Each had given the best he could, to build up a bed of state for the dead hero—a bed of triumph, actually, for in winning here Michael had won everything, according to their rules and their ways. After the supreme victory of his courage, as they saw it, there was nothing left for them but the offering of tribute; their possessions or their lives.
We stood, we three, looking at it all in silence. Finally, Kensie spoke.
“Do you still want to take him home?”
“No,” said Amanda. The word was almost as a sigh from her, as she stood looking at the dead Michael. “No. This is his home, now.”
We went back to Gebel Nahar, leaving the corpse of Michael with its honor guard of the other dead around him.
The next day Amanda and I left Gebel Nahar to return to the Dorsai. Kensie and Ian had decided to complete their contract; and it looked as if they should be able to do so without difficulty. With dawn, individual soldiers of the regiments had begun pouring back into Gebel Nahar, asking to be accepted once more into their duties. They were eager to please, and for Naharese, remarkably subdued.
Padma was also leaving. He rode into the spaceport with us, as did Kensie and Ian, who had come along to see us off. In the terminal, we stopped to look once more at the leto de muerte painting.
“Now I understand,” said Amanda, after a moment. She turned from the painting and lightly touched both Ian and Kensie who were standing on either side of her.
“We’ll be back,” she said, and led the two of them off.
I was left with Padma.
“Understand?” I said to him. “The leto de muerte concept?”
“No,” said Padma, softly. “I think she meant that now she understands what Michael came to understand, and how it applies to her. How it applies to everyone, including me and you.”
I felt coldness on the back of my neck.
“To me?” I said.
“You have lost part of your protection, the armor of your sorrow and loss,” he answered. “To a certain extent, when you let yourself become concerned with Michael’s problem, you let someone else in to touch you again.”
I looked at him, a little grimly.
“You think so?” I put the matter aside. “I’ve got to get out and start the checkover on the ship. Why don’t you come along? When Amanda and the others come back and don’t find us here, they’ll know where to look.”
Padma shook his head.
“I’m afraid I’d better say goodbye now,” he replied. “There are other urgencies that have been demanding my attention for some time and I’ve put them aside for this. Now, it’s time to pay them some attention. So I’ll say goodbye now; and you can give my farewells to the others.”
“Goodbye, then,” I said.
As when we had met, he did not offer me his hand; but the warmth of him struck through to me; and for the first time I faced the possibility that perhaps he was right. That Michael, or he, or Amanda—or perhaps the whole affair—had either worn thin a spot, or chipped off a piece, of that shell that had closed around me when I watched them kill Else.
“Perhaps we’ll run into each other again,” I said.
“With people like ourselves,” he said, “it’s very like-ly.”
He smiled once more, turned and went.
I crossed the terminal to the Security Section, identified myself and went out to the courier ship. It was no more than half an hour’s work to run the checkover— these special vessels are practically self-monitoring. When I finished the others had still not yet appeared. I was about to go in search of them when Amanda pulled herself through the open entrance port and closed it behind her.
“Where’s Kensie and Ian?” I asked.
“They were paged. The Board of Governors showed up at Gebel Nahar, without warning. They both had to hurry back for a full-dress confrontation. I told them I’d say goodbye to you for them.”
“All right. Padma sends his farewells by me to the rest of you.”
She laughed and sat down in the copilot’s seat beside me.
“I’ll have to write Ian and Kensie to pass Padma’s on,” she said. “Are we ready to lift?”
“As soon as we’re cleared for it. That port sealed?”
She nodded. I reached out to the instrument bank before me, keyed Traffic Control and asked to be put in sequence for liftoff. Then I gave my attention to the matter of warming the bird to life.
Thirty-five minutes later we lifted, and another ten minutes after that saw us safely clear of the atmosphere. I headed out for the legally requisite number of planetary diameters before making the first phase shift. Then, finally, with mind and hands free, I was able to turn my attention again to Amanda.
She was lost in thought, gazing deep into the pinpoint fires of the visible stars in the navigation screen above the instrument bank. I watched her without speaking for a moment, thinking again that Padma had possibly been right. Earlier, even when she had spoken to me in the dark of my room of how she felt about Ian, I had touched nothing of her. But now, I could feel the life in her as she sat beside me.
She must have sensed my eyes on her, because she roused from her private consultation with the stars and looked over.
“Something on your mind?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. I didn’t really follow your thinking, back in the terminal when we were looking at the painting and you said that now you understood.”
“You didn’t?” She watched me for a fraction of a second. “I meant that now I understood what Michael had.”
“Padma said he thought you’d meant you understood how it applied to you—and to everyone.”
She did not answer for a second.
“You’re wondering about me—and Ian and Kensie,” she said.
“It’s not important what I wonder,” I said.
“Yes, it is. After all, I dumped the whole matter in your lap in the first place, without warning. It’s going to be all right. They’ll finish up their contract here and then Ian will go to Earth for Leah. They’ll be married and she’ll settle in Foralie.”
“And Kensie?”
“Kensie.” She smiled sadly. “Kensie’ll go on … his own way.”
“And you?”
“I’ll go mine.” She looked at me very much as Padma had looked at me, as we stood below the painting. “That’s what I meant when I said I’d understood. In the end the only way is to be what you are and do what you must. If you do that, everything works. Michael found that out.”
“And threw his life away putting it into practise.”
“No,” she said swiftly. “He threw nothing away. There were only two things he wanted. One was to be the Dorsai he was born to be and the other was never to use a weapon; and it seemed he could have either
one but not the other. Only, he was true to both and it worked. In the end, he was Dorsai and unarmed— and by being both he stopped an army.”
Her eyes held me so powerfully that I could not look away.
“He went his way and found his life,” she said, “and my answer is to go mine Ian, his. And Kensie, his—“
She broke off so abruptly I knew what she had been about to say.
“Give me time,” I said; and the words came a little more thickly than I had expected. “It’s too soon yet. Still too soon since she died. But give me time, and maybe . . . maybe, even me.”
WARRIOR
The spaceliner coming in from New Earth and Freiland, worlds under the Sirian sun, was delayed in its landing by traffic at the spaceport in Long Island Sound. The two police lieutenants, waiting on the bare concrete beyond the shelter of the Terminal buildings, turned up the collars of their cloaks against the hissing sleet, in this unweatherproofed area. The sleet was turning into tiny hailstones that bit and stung all exposed areas of skin. The gray November sky poured them down without pause or mercy; the vast, reaching surface of concrete seemed to dance with their white multitudes.
“Here it comes now,” said Tyburn, the Manhattan Complex police lieutenant, risking a glance up into the hailstorm. “Let me do the talking when we take him in.”
“Fine by me,” answered Breagan, the spaceport officer, “I’m only here to introduce you—and because it’s my bailiwick. You can have Kenebuck, with his hood connections, and his millions. If it were up to me, I’d let the soldier get him.”
“It’s him,” said Tyburn, “who’s likely to get the soldier—and that’s why I’m here. You ought to know that.”