d I am sure you will--"

"Will what?" Tarlac interrupted bitterly. "I thought it was bad
enough, trying to take the Ordeal and bring peace. Now I'm supposed to
start a new era, and avoid racial insanity, too?"

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."

Hovan repeated the phrase, and Tarlac realized he must have spoken
aloud--in English, for the first time since he'd been given Language.
"What things?" Hovan asked, still in English.

"That you're as much a Terran, and as such a citizen of the Empire, as
I am." He took a deep breat