Thanakar moved down the line, feeling unusually deformed. But he put his shoulders back and, as was his unhappy custom, examined their faces to see if they were laughing at him. They weren’t, but for him the soldiers’ earnestness gave them a collective irony that would have been dissipated by a single quivering lip. Thanakar searched eagerly for some sign of mockery, but there was nothing, just popeyed boyishness and stiff black uniforms. They were so young. Thanakar passed the officer, a dark clean boy, his face frozen into a rictus of subservience, and the doctor felt his first contemptuous instincts being polluted by a small amount of sadness. There was no reason for young men to be clever if they were going to die so soon. The eternal war in which their fathers and grandfathers had fought was all around them, yet it was easily forgotten. There was no news, not even lies; there never had been. But Thanakar caught wisps of rumors from his cousins in the army. Even they knew nothing. There was fighting near the city now. You could hear the guns sometimes—where? North, east, west—you only saw it indirectly by how many things were missing: how empty the shops seemed, how pitiful the food available to the poor, how few men in a crowd.

The soldiers marched away, and Thanakar crossed the rest of the parade ground. He entered the mountain through a small postern, thirty feet high, carved in the shape of the twenty-first bishop’s open mouth. The stairs led up his tongue. Inside, all was submission and subservience, though as he penetrated the dingy corridors, the cell-like offices so small they made you forget where you were, the wardens and the guards seemed increasingly sullen. He was abusing his right. They knew it, and they hated him for it.

At the checkpoints, he held his palms up with contemptuous nonchalance, and they were powerless to disobey. They knew better than anyone the penalties for disobedience.

In a windowless cubicle, he stopped before the desk of the subdirector for the ninth day of the week, a middle-aged man with a face full of warts, too ugly for active service, Thanakar supposed. No, the white ribbon of the winter war snaked through his buttonholes, and in his eyes there was a look of—what?

Intelligence? Thanakar reminded himself that these men were all criminals, rapists, murderers, toadies.

Yet as always, they had human voices.

“I thought we had seen you for the last time, sir,” said the man. His name was Spanion Locke, printed on a card pinned to the front of his uniform.

“You were mistaken.”

Locke stared at him sadly. Then he shrugged. “Where do you want to go?”

“Heretics.”

“Heretics.” The man sighed. “Sir, can I . . . may I ask you what you’re planning on doing?”

“No.” The doctor had no idea himself.

“Will you open your bag?”

“It’s my private property.”

“Sir, you understand it’s against the law to bring unauthorized drugs into the wards.”