Though the Enchantress in no way resembled any woman the woodcutter’s sons had seen before, she was in her own manner quite beautiful. She was tall, as tall as Georyn himself, and she was clothed all in silvery green; and her garments were not women’s garments nor yet men’s either, but were unique. Dark and shining was her hair, and it fell not to her shoulders, but rather made a soft halo of waves around her face. And that face was a strange elfin face, yet radiant, and Georyn knew without question that whatever magic she practiced was good magic.
“Whither do you travel, my friends?” asked the Enchantress, and though the tongue in which she spoke was unknown to them, the brothers had no doubt as to her words’ meaning. It was as if, coming from her, any language in the world would be understood; for there was a charm upon her speech.
“We go to ask the King’s blessing, for we plan to slay the Dragon and claim the King’s reward,” Georyn replied quickly.
“Dragon? Tell me of this!” the Enchantress exclaimed, seeming somewhat surprised.
The eldest brother began, “It is a terrible monster, and its mere breath is fire, and many men have been lost in the attempt to kill it; yet we shall surely conquer the beast.”
But Georyn took a step forward, asking, “Do you not already know of the Dragon, Lady, and are you not simply measuring us? For it is my guess that you know much that we have not even glimpsed.”
The Enchantress smiled. “You have guessed truly. I have indeed heard of this Dragon; perhaps I have heard more than you would care to know. Let us speak no more of it. Tell me, what reward do you desire, if you succeed in this quest?”
“I shall ask the King for many servants,” answered the eldest brother.
“And I,” added the next, “shall ask for chests of gold.”
The next brother said, “I shall ask that a fine lady may be my bride.”
There was a pause, and turning to Georyn the Lady asked, “And you, what do you seek of the King?”
Georyn hesitated. “I seek knowledge, that I may be the wisest man in the kingdom.” He had never admitted this openly before.
“I must warn you,” the Enchantress told the brothers, “that if you persist in this venture, you will be in constant danger and will meet with many misfortunes; and it is likely that you will perish.”
“That does not frighten us,” said the eldest brother, with unconcealed pride.
“When the time comes, you will be afraid.”
“Not so!” cried the brothers in protest. “We shall never know fear!” But Georyn knew that the Enchantress spoke truth, and he said to her, “We will be afraid, yet still we shall defeat the Dragon.”
And thereupon the elder brothers turned to go; but Georyn did not wish to leave without knowing more of the Enchantress, for he found himself drawn to her as he had never before been drawn to any maiden. Moreover, he was sure that whatever she knew of the Dragon, he would care to know, if he was to fight the beast. “Lady,” he said boldly, “have you any advice for us, as to how the Dragon may best be overcome?”
She paused, and her eyes were far away, as if she listened to some silent voice that no one else could hear. At length she said, “I can tell you nothing now. But I will make you a promise. If a time ever comes when you can proceed no further in this quest without aid, return to me, and I may then be able to help you. For I have knowledge of many things that are hidden from your people; and if you are indeed the ones destined to rid the world of this Dragon, that knowledge may be of greater value to you than anything the King can give.”
The woodcutter’s sons offered their thanks to the Enchantress, but underneath they smiled, for who can balance the worth of wisdom against the wealth and power of the King? Only Georyn believed that magic is not to be scoffed at, and he said, “I will remember your promise, Lady, and I will make you one of my own: I will surely return when the proper time has come.”
So with these words to the Lady, Georyn continued on his way; but as he went into the trees he looked back at her, and he hoped that the time would be soon.
Just after sunset, we went out into the meadow and stood in the place where Ilura had stood, ankle-deep in the fresh green grass of Andrecia. Though the actual memorial rites would be held aboard the starship when we returned, the brief, formal words that we of the Service say on such occasions could not be left unsaid. These are resolute words, designed to close a door firmly and with haste. For in the field there is no time for mourning. You must put it out of your mind and go on with the job. Anyone who is experienced in such matters knows this; Ilura herself would have been the last one to question it. But to me it seemed cold and unfeeling, and my eyes were wet with tears that rose as much from indignation as from honest grief. Not that the others were unmoved; Evrek looked more stern and withdrawn than I had ever seen him, and I noticed that as Father spoke, he fingered the Emblem.
Later, when we had eaten something and had set up housekeeping, so to speak, in the hut, we went outdoors again; and there, on the stony slope beside the river, we built a small fire. Dry wood was plentiful in the outskirts of the forest; Evrek and I gathered armloads in only a few minutes. Apparently few Andrecians came here. Our woodcutters must have been far from home.
We sat down close to the warm solace of the flames. It was nearly dark now, and the woods seemed gloomy and a little forbidding. “Are we safe here?” I asked. “Won’t anyone see the fire?”
“I doubt if the Imperials will stray this far from their camp again,” Father said. “Certainly they won’t at night. And anyway, if they do come here, our hutful of equipment is danger enough.” He did not add what I now know to be the truth, that a quick means of getting rid of the hutful of equipment was continuously at his disposal.
“What about Andrecians?” I persisted.
“If they find us, it won’t be a disaster.”
For a while we didn’t talk much except to make brief, inane comments on our surroundings; I guess nobody wanted to be the first to broach the subject of what lay ahead of us. Avoiding even mental contact, we concentrated on the look and feeling of the alien world. Your first night on an unfamiliar planet is always an experience in itself. I’ve been told that this is true even to those jaded by journeys to the far reaches of the universe.
Then, abruptly, Father grinned at Evrek and at me and said cheerfully, “One tired old agent, one brand-new one on his first mission, and a trainee who isn’t even sworn! It looks like a hopeless cause, doesn’t it?”
We laughed, sensing that that was what he wanted, though I’d been thinking in pretty much those terms with less levity. And it cleared the air a bit, enough for Father to go on. “All right. There’s a lot to talk over. We have some plans to make, and—well, an important matter to tend to, later this evening. Because tomorrow morning we’ve got to be ready to take constructive steps.”
“What can we do without Ilura?” asked Evrek. “She was the essential link.”
“I’ve got some ideas,” Father assured him.
“I won’t like them if they include Elana,” Evrek commented darkly. “Can we ask now what that contact was all about?” We hadn’t discussed my adventure with the woodcutters; Father had made it plain that he preferred to wait.
“It was just a little experiment to see how well Elana can communicate with the Andrecians,” he told us now. “That’s something I had to know.” Turning to me, he explained, “The original plan depended on Ilura’s ability to pass as Andrecian. Now we’ve got to feel our way, improvise. But that’s usually how these things end up, anyway.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand anything that’s going on,” I confessed. “I don’t even see what we’re aiming for. What can we do against all those invaders if we can’t use weapons or let them know we’re here?”
“Elana, there’s one point you’ve got to get straight right away,” he said curtly. “We’re not against the colonists. Though we’re here to save Andrecia, we can’t do it through violence; all Younglings have equal rights to our protection.”
“I know … but then what can we do? The Andrecians themselves haven’t a chance to repulse them, not with spears and arrows and swords against what the Imperials have.”
“No. So the aim is to make the colonists leave of their own free will.”
“Can we talk them into that?” I asked doubtfully. It sounded rather unlikely to me from what I had seen so far.
“We can’t talk to Imperials at all without disclosure, you know that! And even if we could, they’d only think we were trying to claim Andrecia for ourselves.”
This was true, and as he went on with the explanation I began to grasp it. There was absolutely nothing we could do directly. The Imperials would turn an armada against us rather than give up the “right” to claim one small planet out of the many that were open to them. They’d believe that we wished to compete with their Empire. They had undoubtedly met peoples near their own level who were trying to do just that.
So there was only one course we could take. We’d have to give the natives power advanced enough to impress the invaders, to scare them off. But possession of that power couldn’t be allowed to disrupt the Andrecian culture; it must be made to blend so imperceptibly into the natives’ own background of beliefs that it would not even be noticed by their future historians. Neither side could ever know that there had been intervention.
Impossible? It seemed so to me, at first. But there’s a way to handle such cases. Variations of it have been used before, I’m told, and will be used again. The chances of it working under conditions like those with which we were faced aren’t very large, but if it fails you’re really no worse off than before.
My first reaction was, “The invaders must know as well as we do that the natives are no match for them.”
“Because the Andrecians have no technology?” Evrek asked me.
“Certainly.”
Father said to me, “Elana, suppose the Imperials were to discover that the people of this world have something that they themselves don’t have—something that’s frightening because they don’t understand it?”
“Wouldn’t they be suspicious? I mean, if it’s that far ahead of their own science, they’ll know the Andrecians couldn’t have developed it without help.”
“Yes, but what if it were something they couldn’t identify as being ahead of their science, something they thought the natives came by naturally?”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like magic.”
I laughed. “You’re joking!”
“No. Not at all.”
I looked from Father to Evrek and back to Father; both of them were dead serious. Even in the dim firelight I could see that. This place is changing us, I thought; it is drawing us into its spell. We’ve come far back in time as well as in space. This is a primeval forest, and the fire’s but one of the many primitive campfires that must have burned on countless worlds where human races have been born.
My hand rested on a small, smooth stone; I picked it up and shifted it from hand to hand, scarcely noticing what I was doing. Mystified, I began, “Here we are, with science that’s far, far ahead even of the Empire’s, and you’re saying—”
“That we believe in magic?”
“But we don’t! Science and magic are opposites.”
“It depends on what you mean by magic, doesn’t it?”
“Isn’t magic what prescientific cultures believe in? Cultures like—well, like this world’s?”
“Exactly. That’s the point.”
“But it’s only superstition!”
“No. That’s a Youngling viewpoint, a very adolescent one. If you think it through, you’ll find that you know better.”
“Wait a minute,” Evrek interrupted. “I understood the original plan. Ilura was to pose as a native and scare the daylights out of the Imperials with some spectacular feats of psychokinesis and such, which would be ‘magic’ to them, and therefore very upsetting. But we can never do it; they’ll know we’re not like the other natives, even if we can avoid revealing what we actually are.”
“There’s another method, Evrek,” Father said slowly. “We can work through an actual native.”
Evrek frowned. “Is that really feasible? I’ve heard of it, of course, but—well, isn’t it pretty chancy?”
“Chancy, yes, but impossible, no. Not in a culture like this one, which is very favorably disposed toward it.”
“Perhaps not,” Evrek said. “But I don’t envy the man we choose to throw an interstellar expedition off a non-mechanized world, single-handed. Why, even if he succeeds, he’s bound to suffer for it—”
I turned to Father. “Do you mean to tell me that you’re going to send only one man to scare off a whole shipload of invaders? One Andrecian?”
Father smiled. “I know it sounds pretty fantastic.”
“But he won’t have any chance at all, no matter what weapons we give him! If he acts hostile they’ll simply kill him, won’t they, as they did Ilura?”
“Possibly, though I doubt it. What happened this afternoon was unusual; normally they merely use stunners. I’m not saying there won’t be danger. But he will have a chance, Elana. He’ll have an advantage over them because the weapon we’re going to give him will be very frightening from their point of view. More so from theirs than from his.”
“How can it be, when they know so much more than he does?” I demanded.
“About some things they do,” Father said. “But you’re aware, aren’t you, that Younglings in an adolescent stage of civilization have a blind spot? They’re very powerful so far as their machines are concerned, but they know nothing at all of the powers of the mind.”
I nodded. I’d been reading about it only that morning, back on the starship. It was hard to visualize. What would it feel like to be unable to reach anyone else’s mind? To be unable to exert any psychokinetic power over things, even if you needed to? To have no Shield? It would indeed be like blindness; yet Younglings have none of these abilities. They do not even know what they’re missing!
“But if psychic powers are too mature, too advanced, even for the Imperials,” I protested, “certainly no Andrecian knows anything about them.”
“He will have an open mind, though,” Evrek told me. “He’ll be too naive to be afraid.”
“I suppose so,” I admitted. “Especially since he’ll probably believe in magic in the first place. But we can’t just hand such things to him, as we could a physical weapon. Younglings don’t have the capacity.”
“You’re wrong there,” said Father. “Under certain conditions they do. Our job is to set up those conditions. It won’t be easy, and we’ll have some failures. If it doesn’t work with the first man we try, we’ll have to use someone else. But it’s the only way open to us now, so we have to take it.”
That first night, I didn’t really understand the scheme; it wasn’t till much later that I began to get a feel for it. On the surface, it didn’t look as if one man, however well equipped with “magical” power, could be a very formidable obstacle to people like the invaders. But that wasn’t the point. No obstacle can faze Imperials, for they thrive on obstacles. But here, it was their method of dealing with obstacles that was to be threatened. Those whose strength is in their machines want no part of psychokinesis. Imperial colonists would not want this planet for long once they began to suspect that its inhabitants were … different. And in the face of that suspicion they would generalize too easily; what they saw in one native, they would think to find in all, since all were alike to them. The question of deception would never enter the picture, for that which they would see could not be faked.
Of course, carrying this off was not going to be simple. “Set up the conditions,” Father had said. But that’s easier said than done, because the conditions aren’t concrete. You can’t teach a Youngling to use his latent psychic faculties by the methods through which you yourself learned; his background isn’t the same as yours. So it depends on giving him a very elusive source of power: faith.
In the colony the night air was cool and sweet. Jarel took a deep breath, savoring its freshness. It was a great feeling after weeks of being cooped up in a pressure suit and helmet. He didn’t envy the men who still had to wear suits whenever they stepped outside; he would gladly have volunteered to take his off, even if he had not been ordered to do so as the junior member of the medical staff. After all, tests had already proved the adequacy of the new vaccines, though it was a wise precaution, certainly, to try out a few men’s immunity to the local bacteria before exposing everyone.
The only trouble with being in the experimental group was that he would no longer be allowed inside the sealed shelters. He and the other guinea pigs would be bunking in one room of the barracks used for native prisoners until the rest of the buildings were opened up. And Dulard, never one to waste resources, had decided to kill two birds with one stone by assigning them all to guard duty on top of their regular work. Not that Jarel minded that; he welcomed the chance to get a closer look at the natives, as a matter of fact. But he did not much like Dulard’s policy toward these prisoners. The use of stunners, for instance. The paralysis resulting from a stunner jolt at low intensity might not be bad after you got over the first fright, but still—well, it seemed cruel in a way to keep the poor creatures physically helpless so much of the time.
Of course, if he had his way they wouldn’t be locking the natives up at all, Jarel realized. “What harm would it do just to let them loose?” he asked aloud. “Does Dulard really think they’d organize a full-scale attack on us? As I see it, their society’s not geared for any kind of mass action.”
“No sense in taking chances, is there?” replied his bunkmate, a technician named Kevan. “Do ’em good to learn respect for us, too. It’ll make it easier to herd ’em off to a reservation when the time comes.”
Jarel frowned. He did not like Kevan and would never have chosen his company had they not been required to bunk together. It did seem as if the Imperial Exploration Corps ought to be more choosy about the guys they turned loose on new worlds. The colonists themselves were for the most part decent enough, though they were understandably more concerned with their own safety and their kids’ than with the treatment of the natives. But a few of the Corps people seemed to go out of their way to hurt any wild thing that crossed their path. Men like Kevan, now. What excuse was there for taking off on an unauthorized jaunt into the woods and coming back more proud than sorry at having had to kill a “savage” native woman? Dulard had not raised any objections; to him, what men did in their off-duty time was their own business, so long as they did not start any trouble that would be costly to subdue. But Jarel couldn’t look at it that way.
“We’re doing a great job of earning their respect, all right,” he said bitterly. “No one can say you haven’t done your bit.”
“Now, look—” Kevan began.
Obstinately, Jarel went on. “I still don’t see why you had to blast the woman.”
“She attacked us!”
“Sure, she threw a knife at you. A knife that would’ve bounced right off your suit, except that it didn’t hit even close. Some attack!”
“There were probably a dozen more natives back in those woods, armed with spears. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Do you think we’re here to play kids’ games, or what?”
“What’s the matter with you?” retorted Jarel. “You could have stunned her; that’s what Dulard ordered in the first place—stick to stunners where we can.”
“Dulard’s too soft,” Kevan declared. “We’ve got to make an example sometimes, put these devils in their place—or else sooner or later somebody’s going to get hurt.”
“Hurt? Wasn’t she hurt? Or don’t you put murder in that class?”
“Look, blasting a savage isn’t murder, and you know it,” said Kevan angrily. “Murder’s a word that applies to human beings.”
“And these natives aren’t human, of course.”
“Come off it, Jarel. I know you medics are great ones for getting sentimental over the aborigines, but human—that’s carrying it a bit too far. ‘Humanoid’ maybe, but they’re way below the level of humans. Any fool can see that.”
Technically he was right, Jarel knew. So why should it seem so important? He guessed it all depended on how you defined humanity. Perhaps he was a fool. Perhaps he should never have joined the Corps. Once he had had ideas about what a fine thing it would be to explore the stars, to open the universe to humankind … but it didn’t seem quite such a high destiny now. Planets like this one were getting along quite well before the Empire came.
Jarel suspected suddenly that he might not be cut out for the taming of primitive worlds.
The fire was dying down; we piled more wood on it, for the night was chilly. I stood close to the blaze, shivering, while Evrek went to the hut for our cloaks. The stone I had picked up was still in my hand; I held it out to the light and looked at it. It was rather an odd stone, more or less egg-shaped but with a smooth-worn hole through the middle, and its color was lovely: a muted, blended shade of brown and red. River-polished, it shone on my palm, and not wanting to toss it aside I slipped it into the pocket of the cloak that Evrek put around my shoulders.
“So where do I come into all this?” I asked Father as we settled ourselves again.
He looked at me appraisingly. “Elana, what impression did the men you talked to this afternoon get of you?”
I thought about it. They had been rather in awe of me, I felt; and with most of them, I’d been able to establish very little rapport. But one had been bolder than the others: a tall, blond, rather handsome young man. He hadn’t seemed as I’d have expected a Youngling to be at all. In fact, if I’d seen him at the Academy in other clothes I might have taken him for a fellow student; I’m used to meeting people from different worlds, after all, and they vary widely in appearance. This man’s mind and mine had touched in an almost exciting way, a way that made me hope we would meet again. Even in those few moments he had become a personality to me, an individual.
“Well,” I began, “they knew I was strange—different—but they couldn’t have had any conception of what I really am, not knowing anything of space travel.”
“That’s why it was a safe contact, of course. But how did they fit you into their scheme of things?”
“I guess I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you, then.” Father smiled. “They thought you were an enchantress.”
“A what?”
“An enchantress. A sorceress, a witch. Undoubtedly they thought you could put a magic spell on them—that you had done so, in fact, since they understood your unfamiliar words.”
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” I said, laughing.
“Be honored. Because this is an impression that we are going to foster.”
“Now wait a minute!” Evrek broke in. “Why does it have to be Elana?”
“Because I have some other plans for you,” Father told him. “And also because, telepathically, she is more adept.”
Evrek put his arm around me protectively. I realized that he was still unconvinced, and I couldn’t see why. How could he not want me to take part, when he loved me? I’d be taking no greater risk than he. And wasn’t I in danger anyway, whether I played an active role or not?
Well, it wasn’t entirely a matter of the danger. Evrek had guessed what we were in for. And, under the guise of a stiff-necked devotion to the letter of the law that was not at all like him, he made one last try to save me from it.
“She hasn’t taken the Oath,” he protested to Father. “It’s not right for her to participate unsworn! She shouldn’t even have made the contact this afternoon.”
Father nodded. “That’s true, and I hadn’t forgotten it. But it’s easily remedied; in fact it’s the matter I mentioned earlier that we must take care of.”
Stunned by the way his ploy had backfired, Evrek burst out, “You can’t be serious! Here? On the spur of the moment, when she hasn’t full knowledge of the implications?” Holding me close to him, he told me, “Elana darling, you mustn’t do it.”
“But I want to!” I hadn’t dreamed they would let me go this far, but it was an exciting suggestion.
“I withdraw my original objection,” Evrek said quickly. “If we must stretch the law, let’s go a little further and let her work here unofficially. Leave her free to change her mind.”
Surprisingly, Father defended me. “Look, Evrek,” he said, “Elana’s not going to change. She chose the shape of her life years ago, as a child. She was born to it, as you were not; she has no other world to renounce. And she has the talent for it as well as the vocation. I know; I’ve seen her test results.”
He reached for my hand and squeezed it, but he went on addressing Evrek as though I weren’t even present. “For her to be invested here—tonight—isn’t merely a matter of the law, and of this mission’s safety. It’s necessary for her own protection.”
Evrek flushed. “It’s too soon,” he said obstinately. “The Oath’s too hard, too demanding.”
“It’s been made so in order to keep out people who might try to use our power over Youngling worlds to their personal advantage. But underneath, the Oath is meant to make the job easier, not harder. It lifts the burden of decisions that would otherwise be impossibly difficult.”
“You wouldn’t expose Elana to such decisions!”
“Not deliberately, but they may come to her as they may to all of us.” Father poked the fire with a long branch, sending a burst of sparks up into the darkness. Soberly, he went on, “Just by being here, we’re in a position to change the course of history for two Youngling peoples, not to mention what we may do to the individuals we contact. You’re right when you say that no one should take such responsibility uncommitted. The weight of it would be unbearable.”
Though some of this was over my head, I had a rough idea of what they were talking about. The laws and rituals of the Service didn’t just happen; they were devised by psychologists who knew exactly what they were doing. When you intrude upon a planet not your own, you play with forces beyond anything with which your personal experience of right and wrong has equipped you to deal. And it’s true enough that you can get thrown into a spot where if you weren’t bound, if you had to stop and debate as to which was the lesser of two evils, you might go all to pieces.
Yet you don’t think of the Oath that way when you look forward to it. You think of the investiture: of the great hall of the Academy lit by torchlight, and the glistening, silver-trimmed white uniforms, and the triumphant beat of the anthem sending shivers up your spine … and of course, of the Emblem—of how you’ll feel when its chain is dropped over your head and you know that after all the years of study and preparation you’ve earned the right to wear it. Never in all my wildest imaginings had I pictured this as taking place beside a small campfire in the wilderness of an alien planet, with only Father and Evrek there to see.
It was a thrilling idea but a rather scary one, too, and the cold tingle I began to feel wasn’t entirely pleasant. Not that there was any doubt in my mind about wanting to go through with it eventually. Only this was rather sudden, rather more of a plunge than I’d been thinking of when I’d so blithely stowed away on the landing craft that morning. For the first time, it occurred to me that I had not earned the Emblem and that perhaps it wasn’t quite right to take such a shortcut. Not that I wouldn’t have to complete my training anyway, but—well, wasn’t it akin to getting your diploma before having taken all the courses?
Hesitantly, I said as much to Father. “That needn’t trouble you, Elana,” he told me. “The Oath concerns the future, not the past. You earn its Emblem not by your success in passing exams, but by your free acceptance of the responsibility an agent must carry, your consent to the ordeal of that responsibility.”
That was a solemn thought, and sometimes you shrink from solemnity. I laughed lightly and said, “You’re making it sound ominous!”
Father was not amused. “It’s not a thing to joke about!” he said sharply. He gripped my hand, and his voice was very stern and very intense. “Elana, there’s one thing I want to be sure you’ve got straight. Once you’re sworn, I won’t give you any more protection than I would give any other agent; if we get into a situation where I have to involve you in something unpleasant, I’ll do it. If you don’t believe that you can be hurt, don’t take this on. For you will be hurt, inevitably, in one way or another.” He sighed. “Maybe Evrek’s right; you still have too many illusions.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said quietly. “Perhaps I did when I forced my way into the landing party. But now, since—since this afternoon, I understand.”
“I wonder if you do? You’re thinking of Ilura and picturing yourself in her place. Have you pictured yourself in mine? Have you imagined a situation where it was a Youngling that was killed before your eyes, and you were answerable? Or not killed, perhaps, but changed, less happy?”
He stared down into the fire: a breeze stirred, and the coals pulsed red. The smoke blew into my face, and it was a strange-smelling smoke, for Andrecian trees were not those I had known. Father went on sadly, “Of course you haven’t. You can’t, yet. So you’ve no comprehension of what I mean when I tell you that the price of power can be rather more terrible than what you saw this afternoon. But then, perhaps if we knew beforehand, none of us would ever take the Oath.”
Determinedly, I declared, “Yet if we didn’t, how could we ever accomplish anything good? You can’t scare me that way, Father.”
He smiled and took my hand again, pulling me to my feet. “No, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to make you afraid, Elana. Because it’s not all grim. There can be some pretty wonderful things, too. If the price is high, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth paying. We’ve the freedom of the universe, and it’s a fascinating universe. You’ll see much that’s good, and you’ll never be faced with boredom. And there are great satisfactions. If we can save the people of this world from slavery, for instance—”
Evrek got up and threw another log on the fire; then he turned and opened his arms to me. “I’m sorry, darling,” he whispered. “Why do we always underestimate the people we care for by trying to shield them?” With the forced levity that he always uses to cover his more emotional moments, he went on, “After all, I might not love you if you weren’t willing to go through with it!”
“Mightn’t you?” I laughed.
He held me tight. “Well, I would,” he admitted. “I’d always love you. But you wouldn’t be the same girl.”
“Come on, you two!” Father broke in. “If we’re going to do this, let’s forget the somber side of it and make it the happy occasion it’s supposed to be. We can’t celebrate as we would under different circumstances, but let’s at least give Elana the good memories she deserves.”
“Can we really do it here?” I asked. “The whole ritual, I mean?”
“Of course. Agents have been invested in the field before and will be again.”
He took me aside for a few minutes to go over what I’d have to do, and to make sure that I understood what I’d be swearing to. None of it was new to me; the Oath, as you probably know, is very straightforward. Reduced to its most essential element, it’s simply that you will hold your responsibility to the Service, and to the Youngling peoples with which you’re involved, above all other considerations, though it does contain a number of specifics such as the absolute ban on disclosure of the Federation’s existence. I assured Father that I had no misgivings, and then we went back to the campfire and the three of us sat close around it, on the ground; and it seemed a natural, fitting thing, not like a makeshift ceremony at all.
To me, in fact, it was even more beautiful than it would have been in its usual setting—though I suppose you are always more moved by your own rites than by those you observe. No ceremonial torches, no white uniforms, no music: only the flickering firelight and the dark shapes of the trees and the exotic, pungent smoke fragrance … and far away, rising above the rush of the river, the cry of an unknown bird—an Andrecian bird—that was different from anything I’d ever heard before. I shall remember that bird’s shrill, eerie call forever, I think, no matter how many planets I go to.
It is a long ritual and a complex one, but Father knew it thoroughly, even the telepathic parts, the secret parts that the spectators never hear. Certain portions of it are frightening, for your mind is probed more deeply than is usual in telepathic communication and your inborn tendency is to fight that. It is not anything terrible, however, so long as you really are sincere in what you are promising and have nothing to hide. Of course it was easier for me with Father, whom I loved and trusted, than it would have been with some dignitary from the Academy; and this was not entirely proper, because there’s a point at which you are supposed to be scared. It’s a sort of test. More than that I can’t say, for the details, by tradition, are not spoken of.
Once you’ve passed that point, though, something very wonderful happens to you: a glorious feeling of certainty and of conviction. Dedication, I suppose you could say. All my life I had heard people in the Service speak of investiture as a high spot of their experience, and I had always supposed that they were talking about the outward trappings—the pageantry and the festivities. How naive I was! Those things haven’t anything to do with it at all. What matters is that you are given something to draw on, a solid core to come back to over and over again, for as long as you live. Whether this comes to you telepathically or simply from your own commitment, I don’t know; but I suspect that it’s a little of both.
The climax of the ritual is, of course, the repetition of the Oath itself, aloud, and the presentation of the Emblem. We stood; the firelight threw our shadows tall against the backdrop of foliage. Perhaps my voice wasn’t audible, what with the river and all, but if you have telepathic contact anyway you can’t always tell the difference. “… And I, Elana, swear that I will hold this responsibility above all other considerations, for as long as I shall live.…” That’s the heart of it; it doesn’t seem very difficult or very dramatic, but there’s more to it than you might think. You don’t see, at first, how many other considerations there can be.
Naturally, when it came to the Presentation there was no actual pendant available for me, and Father was about to do it symbolically, with an improvised garland of leaves; but Evrek took the heavy, gleaming metal chain from his own neck and handed it to him instead. (“Wear it until you get yours,” he told me later when I tried to return it to him, it being a thing that no one should be expected to part with for very long. “It’s rather a thrill at first, something I wouldn’t want you to miss.”) So the rite was complete and perfect for me, and it will always be one of my happiest memories.
Afterward, when it was over and we had put out the fire, we walked back to the meadow, shivering in the chill breeze of Andrecian spring. Overhead, unfamiliar constellations glittered; I looked up at them, wondering which stars I would someday see as suns. Evrek’s arm was strong around my shoulders, the Emblem that was both his and mine hung warm against my heart, and we were on a brand-new planet whose people we would surely save through some heroic deed … in that moment, anything seemed possible.
“Is it a good feeling, Elana?” Father asked me.
“ ‘Good’ is too mild a word,” I told him. “It’s more overwhelming, I guess. I feel—well, safeguarded, somehow.”
“I’m glad,” he told me, pressing my hand. And then, wordlessly, So glad, Elana! You’ll have need of that before we’re through here.