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attentiveness he had assumed when he sat down, Andrej concentrated on the movements of the two Security troops behind him. He used to try to guess exactly what faces his young nieces and nephews behind him were making at the kneelers during the long hours in chapel on one Saint’s day or another; and now he found that the old pastime had the effect of giving him eyes in the back of his head, where the strictly subservient Security were concerned. The prisoner had not been brought in just yet, and Security seemed to permit themselves a bit more restlessness than they might have had they felt that someone was watching them — or watching them now as opposed to hours later on Record, where they would like as not be out of orb anyway, if the demonstration tapes were any indication. The image in his mind’s eye amused him — a pleasant relief from the fretful night he’d spent.
    “Gentlemen, a little concentration, if you please,” Andrej said, sensing their surprise and stiffening posture. Quite probably they’d never been forced to kneel devoutly for hours at a time while Uncle Radu declaimed at length about the improbably perfect virtue of some probably hypothetical martyr.
    Perhaps he should approach his task from a different angle after all, Andrej mused.
    To take a medical history one had to connect with a patient, and he wanted as little connection with this place as possible. He wasn’t interested in making any person-to-person contact with the prisoner; but he couldn’t take a medical history without engaging his empathic self.
    His final evaluations in that all-critical block of instruction had cited his “genuine and responsive empathy of a very respectable degree,” and he was proud of himself to have won over his own limitations, proud of how completely his proctor had been surprised as she read the commendatory prose from his record.
    It would be better for him if he could turn the empathy off, pretend he’d never fought through the icy bare-rock pass between his mind and heart. It would be better for him to observe clinically, without emotion. Except all that he was and all that he had won at Mayon depended upon his passionate empathy; how could he set that prize aside, and not diminish himself?
    He was no further toward a solution to the problem this morning than he had been last night, talking to Joslire. What had he been talking to Joslire about? There’d been a good deal of wodac after supper. He wasn’t quite sure.
    The warning signal sounded at the door; Andrej remembered. Uncle Radu, the tiresome business of the confessional, and the brutal simplicity of it all. Confess or be unreconciled. Be contrite or unreconciled; accept your penance joyfully. Or be un-Reconciled.
    Reaching for the glass on the table at his elbow, Andrej drank off half the rhyti in one draw, regretting his gesture immediately for the uneasiness that it betrayed.
    Control, he told himself.
    He had to have control.
    “Step through.” He could hear no tremor in his voice, no uncertainty or nervousness. He had confessed and he was contrite, but Uncle Radu — and the whole of the Blood by extension — could not accept that he was truly penitent while he still resisted his father’s will. He left his home for this place un-Reconciled because he couldn’t accept his father’s wishes without protest. Disgraced and unblessed, and sitting here as though he’d been set by the Holy Mother to examine her children for flaw or fault . . . “State your identification. And the crime to which you wish to confess.”
    He looked up only as he ended the first of the listed questions. He had the series set out in text for him on the scroller at his elbow; a Bench catechism of sorts, the litany for preserving the forms of the Judicial order. Perhaps it would be better to approach it that way. As long as he was un-Reconciled, he might as well be irreverent, and be damned for it. His father had kissed him and blessed him as well as he could