Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 (14 page)

"
She loved Kensie
?" v

"I said—if she loved either of them… then. She was young, they were young. She had had them
around all her life. What was there about them to make her suddenly fall seriously in love with
either one of them? But then they graduated from the Academy and went off to the wars; and
when they came back, it was all different."

She paused.

"Different? How?" Hal said gently, to get her going again.

She sighed once more.

"It's not easy to describe," she said. "It's something that happens often, with the situation we have
here on the Dorsai. You grow up, knowing the boys of your district, and those from a lot of others.

And when they finally sign contracts and go off-planet, that's all they are, still—just tall boys. But
then, perhaps it's a year, or several, before they come home; and when they do you find they're…

different."

"You mean, they've become men."

"Not only men," she said, "but men you never thought might come from the boys you knew. Some
things you hardly noticed about them have moved forward in them and taken over. Other things
you thought were the most important part of what made them, have gone way back in them, or
been lost forever. They've grown up in ways you didn't expect. Suddenly, it's as if you never had
known them. They can be anybody… strangers."

Her voice had sunk so low that she seemed to be speaking more to herself than him; and her gaze
was on nothing.

"
You sit and talk with them, after they come home," she went on, "and you realize you're talking
to someone who's gone away from what was common to both of you and now has something that
has nothing to do with you, that you've never known and maybe never will know
…"

She looked at him. Her eyes were brilliant.

"And then you discover that the same thing that happened to them has happened to you. You were
a girl they grew up with when they left; but that girl is gone, gone forever. With you, too, some
things have come forward, other things have gone back or been lost forever. Now they sit talking
to a woman they don't know, that now they maybe never will know. And so, everything changes."

"I see," he said. "And it changed that much far the second Amanda and for Kensie and Ian?"

"Yes," she said, soberly. "They came back, two strangers, and fell in love with a stranger they had
once grown up with. With any other three people that would have been problem enough—but
those twins were half and half of each other, and Amanda knew it."

"What happened?"

The third Amanda, Hal's Amanda, did not answer. She had drawn her knees up to her chin, and
hugged them. Now she rested her chin upon her knees, staring down into the valley.

"What happened?" Hal asked again.

"Everybody had simply assumed that Kensie and Amanda would end up together," she said, at
last, "including Ian. When Ian found he was in love with Amanda himself, it was unthinkable to
him that he should interfere in any way with his twin brother. So he married Leah, who had
wanted him for a long time. Married her simply and quickly."

"And took himself out of the picture."

"No, "Amanda shook her head. "Because he had made a mistake. After the two of them had come
home, different, it wasn't Kensie, but Ian, that the

second Amanda had fallen in love with. Ian. Only with Ian being the kind of person he was, there
was no chance that, having once married Leah, that situation could ever be changed."

"
But you say
…"
began Hal puzzled, then checked himself. "But, if she had any love for Kensie at
all, what was to keep her from ending up with him? Certainly that would have been better than
the two of them—"

"The way they were." Amanda turned her head to look at Hal. "Kensie and Ian were too close not
to know each other's feelings; and Kensie loved Amanda as completely as Amanda loved Ian.

Knowing how she loved Ian, Kensie could not take the place he would have filled in her life if
things had been otherwise. He went back to the wars as if… he was too much a Dorsai to
deliberately put himself in the way of getting killed. But for all his brightness, he lived in the
shadow of death for years after that; and it seemed as if death was perversely avoiding him."

She looked away from him, down to the valley again.

"The Exotics say," she went on, "that there are ontogenetic laws which explain why someone like
Kensie could lead a charmed life under such conditions."

"Yes," said Hal. He had not realized how strangely he had said the word until he looked up and
saw her gazing at him.

"You know something about ontogenetics?" she asked. "Something that applies to the second
Amanda, and Ian and Kensie?"

"To Ian and Kensie, maybe," he said. The part of him that concerned itself with what he called
The

Purpose—that half-seen thing he must do with his life —was working powerfully, now; and he
heard his own words almost as if someone else was speaking them. "Ontogenetics merely says
nothing happens by chance or accident. Everything is interrelated. Stop and think. When Donal
Graeme was moving toward his goal of bringing all the inhabited worlds under one order, his
enemy was William of Ceta, just as Dow deCastries was the special opponent of Cletus
Grahame."

"Yes," Amanda frowned. "But what of it?"

"To defeat William, who had unlimited power and wealth, Donal needed to defeat all possible military opponents. To do that he needed a military force larger than had ever been seen on the inhabited worlds.

Only one other man could train that force as Donal needed it trained—and the rule in the Graeme household was that no two of their men served in the same place at the same time; far the same reason that a father and mother of young children may travel by different spacecraft, so that in case a phase
shift accident should take one of them, the other would still be there to take care of the children."

"But it was different with Ian and Kensie," Amanda said. "They were allowed to serve in the same
farce, together."

"
Until Kensie's death. Then the rule was broken once more by Eachan Khan Graeme, who you'll
remember was the family head, Donal's father and
Jan's
older brother." The Purpose-oriented
part of Hal's mind was in complete control of him, now. He went on, not noticing the sudden
intensity with which she was regarding him. "He asked
Donal to
find work with him for Ian, as the
only means of rousing Ian after his twin's death
."

She was watching him closely.

"You know a good deal about the Graemes," she said.

Suddenly aware of her attention, he grew flustered.

"I…
don't," he said. "I only know something about ontogenetics
."

"What you're saying adds up to the fact that Donal had Kensie killed to free Ian far his own use."

"No, no…" he protested. "Only Donal's need far Ian, acting on the network of cause and
effect—"

"No!" she said. "Do you think any such farces could combine to kill Kensie, and Ian wouldn't be
aware of it? They were one person, those twins!"

"But you said yourself that Kensie had been searching far death, ever since he had lost Amanda,"

he protested. "Maybe Ian simply, at last, let him go. You remember Kensie was assassinated.

Dorsai aren't easy to assassinate, unless they don't care any

"No!" the third Amanda said, again, almost violently. "That wasn't the way it was, at all. You
don't know… did you know that Tonias Velt, the Blau-vain chief of police, wrote Eachan Khan
Graeme afterwards, telling him the whole story? Velt was there and saw it all. Do you know what
he saw?"

"No," said Hal. The part of him concerned with The Purpose drew close to the front of his mind
and spoke through his lips almost against his will, as if it, not he, controlled them. "But I want to
know."

"
I'll tell you, then," said Amanda, "I'll tell it all to you, just as I read it when I was young—just as
Velt wrote it to Eachan Khan Graeme after Kensie's body had been shipped home here far burial

…"

BROTHERS

Physically, he was big, very big. The professional soldiers of several generations from that small, harsh world called the Dorsai, are normally larger than men from other worlds; but the Graemes are large even among the Dorsai. At the same time, like his twin brother, Ian, Commander Kensie Graeme was so well-proportioned in spite of his size that it was only at moments like this, when I saw him standing next to a fellow Dorsai like his executive officer, Colonel Charley ap Morgan, that I could realize how big he actually was. He had the black, curly hair of the Graemes, the heavy-boned face and brilliant grey-green eyes of his family, also, that utter stillness at rest and that startling swiftness in motion that was characteristic of the several-generations Dorsai.

So, too, had Ian, back in Blauvain; for physically the twins were the image of each other. But otherwise, temperamentally, their difference was striking. Everybody loved Kensie. He was like some golden god of the sunshine. While Ian was dark and solitary as the black ice of a glacier in a land where it was always night.

"… Blood," Pel Sinjin had said to me on our drive out here to the field encampment of the Expedition.

"You know what they say, Tom. Blood and ice water, half-and-half in his veins, is what makes a Dorsai.

But something must have gone wrong with those two when their mother was carrying them. Kensie got all the blood. Ian…"

He had let the sentence finish itself. Like Kensie's own soldiers, Pel had come to idolize the man, and downgrade Ian in proportion. I had let the matter slide.

Now, Kensie was smiling at us, as if there was some joke
we were
not yet in on.

"A welcoming committee?" he said. "Is that what you are?"

"Not exactly," I said. "We came out to talk about letting your men into Blauvain city for rest and relaxation; now that you've got those invading soldiers from the Friendly Worlds all rounded up, disarmed, and ready for shipment home—what's the joke?"

"Just," said Charley ap Morgan, "that we were on our way into Blauvain to see you. We just got a repeater message that you and other planetary officials here on St. Marie are giving Ian and Kensie, with their staffs, a surprise victory dinner in Blauvain this evening."

"Hells Bells!" I said..

"You hadn't been told?" Kensie asked.

"Not a damn word," I said.

It was typical of the fumbling of the so-called government-of-mayors we had here on our little world of St. Marie. Here was I, Superintendent of Police in Blauvain—our capital city—and here was Pel, commanding general of our planetary militia which had been in the field with the Exotic Expedition sent to rescue us from the invading puritan fanatics from the Friendly Worlds; and no one had bothered to tell either one of us about a dinner for the two Commanders of that Expedition.

"You're going in, then?" Pel asked Kensie. Kensie nodded. "I've got to call my HQ."

Pel went out. Kensie laughed.

"Well," he said, "this gives us a chance to kill two birds at once. We'll ride back with you and talk on the way. Is there some difficulty about Blauvain absorbing our men on leave?"

"Not that way," I said. "But even though the Friendlies have all been rounded up, the Blue Front is still with us in the shape of a good number of political outlaws and terrorists that want to pull down our present government. They lost the gamble they took when they invited in the Friendly troops; but now they may take advantage of any trouble that can be stirred up around your soldiers while they're on their
awn
in the city."

"There shouldn't be any," Kensie reached for a dress gunbelt of black leather and began to put it on over the white dress uniform he was already wearing. "But we can talk about it, if you like. —You'd better be doing some dressing yourself, Charley."

"On my way," said Charley ap Morgan; and went out.

So, fifteen minutes later, Pel and I found ourselves headed back the way we had come, this time with three passengers. I was still at the controls of the police car as we slid on its air cushion across the rich grass of our St. Marie summer toward Blau-vain; but Kensie rode with me in front, making me feel small beside him—and I am considered a large man among our own people on St. Marie. Beside Kensie, I must have looked like a fifteen year old boy in relative comparison. Pel was equally small in back between Charley and a Dorsai Senior Commandant named Chu Van Moy—a heavy-bodied, black Mongol, if you can imagine such a man, from the Dorsai South Continent.

"… No real problem," Kensie was saying as
we
left the grass at last for the vitreous road surface leading us in among the streets and roads of the city—in particular the road curving in between the high office buildings; of Blauvain's West Industrial Park, now just half a kilometer ahead, "we'll turn the men loose in small groups if
you
say. But there shouldn't be any need to worry. They're mercenaries, and a mercenary knows that civilians pay his wages. He's not going to make any trouble which would give his profession a bad name."

"I don't worry about your men," I said. "It's the Blue Front fabricating some trouble in the vicinity of some of your men and then trying to pin the blame on them, that worries me. The only way to guard against that is to have your troops in small enough numbers so that my policemen can keep an eye on the civilians around them."