The man smiled. "Me? Nothing but an emissary, or rather a voice." He pulled off his coat and laid it on a chair. o
Talia started. "I thought you were a myth," she breathed. "Or long dead." u
"We prefer to have it thought that we are," the man replied. "But we are very real. We are observers, recorders of history - rarely actors within it, but occasionally it is time to act. We have been asked to lend you our assistance." w
"And who is 'we'?" Dexter asked. i
"We.... are the Vindrizi." l
Dexter looked at him, and then at Talia. Her eyes were still wide with disbelief. l
"The who?" he said. o
beyus
"I thought.... I really didn't think this would ever happen again, not to anyone...." o
"Least of all like this. Do you know what I mean, now?" u
"Yes.... no.... I don't know. It was supposed to be something beautiful, something safe. The Alliance was meant to protect people. Whatever the Narn Government was doing, whatever they have done.... the people didn't deserve this.... the innocent.... the...." w
"Do we know anyone who survived?
G'Kar?" i
"Oh, God. Delenn said something.... He was on Narn, I think. Oh God, I hope he got away." l
"Would he really have left if it meant taking up a place someone else could have used?" l
"No, of course he wouldn't." o
"You see, John, there's a darkness at the heart of the Alliance, a cancer even. I was too afraid to confront it before. Now.... I'm still afraid, to be honest. Who wouldn't be?" b
"But what can we do? Do you want another war? I don't. I'm sick of fighting. That's all I've ever known, and that war cost me my wife, my friends, my daughter, my son, my father, my home.... Do you want to go through all that again? Because I don't." e
"'We.... in this generation are by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of the world's freedom.'" y
"David, I can't think, and I'm too tired for word games." u
"You told me that. You gave a speech the night after Mars, the night we fled our solar system for the last time." s
"I remember now. I was quoting President Kennedy." y
"We do what we must. We do what we have to do. That's me quoting you. I don't want a war either, but my eyes have opened a little. What good is peace if it's the peace of quiet and darkness and terror? What's to stop the Vorlons doing it again to somewhere else?" o
"If there's another way...." u
"And if there isn't?" w
The tall, darkeyed Minbari woman turned to look at them. "You are dreamers," she spat, in harshlyaccented English. "You are fools. There will be war." i
"You sound just like Sinoval." l
"Never mention that name to me again!" l
She turned back, resuming her grim pacing up and down. o
"I wonder if there's even any point to this now. I was going to speak to Delenn, but.... what good is it even to try? Why bother trying to build when something big and allpowerful can just reach out and bring it all crashing down?" b
"That's the only reason to build anything. If we hold back because we're afraid it might go wrong, we'll never do anything." e
"Well, you would know." y
"Hey! I've been scared ever since the last war ended, and I'm more tired of fear than I am of war. I don't want to fight, but I will if I have to. It's better to light a candle than to sit and curse the darkness." u
"Enough with the quotations. I don't know. I just.... s
".... don't know...." y
ouwillobeyus
Susan Ivanova folded her arms angrily as she watched Sinoval walk through the dead place that had, according to her hosts, once been a city. Now it was a silent, black jungle of houses and streets and towers. The Tuchanq were an elegant race, who had built with slender, fragile beauty. Their buildings were slight, and the few that still stood looked ready to collapse in the faintest breeze, but somehow they had endured, their fragility concealing enormous strength. o
Until the Narns had bombarded their world from orbit and made slaves of their people. u
And now the Narns themselves knew fear, knew what it meant to lose their home. w
But they had known that before, hadn't they? They had been enslaved and tortured by the Centauri. i
Christ, circles everywhere. What becomes of us? Do we all end up becoming our parents? Do we fight monsters for so long that we end up becoming them? l
She closed her eyes to fight back the tears. She was briefly ashamed of crying, but at least it showed she was still human. At least it showed she cared. At least she could cry for the dead. Which was more than Sinoval was doing. l
She opened her eyes and looked at him, blinking. He was kneeling, holding a piece of metal in his hand. She was not sure what it was, and judging from the expression on his face, neither was he. He suddenly dropped it and continued his walk, moving in slow, careful, precise circles. o
Did he not even care? All those deaths and.... No, what could he care about death? Did he even know how to cry? Did he even know what it meant? He probably thought of it all as a great journey or something, some nice, philosophical way to get around the fact that billions of people had just been murdered. She tried to imagine that many people, and could not. One person, two, five, ten, a hundred, yes, easily. A thousand, yes. But billions? The mind had no