I ought to feel indignation. I don’t, though. Nor do I feel guilty that I don’t.
Well, I’m not revengeful, either. At least, not very much. I do remember how Trohdwyr died because he was an inconvenience; I remember how Mihail Svetich died, in a war Flandry says our enemies want to kindle anew.
Flandry says—She heard him from afar, fast and pedantic. Had he rehearsed his speech?
“This is not a hypnoprobe here, of course. It puts a human straight into quasisleep and stimulates memory activity, after a drug has damped inhibitions and emotions. In effect, everything the organism has permanently recorded becomes accessible to a questioner—assuming no deep conditioning against it. The process takes more time and skill than an ordinary quiz, where all that’s wanted is something the subject consciously knows but isn’t willing to tell. Psychiatrists use it to dig out key, repressed experiences in severely disturbed patients. I’ve mainly used it to get total accounts, generally from cooperative witnesses—significant items they may have noticed but forgotten. In your case, we’d best go in several fairly brief sessions, spaced three or four watches apart. That way you can assimilate your regained knowledge and avoid a crisis. The sessions will give you no pain and leave no recollection of themselves.”
She brought her whole attention to him. “Do you play the tapes for me when I wake?” she asked.
“I could,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you prefer I wiped them? You see, when our questions have brought out a coherent framework of what was buried, a simple command will fix it in your normal memory. By association, that will recover everything else. You’ll come to with full recall of whatever episode we concentrated on.”
His eyes dwelt gravely upon her. “You must realize,” he continued, “your whole life will be open to us. We’ll try hard to direct our questioning so we don’t intrude. However, there’s no avoiding all related and heavily charged items. You’ll blurt many of them out. Besides, we’ll have to feel our way. Is such-and-such a scrap of information from your recent, bad past—or is it earlier, irrelevant? Often we’ll need to develop a line of investigation for some distance before we can be sure.
“We’re bound to learn things you’ll wish we didn’t. You’ll simply have to take our word that we’ll keep silence ever afterward … and, yes, pass no judgment, lest we be judged by ourselves.
“Do you really want that, Kossara?”
She nodded with a stiff neck. “I want the truth.”
“You can doubtless learn enough for practical purposes by talking to the Gospodar, if he’s alive and available when we reach Dennitza. And I make no bones: one hope of mine is gaining insight into the modus operandi of Merseian Intelligence, a few clear identifications of their agents among us … for the benefit of the Empire.
“I won’t compel you,” Flandry finished. “Please think again before you decide.”
She squared her shoulders. “I have thought.” Holding out her hand: “Give me the medicine.”
The first eventide, her feet dragged her into the saloon. Flandry saw her disheveled, drably clad, signs of weeping upon her, against the stars. She had long been in her own room behind a closed door.
“You needn’t eat here, you know,” he said in his gentlest tone.
“Thank you, but I will,” she answered.
“I admire your courage more than I have words to tell, dear. Come, sit down, take a drink or three before dinner.” Since he feared she might refuse, lest that seem to herself like running away from what was in her, he added, “Trohdwyr would like a toast to his manes, wouldn’t he?”
She followed the suggestion in a numb way. “Will the whole job be this bad?” she asked.
“No.” He joined her, pouring Merseian telloch for them both though he really wanted a Mars-dry martini. “I was afraid things might go as they went, the first time, but couldn’t see any road around. You did witness Trohdwyr’s murder, he suffered hideously, and he’d been your beloved mentor your whole life. The pain wasn’t annulled just because your thalamus was temporarily anesthetized. Being your strongest lost memory, already half in consciousness, it came out ahead of any others. And it’s still so isolated it feels like yesterday.”
She settled wearily back. “Yes,” she said. “Before, everything was blurred, even that. Now … the faces, the whole betrayal—”
{Nobody died in the cave except Trohdwyr. The rest stood by when a mere couple of marines arrived to arrest her. “You called them!” she screamed to the one who bore the name Steve Johnson, surely not his own. He grinned. Trohdwyr lunged, trying to get her free, win her a chance to scramble down the slope and vanish. The lieutenant blasted him. The life in his tough old body had not ebbed out, under the red moons, when they pulled her away from him.
Afterward she overheard Johnson: “Why’d you kill the servant? Why not take him along?”
And the lieutenant: “He’d only be a nuisance. As is, when the Diomedeans find him, they won’t get suspicious at your disappearance. They’ll suppose the Terrans caught you. Which should make them handier material. For instance, if we want any of those who met you here to go guerrilla, our contact men can warn them they’ve been identified through data pulled out of you prisoners.”
“Hm, what about us four?”
“They’ll decide at headquarters. I daresay they’ll reassign you to a different region. Come on, now, let’s haul mass.” The lieutenant’s boot nudged Kossara, where she slumped wrist-bound against the cold cave wall. “On your feet, bitch!”}
“His death happened many weeks ago,” Flandry said. “Once you get more memories back, you’ll see it, feel it in perspective—including time perspective. You’ll have done your grieving … which you did, down underneath; and you’re too healthy to mourn forever.”
“I will always miss him,” she whispered.
Flandry regarded ghosts of his own. “Yes, I know.”
She straightened. He saw her features harden, as if bones lent strength to flesh. The blue-green eyes turned arctic. “Sir Dominic, you were right in what you did to Snell. Nobody in that gang was—is—fit to live.”
“Well, we’re in a war, we and they, the nastier for being undeclared,” he said carefully. “What you and I must do, if we can, is keep the sickness from infecting your planet. Or to the extent it has, if I may continue the metaphor, we’ve got to supply an antibiotic before the high fever takes hold and the eruptions begin.”
His brutal practicality worked as he had hoped, to divert her from both sorrow and rage. “What do you plan?” The question held some of the crispness which ordinarily was hers.
“Before leaving Diomedes,” he said, “I contacted Lagard’s field office on Lannach, transmitted a coded message for him to record, and showed him my authority to command immediate courier service. The message is directly to the Emperor. The code will bypass channels. In summary, it says, ‘Hold off at Dennitza, no matter what you hear, till I’ve collected full information’—followed by a synopsis of all I’ve learned thus far.”
She began faintly to glow in her exhaustion. “Why, wonderful.”
“M-m-m, not altogether, I’m afraid.” Flandry let the telloch savage his throat. “Remember, by now his Majesty’s barbarian-quelling on the Spican frontier. He’ll move around a lot. The courier may not track him down for a while. Meantime—the Admiralty on Terra may get word which provokes it to emergency action, without consulting Emperor or Policy Board. It has that right, subject to a later court of inquiry. And I’ve no direct line there. Probably make no difference if I did. Maybe not even any difference what I counsel Hans. I’m a lone agent. They could easily decide I must be wrong.”