Again Thanakar felt a flush of confusion in his cheeks. “The circumstances are not the same,” he said.

“Aren’t they? You believe they’re not. It was an accident, you know. What happened to you.”

“He dropped me. Everyone knows it. He threw me down deliberately. Down the steps.”

“It was an accident,” repeated the commissar. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have done it like that—not if they were punishing your father, or stealing from him. Not at your final presentation, after you had already gotten your names and your tattoos. They would have done it at your birth, like young Prince Argon.

Not, of course, that they weren’t right. One blue eye. Bad business. You were just unlucky.”

Thanakar said nothing.

“Anyway,” continued the commissar, “You can rely on me. Nothing to fear. I won’t let them touch you.

You’re like a son to me.”

“Thank you.”

“Not to say that you shouldn’t give it up. Visiting the prisons. The painkillers, I mean. The medication.

You can’t do much good that way. The real problem’s something else.”

Thanakar stood up. “Thank you.”

The commissar looked at him anxiously. “Sometimes I express things badly,” he admitted. “You forgive me?”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“Then why don’t you stay to dinner? My wife will join us. The four of us. Quite a . . . jolly party.”

* * *

These conversations transpired on July 92nd of the eighth phase of spring 00016, in the holy city-state of Charn, in the northwest corner of the possessions of the emperor, in the hundredth month of his interminable reign. That year it was an old-fashioned city of twisting alleyways and wooden houses, a trading center for the region. Formerly most shipping had run by sea, but in those bitter days the gulf was choked with warfare, and so the priests shipped their goods by rail, overland, down through the infant deserts to the great manufacturing centers of the South—in summer, oil of roses, prayer birds, sandalwood, rubber, black ivory, and orchids; in autumn, lumber; in winter, quarried glass; and in springtime nothing at all, for there was nothing. The war was very bad.

That year, Paradise was visible for one hundred and eighty-four days at the beginning of spring, at the time of the solstice thaw and the last antinomial crusade. The next time Paradise was visible, more than eight thousand days later, it rose on the night of August 7th, in the eighth phase of spring. That night there was a great festival in Charn, and all the temples of the city were full of candlelight and incense and the urgent, huddled faithful, filling the vaults with old-fashioned chanting—the forty-eight names of self-denial, the seventeen obligations of parenthood, the nine kinds of love. In celebration, the bishop’s council had arranged a truce in the eternal war and exchanged prisoners with Argon Starbridge. There were numerous misunderstandings and delays, but in the end the first trucks arrived after sunset of the first day, and unloaded in the packing yards outside the city gates. There was a big crowd to welcome them, and a complicated official reception, but in spite of that it was the dreariest, most dismal spectacle that anyone had ever seen: more than twenty thousand broken-down old men, veterans of forgotten campaigns, men whose whole lives had been spent as prisoners of war. And even though the worst had been culled out at the border, and the rest washed and fed and issued new uniforms, nothing could disguise the fact that few knew even where they were, and few could recognize the families and friends who had been rounded up to greet them.