“Jamethon and I?” The breath went dry in my throat without warning, and the rain came down harder.
“Yes,” said Padma. “You were the factor that helped Jamethon to his solution.”
“I helped him?” I said. “/ did?”
“He saw through you,” said Padma. “He saw through the revenge-bitter, destructive surface you thought was yourself, to the creative core that was so deep in the bone of you that even your uncle hadn’t been able to eradicate it.”
The rain thundered between us. But Padma’s every word came clearly through it to me.
“I don’t believe you!” I shouted. “I don’t believe he did anything like that!”
“I told you,” said Padma, “you didn’t fully appreciate the evolutionary advances of our Splinter Cultures. Jamethon’s faith was not the kind that can be shaken by outer things. If you had been in feet like your uncle Mathias, he would not even have listened to you. He would have dismissed you as a soulless man. As it was, he thought of you instead as a man possessed, a man speaking with what he would have called Satan’s voice.”
“I don’t believe it!” I yelled.
“You do believe it,” said Padma. “You’ve got no choice except to believe it. Only because of it could Jamethon find his solution.”
“Solution!”
“He was a man ready to die for his faith. But as a commander he found it hard his men should go out to die for no other reasonable cause.” Padma watched me, and the rain thinned for a moment. “But you offered him what he recognized as the Devil’s choice-his life in this world, if he would surrender his faith and his men, to avoid the conflict that would end in his death and theirs.”
“What crazy thinking was that?” I said. Inside the church, the praying had stopped, and a single strong, deep voice was beginning the burial service.
“Not crazy,” said Padma. “The moment he realized this, his answer became simple. All he had to do was begin by denying whatever Satan offered. He must start with the absolute necessity of his own death.”
“And that was a solution?” I tried to laugh but my throat hurt.
“It was the only solution,” said Padma. “Once he decided that, he saw immediately that the one situation in which his men would permit themselves to surrender was if he was dead and they were in an untenable battlefield position, for reasons only he had known.”
I felt the words go through me with a soundless shock.
“But he didn’t mean to die!” I said.
“He left it to his God,” said Padma. “He arranged it so only a miracle could save him.”
“What’re you talking about?” I stared at him. “He set up a truce table with a flag of truce. He took four men-”
“There was no flag. The men were overage martyrdom-seekers.”
“He took four!” I shouted. “Four and one made five. The five of them against Kensie-one man. I stood there by that table and saw. Five against-”
“Tarn.”
The single word stopped me. Suddenly I began to be afraid. I did not want to hear what he was about to say. I was afraid I knew what he was going to tell me, that I had known it for some time. And I did not want to hear it, I did not want to hear him say it. The rain grew even stronger, driving upon us both and mercilessly on the concrete, but I heard every word relentlessly through all its sound and noise.
Padma’s voice began to roar in my ears like the rain, and a feeling came over me like the helpless floating sensation that comes in high fever. “Did you think that Jamethon for a minute fooled himself as you deluded yourself? He was a product of a Splinter Culture. He recognized another in Kensie. Did you think that for a minute he thought that, barring a miracle, he and four overage fanatics could kill an armed, alert and ready man of the Dorsai-a man like Kensie Graeme-before they were gunned down and killed themselves?”
Themselves… themselves… themselves…
I rode off a long way on that word from the dark day and the rain. Like the rain and the wind behind the clouds it lifted me and carried me away at last to that high, hard and stony land I had glimpsed when I had asked Kensie Graeme that question about his ever allowing Friendly prisoners to be killed. It was this land I had always avoided, but to it I was come at last.
And I remembered.
From the beginning, I had known inside myself that the fanatic who had killed Dave and the others was not the image of all Friendlies. Jamethon was no casual killer. I had tried to make him into one to shore up my own lie-to keep my eyes averted from the sight of that one man on the sixteen worlds I could not face. And that one man was not the Group-man who had massacred Dave and the others, not even Mathias.
It was myself.
Jamethon was no ordinary fanatic, no more than Kensie was an ordinary soldier, or Padma an ordinary philosopher. They were more than that, as secretly I had known all along, down inside myself where I need not face the knowledge. That was why they had not moved as. I planned when I had tried to manipulate them. That was why, that was why.
The high, hard and stony land I had visioned was not only there for the Dorsai. It was there for all of them, a land where the tatters of falseness and illusion were stripped away by the clean cold wind of honest strength and conviction, where pretense drooped and died and all mat could live was plain and pure.
It was there for them, for all those who embodied the pure metal of their Splinter Culture. And it was from that pure metal that their real strength came. They were beyond doubt-that was it; and above all skills of mind and body, this was what kept them undefeatable. For a man like Kensie would never be conquered. And Jamethon would never break his faith.
Had Jamethon not told me plainly so himself? Had he not said, “Let me testify for myself alone,” and gone on to tell me that, even if his universe should crumble about him, even if all his God and his religion were proved false, what was in himself would not be touched.
No more, if armies about him retreated, leaving him alone, would Kensie abandon a duty or a post. Alone, he would remain to fight, though other armies came against him; for though they could kill him, they could not conquer him.
Nor, should all Padma’s Exotic calculations and theories be overturned in an instant-proved untrue and groundless-would it move him from his belief in the upward-seeking evolution of the human spirit, in which service he labored.
They walked by right in that high and stony land- all of them. Dorsai, and Friendly, and Exotic. And I had been fool enough to enter it, to try to fight one of them there. No wonder I had been defeated, as Mathias always had said I would be. I had never had
L. c * a hope of winning.
So J came back to the day and the downpour, like a broken straw of a man with my knees sagging under my own weight. The rain was slackening and Padma was holding me upright. As with Jamethon, I was dully amazed at the strength of his hands.
“Let me go,” I mumbled.
“Where would you go, Tarn?” he said.
“Any place,” I muttered. “I’ll get out of it. I’ll go hole up somewhere and get out of it. I’ll give up.” I got my knees straightened finally under me.
“It’s not that easy,” said Padma, lettingmego. “An action taken goes on reverberating forever. Cause never ceases its effects. You can’t let go now, Tarn. You can only change sides.”
“Sides?” I said. The rain was dwindling fast about us. “What sides?” I stared at him drunkenly.
“The side of the force in man against his own evolution-which was your uncle’s side,” said Padma. “And the evolutionary side, which is ours.” The rain was felling only lightly now and the day was brightening. A little pale sunlight filtered through the thinning clouds to illuminate more strongly the parking space around us. “Both are strong winds bending the fabric of human affairs even while that fabric is being woven. I told you long ago, Tarn, that for someone like you mere’s no choice but to be effective upon the pattern one way or another. You have choice-not freedom. So, merely decide to turn your effect to the wind of evolution instead of to the force frustrating it.” I shook my head.
“No,” I muttered. “It’s no use. You know that. You saw. I moved heaven and earth and the politics of sixteen worlds against Jamethon-and he still won. I can’t do anything. Just leave me alone.”