Am I to act only on your command, when the Sleeper comes for me?” “Were you planning to do anything other than lie down and die?” she said, waiting for rage; dying for rage; hoping for the simulacrum of rage, if nothing else. “What do you think you can do, Ortus? Did you have a tactic, beyond stopping bullets with your body?” “It would be within the family character, I agree,” said Ortus, meditatively. “My father died, simply because your mother and father asked him to. He took his own life when your parents handed him the rope, though he had a wife at home and, if he acknowledged it, a son.”
