and brooded about his place in history. In the spring, his sense of grievance flowered like a cactus. He contacted Forshaw, and was granted an audience.
These days Forshaw lived on Xanadu, in the humid confines of the biodomes. It was not cheap to retire here. Gabriel Forshaw, a veteran of nothing more brutal than the press conference and the lecture circuit, could afford it. Mark Shard, who had kept a loyal silence, could not. Inside the dome, it was lush, protected, secluded. Outside, interminable dust storms screamed across empty land indifferent to human suffering. Yet that is all there is.
Abundance—of wealth, of talent, of connections—was what Shard had chiefly associated with Forshaw. Now all spent. Forshaw was a sick man; shrunken. His skin was grey and papery, and his eyes lacked hope and lustre. Not even gerontotherapy could combat the cancer; cosmetic surgery could no longer conceal the decline. Forshaw was dying—and the sheer extravagance of the environment in which he would spend his last days only served to reinforce how cruelly.
Once, in a busier and more active life than either of them now led, Shard and Forshaw had conferred on an almost daily basis. The whole business of putting down a revolt required the military at least to go through the motions of informing the political arm what it was up to, although Forshaw had been particularly adept at not hearing anything that might incriminate. His fitness for the political life had been boundless: he had been snake clever, capable of aping authenticity, and blessed with the moral compass of a tiger. His genius, his trick, had been to make this animal behaviour appear urbane—likeable, even. He was one of a very few from that time to have retired undefeated and all-but-untarnished. Yet this was how it was going to end.
Shard had not liked Forshaw, but he had suffered him as one of the inevitable crosses borne when one chose—as one must—to participate in public life. He had never forgiven him for the end of the war on Roby. Not even the sight of him now could move Shard beyond this. Perhaps there was a moment of tempered compassion—the fearful kind of fellow-feeling that arises from imagining oneself in such a state—but no more than a moment, and then it was gone.
Forshaw's house was filled with literary awards and pictures of him with the other luminaries of his generation. He had Shard brought out onto the terrace, where they sat under the cover of huge, regular green leaves. Life throbbed around them in studied, well-marshalled profligacy. From deep within the foliage, songbirds of the kind designed and kept for pleasure trilled harmoniously. No mention was made of Forshaw's condition, the open secret, the ruin in the midst of plenty. Shard expressed pleasure at seeing him after so long. Forshaw thanked him with equivalent sincerity. Silence fell, and Shard sat in appalled contemplation of Forshaw's ravaged face.
Forshaw drew back his lips into a smile until his teeth showed, skullfashion. "I assume there's some purpose to your being here? I don't recall visiting the sick being part of your religion. In fact, I don't recall you being religious at all. But it has been some time."
Recalled to himself, Shard drew out the file containing the message he had received from Roby, and handed it over. Forshaw read out the header. " 'From the Archive of Public Memory, Salvation, Roby; to Marshal Mark Shard, former Commander, Commonwealth Pacification Force on Roby'."
He laughed, tossing the file and its petition unheard onto the table. "The Archive of Public Memory. They certainly know how to conjure with words out there. One might almost admire them for it—as one had to admire their tenacity."
Shard did not comment. His own encounters with the people of Roby, which had been first-hand whereas Forshaw's had not, did not make him want to express admiration.
"So what is it? A summons?"
Shard retrieved the file from the table. He put it away with care, as an historian might with a piece of evidence. "Nothing so crude. They want to interview me."
"You're not thinking of agreeing?"
"Why not?"
"Mark, it's done. It's over. Nobody cares any longer."
"They do on Roby, patently—"
"Nobody here cares. Why should they?"
"Perhaps . . . " Shard struggled to articulate new ideas that were as yet only half-formed in his mind. "Perhaps the record should be set straight."
Forshaw had long since stopped listening. "An old war," he said, "finished years ago. A lost war. The failed policies of old men, soon to be gone and then hastily, all too hastily, forgotten." His words were like his books, Shard thought; florid and without substance. Groundless. "Besides, it all rather runs the risk of becoming something of an embarrassment. One example. What would you say, exactly, if this woman chose to ask you about the end?"
"We didn't do anything wrong," Shard insisted, his first hint of mutiny.
A butterfly settled on Forshaw's wrist. It was about the size of a child's hand, and coloured deep blue. There were white spots on the larger, upper portions of its wings, and a hint of imperial purple to the lower. Forshaw sat in contemplation it for a while before gently brushing it away with a translucent finger. "Well," he said. "I know I didn't."
Shard lifted his eyes, looking past the leaves at the barrier that constituted the limit of the sky. He thought he saw a faint dark line, marking the place where two pieces of the dome met. He reflected upon these joints. He imagined them widening, the dome collapsing; briefly he pictured the unspeakable, unliveable aftermath . . . "You son of a bitch," he said, in wonder. "You son of a bitch."
Forshaw closed his eyes. "At least have the decency to wait till I'm dead."
Decency. The word was an offence coming from the mouth of this man. What, in the end, did he know about Roby? His policies had only ever been implemented at a distance; he had been protected from their consequences just as this dome protected him from the hell outside. But what would history record? A history that Forshaw had spent decades securing—while Shard had kept his loyal silence. Trembling, Shard looked upon Forshaw's ruined face and he was glad.
"But since you're clearly going to do it," Forshaw said, "a word of advice. These people are not the rude peasants of our propaganda. They never were. They were sophisticated and they were ruthless." He cracked open a yellow lizard eye. "Don't lose sight of your real enemy. And try not to lose your bloody temper."
Shard left. Violently he desired now to be instrumental in the failure of this man's bid for immortality, to wrest their shared history back from him and strip it of the veneer with which Forshaw had tried to finish it. Besides, loyalty had not rewarded as richly as leadership. Shard could do with the money.
Liberation +40 years
Shard's first night back on Roby was not restful. Exhaustion, jump-lag, a room too sparsely furnished—all of this contributed to his discomfort, not to mention the twinge of some burgeoning dread which he glossed as performance nerves. Eventually, faint light began to creep through the gap between the curtains. Shard gave up torturing himself with the hope of sleep. He got up and went out onto the balcony to contemplate the world outside, the world he had lost.
It was a cold spring morning, the light as pure and hard as in memory, the hills brown and stony. Deliberately, Shard's eye followed their line westwards; a squat range deeply riven by vanished glaciers, caught in perpetual convulsion, as if ancient gods or monsters had fought some fundamental struggle here, ages before humanity got its chance. The city's towers stood in a ring on four low hills, the circle broken by the ruin of the fifth. That was at the centre of his view. No doubt the room had been selected for this purpose.
The sky above was bright blue, the promise of a warm day. As Shard watched, the mist lying in the hollow formed by the hills began to lift. Piecemeal, their lower reaches came into sight, greened by moss and ivy, shimmering with tiny pale flowers adapted to life in the cracks. Last of all, the undercity was revealed, ramshackle and disorderly, squatting like a beggar in the space between the hills—and here, at last, were the anticipated changes: the barricades completely gone, disappeared without trace; hilltop and undercity now linked by black tramlines, zigzagging surely, inevitably, upwards.
Forty years ago, all of this—air and land, hill and hollow—had belonged to Shard. Not in any legal sense—the various consortia on behalf of whom the Commonwealth had fought this war would surely have contested that—but it had been his in all the ways that matter beyond possession. He had been the one to decide who of his men and his enemies were to live and who were to die. It was that responsibility which had given him title to this land, in a moral sense at least. Shard had referred to this place as West-20. Now it was named Salvation.
From deep within the undercity, which Shard had once held but had never mastered, a clock chimed the tenth before the hour. Others began to follow suit, and then Shard's comm buzzed too. It was Lowe, asking the Marshal to join him on the tower-top, where he was waiting for the car to take them to the Archive.
They were still waiting an hour later. Lowe was frantic. Shard sat to one side and practiced patience. If the delay was a result of mismanagement, that boded well for the day ahead. If it was intended as an insult—what else should he expect from these people?
When at last the car landed, the driver offered no explanation. Installed in the back, Lowe fussed over the day's agenda. Shard stared down at the city as it passed below, picking over the scar left by the obliterated tower. Why had it been left in that state? Forty years had passed. Why not remove it, rebuild it, overwrite it? Was it meant as a memorial? Or a symbol, perhaps; proof that nothing was lasting.
The second tower hove into view. The car pitched sharply, decelerated, and bumped out a landing. The driver did not get out, but stuck his arm out of the window, reaching to open the back door that way. Shard got out onto the landing bay and went forward to speak to him. An apology was clearly not going to be forthcoming but there would at least be an explanation. Before he could demand it, he heard voices shouting his name. He looked across the roof to see yet another pack heading his way, banners aloft. Forgetting the driver, he turned on Lowe. "What in the name of hell are they doing here?"
"I've absolutely no idea—"
"How do we get inside? Come on, man, quickly!"
Lowe looked around helplessly. Shard, meanwhile, had sighted a metal door set in a concrete block about twenty paces away. If memory served correctly, this should provide access to the stairwell. He took Lowe's arm and shoved him that way. "Over there. Get a move on!"
They were halfway there when the door opened. A slight figure leaned out and began gesturing to them frantically to come that way. Lowe reached the door first; Shard, panting, just after. He pushed Lowe inside and slammed the door shut behind him. Moments later, there was a hammering on it, but these doors had been built to survive bombardment and siege. A handful of grubby activists should prove no problem. Satisfied, for the moment, that he was safe, Shard turned his wrath upon the new arrival. "How did they get up here? Who let them in?"
Their saviour—a slight, androgynous youth—stared in frank alarm past Shard's shoulder at the barricaded door. "Christ, that was close!"
Shard exploded. He stuck his finger in the youth's face. "If you're trying to shake me, it won't bloody work! Nothing you people threw at me ever shook me! Do you hear me? Nothing!"
There was a short charged silence. Lowe nervously cleared his throat. As it began to occur to Shard that he might not be entirely in control, he heard slow footsteps coming up the metal steps. From out of the shadowy stairwell, another figure emerged. It was an old woman. Shard looked her up and down, was about to dismiss her—but curiosity got the better of him. "Who the hell are you?"
"Marshal," she said. "I'm Ines de Souza. You can stop shouting now."
In the lift down into the main body of the tower, de Souza gave Shard his explanation. "Most of the building is public access, but we cordoned off the secondary landing bay in advance of your arrival. For some reason, your driver elected to land at the main bay."
Lowe said, "It really is very irregular—"
De Souza looked him up and down and then looked away. Shard winced. "I can make a formal apology," she said, "if that would help."
"Don't trouble yourself, ma'am," Shard said, in a quieter voice than he had used in several days. "No harm was done."
De Souza grunted in—dear God, was that approval? Shard eyed her. She was small and nut-brown, and dressed exceedingly badly in a long patterned skirt in green and gold, a pale blue cotton shirt, and scuffed sandals. Slung across her right shoulder was a dilapidated hessian bag which bore a bright orange flower stitched on with pink thread. The bag was stuffed to bursting with papers, many of them yellowed. Shard had expected an elegant academic, perhaps, or a trim administrator. Not confusion, disarray, poverty. Most startling to his eyes was how old she looked. One did not see that within the Commonwealth anymore; one had to be poor, or as sick as Forshaw. Shard took heart. Whatever had happened, Roby remained the poor relation.
The lift doors opened onto a dim unfurnished corridor. If this was freedom, Shard thought, as they walked along it, he would rather be rich. His good spirits did not last: at the end of the corridor, de Souza led him into a room which for all the world looked exactly like a torture chamber.
Liberation +39.75 years
After Xanadu, Shard's fury flourished. He was a new man, fired with a new purpose—the unmaking of Gabriel Forshaw. He lost no time in responding to the Archive and agreeing to an interview. His greatest fear now was that Forshaw might cheat him, dying before Shard had the chance to give his version of events. He even offered to go to Roby, rather than risk the inevitable delay that would be involved in getting permission for his interviewers to enter Commonwealth space. Friendly they all might be these days, or nearly, but one should never forget the provenance even of one's friends.
There was a gap of several weeks before the Archive replied; a period during which Shard monitored the obituary feeds compulsively. Forshaw— thank God—was not dead by the time de Souza replied agreeing to his visit. The morning after, Lowe arrived unasked on Shard's doorstep, sent from the Bureau to assist him. "These are delicate times," Lowe explained, perched on Shard's sofa like a dapper heron, handling his cup and saucer with fastidious care. "Relations between us are finely balanced, and it is to the benefit of all that nothing happens to disturb that balance."
Presumably he was a spy, but that at least meant he might come in useful. Shard took out the file containing all his correspondence with de Souza and threw it over. The cup slipped in Lowe's grasp, splashing tea into his saucer, but he steadied it. "If you want to help," Shard said, "find out what this one got up to during the war."
A tall order. Secrecy lingered over the files from that period like flies above a shallow grave. Nonetheless, Lowe returned in a matter of days. "She worked with children. Specifically orphans, resettling them after the war. After that she was a history teacher in Salvation and for the past twelve years she has been co-ordinating their Archive."
"What about before the war?"
"There's nothing from then."
"Nothing at all?"
"Date and place of birth, who owned her bond . . . There's no reason why there should be anything else. Not everyone on Roby was directly involved in hostilities."
Shard grunted. He had never made that mistake. Every last one of them had been either a threat or a threat in the making.
"But we do have one concern," Lowe said.
"Get on with it."
"Her name appears on several of the extradition requests we received in the twenties." There had been a rash of them back then. They asked for Shard on numerous occasions; once or twice, they had even asked for Forshaw. The people of Roby certainly had no trouble determining their enemies. "Our strong advice is that you reconsider travelling to Roby—"
"No."
"She's not on any outstanding blacklist. She can travel here."
"That would take too long."
"We have no jurisdiction in Roby—"
"Do you know, I remember there was a war fought about that—"
"And you have no diplomatic immunity—"
"For God's sake, man, enough! What you're saying is that if anything goes wrong out there I'm on my own?"
Lowe pressed a fingertip delicately against the side of his nose. "You have all the protections that any citizen of the Commonwealth can expect, of course. But if there is trouble out there, we might not be in a position to help you."
"You mean you don't want to kick up the diplomatic stink it would need?"
Shard watched grimly as Lowe struggled to come up with a form of language acceptable to them both. "Times have changed, Marshal. We are no longer enemies and there is the strong possibility that we might become friends. Many of their current organizers were born after the war—"
This was enough. "Do you really believe they think of us as friends in the making?" Shard said. "They hated us. They will hate us till the end. Every last one of them. If you'd been there, if you'd seen how it was there, you'd understand that. Have you all gone mad at the Bureau? Is there anyone looking out for us these days? Or have you bought into your own propaganda? We fought a war with these people, man! We killed them in their hundreds of thousands, and they would have done the same to us if they'd had the capability. This new generation has been taught by the last. If you and your masters believe this is over, you're living in a fantasy land."
Lowe, uncomfortable, had looked away. He was tweaking his cuffs, unnecessarily. "You're free to do whatever you choose, of course. But the Commonwealth is now looking to advance its friendship with the people of Roby." He stretched his hands out in appeal to some final authority. "That's policy."
For one shattering second, Shard surveyed his life, and he saw how all that had once mattered now counted for nothing. Worse than nothing—it was, as Forshaw had said, an embarrassment. His heart burned within him. Even shame would be better, he thought; that at least would accord some significance to all that had happened, all that had been suffered. But they had not even earned that recognition. They were an embarrassment. "Damn you all," he whispered, thinly, like a voice in the wilderness. "But you won't stop me going! I will have my say, before the end."
Lowe barely covered a sigh. "I'm sure you will, Marshal. But I wonder— who do you imagine is listening?"
Liberation +40 years
It was not the bareness of the room that had struck Shard, although it was bare—a table, two chairs, grey walls and a carpetless floor, and a single small window through which light passed feebly to reveal the dust swirling slowly. It was how the room was equipped.
The chairs were set in opposition, the table between them, and behind each place stood a diptych of screens, positioned at a slight angle to each other. Four screens in total, two on each side. Each of them was connected by a veritable web of cables to two small black boxes, one at either end of the table. Attached to each of these was a set of sensors, one for the arm, two for each temple. Shard recognized every last piece of this equipment; what surprised him was that it was duplicated. That was not the usual arrangement.
"Forgive the accommodation," de Souza said, dumping her bag on the table. It slumped under the weight of its contents. She followed his look around the room. "I imagine you recognize all this. Your people left it all behind."
Unhurriedly, her bag fell over. Papers spilled out onto the floor. "Blast," she said, without rancour. She leaned one hand on the table and started to lower herself down, but her aide got there first, kneeling to gather her scattered works and then holding them out to her like an offering. "Bless you, Jay," she said, and sat down, with a sigh. "Have a seat, Marshal."
"Can I get you anything, Ines?" the youth said. "Tea?"
"Tea, yes, yes—thank you. Please, Marshal," this with a touch of asperity, "have a seat. It's exhausting watching you standing to attention. You'll be giving me your name and number next."
Shard made a sweeping gesture that took in the screens, the sensors, the blood flow monitors. "Is that my safest option?"
"All this? Nothing to lose sleep over." Deftly, as if this was something she had done countless times before, de Souza began to hook herself up. She rolled up her sleeve, fixing a sensor against her upper arm with an armband. "You must have seen a psycho-imager in use before, surely? While you were here, if not since?"
Shard stiffened. He gripped the back of his chair and his knuckles turned white. "Mme de Souza, it is a matter of record that I did not conduct any interrogations on Roby. If you're looking to trap me that way you'll have to try considerably harder."
De Souza, who had been about to attach the other two sensors to her temples, halted with her hand halfway up to her face. "Trap you? You have a very strange idea of what I'm doing here, Marshal. I'm hardly fit for mortal combat, am I?" She finished attaching the sensors. "If I were you I'd sit down in your chair and stop trying to second-guess me. I'm only going to ask you a few questions."
Hooked up, de Souza turned her attention to the black box on her right, playing with dials and switches. "Useless bloody . . . Ah! There we are!" A green light flickered and, behind her, on the left-hand screen, an image appeared, grainy at first, and then coming slowly into focus. It was a sunflower—joyful and riotously bright against the uniform grey wall. Shard glanced over his shoulder: yes, there it was, on the left-hand screen behind him.
"On my mind," she said. "No luck with them. Top-heavy."
"Try propping them up against a wall," Shard said faintly. He took his seat, uncomfortably conscious of the two screens behind him and what they might reveal. "But one that gets light. And not too much water. It loosens the soil so it can't bear the weight."
"I'll bear that in mind next time. Thank you."
Shard examined the second set of sensors on the table in front of him. He picked up the armband. "Marshal," Lowe said urgently, "I strongly advise against this—"
"It's strange how things work out," de Souza said. "These little devices turned out to be a godsend. I never would have thought that, given what they were used for before Liberation. What we found was that they got people round the table who didn't trust each other and showed them exactly what it was they could expect from each other." Behind her, the sunflower transformed into a rapid series of images—memories, Shard imagined—of people gathered round tables, shouting, debating. Back home, they had predicted civil war on Roby; had considered the potential of a humanitarian mission. It hadn't happened. "If you can't hide what you're thinking," de Souza said, "you'd better have a way of justifying it. And of course, we couldn't have built the Archive without them."
The picture altered. Shard realized that he was seeing from her perspective as she sat at this table, looking back at the place where he was now, talking to another old man, an old man thinking about the war. What else was there? "Not just to document the order of events," she said, "but to archive the personal recollections, the individual impressions of that time. The marching songs, the stump speeches. I doubt we got the half of it. We suffer from a surfeit of history on Roby." And she showed him the essence of it: what it was like to crawl out from beneath a pile of bodies, to watch a plantation burn, to see armed men line up in advance of opening fire upon you. "But what never ceased to amaze me," she said, "was how often people said it was the best time of their life. Because they were young and active, I imagine. Committed to something bigger than themselves. Is that how it was with you, Marshal? Was it the best time of your life?"
Shard put his hands, palm down, flat upon the table. "Madame," he said. "If we are going to talk, you will have to take my word—or nothing."
De Souza gave him the kind of look a teacher might give a promising student who had failed a simple test through idleness or a closed mind. Shard cleared his throat. Carelessly, he said, "You know, we often wondered what control individuals had over what they were showing us. How much an image could be manipulated by an unwilling subject. How much we could rely on what was generated as a result."
"But you use them within the Commonwealth, don't you? You must know something about how little a subject can conceal—willing or otherwise."
"An artist might use one, yes, or a therapist with a patient, but they're hardly forced!"
"How about within the justice system?"
"If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear—"
Quickly, Shard cut himself off. Too late. De Souza smiled, benignly and, with a sigh, he began to roll up his sleeve. "Marshal . . . " Lowe warned.
Damn idiot sounded surprised. "She has me," Shard explained, as he attached the sensors. "Condemned from my own mouth." De Souza leaned over to switch on the box next to him. She was still smiling.
He gave a bark of laughter. "How much can be concealed? I can find out for myself now, can't I?" De Souza's eyes flicked up past his shoulder, and he looked in turn at the right-hand screen behind her, where he could examine his own thoughts. It was hazy for a while, and then sharpened suddenly into focus and showed the face of Gabriel Forshaw.
De Souza drew in a breath. "I had no idea he was so sick."
She was thinking—as Shard could see—of how Forshaw had looked forty years ago, in one of the propaganda 'casts, encouraging the insurgents to surrender. Smoke and mirrors. Forshaw had never been that glossy. "Even sicker in the flesh," he said. He tapped the table, clearing his thoughts, and showed her how spectacular his garden had been the previous summer. "Shall we begin?"
She did not ask about Roby. They talked in some detail about his early career and then she went back in time and asked him about his decision to join the army. He gave his habitual, pre-prepared defence and then was confronted, suddenly, with the sight of his father—a splinter of memory so sharp he feared its capacity to wound if he touched it further. Enough. "Madame. I have to stop."
They had been talking for almost three hours. Shard's head throbbed; so did his upper arm where the band was strapped on. "Of course," de Souza said.
Shard yanked the sensors from his temples and the picture on the screen disappeared from view. He saw that de Souza was watching him. "I hope I've not worn you out."
He wiped his hand across his forehead. "No."
"We can break for the day—"
"No."
"Have you discovered how much you can conceal?"
"Enough," he answered honestly, "but only with effort. I imagine that your difficulty is in interpretation."
"Whereas our fear was always self-disclosure. That was all you needed, really. You needed to make us mistrust ourselves. Self-doubt, a moment of hesitation, checking oneself before speaking—that was your way in. Once that became too much to sustain . . . " She studied him. She had not yet detached herself. "We would have to continue for some time yet before we reached that point."
Shard nodded. His hands, he realized, were trembling slightly. He put them on his knees, hiding them away under the table. "So, have you learned anything of substance, Madame?"
"Plenty." She paused, as if to sift through evidence. "You see yourself as scrupulous, meticulous. You hold the politicians responsible for all that happened here, and you mean that in its broadest sense. If you thought you could get away with it, you would tell me that you were only following orders."
Shard shoved back his chair. He stood up, abruptly. "Lowe," he said. He was shaking. "Get the car."
"You are besieged," she told him, softly and, behind her, West-20's fifth tower shuddered and began to fall. "And I find myself wondering—have you ever stopped thinking of us as the enemy?"