David

A personal story of General Duv Galeni, chief of the Imperial Security Service

I. The Cache

The cache was found by construction workers — the way most caches are found — during the renovation of a ventilation node beneath the Solstice-West dome: a niche behind a false partition, dry, carefully bricked, forty-odd years old by the look of it. Inside: three stunners of the period, preserved by regulation; a printing plate for passes of a type withdrawn from circulation a generation ago; and a metal box of documents on paper — because paper leaves no traces in the networks, a thing everyone on Komarr of a certain generation and a certain biography knew.

The report climbed the levels at the usual speed of historical finds — that is, lazily — until it reached an analyst who unfolded the documents, recognized the structure of the cipher texts, and compared it against the training archive. After that the report traveled upward at an entirely different speed, because the structure figured in the training archive under a name taught at ImpSec in the course on the history of the service, in the chapter “Komarran Terrorist Organizations, Galen Wing.”

The chief of the Imperial Security Service, General Duv Galeni, read the report in his office in Vorbarr Sultana at seven in the morning, alone, twice. Then he rose, stood at the window, and looked at the snow for a long time — a sixty-seven-year-old man with a straight back and a face that thirty-five years of service had taught to say nothing — because on the third page of the report, in the photocopy of the accounting sheet from the box, there was a column of dates.

The last date was eleven days old.

His father’s network had not died. His father’s network had gone to sleep — and was continuing, forty years after London, forty years after the death of Ser Galen, to receive money.

The audience with the Emperor Duv Galeni requested that same morning, and he opened it with the sentence he had rehearsed in the car and which still came out harder than he expected:

“Sire, I am obliged to declare a conflict of interest and to offer my recusal from the case. The find at Solstice-West is a cache of my father’s organization. Its accounts are active. And before I continue — one clarification for the record, which I have owed this office for thirty-five years: I know these ciphers from the inside, Sire. Not from the course. My father taught them to me when I was nine years old, instead of bedtime stories.”

Gregor Vorbarra heard him out to the end without moving. Then he said:

“The recusal is denied. For two reasons, Duv, and hear both. The first is practical: you have just explained to me that you are the only living man who reads this hand like a native language. The second matters more. If I assign the case to another and he fails, they will say: the Service couldn’t manage it. If I assign it to another and he succeeds, they will say: they kept the Komarran away from his Komarran affairs. But if you take it — whatever comes of it — they will say the truth: that the chief of my security unraveled his own father’s network, in the light, to the end.” The Emperor paused. “You work alone; you report only to me; your powers are written in the Auditorial regulation. And, Duv… whatever you find in there — it is evidence in a case, not a verdict on you. Remember the difference. You are going to need it.”

II. The Hand

He worked at night, in the small windowless office he had asked for specially — because this work was not to meet the daytime kind — and the first two weeks were an archaeology of his own childhood.

The network’s cipher was Ser Galen’s personal cipher: one-time keys generated from a text that every member knew by heart and no one carried on his person. For forty years the analysts had guessed at the text and had tried everything — the Komarran constitution, Galen’s speeches, the dome registries. Duv Galeni had known the answer since he was nine, because he had grown up with that text in place of a prayer: the list. The two hundred names of the Solstice Massacre — the counselors shot after the capitulation, his aunt Rebecca Galen among them — recited by his father in the evenings, name by name, with the requirement that the boy repeat them. “Memory is a weapon, David. He who remembers by name does not forgive wholesale.”

He sat down before the first cipher text, closed his eyes, summoned the list up from forty years’ depth — it came whole, without effort, the way only things hammered in in childhood come — and began to read.

He read for three weeks. The network’s accounts unrolled before him like a slow, patient, monstrously disciplined fresco: after London, after the rout, the surviving core had not tried to continue the struggle. It had turned itself into a pipe. Money — at first from the movement’s old funds, then from legal revenues: shareholdings, rents, one freight-forwarding firm — had flowed for forty years down a cascade of accounts, patiently, with the interest, without a single operation, without a single expenditure except the maintenance of the pipe itself. A network that does nothing. A seed-network, left in the ground by a man who knew that his generation had lost, and who was building for another.

And at the end of the accounting mass, set apart, sealed in its own cipher layer — Duv recognized it by its density before he ever opened it — stood a document with a classification line at which the chief of the Imperial Security Service, sixty-seven years old, with thirty-five years of service, found for several seconds that his breathing had stopped obeying him.

The classification line read: Protocol “David.”

His father had named it with his birth name.

III. The Protocol

He opened it only the following night — he admitted that interval afterward to the one person to whom he admitted intervals — and read it the way one reads a letter from a grave: with the eyes of a professional and the spine of a son.

Protocol “David,” drawn up by Ser Galen in London, weeks before his death, deposited with the network under the status “to be executed upon condition.” The condition: “if my son David Galen, having taken the name Duv Galeni and the occupier’s uniform, attains in their service a height from which his fall will cost Barrayar more than one career.” The execution: a package. A package of forgeries built patiently over forty years — reports, receipts, photographs, ‘contacts’ — proving that Duv Galeni had been an agent of the movement throughout his service; manufactured in advance, aged with care, extended by the network per instruction with each of his promotions. And the detonator: the package to be delivered to the Barrayaran press and to the Komarran radicals simultaneously, at the moment of maximum publicity — “so that it is not the man who falls, but the bridge: let two generations of Komarrans see what the Empire does with its most loyal Komarran, and let two generations of Barrayarans see what Komarran loyalty is worth.”

His father had not fired at him. His father had built a machine designed to kill not Duv Galeni but the very possibility of Duv Galeni — the idea that between the two worlds there could be a bridge made of flesh — and had loaded it with his son’s life as the ammunition.

Duv Galeni sat over the protocol until dawn. Then, methodically, as he did everything, he separated the final sheet — the one with the signature — and read it through once more, because on the final sheet, beneath the executive clause, in the small, slanted, unmistakably paternal hand, stood a paragraph which the network’s executors, judging by the overlapping cipher layers, had never fully decoded. The paragraph read:

“Revocation clause, not subject to review: the protocol is terminated wholly and forever if the subject presents himself before the keeper of the protocol alone, without escort and without weapons, and recites from memory, without error, the two hundred names. If he still holds them — then he has not forgotten Komarr, but only chosen another road through it, and in that case the dispute between us remains where it belongs: between father and son, not between peoples. The sentence in that case is remitted. The father has no right to remit it himself — he no longer trusts his own mercy. Therefore he entrusts it to the son’s memory.”

IV. The Fund

The daytime half of the investigation meanwhile did its work, because Duv Galeni was before all else a professional, and the personal did not prevent him from reading banking cascades.

The pipe ended, in the present day, at an institution of impeccable reputation: the Two Hundred Memorial Fund, Solstice — a charitable foundation for the memory of the massacre, scholarships for descendants of the fallen, upkeep of the memorial, the annual ceremony. Three-quarters of its activity was genuine and clean. The fourth quarter, hidden inside the upkeep, financed the keepership: the storage of the package, the courier chain, and — for thirteen months, ever since the first Komarran in history had come to head ImpSec and the protocol’s condition had ripened — the preparation of the detonation. The date: the anniversary of the massacre, twenty-nine days away, at the ceremony before the memorial, where this year, for the first time, at the invitation of the Komarran councils, the Emperor himself would attend and kneel before the two hundred names.

Maximum publicity. His father had planned well — across forty years, across his own grave.

The keeper Duv Galeni identified through the courier chain in nine days, and when the file came up on the screen he sat motionless for a long time, because the face in the file was looking at him out of his own childhood. Emil Varga, eighty-six, retired dome engineer, Solstice. In the network’s accounts: “keeper, last of the council of five.” In the memory of nine-year-old David Galen: Uncle Emil — the man who had carried him on his shoulders through the dome galleries, taught him chess with a patience his father did not have, and once, only once, when the boy wept under the weight of the two hundred names, said to Ser Galen in front of him: “He is a child, Galen, not an archive” — and received in reply a silence Duv remembered to this day.

The executive wing was simpler and sadder: three people, all under thirty-five, all descendants of names on the list, raised by the fund on scholarships and on history served in the correct redaction. At their head: Teren Malek, twenty-nine, great-grandson of Counselor Anna Malek, line eighty-seven of the list — intelligent, burning, convinced he was preparing to render justice, and unaware, by Duv’s assessment of the intercepted communications, of the true contents of the package he was to deliver: the young had been told the package was “the truth about the traitor Galen.”

Twenty days remained. Duv Galeni possessed everything necessary for a standard resolution: names, addresses, evidence, powers. One order — and the network would be taken in a single night, quietly, finally, professionally.

He did not sign the order. Instead he went home before midnight — for the first time in weeks — and woke his wife, because there was one conversation that could not wait and could not pass through any office.

V. Delia

Delia Galeni, née Koudelka, heard it all — the protocol, the clause, Uncle Emil, the ceremony — sitting up in bed, in her nightgown, graying hair loose, and asked only one question, but the right one:

“And do you still remember them? The names.”

“All of them,” said Duv. “I tested myself. Forty years I have not said them aloud — and there they stand, every one, in my father’s order. That is his most terrible legacy, Delia: he turned out to be right. Memory is a weapon. He merely failed to specify in whose hands.”

“Then why are you sitting on the edge of the bed like a man before a tribunal, Duv Galeni?” Delia took his hand, Koudelka-fashion: without ceremony. “Say it aloud. What do you want to do?”

“I want to go.” There — it was said. “Alone, without escort, without weapons, exactly per the clause. To Emil Varga. And to recite the list.” He was looking at the floor. “Every analyst in my service, myself included, will say this is madness: the clause is forty years old, the keeper is a fanatic, the executors are ready, and I am the most valuable target in the Empire after the Emperor. The correct move is the arrest. Clean, safe, tomorrow morning.”

“But?”

“But if I arrest them, the protocol wins, Delia. Not the package — the package is a forgery; we will prove it; we would survive even the publication, if it comes to that. The protocol. My father’s verdict remains unanswered forever: a son who sent police against his father’s last question. And the question…” his voice broke for the first time, by a millimeter, “…the question is addressed to me. Personally. With a revocation clause he hid so deep because he did not trust his own mercy — but he wrote it, Delia. He wrote it. It is the single crack of humanity in the whole document, the single time my father, after London, after everything, allowed that he might be wrong about me. If I do not walk through that crack — no one ever will. And the dispute between us stays on the table of peoples, when its place is at another table. Ours.”

Delia Galeni was silent a long time. Then she said — and he would carry the sentence to the end:

“For thirty-five years I have watched you carry your father like shrapnel lodged next to your spine: it doesn’t kill you, but it speaks up every time you bend. Go, Duv. Recite him the list. Only hear your wife on one point: the clause says ‘alone and without weapons.’ It does not say ‘without the Empire at your back.’ Tell Gregor. Let him know where you are going and why. You have spent forty years proving the bridge is possible — do not start creeping across it by night now.”

VI. The Old Man

Gregor heard the plan out in a silence that lasted a full minute past its end, and then said only: “The clause is your father’s, but the life is my security chief’s. You go with a tail at one kilometer and a medical team at two. That is not subject to negotiation — I have revocation clauses too.” And added, more quietly: “Go finish your conversation, Duv. I have watched you postpone it for thirty-five years.”

Emil Varga lived on the twelfth level of Solstice, in an apartment with a view of the dome’s ribs, among chessboards and photographs of the dead. He opened the door himself — and froze: an eighty-six-year-old man looking through the doorway at a ghost of sixty-seven.

“David,” he said. Not “General Galeni.” David.

“Uncle Emil,” said the chief of the Imperial Security Service. “I am alone. Without weapons. I come under the clause.”

The old man’s hands began to tremble — he knew which clause was meant; alone of all the living he had read it before the layers sealed it — and he stepped back from the door with the movement of a man who has waited forty years for exactly this and prayed it would not come.

They talked for three hours. No — the first hour Varga talked: about the massacre, about Rebecca Galen, about the years of fury, about London, about Ser Galen, who “loved you and condemned you in the same sentence, David, and I told him then that a sentence with that construction collapses, and he answered me: that is why I am adding a clause.” About the forty years of keepership: “I never believed in the package, boy. I kept it the way one keeps a grave — not because the dead man is right, but because he is yours.” About the young: “Teren and the others know nothing. They were told a fairy tale. I told it to them, David. That is my sin, not theirs — I wanted the memory to live, and I gave it poison instead of blood.”

Then it grew quiet. And in the quiet, standing in the middle of the room, without paper, without prompting, hands at his sides as his father had taught him, Duv Galeni began:

“Anna Malek, counselor, Solstice. Bran Toscane, counselor, Solstice. Vera Kler, counselor, Hagelin dome…”

He recited for eleven minutes. He did not err once — not a line, not a stress, not a position: the list came out of him whole, as it had gone in fifty-eight years before, evening after evening, in place of a bedtime story — and somewhere around the sixtieth name the old man opposite began to weep, soundlessly, in the way of the old, and at the hundred-and-fortieth he began to recite along with him, and the final names — including “Rebecca Galen, counselor, Solstice” — the two of them pronounced in one voice: the last keeper of the network and the son of its creator, two Komarrans over one list, in a room full of the dead.

“The clause is fulfilled,” said Emil Varga, when he could speak. His voice was that of a man off whom a building has been lifted. “The sentence is remitted. Wholly and forever — so it is written; I have read it with my own eyes.” He went to the wall, opened with a trembling hand a safe behind a chess photograph, and took out the package: forty years of forgeries, aged, extended, perfect. He handed it over with both hands, like something dead. “The dispute returns to the table where it belongs, David. Your father… your father, at the end of that paragraph, allowed that he might have lost you not because you betrayed, but because he had drunk too deep of fury and left nothing else on the table to drink. That is the nearest thing to an apology the man ever wrote in his life. Take it. And…” the old man drew himself up, as far as he could, into a posture half a century old, “…I make full confession, General. The network, the fund, the young ones — everything. One thing only I ask: let Teren and the others be tried for what they knew, not for what they carried. The fairy tale was told to them by me.”

“Your statement will be taken tomorrow, in due order,” said General Duv Galeni. Then, after a pause: “But the chess game we finish today, Uncle Emil. You have owed it to me for fifty-eight years. I was in a winning position.”

“You were in a losing position, David, and you were crying about it in advance.”

“Then our memories differ on one question out of two hundred and one,” said Duv Galeni, and sat down at the board. “An acceptable ratio. Play.”

VII. The Names

The resolution followed the order Duv Galeni had chosen from the first day: in the light, to the end.

The network was taken in a single night, quietly; Emil Varga gave his statement and received, in view of his age, his cooperation, and the clause, house arrest to the end of his days — with permission for chess visits, entered in the ruling at the insistence of the injured party. The three young people stood before a Komarran court, Komarran judges, and the truth: the package was published by ImpSec itself, voluntarily, with the complete forensics of the forgery — every aged sheet, every doctored date — and over the signature of the man against whom it had been built. “The Service will not permit dead hands to write the history of the living,” ran the official statement. The unofficial effect was stronger: two worlds watched the first Komarran at the head of ImpSec bring out himself, first, before everyone, the bomb buried under his own name — and defuse it with transparency. The bridge the protocol was meant to bring down came out of the story wider.

Teren Malek received four years, of which he served two; on his release he asked for a meeting with the General and got it; what they said to each other no one recorded, but three years later Malek defended, on Solstice, a dissertation on the history of the resistance — the true one, with the archives, with their whole weight — and the first copy arrived in Vorbarr Sultana with a dedication: “To the man who gave me the list whole. Including the difficult names.”

The anniversary ceremony took place on schedule. The Emperor of Barrayar knelt before the wall with the two hundred names — the first Barrayaran sovereign to do so — and two paces behind him, by protocol and by right, stood the chief of his security: a Komarran, sixty-seven years old, with a straight back, who, during the reading of the names — this year, for the first time in fifty-eight, they were read aloud, name by name, before the whole dome square — pronounced each one soundlessly, in time with the reader, to the end.

And after the ceremony, in the silence of the emptied memorial, Duv Galeni remained alone before the wall, found with his eyes the line “Rebecca Galen, counselor, Solstice,” and stood before it as long as was needed. Then he said — quietly, in Komarran, to the wall, to the list, to the man who was not inscribed on it and had no wall anywhere:

“I recited them, Father. Without error, in your order. You asked your question with a forty-year fuse — I answered you by name, as you taught me: he who remembers by name does not forgive wholesale. You were right. I do not forgive wholesale. I forgive by name.” A pause. “One name today. Next year, we shall see.”

Then the chief of the Imperial Security Service turned and walked across the square toward the car, toward the report, toward the Service — with the gait of a man who has carried shrapnel next to his spine for long years and today, bending, has for the first time felt nothing.

Circles do not close, a friend of his, an Auditor, had once said. Accounts close. This one had been paid — by name, to the last line.