With All Thy Heart

Part OneThe Lawyer's Test

Over three hundred thousand years of accumulation, the Order's Code had grown to nearly four hundred thousand separate statutes — outpost regulations, ritual procedures, the order of succession for seals, disciplinary codes, protocols for distant expeditions. No Keeper in the Order's history had ever held it entirely in memory. Keeper Juvenalius came closer than any living Keeper: at twenty-six he had passed the Code examination with a score unmatched in the last century.

On the Day of the Great Examination, when candidate Keepers sit their public trial before the whole Academy, Juvenalius rose from his seat to put a question not to a candidate, but to the examiner himself — the aged teacher Or, whose reading of the Code had been held as exemplary for half a century.

"Teacher," said Juvenalius, and the hall fell silent — a challenge to an elder at a public examination happened once a decade. "The Code holds four hundred thousand statutes. Name one — the greatest. The one for whose sake all the others exist. If you falter, it will mean the Code has no single heart, and you have spent fifty years interpreting something you do not understand yourself."

The hall waited for hesitation. Many of those present could not have answered a far simpler question.

Part TwoOn These Two Commandments

Or did not hesitate for a second.

"Love the Creator with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," he said. "This is the first and greatest commandment of the Code, though it is entered under no first number in any of its sections. And the second, like unto it: love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two the whole Code depends — all four hundred thousand statutes, down to the last comma."

"That is not a statute of the Code," Juvenalius objected. "I asked about a statute."

"You asked for whose sake the statutes exist," Or answered. "The outpost regulations exist so that a Keeper never leaves his neighbor alone before a Rift. The expedition protocols exist so that a man sent into danger is never sent there in vain, out of a commander's vanity rather than love for the task the Creator entrusted him with. The disciplinary code exists so the Order's strength never turns against those it was raised to protect. Take love of the Creator and love of neighbor out from beneath any statute, and what remains is an empty form — one that can be perfectly kept and perfectly betrayed at the same time, because there is nothing left to measure its meaning against."

"Fine words," said Juvenalius. "But the Code demands precision, not eloquence."

"Then let us test the precision," Or said calmly. "You know the Code better than I do. Name me a statute that can be kept to perfection without loving either the Creator or the person for whose sake it was written."

Juvenalius opened his mouth to answer — and found nothing to say. The hall fell silent along with him.

Part ThreeThe Test Outside the Hall

The examination would have continued its course had a cadet from a border outpost not burst into the hall a minute before the recess: on the Academy's observation deck a young novice repairing an antenna had slipped from his mounting harness and now hung by an emergency line over a forty-meter shaft.

The whole hall was on its feet at once — the examination ceased to exist for everyone in that instant, Juvenalius included. He ran out with the rest, asking not a single question about the seal regulation he had quoted with such confidence an hour before — and turned out to be the first to work out, without error, how to redistribute the load on the safety line while Or and two cadets hauled the novice up.

The boy was pulled to safety ninety seconds before the anchor finally tore free. Everyone who had been in the hall — Or, Juvenalius, the candidates, the witnesses — found themselves outside together, in a single motion, without a word spoken about who had the right to leave and who was bound to stay.

Part FourWho Is Thy Neighbor

Once the boy had been handed over to the healers and the first rush of alarm had settled, Juvenalius went back into the empty hall for the data-slate he had left behind — and the moment he picked it up, he began typing: "Examination session suspended at 14:52 due to emergency. Procedure for resumption and liability status for breach of hall seal to be determined..."

"Five minutes ago you were running for the line without once thinking of that regulation," said Or, watching him from the doorway. "Now that the boy is safe, the regulation has come back before you've even caught your breath."

Juvenalius looked up from the slate as if caught at something shameful.

"Someone has to record what happened correctly," he said, though without his earlier certainty.

"Someone does," Or agreed. "But notice: you did not consult the Code when you decided whether to run. You already knew the answer — the very one you asked me to name as a single statute an hour ago. You simply didn't notice you had already given it yourself, before you had time to think about it."

"I wasn't thinking at all," Juvenalius admitted. "I just ran."

"That is the whole difference between a commandment written on the heart and one written in a code," said Or. "The one written on the heart needs no finding before the deed. It only needs not to be silenced afterward."

Juvenalius slowly lowered the slate.

"I knew the Code better than anyone in this hall," he said finally. "And I ran anyway, without opening a single page of it. And the moment I came back, the first thing I did was go looking in it for what I had already done without it."

EpilogueOne Law, Two Names

The examination was rescheduled for the following day. Juvenalius found Or that evening in the Academy library, among scrolls he had been paging through for fifty years.

"I want to retake not only the examination," he said. "I want to understand how you hold four hundred thousand statutes in your mind and never lose sight of why they were written."

"I don't hold them," Or admitted. "I forget statutes constantly — the Code is too vast for a single memory. But I hold two things in my heart that never slip away: whom I love, and for Whose sake. Everything else is commentary on those two lines, written over three hundred thousand years by very diligent people."

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law.

Knowledge of the law without love is only memory. Love without knowledge of the law still finds its way to the line over the shaft.