“As long as the cantons remain independent of the Council,” said Eachan, “and the families remain independent of the cantons, there’ll be no success for mem, lan.” He nodded at all about the table. “That’s my end of the job here at home. You can-go out to the wars with easy consciences. I promise you your children will grow up free in this house—free of any man’s will—or the house will no longer stand.”
“I trust you,” said lan. His eyes were gleaming pale as the scar in the dimness and he was very close to that Dorsai violence of emotion that was at once so cold and so deadly. “I have two boys now under mis roof. But remember no men are perfect—even the Dorsai. There was Mahub Van Ghent only five years back, who dreamed about a little kingdom among the Dorsai in the Midland South—only five years ago, Eachan!”
“He was on the other side of the world,” said Eachan. “And he’s dead now, at the hand of one of the Benali, his closest neighbor. His home is burnt and no man acknowledges himself a Van Ghent any more. What more do you want?”
“He should have been stopped sooner.”
“Each man has a right to his own destiny,” said
Eacban, softly. “Until he crosses the line into another man’s. His family has suffered enough.”
“Yes,” said lan. He was calming down. He poured himself another drink. “That’s true—that’s true. They’re not to blame,”
“About the Exotics—” said Mor, gently.
“Oh, yes,” answered Kensie, as if the twin brother that was so much a part of himself had never gotten excited at all. “Mara and Kultis—interesting worlds. Don’t mistake them if you ever go there, Mor—or you either, Donal. They’re sharp enough, for all their art and robes and trappings. They won’t fight themselves, but they know how to hire good men. There’s things being done on Mara and Kultis—and not only in the arts. Meet one of their psychologists, one time.”
“They’re honest,” said Eachan.
“That, too,” said Kensie. “But what catches at me is the fact they’re going some place, in their own way. If I had to pick one of the other worlds to be born on—”
“I would always be a soldier,” said Mor.
“You think so now,” said Kensie, and drank. “You think so now. But it’s a wild civilization we have nowadays, with its personality split a dozen different ways by a dozen different cultures. Less than five hundred years ago the average man never dreamed of getting his feet off the ground. And the farther we go the faster. And the faster the farther.”
“It’s the Venus group forcing that, isn’t it?” asked
Donal, his youthful reticence all burnt away in the hot fumes of the whiskey.
“Don’t you think it,” said Kensie. “Science is only one road to the future. Old Venus, Old Mars— Cassida, Newton—maybe they’ve had their day. Project Blaine’s a rich and powerful old man, but he doesn’t know all the new tricks they’re dreaming up on Mara and Kultis, or the Friendlies—or Ceta, for that matter. Make it a point to take two good looks at things when you get out among the stars, you two young ones, because nine times out of ten that first glance will leave you fooled.”
“Listen to him, boys,” said Eachan from the top of the table. “Your uncle Kensie’s a man and a half above the shoulders. I just wish I had as good advice to give you. Tell them, Kensie.”
“Nothing stands still,” said Kensie—and with those three words, the whiskey seemed to go to Donal’s head in a rush, the table and the dark harsh-boned faces before him seemed to swim in the dimness of the dining room, and Kensie’s voice came roaring at him as if from a great distance. “Everything changes, and that’s what you must bear in mind. What was true yesterday about something may not be true today. So remember that and take no man’s word about something without reservation, even mine. We have multiplied like the biblical locusts and spread out among the stars, splitting into different groups with different ways. Now, while we still seem to be rushing forward to where I have no idea, at a terrific rate, increasing all the time, I have this feeling—as if we are all poised, hanging on the brink of something, something great and different and maybe terrible. It’s a time to walk cautious, it is indeed.”
“I’ll be the greatest general that ever was!” cried Donal, and was startled as the rest to hear the words leap, stumbling and thick-tongued, but loud, from within him. “They’ll see—I’ll show them what a Dorsai can be!”
He was aware of them looking at him, though all their faces were blurred, except—by some trick of vision—that of Kensie, diagonally across the table from him. Kensie was considering him with somber, reading eyes. Donal was conscious of his father’s hand on his shoulder.
“Time to turn in,” said his father.
“You’ll see—” said Donal, thickly. But they were all rising, picking up their glasses and turning to his father, who held his own glass up.
“May we all meet again,” said his father. And they drank, standing. The remains of the whiskey in his glass flowed tasteless as water down Donal’s tongue and throat—and for a second everything cleared and be saw these tall men standing around him. Big, even for Dorsai, they were; even his brother Mor topping him by half a head, so that he stood like a half-grown boy among them. But at that same instant of vision he was suddenly wrung with a terrible tenderness and pity for them, as if he was the grown one, and they the children to be protected. He opened his mouth to say, for once in his life, how much he loved them, and how always he would be there to take care of them—and then the fog closed down again; and he was only aware of Mor leading him stumblingly to his room.
Later, he opened his eyes in the darkness to become aware of a dim figure drawing the curtains of his room against the bright new light of the double moon, just risen. It was his mother; and with a sudden, reflexive action he rolled off his bed and lurched to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Mother—” he said.
She looked up at him with a pale face softened by the moonlight.
“Donal,” she said tenderly, putting her arms around him. “You’ll catch cold, Donal.”
“Mother—” he said, thickly. “If you ever need me … to take care of you—”
“Oh, my boy,” she said, holding his hard young body tightly to her, “take care of yourself; my boy … my boy—”
MERCENARY
Donal shrugged his shoulders in the tight civilian half-jacket and considered its fit as reflected in the mirror of his tiny, boxlike cabin. The mirror gave him back the image of someone almost a stranger. So much difference had three short weeks brought about in him, already. Not that he was so different, but his own appraisal of himself had changed; so that it was not merely the Spanish-style jacket, the skintight under-tunic, and the narrow trousers that disappeared into boots as black as all the rest of the costume, that made him unfamiliar to himself—but the body within. Association with the men of other worlds had done this to his point of view. Their relative shortness had made him tall, their softness had made him hard, their untrained bodies had made his balanced and sure. Outbound from the Dorsai to Alpha
Centauri and surrounded by other Dorsai passengers, he had not noticed the gradual change. Only in the vast terminal on Newton, surrounded by their noisy thousands, had it come on him, all at once. And now, transhipped and outbound for the Friendlies, facing his first dinner on board a luxury-class liner where there would probably be no others from his world, he gazed at himself in the mirror and felt himself as suddenly come of age.
He went out through the door of his cabin, letting it latch quietly behind him, and turned right in the tightly narrow, metal-walled corridor faintly stale with the smell of dust from the carpet underfoot. He walked down its silence toward the main lounge and pushed through a heavy sealing door that sucked shut behind him, into the corridor of the next section.
He stepped into the intersection of the little cross corridor that led right and left to the washrooms of the section ahead—and almost strode directly into a slim, tall girl in an ankle-length, blue dress of severe and conservative cut, who stood by the water fountain at the point of the intersection. She moved hastily back out of his way with a little intake of breath, backing into the corridor to the women’s washroom. They stared at each other, halted, for a second.