"Left the Dorsai?"
"Some think they don't have any choice. Others of us, of course, would never leave. But this world's always been one where any adult's free to make his own decisions, without advice or comment unless she or he asks for it."
"Of course…" said Hal, hardly knowing what he was saying.
He was caught up entirely in what he had just heard. Since the hours in the cell on Harmony he had known that the time of the Splinter Cultures was over. But for the first time, with what Amanda had just told him, the knowledge hit deeply within him. The Dorsai world without the Dorsai people was somehow more unthinkable than the same thing on any of the other Younger Worlds. All at once, his mind's eye saw it deserted; its homes empty and decaying, its level lands, oceans and high mountains without the sound of human voices. His whole being tried to push the image from him; and still, in the back of his mind, the certainty of it sat like a certainty of the end of the universe. This, too, had to end; and the concept that had been built here with such labor must finally vanish with it, not to come again.
He roused himself from the feeling that had suddenly crushed him like the grip of some giant's icy hand, into a perfect silence. Across the table with the tray holding glasses, cups, coffee dispenser and whiskey decanter, Amanda still sat watching him almost oddly, as she had watched him in that first moment of their meeting.
He was conscious of something, some current of feeling that seemed to wash back and forth between them, virtually unknown to each other as they were.
"Are you all right?" he heard her ask, calmly.
"I'd kill time if I could!" he heard the words break from him without warning, shocking him with their intensity. "I'd kill death. I'd kill anything that killed anything!"
"But you can't," she answered, softly.
"No." He pulled himself back to something like normal self-possession. The whiskey, he told himself—but he had drunk very little, and alcohol had always had only small power to touch him. Something else had driven him—was still driving him to speak as he just had. "You're right. Everyone's got a right to his own decisions; and that's what creates history—decisions. The decisions are changing and the times are changing. What we were all used to is going to be put aside; and something new is going to be taking its place. I tried to tell that to some Exotics before I came here; and I thought if anyone would listen, they would."
"But they didn't?"
"No," he said, harshly. "It's the one thing they can't face, time running out. It sets a limit to their search—it means that now they'll never find what they've been looking for, all this time since they called themselves the Chantry Guild, back on Earth. Strange…"
"What's strange?" he heard her ask, when he did not go on.
He was staring into the dark, firelit pool of whiskey in his glass, kneading it between his hands again. He looked up from the glass at her.
"Those who ought to see what's happening—the people who could do something—refusing to see. While everyone who can't do anything about it seems to know it's there. They seem to feel it, the way animals feel a thunderstorm coming."
"You feel it yourself, do you?" she asked. Her eyes, darker now in the firelight, still watched him, and drew him. He talked on.
"Of course. But I'm of those caught up in it," he said. "I've had to face up to what's happening, and will happen."
"Tell me, then," said Amanda's voice softly. "What is it that's happening? And what is it that's going to happen?"
He pressed the hard shape of the whiskey glass between his hands, staring now into the flames of the fireplace.
"We're headed toward the last battle," he said. "That's what's happening. No, call it a last conflict, because most of it won't be a battle in the dictionary sense. But, depending on how it comes out, the race is either going to have to die or grow. I know—that sounds like something too large to believe. But we've made it that big ourselves, over the centuries. Only those in the best position to understand how it could happen, wouldn't ever look squarely at the situation. I couldn't see it myself until my nose was rubbed in it. But if you look back at what's been happening in just the last twenty or thirty standard years, you see the evidence all over the place. The Others appearing…"
He talked on, almost in spite of himself. The words ran from him like dogs unleashed, and he found himself telling her about everything that he had come to understand in the cell on Harmony.
She sat quietly, asking a brief question now and then, watching him. He felt a tremendous relief in being able to uncap the pressure of that explosion of understanding. It was a pressure that had been growing steadily in him lately, as his mind developed and extended its first discoveries. His original impulse had been to do no more than sketch the situation for her; but he found himself being drawn, by the way she listened, from that to the people and things that had led him to understanding. He felt captured by her attention; and he heard his own voice going on and on as if it had developed an independent life of its own.
Once, it crossed his mind again to wonder if the Dorsai whiskey had something to do with it. But once more he rejected the idea. It had been in his first year on Coby that he had found that alcohol did not affect him in the same measure as it seemed to affect the other miners. When they had finally drunk themselves into silence and even slumber, he would be still awake and restless, so restless he had been driven to those long, solitary walks of his down the endless stone corridors. It had been as if a part of his mind had withdrawn a little farther with each step his body took toward intoxication; until he had existed apart from the moment, wrapped in a sadness and a sense of isolation that would drive him eventually out, away from the unconscious others to walk those lonely distances.
But what he was feeling now, with her, was if anything the opposite of that sense of isolation; and, in any case, there was a reasonable limit to the strength of alcoholic liquors made for the pleasure of drinking. Beyond a certain proof they were uncomfortable to the palate and throat; and that point the Dorsai whiskey, though strong, had not exceeded. Nor was the amount he had drunk at all great, measured by the meterstick of his experience…
He found himself telling the third Amanda about Child-of-God, and the effect of Child's death upon his own understanding.
"… When I first met him," he was saying, "I thought he was another Obadiah—I told you about my other two tutors, didn't I? Then, as I got to know him, I began to have less and less use for him. He seemed to be a fanatic and nothing more—not able to care or feel, not interested in anything but the rules of that religion of his. But then, he was the one who spoke up when the local people wanted the Command to send me away; and for the first time I began to see a pattern to what he was; and it was larger—much larger—than I'd thought."
"You were still young," said Amanda.
"Yes," he said. "I was young. We're always young, no matter how old we are. And then, when he insisted on staying behind to slow down the Militia; and I couldn't stay with him—knew that it wasn't for me to stay with him—and that he understood that, this man I'd thought had no sensitivity, no understanding beyond the church rules he lived by, then it all opened up for me. I knew the difference between someone like him, then, and someone like Barbage, who was my jailer in that Militia cell, the man whose life I'd saved in the mountain pass…"
The lights of the living room blinked once.
"Curfew," murmured Amanda. "We save power, nowadays, for those who most need it."
She got to her feet. The hard fabric of her riding pants whispered lightly, leg against leg, as she stepped to the fireplace once more; and the firelight, reflecting from the polished apron of black stone before it, sent glitters of light into the small wave of her bright hair, where it clung close against the tanned skin of her neck. She lit the stubs of two large candles that stood on supports on either side of it. They looked from their thickness to have been as long as her forearm to begin with; and the stands they rested on were tall, lifting the candle fl
ames even now above Hal's eye level as he sat in his armchair. The candles themselves seemed to be made of grayish-green, waxy-looking seeds, pressed together into sticks. As the generous flamens rose from their wicks, the built-in lighting of the room dimmed itself gradually into extinction. Shadow moved in from the corners of the room, until Hal and Amanda were in a little illuminated space constructed by candlelight and firelight alone. A faint, piny odor reached Hal's nostrils.
Amanda sat down again. Even as close as she was to him, the darkness of her outdoor clothing lost itself against the shadows of her chair, so that the whiteness of her face seemed to float in a friendly gloom, watching him.
"You were telling me about someone whose life you saved in a mountain pass," she said.
"Yes," he said. "Barbage's life. I didn't understand then the sort of things the Militia did to anyone from the Commands that they got their hands on; and what Barbage himself must have done to prisoners from the Commands, while he was working his way up through the ranks to Captain. And still, there wasn't anything false about him, either. He was—he is wrong. I think I know why now—but he was what he was. That's why the other Militia officers were afraid of him. I saw him face down another Militia Captain, the one time I managed to get close to their camp…"
He talked on. The candles burned lower; and, imperceptibly, he found he had drifted from telling her about those he had met to telling her about himself. Something within him, some small alarm sensor, was trying to catch his attention, but the force pushing him to talk was too great to be denied. Amanda hardly needed to ask questions, now; and in the end he found himself telling her about what it had been like for him when he was very young.
"… But what was it, specifically," she asked, finally, "that made you identify so with the Graemes?"
"Oh, well," he said, staring into the fire, his mind adrift in the flame-lit darkness and carried on by the force within him, "you've got to remember I'm an orphan. I've always been… isolated. I suppose I identified with Donal's isolation. You remember how when he was at the Academy, they used to speak of him as an odd boy, different from anyone else—"
—Something happened in the room. He looked up swiftly.
"I'm sorry—" he gazed at Amanda but she was exactly as she had been a moment before. The small alarm sensor was now obvious within him. Deliberately, he forced it from his consciousness. "Did you say something?"
"No," she answered. Her eyes were steady on his in the dimness of the room. "Nothing."
He tried to pick up the thread of what he had been saying.
"You see he had always been alone inside, always…" His voice ran down. He put his hand to his forehead, felt dampness, and took it away again. "What was I saying?"
"You're probably tired," Amanda leaned forward in her chair. "You were saying Donal was always alone. But he wasn't. He married Anea of Kultis."
"Yes, but that was his mistake. You see, he was hoping then that, after all, he could still live an ordinary life. But he couldn't. He'd been committed so early… it was something like the mistake Cletus made with Melissa Khan; although that was different, because all Cletus had to do was finish his book…"
His thoughts slipped away from him once more. He wiped his forehead with his hand and felt the cool dampness of perspiration.
"I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am tired—it's been a large day…"
He was, he realized suddenly, exhausted, sodden with fatigue.
"Of course it has," said Amanda, gently. "I'll show you how to get to your room."
She rose, taking one of the candles from its stand, and led the way into a corridor beyond a further doorway in the wall to the left of the fireplace. He lifted himself woodenly to his feet and walked after her.
Chapter Forty-three
His sleep was a dead sleep, so heavy as almost to be exhausting in its own right. He roused once during the night, for only a moment, and lay there in the darkness in an unfamiliar bed, wondering where he was. Remembering, he dropped like a stone back into sleep again.
When he woke again, the bedroom in which he lay was, bright with morning sunlight diffused through thin white drapes. He vaguely remembered Amanda as she had turned, candle in hand, to go back down the hall, telling him that there were two sets of window drapes to pull, the light and the heavy. Clearly, he had forgotten to pull the heavy, outer set.
But it did not matter. He sat up, swinging his naked legs over the edge of the bed. He was now up for the day; and he felt fine—except for a mild fuzziness in the head that made his surroundings seem at one remove from him. The room he was in had no lavatory facilities. He remembered something else Amanda had said, put on his pants and found his way down the hall to another door which let him into a lavatory.
Fifteen minutes later, cleaned, shaved and dressed, he walked into the kitchen of Fal Morgan. Amanda was there, seated at the round table, talking on the phone with her sister. Hal took a chair at the table to wait for the end of the conversation. The sister, seen in the screen high on the wall, was more round of face and yellow, rather than white-blond, of hair, but unmistakably a sibling. Like Amanda, she was beautiful, but the intensity Hal had noticed so clearly in Amanda was missing in this other Morgan—or, he thought, perhaps it just did not come through as well on a phone screen.
But his inner senses rejected the latter explanation. The intensity of Amanda was a unique quality, something he had felt in no other human being until now. It was beyond reason to suppose that her whole family shared it.
Amanda had been explaining that she had to take Hal to Graemehouse first before arriving as promised. Now she ended the talk, shut off the phone and looked across the table at him.
"I was just about to wake you," she said. "We should be going as soon as you're fed. Do you feel like having breakfast?"
Hal grinned.
"As much as it turned out I felt like having dinner," he said. His appetite was back to normal.
"All right," said Amanda, getting to her feet. "Sit tight. It'll be ready in a minute."
Fed and mounted, they started off in the morning light of Fomalhaut, a brilliant pinpoint now in the eastern sky, making the snowfields of the mountains just below it glitter like mirrors. It was a cool, clear, still morning with only an occasional cloud in view. The horses fought their bits and waltzed sideways until they were let run to the edge of the tableland on which Fal Morgan stood. At the edge of that flat stretch, however, Amanda pulled the gray under her back to a walk and Hal followed her example.
They plunged over the edge onto a steep downslope thick with variform conifers and native bush forms. The clear ground between the growths was stony and only sparsely covered with small vegetation. They rode through such gullies and alternating stretches of open mountainside for perhaps ten minutes before they came out into an area of high rolling hills covered with the brown, drying grass of late fall. Tucked back up on a high point above these hills, so that it was not visible until they came up over the crest of the slope below it, was a shelf of long, narrow land on which Graemehouse stood.
It was a house of dark timber, two-storied, but low looking in relation to its length, that seemed to hug the slight curve of the earth on which it and its outbuildings stood. Barely a dozen meters behind it, the ground lifted suddenly in a bare, steep slope toward the mountainside above. They climbed their horses onto the shelf and approached the homestead from the side. The morning sun was ahead of them as they rode toward the buildings; and Graemehouse itself sat at an angle to their line of approach, facing south and downslope toward the lower hill area from which they had just come.
"Not as sheltered as Fal Morgan," said Hal, almost absentmindedly, looking at it. Amanda glanced over at him.
"It's got other advantages," she said. "Look here—"
She reined to her right and led the way to the edge of the shelf. Hal halted with her. From the edge they could see clear down to the river below and Foralie Town.
"With a scope up on the
roof of that house," Amanda said, "you can keep a watch on half the local area. And that rise behind cuts off most of the snow and wind that would ordinarily bury a homestead this high up and exposed, when winter comes. Cletus Grahame knew what he was doing when he built it—for all that he called himself a scholar instead of a soldier."
She turned away from the rim and walked her horse toward the house. Hal rode with her. At the front entrance, they dismounted and dropped their reins. The horses lowered their heads to nibble at the grass of the front lawn.
Amanda led the way to the front entrance, and put her thumb into its lock sensor. The wide, heavy, dark door there swung open. She led the way into a square entry-hall with pegs on the walls, from some of which sweaters and jackets still hung. Straight ahead was an open archway into what seemed a lounge—or, as Amanda had called the equivalent space at Fal Morgan, a living room.
The atmosphere in the house was still and empty, without being lifeless. Amanda turned to Hal.
"I'll leave you now," she said. ''I'll be back either right around noon, or shortly after. In the meantime, if I get delayed and you want something to eat or drink, the kitchen and storage rooms are at the west end of the house, to your left. Help yourself to whatever's there—that's how we do things here. I don't suppose I need to tell you to clean up after yourself."
"No," said Hal. "But I'll probably just wait to eat with you."
"Don't hold back out of politeness," she said. "The food and drink are there to be used by whoever in this house needs them. You'll also find phones in most of the rooms. My sister's married name is Debigné. Just code for the directory and call me if you need to."
"Thanks again," said Hal. A certain awkwardness of feeling came over him. "I appreciate your trusting me this way, leaving me here alone."