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He picked it up and swallowed heavily from it.
Melissa went to him and for a second put her arm around his shoulders, laying
her head against the side of his head. Then she turned back to Cletus and
placed a cold hand on his wrist. She looked at him with eyes that were
strangely deep and free of anger or resentment.
"Come along, then, Cletus," she said, quietly. "We'd better be getting
started."
It was some hours later before they were able to be alone together. The
wedding guests had seen them to the door of the master bedroom in newly built
Grahame House, and it was only when the door was shut in their faces that they
finally left the building, the echo of their laughter and cheerful voices
fading behind them.
Wearily, Melissa dropped into a sitting position on the edge of the large bed.
She looked up at
Cletus, who was still standing.
"Now, will you tell me what's wrong?" she asked.
He looked at her. The moment he had foreseen when he had asked her to marry
him was upon him now. He summoned up courage to face it.
"It'll be a marriage in name only," he said. "In a couple of years you can get
an annulment."
"Then why marry me at all?" she said, her voice still empty of blame or
rancor.
"DeCastries will be back out among the new worlds within another twelve
months," he said. "Before he came, he'd be asking you to come to Earth. With
your marriage to me, you lost your Earth citizenship.
You're a Dorsai, now. You can't go until you've had the marriage annulled and
reapplied for Earth citizenship. And you can't annul the marriage right away
without letting Eachan know I forced you to marry me with the results you
know, the same results you agreed to marry me to avoid, right now."
"I would never let you two kill each other," she said. Her voice was strange.
"No," he said. "So you'll wait two years. After that, you'll be free."
"But why?" she said. "Why did you do it?"
"Eachan would have followed you to Earth," said Cletus. "That's what Dow
counted on. That's what I
couldn't allow. I need Eachan Khan for what I've got to do."
He had been looking at her as he talked, but now his eyes had moved away from
her. He was looking out the high, curtained window at one end of the bedroom,
at the mountain peaks, now just beginning to be clouded with the afternoon
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rains that would in a few months turn to the first of autumn snows.
She did not speak for a long time. "Then," she said, at last "you never did
love me?"
He opened his mouth to answer, for the moment was upon him. But at the last
minute, in spite of his determination, the words changed on his lips.
"Did I ever say I did?" he answered, and, turning, went out of the room before
she could say more.
Behind him, as he closed the door, there was only silence.
20
The next morning Cletus got busy readying the expeditionary contingent of
new-trained and not yet new-trained Dorsais he would be taking with him to
Newton. Several days later, as he sat in his private office at the Foralie
training grounds, Arvid stepped in to say that there was a new emigrant to the
Dorsai, an officer-recruit, who wanted to speak to him.
"You remember him, I think, sir," said Arvid, looking at Cletus a little
grimly. "Lieutenant William
Athyer formerly of the Alliance Expeditionary Force on Bakhalla."
"Athyer?" said Cletus. He pushed aside the papers on the float desk in front
of him. "Send him in, Arv."
Arvid stepped back out of the office. A few seconds later, Bill Athyer, whom
Cletus had last seen drunkenly barring his way in the in-town spaceship
terminal of Bakhalla, hesitantly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in
the brown uniform of a Dorsai recruit, with a probationary officer's insignia
where his first lieutenant's silver bars had been worn. "Come in," said
Cletus, "and shut the door behind you." Athyer obeyed and advanced into the
room. "It's good of you to see me, sir," he said, slowly. "I
don't suppose you ever expected me to show up like this & "
"Not at all," said Cletus. "I've been expecting you. Sit down." He indicated
the chair in front of his desk. Athyer took it almost gingerly. "I don't know
how to apologize & " he began.
"Then don't," said Cletus. "I take it life has changed for you?"
"Changed!" Athyer's face lit up. "Sir, you remember at the Bakhalla Terminal &
? I went back from there with my mind made up. I was going to go through
everything you'd ever written everything with a fine-toothed comb, until I
found something wrong, something false, I could use against you. You said not
to apologize, but & "
"And I meant it," said Cletus. "Go on with whatever else you were going to
tell me."
"Well, I & suddenly began to understand it, that's all," said Athyer.
"Suddenly it began to make sense to me, and I couldn't believe it! I left your
books and started digging into everything else I could find in that Exotic
library in Bakhalla on military art. And it was just what I'd always read, no
more, no less. It was your writing that was different & Sir, you don't know
the difference!"
Cletus smiled.
"Of course, of course you do!" Athyer interrupted himself. "I don't mean that.
What I mean is, for example, I always had trouble with math. I wasn't an
Alliance Academy man, you know. I came in on one of the reserve officer
programs and I could sort of slide through on math. And that's what I did
until one day when I ran into solid geometry. All at once the figures and the
shapes came together it was beautiful. Well, that was how it was with your
writing, sir. All of a sudden, the art and the mechanics of military strategy
came together. All the dreams I'd had as a kid of doing great things and all
at once I
was reading how they could be done. Not just military things all sorts and
kinds of things."
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