list written on it with a practiced eye. A two-meter-long tri staff, the signature weapon of a Concord Administrator, leaned against the wall next to him.
His room on board the light cruiser was plain, undecorated, and seemed scarcely above the quality that would have been found in a medium-grade officer's quarters. The man remembered how there had been complaints about that at first. There were people aboard any ship who could not cope with the idea that someone of his stature should not have a room to match it. He let them worry about that and not about what he was doing. It was less trouble to him that way.
Lorand Kharls was now seventy years old, and he took the Verge very personally. He had not been here, of course, for the earliest expeditions. That wave of exploration had begun when the StarMech Collective's ships first broached these spaces after the First Galactic War, colonizing the planets of the star called Tendril. Neither had he been here for the later colonizations of Aegis system by the Orions, or the Hatire's first seizure of Grith, or the settlements of Algemron system by the Thuldans and the Austrins. Kharls had been born more than twenty-five years after the Battle of Kendai, well into what the burgeoning nations of the Stellar Ring called the Long Silence. All through his childhood, during his schooling when he had first fallen in love with the concept of history as something that was happening now, and later as a young man starting his formal adult education, that silence had come back to haunt Kharls. What was happening out there? There had been no way to tell, not until the restoration of the stardrive-based communications relay near Hammer's Star had brought the desperate cry for help from the colony at Silver Bell ringing across space, seven years delayed. The ships of the stellar nations, and then those of the Concord, had gone out to find what had happened, and they had been unable to discover anything.
Long before that, still deep in the Silence, Lorand Kharls had gone into the Concord civil service. At first his intention had simply been to find out what he was good for. The numerous batteries of aptitude tests through which he had suffered had given his teachers some indication. Soon, rather against the odds for someone born on a third world, he had found himself at the Administrators' College on Ascension. Ten years he had spent there, then another ten years of field work at Senior Cadet level, before taking his first assignment as a Deputy Administrator in the Aegis system. They had told him it was difficult work, but he had hardly noticed. He had been enjoying himself too much, and besides, his eyes had already turned to other things. Kharls had become aware that if he did his work well he might finally be allowed to live in and investigate the great mystery that had haunted his young life: the Silence, and the places where it had fallen.
It was silent no longer in the Verge. It had stopped being silent by the time he was first assigned here, four years ago, as an early System Administrator for Corrivale. But two years after that he was detached to more advanced duties as a Cluster Administrator, traveling among the stars within a ten-light-year diameter from Corrivale and watching the intricate interlacing of their cultures and governments- advising when he could, intervening when he had to, acting in his 'final judicial' role no more than three times over the years since. When he was young and new to the job, he doubtless would have tried and executed that many criminals out in the backwaters of this or that star system in perhaps half a standard year. Now his job took him to places where the criminals were usually of high enough standing in the community that simply trying them and shooting them would have done little good. He had learned a lot of patience and a fair amount of wile moving among the politicians, and he had not had to shoot one yet. Usually there were more effective ways to intervene. Mostly they had to do with arriving in very large Star Force vessels with very large guns. A gun's vocabulary might be limited, but once it spoke there was some tendency for people to listen very carefully to whoever spoke next. Now a part of the Verge that Kharls took more personally than usual appeared to be having some teething troubles in its neighborhood. There were not that many other star systems in the immediate region of Corrivale. Corrivale itself had once been nothing all that important, that is, until the discovery of the sesheyan colony on Grith, the resurgence of the Hatire, and the inroads since made by VoidCorp. The place was getting crowded. Most specifically, it was getting crowded with power players. Their actions cast shadows a long way, often over people who did not deserve to have their lives shadowed. That was where, when possible, a Concord Administrator might step in and see what could be done. That time had now come to Kharls, so he would uproot himself from here (which would cause talk), resettle himself in another ship better suited to the duty he would assign it (which would cause much more talk), and then finally start 'meddling.'
Like any good artist, he had not arranged all this without first studying carefully where to go to work. If you wanted to drop a rock on someone's head, for example, you could spend a lot of time trying to push the rock up to the top of the hill to produce the maximum result. Or you could get a lever and a map and push the rock off from right where you were, assuming that the person you wanted to hit with it was presently standing in the right place.
Lorand Kharls's work for a long time now had been inducing the people who needed to be hit by a given rock to go stand under it themselves. The best occurrences of this sort were always when such people started the rock moving under their own power and without realizing what they were doing. You couldn't always count on that happening, but it was always something to shoot for.
And now it was happening, though he wished he understood why.
Phorcys and Ino. They had been a fruit ripe to fall, ready for peace, despite the best efforts of others in the Thalaassa system and elsewhere. Lauren Delvecchio had come along and plucked the fruit with her usual skill, but that skill had availed her no further. The job, or something associated with it, had killed her and numerous others.
That by itself was tragic enough, but rumors had been coming to Kharls's office of something else that might or might not be happening out in the Thalaassa system. Concrete resources on which he could call, at least without stirring up unwanted trouble, were thin out that way. He had sent out feelers to see what the rumors said closer to the source of the problem. He had received no answers back. Somewhat after the fact, Kharls had found that one of the sources he had meant to question had been sold to another bidder quite some time before.
This discovery left him with a whole new box of questions, ones to which he could find no immediate answers. Events began to take their course, and Lorand Kharls sat and watched to see what would happen. The temptation to intervene had been considerable, but Lorand knew that there was no quicker way to lose the formidable reputation of a Concord Administrator than by routinely dashing into planetary legal processes and overturning them. Besides, there were questions about the young man as well. What had he been up to with Delvecchio? What else had he been up to? Whose side he was on? This led to the even more important questions of whether he was still on that side after the disgrace that had befallen him or whether he had turned coats again. The answers to those questions would determine what other questions needed to be asked next-or whether any needed to be asked at all, except the kind of question to which the simplest answer is a corpse. There was some time yet to see what action was required in that area.
Meanwhile, he had set other interventions in motion. The most obvious of them would culminate today, within the hour, Kharls thought. It would cause a great deal of talk, for normally Concord Administrators did not venture too far out of their perceived ambit. The trouble was that the ambit, the Administrator's area of responsibility and power, was still being determined out here in the Verge by trial and error. Worlds not specifically affiliated with the Concord might bridle at the sudden appearance in their space of an Administrator with his or her sweeping powers, but they never seemed to argue about it too loudly when the job was done correctly, and when the spaces in question were left cleaner, more peaceful, or more crime-free than they had been when he started.
When the job was done correctly, Kharls thought. There were always chances that things could go wrong. And this job looked rather more touchy than usual.
He looked at the pad one more time, sighed at being able to find nothing else that needed to be added to it, and dropped it on the couch. That pad was his chief weapon at the moment, his shopping list. He would turn it over to his aide in a little while and then check the execution of the more delicate items in a day or three after he and his staff were settled in the new venue.
There would be the inevitable feeling-out, checking-out period. There were ship captains who felt their authority threatened by the presence of a Concord Administrator who was empowered to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It sometimes took them a while to realize that no Concord Administrator had much interest in playing shipboard politics. Their playing field was much wider, whole systems, whole clusters of stars. Their one duty was peace, and they went through ferocious training to ensure that their personal feelings and emotions would not mar their judgments on the large scale or the small. As a result, their decisions were usually honored, and the solutions they crafted stuck in place. For a while at least, Kharls thought, getting up and stretching. Time passes, situations
