He lay that night in the cold room in the silent house, listening to his heart beat like a slow drum.
He was not unhappy, the relief of being at peace and the sweetness of being home.were too great for that;
but it was a desolate calm, and somewhere in it was anger. Not used to anger, he was not sure what he felt. It was as if a faint, sullen red flare colored every image in his mind, as he lay trying to think through the seven years on Yeowe, first as a pilot, then the ground war, then the long retreat, the killing and the being killed. Why had they been left there to be hunted down and slaughtered? Why had the government not sent them reinforcements? The questions had not been worth asking then, they were not worth asking now. They had only one answer: We do what they ask us to do, and we don't complain. I fought every step of the way, he thought without pride. The new knowledge sliced keen as a knife
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through all other knowledge — And while I was fighting, she was dying. All a waste, there on Yeowe. All a waste, here on Werel. He sat up in the dark, the cold, silent, sweet dark of night in the hills. 'Lord Kamye,' he said aloud, 'help me. My mind betrays me.'
During the long leave home he sat often with his mother. She wanted to talk about Emdu, and at first he had to force himself to listen. It would be easy to forget the girl he had known for seventeen days seven years ago, if only his mother would let him forget. Gradually he learned to take what she wanted to give him, the knowledge of who his wife had been. His mother wanted to share all she could with him of the joy she had had in Emdu, her beloved child and friend. Even his father, retired now, a quenched, silent man, was able to say, 'She was the light of the house.' They were thanking him for her. They were telling him that it had not all been a waste.
But what lay ahead of them? Old age, the empty house. They did not complain, of course, and seemed content in their severe, placid round of daily work; but for them the continuity of the past with the future was broken.
'I should remarry,' Teyeo said to his mother, 'Is there anyone you've noticed . . . ?'
It was raining, a grey light through the wet windows, a soft thrumming on the eaves. His mother's face was indistinct as she bent to her mending.
'No,' she said. 'Not really.' She looked up at him, and after a pause asked, 'Where do you think you'll be posted?'
'I don't know.'
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'There's no war now,' she said, in her soft, even voice.
'No,' Teyeo said. 'There's no war.'
'Will there be ... ever? do you think?'
He stood up, walked down the room and back, sat down again on the cushioned platform near her;
they both sat straight-backed, still except for the slight motion of her hands as she sewed; his hands lay lightly one in the other, as he had been taught when he was two.
'I don't know,' he said. 'It's strange. It's as if there hadn't been a war. As if we'd never been on Yeowe — the Colony, the Uprising, all of it. They don't talk about it. It didn't happen. We don't fight wars. This is a new age. They say that often on the net. The age of peace, brotherhood across the stars. So, are we brothers with Yeowe, now? Are we brothers with Gatay and Bambur and the Forty States? Are we brothers with our assets? I can't make sense of it.
I don't know what they mean. I don't know where I fit in.' His voice too was quiet and even.
'Not here, I think,' she said. 'Not yet.'
After a while he said, 'I thought... children ...'
'Of course. When the time comes.' She smiled at him. 'You never could sit still for half an hour. . . .
Wait. Wait and see.'
She was right, of course; and yet what he saw in the net and in town tried his patience and his pride.
It seemed that to be a soldier now was a disgrace. Government reports, the news and the analyses, constantly referred to the Army and particularly the veot class as fossils, costly and useless, Voe Deo's principal obstacle to full admission to the Ekumen. His own uselessness was made clear to him when his request
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for a posting was met by an indefinite extension of his leave on half pay. At thirty-two, they appeared to be telling him, he was superannuated-
Again he suggested to his mother that he should accept the situation, settle down, and look for a wife. 'Talk to your father,' she said. He did so; his father said, 'Of course your help is welcome, but I can run the farm well enough for a while yet.
Your mother thinks you should go to the capital, to Command. They can't ignore you if you're there. After all. After seven years' combat — your record — '
Teyeo knew what that was worth, now. But he was certainly not needed here, and probably irritated his father with his ideas of changing this or that way things were done. They were right: he should go to the capital and find out for himself what part he could play in the new world of peace.
His first half-year there was grim. He knew almost no one at Command or in the barracks; his generation was dead, or invalided out, or home on half pay. The younger officers, who had not been on Yeowe. seemed to him a cold, buttoned-up lot, always talking money and politics. Little businessmen, he privately thought them. He knew they were afraid of him — of his record, of his reputation. Whether he wanted to or not he reminded them that there had been a war that Werel had fought and lost, a civil war, their own race fighting against itself, class against class. They wanted to dismiss it as a meaningless quarrel on another world, nothing to do with them.
Teyeo walked the streets of the capital, watched the thousands of bondsmen and bondswomen hur-
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rying about their owners' business, and wondered what they were waiting for.
'The Ekumen does not interfere with the social, cultural, or economic arrangements and affairs of any people,' the Embassy and the government spokesmen repeated. 'Full membership for any nation or people that wishes it is contingent only on absence, or renunciation, of certain specific methods and devices of warfare,' and there followed the list of terrible weapons, most of them mere names to Teyeo, but a few of them inventions of his own country: the biobomb, as they called it, and the neuronics-
He personally agreed with the Ekumen's judgment on such devices, and respected their patience in waiting for Voe Deo and the rest of Werel to prove not only compliance with the ban, but acceptance of the principle. But he very deeply resented their condescension. They sat in judgment on everything
Werelian, viewing from above. The less they said about the division of classes, the clearer their disapproval was, 'Slavery is of very rare occurrence in Ekumenical worlds,' said their books, 'and disappears completely with full participation in the Ekumenical polity.' Was that what the Alien Embassy was really waiting for?
'By our Lady!' said one of the young officers — many of them were Tualites, as well as businessmen
— 'the Aliens are going to admit the dusties before they admit us!' He was sputtering with indignant rage, like a red-faced old rega faced with an insolent bondsoldier. 'Yeowe — a damned planet of savages, tribesmen, regressed into barbarism — preferred over us!'
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'They fought well,' Teyeo observed, knowing he should not say it as he said it, but not liking to hear the men and women he had fought against called dusties. Assets, rebels, enemies, yes.
The young man stared at him and after a moment said, 'I suppose you love 'em, eh? The dusties?'
'I killed as many as I could,' Teyeo replied politely, and then changed the conversation. The young man, though nominally Teyeo's superior at Command, was an oga, the lowest rank of veot, and to snub him further would be ill-bred.
They were stuffy, he was touchy; the old days of cheerful good fellowship were a faint, incredible memory. The bureau chiefs at Command listened to his request to be put back on active service and sent him endlessly on to
