this is what you must prevent, Center's passionless tones went on. we have waited seven hundred years for a man such as you.

"Me?" Adrian squeaked. "Why not my brother Esmond?"

this world does not require a warrior, Center said. it needs. . wisdom.

"Philosophy?" Adrian asked, bewildered. "Rhetoric? Yes, they're the arts of civilization, but our thinkers and speakers are the finest that have ever lived. How can I—"

Raj cut him off. I'll explain; the concept wasn't very easy for me, either, back on Bellevue — back on the world where I was born, he said. It's called "technological progress."

Adrian felt a familiar excitement; it was like the first time he grasped that this syllogism thing the lecturer was talking about meant something, or understood just why the angles of a right-angled triangle had to add up in a certain way — the feeling of real knowledge, like a conduit to the mind of God.

"Tell me," he whispered.

* * *

"Way!" the soldier's voice rang harsh and loud. "Make way!"

Adrian and Esmond reined their velipads to the side of the highway. It was a Confederation road, built a century ago to nail down the Confederacy's control of the coastal river valleys to the north. Twenty paces broad, ditched, and paved with hexagonal blocks of volcanic rock, built to last for the ages — Adrian had seen one undercut by a flash flood once, and it was five feet thick. A layer of fist-sized stones in lime mortar, a layer of sand, another of mortar with smaller rocks, then a layer of mortar and gravel, and then the paving blocks. .