If you wanted to avoid being noticed, Mikal said, it would have been better to come in on a civilian bus. Nothing's more conspicuous than soldiers hiding in the woods.

The Chamberlain felt Mikal's criticism like a blow. I'm not a tactician, he said.

Tactician enough, said Mikal, letting the Chamberlain relax a bit. We'll go back to the palace now. Do you have anyone you can trust to make the arrest?

Yes, the Chamberlain said. They're already warned not to let him leave the palace.

Who? Ansset asked. Who are you arresting?

For a moment they seemed reluctant to answer. Finally Mikal said, The Captain of the guard.

He was behind the kidnapping?

"Apparently so, said the Chamberlain.

I don't believe it, Ansset said, for he had thought he knew the Captain's voice, and hadn't heard any songs except loyalty in it. But the Chamberlain wouldn't understand that. It wasn't evidence. And this was the boat, which seemed to prove something to them. So Ansset said nothing more about the Captain until it was too late.

14

As prisons went, there had been worse. It was just a cell without a door-at least on the inside. And while there was no furniture, the floor yielded as comfortably as the floor in Mikal's private room.

It was hard not to be bitter, however. The Captain sat leaning on a wall, naked so that he couldn't harm himself with his clothing. He was more than sixty years old, and for four years had been in charge of all the emperor's fleets, coordinating thousands of ships across the galaxy. And then to get caught up in this silly palace intrigue, to be the scapegoat-

The Chamberlain had plotted it, of course. Always the Chamberlain. But how could he prove his innocence without undergoing hypnosis; and who would conduct that operation, if not the Chamberlain? Besides, the Captain knew what no one else alive did-that while a serious probe into his mind would not prove that he was at all involved in kidnapping Ansset, it would uncover other things, earlier things, any one of which could destroy his reputation, all of which together would result in his death as surely as if he had captured Ansset himself.

Forty years of unshakable loyalty, and now, when I'm innocent, my old crimes stop me from forcing the issue. He ran his hands along his aging thighs as he sat leaning against a wall. The muscles were still there, but his legs felt as if the skin were coming loose, sagging away. A man should live to be a hundred and twenty in this world, he thought. I won't have had much more than half that.

What had prompted them to imprison him? What had he done that was suspicious? Or had there been anything at all?

There must have been something. Mikal was not a tyrant; he ruled by law, even if he was all powerful. Had he talked to the wrong people too often? Had he been in the wrong cities at the wrong time? Whoever the real traitors were, he was sure the case they had set up against him looked plausible.

Abruptly the lights dimmed to half strength. He knew enough about the prison from the other end of things to know that meant darkness in about ten minutes. Night, then, and sleep, if he could sleep.

He lay down, rested his arm across his eyes, and knew that the fluttering in his stomach would be irresistible. He wouldn't sleep tonight. He kept thinking-morbidly let himself think, because he had too much courage to hide from his own imagination-kept thinking about the way he would die. Mikal was a great man, but he was not kind to traitors. They were taken apart, piece by piece, as the holos recorded the death agony to be broadcast on every planet. Or perhaps they would only claim he was peripherally involved, in which case his agony could be more private, and less prolonged. But it wasn't the pain that frightened him-he had lost his left arm twice, not two years apart, and knew that he could bear pain reasonably well. It was knowing that all the men he had ever commanded would think of him from then on as a traitor, dying in utter disgrace.

That was what he could not bear. Mikal's empire had been created by soldiers with fanatic loyalty and love of honor, and that tradition continued. He remembered the first time he had been in command of a ship. It was at the rebellion of Quenzee, and his cruiser had been surprised on the planet. He had had the agonizing choice of lifting the cruiser immediately, before it could be damaged, or waiting to try to save some of his detachment of men. He opted for the cruiser, because if he waited, it would mean nothing at all would be saved for the empire. But the panicked cries of Wait, Wait rang in his ears long after the radio was too far to hear them. He had been commended, though they didn't give him the medal for months because he would have found a way to kill himself with it.

I thought so easily of suicide then, he remembered. Now, when it would really be useful, it is forever out of reach.

I will only be paying for my crimes. They don't realize it, but even though they think they're setting up an innocent man, I deserve exactly the penalty I'm getting.

He remembered-

And the lights went out-

He tried to sleep and dream, but still he remembered. And remembered. And in every dream saw her face. No name; He had never known her name-it was part of their protection, because if a name was never known, it could never be found by the cleverest probe, no matter how hard he tried. But her face-blacker than his own, as if she had pure blood descending from the most isolated part of Africa, and her smile, though rare, so bright that the very memory brought tears to his eyes and made his head swim. She was supposed to be the real assassin. And the night before they had planned to kill the prefect, she had brought him to her house. Her parents, who knew nothing, were asleep in the back; she had given herself to him twice before he finally realized that this was more than just release of tension before a difficult mission. She really loved him, he was sure of it, and so he whispered his name into her ear.

What was that? she asked.

My name, he answered, and her face looked as if she was in great pain.

Why did you tell me?

Because, he had whispered as she ran her fingers up his back, I trust you. She had groaned under the burden of that trust-or perhaps in the last throes of sexual ecstasy. Whatever. He would never know. As he left, she whispered to him at the door, Meet me at nine o'clock in the morning, meet me by the statue of Horus in Flant Fisway.

And he had waited by the statue for two hours, then went looking for her and found her house surrounded by police. And the houses of two other conspirator and he knew that they had been betrayed. At first he thought, had let himself think that perhaps she had betrayed them, and it was to save his life that she asked him to meet her at the time she knew the police would come. Either way, though, even if she was innocent, he read in the papers that she had killed herself as the police came into her house, had blasted her head off with an old-fashioned bullet pistol right in front of her parents as they sat in the living room wondering why the police were coming to the door. Even if she had betrayed the group, she had refused to betray him-knowing his name, she had preferred death to the possibility of being forced to reveal it.

Scant comfort. He had killed the prefect himself, then left the planet he had been born on and never returned. Spent a few years, until he was twenty, trying to join rebellions or foment rebellions or even uncover some serious discontent somewhere in Mikal's not-very-old empire. But gradually he had come to realize that not that many people longed for independence. Life under Mikal was better than life had ever been before. And as he learned that, he began to understand what it was that Mikal had achieved.