Hovan shook his head sadly. "I can say no more, Steve, except— remember always the purpose of the Ordeal."
"Purpose. Yeah. Only I'm beginning to think there is no purpose. This whole damn thing's impossible."
But Hovan's words roused Tarlac from his exhausted depression and made him think, with all a Ranger's problem-solving acuteness.
Start with one thing: Hovan had told him the Lords didn't ask the impossible, and his experience as Kranath confirmed that. They might ask things just short of impossible, but anything they asked could be done.
All right. That meant there was a solution; he just had to find it. Hovan hadn't stated as a fact that Kranath's Vision would bring the end of this cycle, but that idea gave him background he needed.
Wait a minute. It couldn't be a coincidence that the Vision and the cycle's end came together—but it also couldn't be the cause-and-effect relationship Hovan seemed to think. The cycle had already ended, ten years ago, when the Empire and Traiti had first met. The Traiti were no longer isolated, whatever happened.
And he'd already accepted responsibility for determining the new cycle, by agreeing to the Ordeal. If it was death, he'd share it. If it was peace, the Traiti would be exposed to Imperial culture, and he'd help them make the best synthesis they could of it and their own.
That simplified things again, to whether or not he should tell them of their origin. And it brought up what had to be the real consideration. Did he have the right—was it honorable—to deny the Traiti knowledge of their heritage? Whatever the consequences?
Put that way, the answer was obvious. He did not.
Hovan had given him that answer, before either of them knew the question, the day they'd landed on Homeworld. Tarlac remembered asking, surprised, if the unworried-seeming civilians knew how the war was going, and the reply was apt here too: "Such things must in honor known be."