XVIII
THE GREAT RIDDLE
The homecoming! The return of our war-racked forces to the city, with half its suburbs burned, and a thousand of its people killed by Talon’s bombardment! I shall not describe the cheers, the laughter, the sobbing. Victory in war can seem to be so little better than defeat! All the paeans of triumph cannot heal the maimed, or bring back the dead.
I was king no longer, for our prince now was ruler, with Sonya for his queen. I was glad to be released. There is a very false, a pseudo-glory, in ruling a nation.
But Altho would not have me wholly resign. My promised reforms, my earthly ideas of government, were needed here. And so they called me premier, and thrived upon a crude but humane version of what we on earth would call a civilized government: a veneration of the aged, a new idea of infant welfare, a monogamy of marriage with the surplus women doing their rational work in art and industry.
Of Talon’s thousands, fully half of them escaped back into the mountains. They are there now. They will always be a menace. But there is not a race of humans in all the universe unmenaced by something. The very essence of human existence is struggle. We do not think of Talon’s brutes now as the Nameless Horror, and we are always prepared.
It was shortly after my marriage to Alice, that one evening I came upon Jim and Dolores in each other’s arms.
“Well!” I said. “What’s this?”
He kissed her again. “I loved her right from the beginning,” he declared.
Which was not exactly true, but I knew he thought so.
I had never seen little Dolores so radiant. “And I always loved him, Len. You know that.”