Now, as he looked about him, there was a quality of familiarity that lay like a patina on everything at which he looked. As he stepped into the living room, the face of Eachan Khan in the portrait had become one he knew intimately, in all details. With the sword above the fireplace, his fingers and palm seemed to recall the grasp of its hilt, and his mind's eye saw the sudden flash and glitter of its blade, as it was drawn from its scabbard. All about him the rest of the room echoed and reechoed a similar sense of recognition.
He sank into the chair in which he had seated himself when he had first arrived; and sat there, feeling his strength slowly returning to refill the emptiness left by his last coldness at the graveside. All around him, now, the house vibrated with the silent noises of its past. He sat listening to them; and after a while an impulse brought him up out of the chair to his feet. He walked to the corner of the room where the last panel of the east wall touched the windowed north wall. The wood surface was a polished blank before him; but an impulse moved him to put the palm of his right hand flat upon it; and it moved easily, sliding to the right to open a tall, narrow entrance directly from the living room into the library.
He stood, gazing into the opening. He remembered now, hearing it spoken of by Malachi in the stories the old man had told him of Graemehouse. There had been talk of this doorway—and something special about it. For a moment he could not recall just what that was, and then it came back to him. This was the place in which the young Graemes had measured their height as they were growing up.
He looked at the left post of the doorway, from which the panel had slid back. Plain there, now that he gave his attention to it, were thin, neat, dark lines with initials and dates beside them. Looking down, he found Donal's initials, close to the floor, but none any higher than would indicate a measurement had been taken after he had been about five years of age.
Donal had been the smallest among the adult male Graemes of his time. Once he had become conscious of this, it would not have been surprising if the boy had avoided further measurement. Hal looked at the doorway. The patina of recognition lay heavily upon it also, and he remembered something more, how Malachi had told him that in all their generations, none of the Graeme family had ever filled that doorway from top to bottom and side to side, except the twins—Donal's uncles, Ian and Kensie. Hal stared at the doorway with its years of markings; and an emotion compounded of something like fear, mixed with a strange, strong longing moved in him. Ian and Kensie had been outsize, even for Dorsai—and it was Ian he imagined now, dark and massive, standing in the doorway, filling it.
It was foolish to think of measuring himself against the marks here, even in the privacy of this moment that no one else need know about. But the desire grew in him as he stood, until it was undeniable.
The logical front of his mind tried to push the notion aside. There was no real purpose to it. In any case, size alone meant nothing. On the fourteen worlds there must be no end of individuals not only big enough to fill the doorway, but too large to fit themselves into it. But the logical arguments had no strength. It was not a question of his size that was pulling him forward to measure himself, it was part of that same search for identity with those who had lived here, that had drawn him to reach for Donal in the small bedroom.
He shook off the last objection. What summoned him was only a part of what he had come to Foralie to do. He stepped into the doorway and stood erect there.
With a sudden, cold shock, he felt the underside of the frame's top rail come hard against the top of his head. He stayed as he was, unmoving. For a second his mind denied the implication of that contact with his scalp. He had been aware for years that his eventual height would be far above ordinary. He had even come to take for granted in recent years his looking down at other people. But still, inside him, he shrank from a reality in which his height was also the height of Ian Graeme. The Ian of his imagination had for so long towered like a giant above all others, that for a moment he would not accept what the doorway told him.
Slowly, acceptance came; and only after it had, did he realize that, while he had felt the top rail with his head, he had felt no corresponding touch of the vertical members of the frame against his shoulders. Looking right and left, now, he saw that four to six centimeters of space showed between the shoulder welts of his jacket and the stiles of the doorframe on either side of him. Granted that he still might grow and put on weight, it was hardly likely he could make up that much difference in shoulder width. Ridiculously, a feeling of pure relief woke in him. He was not ready—not yet—to try to be an Ian.
He stepped back out of the doorway. As if its sensors had been only waiting for his leaving, the door slid closed and the wall was whole once more. He turned back to the living room. With the moment of his identification with Donal in the bedroom, his awareness had heightened. But now with his measurement of himself in the doorway, that awareness had been raised near to a point of pain.
The scent of the air in his nostrils, the colors, the shapes, the sounds and echoes of the house as he had moved about it—the light from the windows and the interior lights of the long corridor past the offices and bedrooms—all these had finally built a connection between him and those who also once moved about here; and he finally now felt that, like them, he belonged to the house.
There was no miracle to it. He knew that all he had achieved here so far was humanly quite possible. His recreation of Donal and the others to the point where he literally felt their presence about him was within what he knew of the capability of the human mind and imagination. But nonetheless it felt as if he teetered on the border of something far more awesome; a step beyond the possible into some area where no one had gone before.
He shivered. With the heightened sensitivity had come a clarity of mind that also was close to painful; and with that clarity in him he now identified the one part of the house he had been unconsciously avoiding all this time. The dining room, Amanda had told him, was the area of a Dorsai house where decisions were made, not merely business decisions, but family ones as well. Remembering this, his mind turned him at last toward the dining room, knowing that, if anywhere, he would find there the greatest locus of Donal's being and purpose.
He took a step toward it. But a fear stopped him. He checked himself and sat down in one of the living room's chairs. Sitting, he gazed at the entrance before, trying to understand the faceless, but very real, terror that had flared at the instant of his decision to go in.
He reached out to grapple with it, as Walter had taught him. Consciously, he made the almost physical effort needed to put emotion apart from him. In his mind he made himself visualize what he feared, as a formless shape standing a little distance from him. Having given it form, he considered it. In itself, it was not important. It was only its effect on him that was important. But to understand that effect, he must understand what it was; and what was it?
It was not the room, itself, nor the thought of what he might find there. It was that irrevocable thing that the finding of it might do to him, that he feared. To enter the dining room in his present state of sensitivity could be finally to discover what part of him was himself and what was Donal. And if he should come to know what he feared to know…
… He might find himself committed to something from which there would be no drawing back. Perhaps, before him was that boundary of which all men and women were instinctively afraid—the boundary between the possible and the impossible; and if so, once into the impossible he might belong to it forever.
It was an old fear, he understood suddenly; one not merely old to him, but old in humankind. It was the fear of leaving the safeness of the known to cross into the darkness of the unknown, with all the unimaginable dangers that might wait there. And there was, he realized now, only one counter to it—equally old. The great urge to continue, no matter what, to grow and adventure, to discover and learn.
Understanding this at last, he understood for the first time that the commitment he ha
d feared just now was one that he had already made for himself, long since. Faced with the choice of entering the unknown, he was one who would always go forward. Like a messenger, a few lines from a poem by Robert Browning returned to him, out of the depths of memory:
… they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'
The path he had chosen for himself had led him to the cell on Harmony. And the path he had chosen for himself there had led to this house, this room and this moment. He got to his feet and walked across the living room and into it.
Within, the long, silent chamber was in dimness. Here, unlike in those other rooms he had entered, automatic sensors had not pulled the drapes back from the windows. Nor did the drapes pull back as he entered now. They were of heavy but soft cloth, a light brown in color, and the white daylight of Fomalhaut did not so much shine through them as make them glow softly, so that the room seemed caught in a luminous, amber twilight.
In that twilight the long, empty slab of the table and the upright, carved chairs ranked on both sides, with one only at the top end by the kitchen entrance, gleamed in a wood so dark a brown as to be almost black. The ceiling was lower than that of the living room, and beamed, so that the very air of the place, enclosed and populated by stillness, seemed even more hushed and timeless than that in the rest of the house.
On the long wall opposite the windows was the only active color in the dining room. Spaced along it at regular intervals were six small, archaic two-dimensional pictures in narrow frames, showing outdoor scenes; and, offset behind the single chair at the head of the table, to Hal's left as he looked at them, was the entrance from the kitchen.
The light and stillness of the place seemed to flow about Hal, enclosing him from the rest of the house. All else may alter, the dining room seemed to say, I have not changed in two hundred years. He stepped forward and walked slowly down the wall side of the table, pausing to look at the small framed pictures as he passed.
They were scenes variously showing mountain, lake, glen and seashore, in reproductions which must be as old as Eachan Khan's memory of such places. And they were of Earth. The colors of land and sky, the relationships of slope and level were of the kind that was to be found nowhere else. A thousand tiny, subtle details authenticated the origin of what each represented. For a moment they recalled memories of Hal's that had not come to his mind for a long time; and he felt a sudden, intense homesickness for the Rocky Mountains he remembered from his own youth.
But then the feeling was gone, washed away by the power of the emotion that came from all that surrounded him. It was an emotion stained into walls and floor, chairs and table, and most of all into those pictures on the wall—the emotion of a family that had lived and died according to its own private code for more than two hundred years. There had been a saying that Malachi had quoted to Hal once when he had been very young—that the Dorsai, more than any other world, was its people. Not its wealth, or its power, or its reputation—but its people. Here, in this long, silent room, that saying stood forward from his memory to confront him.
As those of this family would have stood. Hal walked slowly to the head of the table and stood a little back from the corner of it, there, looking down its length. They had all sat here, at one time or another, since these walls had first been raised. Those whose names he had seen on the gravestones—Eachan Khan, Melissa and Cletus Grahame, Kamal Graeme; Eachan, who had been the father of Donal, Mor—Donal's brother; James, Kensie and Ian—his uncles; Leah—Ian's wife; Simon, Kamal and James—Ian's sons… and others.
Including Donal.
Donal would have sat here often before the night of his graduation from the Academy, the night before he was to leave under his first contract. But that one night, after dinner, for the first time, he would have joined those others in the family who had already made their outgoing; those who had left the planet of their birth under contract to fight for other people they did not know. For the first time, then, he would have felt himself one with these older relatives who had already achieved what he had privately feared was beyond any strength and skill he would ever manage. That evening, for the first time, the door to the fourteen worlds would have seemed to stand open to him; and he would have looked through it, and on those beside him, with new eyes.
Hal moved slowly up past the pictures to the head of the table and stood behind the single chair there, looking back down the room. The night before Donal's leaving, who would have been here at Foralie of those who had gone out to the other worlds?
Kamal Khan Graeme—but he would not have been with the rest at the table. By the time of Donal's outgoing, he was confined to his bed. Eachan, of course, who had been home since his right leg had been so badly wounded that field command was no longer practical for him. Hal tried to remember who else might have been here; and, slowly as if of their own accord, the names swam up to the surface of his memory. Ian and Kensie had been home then. And Mor, Donal's oldest brother, had been home on leave from the Friendlies. James had died at Donneswort seven years before.
So… there had been five of them at the table after dinner that night. The unchanging twilight of the room about Hal seemed to thicken. Eachan would have been here, at the head of the table—in the chair before Hal. Ian and Kensie, as the two next senior, would normally each have taken the first chair on either side, at Eachan's elbows. But the twins always sat side by side—this night they had sat on Eachan's left, out of the habit of years, with a wall at their backs and both entrances in view. At Eachan's right, then, would have been Mor; and in the chair next to Mor, then…
Hal left his station at the head of the table and moved down to stand behind the second chair on Eachan's right, the one Donal would have occupied.
He focused mind and eyes together, rebuilding the scene in his mind. Gazing at the empty chairs, he filled them with the images of the men whose pictures he had seen in the books about Donal. Eachan, tall and gaunt, now that he could not be as physically active as he had been—so that his shoulders looked abnormally wide above the rest of his body, and below the dark, lean face. The face with the deep parentheses around the mouth and the frown-line born of chronic, unmentioned pain deep between his black, level brows.
Ian and Kensie, alike as mirror images—but unmistakably different, with the inner characters that altered their whole appearance. Kensie bright, and Ian dark; both of them taller even than Eachan and Mor and with the massiveness of working muscle that Eachan had lost. Mor, leaner than both his uncles, smooth-faced and younger, but with something lonely and hungry in his dark eyes.
And Donal… half a head shorter than Mor, and even slimmer, with the double difference of greater youth and smaller boning, so that he looked like a boy among men at this table.
Eachan, leaning with his forearms on the table, Ian upright and grim, Kensie laughing easily as he always laughed. Mor leaning forward, eager to speak. And Donal… listening to them all.
The talk would have been of business, of working conditions for professional soldiers on the worlds they had last left to come home. Ordinary shop talk, but with an ear to Donal, so that they could inform him without seeming to directly give him advice…
The sound of their voices had run and echoed off the beams overhead, fast and slow. Statement and response. Pause and speak again.
"… The lusts are vampires," Eachan had said. "Soldiering is a pure art…"
"… Would you have stayed home, Eachan," Mor had asked his father, "when you were young and had two good legs?"
"Eachan's right," it was Ian speaking. "They still dream of squeezing our free people up into one lump and then negotiating with that lump for the force to get the whip hand on all the other worlds. That's the danger…"
"As long as the Cantons remain independent of the Council," said Eachan…
"Nothing stands still," said Kensie.
And with those last three words the whiskey they had been drinking had seemed to go to Donal's head in a rush; and to him it seemed that the table and the dark, harsh-boned faces he watched seemed to swim in the dimness of the dining room and Kensie's voice came roaring at him from a great distance.
About Hal the room was filling with others, other Graemes from before and since, taking the other chairs at the table, joining in the talk, so that the voices rose and mingled, the atmosphere of the room thickened… and then, abruptly, the after-dinner gathering was over. They were all standing up, to go to their beds ready for an early start in the morning. The room was full of tall bodies and deep voices; and his head spun.
He had to get out, himself. He was very close to something that had now picked him up and was carrying him away, faster and faster, so that soon he would be beyond the power of his strength to get free. He turned toward what he thought was the living room entrance to the dining room, but which he could no longer see for the shapes all around him. He pushed his way between them, stumbling, feeling his strength go. But he could not see the entrance and he did not have the strength to turn and go back the other way—
Strong arms caught him, held him and steered him, on unsteady feet through a mist of wraiths. Suddenly there was fresh air on his face, a breeze blowing against him. His right foot tripped on a downstep and dropped to a yielding surface, and the arms holding him brought him to a halt.
"Breathe deeply," commanded a voice. "Now—again!"
He obeyed; and slowly his vision cleared to show him earth and mountains and sky. He was standing on the grass, just outside the front door of Graemehouse; and it was Amanda who was upholding him.