The Gap Cycle GC Omnibus by Stephen R. Donaldson

Author:Stephen R. Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Adventure

WARDEN

He was at his best when he was ashamed.

He could not have explained that: he was hardly aware of it. Yet it was true. The tension between his unyielding passion for standards of integrity, commitment, and efficacy so untrammeled that they could never be attained and his sense of mortal chagrin when he fell below those standards was fruitful for him. It taught him strengths he might never have known he possessed.

Shame and idealism were the means by which Holt Fasner had manipulated him into becoming what he was: the director of the UMCP, guilty as charged; the man most directly responsible for the corruption of the cops. Holt had focused his idealism—his essential belief that it was the honorable and necessary function of the police to serve and protect humanity—to position him where he would be vulnerable; then had exercised his shame to push him farther and farther from those ideals.

In a sense Warden had accepted this. Presumably he could have refused at any time—could have preserved the man he wished to be by letting Holt fire him. At the worst Holt might have had him killed. So what? Warden knew to his cost that there were many worse fates than death.

Yet he hadn’t refused. At every crisis he’d resisted the Dragon’s cunning up to a certain point; then he’d let it carry him along.

In a sense, the reason he did this was simple.

All his life, he’d considered himself inadequate to his dreams; unequal to the task of making them live. Certainly he’d been too flawed to see Holt Fasner accurately when the Dragon had first hired him to work for SMI Security. Stupid with naïveté, he’d believed that he was being given a chance to do good, valuable work for a good, valuable man. And Holt had encouraged that illusion with every trick at his command. Hungry with dreams and shame, Warden had learned to define himself in terms of law enforcement at its noblest: service and protection for those who needed it most—and could afford it least.

By the time he’d realized that Holt used the cops for no purposes but his own, and that those purposes had nothing to do with idealism, Warden had already acquired a taste for the nourishment his sore heart craved: the food of lawful power.

So who could hope to stop the Dragon, if not an officer of the law? Whose job was it? And to whom did that job properly belong, if not to the man who had helped make the Dragon powerful by allowing his own hopes to blind him?

Precisely because he considered himself culpable, Warden Dios had sworn to take any risk and pay any price which might help him undo the harm he’d caused by supporting Holt Fasner’s ambitions.

Of course he couldn’t undo that harm if he weren’t a cop. The authority of his position as director of the UMCP was all that enabled him to act. He couldn’t afford to sacrifice that authority in the name of personal honor.

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