On the Razor’s Edge

IV. The Synthesis

And third, there was the scarred man …

The scarred man had wearied of waking in strange ships, although he did not see how until now he had had much say in the matter. This time, he lay immobile on his back while an autoclinic caressed him, fed him, evacuated him, and numbed him where the pain grew too great. Soothing medications dripped into him; burned skin sloughed snakelike from his arms; cells were cultured, regressed, grafted. New skin grew. Bones knit. He wondered at one point how much of the original him might be left.

Perhaps he would get a better body out of this. One with skin not so parchment tight across his bones, with eyes less sunken, with the scalp free of the crisscross scars that parted the tufts of snow-white hair. Perhaps he would be restored to the vigor of his youth.

But probably not. He was not sure he had had a youth, or that it had been filled with vigor. The scars that parted his hair had parted his mind, as well. Years ago, the Names had divided it into sundry and diverse shards, each an expert in some facet of the espionage art. The intent had been a team; the consequence, a committee; the price, a loss of memories.

So while his body thus healed itself of its wounds, his minds were free to consider how he had come by them.

At first it was difficult. The mind recoils from injury, and Donovan’s mind had recoiled in multiple directions and it took awhile for them to find one another. It was not exactly amnesia; it was more like fugue. But parts of him remembered different things: sights or sounds; strategies and tactics; thoughts and words. From these fragments he sought to assemble the thing entire.

How long recollection took he could not say, nor how reliable the result. Pollyanna was prone to burnish his memories with the polish of best construal, and the Sleuth sometimes spanned the gaps with bridges of logical interpolation. Yet events were not always logical and their meanings seldom rosy.

We been in a fight, the Brute concluded. He could name the blows by the wounds they had left behind. The melted skin implied the penumbra of a dazer burst. The snapped rib entailed the shod foot that had cracked it. The holes in his leg intimated shrapnel; the slice, a sharpened edge.

But we’re alive, the Sleuth submitted. That means we won. “Although if this were victory,” the Fudir countered, “we would just as soon not taste defeat.” Besides, other events than victory might end with the scarred man bundled in an autoclinic. Rescue, for instance. Preparation for torture, for another.

Consciousness was a sometime thing. Sleep was a blessing.

In sleep, the Silky Voice took over, metering out soothing enzymes, working in concert with the autoclinic. Donovan worried, as was his nature, over in whose custody they lay and for what purpose; but as no one in the ship’s crew had made an appearance and as his present state precluded effective response in any case, there was little point to the bother save to upset the enzymatic balance. So the Silky Voice sedated him as well.

Only the Brute seemed unaffected. But that was because the Brute was immersed always in his senses, keenly aware of his surroundings at all times. He knew how his knee bent just so. He knew the curl of each finger, and the lay of his head. Kinesthesia was his, and proprioception. He knew the drape of each tube across his body, the warmth of the osmotic infusers and the limaceous slime of the gels in which they nestled. He felt the rush of the richly scented air that coursed through his nostrils and into his lungs.

Like a tiger, the Brute was a smooth stimulus-response machine, his reflexes unencumbered by reflection—yet, for all that, he was not severed entirely from his more cerebral compatriots in the small principality of Donovan’s brain.

It was a hell of a fight, the Brute told them one morning. But you shoulda seen the other guy.

He remembered the combat now. The old ruined warehouse. The loyalist Shadows led by Ekadrina Sèanmazy and the rebels led by Oschous Dee Karnatika, locked in the mad embrace of mutual and escalating ambuscade. The abrupt appearance of the late Domino Tight; the sudden and fearful manifestation of several Names; Ravn Olafsdottr and her wild and fatal play wearing Padaborn’s colors that had finally induced him to take up arms himself. And his own death struggle with Ekadrina.

«And then Gidula swooped in.» That was Inner Child, the wary and watchful one.

“Maybe,” said Donovan. “But if he rescued us from Sèanmazy, he rescued her from us.”

Gidula is a rebel, said the young man in the chlamys, but he is also a traditionalist. For everyone, the world is as it was when we came of age. Gidula soaked up djibry with his mother’s milk. He can no more act in a non-djibrous manner than he could wear motley to a pasdarm.

A few days later, two magpies in black shenmats with Gidula’s comet on their sleeve brassards entered the dispensary.

“How we feeling?” the junior magpie asked. He wore the skull-and-crossbones breast-badge that marked him as a medic. He glanced over the readouts on the autoclinic, waved a slug across the infoports, and spoke a few words into it. His was not an idle question. Readouts could tally only quantities. These neurons were firing; those areas of the brain lit under resonance; such were the blood pressure and heart rate—but none of it could capture the quality of pain. There was no gauge for suffering.

“We’ve felt better,” Donovan allowed.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two. How many fingers am I holding up?”

The medic smiled. “One. What is the square root of seventeen?”

“Four point one-two-three.”

The medic looked up and Donovan added, “Metric. Four point two-nine-two, in dodeka.”

“Name the Crossings.”

“Including the Tightrope? Point Pleasant, Krinthic Junction, Hanseatic Point, Sapphire Point…”

The smile vanished. “Those are the Peripheral names.”

“Well, we lived most our life over there—as myan zhan shebang, a sleeping agent—later as a discarded wreck of a man.” He cackled to show how wrecked he was.

“You were ill-used,” said the older magpie, speaking for the first time. The medic glanced at him but said nothing.

“I’ve prepared a schedule for your physical therapy,” the medic told Donovan. “Ready to get out of the box?”

Donovan agreed that they were ready and, with a little assistance from the two comets, was soon disconnected from the support systems and lowered to the floor, where he stood in momentary unsteadiness. The medic spoke another verbal note into his slug. Donovan glanced at the other three autoclinics in the room. Empty, but he had a phantom recollection that one of them had been occupied. He stretched, touched his toes, inspected those wounds visible from his perspective. He wondered if he should pretend to a lesser vigor than he felt. One of a man’s sharpest weapons was underestimation by his foes.

“What of the others?” he asked. “Ekadrina, Oschous, Big Jacques … Ravn?”

The medic glanced up from powering down the autoclinic. “Master will discuss that with you.”

Donovan turned to the older magpie. “You don’t talk much.”

“Don’t need to.”

“And you are…?”

“Your sparring partner. Physical therapy.”

“We had enough sparring with Ekadrina. We were hoping to relax.”

The older magpie nodded toward the autoclinic. “You have been.”

“I think we like you…” Donovan looked at the brassard. “Should we call you Five, or do you have a nicknumber?”

A smile very nearly cracked the man’s face. “I will have to you soon a schedule sent of our sessions.” And he bowed a fractional amount from the waist. From the man’s careful pronunciation the Fudir judged him not a native speaker of Confederal Manjrin, but he did not recognize the home-world from which the man’s consonants sprang.

“If you’ll follow me,” the medic said, “I’ll take you to Gidula. He was anxious for your recovery and wanted to see you as soon as you were ambulatory.”

Donovan could think of several reasons for that anxiety, not all of them a comfort. Gidula had snatched him away from Ekadrina, but he was not especially certain it had been a rescue.

Don’t worry, said the young woman in the chiton. Like the Brute always says, we’ve got him outnumbered.

“Pollyanna,” Donovan chided his optimism, “you’ve forgotten his magpies.”

We may have a handle there, said the young man, if I’ve read the body language aright.

The medic led Donovan down a carpeted hallway lined with paintings composed of intersecting geometric figures in various bright colors. Hand painted, the Pedant noted, and not drafted by machine. The subtle imperfections in the art—or should I say “craft”—

You shouldn’t say anything, the Sleuth suggested.

—add market value to the work. They grant an assurance of exclusivity that machine-craft does not. Perfection is too easily imitated; flaws are unique.

The Fudir’s previous life as a thief in the Terran Corner of Jehovah had given him an appreciation for art that a mere connoisseur did not possess. “We could make a shiny ducat from these pretties,” he murmured.

They give insight into Gidula, said the young man, both their hand-crafted nature and their subject matter.

Subject matter? said the Brute. They’re just shapes.

Yes. Exactly.

The hallway led around an S-curve and ended at an open archway, on the other side of which lay a vestibule. A young magpie sat behind a minimal desk, engaged in a multitude of tasks. One hand wrote on a light-pad with a stylus; the other hand entered data on a touch screen. Her throat worked as she subvocalized into a pickup. Her goggles, which lent her an insectlike appearance, flickered with disparate information on each lens. Earwigs undoubtedly whispered independently in each ear. A paraperceptic. Donovan regarded her as he might an evolutionary ancestor, and not without a little envy. Her channels were merely sensory and motor. Her intellect and will had not been fragmented into independent personalities.

“Ah, don’t fret, Donovan buigh,” the Fudir told himself. “You’d be lonely without us.”

Two other magpies sat in the vestibule along one wall, talking to each other in low voices. When Donovan and the medic entered, they glanced up and fell silent. One of them favored Donovan with a barely perceptible nod.

The office manager appeared not to notice, but that was the way of paraperceptics. They took a certain pride in what they called “multitasking” and delighted in disregard. Donovan was certain that she had seen him, studied him, and informed Gidula immediately of his arrival. The other two magpies returned to their conversation.

The medic had handed his slug to the office manager and departed. The Fudir looked about the room, and saw two open seats on opposite sides of the room. He started toward one, stopped, and turned toward the other, stopped again, and scratched his head. This attracted the attention not only of the two magpies but also of the office manager, which the scarred man counted as a signal accomplishment.

“What are you up to, Fudir?” he muttered.

In a whisper: “Let’s maintain the charade that we’re still fragmented.”

After that display of prowess with Ekadrina?

“How many of Gidula’s people actually witnessed that fight? As far as they’re concerned, their boss rescued us from certain death.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t think the Old One will be fooled.”

Perhaps not, but the manner in which he is not fooled may tell us much.

Did you notice the body language of the three magpies? said the young man. Number Two, the paraperceptic, seemed suspicious—but Twenty-three smirked while his friend Seventeen stifled genuine distress.

“Conclusions?”

The manager suspects the Fudir was playing Buridan’s Ass. In her position, she’d be privy to most of what Gidula knows. Twenty-three holds us in contempt. He knows we were supposed to be broken and doesn’t yet know we fought Ekadrina to a draw. But Seventeen …

“… is a genuine partisan of Geshler Padaborn.”

Who is supposedly us. The scarred man would not mind so much being a great hero from the past if he could remember any of the heroics. When the Names had diced and sliced his mind, they had buried his memories under a pile of shavings and debris.

Our therapist, Five, is also a Padabornian, the young man added.

The scarred man considered this. He had decided long before that Gidula was attempting to subvert the Revolution from within. Why bring Padaborn back if you truly believed him a ruined man? To raise the rebels’ spirits with the idea that Padaborn had returned, then crush them with the reality of the scarred man.

On the other hand—if anything as twisted as the politics of the Confederation had only two hands—broken or not, Geshler Padaborn knew some way into the Secret City; and whatever Gidula’s original purpose in peeling the scarred man from his uisce, he had other purposes now.

Yet Donovan understood that Ravn had been sent to snatch him more than two metric years ago and the rebels had determined to attack the Secret City a little over a year ago. Their curiosity regarding Padaborn’s escape was more recent than their desire to secure his person.

Unless, said the young man in the chlamys, we have been misreading them all along.

“That’s your job,” Donovan murmured. “You’re supposed to get inside the heads of our enemies and figure out what makes them tick.”

“Without,” the Fudir warned, “empathizing too much.”

Several of the Shadows now in rebellion had fought to suppress Padaborn’s Rising. One obvious reason for the contradiction was that the Rising had been premature and in the interim minds had changed, enthusiasms had shifted, and the doubtful had grown convinced. Perhaps the Names had overreacted in the aftermath. Such measures could trigger the very revolutions they meant to crush. Lucky Nanduri, the fifteenth maxraj of New Chennai, had put down the Mylapore riots with exquisite cruelty. His tontons had burned entire neighborhoods, blown up family compounds, executed citizens rounded up in sweeps regardless of whether they had participated in the riots or not. “Fear begets obedience,” the maxraj had declared. What it begat was twelve weeks of quiet. Then rebellion erupted across the continent, from Royapuram to Coromandel. When royal troops were ordered decimated as punishment for allowing the sack of the Coromandel Taj, the Palace Guard itself had turned on the maxraj, slaughtered him, and offered the Golden Tuban to a surprised—and rather unwilling—second maternal cousin.

Something similar may have happened in the wake of Padaborn’s Rising.

Watch the magpies, the young man advised them. They dream “the great game of the beautiful life.” There is ever romance in the heart of cruelty.

Aye, thought Donovan. The grand gesture, the emotion that tugs at the heart, the sheer drama of Padaborn on the Rooftops might lure Shadows into rebellion for no better reason than the tears of a pasdarm.

On the Rooftops…? There was a vague recollection there, but it would not come clear.

There was another answer, less obvious. The Shadow War was not in fact a resumption of Padaborn’s Rising. “The lamp that was lit” had not been lit again but was another struggle entirely, with different goals and only coincidentally similar objectives.

“Who fights for anything so abstract as ‘liberty’ or ‘tradition’ anyway?” Donovan grumbled. “The Shadows fight for injury or revenge or ambition, and because they have reached the point where nothing else is left. The fine words they make up later to justify themselves. An ambitious man like Oschous Dee might prate about oppression, but he was not oppressed, and had the paths of his ambition wound the other way, he would be defending the Names as loyally as Ekadrina.”

“You’re too cynical,” the Fudir told him. “Méarana always said so. Ambitious Oschous may be, but there are safer ambitions than raising the red banner.”

And would Ekadrina fight so doggedly were she not equally fervent in her loyalty? asked the Silky Voice.

“The drivers of doggedness and bravery needn’t be devotion and conviction. Ekadrina and Epri are Korpsbrüder, trained together by Shadow Prime himself. She’s in it because Epri is in it, and Epri stayed loyal because Manlius did not…”

“And Dawshoo rebelled because Manlius did … Never mind. We get the picture.” Motives were complex and seldom known, even to the actor. Purposes were easier, and often could be teased out. Two men might conspire to murder a third: but one to protect himself, the other merely to rob him.

The inner door opened and a fourth magpie emerged. This one betrayed no emotion on noticing Donovan, and the young man tagged him as “enthusiasm unknown.” The other two magpies rose and the three left the room together, murmuring in low voices.

The paraperceptic did not look away from her work. Hands danced across touch screens, eyes scanned scrolling images on her goggles, information whispered in her ears. She spared a moment of her mouth. “He see you now,” she said with admirable concision.

The scarred man hesitated and waited for Two’s reaction to the hesitation.

“He wait.”

Donovan grinned at her. “What are you doing after work, babe?”

The term of endearment was Terran, and unfamiliar to her; the essence of the question was not. “No ‘after work,’ me,” she told him. “You wish enter ‘jade gate pond,’ I multitask.” The face she turned to him was rendered beetlelike by the flickering data goggles, and she seemed suddenly a strange and alien thing.

Donovan recoiled, his joke gone sour in his mouth. He could imagine her busily manipulating multiple information streams even while she beat her chosen lover wet, and the pleasures of the latter would in no wise interfere with the efficiencies of the former. There was something in that which repelled him. One ought to take pleasure in one’s pleasures.

Gidula sat in a high-backed black padded chair at the far end of a long room. The carpeting was hard and durable, and woven in a tapestry of interlocking brightly colored lines against a sable background. The pattern reminded the Fudir of vines and creepers; the Sleuth, of mazes. The sable was shot through with silver threads, which lent it an odd sense of depth, as if the pattern comprised a catwalk above a deep and dimly lit cavern.

Crossing the room, Donovan made a play of walking carefully on the tapestry, as if he feared falling into the illusory sable pit.

“Really, Gesh,” Gidula said. “We know better, don’t we?” He gestured broadly with his left arm. “Please, sit.”

Gidula had no desk, as such. He sat within a nest of shelves and surfaces and glowing screens, some of which seemed permanent, some mobile, and some of which recessed into floor or ceiling as needed. At his word, a chair slid up from the floor, locking itself in place. Donovan made himselves comfortable and waited.

Gidula gestured with his right hand and a door slid open on the back wall to admit an androgynous servant bearing hot drinks on a wooden tray. The fey offered the drinks first to Donovan, who selected one at random, then to Gidula, who raised the second to his lips.

Donovan sipped from the steaming mug. If Gidula had wanted to poison him, he would have been poisoned while lying helpless in the autoclinic. The beverage was an infusion of some sort, with a hint of licorice. He blew on it to cool it.

“Why play the scatterbrain?” the Old One asked. “We brought you back to lead us, to lend your legendary name to our cause.”

“You brought me back to learn the entry into the Secret City.”

How better to lead us, Gidula’s shrug proclaimed, than to lead us to victory? But Donovan had long decided that the last thing a triumvirate wanted was a fourth man.

“Naturally, your infirmity dismayed us and we had almost given up hope you would recover your wits. Oschous promised to revive you, and Olafsdottr went with him to assist. And it is clear from your actions at the Battle of the Warehouse that they succeeded. Surely,” and here Gidula’s voice took on a note of disapproval, “surely the continued pretense does not mean that Geshler Padaborn has gone shy!”

The scarred man pondered his reply. If Gidula had hoped for a broken Padaborn, what would he do when faced with a whole? Ravn Olafsdottr had advised him to act disintegrated, and it was clear now that in doing so she had betrayed her master. “You know you get scatterwit,” he said in the Terran patois. “Billy Chins tell him so.”

Gidula sighed. “Billy turned his coat and threw in with the loyalists. We thought he meant to dissuade us from recalling you. But no man can be impaired in the mind and still be standing after a battle with Ekadrina Sèanmazy.”

“What man unimpaired would engage her in first place? Besides, we were barely standing.”

“Barely is more than her other opponents have stood.”

“Ravn slain,” he said, “we see red; go berserk, fight like madman. Which,” he added in a different voice, “is appropriate, seeing as we are a madman. Perhaps facing prospect of certain death focus our minds most wondrously.”

Gidula said nothing for a moment. Then he crooked a finger and summoned the fey once more to his side to refresh his mug. This time, he took a deeper draft and set it on the waiting tray with a satisfied sigh. “You’ve hardly touched your drink,” he pointed out.

“I just woke up,” the Fudir said.

“It’s a stimulant. Tell me, Gesh: why will you not join us? It’s not for lack of inducements. Vengeance for what the Names did to you. The glory and honor of your name. Not even for Terra! I’m certain Oschous Dee took you to the mountaintop and showed you Terra. I’m disappointed.”

He really did sound disappointed—but the nature of that disappointment remained elusive. “True Terry-fella, me. But Oschous no Terry-man.”

Gidula invited details with his silence. So the Fudir recited the Terran rhyme:

“There be no fur-face foxes among the races of Terra.”

“Did Oschous claim to be a Terran? That surprises me. Dee Karnatika is generally more careful in his lies.”

The Pedant mulled over the conversation in the fox’s shipboard sanctum. No, Donovan decided, Oschous never had made that specific claim. The best lie is the one you induce your hearer to tell himself. “His promise was smoke. Terra can never be truly free,” Donovan said. “Not in the Triangles. She stands too near to Dao Chetty and Delpaff, to Old Eighty-two.

“Too close for one to escape domination by another. It requires only a would-be conqueror with enough swagger in his step—or enough steps in his swagger.”

“Would you rather it be Terra dominating the others, as in the ‘golden age’? I’m sure the Delpaffonis or the Eighty-seconds have other perspectives.”

Donovan sat forward in his chair. “Those with a stake in the status quo might feel some disquiet at the thought of change.”

“A great deal depends on the nature of the change, does it not? Most change is for the worse. Delpaff and Old Eighty-two—and a dozen other worlds beside—may chafe under Dao Chetty’s thumb, but they’d not exchange it for Terra’s. As for those worlds far from the centers of power—Henrietta, for example—they find the yoke endurable and the checkreins lightly held.”

“The worst sort of slavery is when the slave does not feel the collar.”

“Is it? I would have thought that the best sort.” Gidula raised a hand just so and the fey scurried over without the carafe.

“Yes, Law Gidula? How may I serve you?” The contralto would have served either man or woman. It was drawled, halting, uncertain. The face was ageless; the eyes were old.

Gidula smiled at him, patted his cheek, groomed his hair. “Tell me, Podiin. How long have you been in my service?”

“Sir? Aw my life. Seven years an’ fawty, each basking in the sun of my law’s ray-dee-ents.”

Gidula gathered both the fey’s hands and clasped them between his own. “You have served me well, Podiin. I have thought of freeing you.”

The fey’s mouth gaped open. He fell to his knees, grabbed Gidula’s left hand, and bestowed kisses on the back of it. “Please, Law Gidula! Do no do tha’ to me!” Tears coursed down his cheek, and he moaned. “Please, my law, have I naw serve’ you well? Don’ sen’ me ’way!”

“But you would be free, boy!”

The fey sobbed. “No, my law! Will freedom feed me? Will it care for me? Will it ensure me again’ sickness? No, Law Gidula, only your gen’rous and open han’ cares for me—as I care for you.”

Donovan noted to his own astonishment the tears wetting Gidula’s cheeks. “Ah, no, my boy, no,” the Old One said stroking the servant’s head. “I’ll not do such a thing to you. You will stay at my side; and when the gods call me, you alone will scatter my ashes.”

That sent the fey into further paroxysms, only the tears now were those of joy. He bubbled his thanks, covered Gidula’s hand with kisses. Gidula with his free hand produced a kerchief from a sleeve and dried first his own eyes, then the servant’s. “Here, now,” Gidula said, “stand up, boy.”

When the servant was once more erect, Gidula twisted a ring off his right hand and gave it to the servant. “Here, Podiin. Wear this with pride.” The fey might have collapsed once more into weak-kneed delight, but Gidula held him up. “With pride, I said.” And the fey nodded and visibly braced his shoulders.

“Now bring the Donovan and me a selection of fruits and light-meats. Hurry along.”

When the servant had vanished, Gidula sniffled, turned to Donovan, and spread his hands as if to say, There. You see?

“Trained from birth, was he?” Donovan said. “Small wonder freedom terrifies him. He’s known no-but else.”

“It’s not a bad life for his ilk. They are suited by nature to serve others.”

“His ilk … The feys?”

“What? No. Feys are no more servile than foxies or clappers or any other race of men. But they have their share of the mentally slow. Podiin can follow simple instructions, act on his own in familiar, structured environments, but he would be lost without the direction of others. What do you do with them out in the Periphery? Kill them at birth? Toss them on the street to fend for themselves?”

“It was a nice performance. I noticed he got a black pearl ring out of you.”

Gidula shrugged. “A man may be slow but nonetheless reach his destination. He is retarded, not stupid. But enough. I take it my point is made. You might not find Terra so eager to be ‘free.’ Our society is a tightly woven network of obligations.” He interlocked his fingers and tugged. “I am as much in Podiin’s service as he in mine. No, do not sneer, Gesh. You have lived too long among the Peripherals and their anarchies. A tightly woven web, I say, of beliefs, customs, tales, fealties, and the like. Our law books are thinner than the Peripheral’s because we are led by living words and not by dead legalities. When right action is needed, a parable is a surer guide than a statute. It is what gives us stability. It is why the Confederation is still what it always was, while the Periphery is constantly stumbling about.”

“‘Still what it always was…,’” said the Fudir. “But there was a Commonwealth, once.”

“Ah, the fabled Commonwealth of Suns. You Terrans look back at it misty-eyed, and I grant you it scaled greater heights than either the Confederation or the League has attained. But the Commonwealth was arrogance at the center, with the reins held loose. That is not a happy formula. If you value the lightly held leash, modest fellowship is best advised. But if you would strut your boots on other men’s faces, clench the reins tight and never relax.”

“The Commonwealth was not like that!”

“Were you there? Well, perhaps you are right—about her early days. But the Triangles did not rise up on a whim.”

Donovan tracked the fey as he returned with the refreshments. He hated servility in all its forms, and the Kabuki that Gidula had played with the fey sickened him; yet even he had to admit that there were gradations to the thing. Obedience need not be servile—and Gidula had wept true tears. The philosopher R. V. Ambigeshwari had spoken rightly in the autumn of the Commonwealth when she wrote: Every system works—after its own fashion; and every system fails—in its own way. Maybe so, but he didn’t have to like it.

Podiin proffered the tray first to Donovan, who saw that “light-meats” meant thin slices of fish or meat wrapped around vegetables and caked in rice. The scarred man let the Silky Voice make the selection. Inner Child noted that the boy now wore Gidula’s ring on a chain around his neck. Podiin favored Donovan with a smirk, as if this small boon had marked him a man among men. Donovan did not know whether to rejoice with him on this small victory or pity him for his larger defeat.

“A stable system, you say. Yet, you want to overthrow it.” Gidula was supposed to be a leader of the Revolution. There was a limit to how far he might plausibly go in defense of the status quo.

Gidula made his own selection, then waved the boy aside, to stand by the wall out of earshot. “A dead man is stable,” Gidula said. “Only living men stumble. But that our social fabric has frayed at the top does not mean that the tapestry must be burned entire. Poor Ravn understood that. You see, Those do not command our customs the way they command our laws—and custom is king of all. If it is our part to obey Those, it is their part to be worthy of obedience.”

Donovan, the Sleuth, and the Fudir considered this while the Silky Voice and the young man carefully studied Gidula. “And some of Those are not.”

“It is the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not to skin it. I believe you Terrans have a saying. ‘Numpollyarky’ something, something.”

“Numpollyarky ysceala tattoo. ‘The act is unworthy of the person.’”

“You Terrans.…” Gidula laughed and shook his head. “You always have a great mouthful of words.”

“It gives us something to chew on.”

“Clever, too. I suppose with every man’s hand against you, the Fates have sharpened your wits, or you’d not have survived. Well, it’s been a long, hard time since the Commonwealth fell,” he continued. “Those were other days, and they worshiped other gods. The histories of the Late Commonwealth, while it was in power, were falsified through terror and sycophancy, and after its fall through the distortion of hatred. But the heat has gone out of it now; the coals are grown cold.”

Donovan looked at him oddly. “And so you enjoy,” he quoted, “‘the rare happiness of times, when you may think what you please, and express what you think.’”

Gidula shrugged and sipped from his drink. “When have there ever been such times? It is never too wise to express what you think. But our scholars now look back on the Commonwealth with neither the servility nor the enmity that once consumed men. We can begin, a little, to regard the age with dispassion.”

“I wonder if dispassion is an improvement.”

Gidula leaned forward. “Listen, Gesh. We must kill men in this struggle—our brothers in the Abbatoir, even some Names. Best if we don’t hate them in the bargain. Hate makes personal what should be detached. Those have done, as you Terrans say, acts unworthy of their status, and so must be expunged, some of them. But the act is no more a matter of hate than would be the stomping of a cockroach.”

The Fudir swallowed a spiced tuna roll wrapped in a banana leaf. “I’m no cockroach,” he said. “I’d rather be hated.”

Gidula grunted. “You may get your wish. The Names have been aroused from their delicate slumbers and have begun to meddle in affairs not proper to their offices.”

“Oschous told me about the business at the pasdarm on Ashbanal. And two or three intervened on Yuts’ga.”

“And that was only overtly,” the Old One agreed. “There have been covert moves, as well. And Those have shown … disturbing capabilities.”

“They did seem to come and go rather abruptly,” the Fudir said dryly.

“And given what Those have revealed, what might yet remain occulted?” Gidula leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “That is why I urged an infiltration of the Secret City itself. Do you see why we must end this, Gesh? And end it soon? Before the real revolutionaries, like Oschous or Domino Tight, burn the whole tapestry and we lose the good with the bad—and before Those of Name escalate the struggle with their meddling and we lose … everything.”

Donovan took over from the Fudir and laughed. “One more enticement, eh? ‘Help us prevent a worse conflict!’ Those did this to me…” He ran a hand through the furrows of his head, over the headlands and ridges and tufts of woodland-hair where the plows of his tormenters had broken the soil of his mind. “Why should I care how badly your Confederation suffers? How can it suffer too much?”

Gidula evinced no reaction. “Because,” he said in reasoned tones, “what has a shopkeeper on Henrietta or a schoolteacher on Delpaff done to merit slaughter? Ask yourself, who would suffer first and most of all should our cities burn? Why do you think we’ve labored these twice-ten years to keep the conflict tightly controlled? Why do you think we put boundaries to it?”

“Boundaries of straw,” Donovan retorted. “Why suppose they will stand one moment beyond the first hard blow?”

Gidula sucked in his breath and leaned back suddenly in his chair. “Ah. So. Wisdom dawns. You do remember—or some hidden part of you does.”

The response was unlooked for, and Donovan retreated in confusion. “Remember what?” He growled. And the Silky Voice, deep within, said, Some hidden part?

“How Padaborn’s Rising spun out of control. How whole city blocks were smashed in San Jösing and people whose only crime was rising early to go to work were scythed down because Padaborn rose too early for another purpose. You want to believe that the violence was inevitable, and not a misjudgment on your part.”

“Are you done telling me what I believe?”

“But Gesh, Gesh. A tumor can be carefully excised. There are medicines that invade the body and touch nothing but the malignancy. We can remove the malignant Names and not touch the benign ones, not touch the honorable neutrals, not touch the sheep.”

Donovan said nothing. His inner voices were silent. He bit into another light-meat and found the taste sour and the texture glutinous. “You almost had me, up to the ‘sheep.’”

Gidula lifted a hand, as if helpless. “Delicacy of nomenclature will not alter the facts. The great mass of men must be led—or driven. We propose they be led.”

“Are they to have no say in how they are governed?”

“Does it matter how they are governed, so long as they are governed well?”

“It matters a great deal. If it belongs to the people to choose a king, then it belongs to the people, if the king is become a tyrant, to remove and replace him.”

The Old One pressed his hands together and touched them to his chin, just below his lips. “That has the flavor of some ancient Terran sage. But tyranny travels with the fastest ship. Your League will feel the hand of the Ardry and his Grand Sèannad heavier on her shoulder now that your Ourobouros Circuit inserts its tentacles into each man’s world.”

“Enough,” said Donovan, rising. He started to turn, checked himself, faced the question he had been avoiding. “What happened to Ravn … and the rest?”

Sadness overcame the face of Gidula. “Alas, the Ravn is no longer with us.”

Donovan knew bleakness in his heart. He was not sure he had come to like his kidnapper, but he had certainly grown used to her sassy presence. There had been a mischievousness to her that he had found appealing. “She was always cheerful,” he said.

“Yes,” said the Old One, “but she was working on that and making great improvement. As for Oschous, he fled to Old Eighty-two, along with Big Jacques. Manlius and Dawshoo had already gone to the Century Suns by prearrangement. They intend to … What do you Terrans say?”

“Lie low.”

“Yes. Such a colorful ‘lingo.’”

“It’s a patois. A synthesis of a dozen different tongues. The ancient tongues—”

“Is it.” Gidula was not really interested. “Oschous told me that Domino Tight survived the assassination attempt—he was not clear how—and has agreed to enter San Jösing and set up safe houses. Everyone is recruiting new magpies. So the team we agreed would infiltrate the Secret City remains nearly intact. Like you, Big Jacques must recover from his wounds. We are going to make contact with Little Jacques, who will meet us on Terra.”

“On Terra.” The name went through Donovan like the slice of a sword and cut short all his thoughts.

“Why, yes,” said Gidula. “I thought I had told you. My offices are on Terra.”

“The Taj…,” whispered the Fudir, slowly sinking back into his seat. Oh, to see the green hills, to walk the holy soil of Vraddy and bathe in the sacred Ganga … To see Zhõgwó. And Vrandja, where the Yurpans lived; and Murka—and walk the fabled streets of Pree and Mumble, Vayshink and Ũāvajorque.

And Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds.

The Fudir fought to keep the emotion from his voice. “When,” he said, “do we arrive?”

“In four standard days. Ekadrina used you ill, and it wanted all this time to restore you. Work with Five. Get your strength and endurance back up.” He rose and took Donovan by the elbow and bowed him toward the door. “The time has come to bury all pretenses. You really must remember the way into the Secret City. It is essential to our plans, and I propose to do all in my power to aid your recollection.”

Somehow, that last was not a comfort to Donovan buigh.