The War with the Belatrin. Don Webb

      I would be allowed to write, but not publish. I couldn’t give interviews, write uncensored letters to friends, and above all, I couldn’t leave the island. The­ pyscho-engineers thought my idea of building a replica was too morbid, so they took all my notes and all my facilities for that.

      I did get to keep the portrait of her. For a year I’d get up every morning and stare at it. I could’ve given you everything. She looked so pretty, but she never said anything. Eternally reticent. I tried to figure out my life. If I hadn’t met her, I would have been a happy, unknown writer living on the dole on Angkor III. My sister would be alive. My parents would talk to me. Who was this person that had taken all this from me? What right did she have to ­be smiling in that portrait? Everyday she smiled, unaging. ­I begin to hate her. Not with a common hate, but hate that only someone who had had their life stolen from them can know. She couldn’t face up to her own damn problems and let them engulf me. Her trickery was the REAL ENEMY, not the­ Belatrin.

      She was probably laughing at me in some other­ dimension. Laughing at me in U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz’s voice­, telling me I was in trouble. That I made her death look tawdry. Laughing at me that day the news came about Zohra. ­Laughing at me through the sound of her father’s statue being torn down. Laughing at me with the sound of the waves on my lonely island.

      I planned my fifth book on General Helen Lyndon Gerrhan­ very carefully. It would have the same structure as the­ second and third books. But instead of her telling me of­ her derring-do on our wedding night, it would be her­ confession to a man she picked up in a bar on a third-rate planet. She would confess to being a Belatrin secret agent, to having sacrificed the fleet in the battle of the Lister­ system. She would tell how she was going to kill me in the morning—she had just needed some fool to get some of the guilt off her chest. Unfortunately for her, the Belatrin had called her home. The colours weren’t really a weapon, they were a transportation device. I had been afraid all these years to tell the truth.

      It felt damn good to write the book. I felt a pain in my chest finally leave me. I cried long and hard for the death of my sister, I cried for the loss of communication with my parents, but mainly I cried for me.

      My plan had been to write the poisonous book and then consign it to the flames after its healing work was done. ­But I just couldn’t do it. The writing was good, I guess because it was the only truly motivated writing I’d ever done. The only writing in which I had given my heart full reign. And the hate was still there. When I’d see a rocket on the way to the Houston ship port, when I watched a news broadcast about the war, when I would see an oleander bloom­—I hated her more and more. So I grew crafty.

      I watched the supply robot. I learned how to encode things in my letters to my agent. Finally, I had a plan, I reduced my fifth book, The Judgment of Paris: The True Story ­of HLG, to a tiny data dot that I tossed into a small crease of the supply ’bot’s carapace. My agent had bribed the agency that washed the robots.

      The book sold to the Siirian market; they were very pleased to get some dirt on the human heroine. Despite our common enemy of the Belatrin, the old rivalry ran very deep.

      I suspected they would kill me for High Treason. ­Instead, the authorities put me in a prison oneill somewhere, I think maybe near the glowing ruin of Eta Carinae, a nebula ­8,000 light years from Earth. I’ve only seen the outside once. It has been a long time. I think we’ve won the war, since they say they’re letting me publish this. I have been here for a long time. I think it has been a century. Every day I think of her. Sometimes with love, sometimes with hate, but mainly with envy. I too want to become a handful of bluish dust to be scattered at the walls of windy Troy.