"I don't need to." He cocked his head, frowning. "I should hate you, you know. But I can't. I fear Minister Takka, that you, like me, are no more than a tool of greater purposes."
"Why do you say that?"
Fist's voice carried a desperate note. "Because I believe you engineered the suffering my people have experienced. You were the political manipulator who left us to die, weren't you?"
Ily straightened, fingers tensing on the stassa cup.
"Oh, I wanted to find you at first," Sinklar continued, still lost in his thoughts. "I would have given anything to have put you against a wall and shot you dead. But then I
aw the reality and realized that you — like me — had ceased to control events but must n tu be controlled by them. Were it otherwise, you wouldn't be here to see what your machinations had unexpectedly wrought. Like me, you, too, are curious and, perhaps, desperate?"
"My curiosity increases by the moment, Sinklar."
He settled back on the hard seat. "Tell me, did you goad the Seddi into this revolt? Why? What was your purpose? That's the ony thing I can't figure out."
She narrowed her eyes and stared into the black stassa. "The Seddi? I've had no dealings with them. But I'd gve a planet's ransom to get my hands on one of their leaders."
Sinklar frowned as he pulled up his knee and pursed his lips. "No dealings? Ever?"
Ily shook her head. "None. Don't get me wrong. If I could find an advantage…"
"We have a high ranking Seddi." He said it so bitterly.
"Indeed? Could I see him?" Ily's heart raced. In the past, Seddi had always managed to kill themselves before she could get Mytol past their lips.
Sinklar's jaw muscles jumped. "Better than that, you can watch her execution."
"There is more to be gained from a live Seddi than from a corpse."
"She dies."
"Let me see her first." Ily caught the hardening around his mouth and switched the subject. "You said you'd accept most of my conditions?"
Sinklar leaned his head back and sighed. "Yes, Minister. I will be your conqueror. I'll destroy the Companions for you and forge Free Space into a single empire."
"You think you can take Staffa's Companions?" She raised an eyebrow. "You have a lot of faith in your wild children troops."
Sinklar steepled his fingers, his head braced against the plate behind the booth. "I know this will sound arrogant, but the reality of the situation is that once I have transportation for my Divisions, nothing can stop me — unless the Star Butcher attacks before I can get to Rega. Give me four weeks to train my troops, and no one in space can stop me."
"You do sound arrogant."
He shook his head sadly. "No, only pragmatic. You see, I was a student once. That's really all I ever wanted to be. People thought I was brilliant, but the key to brilliance is to find the baseline assumptions upon which an idea
or science is constructed. A long time ago, people thought war could be fought by rules, so they got together and adopted a military code. That code became ritualized until it embedded itself in our perception of reality. People don't generally question what they think is real, it leads to dangerous waters and shifting foundations."
"But you did."
"Perhaps that's a curse instead of blessing." Sinklar cocked his head to study her. "I have only one condition. I must break the Seddi first — find out why they did this to Targa."
"I will give you the Seddi." She cocked her head. "If you will tell me why. Because of your parents? Is this some deep-seated drive to discover who you are? Who they were?"
For a long moment he watched her, and her scalp crawled under the intensity of his hard stare. "A Seddi assassin killed the only woman I ever loved. The fact that my parents were Seddi has nothing to do with this case. What they did, they did for reasons of their own that I'm not familiar with. I must make my own assumptions — and currently, the Seddi don't fit any model I can devise. Their actions seem random, purposeless. Why did they send Arta after me? Whey did they continue the revolt when they'd lost? Why start it? I want to know!"
"You fascinate me. You're so young… so very, very young, and yet you have nothing of youth about you."
He frowned as he stared down into his stassa. "Youth and dreams are codependent. When the dreams have all been murdered and only the odor of decay remains in the memories, youth must yield to a harsher reality."
Ily took a deep breath as relief flooded her. "I think you and I will do very well together, Sinklar Fist."
Ethics? Right and wrong? Such slippery concepts. Staffa rubbed his face, racking his brain as he recalled everything
Kaylla had tod him about Seddi philosophy. For hours they had argued back and forth, playing devil's advocate. They didn't have anything else to do but wait — and stare at the gray syalon walls until they went mad. Instead, Staffa bad urged Kaylla to tell him about the Seddi.
She sat across from him in the brown robe Tyklat had provided, the low angle of the light casting shadows over her square-boned face. Her shoulder-length brown hair glinted with threads of gold.
"We share God Mind: awareness," Staffa said as he collected his thoughts. "If awareness is the same mind, and I cause you to suffer, then I am causing a part of myself to suffer."
Kaylla nodded, glancing up as she felt the crate shift again — inertia playing games with stability. "All right, if you accept that, what happens if we change the initial conditions. What do you tink of a person who beats himself, scars his flesh to enjoy self-inflicted agony?"
"He is mentaly ill," Staffa declared. "If he really enjoys making himself hurt, he is dysfunctional."
"Is he ethically right or wrong? It's his flesh, his own bit of God Mind that he's causing to suffer. What difference does it make to you? How can you call him sick?"
Staffa tried to stretch his kinked back. How long had he been cooped up in grayness? Any sense of time had long since vanished. Here, so deep in the hold, no sound or stimulus penetrated. He had nothing except energy bars, the generator, the oxygenator, and this constant foiling with Kaylla. Reality had been suspended.
"He's wrong. Unethical," Staffa insisted. "The reason why is that he's changing reality — causing God Mind to hurt through his own distorted misuse of observation. And, to willingly increase discomfort demonstrates an observer making decisions for purposes alen — but possible through free will — to the nature of the universe. In a sense, he's reinforc ing misinformation rather than seeking knowledge."
"Very good," Kaylla said, a silver of pride in her voice. "And what about a man who beats another man whom he considers his inferior? Ethical?"
"Unethical," Staffa admitted, thckness in his voice. "Such a man is, by virtue of his shared God Mind, inflicting the same wrong as the masochist. In the end, though he
may act in ignorance, his perceptions will harm the God Mind, and himself."
"Correct." Kaylla pursed her lips. "You talked about your ife before Myklene, before the Praetor told you about your wife and son. When he stripped that superficial myt fif your identity away, you became aware Staff a. Do you see that now?"
He lifted a shoulder, looking at his gray-clad knees.
"The Praetor had provided you with a series of assumptions around which you built an entire episteroology. Once that artificial identity had been torn open, you looked through and found you were governed by epistemologies which proved every bit as mythical as your identity. What you have just successfully done was to investigate how you know what you know.
"You see, in our particular culture we have a false epistemology of unilaterality — a very convenient and continuously reinforced theory of knowledge, to be sure. Sassa the Sec ond and Tybalt the Imperial Seventh are maintained by such flawed frameworks of understanding. We even go so far as to perceive unilaterality as the True nature of things — as you did before Myklene. It allowed you to make command decisions to exterminate entire planets."