Soldier, ask not

Chapter 19

"You come well recommended by Field Commander Wassel," he said after he had shaken my hand. "An unusual thing for a Newsman." It was a statement, not a sneer; and I obeyed his invitation - almost more order than invitation - to sit, as he went back around to sit down behind his desk. He faced me across it. There was power in the man, the promise of a black flame. Like the promise, it suddenly occurred to me, of the flame latent in the gunpowder, stored in 1687 by the Turks within the Parthenon, when a shell fired by the Venetian army under Morosini exploded the black grains and blew out the center of that white temple. There had always been a special dark corner of hatred in me for that shell and that army - for if the Parthenon had been living refutation of Mathias' darkness to me as a boy, the destruction wrought by that shell had been evidence of how that darkness conquered, even in the heart of light.

So, viewing Eldest Bright, I connected him in my mind with that old hate, though I was careful to shield my feelings from his eyes. Only in Padma had I felt such a penetrating power of gaze, before now - and there was a man here, too, behind the gaze.

For the eyes themselves were the eyes of a Torquemada, that prime mover of the Inquisition in ancient Spain - as others had remarked before me; for the Friendly Churches were not without their own repressers and extinguishers of heresy. But behind those eyes moved the political intelligence of a mind that knew when to leash or when to loose the powers of two planets. For the first time I realized the feeling of someone who, stepping into the lion's cage alone for the first time, hears the steel door click shut behind him.

For the first time, also, since I had stood in the Index Room of the Final Encyclopedia and loosened the hinges of my knees - for what if this man had no weaknesses; and in trying to control him, I only gave my plans away?

But the habits of a thousand interviews were coming to my rescue and even as the doubts struck and clung to me, my tongue was working automatically.

". . .the utmost in cooperation from Field Commander Wassel and his men on New Earth," I said. "I appreciated it highly."

"I, too," said Bright harshly, his eyes burning upon me, "appreciated a Newsman without bias. Otherwise you wouldn't be here in my office interviewing me. The work of the Lord between the stars leaves me little time for providing amusement for the ungodly of seven systems. Now, what's the reason for this interview?"

"I've been thinking of making a project," I said, "of revealing the Friendlies in a better light to people on the other worlds-"

"To prove your loyalty to the Creed of your profession - as Wassel said?" interrupted Bright.

"Why, yes," I said. I stiffened slightly in my chair. "I was orphaned at an early age; and the dream of my growing years was to join the News Services-"

"Don't waste my time, Newsman!" Bright's hard voice chopped like an axe across the unfinished section of my sentence. He got to his feet once more, suddenly, as if the energy in him was too great to be contained, and prowled around his desk to stand looking down at me, thumbs hooked in the belt at his narrow waist, his bony, middle-aged face bent above me. "What's your Creed to me, who move in the light of God's word?"

"We all move in our own lights, in our own way," I said. He was standing so close above me that I could not get to my feet to face him as my instincts urged me. It was as if he held me physically pinned in my chair, beneath him. “If it weren't for my Creed I wouldn't be here now. Perhaps you don't know what happened to me and my brother-in-law at the hands of one of your Groupmen on New Earth-"

"I know." The two words were merciless. "You'll have been apologized to, some time since, for that. Listen to me, Newsman." His thin lips quirked slightly in a sour smile. "You are not Anointed of the Lord."

"No," I said.

"In those who follow God's word, there may be a cause to believe that they act from faith in something more than their own selfish interests. But in those without the Light, how can there be any faith to anything but themselves?" The quirking smile on his own lips mocked his own words, mocked at the canting phrases in which he called me a liar - and dared me to deny the sophistication in him that had permitted him to see through me.

I stiffened this time with a look of outrage.

"You're sneering at my Newsman's Creed only because it isn't your own!" I snapped at him.

My outburst moved neither him nor his quirk of a smile.

"The Lord would not choose a fool to be Eldest over the Council of our Churches," he said - and turning his back on me, walked back around to sit down once more behind his desk. "You should have thought of that before you came to Harmony, Newsman. But at any rate you know it now."

I stared at him, almost blinded by the sudden brilliance of my own understanding. Yes, I knew it now - and in knowing it, suddenly saw how he had delivered himself out of his own mouth into my hands.

I had been afraid that he might turn out to have no weakness of which I could take advantage as I had taken advantage of lesser men and women with my words. And it was true - he had no ordinary weakness. But by the same token he had an extraordinary one. For his weakness was his strength, that same sophistication that had lifted him to be ruler and leader of his people. His weakness was that to have become what he was, he had to be as fanatic as the worst of them were - but with something more, as well. He had to have the extra strength that made him able to lay his fanaticism aside, when it came to interfere in his dealing with the leaders of other worlds - with his equals and opposites between the stars. It was this, this he had unknowingly admitted to me just now.

Unlike the furious-eyed, black-clad ones about him, he was not limited to the fanatic's view of the universe that painted everything in colors of either pure black or pure white. He was able to perceive and deal in shades between - in shades of gray, as well. In short, he could be a politician when he chose - and, as a politician, I could deal with him.

As a politician, I could lead him into a politician's error.

I crumpled. I let the stiffness go out of me suddenly as I sat in my chair with his eyes newly upon me. And I heaved a long, shuddering breath.

"You're right," I said in a dead voice. I got to my feet. "Well, it's no use now. I'll be going-"

"Go?" His voice cracked like a rifle shot, stopping me. "Did I say the interview was over? Sit down!"

Hastily I sat down again. I was trying to look pale, and I think I succeeded. For all I had suddenly understood him, I was still in the lion's cage, and he was still the lion.

"Now," he said, staring at me, "what did you really hope to gain from me - and from us who are the Chosen of God on these two worlds?"

I wet my lips.

"Speak up," he said. He did not raise his voice, but the low, carrying tones of it promised retribution on his part if I did not obey.

"The Council-" I muttered.

"Council? The Council of our Elders? What about it?"

"Not that," I said, looking down at the floor. "The Council of the Newsman's Guild. I wanted a seat on it. You Friendlies could be the reason I could get it. After Dave - after what happened to my brother-in-law - my showing with Wassel that I could do my job without bias even to you people - that's been getting me attention, even in the Guild. If I could go on with that - if I could raise public opinion in the other seven systems in your favor - it'd raise me, too, in the public eye. And in the Guild."

I stopped speaking. Slowly I looked up at him. He was staring at me with harsh humor.

"Confession cleanses the soul even of such as you," he said grimly. "Tell me, you’ve given thought to the improvement of our public image among the cast-aside of the Lord on the other worlds?"

"Why, that depends," I said. "I'd have to look around here for story material. First-"

"Never mind that now!"

He rose once more behind his desk and his eyes commanded me to rise also, so I did.

"We'll go into this in a few days," he said. His Torquemada's smile saluted me. "Good-day for the present, Newsman."

"Good-day," I managed to say. I turned and went out, shakily.

Nor was the shakiness entirely assumed. My legs felt weak, as if from tense balancing on the edge of a precipice, and a dry tongue clung to the roof of my dry mouth.

I puttered around the town the next few days, ostensibly picking up background material. Then, on the fourth day after I had seen Eldest Bright, I was called once more to his office. He was standing when I came in, and he remained standing, halfway between the door and his desk.

"Newsman," he said abruptly, as I came in, "it occurs to me that you can't favor us in your news reports without your fellow Guild members noticing that favoring. If this is so, what good are you to me?"

"I didn't say I'd favor you," I answered indignantly. "But if you show me something favorable on which I can report, I can report on it."

"Yes." He looked hard at me with the black flames of his eyes. "Come and look at our people, then."

He led me out of his office and down an elevator tube to a garage where a staff car was waiting. We got in and its driver took us out of the Council City, through a countryside that was bare and stony, but neatly divided into farms.

"Observe," said Bright dryly as we went through a small town that was hardly more than a village. "We grow only one crop thickly on our poor worlds - and those are the bodies of our young men, to be hired out as soldiers that our people may not starve and our Faith endure. What disfigures these young men and the other people we pass that those on the other worlds should resent them so strongly, even while hiring them to fight and die in their foreign wars?"

I turned and saw his eyes on me with grim amusement, once again.

"Their - attitudes," I said cautiously.

Bright laughed, a short lion's cough of a laugh deep in his chest.

"Attitudes!" he said harshly. "Put a plain word to it, Newsman! Not attitudes - pride! Pride! Bone-poor, skilled only in hand toil and weapon-handling, as these people you see are - still they look as if from lofty mountains down on the dust-born slugs who hire them, knowing that those employers may be rich in worldly wealth and furniture, fat in foodstuffs and padded in soft raiment - yet when all peoples pass alike beyond the shadow of the grave, then they, who have wallowed in power and wealth, will not be endured even to stand, cap in hand, below those gates of silver and of gold which we, who have suffered and are Anointed, pass singing through."

He smiled at me, his savage, predator's smile, across the width of the staff car.

"What can you find in all you see here," he said, "to teach a proper humbleness and a welcome to those who hire the Bespoken of the Lord?''

He was mocking me again. But I had seen through him on that first visit in his office, and the subtle path to my own end was becoming clearer as we talked. So his mockery bothered me less and less.

"It isn't pride or humbleness on either side that I can do much about," I said. "Besides, that isn't what you need. You don't care what employers think of your troops, as long as they hire them. And employers will hire them, if you can make your people merely bearable - not necessarily lovable, but bearable."

"Stop here, driver!" interrupted Bright; and the car pulled to a halt.

We were in a small village. Sober, black-clad people moved between the buildings of bubble-plastic - temporary structures which would long since on other worlds have been replaced with more sophisticated and attractive housing.

"Where are we?" I asked.

“A lesser town called Remembered-of-the-Lord,” he answered, and dropped the window on his side of the car. "And here comes someone you know."

In fact, a slim figure in a Force-Leader's uniform was approaching the car. It reached us, stooped slightly, and the face of Jamethon Black looked calmly in on both of us.

"Sir?" he said to Bright.

"This officer," said Bright, to me, "seemed qualified once for high service in the ranks of us who served God's will. But six years past, he was attracted by a daughter of a foreign world who would not have him; and since then he has seemed to lose his will to rise in rank among us." He turned to Jamethon. "Force-Leader," he said. "You have seen this man twice. Once in his home on Earth six years ago, when you sought his sister in marriage; and again last year on New Earth when he sought from you a pass to protect his assistant between the battle lines. Tell me, what do you know about him?"

Jamethon's eyes looked across the interior of the car into mine.

"Only that he loved his sister and wanted a better life for her, perhaps, than I could give her," said Jamethon in a voice as calm as his face. "And that he wished his brother-in-law well, and sought protection for him." He turned to look directly into the eyes of Bright. "I believe him to be an honest man and a good one, Eldest."

"I did not ask for your beliefs!" snapped Bright.

"As you wish," said Jamethon, still calmly facing the older man; and I felt a rage swelling up inside me so that I thought that I would burst out with it, no matter what the consequences.

Rage against Jamethon, it was. For not only had he the effrontery to recommend me to Bright as an honest man and a good one, but because there was something else about him that was like a slap in the face. For a moment, I could not identify it. And then it came to me. He was not afraid of Bright. And I had been so, in that first interview.

Yet I was a Newsman, with the immunity of the Guild behind me; and he was a mere Force-Leader facing his own Commander-in-Chief, the Warlord of two worlds, of which Jamethon's was only one. How could he-? And then it came to me, so that I almost ground my teeth in fury and frustration. For it was with Jamethon no different than it had been with the Groupman on New Earth who had denied me a pass to keep Dave safe. That Groupman had been instantly ready to obey that Bright, who was the Eldest, but felt in himself no need to bow before that other Bright, who was merely the man.

In the same way now Bright held the life of Jamethon in his hand, but unlike the way it had been with me, in holding this he held the lesser part of the young man before him, rather than the greater.

"Your leave home here is ended, Force-Leader," Bright said sharply. "Tell your family to send on your effects to Council City and join us now. I'm appointing you aide and assistant to this Newsman from now on. And we'll promote you Commandant to make the post worthwhile."

"Sir," said Jamethon emotionlessly with an inclination of his head. He stepped back into the building from which he had just emerged, before coming back out a few moments later to join us. Bright ordered the staff car turned about and so we returned to the city and his office.

When we got back there, Bright turned me loose with Jamethon to get acquainted with the Friendly situation in and around Council City. Consequently, the two of us, Jamethon and I, did a certain amount of sightseeing, though not much, and I returned early to my hotel.

It required very little in the way of perception to see that Jamethon had been assigned to act as a spy upon me while performing the functions of an aide. However, I said nothing about it, and Jamethon said nothing at all, so that, almost strangely, we two moved around Council City, and its related neighborhood, in the days that followed like a couple of ghosts, or men under a vow not to speak to each other. It was a strange silence of mutual consent that agreed that the only things worth talking about between us - Eileen, and Dave and the rest - would reward any discussion only with a pain that would make the discussion unprofitable.

Meanwhile, I was summoned from time to time to the office of Eldest Bright. He saw me more or less briefly on these occasions and spoke of little that was to the point of my announced reason for being on the Friendlies and in partnership with him. It was as if he were waiting for something to happen. And eventually I understood what that was. He had set Jamethon to check me out, while he himself checked out the interstellar situation which, as Eldest of the Friendly Worlds, he faced alone, searching for the situation and the moment in which he could best make use of this self-seeking Newsman who had offered to improve the public image of his people.

Once I had realized this, I was reassured, seeing how, interview by interview, day by day, he came closer as I wanted to the heart of the matter. That heart was the moment in which he might ask my advice, must ask me to tell him what he should do about me and with me.

Day by day and interview by interview, he became apparently more relaxed and trusting in his words with me - and more questioning.

"What is it they like to read, on those other worlds, Newsman?" he asked one day. "Just what is it they most like to hear about?"

"Heroes, of course," I answered as lightly as he had questioned. "That's why the Dorsai make good copy-and to a certain extent the Exotics."

A shadow which may or may not have been intentional passed across his face at the mention of the Exotics.

"The ungodly," he muttered. But that was all. A day or so later he brought the subject of heroes up again.

"What makes heroes in the public's eyes?" he asked.

"Usually," I said, "the conquering of some older, already established strong man, villain or hero." He was looking at me agreeably, and I took a venture. "For example, if your Friendly troops should face up to an equal number of Dorsai and outfight them-"

The agreeableness was abruptly wiped out by an expression I had never seen on his face before. For a second he all but gaped at me. Then he flashed me a stare as smoking and hot as liquid basalt from a volcano's throat.

"Do you take me for a fool?" he snapped. Then his face changed, and he looked at me curiously. "-Or are you simply one yourself?"

He gazed at me for a long, long moment. Finally he nodded.

"Yes," he said, as if to himself. "That's it - the man's a fool. An Earth-born fool."

He turned on his heel, and that ended our interview for the day.

I did not mind his taking me for a fool. It was that much more insurance against the moment when I would make any move to delude him. But, for the life of me, I could not understand what had brought such an unusual reaction from him. And that bothered me. Surely my suggestion about the Dorsai could not have been so farfetched? I was tempted to ask Jamethon, but discretion as the better part of valor held me wisely back.

Meanwhile the day came when Bright finally approached the question I knew he must ask me sooner or later.

"Newsman," he said. He was standing, legs spread, hands locked together behind his back, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling window of his office at the Government Center and Council City, below. His back was to me.

"Yes, Eldest?" I answered. He had called me once more to his office, and I had just walked through the door. He spun around at the sound of my voice to stare flamingly at me.

"You said once that heroes are made by their defeat of some older, established heroes. You mentioned as examples of older heroes in the public gaze the Dorsai - and the Exotics."

"That's right," I said, coming up to him.

"The ungodly on the Exotics," he said, as if he mused to himself. "They use hired troops. What good to defeat hirelings - even if that were possible and easy?"

"Why not rescue someone in distress, then?" I said lightly. "That sort of thing would give you a good, new public image. Your Friendlies haven't been known much for doing that sort of thing."

He flicked a hard glance at me.

"Who should we rescue?" he demanded.

"Why," I said, "there're always small groups of people who, rightly or wrongly, think they're being imposed on by the larger groups around them. Tell me, don't you ever get approached by small dissident groups wanting to hire your soldiers on speculation for revolt against their established government-" I broke off. "Why, of course you do. I was forgetting New Earth and the North Partition of Altland."

"We gained little credit in the eyes of the other worlds by way of our business with the North Partition," said Bright, harshly. "As you well know!"

"Oh, but the sides were about equal there," I said. "What you've got to do is help out some really tiny minority against some selfish giant of a majority - say, something like the miners on Coby against the mine owners."

"Coby? The miners?" He darted me a hard glance, but this was a glance I had been waiting for all these days and I met it blandly. He turned and strode over to stand behind his desk. He reached down and half-lifted a sheet of paper - it looked like a letter - that lay on his desk. "As it happens, I have had an appeal for aid on a purely speculative basis by a group-"

He broke off, laid the paper down and lifted his head to look at me.

"A group like the Coby miners?" I said. "It's not the miners themselves?"

"No," he said. "Not the miners." He stood silent a moment, then he came back around the desk and offered me his hand. "I understand you're about to leave.”

"I am?" I said.

"Have I been misinformed?" said Bright. His eyes burned into mine. "I heard that you were leaving for Earth on a spaceliner this evening. I understood passage had already been booked by you."

"Why - yes," I said, reading the message clear in the tone of his voice. "I guess I just forgot. Yes, I'm on my way."

"Have a good trip," said Bright. "I'm glad we could come to a friendly understanding. You can count on us in the future. And we'll take the liberty of counting on you in return."

"Please do," I said. "And the sooner the better."

"It will be soon enough," said Bright.

We said good-bye again and I left for my hotel. There, I found my things had already been packed; and, as Bright had said, passage had already been booked for me on a spaceliner leaving that evening for Earth. Jamethon was nowhere to be seen.

Five hours later, I was once more between the stars, shifting on my way back toward Earth.

Five weeks later, the Blue Front on St. Marie, having been secretly supplied with arms and men by the Friendly worlds, erupted in a short but bloody revolt that replaced the legal government with the Blue Front leaders.