C. J. Cherryh - The Scapegoat

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THE SCAPEGOAT

C J Cherryh

1985

First published in Alien Stars ed. Elizabeth Mitchell

(Baen 0-671-55934-6).

A 1986 Hugo Nominee

Defranco sits across the table from the elf and he dreams for a

moment, not a good dream, but recent truth: all part of what

surrounds him now, a bit less than it was when it was happening,

because it was gated in through human eyes and ears and a human

notices much more and far less than what truly goes on in the

world—

—the ground comes up with a bone-penetrating thump and dirt

showers down like rain, over and over again; and deFranco wriggles

up to his knees with the clods rattling off his armor. He may be

moving to a place where a crater will be in a moment, and the place

where he is may become one in that same moment. There is no time

to think about it. There is only one way off that exposed hillside,

which is to go and keep going. DeFranco writhes and wriggles

against the weight of the armor, blind for a moment as the

breathing system fails to give him as much as he needs, but his

throat is already raw with too much oxygen in three days out. He

curses the rig, far more intimate a frustration than the enemy on

this last long run to the shelter of the deep tunnels…

He was going home, was John deFranco, if home was still there,

and if the shells that had flattened their shield in this zone had not

flattened it all along the line and wiped out the base.

The elves had finally learned where to hit them on this weapons

system too, that was what; and deFranco cursed them one and all,

while the sweat ran in his eyes and the oxy-mix tore his throat and

giddied his brain. On this side and that shells shocked the air and

the ground and his bones; and not for the first time concussion

flung him bodily through the air and slammed him to the churned

ground bruised and battered (and but for the armor, dead and

shrapnel-riddled). Immediately fragments of wood and metal rang

off the hardsuit, and in their gravity-driven sequence clods of earth

rained down in a patter mixed with impacts of rocks and larger

chunks.

And then, not having been directly in the strike zone and dead,

he got his sweating human limbs up again by heaving the

armor-weight into its hydraulic joint-locks, and desperately hurled

fifty kilos of unsupple ceramics and machinery and ninety of

quaking human flesh into a waddling, exhausted run.

Run and fall and run and stagger into a walk when the dizziness

got too much and never waste time dodging.

But somewhen the jolts stopped, and the shell-made earthquakes

stopped, and deFranco, laboring along the hazard of the

shell-cratered ground, became aware of the silence. His staggering

steps slowed as he turned with the awkward foot-planting the

armor imposed to take a look behind him. The whole smoky valley

swung across the narrowed view of his visor, all lit up with ghosty

green readout that flickered madly and told him his eyes were

jerking in panic, calling up more than he wanted. He feared that he

was deaf; it was that profound a silence to his shocked ears. He

heard the hum of the fans and the ventilator in the suit, but there

would be that sound forever, he heard it in his dreams; so it could

be in his head and not coming from his ears. He hit the

ceramic-shielded back of his hand against his ceramic-coated

helmet and heard the thump, if distantly. So his hearing was all

right. There was just the smoke and the desolate cratering of the

landscape to show him where the shells had hit.

And suddenly one of those ghosty green readouts in his visor

jumped and said 000 and started ticking off, so he lumbered about

to get a look up, the viewplate compensating for the sky in a series

of flickers and darkenings. The reading kept up, ticking away; and

he could see nothing in the sky, but base was still there, it was

transmitting, and he knew what was happening. The numbers

reached Critical and he swung about again and looked toward the

plain as the first strikes came in and the smoke went up anew.

He stood there on the hillcrest and watched the airstrike he had

called down half an eternity ago pound hell out of the plains. He

knew the devastation of the beams and the shells. And his first and

immediate thought was that there would be no more penetrations

of the screen and human lives were saved. He had outrun the chaos

and covered his own mistake in getting damn near on top of the

enemy installation trying to find it.

And his second thought, hard on the heels of triumph, was that

there was too much noise in the world already, too much death to

deal with, vastly too much, and he wanted to cry with the relief and

the fear of being alive and moving. Good and proper. The base scout

found the damn firepoint, tripped a trap and the whole damn

airforce had to come pull him out of the fire with a damn million

credits worth of shells laid down out there destroying ten billion

credits’ worth of somebody else’s.

Congratulations, deFranco.

A shiver took him. He turned his back to the sight, cued his

locator on, and began to walk, slowly, slowly, one foot in front of

the other, and if he had not rested now and again, setting the limbs

on his armor on lock, he would have fallen down. As it was he

walked with his mouth open and his ears full of the harsh sound of

his /Own breathing. He walked, lost and disoriented, till his unit

picked up his locator signal and beaconed in the Lost Boy they

never hoped to get back.

“You did us great damage then,” says the elf. “It was the last

effort we could make and we knew you would take out our last

weapons. We knew that you would do it quickly and that then you

would stop. We had learned to trust your habits even if we didn’t

understand them. When the shelling came, towers fell; and there

were over a thousand of us dead in the city.”

“And you keep coming.”

“We will. Until it’s over or until we’re dead.”

DeFranco stares at the elf a moment. The room is a small and

sterile place, showing no touches of habitation, but all those small

signs of humanity—a quiet bedroom, done in yellow and green

pastels. A table. Two chairs. An unused bed. They have faced each

other over this table for hours. They have stopped talking theory

and begun thinking only of the recent past. And deFranco finds

himself lost in elvish thinking again. It never quite makes sense.

The assumptions between the lines are not human assumptions,

though the elf’s command of the language is quite thorough.

At last, defeated by logicless logic: “I went back to my base,” says

deFranco. “I called down the fire; but I just knew the shelling had

stopped. We were alive. That was all we knew. Nothing personal.”

There was a bath and there was a meal and a little extra ration

of whiskey. HQ doled the whiskey out as special privilege and

sanity-saver and the scarcity of it made the posts hoard it and

ration it with down-to-the-gram precision. And he drank his three

days’ ration and his bonus drink one after the other when he had

scrubbed his rig down and taken a long, long bath beneath the pipe.

He took his three days’ whiskey all at once because three days out

was what he was recovering from, and he sat in his corner in his

shorts, the regs going about their business, all of them recognizing

a shaken man on a serious drunk and none of them rude or crazy

enough to bother him now, not with congratulations for surviving,

not with offers of bed, not with a stray glance. The regs were not in

his command, he was not strictly anywhere in the chain of

command they belonged to, being special ops and assigned there for

the reg CO to use when he had to. He was 2nd Lt. John R.

deFranco if anyone bothered and no one did hereabouts, in the

bunkers. He was special ops and his orders presently came from the

senior trooper captain who was the acting CO all along this section

of the line, the major having got hisself lately dead, themselves

waiting on a replacement, thank you, sir and ma’am; while higher

brass kept themselves cool and dry and safe behind the shields on

the ground a thousand miles away and up in orbit.

And John deFranco, special op and walking target, kept his silver

world-and-moon pin and his blue beret and his field-browns all

tucked up and out of the damp in his mold-proof plastic kit at the

end of his bunk. The rig was his working uniform, the damned,

cursed rig that found a new spot to rub raw every time he realigned

it. And he sat now in his shorts and drank the first glass quickly,

the next and the next and the next in slow sips, and blinked

sometimes when he remembered to.

The regs, male and female, moved about the underground

barracks in their shorts and their T’s like khaki ghosts whose

gender meant nothing to him or generally to each other. When

bunks got double-filled it was friendship or boredom or outright

desperation; all their talk was rough and getting rougher, and their

eyes when real pinned-down-for-days boredom set in were hell,

because they had been out here and down here on this world for

thirty-seven months by the tally on bunker 43’s main entry wall;

while the elves were still holding, still digging in, and still dying at

unreasonable rates without surrender.

“Get prisoners,” HQ said in its blithe simplicity; but prisoners

suicided. Elves checked out just by wanting to die.

“Establish a contact,” HQ said. “Talk at them—” meaning by any

inventive means they could; but they had failed at that for years in

space and they expected no better luck onworld. Talking to an elf

meant coming into range with either drones or live bodies. Elves

cheerfully shot at any target they could get. Elves had shot at the

first human ship they had met twenty years ago and they had

killed fifteen hundred men, women, and children at Corby Point for

reasons no one ever understood. They kept on shooting at human

ships in sporadic incidents that built to a crisis.

Then humanity—all three humanities, Union and Alliance and

remote, sullen Earth—had decided there was no restraint possible

with a species that persistently attacked modern human ships on

sight, with equipage centuries less advanced—Do we have to wait,

Earth’s consensus was, till they do get their hands on the advanced

stuff? Till they hit a world? Earth worried about such things

obsessively, convinced of its paramount worldbound holiness and

importance in the universe. The cradle of humankind. Union

worried about other things—like breakdown of order, like its

colonies slipping loose while it was busy: Union pushed for speed,

Earth wanted to go back to its own convolute affairs, and Alliance

wanted the territory, preferring to make haste slowly and not

create permanent problems for itself on its flank. There were

rumors of other things too, like Alliance picking up signals out this

direction, of something other than elves. Real reason to worry. It

was at least sure that the war was being pushed and pressed and

shoved; and the elves shoved back. Elves died and died, their ships

being no match for human-make once humans took after them in

earnest and interdicted the jump-points that let them near human

space. But elves never surrendered and never quit trying.

“Now what do we do?” the joint command asked themselves

collectively and figuratively—because they were dealing out bloody,

unpalatable slaughter against a doggedly determined and

underequipped enemy, and Union and Earth wanted a quick

solution. But Union as usual took the Long View: and on this single

point there was consensus. “If we take out every ship they put out

here and they retreat, how long does it take before they come back

at us with more advanced armaments? We’re dealing with

lunatics.”

“Get through to them,” the word went out from HQ. “Take them

out of our space and carry the war home to them. We’ve got to

make the impression on them now—or take options no one wants

later.”

Twenty years ago. Underestimating the tenacity of the elves.

Removed from the shipping lanes and confined to a single world,

the war had sunk away to a local difficulty; Alliance still put money

and troops into it; Union still cooperated in a certain measure.

Earth sent adventurers and enlistees that often were crazier than

the elves: Base culled those in a hurry.

So for seventeen years the matter boiled on and on and elves

went on dying and dying in their few and ill-equipped ships, until

the joint command decided on a rougher course; quickly took out

the elves’ pathetic little space station, dropped troops onto the

elvish world, and fenced human bases about with antimissile

screens to fight a limited and on-world war—while elvish weaponry

slowly got more basic and more primitive and the troops drank

their little measures of imported whiskey and went slowly crazy.

And humans closely tied to the elvish war adapted, in humanity’s

own lunatic way. Well behind the lines that had come to exist on

the elves’ own planet, humans settled in and built permanent

structures and scientists came to study the elves and the

threatened flora and fauna of a beautiful and earthlike world, while

some elvish centers ignored the war, and the bombing went on and

on in an inextricable mess, because neither elves nor humans knew

how to quit, or knew the enemy enough to know how to disengage.

Or figure out what the other wanted. And the war could go on and

on—since presumably the computers and the records in those

population centers still had the design of starships in them. And no

enemy which had taken what the elves had taken by now was ever

going to forget.

There were no negotiations. Once, just once, humans had tried to

approach one of the few neutral districts to negotiate and it simply

and instantly joined the war. So after all the study and all the

effort, humans lived on the elves’ world and had no idea what to

call them or what the world’s real name was, because the damn

elves had blown their own space station at the last and

methodically destroyed every record the way they destroyed every

hamlet before its fall and burned every record and every artifact.

They died and they died and they died and sometimes (but seldom

nowadays) they took humans with them, like the time when they

were still in space and hit the base at Ticon with ¾-cee rocks and

left nothing but dust. Thirty thousand dead and not a way in hell to

find the pieces.

That was the incident after which the joint command decided to

take the elves out of space.

And nowadays humanity invested cities they never planned to

take and they tore up roads and took out all the elves’ planes, and

they tore up agriculture with non-nuclear bombs and shells, trying

not to ruin the world beyond recovery, hoping eventually to wear

the elves down. But the elves retaliated with gas and chemicals

which humans had refrained from using. Humans interdicted

supply and still the elves managed to come up with the wherewithal

to strike through their base defense here as if supply were endless

and they not starving and the world still green and undamaged.

DeFranco drank and drank with measured slowness, watching

regs go to and fro in the slow dance of their own business. They

were good, this Delta Company of the Eighth. They did faithfully

what regs were supposed to do in this war, which was to hold a

base and keep roads secure that humans used, and to build landing

zones for supply and sometimes to go out and get killed inching

humanity’s way toward some goal the joint command understood

and which from here looked only like some other damn shell-pocked

hill. DeFranco’s job was to locate such hills. And to find a prisoner

to take (standing orders) and to figure out the enemy if he could.

Mostly just to find hills. And sometimes to get his company into

taking one. And right now he was no more damn good, because they

had gotten as close to this nameless city as there were hills and

vantages to make it profitable, and after that they went onto the

flat and did what?

Take the place inch by inch, street by street and discover every

damn elf they met had suicided? The elves would do it on them, so

in the villages south of here they had saved the elves the bother,

and got nothing for their trouble but endless, measured carnage,

and smoothskinned corpses that drew the small vermin and the

huge winged birds—(they’ve been careful with their ecology, the

Science Bureau reckoned, in their endless reports, in some fool’s

paper on large winged creatures’ chances of survival if a dominant

species were not very careful of them—)

(—or the damn birds are bloody-minded mean and tougher than

the elves, deFranco mused in his alcoholic fog, knowing that

nothing was, in all space and creation, more bloody-minded than

the elves.)

He had seen a young elf child holding another, both stone dead,

baby locked in baby’s arms: they love, dammit, they love— And he

had wept while he staggered away from the ruins of a little elvish

town, seeing more and more such sights—because the elves had

touched off bombs in their own town center, and turned it into a

firestorm.

But the two babies had been lying there unburned and no one

wanted to touch them or to look at them. Finally the birds came.

And the regs shot at the birds until the CO stopped it, because it

was a waste: it was killing a non-combatant life form and that (O

God!) was against the rules. Most of all the CO stopped it because it

was a fraying of human edges, because the birds always were there

and the birds were the winners, every time. And the damn birds

like the damn elves came again and again, no matter that shots

blew them to puffs of feathers. Stubborn, like the elves. Crazy as

everything else on the planet, human and elf. It was catching.

DeFranco nursed the last whiskey in the last glass, nursed it

with hands going so numb he had to struggle to stay awake. He

was a quiet drunk, never untidy. He neatly drank the last and fell

over sideways limp as a corpse, and, tender mercy to a hill-finding

branch of the service the hill-taking and road-building regs

regarded as a sometime natural enemy—one of the women came

and got the glass from his numbed fingers and pulled a blanket over

him. They were still human here. They tried to be.

“There was nothing more to be done,” says the elf. “That was

why. We knew that you were coming closer, and that our time was

limited.” His long white fingers touch the table-surface, the white,

plastic table in the ordinary little bedroom. “We died in great

numbers, deFranco, and it was cruel that you showed us only

slowly what you could do.”

“We could have taken you out from the first. You knew that.”

DeFranco’s voice holds an edge of frustration. Of anguish. “Elf,

couldn’t you ever understand that?”

“You always gave us hope we could win. And so we fought, and so

we still fight. Until the peace. My friend.”

“Franc, Franc—” —it was a fierce low voice, and deFranco came

out of it, in the dark, with his heart doubletiming and the instant

realization it was Dibs talking to him in that low tone and wanting

him out of that blanket, which meant wire-runners or worse, a

night attack. But Dibs grabbed his arms to hold him still before he

could flail about. “Franc, we got a move out there, Jake and Cat’s

headed out down the tunnel, the lieutenant’s gone to M1 but M1’s

on the line, they want you out there, they want a spotter up on hill

24 doublequick.

“Uh.” DeFranco rubbed his eyes. “Uh.” Sitting upright was

brutal. Standing was worse. He staggered two steps and caught the

main shell of his armor off the rack, number 12 suit, the lousy

stinking armor that always smelled of human or mud or the purge

in the ducts and the awful sick-sweet cleaner they wiped it out with

when they hung it up. He held the plastron against his body and

Dibs started with the clips in the dim light of the single 5-watt they

kept going to find the latrine at night— “Damn, damn, I gotta—”

He eluded Dibs and got to the toilet, and by now the whole place

was astir with shadow-figures like a scene out of a gold-lighted hell.

He swigged the stinging mouthwash they had on the shelf by the

toilet and did his business while Dibs caught him up from behind

and finished the hooks on his left side. “Damn, get him going,” the

sergeant said, and: “Trying,” Dibs said, as others hauled deFranco

around and began hooking him up like a baby into his clothes, one

piece and the other, the boots, leg and groin-pieces, the sleeves, the

gloves, the belly clamp and the backpack and the power-on—his

joints ached. He stood there swaying to one and another tug on his

body and took the helmet into his hands when Dibs handed it to

him.

“Go, go,” the sergeant said, who had no more power to give a

special op any specific orders than he could fly; but HQ was in a

stew, they needed his talents out there, and deFranco let the regs

shove him all they liked: it was his accommodation with these regs

when there was no peace anywhere else in the world. And once a

dozen of these same regs had come out into the heat after him,

which he never quite forgot. So he let them hook his weapons-kit

on, then ducked his head down and put the damned helmet on and

gave it the locking half-twist as he headed away from the safe light

of the barracks pit into the long tunnel, splashing along the low

spots on the plastic grid that kept heavy armored feet from sinking

in the mud.

“Code: Nightsight,” he told the suit aloud, all wobbly and shivery

from too little sleep; and it read his hoarse voice patterns and gave

him a filmy image of the tunnel in front of him. “Code: ID,” he told

it, and it started telling the two troopers somewhere up the tunnel

that he was there, and on his way. He got readout back as Cat

acknowledged, “Ia-6yg-p30/30,” the green numbers ghosted up in

his visor, telling him Jake and Cat had elves and they had them

quasi-solid in the distant-sensors which would have been tripped

downland and they themselves were staying where they were and

taking no chances on betraying the location of the tunnel. He cut

the ID and Cat and Jake cut off too.

They’ve got to us, deFranco thought. The damned elves got

through our screen and now they’ve pushed through oil foot, and it’s

going to be hell to pay—

Back behind him the rest of the troops would be suiting up and

making a more leisurely prep for a hard night to come. The elves

rarely got as far as human bunkers. They tried. They were, at close

range and with hand-weapons, deadly. The dying was not all on the

elves’ side if they got to you.

A cold sweat had broken out under the suit. His head ached with

a vengeance and the suit weighed on his knees and on his back

when he bent and it stank with disinfectant that smelled like some

damn tree from some damn forest on the world that had spawned

every human born, he knew that, but it failed as perfume and failed

at masking the stink of terror and of the tunnels in the cold wet

breaths the suit took in when it was not on self-seal.

He knew nothing about Earth, only dimly remembered Pell,

which had trained him and shipped him here by stages to a world

no one bothered to give a name. Elfland, when High HQ was being

whimsical. Neverneverland, the regs called it after some old fairy

tale, because from it a soldier never never came home again. They

had a song with as many verses as there were bitches of the things

a soldier in Elfland never found.

Where’s my discharge from this war?

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THESCAPEGOATCJCherryh1985FirstpublishedinAlienStarsed.ElizabethMitchell(Baen0-671-55934-6).A1986HugoNomineeIDefrancositsacrossthetablefromtheelfandhedreamsforamoment,notagooddream,butrecenttruth:allpartofwhatsurroundshimnow,abitlessthanitwaswhenitwashappening,becauseitwasgatedinthroughhumaneyesandea...

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