Corwin hesitated, truly unsure of how to answer. Very little about this meeting felt right, and the Captain.... the General.... John.... did not sound himself. Well, he sounded more like himself than he had in almost a year, but that was still not much. He had been insulated from the real world in his Dark Star for months, a ship built around an imprisoned and probably insane telepath.
Could he handle the truth? The way things really were?
'There's no need to think hard, David,' the General said wryly. 'I know how I must look, but.... I need to know. You're right. I've been insulated from the real world too long. I need to know.'
Corwin started, his heart beating faster. He hadn't said those words aloud, had he? But the near exactness of phrasing.... He coughed, and tried to order his thoughts. He had known General John Sheridan for years, and been his best — sometimes only — friend for so long. If he could not trust him, whom could he trust?
(An unbidden image of Lyta crossed his mind.)
'They're bad,' he said. 'Possibly worse than I can ever remember.'
'Exaggerating, surely? You do remember the years after Orion, don't you?'
Oh, yes, he remembered. The Orion colony destroyed in a single night by a Minbari war fleet. The death toll had been relatively low.... that night, even if the General's daughter had been among them.
But the months afterwards, that long and terrible winter. Corwin could see again the people starving in the streets of Proxima, the riots, the prison break-outs, the near-anarchy. But the thing he remembered most was the complete despair. Before Orion there had been a slow and steady increase in hope, a growing belief that humanity had seen the worst the universe could offer, and had survived. After Orion, there had been nothing.
He did not hesitate in replying. 'Yes,' he said, simply. 'It's worse.'
The General didn't say anything, and a heavy and uncomfortable silence fell across the room. Corwin shivered, seeing a momentary flash of light appear above the General's head. A halo.... or a chain?
Or just a figment of his imagination?
'At least then we all knew who the enemy was,' he said finally, desperate to fill the silence, to explain his feelings, just to get some reaction from his oldest friend. 'The Minbari were the enemies. We could see them, we could identify them. There was absolutely no doubt at all. But now....' He sighed.
'People are being told so many things. Strange as it sounds, they liked Clark. Really, really liked him. Most of them are saying that he wasn't responsible for the turning of the defence grid. Some say the Shadows were responsible, others that we were. And none of them like us. We're the humans who sold our race out to the aliens, remember. We're the people who swore to defend Proxima and then came back with an alien fleet and Minbari allies.'
(An alien fleet built around enslaved telepaths, some of them human.) If he concentrated hard enough, Corwin could just about shut out their screaming.
'Nobody really knows who to believe out there. There's a lot of anger and fear and hate and.... I've never seen Proxima this bad. Never.'
'There'll be free elections soon. We'll have a war crimes tribunal, put a few people on trial, reform the Senate. There'll be an elected Government by this time next year, if not sooner.'
'And who are they going to vote for? Nobody is going to believe the elections are free anyway. I don't think we can put together twenty people in this whole planet who actually want to lead it at the moment.'
'You could.'
Corwin did not know what to say. He almost fell from his chair. 'Me? But.... that's crazy. I'm a soldier, just a soldier. Why don't you...?'
'I couldn't.... not any more. Anyway, I'll be going back to Kazomi Seven once this war is over, going back there with....'
'With Delenn.'
'Yes.... with Delenn.' The General's eyes darkened, and he suddenly picked up the bottle and raised it to his lips. 'Cheers,' he said, taking a long draught.
'Cheers.'
* * * I did.... we did a lot of horrible things over the years. We had to, or at least that was what we told ourselves. The survival of the race mattered. All of humanity was resting on our shoulders. We had to be strong enough to bear that burden, to do what was necessary.
Me, Clark, President Crane, General Hague, Takashima.... a few others. We would go down in history as the saviours of humanity.... or as the final, pathetic lost: Oedipus twisting and turning to avoid his fate, Lear raging vainly against the storm.
We had to win. There was no other choice. We would do whatever was necessary. Sell out half our race to the Narns? If they'd protect the other half, then fine! Make deals with a man who saw us all as microbes and was relishing the chance to assert the superiority of his race over ours? If he'd help, then of course. Institute laws that all but banned freedom of speech, of assembly, that let criminals run free and the innocent suffer? If we had to.
Ally ourselves with an alien race of whom we knew nothing but that they wanted to help us? Did we even need to think about that one?
I was never on very good terms with any of them. Well, I was never on very good terms with anyone other than Vicky. When she was alive, I at least had something to focus on. A reason to want to save humanity. In her smile I saw something worth redeeming, worth saving. When she was gone.... there was no longer the dream of survival, only a game.
I didn't even hate the people who'd killed her. I caught them, eventually, and they were punished just as if they'd murdered anyone who wasn't my wife. I didn't glory in it, though. There was no sense of revenge. I doubt they even knew it was my wife they'd killed. What was the point in taking revenge on them? They were just like the rest of humanity, right?
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
