The War with the Belatrin. Don Webb

said, “you are in big trouble.”

      “How am I in trouble? I’ve done nothing.”

      “You were present at the death of someone the Allies want to make into a hero. You make that death tawdry.”

      “I know nothing about this woman. Let me go. I don’t know anything about this woman. All I want to do is go back to writing.”

      “We can’t let you do that. I have your profile.” U’ssmahzzrizz­ssuibz tapped a small silver disk with his right claw. “Oh, I’m not interested in your petty larceny. ­It is the opinion of the Free Machine that interrogated you that having gone through such a traumatic experience as the­ colours, you cannot not begin to write about them.”

      That was true I had already begun (in my mind) to try to describe their ecstasy and terror.

      “So,” he said, “we can do one of two things. One, we can lock you up and deprive you of an audience while we are at war. Two, we censor your writings. Now I don’t like ­socio-engineers, because I don’t like being told what to do ­by humans. I have my own idea. We let you write about the ­general and about her death. But you write it as an heroic­ biography with a beautiful ending in her lover’s arms.”

      “But I don’t know anything about her. I don’t follow ­the war effort, I find it too depressing.”

      “We can give you her life, at least as much of her life as the propaganda department thinks the Allies should know.”

      “I’ve never written nonfiction.”

      “Haven’t you been paying attention? This will be fiction.”

      * * * *

      The book was Helen: Why We Fight. I did not come up with the title.

      The first thing I had to change was my birth. Helen had been born and raised on Earth with an hereditary tie to the space army. So I changed my life. We had met at the Space Academy at Katmandu. She was a better than average student, and I was studying the Vajra paradigm of Tibet. I wanted to be bonded, but she had said that her career came first. Civilized space had given so much to her that she felt it was her duty to protect it. She had a near accident on Venus during a training flight. She graduated with honors.

      I traced her rise through the ranks, her brilliant tactics during the Human-Siirian war. Her brief tour in the Exploration Service, which found three suitable worlds for human colonization.

      She was going to retire and join me in a paradisical ­artists colony on Angkor III. Then she was caught in the surprise Belatrin attack on the Lister system. Valiantly she fought amidst blazing lasers and the insidious reality-warping devices of the Belatrin.

      Finally having taken down one of their cruisers, she flew the crippled Pegasus home.

      There I met her with flowers and wine and candlelight reciting my verses, when suddenly a strange fate pulled her from me.

      It was a short book immediately made into all kinds of other media.

      It sold on every planet, every ship, every asteroid, every oniell, and every Dyson sphere in the Alliance.

      I had money, something my experimental writing had never brought me.

      I got a Free Machine as an agent, and its first recommendation was write the book again in a longer version.

      * * * *

      The first book had been very hard to write. I am not a narrative-driven writer. I am language-driven. This means sound and philology turn me on, and money is something that other writers get. I figured the good stories, the ones that truly work the human psyche, have already been told as myths, so why should I contaminate the myth-sphere?

      I know at one time people thought there would cease to ­be writers as new technologies bloomed, but as long as human brains have a left hemisphere, there will a place for the words-in-a-row guys.

      The second book was called HLG: Her Life and My Love.

      I am a fairly good parodist. An even century before the True Space Age, there has been a market for the space adventure novel. I don’t know how many scholarly studies have been done showing how the early space adventure novel actually shaped both the myth and practice of space exploration. Anyway, I bought hundreds of these books, and read nothing but them.

      Now at that time, you must remember, no one had seen Belatrin. The popular imagination considered them to be more or less physical beings, so with the blessing of the propaganda office, I gave Helen a sword and blaster, and had her lead an assault on the Belatrin ship itself. She told me the story on our wedding night. Oh yes, in the second book we were married under the stars of Angkor III.

      We spent our few hours of wedded bliss with her rendition of the horrors of battle and her hope that, despite whatever fiendish obstacles the Belatrin had, the Allies would emerge victorious, strong and without the scars of the Human-Siirian war. We spent our honeymoon in the Hotel­ Splendide, using our meager money to buy the penthouse suite.

      Of course, as an Allied general Helen would have been able to buy the hotel without blinking, but “meager money” is more becoming to a heroine.

      I was making enough money from the first book to rent the penthouse suite fairly often, and I had enough of a reputation as a casualty of romance that I could have my pick of good-looking off-world women.

      I dedicated the book to my younger sister, Zohra Kitab ­Lasser.

      You may remember the passage where Helen takes on the Belatrin captain:

      “It sprawled before me on its barbaric throne, this twelve-armed horror that had given the command that had melted the minds of the folk of Lister IV. Its baleful red eyes radiated a hatred of all that was good or sane in the cosmos. I needed to return to the Pegasus, but I wanted this moment to try and spill the ichor of this other leader.

      “It heaved itself off its throne. Two of its pale purple tentacles held the tiny but powerful blasters that I had seen the crewmen use. It slithered toward me much faster than I had imagined such a boneless mass could move. I plunged forward swinging my sword. I would at least wound it, that was all that mattered.

      “I never felt as great a pleasure as when my sword cut though the first throbbing tentacle.”

      When we really found out what the Belatrin were, during the False Peace Talks, the book was banned. But the popular image of the Belatrin as a kind of phallic purple octopus entered the human collective unconsciousness through me.

      I’ll be honest. I had written the book way over the top. I didn’t want it to do well. I was growing uncomfortable with the knowledge that what I would be known for was a cheap night’s entertainment, and I even felt guilty because I was robbing so much from what had been a­ nice, but haunted, woman.

      It was about then that I commissioned a portrait of Helen.

      The book set records for sales that still stand today, a hundred years later. It was translated into languages and dialects of human and Siirian tongues that hadn’t had new writing in decades. There wasn’t a hut on Bemi III, or igloo on Earth, that lacked a copy. I had a library built on Angkor III that housed nothing but various copies of the book, and reproductions and adaptations in all existing media.

      It was a big building.

      The war was going very badly.

      Zohra joined the army. She died in the battle of the Coal Sack Nebula.

      My parents never spoke to me again.

      * * * *

      I traveled as much as I could, the war stopping most planetary travel.

      I swam in the seas of Earth, visited the ruins of New Mars, saw the lava sculpture festival on W’ssaterzzss, ­tasted the wines of Garcian II.

      My earlier work had been reissued. It was dutifully bought by a patriotic publication, who was not in the habit of buying experimental prose. Small efforts of mine—­poems