It was quite true. The vital currency between worlds was not wealth, as every schoolchild knows, but the exchange of interplanetary work credits. The in habited worlds trade special skills and knowledges, packaged in human individuals; and the exchange credits earned by a Dorsai on Newton enables the Dorsai to hire a geophysicist from Newton - or a physician from Kultis. In addition to his personal pay, Michael had been earning exchange credits ever since he had come here. True, he might have earned these at a higher rate if he had chosen work as a mercenary combat officer; but the exchange credits he did earn as bandmaster more than justified the expense of his education and training.
"I'm not talking about that - " he began.
"No," I said, "you're talking about a point of ob ligation and honor not very much removed from the sort of thing these Naharese have tied themselves up with."
He stood for a second, absorbing that. But his mouth was tight and his jaw set.
"What you're telling me," he said at last, "is that you don't want to listen. I'm not surprised."
"Now," I said, "you really are talking like a Naharese I'll listen to anything you want to say, of course "
"Then sit down," he said.
He gestured to the rampart and sat down himself. I came and perched there, opposite him.
"Do you know I'm a happy man?" he demanded. "I really am. Why not? I've got everything I want. I've got a military job, I'm in touch with all the things that I grew up feeling made the kind of life one of my family ought to have. I'm one of a kind I'm better at what I do and everything connected with it than anyone else they can find - and I've got my other love, which was music, as my main duty. My men like me, my regiment is proud of me. My superiors like me."
I nodded.
"But then there's this other part. . ." His hands closed on the bag of the gaita, and there was a faint sound from the drone.
"Your refusal to fight?"
"Yes." He got up from the ramparts and began to pace back and forth, holding the instrument, talking a little jerkily. "This feeling against hurting anything... I had it, too, just as long as I had the other - all the dreams I made up as a boy from the stories the older people in the family told me. When I was young it didn't seem to matter to me that the feeling and the dreams hit head on. It just always happened that, in my own personal visions the battles I won were always bloodless, the victories always came with no one get ting hurt. I didn't worry about any conflict in me, then. I thought it was something that would take care of itself later, as I grew up. You don't kill anyone when you're going through the Academy, of course. You know as well as I do that the better you are, the less of a danger you are to your fellow-students. But what was in me didn't change. It was there with me all the time, not changing."
"No normal person likes the actual fighting and killing," I said. "What sets us Dorsai off in a class by ourselves is the fact that most of the time we can win bloodlessly, where someone else would have dead bodies piled all over the place. Our way justifies itself to our employers by saving them money; but it also gets us away from the essential brutality of combat and keeps us human. No good officer pins medals on himself in proportion to the people he kills and wounds. Remember what Cletus says about that? He hated what you hate, just as much."
"But he could do it when he had to," Michael stopped and looked at me with a face, the skin of which was drawn tight over the bones. "So can you, now. Or Ian. Or Kensie."
That was true, of course. I could not deny it.
"You see," said Michael, "that's the difference between out on the worlds and back at the Academy. In life, sooner or later, you get to the killing part. Sooner or later, if you live by the sword, you kill with the sword. When I graduated and had to face going out to the worlds as a fighting officer, I finally had to make that decision. And so I did. I can't hurt anyone. I won't hurt anyone - even to save my own life, I think. But at the same time I'm a soldier and nothing else. I'm bred and born a soldier. I don't want any other life, I can't conceive of any other life; and I love it."
He broke off, abruptly. For a long moment he stood, staring out over the plains at the distant flashes of light from the camp of the deserted regiments.
"Well, there it is," he said.
"Yes," I said.
He turned to look at me.
"Will you tell my family that?" he asked. "If you should get home and I don't?"
"If it comes to that, I will," I said. "But we're a long way from being dead, yet."
He grinned, unexpectedly, a sad grin.
"I know," he said. "It's just that I've had this on my conscience for a long time. You don't mind?"
"Of course not."
"Thanks," he said.
He hefted the gaita in his hands as if he had just suddenly remembered that he held it.
"My men will be back out here in about fifteen minutes," he said "I can carry on with the drilling myself, if you've got other things you want to do."
I looked at him a little narrowly.
"What you're trying to tell me," I said, "is that they'll learn faster if I'm not around."
"Something like that." He laughed. "They're used to me; but you make them self-conscious. They tighten up and keep making the same mistakes over and over again; and then they get into a fury with themselves and do even worse. I don't know if Ian would approve, but I do know these people; and I think I can bring them along faster alone. . ."
"Whatever works," I said. "I'll go and see what else Ian can find for me to do."
I turned and went to the door that would let me back into the interior of Gebel Nahar.
"Thank you again," he called after me. There was a note of relief in his voice that moved me more strongly than I had expected, so that instead of telling him that what I had done in listening to him was nothing at all, I simply waved at him and went inside.
I found my way back to Ian's office, but he was not there. It occurred to me, suddenly, that Kensie, Padma or Amanda might know where he had gone - and they should all be at work in other offices of that same suite.
I went looking, and found Kensie with his desk covered with large scale printouts of terrain maps.
"Ian?" he said. "No, I don't know. But he ought to be back in his office soon. I'll have some work for you tonight, by the way. I want to mine the approach slope. Michael's bandsmen can do the actual work, after they've had some rest from the day; but you and I are going to need to go out first and make a sweep to pick up any observers they've sent from the regiments to camp outside our walls. Then, later, before dawn I'd like some of us to do a scout of that camp of theirs on the plains and get some hard ideas as to how many of them there are, what they have to attack with, and so on. . ."
"Fine," I said. "I'm all slept up now, myself. Call on me when you want me."
"You could try asking Amanda or Padma if they know where Ian is."
"I was just going to."
Amanda and Padma were in a conference room two doors down from Kensie's office, seated at one end of a long table covered with text printouts and with an activated display screen flat in its top. Amanda was studying the screen and they both looked up as I put my head in the door. But while Padma's eyes were sharp and questioning, Amanda's were abstract, like the eyes of someone refusing to be drawn all the way back from whatever was engrossing her.
"Just a question. . ." I said.
"I'll come," Padma said to me. He turned to Amanda. "You go on."
She went back to her contemplation of the screen without a word. Padma got up and came to me, step ping into the outside room and shutting the door be hind him.