CAN YOU STOP IT CAN you stop it I said I order you to stop it. The Cutter only looked at me and of course I know the progression cannot be stopped. But she opened her past-eyes and said Kwler had asked her that. She said nothing about Tlorr but maybe Tlorr has asked a different Cutter. This one said though I had chosen her carefully because she is old enough she must have doubted, she must doubt but she said. We are to live in the day and Abundant God gives us forgetfulness to make it easier to obey. I wonder what she thought, explaining a fundamental directive of God to a Commander so old, but she knew what she was supposed to say.
That is what I believed when I did not have so many summers, when I did not have many summers at all, and maybe I was wrong and she is not old enough, Prookt should be old enough but evidently he is not, and maybe this Cutter believes as Prookt believes. And maybe they are right and my doubts wrong.
It is hard coming to this, I look at Kwler and remember what he was, I look at Tlorr and know she moves inexorably toward the place where Kwler has already gone and I also move toward it no matter how intensely I do not want to. I remember the summers before Kwler changed, I remember a summer when we talked about going to That Place—how long will I remember that talk, it will not be long, I think.
If we had gone
• • •
Hanna put out a hand to activate transmission to Rowtt, and stopped. After a while the man next to her—he was always next to her in Communications, no matter when she was there, slipping into place as soon as she came in—said her name. She turned her head slowly, and looked at him.
“Are you all right?” he said.
Hanna nodded. He was Metra’s spy. She seldom spoke to him unless he spoke to her, and not always then. He didn’t care, as long as he knew what she was doing.
Hanna noticed her suspended hand. It didn’t seem to have enough joints. She drew it back. There were beings she would rather feel a bond with than Kwoort. If the last minutes were an indicator, however, she might not have the choice.
“Do you know where Gabriel Guyup’s quarters are?” she asked Metra’s man, and of course he did.
Gabriel woke with the reader draped over his chest. He had drifted into sleep and let it fall. It was his second day on Endeavor, and he had spent nearly all the time studying what Endeavor had learned so far. Sleep had caught up with him; the door might have been sounding the entry request for a long time.
He stumbled to it, conscious of uneasy dreams that fled as he tried to seize them. “Enter,” he said, and remembered at the last second to push his hair out of his eyes.
“Oh!” he said—idiotically, he thought too late. Hanna ril-Koroth looked up at him with an odd expression on her face.
“Not ril-Koroth,” she said. “Bassanio. I resigned from Koroth’s House.”
“Oh, that’s right, I knew that—” Worse and worse. “Come in, come in!”
He didn’t think at once of offering her a seat; by the time he did she was leaning against the wall, hands behind her. She was dressed with stark simplicity, but before her hands disappeared he saw the blue gleam of the ring that he knew (from his half-guilty perusal of her life) had excited so much comment.
“I want you to come with me to the surface,” she said abruptly.
“Me?”
“Why not?”
Gabriel was having as much trouble waking up as usual. He grasped for words that tried to elude him. “I’m not—trained. I haven’t even been through your program, I’d like to do that if I could get permission, but it’s not relevant to what I do, if I keep doing it—”
He was babbling.
“This is a better way to learn,” she said calmly. “You can skip the preliminaries.”
“I thought I would, I don’t know, be analyzing things.”
“Oh, there are plenty of people to do the analyzing! But there’s not a single other soul on board who might be able to talk to these people about a god. Do you think you could pass yourself off as a human version of a Holy Man?”
There were so many things wrong with that proposition that he didn’t know which one to point out first. No one knew yet exactly what function Soldiers’ Holy Men served. He couldn’t imagine passing himself off as a holy anything, and the implied dishonesty was repellent. Before he could decide what to object to first, she pushed off from the wall, ready to leave.
“Go to Kit Mortan and get a crash course in using a translator. I think Kwoort’s at leisure; I’ll see if he can spare us some time.”
“Now?”
“If he’ll see us. Don’t worry.” She smiled at him, the first real smile he had seen on her face. It blinded him; he closed his eyes and made himself concentrate on what she said next. “Engage him in a real dialogue about their beliefs, if you can. I want to—observe.”
“Snoop in his mind,” Gabriel translated, not knowing what he said; it might have been nonsense for all he knew.
Her eyebrows went up.
“Observe,” she said firmly. “Anyway, I’m not supposed to go down there alone. Starr found out I did it again and made it clear what he thought about that. He’ll be easier to get along with if you come with me.”
“Starr?—oh, the director.”
“Commissioner. You might as well get used to calling him commissioner. I have to,” she said, obviously not happy about it, and went out.