"Does this Auk that you know have many friends besides you, Patera?"
"I'm sure he must. There's a man named Gib-a larger man even than Auk, now that I come to think of it. And one of our sibyls is certainly Auk's friend."
"We'll leave her out. Suppose I had to fight you and Auk and this other bio Gib, and all three of you had slug guns."
Still anxious not to offend. Silk said, "I would think that any outcome would be possible."
Hammerstone straightened up and took a step toward Silk, looming above him. "You're right. Maybe I'd kill all three of you, or maybe you'd kill me and never get a scratch doing it. But what would you say's most likely? I'm telling you right now that if you lie to me, I'm not going to be as nice to you as I been up till now, and you best think some about that before you answer. So what about it? The three of you against me, and we've all got guns."
Silk shrugged. "If you wish. I certainly don't know a great deal about fighting, but it would seem to me probable that you would kill one or two of us, but that you would be killed yourself-in the process, so to speak."
Hammerstone threw back his head in another grin. "You don't scare easy, do you, Patera?"
"On the contrary, I'm a rather timid man. I was quite frightened when I said that-as I still am-but it was what you had asked me for, the truth."
"How many bios in Viron, Patera?"
"I don't know. "Silk paused, stroking his cheek. "What an interesting question! I've never actually thought about it."
"You're a smart man, I've seen that already, and it's been a long time since I spent much time in the city. How many would you say?"
Silk continued to stroke his cheek. "Ideally we-the Chapter, I mean-would like to have a manteion for each five thousand residents, and these days nearly all of those residents would be bios-there are a few chems left, of course, but the number is probably less than one in twenty. I believe that there are a hundred and seventeen manteions in current operation. That was the figure, at least, when I was at the schola."
"Five hundred and fifty-five thousand, seven hundred and fifty," Hammerstone told him. "But the actual ratio is much higher. Certainly over six thousand, and perhaps as high as eight or nine."
"All right, let's say six thousand bios," Hammerstone decided, "since you sound pretty sure it's more than that. That's seven hundred and two thousand bios. Suppose that half are sprats, all right? And half the rest are females, and not enough of them will fight to make much difference. That leaves a hundred and seventy-five thousand five hundred males. Say half those are too old or too sick, or they run off. That's eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty. You see what I'm getting at, Patera?"
Bewildered by the deluge of figures, Silk shook his head.
"You and me said three to one would probably end up with me dead. All right, eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty against thirty-five hundred tinpots, which is about what we think Wick's got, just to grab a for instance, makes it about twenty-five to one."
"I believe I'm beginning to understand," Silk said.
Hammerstone aimed a finger as thick as a crowbar at his face. "That's everybody that'll fight. Take just the Guard. Five brigades?"
"They're forming a new one," Silk told him, "a reserve brigade, which will make six."
"Six brigades, with four or maybe five thousand troopers in each of them. So what matters if there's a new war soon, Patera? Us tinpots, or the Ayuntamiento, that gives the Guard its orders and could pass out slug guns to half the bios in Viron if it wanted to?"
Lost in thought, Silk did not reply.
"You know now, Patera, and so do we. These days we're an elite corps, where we used to be the whole show. Come on, I want to show you those replacements."
At the back of that wide and lofty arsenal, in the racks nearest the rear wall, lay soldiers swaddled in dirty sheets of polymer, their limbs smeared with some glutinous brownish black preservative. Full of wonder, Silk stooped to examine the nearest, blowing at the dust and cobwebs, and (when that proved insufficient) wiping them away with his sleeve. "One company," Hammerstone announced with casual pride, "still exactly like they came out of Final Assembly."
"He's never spoken a word, or ... or sat up and looked around? Not in three hundred years?"
"A little longer than that. They were stockpiling us for maybe twenty years before we ever went on board." This man had come into being at about the same time as Maytera Marble, Silk reflected-had come to be at the same time that Hammerstone himself had, for that matter. Now she was old and worn and not far from death; but Hammerstone was still young and strong, and this man still unborn.
"We could wake him up right now," Hammerstone explained, "just yell in his ear a little and beat on his chest. Don't do it though."
"I won't." Silk straightened up. "That would start his mental processes?"
"They're started already, Patera. They had to do that at Final Assembly to make sure everything worked. So they just left them on. Only turned way down, if you know what I mean, so there's practically no reduction in parts life at all. He knows we're here, kind of. He's listening to us talking, but it doesn't mean a lot to him and he won't think about it. The good thing is that if there's ever an emergency like a fire in here, he'd wake up, and he'd have his Standing Orders."
"There's a question about all those things you told me earlier that I'm anxious to ask you," Silk said. "Several questions, really, and I hope very much that you won't be angry, although you may consider them impolite; but before I do, is it the same for all these other soldiers sleeping in these racks?"
"Not exactly." Hammerstone sounded troubled, reminding Silk of his dissatisfaction with the Ayuntamiento. "When you've been awake for a while it's harder to shut down. I guess because there's so much more that's got started up. You know what I mean?"
Silk nodded. "I think so."
"At first it just seems to you like you're just lying there. You think something's wrong and you're not going to sleep at all and you might as well get up. You never quite do, but that's how you think. So then you think, well, I got nothing better to do, so I'll just go over some the best stuff that happened, like the time Schist got the shell in backwards. And it goes on like that, except that after a while it's not quite the way it really happened, and maybe you're somebody else." Hammerstone made an odd, unfinished gesture. "I can't really explain it."
"On the contrary," Silk told him, "I would say you've explained it very well indeed."
"And it keeps getting darker. There's something else I wanted to show you, Patera. Come on, we got to follow this back wall a ways to see it."
"Just a moment, please, my son." Silk put his right foot on the lowest transverse bar of the rack and unwound Crane's wrapping. "May I ask those questions I mentioned while I take care of this?"
"Sure. Shoot."
"Some time ago, you mentioned a major who would decide whether to put me under arrest. I assume that he's the highest-ranking officer awake?"
Hammerstone nodded. "He's the real C.Q., the Officer in Charge of Quarters. The sergeant and me and all the rest of us are really the O.C.Q.'s detail. But we say we're on C.Q. It's just the way everybody talks about it."
"I understand. My question is why is this major-or any officer-an officer, while you're a corporal? Why is Sand a sergeant, for that matter? It seems to me that all of you soldiers should be interchangeable."
Hammerstone stood silent and motionless for so long that Silk became embarrassed. "I apologize, my son. I was afraid that was going to sound insulting, although it wasn't intended to be, and it emerged worse even than I had feared. I withdraw the question."
"It isn't that, Patera. It's just that I was thinking everything over before I shot off my mouth. It's not like there was only the one answer."