“Because they don’t believe you,” I said.
“That’s it.” His face was almost savage. “They don’t. Why won’t they believe me?”
“Because you only say you won’t use a weapon,” I told him bluntly. “In every other language you speak, everything you say or do, you broadcast just the opposite information. That tells them that not only can you use a weapon, but that you’re so good at it none of them who’d challenge you would stand a chance. You could not only defeat someone like that, you could make him look foolish in the process. And no one wants to look foolish, particularly a macho-minded individual. That message is in the very way you walk and talk. How else could it be, with you?”
“That’s not true!” he got suddenly to his feet, holding the gaita. “I live what I believe in. I have, ever since—“
He stopped.
“Maybe we’d better get back to work,” I said, as gently as I could.
“No!” The word burst out of him. “I want to tell someone. The odds are we’re not going to be around after this. I want someone to. . .”
He broke off. He had been about to say “someone to understand. . .” and he had not been able to get the words out. But I could not help him. As I’ve said, since Else’s death, I’ve grown accustomed to listening to people. But there is something in me that tells me when to speak and when not to help them with what they wish to say. And now I was being held silent.
He struggled with himself for a few seconds, and then calm seemed to flow over him.
“No,” he said, as if talking to himself, “what people think doesn’t matter. We’re not likely to live through this, and I want to know how you react.”
He looked at me.
“That’s why I’ve got to explain it to someone like you,” he said. “I’ve got to know how they’d take it, back home, if I’d explained it to them. And your family is the same as mine, from the same canton, the same neighborhood, the same sort of ancestry. . .”
“Did it occur to you you might not owe anyone an explanation?” I said. “When your parents raised you, they only paid back the debt they owed their parents for raising them. If you’ve got any obligation to anyone —and even that’s a moot point, since the idea behind our world is that it’s a planet of free people—it’s to the Dorsai in general, to bring in interstellar exchange credits by finding work off-planet. And you’ve done that by becoming bandmaster here. Anything beyond that’s your own private business.”
It was quite true. The vital currency between worlds was not wealth, as every schoolchild knows, but the
exchange of interplanetary work credits. The inhabited worlds trade special skills and knowledges, packaged in human individuals; and the exchange credits earned by a Dorsai on Newton enables the Dorsai to hire a geophysicist from Newton—or a physician from Kultis. In addition to his personal pay, Michael had been earning exchange credits ever since he had come here. True, he might have earned these at a higher rate if he had chosen work as a mercenary combat officer; but the exchange credits he did earn as bandmaster more than justified the expense of his education and training.
“I’m not talking about that—“ he began.
“No,” I said, “you’re talking about a point of obligation and honor not very much removed from the sort of thing these Naharese have tied themselves up with.”
He stood for a second, absorbing that. But his mouth was tight and his jaw set.
“What you’re telling me,” he said at last, “is that you don’t want to listen. I’m not surprised.”
“Now,” I said, “you really are talking like a Naharese I’ll listen to anything you want to say, of course “
“Then sit down,” he said.
He gestured to the rampart and sat down himself. I came and perched there, opposite him.
“Do you know I’m a happy man?” he demanded. “I really am. Why not? I’ve got everything I want. I’ve got a military job, I’m in touch with all the things that I grew up feeling made the kind of life one of my family ought to have. I’m one of a kind I’m better at what I do and everything connected with it than anyone else
they can find—and I’ve got my other love, which was music, as my main duty. My men like me, my regiment is proud of me. My superiors like me.”
I nodded.
“But then there’s this other part. . .” His hands closed on the bag of the gaita, and there was a faint sound from the drone.
“Your refusal to fight?”
“Yes.” He got up from the ramparts and began to pace back and forth, holding the instrument, talking a little jerkily. “This feeling against hurting anything … I had it, too, just as long as I had the other—all the dreams I made up as a boy from the stories the older people in the family told me. When I was young it didn’t seem to matter to me that the feeling and the dreams hit head on. It just always happened that, in my own personal visions the battles I won were always bloodless, the victories always came with no one getting hurt. I didn’t worry about any conflict in me, then. I thought it was something that would take care of itself later, as I grew up. You don’t kill anyone when you’re going through the Academy, of course. You know as well as I do that the better you are, the less of a danger you are to your fellow-students. But what was in me didn’t change. It was there with me all the time, not changing.”
“No normal person likes the actual fighting and killing,” I said. “What sets us Dorsai off in a class by ourselves is the fact that most of the time we can win bloodlessly, where someone else would have dead bodies piled all over the place. Our way justifies itself to our employers by saving them money; but it also gets us away from the essential brutality of combat and
keeps us human. No good officer pins medals on himself in proportion to the people he kills and wounds. Remember what Cletus says about that? He hated what you hate, just as much.”
“But he could do it when he had to,” Michael stopped and looked at me with a face, the skin of which was drawn tight over the bones. “So can you, now. Or Ian. Or Kensie.”
That was true, of course. I could not deny it.
“You see,” said Michael, “that’s the difference between out on the worlds and back at the Academy. In life, sooner or later, you get to the killing part. Sooner or later, if you live by the sword, you kill with the sword. When I graduated and had to face going out to the worlds as a fighting officer, I finally had to make that decision. And so I did. I can’t hurt anyone. I won’t hurt anyone—even to save my own life, I think. But at the same time I’m a soldier and nothing else. I’m bred and born a soldier. I don’t want any other life, I can’t conceive of any other life; and I love it.”
He broke off, abruptly. For a long moment he stood, staring out over the plains at the distant flashes of light from the camp of the deserted regiments.
“Well, there it is,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He turned to look at me.
“Will you tell my family that?” he asked. “If you should get home and I don’t?”
“If it comes to that, I will,” I said. “But we’re a long way from being dead, yet.”
He grinned, unexpectedly, a sad grin.
“I know,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve had this on my conscience for a long time. You don’t mind?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks,” he said.
He hefted the gaita in his hands as if he had just suddenly remembered that he held it.
“My men will be back out here in about fifteen minutes,” he said “I can carry on with the drilling myself, if you’ve got other things you want to do.”
I looked at him a little narrowly.
“What you’re trying to tell me,” I said, “is that they’ll learn faster if I’m not around.”
“Something like that.” He laughed. “They’re used to me; but you make them self-conscious. They tighten up and keep making the same mistakes over and over again; and then they get into a fury with themselves and do even worse. I don’t know if Ian would approve, but I do know these people; and I think I can bring them along faster alone. . .”