Norma did what she could, did what she thought right. "You don't have to die," she told him. "You're not responsible."
That was what he heard, and it was enough. He hadn't made the Alberts into slaves. He hadn't made the Alberts into slaves.
But he knew who had. Long before, it had all been carefully explained to him. All of the tricks that had been used....
Of course, Dodd thought. Of course he wasn't responsible.
He felt an enormous peace descend on him, like a cloak, as he turned with the beam in his hand and smiled at Norma. She began, tentatively, to return his smile.
The beam cut her down where she stood and left a swathe of jungle behind her black and smoking.
Dodd, his job completed, dropped the beam. For one instant four words lit up in his mind, and then everything went out into blankness and peace. The body remained, the body moved, the body lived, for a time. But after those four words, blinding and bright and then swallowed up, Johnny Dodd was gone.
From A Cultural Record of Fruyling's World
Personal Histories of the Natives (called Alberts)
As Dictated and Preserved on Tape by Historical Commission HN3-40-9
... Dara is dead in the returning, when new masters come to us and say the fighting is over. It is an accident which kills her, a stumble, they say, against a plant which is dangerous to animal life and to our kind. The accident is over and Dara is dead, and we return.
I find Marvor after the fighting, once only, and I ask him what it is that is so important about this fighting. The Confederation--the masters we now have--are only masters like the ones we know. Marvor looks at me with a look as if he, too, is a master.
"Freedom is that important," he says. "Freedom is the most important thing."
I know that Marvor is not right, because I know the most important thing: it is the dead. For me Dara is most important, and I remember Puna, who is dead in the fighting: the rest does not matter. I say this now, knowing that the talk-machine hears me and that the Confederation hears me.
Marvor looks more like a master. "Freedom is good," he says.
"And yet Dara is dead," I say. "And others are dead. How do I feel happy when I know this?"
"In freedom," Marvor tells us, "Dara would be safe, and the others."