He fixed his gaze on the three who remained, realizing with a start of disbelief that he knew them all. Two were Kharemoughis—Estvarit, the Hegemonic Chief Justice, and Savanne, Chief Inspector of the Hegemonic Police force on Number Four; the third questioner was Yungoro, the Governor-General of the planet. He barely controlled the reflex that would have had the man he was before Fire Lake down off the table, delivering a rigid salute before he had taken another breath. Instead he looked behind himself, pointedly, at the restraints that had held him down He looked at the men again, forcing himself to remember all he had learned and endured and become in the past months… . Forcing himself to remember that he himself was now a Commander of Police, and though he had no assigned command, outranked two of the three men in the room with him. He nodded to each man in turn, an acknowledgment between equals. “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” His voice was steady; his mouth curved up of its own accord into an ironic smile. “Especially as a stranger far from home.”
“The Universe is Home to us all.” The Chief Justice—the one man who outranked him in the outside world—made the response, with a smile that looked genuine.
“You’re a little hard on strangers,” Gundhalinu said, and saw Savanne glance away. He got down from the table at last, feeling muscles pull painfully in his stiffened side. His relief and exhaustion left him weak; he supported himselt unobtrusively against the cold metal edge of the table.
“I’m sorry. Commander,” Estvarit said. “But it is always done this way. It is imperative that we impress upon new initiates both the seriousness of this induction and its grave importance to their own lives. A certain amount of fear serves the purpose.” The Chief Justice was a tall, lean man. the tight curls of his hair graying. He had a slow, almost languid way of speaking that put others instinctively at ease.
Gundhahnu felt the iron in his smile turn to rue. “My nurse told me, when I was a boy, that one day when she was a child a winged click-lizard appeared on the windowsill of her parents’ house. Her people considered it to be a blessing on the house. When she pointed it out to her father, he knocked her across the room. He told her afterward that an important event should always be marked by pain, so that you would remember it. But she said that she was not sure now whether she remembered the lizard because of the slap, or the slap because of the lizard.”
He heard a barely restrained chuckle from the Governor-General. Estvarit quirked his mouth. “I think you have a career ahead of you as a public speaker, Gundhalinu.”
“What made you decide all at once that I was material for the inner circles of Survey?”
Estvarit reached into his uniform robes and pulled something out. Gundhalinu started as his eyes registered what the other man held up for his perusaclass="underline" two overlaid crosses forming an eight-pointed star within a circle, the Hegemonic Seal he had seen reproduced on every official government document and piece of equipment down to the buckle of his uniform belt; but transformed here into a shimmering miracle of hologramic fire. “I’m to be given the Order of Light?” he murmured; stunned, but, he realized, not particularly surprised. He had a sudden memory of the wilderness, of the fiery gem called a solii held out to him in the slender-fingered hand of a madwoman. … He shook his head slightly, clearing it.
Estvarit nodded. “For conspicuous courage and utter sacrifice, you are being made a Hero of the Hegemony. You won’t be informed—officially—of the honor for about another week. Congratulations, Commander Gundhalinu. This award is usually given posthumously.”
Gundhalinu wondered whether there was actually irony in Estvarit’s voice. “I’m honored… .”He shook his head again, in awe, not in denial, as Estvarit placed the medal in his hand, letting him prove its reality.
“You’ve shown yourself worthy of the honor, Gundhalinu,” Savanne said. “The … scars of the past have been erased by your discovery of the stardrive—”
Estvant turned, frowning, to silence Savanne with a look. The Governor General coughed and flexed his hands.
“Yes,” Estvarit said brusquely, “you have been chosen to join the inner circles because of the discovery you made at Fire Lake, and all that it implies—and I don’t mean awards or honors or any other superfluous symbolism. I mean the real, raw courage and the intelligence obviously required of anyone who could survive World’s End, and come out of it not only alive and sane, but with the truth about it. The past is meaningless, now, because you’ve changed the future for all of us, as well as for yourself. I don’t have to tell you that.”
Gundhalinu passed back the medal without responding. He folded his hands in front of him, feeling surreptitiously for the marks on the inside of his wrists, the brand of a failed suicide, that he had had removed at last after his return from World’s End.
“And because, instead of holding your knowledge for ransom, you gave it freely to the Hegemony.” The Chief Justice’s eyes searched his face. “Gundhalinu, the petty prejudices and the narrow-minded cultural biases of nations or worlds have no place in our organization. We serve the side of Order, against the Chaos that always threatens. I sense that you share that vision. And you have proven that you have the capacity to make a genuine difference.”
Gundhalinu hesitated, studying the other man’s face in turn, with eyes that had judged a lot of liars, and knew they were too often indistinguishable from honest human beings. But there was no hidden revulsion in this man’s eyes, for what he had done to himself in what seemed now like a former life… . The Chief Justice was not simply the most powerful man in the Hegemonic government on Four, he was a Tech, a member of the highest level of society on Kharemough, their mutual homeworld. He could not have suppressed his response—would not have bothered to—unless what he said was true.
Gundhalinu had always had a sense that Estvarit was a man who deserved his position, a man of uncommon integrity; but now he actually believed it. “Yes,” he said at last. “That is what I feel, too.” His ordeal at Fire Lake had taught him many hard truths. But the hardest of them all was the bitter knowledge that what he had believed all his life—what being a Tech on Kharemough had always let him believe—about himself as the ultimate controlling force in his life was a laughable lie. He controlled nothing, in the pattern of the greater universe. And yet that utter negation of his arrogant self-importance, which had made him blame himself for circumstances beyond his control—which had made him believe he was better off dead—had, in the end, freed him. He had witnessed the precarious balance between Order and Chaos in the universe, and realized that, as a free man, he could make his own choices, that he was only himself, and not his family’s honor, or his ancestors’ expectations.
He had decided then that he and he alone controlled one thing, and that was how he chose to live his life. He had chosen to work for Order, and against Chaos … to do the greater good, even in defiance of the laws of the Hegemony, if those laws were unjust. “How did you know?” he murmured.
“Your actions spoke for you.”
Gundhalinu sighed, like a man who had finally arrived home, feeling the tension flow out of him—tension that had become so profoundly a part of him that he could hardly believe it had gone. “Thank you,” he said, feeling his throat close over the words, “for showing me that I’m not alone.”
The Chief Justice smiled, and held up a hand. Gundhalinu raised his own hand, pressed it palm to palm in a pledge and a greeting. Somberly the other men touched hands with him.