I got to the church just as people were beginning to arrive. Under the dark, draining skies, the interior of the church was almost too dim to let me see my way about, for the Friendlies permit themselves no windows and no artificial lighting in their houses of worship. Gray light, cold wind and rain entered the doorless portal at the back of the church. Through the single rectangular opening in the roof watery sunlight filtered over Jamethon’s body on a platform set up on trestles. A transparent cover had been set up to protect the body from the rain, which was channeled off the open space and ran down a drain in the back wall. But the elder conducting the Death
Service and anyone coming up to view the body was expected to stand exposed to sky and weather.
I got in line with the people moving slowly down the central aisle and past the body. To right and left of me the barriers at which the congregation would stand during the service were lost in gloom. The rafters of the steeply pitched roof were hidden in darkness. There was no music, but the low sound of voices individually praying to either side of me in the ranks of barriers and in the line blended into a sort of rhythmic undertone of sadness. Like Jame-thon, the people were all very dark here, being of North African extraction. Dark into dark, they blended and were lost about me in the gloom.
I came up and passed at last by Jamethon. He looked as I remembered him. Death had shown no power to change him. He lay on his back, his hands at his sides, and his lips were as firm and straight as ever. Only his eyes were closed.
I was limping noticeably because of the dampness, and as I turned away from the body, I felt my elbow touched. I turned back sharply. I was not wearing my correspondent’s uniform. I was in civilian clothes, so as to be inconspicuous.
I looked down into the face of the young girl in Jamethon’s solidograph. In the gray, rainy light her unlined face was like something from the stained-glass window of an ancient cathedral back on Old Earth.
“You’ve been wounded,” she said in a soft voice to me. “You must be one of the mercenaries who knew him on New Earth, before he was ordered to Harmony. His parents, who are mine as well, would find solace in the Lord by meeting you.”
The wind blew rain down through the overhead opening all about me, and its icy feel sent a chill suddenly shooting through me, freezing me to my very bones.
“No!” I said. “I’m not. I didn’t know him.” And I turned sharply away from her and pushed my way into the crowd, back up the aisle.
After about fifteen feet, I realized what I was doing and slowed down. The girl was already lost in the darkness of the bodies behind me. I made my way more slowly toward the back of the church, where there was a little place to stand before the first ranks of the barriers began. I stood watching the people come in. They came and came, walking in their black clothing with their heads down and talking or praying in low voices.
I stood where I was, a little back from the entrance, half-numbed and dull-minded with the chill about me and the exhaustion I had brought with me from Earth. The voices droned about me. I almost dozed, standing there. I could not remember why I had come.
Then a girl’s voice emerged from the jumble, bringing me back to full consciousness again.
“… he did deny it, but I am sure he is one of those mercenaries who was with Jamethon on New Earth. He limps and can only be a soldier who hath been wounded.”
It was the voice of Jamethon’s sister, speaking with more of the Friendly cant on her tongue than she had used speaking to me, a stranger. I woke fully and saw her standing by the entrance only a few feet from me, half-facing two elder people whom I recognized as the older couple of Jamethon’s solidograph. A bolt of pure, freezing horror shot through me.
“No!” I nearly shouted at them. “I don’t know him. I never knew him. I don’t understand what you’re talking about!” And I turned and bolted out through the entrance of the church into the concealing rain.
I all but ran for about thirty or forty feet. Then I heard no footsteps behind me; I stopped.
I was alone in the open. The day was even darker now and the rain suddenly came down harder. It obscured everything around me with a drumming, shimmering curtain. I could not even see the ground-cars in the parking lot toward which I was facing; and for sure they could not see me from the church. I lifted my face up to the downpour and let it beat upon my cheeks and my closed eyelids.
“So,” said a voice from behind me. “You did not know him?”
The words seemed to cut me down the middle, and I felt as a cornered wolf must feel. Like a wolf, I turned.
“Yes, I knew him!” I said.
Facing me was Padma, in a blue robe the rain did not seem to dampen. His empty hands that had never held a weapon in their life were clasped together before him. But the wolf part of me knew that as far as I was concerned, he was armed and a hunter.
“You?” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“It was calculated you would be here,” said Padma softly: “So I am here, too. But why are you here, Tarn? Among those people in there, there’s sure to be at least a few fanatics who’ve heard the camp rumors of your responsibility in the matter of Jamethon’s death and the Friendlies’ surrender.”
“Rumors!” I said. “Who started them?”
“You did,” Padma said. “By your actions on Ste. Marie.” He gazed at me. “Didn’t you know you were risking your life, coming here today?”
I opened my mouth to deny it. Then I realized I had known.
“What if someone should call out to them,” said Padma, “that Tarn Olyn, the Ste. Marie campaign Newsman, is here incognito?”
I looked at him with my wolf-feeling, grimly.
“Can you square it with your Exotic principles if you do?”
“We are misunderstood,” answered Padma calmly. “We hire soldiers to fight for us not because of some moral commandment, but because our emotional perspective is lost if we become involved.”
There was no fear left in me, only a hard, empty feeling.
“Call them then,” I said.
Padma’s strange hazel eyes watched me through the rain.
“If that was all that was needed,” he said, “I could have sent word to them. I wouldn’t have needed to come myself.”
“Why did you come here?” My voice tore at my throat. “What do you on the Exotics care about me?”
“We care for every individual,” said Padma. “But we care more for the race. And you’re still dangerous to it. You’re an unadmitted idealist, Tarn, warped to destructive purpose. There is a law of conservation of energy in the pattern of cause and effect just as there is in other sciences. Your destructiveness was frustrated on Ste. Marie. Now what if it should turn inward to destroy you, or outward against the whole race of man?”
I laughed, and heard the harshness of my laughter.
“What’re you going to do about it?” I said.
“Show you how the knife you hold cuts the hand that holds it as well as what you turn it against. IVe got news for you, Tarn. Kensie Graeme is dead.”
“Dead?” The rain seemed to roar around me suddenly and the parking lot shifted unsubstantially under my feet.
“He was assassinated by three men of the Blue Front in Blauvain five days ago.”
“Assassinated,” I whispered. “Why?”
“Because the war was over,” said Padma. “Because Jamethon’s death and the surrender of the Friendly troops without the preliminary of a war that would tear up the countryside left the civilian population favorably disposed toward our troops. Because the Blue Front found themselves farther from power than ever, as a result of this favorable feeling. They hoped by killing Graeme to provoke his troops into retaliation against the civilian population, so that the Ste. Marie government would have to order them home to our Exotics, and stand unprotected to face a Blue Front revolt.”
I stared at him.
“AH things are interrelated,” said Padma. “Kensie was slated for a final promotion to a desk command back on Mara or Kultis. He and his brother lan would have been out of the wars for the rest of their professional lives. Because of Jamethon’s death, which allowed the surrender of his troops without fighting, a situation was set up which led the Blue Front to assassinate Kensie. If you and Jamethon had not come into conflict on Ste. Marie, and Jamethon had not won, Kensie would be alive today. So our calculations show.”