They were now no more than a thousand meters up, at most, and beginning to descend on atmosphere drive toward a spaceport misted with early morning rain under gray skies; a spaceport larger in area than the small city to which it was adjacent. Clearly, they were about to land at what Amid had earlier told Hal was the intended destination of the ship—the closest thing to a capital city that the Dorsai possessed. This was the city of Omalu, which housed the central administrative offices of the United Cantons, the districts into which the Dorsai had come to be organized for purposes of local self-government.
Actually, however, as Hal knew as well as the Exotics who had sent him here, these offices formed no more than a library and storage center for contractual records; and a contact point for discussion of matters that could not conveniently be discussed and settled locally in or between the cantons concerned. The Dorsai had even less than the Exotic Worlds in the way of a central government.
In theory, the cantonal officers had authority over the individuals and families living within the boundaries of the individual canton; but in actuality even this authority was more a matter of expressing local public opinion than otherwise.
Neighborliness—a word that held a special meaning on the Dorsai—was what made a social unit of this world. The cantons, even in theory, had only a courtesy relationship to the central administrative offices of each island on this world of islands, large and small. And the island offices did no more than communicate with the United Cantonal Offices here in Omalu. It was the only way a world could operate on which families, and individuals in those families, were constantly dealing on a direct and independent basis with off-planet governments and individuals scattered over all the other thirteen worlds.
Ironically, Hal had been sent out at Exotic expense to speak to representatives of a world which had no representatives, at least officially. It was ironic because the Exotics, who trusted nothing they could not test and identify, had in this case simply trusted the people of the Dorsai world to bring Hal somehow to those to whom he should speak.
But the spacecraft was now landing at the port, almost as precipitously and economically as it had phase-shifted to within a breath of ground level. As it settled down and became still, the sign winked out over the door. Hal shut off the restraining field. He got to his feet and collected a shoulder bag supplied and filled by Amid, and containing necessary personal clothes and equipment. Amid had reminded him—unnecessarily—that the Dorsai was one world where it was not always possible to buy suddenly needed clothes and other personal necessities conveniently close at hand.
Leaving his stateroom, he had to squeeze his way past crates of Exotic medical machines of various sizes and complexity, stacked even in the central corridor of the craft. A majority of these were new, replacements for worn-out units in Dorsai hospitals; but a fair number were older machines which had been taken back to their designers on Mara for repair or the additions of improvements beyond the training of the local Dorsai technicians doing ordinary maintenance on them. There were even more of these filling the vessel than Hal remembered encountering when he had come aboard. It had been remarkable that a craft this small could lift from the surface, packed with this much cargo.
Finding his way out of the entry port at last, Hal stepped into the cloudy morning and the gusting rain above the landing pad. Descending the ramp to the pad, Hal found at the foot of it a tall, lean, middle-aged woman in gray coveralls, in brisk conversation with a lean-faced, older man riding a small hovertruck.
"—You'll need bodies!" she was saying. "The way that equipment's packed in there, you're not going to get it out alone, even with handlifters. Even the two of us can't do it. We're going to have to lift three things to get one clear enough for you to carry it off."
"All right," said the man. "Back in five minutes."
He turned his truck and slid off swiftly across the pad toward a blurred line of gray buildings in the distance. The woman turned and saw Hal. Saw him, and stared at him for a long moment.
"Are you Dorsai?" she said, at last.
"No," said Hal.
"I was about twenty meters away from you, over by the truck, unloading, when they took you on board," she said. "You moved like a Dorsai. I thought you were."
Hal shook his head.
"One of the people who raised me was Dorsai," he said.
"Yes." She stared at him for a moment more. "So, then, you've never had ship-handling. There ought to have been two of us on a trip like this, and I wondered why you didn't come up front and offer to give me a hand. But I had my own hands full; and when you didn't, I took it there was some reason you wanted privacy."
"In a way," said Hal, "I did."
"Good enough. If you couldn't help, you did just what you should have by staying out of my way. All right, no harm done. I made it here well enough by myself, and you're where you wanted to go."
"Not exactly," said Hal. "Foralie's where I wanted to go."
"Foralie? On Caerlon Island?" She frowned. "Those Exotics told me Omalu."
"They were assuming something," said Hal. "I'll be coming back to Omalu here, eventually. But for now, I want to go to Foralie."
"Hmm." The pilot glanced over at the buildings. "Babrak'll be back in a moment. He can give you a ride to the terminal and they can tell you there how you might get to Foralie. You'll probably have to change boats several times—"
"I was hoping to fly straight there," said Hal. "I've got the interstellar credit to pay for it."
"Oh." She smiled a little grimly. "Interstellar credit's one thing we can always use these days. I should have guessed you'd have some, since you came aboard on one of the Exotics. Well, as I say, Babrak'll be back shortly. Let's get in out of this weather; and meanwhile, how about giving me a hand clearing enough space just inside the entry port for him to get started?"
Less than two hours later, Hal was airborne in the smallest jitney-type space and atmosphere craft in which he had ever ridden. He sat side by side with the driver before the control panel; there were two more empty seats behind them, and beyond that only a small cargo space.
"It's about a third of a circumference," said the pilot, a thin, brisk, black-haired man of about thirty in a fur-collared jacket and slacks. "Take us something over an hour. You're not Dorsai, are you?"
"No," said Hal.
"Thought for a moment you were. Hold on." The jitney went straight up toward the upper edge of the atmosphere. The pilot checked his controls and looked over at Hal, again.
"Foralie Town, isn't it?" he said. "You know someone there?"
"No," answered Hal. "I've just always wanted to see Foralie. I mean, Foralie, itself. Graemehouse."
"Foralie's the property. Graemehouse's the name of the house on it. Which is it, the property or the house you want to see?"
"All of it," said Hal.
"Ah."
The driver watched him briefly for a moment longer before returning his gaze to the stars visible above the far, curved horizon of the daylit surface below, visible beyond the vehicle's windshield. They were headed in the same direction as the rotation of the planet. The brilliant white pinpoint of the local sun, Fomalhaut, which had been behind them on liftoff, began now to catch up. "You didn't happen to have a relative who was a Graeme?"
"Not as far as I know," said Hal.
The dry tone in which he had unthinkingly answered had its effect. The driver asked no more questions and Hal was left in the dimness of the jitney's interior to his own thoughts once more. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. When he had been very young one of his fanciful dreams had indeed been that his parents might have been related to the Foralie Graemes. But that sort of wishful thinking was long past now. The pilot's question had still managed to touch an old sensitivity.
However, now that he was actually headed toward Foralie, he found himself strangely uneasy with his decision to go there first, before doing anything else on the Dorsai. He had no sensible reason for making this
trip now—only his early fascination with the history of the Graemes and the stories Malachi had told him of Ian and Kensie, Donal, and the others.
No, it had simply been that, darkened by the shadow which had come over him in the garden on Mara, he had felt a reluctance to move too swiftly here on the Dorsai—in his execution of the commission that Nonne and the other Exotics had asked him to undertake, or anything else; and in the face of that feeling, on the trip here, he had decided to do what he had always wanted to do since he had been a child, and that was see the Foralie which Malachi had so many times mentioned to him.
The deeper reason was less clear, but more powerful. It was that of all his dreams and fever-visions during the period in the cell, the one that still clung in his mind and moved him most strongly was the dream of the burial. Its events were solid and real in his mind even now—the tearing sorrow and the commitment. He did not need to hunt out points of evidence within that dream to know that it had been about some place and people on the Dorsai. To someone raised as he had been, the fact was self-evident—the very color and feel of what he had dreamed was Dorsai. So powerful had been its effect on him that he felt it like an omen—to be disregarded at his peril; and since Malachi had been the last of his own family, there was no place on that world to which Hal could relate strongly but the household of the legendary Graemes of which he had heard so much in his young years.
It was true, he had always wanted to see the birthplace of Donal Graeme. But something more than that was at work in him, now—something beyond his present understanding of that vision of death and commitment—that was still hidden from his conscious mind and which drew him instinctively toward some place or time strongly Dorsai, for a fuller understanding.
Besides, it was curiously apt that he should go there now. Malachi, or the shade of Malachi which he had conjured up with those of Walter and Obadiah four years past at the Final Encyclopedia, had told him that there would be no reason for him to go to the Dorsai until he was ready to fight the Others. Well, he was at last ready to fight them; and it had been from the starting point of Foralie that Donal Graeme had gone in his time to gain leadership of the whole fourteen worlds. An almost mystic sense of purpose seemed to beckon Hal to the same place of beginning.
Also, he was in a mood that needed support, even mystic support. He had failed dismally to get the Exotics to listen to him or help him. There was no reason to expect the Dorsai to do more. In fact, considering the independence of its people on that harsh world, there was less reason. What had happened to him in Amid's garden as he had waited for their decision had been something outside his experience until that moment. A certain belief in himself with which he had emerged from the Militia cell on Harmony, and which he had then thought impregnable, had been struck and weakened by the blindness of the Exotic attitude.
It had not been merely the fact that they had not listened. That had been only the final assault that had breached the inner fortress of his spirit. But the breach had been made only after a number of recent blows that had already cracked and weakened what he had always thought was unbreakable in him. Where he had once taken for granted that whatever he defended was unconquerable, he now could see defeat as a real possibility.
Granted, there were excuses. The emotional pain of having to trick and abandon his friends in the Command, his illness at the time, his driving of his body far beyond its physical limits and, finally, his rite-of-passage—as Amid had referred to it—alone in the Militia cell, had all had their effect. Even the arguments of Bleys, which, even denied, had weakened him in preparation for this final blow that was the Exotic refusal to hear what he had to say. Of all peoples, he had expected the men and women of Mara and Kultis to understand, to recognize something once it was pointed out to them.
But knowing these things did not help. The grayness, the feeling of defeat remained. He looked at his life and could not see that from the start he had achieved anything. His early dreams, put to the test out on the worlds, had vanished like pricked soap bubbles.
Who was he to think that he was anything but a minor annoyance to the Others—a mouse dodging about under the feet of giants who would sooner or later crush him? He was nothing; not Friendly, not Exotic, not Dorsai. He had no reason even to believe that he had any claim to belong to Earth. That ship in which he had been found could have been coming from anywhere; and been headed to anywhere. What was this present trip to Foralie, but a clutching at a straw floated to the surface of his mind by a dream? He had no real proof that he was not, indeed, a crossbreed, as Bleys had said. He had no identity, no home, no people. He was a stranger in every house, a foreigner on every world, his only known family three old men who had been no actual relations; and even they had only been with him for the first, early years of his life.
He had wanted to stay at the Final Encyclopedia, and his feeling that he must strike back at the Others had driven him from it. He had found a way of life as a miner; then, to save his life, had been forced to run and leave that way of life behind. He had found friends, almost a family, in Rukh's Command; and he had deliberately made the choice to abandon them. The Exotics had had no place or use for him except as a messenger; and there was no hearth waiting for him here on the Dorsai, where there were not even relatives of Malachi's to sit with for a moment and tell about Malachi's death. To have found even one other person who could have shared his grief over the loss of Malachi and the others, would have strengthened him to bear the dry emptiness of his solitary position in the universe.
He drew a deep, slow breath. Long ago, Walter InTeacher had told him how to deal with psychic pain like this; and he had remembered dutifully, if without great interest, seeing that the technique was for something that he could not imagine happening to him. Walter's instruction had been not to fight the depression and the self-condemnation, but to go with them and try to understand them. In the end, Walter had said, understanding could drain the destructive emotion from any situation.
He made an effort to do this now; and his mind slid off into a strange area, without symbols, where he seemed to feel himself tossed about by the vectors of powerful forces he could not see—like someone swept overboard from a ship in a hurricane. It went against his instincts not to fight these pressures; but Walter had emphasized the absence of resistance. Sitting in the thrumming near-silence of the jitney, hurling itself through the space where air and void meet, he forced himself into passivity, searching and feeling for some pattern to the situation that held him…
"Going down now," said the voice of the pilot, and Hal opened his eyes.
They were back into the atmosphere, descending fast over what seemed open ocean. Then a point of darkness near the horizon became apparent, enlarging as the jitney fell in a long curve toward it, until it was clearly visible as land. A few moments later they were low above mountain meadows and stony peaks; and shortly thereafter they dropped vertically to earth, on a concrete pad at the edge of what had seemed to be a small village beside a river.
"Here you are," said the driver. He punched a control on the panel before him and the entry to the jitney swung open, steps sliding down and out to the pad surface. "Just head up that road there. Center of Foralie Town's beyond the trees and the housetops, there."
"Thanks," said Hal. He reached for his case of credit papers, then remembered he had paid for this trip before leaving Omalu. He got up, taking his shoulder bag with him. "Is there a central office or—"
"Town Hall," said the driver. "It's always in the center of town. Just follow that road in. You can't miss it and it'll have a sign out front. If you do get lost, ask anyone."
"Thanks again," said Hal, and left the jitney, which took off before he had covered half the width of the pad to the road the driver had indicated.
They had flown forward into mid-afternoon. No breeze stirred. The trees that the jitney driver had mentioned were variform maples, and the color on them spoke of autumn. But it hardly needed that to tell Hal of the time of the
year in this part of the Dorsai; for the clear, clean light of fall spoke of the season in every quarter. Under an almost cloudless sky, the still air was scentless, cool in the shadow but hot in the sun. The shadows of the trees and, after a bit, the shadows of the wooden buildings when he had passed through the trees and found himself in the streets of Foralie Town itself, seemed hard-edged, they lay so crisply where the brilliant sunlight was interrupted. The colors of the houses glowed, clean and bright, as if all structures there had just been freshly washed and painted against the oncoming winter.
But the town itself was still and quiet, and the relative silence of it touched Hal strangely. He felt an emotion toward its houses and its streets that was an unusual thing to feel to a place never seen before. No one was in the streets through which he walked, although occasionally he heard voices through the open windows he passed. He came after a few moments to a central square; and, facing him at the far end, was a white building of two stories, its lower level half-sunken into the ground. There were two doors visible; one at the top of a flight of six steps to the upper story, the other preceded by a shorter flight, down to the floor below.
The white building plainly showed its difference in design from the obvious homes that fronted on the other three sides of the square. Hal went to it; and as he got close, he saw the word Library above the door to the semi-basement entrance. He went up the stairs to the higher door and touched its latch panel. It swung open and he entered.