“It seems to me,” I said, “the easiest thing to change would be the position of the Conde. If he’d just agree to come to terms with the regiments, the whole thing would collapse.”
“Obvious solutions are usually not the easiest,” Padma said. “Stop and think. Why do you suppose the Conde would never change his mind?”
“He’s a Naharese,” I said. “More than that, he’s honestly an hispanic. El honor forbids that he yield an inch to soldiers who were supposedly loyal to him and now are threatening to destroy him and everything he stands for.”
“But tell me,” said Padma, watching me. “Even if el honor was satisfied, would he want to treat with the rebels?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. It was something I had recognized before this, but only with the back of my head. As I spoke to Padma now, it was like something emerging from the shadows to stand in the full light of day. “This is the great moment of his life. This is the chance for him to substantiate that paper title of his, to make it real. This way he can prove to himself he is a real aristocrat. He’d give his life—in fact, he can hardly wait to give his life—to win that.”
There was a little silence.
“So you see,” said Padma. “Go on, then. What other ways do you see a solution being found?”
“Ian and Kensie could void the contract and make the penalty payment. But they won’t. Aside from the fact that no responsible officer from our world would risk giving the Dorsai the sort of bad name that could give, under these special circumstances, neither of those two brothers would abandon the Conde as long as he insisted on fighting. It’s as impossible for a Dorsai to do that as it is for the Conde to play games with el honor. Like him, their whole life has been oriented against any such thing.”
“What other ways?”
“I can’t think of any,” I said. “I’m out of sugges-
tions—which is probably why I was never considered for anything like Amanda’s job, in the first place.”
“As a matter of fact, there are a number of other possible solutions,” Padma said. His voice was soft, almost pedantic. “There’s the possibility of bringing counter economic pressure upon William—but there’s no time for that. There’s also the possibility of bringing social and economic pressure upon the ranchers; and there’s the possibility of disrupting the control of the revolutionaries who’ve come in from outside Nahar to run this rebellion. In each case, none of these solutions are of the kind that can very easily be made to work in the short time we’ve got.”
“In fact, there isn’t any such thing as a solution that ran be made to work in time, isn’t that right?” I said, bluntly.
He shook his head.
“No. Absolutely wrong. If we could stop the clock at this second and take the equivalent of some months to study the situation, we’d undoubtedly find not only one, but several solutions that would abort the attack of the regiments in the time we’ve got to work with. What you lack isn’t time in which to act, since that’s merely something specified for the solution. What you lack is time in which to discover the solution that will work in the time there is to act.”
“So you mean,” I said, “that we’re to sit here tomorrow with Michael’s forty or so bandsmen—and face the attack of something like six thousand line troops, even though they’re only Naharese line troops, all the time knowing that there is absolutely a way in which that attack doesn’t have to happen, if only we had the sense to find it?”
“The sense—and the time,” said Padma. “But yes, you’re right. It’s a harsh reality of life, but the sort of reality that history has turned on, since history began.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, I find I don’t accept it that easily.”
“No.” Padma’s gaze was level and cooling upon me. “Neither does Amanda. Neither does Ian or Kensie. Nor, I suspect, even Michael. But then, you’re all Dorsai.”
I said nothing. It is a little embarrassing when someone plays your own top card against you.
“In any case,” Padma went on, “none of you are being called on to merely accept it. Amanda’s still at work. So is Ian, so are all the rest of you. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to sneer at the reflexes of your culture. I envy you—a great many people envy you—that inability to give in. My point is that the fact that we know there’s an answer makes no difference. You’d all be doing the same thing anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“True enough,” I said—and at that moment we were interrupted.
“Padma?” It was the general office annunciator speaking from the walls around us with Amanda’s voice. “Could you give me some help, please?”
Padma got to his feet.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
He went out. I sat where I was, held by that odd little melancholy that had caught me up—and I think does the same with most Dorsai away from home—at moments all through my life. It is not a serious thing, just a touch of loneliness and sadness and the facing of the fact that life is measured; and there are only so
many things that can be accomplished in it, try how you may.
I was still in this mood when Ian’s return to the office suite by the corridor door woke me out of it.
I got up.
“Corunna!” he said, and led the way into his private office. “How’s the training going?”
“As you’d expect,” I said. “I left Michael alone with them, at his suggestion. He thinks they might learn faster without my presence to distract them.”
“Possible,” said Ian.
He stepped to the window wall and looked out. My height was not enough to let me look over the edge of the parapet on this terrace and see down to the first where the bandsmen were drilling; but I guessed that his was.
“They don’t seem to be doing badly,” he said.
He was still on his feet, of course, and I was standing next to his desk. I looked at it now, and found the cube holding the image Amanda had talked about. The woman pictured there was obviously not Dorsai, but there was something not unlike our people about her. She was strong-boned and dark-haired, the hair sweeping down to her shoulders, longer than most Dorsais out in the field would have worn it, but not long according to the styles of Earth.
I looked back at Ian. He had turned away from the window and his contemplation of the drill going on two levels below. But he had stopped, part way in his backturn, and his face was turned toward the wall beyond which Amanda would be working with Padma at this moment. I saw him in three-quarter’s face, with the light from the window wall striking that quarter of
his features that was averted from me; and I noticed a tiredness about him. Not that it showed anywhere specifically in the lines of his face. He was, as always, like a mountain of granite, untouchable. But something about the way he stood spoke of a fatigue—perhaps a fatigue of the spirit rather than of the body.
“I just heard about Leah, here,” I said, nodding at the image cube, speaking to bring him back to the moment.
He turned as if his thoughts had been a long way away.
“Leah? Oh, yes.” His own eyes went absently to the cube and away again. “Yes, she’s Earth. I’ll be going to get her after this is over. We’ll be married in two months.”
“That soon?” I said. “I hadn’t even heard you’d fallen in love.”
“Love?” he said. His eyes were still on me, but their attention had gone away again. He spoke more as if to himself than to me. “No, it was years ago I fell in love. . .”
His attention focused, suddenly. He was back with me.
“Sit down,” he said, dropping into the chair behind his desk. I sat. “Have you talked to Kensie since breakfast?”
“Just a little while ago, when I was asking around to find you,” I said.
“He’s got a couple of runs outside the walls he’d like your hand with, tonight after dark’s well settled in.”
“I know,” I said. “He told me about them. A sweep of the slope in front of this place to clear it before laying mines there, and a scout of the regimental camp
for whatever we can learn about them before tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” Ian said.
“Do you have any solid figures on how many there are out there?”
“Regimental rolls,” said Ian, “give us a total of a little over five thousand of all ranks. Fifty-two hundred and some. But something like this invariably attracts a number of Naharese who scent personal glory, or at least the chance for personal glory. Then there’re perhaps seven or eight hundred honest revolutionaries in Nahar, Padma estimates, individuals who’ve been working to loosen the grip of the rancher oligarchy for