There Won't Be War

“Do you think that two children would be allowed to plunge their countries into total war? Our parents have let this war come about, prince, in order to draw us together.”

My hair prickled. “Who told you this?”

“I discovered it clue by clue, over the years. It’s obvious when you comprehend the pattern.”

I rose from the steps. “But how can you go along with it, knowing what you do?”

Her eyebrows arched up. “It suits me. By playing along, I get all I desire. Best of all, I get you.”

“A lousy trade. You’ll sacrifice your freedom and then you won’t want me. Not on our parents’ terms, you won’t.”

I was glad to see her considering this.

“Look,” I said, “what if I said you can have me? You know that in the only way that matters, I am already yours.”

She leaned closer. Her chauffeuse watched us with eyes like moons. “Yes?”

“But I don’t want to live in your land, Princess, and admit it, you have no fondness for mine. If we married, you would have to live in my country.”

“We can break with custom.”

“If you follow it now, even to get what you want, tradition will trap you forever. Listen, my bloody darling, Listen to what I propose.”

Her hand slid into mine.

“Pitch the war with all your will,” I said. “Drive your father until he howls. Be a cancer in his heart. Attack, my love, and never stop. Let there be ever newer weaponry, mountains of bodies. Let our love never stagnate in treaties. If we forsake peace, we can slake our lust forever.”

She looked out over the ragged fields, the sloppy graves. I could see my vision playing in her eyes. How easily it would spread, out of the wine lands and over the hills, blighting crops and felling forests, drenching the world in blood.

“And you’ll be mine?” she asked huskily.

“Yes, yours always. We will meet thus, in the midst of death, pretending to discuss the terms of an impossible peace. For as long as we have each other, peace will never come.”

“You are mine!”

“And you are mine, Princess. And now there is something we share.”

“A war.”

“Our war.”

“Yes.” Tightening her grip, she pulled me in again. “Yes.”

When I finally descended from the bus, my escorts stood stiffly around the limousine, sucking on perfumed cigarettes. They gasped at the sight of blood on my face and hands, the nail marks and bruises. The Princess’s bus roared and lumbered away, grinding through the carnage. I watched it until the taillights vanished, and thought I heard gunfire beginning in the distance. They couldn’t know it yet, but the cease-fire had ended.

“There was trouble?” asked an aide.

I pushed past him to the car, saying brusquely, “There will be no truce, no compromise. Take me home.“

The Peacemakers Timothy Zahn

The World Peace Accords were signed January 1, 1992, to a flourish of propagandist trumpets from the major powers and almost deafening skepticism from everyone else. Yet in the first year, contrary to popular cynical expectation, no fewer than four major disputes between East and West were resolved peacefully. By year five a half-dozen long-standing Third World brush wars had been brought to a close; by year eight the message that peace implied progress and prosperity had penetrated even the densest of despots and cruelest of cultures.

By the tenth anniversary celebration the pattern was clear. War was well on its way to joining smallpox and the dodo bird in oblivion.

All the architects of the Accords were on hand in Geneva for the big bash, of course. It was unquestionably the media event of the decade, and for a solid week the assembled dignitaries generated enough quotes and photos and interviews to keep even the impossibly ravenous maw of the international media machine comfortably fed.

In all the noise and fury and videotape, no one paid much attention to Andrew Xavier Martin. No one except me.

Not unexpectedly, of course. On the surface, Martin was hardly one of the leading lights of the spectacle—his only official function during the drafting of the Accords had been to act as recorder and occasional pinch-hitting translator. But I had highly placed sources, and from those sources I had heard some highly intriguing whispers. Insubstantial whispers, not solid enough even to qualify as vague rumors. But I’d always been the type to play long odds, especially when the potential payoff was as big as this one was.

I tracked Martin down the evening of the second day, sitting alone in a corner of the hotel restaurant and watching with gentle amusement the attention being lavished on the Soviet delegation across the room. “Mr. Martin?” I asked, stepping up to his table.

He looked up. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “And you?”

“My name is Redmond Kelly,” I told him, offering my press card for his inspection. “I wonder if I might ask you a few questions.”

“Certainly,” he said, gesturing me to the chair opposite. “What would you like to know?”