This was the Empire I loved, though I had scarcely lived in it. The Empire of ordinary men and women living ordinary lives. I smiled to see them, though I felt again the sharp division I had felt—as between species—wandering the streets of Meidua as a boy. With the glass of the armored window between them and me, I might have been at a menagerie, though I dared not guess which of us was the audience, and which the caged beast.
