Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

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.