A Talent for War Read Free Page A

house for years, and eased himself stiffly into a chair opposite mine. "Pity."
    He'd slowed down: his movements were more deliberate now, and the quixotic face had sobered. It was difficult to judge whether he was showing the effects of age, or simply responding to the news of his death. In any case, there was a grayness about the conversation, a quivery uncertainty, and a sense of things undone.
    "You look good," I said, emptily. It was, under the circumstances, an eerie remark. He seemed not to notice.
    "I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk together at least one more time. This is a poor substitute."
    "Yes."
    "I wish things had been better between us."
    There was no easy way to respond to that. He'd been the only parent I'd known, and we had suffered the usual strains. But there had been more: Gabe was an idealist. "You made it very difficult," he continued. What he meant was that I'd made a comfortable living selling rare artifacts to private collectors. An activity he considered immoral.
    "I broke no law," I said. Arguing was pointless: nothing I could say would be carried back to the sender. Gabe was beyond this sort of communication now. The illusion was all that remained.
    "You'd have broken a few here. No enlightened society allows the sort of thing you do to go unregulated." He took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. "Let it go. I paid a higher price for my principles than I would have wished, Alex. It's been a long time."
    The figure before me was nothing more than software, knew only what my uncle had known at the moment of storage. It had no grasp of the principles of which it spoke, no real sense of the regret that I felt. But it allowed him to do something that I would have liked very much to have done: "I'm sorry," he said. "If I had it to do over, I would have let it go."
    "But you would still have disapproved."
    "Of course."
    "Good."
    He smiled, and repeated my comment with satisfaction. "There's hope for you yet, Alex." He pushed himself to his feet, opened a liquor cabinet, and extracted a bottle and two glasses.
    "Mindinmist," he said. "Your favorite."
    It was good to be home.
    I violated a personal rule with that sponder: I gave in to the images and allowed myself to accept the illusion as real. And I realized how much I'd missed the paneled, book-lined study at the back of the house. It had always been one of my two favorite rooms. (The other was in the attic, a magic place from which I'd watched the forest many times for the approach of dragons or enemy soldiers.) It smelled of pine and fresh cloth drapes and casselate book covers and scorched wood. It was filled with exotic photos: an abandoned vine-strangled temple guarded by an obscene idol that seemed to be mostly belly and teeth, a broken column in an otherwise empty desert, a small group gathered before a step pyramid under a pair of moons. A reproduction of
    Marcross's portrait of the immortal warship Corsarius hung on one wall, with plyseal sketches of men and women with whom Gabe had worked. (Plyseal had been one of his hobbies. There was one of me, at about four years old, in my old bedroom.)
    And there were always artifacts: toys, computers, lamps, statuary that Gabe had recovered from various field sites. Even now, I could see a cylindrical, studded object in a glass display.
    I raised my drink to him. He lifted his own, and our eyes locked briefly. I could almost believe that Gabe and I were making it right, at long last. The liquor was warm, very smooth, and it Page 7

    tasted of other days.
    "There's something you'll have to do," he said.
    He was standing before VanDyne's depiction of the ruins at Point Edward. You know the one: blackened wreckage beneath red-gold rings and a cluster of silver moons. The way they found it after the attack.
    The chair was comfortable. Supernaturally so, in fact, just as the Mindinmist was supremely good. You get that kind of effect with objects that don't really exist. Some people say perfection spoils