And we suffered, too. Not just in the physical conditions, though those were bad enough, but in our minds, in our consciences. There may have been a few brutes, a few monsters who gloried in it all (perhaps we kept a few murderers off the streets of our cities for all that time), but most of us went through intermittent agonies, wondering in moments of crisis if what we were doing was really right, even though in our hearts we knew it was.

So many of us had nightmares. The things we saw each day, the scenes we witnessed, the pain and terror; these things could not help but affect us.

Those we disposed of; their torment lasted a few days, maybe a month or two, then it was over as quickly and efficiently as we could make the process.

Our suffering has gone on for a generation.

I am proud of what I did. I wish it had not fallen to me to do what had to be done, but I am glad that I did it to the best of my capabilities, and I would do it again.

That was why I wanted to write down what had happened; to witness our belief and our dedication and our suffering.

I never did.

I am proud of that too.

He awoke and there was something inside his head.

He was back in reality, back in the present, back in the bedroom of his house in the retirement complex, near the sea; he could see the sunlight hitting the tiles of the balcony outside the room. His twinned hearts thumped, the scales had risen on his back, prickling him. His leg ached, echoing with the pain of that ancient injury on the glacier.

The dream had been the most vivid yet, and the longest, finally taking him to the ice-fall in the western face and the accident with the drag line (deep buried, that had been, in his memory, submerged beneath all the dread white weight of his remembered pain). As well as that, whatever he had experienced had gone beyond the normal course, the usual environment of dreams, propelled there by the reliving of the accident and the image of fighting for breath while he stared transfixed into the face of the dead girl.

He had found himself thinking, explaining, even justifying what he had done in his army career, in the most definitive part of his life.

And now he could feel something inside his head.

Whatever it was inside his head got him to close his eyes.

~ At last, it said. It was a deep, deliberately authoritative voice, its pronunciation almost too perfect.

At last? he thought. (What was this?)

~ I have the truth.

What truth? (Who was this?)

~ Of what you did. Your people.

What?