“If you’re busy, I can drop back in a little while,” I said.
“No, no.” He swung his chair around, away from the desk. “Sit down. I’m just doing up a report for whoever comes out from the Exotics to replace me.”
“You won’t need to be replaced if you’ll leave now,” I said. It was a blunt beginning, but he had given me the opening and time was not plentiful.
“I see,” he said. “Did Ian or Kensie ask you to talk to me, or is this the result of an impulse of your own?”
“Ian asked me,” I said. “The Naharese are delaying their attack, and he thinks that they’re so generally disorganized and unmilitary that there’s a chance for you to get safely away to Nahar City. They’ll undoubtedly stop whatever vehicle you’d take, when they see it coming out of Gebel Nahar. But once they see you’re an Exotic—“
His smile interrupted me.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me. Why shouldn’t they let you pass when they see you’re an Exotic? All the worlds know Exotics are noncombatants.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Unfortunately, William has made a practice of identifying us as the machiavellian practitioners at the roots of whatever trouble and evil there is to be found anywhere. At the moment most of the Naharese have an image of me that’s half-demon, half-enemy. In their present mood of license, most of them would probably welcome the chance to shoot me on sight.”
I stared at him. He was smiling.
“If that’s the case, why didn’t you leave days ago?” I asked him.
“I have my duty, too. In this instance, it’s to gather information for those on Mara and Kultis.” His smile broadened. “Also, there’s the matter of my own temperament. Watching a situation like the one here is fascinating. I wouldn’t leave now if I could. In short, I’m as chained here as the rest of you, even if it is for different reasons.”
I shook my head at him.
“It’s a fine argument,” I said. “But if you’ll forgive me, it’s a little hard to believe.”
“In what way?”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I don’t seem to be able to give any real faith to the idea that you’re being held here by patterns that are essentially the same as mine, for instance.”
“Not the same,” he said. “Equivalent. The fact others can’t match you Dorsai in your own particular area doesn’t mean those others don’t have equal areas in which equal commitments apply to them. The physics of life works in all of us. It simply manifests itself differently with different people.”
“With identical results?”
“With comparable results—could I ask you to sit down?” Padma said mildly. “I’m getting a stiff neck looking up at you.”
I sat down facing him.
“For example,” he said. “In the Dorsai ethic, you and the others here have something that directly justifies your natural human hunger to do things for great purposes. The Naharese here have no equivalent ethic; but they feel the hunger just the same. So they invent their own customs, their leto de muerte concepts. But can you Dorsais, of all people, deny that their concepts can lead them to as true a heroism, or as true a keeping of faith as your ethic leads you to?”
“Of course I can’t deny,” I said. “But my people can at least be counted on to perform as expected. Can the Naharese?”
“No. But note the dangers of the fact that Dorsais are known to be trustworthy, Exotics known to be per-
sonally nonviolent, the church soldiers of the Friendly Worlds known to be faith-holders. That very knowledge tends too often to lead one to take for granted that trustworthiness is the exclusive property of the Dorsai, that there are no truly non-violent individuals not wearing Exotic robes, and that the faith of anyone not a Friendly must be weak and unremarkable. We are all human and struck with the whole spectrum of the human nature. For clear thinking, it’s necessary to first assume that the great hungers and responses are there in everyone—then simply go look for them in all people—including the Naharese.”
“You sound a little like Michael when you get on the subject of the Naharese.” I got up. “All right, have it your way and stay if you want. I’m going to leave now, myself, before you talk me into going out and offering to surrender before they even get here.”
He laughed. I left.
It was time again for me to check Amanda. I went to the medical section. But she was honestly asleep now. Apparently she had been able to put her personal concerns aside enough so that she could exercise a little of the basic physiological control we are all taught from birth. If she had, it could be that she would spend most of the next twenty-four hours sleeping, which would be the best thing for her. If the Naharese did not manage, before that time was up, to break through to the inner fort where the medical section was, she would have taken a large stride toward healing herself. If they did break through she would need whatever strength she could gain between now and then.
It was a shock to see the sun as high in the sky as it was, when I emerged from the blind walls of the cor-
ridors once more, on to the first terrace. The sky was almost perfectly clear and there was a small, steady breeze. The day would be hot. Ian and Kensie were each standing at one end of the terrace and looking through watch cameras at the Naharese front.
Michael, the only other person in sight, was also at a watch camera, directly in front of the door I had come out. I went to him and he looked up as I reached him.
“They’re on the move,” he said, stepping back from the watch camera. I looked into its rectangular viewing screen, bright with the daylight scene it showed under the shadow of the battle armor hooding the camera. He was right. The regiments had finally formed for the attack and were now moving toward us with their portable field weapons, at the pace of a slow walk across the intervening plain.
I could see their regimental and company flags spaced out along the front of the crescent formation and whipping in the morning breeze. The Guard Regiment was still in the center and Michael’s Third Regiment out on the right wing. Behind the two wings I could see the darker swarms that were the volunteers and the revolutionaries, in their civilian clothing.
The attacking force had already covered a third of the distance to us. I stepped away from the screen of the camera, and all at once the front of men I looked at became a thin line with little bright flashes of reflected sunlight and touches of color all along it, still distant under the near-cloudless sky and the climbing sun.
“Another thirty or forty minutes before they reach us,” said Michael.
I looked at him. The clear daylight showed him as pale and wire-tense. He looked as if he had been whittled down until nothing but nerves were left. He was not wearing weapons, although at either end of the terrace, Ian and Kensie both had sidearms clipped to their legs, and behind us there were racks of cone rifles ready for use.
The rifles woke me to something I had subconsciously noted but not focused upon. The bays with the fixed weapons were empty of human figures.
“Where’re your bandsmen?” I asked Michael.
He gazed at me.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“Gone?”
“Decamped. Run off. Deserted, if you want to use that word.”
I stared at him.
“You mean they’ve joined—“
“No, no.” He broke in on me as if the question I was just about to ask was physically painful to him. “They haven’t gone over to the enemy. They just decided to save their own skins. I told you—you remember, I told you they might. You can’t blame them. They’re not Dorsai; and staying here meant certain death for them.”
“If Gebel Nahar is overrun,” I said.
“Can you believe it won’t be?”
“It’s become hard to,” I said, “now that there’s just us. But there’s always a chance as long as anyone’s left to fight. At Baunpore, I saw men and women firing from hospital beds, when the North Freilanders broke in.”
I should not have said it. I saw the shadow cross his
eyes and knew he had taken my reference to Baunpore personally, as if I had been comparing his present weaponless state with the last efforts of the defenders I had seen then. There were times when my scars became more curse than blessing.
“That’s a general observation, only,” I told him. “I don’t mean to accuse—“
“It’s not what you accuse me of, it’s what I accuse