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"I was afraid that you would kill me and I would not be taken to higher glory by the angels of mercy. I still have a chance to make something of my death."
Valentine felt like slapping some sense into the hopeful, young brown eyes. A little understanding, please, David, he heard Father Max's voice say, sounding just as he had when Valentine complained as a sixteen-year-old about his first and second year students' haphazard efforts with their literacy homework. What would he have become, had he been raised on Church propaganda as though it were mother's milk?
He left the prisoner and his disquieting thoughts, and plunged into planning a route back to the brigade.
* * * *
With the column under way again, Valentine sought out Brother Mark.
"Is confession a specialty of yours?" he asked.
Brother Mark took a deep breath. "It's not a part of my official dogma, no. But I believe in unburdening oneself."
Valentine sat. "There's a demon in me. It keeps looking for chances to get out. This damn war keeps arranging itself so I don't have much choice but to free it. I just came back from a little ambush in Green River clan territory. I did . . . appalling things."
"You want to talk sins, my son? You will have to live lifetimes to catch up to my tally."
"Killing wounded?"
"Oh, much worse. I believe I told you some of my early schooling and work at the hospital? Of course. After my advanced schooling they posted me to Boston. I did well there.
Married, had three kids. All were brought up by their nannies with expectations of entering the Church in my footsteps. Poor little dears. There was a fourth, but my Archon suggested I offer her up. Parenting effectiveness coefficients for age distribution and all that. Middle children sometimes grow up wild in large families."
"I'm sorry. So you left after that?" Valentine asked.
"Oh, no. No, I gave her up gladly and took Caring out to dinner on the wharf to celebrate afterward. My bishop sent us a bottle of French champagne. Delicious stuff. I became a senior regional guide for the Northeast. The Church keeps us very busy there. There are a lot of qualified people employed in New York or Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston, and down to Washington. High tech, communications, research, education, public affairs-the cradle of the best and the brightest. They require a lot of coddling and emotional and intellectual substantiation. You can't just say 'that's the way it must be; Kur has decided' to those people.
You have to argue the facts. Or get some new facts.
"So I became an elector. Myself and the council of bishops helped set regional, and sometimes interregional, Church policy. How old could an infant be before it could no longer be offered up for recycling? What was the youngest a girl could be and have a reasonable expectation of surviving childbirth? We listened to scientists and doctors, debated whether a practicing homosexual was a threat to the community even if he or she produced offspring.
High Church Policy, it was called, to distinguish ourselves from the lower Church orders who spent their days giving dental hygiene lectures and searching Youth Vanguard backpacks for condoms. My glory days.
"They taught me a few mental tricks. Most of it involved planting suggestions in children to prove reincarnation, giving them knowledge they couldn't possibly have obtained otherwise. In an emergency I was taught how do induce hysterical amnesia. That's why amnesia is such a popular plot device on Noonside Passions, by the way. We've found it useful for rearranging the backgrounds of people who've engaged in activities that are better off forgotten.
"Better off forgotten," he repeated, taking another drink. "Then I lost my wife."
"I'm sorry."
"I was too. Caring was a wonderful woman. Never a stray thought or an idle moment. Her one fault was vanity. After the third child she put on weight that was very hard to get off. She wanted a leadership position in the local Youth Vanguard so she could travel on her own, and you had to look fit and trim and poster-perfect. She didn't want more pregnancies and of course you wouldn't catch me using black-market condoms, so she went to some butcher and got herself fixed.
"Of course matters went wrong and she had to be checked into a real hospital. Age and the source of her injuries . . . well, the rubric put her down for immediate drop. The hospital priest had more doubts about her case than I did. I signed her end cycle warrant myself. If there was any part of me that knew it was wrong, it stayed silent. I am almost jealous of you.
You have a conscience which you can trust to give you pangs. Doubts. Recriminations. I've no such angel on my shoulder."
uDid you regret it later, then?"
"I'm not even sure I do now. She was so conventional, I'm sure she was happy to be useful in death. No, I didn't come to regret it. Not even after Constance, my middle daughter, killed herself rather than marry that officer. It was the strangest thing. I was at a rail station. A brass ring's mother had been put on a train, and he had enough weight to argue it with the Archon, and he sent me, because as an Elector and a regional guide I had enough weight to get someone taken off a train and the nearest porter who didn't genuflect promptly enough put on."
He took another drink.
"The next car had a group of people being put on. They had to know. There was one girl in a wheelchair. She must have been sixteen or seventeen. When you get to be my age, youth and strength take on their own sort of beauty, Valentine. She had so much of it she almost shone. I wonder what put her in that wheelchair. The lie that day was that they were going to work on factory fishing ships, but I think most of them knew what the railcars meant. This girl was laughing and joking with the others.
"Just an ordinary girl, mind you. Beautiful in her way. I looked at her tight chin and bright eyes, saw her laugh with those white teeth as she spun her chair to the person behind-she had a green sweater on-and I thought, what a waste. What a waste. Suddenly all the justifications, all the proverbs from the Guidon, it's like they turned to ash, dried up and illegible, at least to my mind.
"If only I'd learned her name. I want to write an article about her. Something. I want her to exist somewhere other than my memory. But if I give her a name-well, that just seems wrong. Any suggestions for what to call her?"
"Gabrielle Cho."
