But the bunks around him were empty. Even Tili was missing — even Cohl.

Pirius lay down and massaged an aching shoulder. He peered up into the shadows. His new eyes changed the way he saw the world, even a mundane scene like this, if only at the fringes. You saw new colors, to which the cadets gave names like sharp violet and bloody red. And you made out new details. He could see the hot breath rising from his own mouth, curling knots of turbulence that rose up and splashed languidly on the bunk above him. Pointlessly beautiful.

Where was everybody? Well, what did he care? But curiosity got the better of him. Besides, he felt oddly lonely; after months in this crowded barracks, he was getting addicted to company.

He rolled out of his bunk.

Barefoot, he padded down the barracks’ center aisle. The place was quieter than usual, with hardly anybody about, the general horseplay, fighting, flirting, and sex subdued. But he heard a single clear voice, speaking softly and steadily.

He turned a corner and came upon a crowd.

This Burden Must Pass was standing on an upturned locker, hands spread wide, smiling. Before him, privates and cadets sat on the floor, or crowded together on bunks, squashed up against each other with the casual intimacy of familiarity. There were perhaps fifty of them here, gathered around Burden.

Pirius sat down on the floor at the back, folding his legs under him. The cadets wriggled to make room, but he still ended up with warm bodies pressed against either side. Glancing around, he saw Tili Three and Cohl. Burden noticed him, and Pirius thought he acknowledged him with a wink. But Burden didn’t break his smooth flow.

Burden was talking about his religion, the creed of the Friends.

“Entropy,” he said. “Think of it that way. You start out with a hundred in a company. A hundred move out of some dismal trench. Ten die straight away, another ten are hit and injured. So eighty go on to the next earthwork. And then it’s over again, lads, and ten more fall, ten more are wounded… On it goes. It’s entropy, everything slowly wearing down, lives being rubbed out. It’s relentless.” He smacked one fist into another. “But entropy is everywhere. From the moment we’re born to the moment we die we depend for our lives on machines. Entropy works on them too; they wear out. If we just accepted that, the air machines and water machines and food machines would fail, one by one, and we would be dead in a few days. But we don’t accept it. Everything wears out. So what? You fix it.”

The cadets’ smooth young faces, so alike when you saw them all together, were like clusters of little antennae turned toward Burden, metallized eyes shining. Tili’s face, still young, was lined by grief. But as Burden talked, Pirius saw those lines fading, her eyes clearing. She even smiled at Burden’s poor jokes. Burden might be talking a lot of garbage, but it was clearly comforting garbage, comforting in a way that no words of Pirius could have been. He wondered, though, how Burden was feeling inside, as he absorbed the pain of these damaged children.

And it was certainly non-Doctrinal.

Burden spoke on. “We won’t last much longer. None of us will. But our children will survive, and our children’s children, an unending chain of blood and strength that will go on forever, go on to the end of time. And at the end, at timelike infinity, where all the world lines of all the particles and all the stars in the whole universe, all the people who ever lived, when all of it comes together, our descendants will meet — no, they will become — the Ultimate Observer. And the final observation will be made, the final thoughts shaped in the ultimate mind. And everything will be cleansed.” He waved a hand. “All of this, all our suffering and grief, will pass — for it will never have happened. The universe is just another balky machine. Any one of you could fix a busted air cleanser or biopack. Some day, we’ll fix the universe itself!”

Tili Three spoke up. “But Michael Poole didn’t wait for timelike infinity.”

“No.” Burden smiled. “Michael Poole went into the future. He sacrificed himself to save his children, all our children. He is with the Ultimate Observer — is, was, always will be…”

The listeners asked more softball questions. But Cohl asked a tougher one. “How do you know? Are we supposed to accept this on faith?”

Burden wasn’t perturbed. “Of course not. Past and future aren’t fixed; history can be changed — in fact, it changes all the time. You know that, Cohl. You lived through an action that got deleted from the timeline. So you know that contingency is real. It’s not much of a leap of faith to imagine that some day somebody will make a purposeful change — an intelligent change — and wipe away all our tears.”

Cohl’s expression was complex. She kept up her mask of skepticism. But she wanted to believe, Pirius realized with a shock; even Cohl, once an ultraorthodox Druzite. She might have her suspicions about the man, but she was listening to his words, and seemed to want to accept Burden’s strange and comforting faith.

A small Virtual drifted before Pirius’s eyes: it was Captain Marta’s face. “Come to my office, Private. We need to talk.”

With a mixture of regret and relief, Pirius slipped away from the little congregation. Nobody seemed to notice.

Marta’s office was unglamorous. It was just a partitioned-off corner of the barracks, the furniture no more than a bunk and a table where data desks were untidily heaped. The only luxury seemed to be a coffee machine. But in one corner there was a kind of cubicle, like a shower, with walls pocked with interface sockets. Pirius wondered if this equipment had something to do with Marta’s complex injuries.

Marta waved him to a chair. Pirius could hear the whir of motors as she sat down opposite him. “Sorry to drag you off from Quero’s lecture.” She eyed him. “And you can lower those eyebrows, private. Of course we know about Burden and his proselytizing.”

“Burden’s talk comforts them,” he said.

“Of course it does. That’s why it’s so successful in the first place, I suppose. And why we turn a blind eye.” She sipped her coffee, and Pirius saw that the metallic surface of her face extended through her lips to the roof of her mouth. “We allow them to stay in their cadre groups, or even their families if we have to, because it gives them something to fight for. And Burden’s waffle about the end of time comforts them when they fall. The ideologues at the center disapprove, of course, but out here we have a war to wage.”

Pirius wondered how to put his own doubts about Burden into words — or even if he should. “I don’t get Burden,” he admitted. “He is his own man. In combat he fights as hard as anybody—”

“Harder than most,” said Marta laconically.

“And he’s not afraid of being ostracized for his faith. But sometimes he seems — weak.”

Marta eyed him. “Burden has depths. And a past which he’s apparently not prepared to share with you. But, you know what? It doesn’t bother me. If Burden took a hit tomorrow, all his emotional complexity would disappear with him. In the meantime, he can think what he likes, feel what he likes, as long as he does such an effective job. As long as our soldiers fight, who cares what goes on in their heads?”

Pirius was silent.

“You’re judging me, Private,” Marta said more heavily.

“I’m having trouble with your contempt for us, sir.”

She nodded, apparently not offended. “Not contempt. But I have to manage you from birth to death, and send you into war. Not contempt, no. Distance, I suppose. This is the nature of command.”

“If you’re so tolerant about the Friends, why did you give Tuta such a hard time when we got here?”