Pirius was uncomfortable; this talk of “brothers” was seriously non-Doctrinal. “Sir, I wouldn’t know about brothers. I grew up in cadres.”
“Of course you did. Popped from the birthing tanks, placed in a training cadre, plucked out and moved on, over and over! You don’t know what it’s like to have a brother — how could you? But I know,” he said, and sighed. “There are corners, even on Earth itself, where people find room to do things the old way. Of course I had to give all that up when I joined the Commission. How unfortunate for you; if only your cultural background were richer, it might help you cope better now. Don’t you think?”
None of this meant much to Pirius. “Sir, please—”
“You want to know what an old buffoon like me is doing all the way out here.” He smiled. “I volunteered. As soon as I heard the particulars of the case, I knew I had to get involved. I volunteered to act as counsel to you and your twin.”
“But why?”
“You know that I’m a Commissary.” That meant he worked for the Commission for Historical Truth, the grand, ancient agency dedicated to upholding the purity of the Druz Doctrines — a task it performed with persuasion and force, with zeal and dedication. “What you probably don’t know is that the Commission itself has many divisions. The Commission is thousands of years old, Pirius. Astonishing when you think of it! The Commission has lasted longer than many of Earth’s civilizations. And it has grown into a very old, very tangled, bureaucratic tree.
“I work for a department called the Office of Technological Archival and Control. We’re a sort of technological think tank. If somebody gets a bright idea on Alpha Centauri III, we make sure it’s passed on to Tau Ceti IV.” These were places Pirius had never heard of. “But the name says everything: Archival and Control. Not a word about innovation, eh? Or development? The Commission’s cold hand is at our throats, and our opportunity to think is restricted. Because that’s the last thing the high-ups want us to do. Oh, yes, the very last. And that’s why I’m here. Do you see?”
Pirius tried to pick his way through all this. “No, sir, I don’t.”
“I heard about your heroics — or rather, Pirius Blue’s. I knew that to have captured a Xeelee, even to have survived such an encounter, he must have innovated. He must have found some new way of striking back at our perennial foe. And I’ve come to find out what that is. Of course, I’m unqualified for the job, and from the wrong corner of the Commission. I had to fight my way through a few administrative thickets to get this far, I can tell you.”
Out of all that, one word stuck dismayingly in Pirius’s mind: unqualified.
“But why is all this so important to you — to Earth?”
Nilis sighed. “Pirius, have you no sense of history? Perhaps not — you young soldiers are so brave, but so limited in your horizons! Have you any idea at all how long this war has been going on — how long this Front has been stalled here? And then there are the deaths, Pirius, the endless deaths. And for what?”
“The Xeelee are powerful. FTL foreknowledge leads to stalemate—”
Nilis waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. That’s the standard justification. But we have got used to this stasis. Most people can’t imagine any other way of conducting the war. But I can. And that’s why I am here. Listen to me. Don’t you worry about this absurd trial. I’ll get you both cleared — you and your older twin. And then we’ll see what we will see — eh?”
Pirius stared, bemused. He was no fool, and in fact had been selected for pilot training because of his capacity for independent thought. But he had never in his life come across anybody as strange as this Commissary, and could make nothing of what he said. Bewildered, disoriented, he longed only to be out of here, out of Officer Country, and back in the great orderly warmth of the Barracks Ball, safe under his sheets’ coarse fabric with Torec.
Pirius had to wait an agonizing week for the trial to be called. He tried to immerse himself in the mundane routines of his training.
Arches was under the control of the Training and Discipline Command, jointly run by the Navy and the Green Army, and every child hatched here was born into the Navy’s service. Most were destined to live out their lives performing simple services, administrative or technical support. But at the age of eight, a few, a precious few, were filtered out by a ruthless program of tests and screening, and submitted for officer training.
Pirius had made it through that filtering. Now his life was crammed with instruction in mathematics, science, technology, tactics, games theory, engineering, Galactic geography, multispecies ethics,
even Doctrinal philosophy — as well as a stiff program of physical development. But at the end of it was the prospect of serving the Navy in a senior and responsible role, perhaps as technical or administrative ground crew of some sort, or better yet in one of the prized flight roles — and best of all, as Pirius already knew was his own destiny, as a pilot. After that, if you prospered, there was the possibility of moving on to command, or, if you were invalided out, you could expect a role on the ground, or even in Training Command itself, like Captain Seath.
For young people primed from birth with the importance of duty, no better life could be imagined.
But none of this would come to pass if Pirius flunked his training, no matter what destiny FTL foreknowledge described for him. So Pirius tried to keep working. But his mind wasn’t on it, and as rumors spread about his predicament, his friends and rivals — even Torec — kept their distance.
He was relieved when the trial finally started. But, despite Nilis’s confidence, it didn’t go well.
The hearing was convened in a dedicated courtroom, a spherical chamber close to the geometric center of Officer Country. The judges, officers of the court, advocates and counsels, witnesses, and defendants took their places in tiered seats around the equator of the sphere. The central section was left open for Virtual displays of evidence. As mandated by custom and enshrined in Coalition law, the judging panel contained representatives from many of the great agencies of mankind: the Commission, of course, the Green Army, who governed the destinies of the millions of Rock-bound infantrymen, and the Navy, of which Pirius Blue’s Strike Arm was a section.
Before the trial opened, the president of the court, a grizzled Army general, gave a short instruction about the formal use of language: specifically, the use of historic tenses to describe events occurring in the “past” of Pirius Blue’s personal timeline, though they were in the future of the court itself.
Nilis leaned toward Pirius Red. “Even our language strains to fit the reality of time paradoxes,” he said. “But we try, we try!”
At first it wasn’t so bad: it was even interesting. Prompted by an advocate, Pirius Blue, the Pirius from the future, talked the court through a Virtual light-show dramatization of the incident in question, drawn from the ship’s log and the crew’s eyewitness accounts. The court watched Pirius’s withdrawal under fire from the line around the Rock barrage, his flight to Sag A East, the spectacular showdown with the Xeelee. From time to time he referred to his crew, Cohl the navigator and Tuta the engineer, to clarify details or correct mistakes. The show was stop-start, and if a clarification was conceded it would be incorporated into the draft of the Virtual sequence and that section run again.
Pirius himself — Pirius Red — watched intently. He felt intimidated that a version of himself, only a few years older, had been capable of this.