"What was it you said—that I'd need to convince most of those that come?" he asked her as they sat before the fire. "What percentage is 'most'?"
She raised her gaze from the flames, which she had been watching; and smiled a little. "If you can get through to seventy per cent of those who come, you'll be a success," she said. "Those who don't get here will eventually react in pretty much the same proportions, after talking to those who did."
"Seventy per cent," he echoed, turning the short, heavy glass slowly in his hands and looking at the firelight through the brown liquid he had barely tasted.
"Don't expect miracles," her voice said; and he looked up to see her watching him. "No one, except Cletus, or maybe Donal, in his lifetime, could carry them all. Seventy per cent will give you what you want. Be very happy with that. As I told you—everyone makes up his own mind here, and the Grey Captains more than most."
He nodded.
"Do you know what you're going to say?" she asked after a moment.
"Part of it. The part that's the Exotic message," he answered, nursing the whiskey glass between his palms. "For the rest—it doesn't seem to plan."
"If you tell them what you told me, your first night here," she said, "you'll be all right."
He looked at her, startled.
"You think so?"
"I know so," she said.
He continued to look at her, searchingly, trying to remember all of what he had said that first night.
"I'm not sure I remember exactly what that was," he said, slowly.
"It'll come to you," she told him. The words lingered on his ears. She got to her feet, carrying her half-empty glass.
"Well, I need sleep," she said; and watched him for a second. "Possibly you do, too."
"Yes," he said. "But I think I'll sit here just a little while longer, though. I'll take care of the fire."
"Just be sure the screen's in place…"
She went off. He sat alone for another twenty minutes before he sighed, reached out to wave his hand over the screen sensor, and stood up. The screen slid tightly across the front of the fireplace, and the last of the flames, cut off from fresh oxygen, began almost immediately to dwindle and die. He drained his glass, took it to the kitchen, and went to bed.
The meeting was not to be held until an hour after lunch time at Foralie. Half an hour before then, Hal and Amanda saddled up and rode from Fal Morgan.
He did not feel like talking, and Amanda seemed content to leave him in his silence. He had expected his mind to be buzzing with possible arguments he could use. Instead, it had retreated into a calmness, utterly remote from the situation into which he was heading.
He was wise enough to let it be. He sat back in the saddle and let his senses be occupied by the sound, scent and vision of the ride.
When they reached the mounded level of the area on which Graemehouse was built, they found a couple of dozen air-space jitneys parked before the main building; and as they dismounted at the corral by the stable, the sound of internal activity reached out to them, through an opened kitchen window. They removed saddles and bridles from their horses, turned them loose in the corral, and went in through the front entrance.
In the living room, they found only two people, seated talking in an adjoining pair of the overstuffed chairs. One was a square, black woman with a hooked nose in a stern face, and the other a pink-faced, small man, both at least in their sixties.
"Miriam Songhai," said Amanda, "this is Hal Mayne. Rourke di Facino, Hal Mayne."
"Honored," they all murmured to each other.
"I'll go round up people," added di Facino, getting to his feet, and went off toward the office and bedroom end of the house. Amanda stayed with Hal.
"So you're the lad," said Miriam, in a voice that had a tendency to boom.
"Yes," said Hal.
"Sit down," she said. "It'll be a while before they're all together. Where do you spring from originally?"
"Earth—Old Earth," said Hal, taking the chair di Facino had vacated.
"When did you leave? Tell me about yourself," she said; and Hal began to give her something of his personal history.
But they were interrupted by others entering the room in ones and twos, and the necessity of introductions. Shortly, the conversation with Miriam Songhai was lost completely and Hal found himself standing in a room full almost to overcrowding.
"Everybody's here, aren't they?" said a tall, cadaverous man in at least his eighties. He had a bass voice that was remarkable. "Why don't we move in and get settled?"
There was a general movement toward the dining room and Hal found himself carried along by it. At the entrance to the dining room, for a second only, a small hesitation took him; and then it was gone. The long room before him was no longer dim and filled with amber light in which ghosts might walk. The drapes had at last been drawn and the fierce white illumination of Fomalhaut reflected off the gray-white surface of the steep slope behind the house and sent hard light through the windows, to carve everything animate and inanimate within to an unsparing three-dimensional solidity. Hal went on, saw Amanda standing beside the single chair at the table's head beckoning to him, and walked forward.
He sat down. Amanda went to seat herself, several chairs from him on his right. The room had filled behind them and empty chairs were rapidly being occupied. In a minute, they had all been filled; and he found himself looking along the polished tabletop, above which thirty-odd faces looked back and waited for him to speak.
Chapter Forty-seven
As they all sat watching him and waiting, an awareness he had never felt before woke suddenly in him.
Later, he was to become familiar with it, but this was his first experience; and it came on him with a shock that there could be a moment in which the universe seemed to stand still, like a ballet dancer poised on one toe; and for a fraction of a second all possibilities were equal. In that moment, he found, a form of double vision occurred. He saw the surrounding scene simultaneously from two viewpoints—both directly, and at one remove. So that he was at the same time both observer and observed; and he became aware of himself, for the first time, as part of something separate and remote. In that transient moment, for a split-second, his detachment was perfect; and his remote, viewing mind was able to weigh all things dispassionately, itself included.
Caught so, he understood for the first time now how those who knew they would be staying in Foralie Town under the vapors of the nickel carbonyl could have made the decision to use it. For at the core of such a moment was a perception tuned too sharply in self-honesty for fear or selfishness to affect decision.
Caught up in wonder at this new perception, Hal did not react for a long moment to the waiting faces as he ordinarily would have; and Rourke di Facino, far down the table on Hal's left, spoke instead to Amanda.
"Well, Amanda? You hinted at some strong reasons for our coming to this meeting. We're here."
Hal had not realized the quality of the acoustics in the dining room. Di Facino had spoken in no more than a soft conversational tone, but his words had sounded clearly across the length of the space between himself and Hal.
"I said there might be strong reasons for listening to Hal Mayne, Rourke," answered Amanda, "and I think there are. One, at least, is the one I told you about—that he's been sent here from Mara by the Exotics, to give us a message. And we could have other reasons for listening to him, as well."
"All right," said di Facino. "I only mention it because—no offense intended, of course—the ap Morgans have been reported before this as seeing things that aren't there, on occasion."
"Or perhaps," said Amanda, "they merely saw things other people were too blind to see. No offense intended, of course."
They smiled at each other like friendly old enemies across half the length of the dining room. Still caught in his moment, watching them all, Hal found Amanda standing out among the others as one very bright beacon might stand out in a bank of duller ones. The averag
e age of the Grey Captains was at least in the fifties; and she, in her apparent youthfulness, looked almost like a young girl who has slyly slipped into a solemn gathering of family elders and waits to see how long she can hold her place before being discovered.
"In any case," the booming voice of Miriam Songhai reached them all, we've no prejudice on the Dorsai against people being sensitive, simply because what they're sensitive to isn't easily measured, weighed or tagged— I hope."
She turned to Hal.
"What's this message from the Exotics?',' she demanded.
Hal looked at the waiting faces. There was a quality of difference in those here, compared to the five he had faced on Mara. It was a difference in quietness. The Exotics had not fidgeted physically; but he had been conscious of conflict and uncertainty within each of them. Those sitting at this table with him now radiated no such impression of inner concerns. They were at home here, he was a stranger, and it was their job to decide whatever needed decision. In the hard daylight, here and now, there was no room for the ghosts and the memories he had found in the dining room earlier. He felt isolated, helpless to reach them and convince them.
"I was on my way to the Dorsai, in any case," he said. "But as it happened, I got to Mara first; and so it was the Exotics I talked to—"
"Just a minute." It was a heavy-bodied man in his fifties with a brush of stiff, gray hair; the one person there with oriental features. Hal rummaged in his memory for the name he had heard when Amanda had introduced them. Ke Gok, or K'Gok, was what he remembered hearing her say. "Why did they pick you to carry their message instead of sending one of their own people?"
"I can tell you what they told me," Hal said. "Amanda may have explained to you how I was raised by three tutors, one of them a Dorsai—"
"By the way, does anyone here know of a family named Nasuno?" Amanda's clear voice cut in on him. "They should have a homestead on Skalland."
There was a moment's silence, then the cadaverous man—whose name, in spite of the mnemonics of Hal's early training, had freakishly been lost—spoke, thoughtfully.
"Skalland's one of the islands in my area, of course. I know you asked me about that when you called, Amanda. But in the time I had I couldn't seem to turn up any such family. Which doesn't mean they aren't there—or weren't there—a generation ago."
"It's hardly likely someone could pose as a Dorsai for a dozen years, even on Earth, and get away with it," said Ke Gok. "But what I'm still waiting to hear is why the Exotics thought someone tutored by a Dorsai should be particularly qualified to talk to us for them."
"I was also tutored by a Maran—and by a Harmonyite," said Hal. "They seemed to feel the fact I'd been brought up by people from both their culture and yours might make me better able to communicate with you, than one of them could."
"Still strange," said Ke Gok. "Two worlds full of trained people and they pick someone from Earth?"
"They'd also run calculations on me," said Hal, "which seemed to show I might be historically useful at this time."
He had been dreading having to mention this; and he had chosen the mildest words in which to put the information, fearing the prejudice of practical people against anything as theoretical and long-range as Exotic calculations in ontogenetics. But none of those before him reacted antagonistically, and Ke Gok said no more.
"In what way," said a slim, good-looking woman named Lee, with large, intent brown eyes and gray-black hair, "did they think you could be historically useful?"
"Useful in dealing with the present historical situation—particularly with the situation created by the Others," he answered. "It's that same situation I'm concerned with, myself; and that I'd like to talk to you about, after I've given you the Exotic message—"
"I think we'll want to hear anything you've got to tell us—Exotic message and whatever else you want to talk to us about," said Lee, "but some of us have questions of our own, first."
"Of course," said Hal.
"Do I understand you right, then?" said Lee. "The Exotics are concerned about the Others; and they sent you to us because they thought you could do a better job of convincing us to think their way than any one of their own people could?"
Hal breathed deeply.
"Effectively," he said, "yes."
Lee sat back in her chair, her face thoughtful.
"How about you, Amanda?" di Facino said. "Are you part of this effort to bring us around to an Exotic way of thinking?"
"Rourke," said Amanda, "you know that's nonsense."
He grinned.
"Just asking."
"Don't," said Amanda, "and save us time, all around."
She looked about at the others. No one else said anything. She looked up at Hal.
"Go ahead," she said.
Hal looked around at them. There was nothing to be read from their faces. He plunged in.
"I assume there's no point in my wasting your time by telling you what you already know," he said. "The interstellar situation's now almost completely under the control of the Others; and what they're after in the long run is no secret. They want total control; and to have that, they've got to get rid of those who'll never work with them—some of the people on the Friendlies, essentially all of the Exotics, and the Dorsai people. The point the Exotics make is that the Others have to be stopped now, while there's still time. They think that, of all those opposed to the Others, the Dorsai are the one people who can do that; and they sent me with word that they'll give you anything they have to give, back you in any way they can, if you'll do it."
He stopped.
The faces around the table looked back at him as if they had expected him to continue.
"That's it?" said Ke Gok. "How do they think we can stop the Others? Don't they think we'd have done it before this, if we knew how?"
There was a moment of silence around the table. Hal thought of speaking and changed his mind.
"Just a minute," said the cadaverous old man. "They can't be thinking—this isn't that old suggestion we go out and play assassins?"
It was as if a whip cracked soundlessly in the room. Hal looked down the room at the hard faces.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I was obligated to bring you the message. I told them you'd never do it."
The silence continued for a second.
"And why were you obligated?" said Miriam Songhai.
"I was obligated," said Hal, patiently, "by the fact that delivering the message gave me the chance to speak to you all about what I, myself, believe is the only way to deal with the Others."
Another tiny silence.
"Perhaps," said di Facino—very softly, but the words carried through the dining room, nonetheless—"they don't realize how they insult us."
"Probably they don't—in the emotional sense," said Hal. "But even if they did, it wouldn't matter. They'd have to ask you anyway, because they don't see any other way out."
"What he's telling you," said Amanda, "is that the Exotics feel helpless; and people who feel helpless will try anything."
"I think you can tell them for us," said the cadaverous man, "that the day they give up the principles they've lived by for three hundred years, they can ask us again. But our answer will still be that we don't give up our principles."
He looked around the room.
"What would we have left, if we did something like that to save our necks? What would the point have been of living honestly, all these centuries? If we'd do assassin's work now, we'd not only not be Dorsai any longer; we'd never have been Dorsai!"
No one nodded or spoke, but a unanimity of approval showed clearly on the faces around the table.
"All right," said Hal. "I'll tell them that. But now can I ask, since I've got you all here, what you do intend to do about the Others, before they starve you to death?"
Hal looked at Amanda. But she was still merely sitting, a little back from the table, watching. It was Miriam Songhai who spoke.
"Of course we've no plans," she said. "Yo
u evidently do. Tell us."
Hal took a breath and looked at them all.
"I don't have a specific plan, either," he said. "But I believe I've got the material out of which a plan can be made. What it's based on, what it has to be based on, is an understanding of the historical situation that's resulted in the Others being so successful. Basically, what we're involved in now is the last act of an era in human development; and the Others are there to threaten us because they stand for one attitude that exists in the race as a whole; and we—you Dorsai, the Exotics, the true faithholders on the Friendlies and some others scattered around all the other worlds—stand for the attitude opposed to it. Natural historical forces in human development are what are pushing this conflict to a showdown. We're looking not merely at the ambitions of the Others, but at an Armageddon…"
He talked on. They listened. The light lancing in through the windows made the long, smooth surface of the table glisten like wind-polished ice; and the Grey Captains sat listening in utter stillness, as if they had been carved in place as they sat, to last forever. Hal heard his voice continuing, saying the same things he had said to Exotic ears; and much of what he must have said to Amanda, that first night here. But there was no sign or signal from this audience to tell him if he was reaching them. Deep within himself, the fear grew that he was not. His words seemed to go out from him, only to die in the silence, against minds that had already shut them out.
He glanced fleetingly at Amanda, hoping for some signal that might give him reassurance; and found none. She did not shake her head, even imperceptibly; but the unchanging gaze she returned to him conveyed the same message. Internally, Hal yielded. There was no point in simply continuing to hold them hostage with words, if the words were not being heard and considered by them. He brought what he had been saying to a close.
There was a moment without anyone speaking. The Captains stirred slightly, as people will who have sat for some time in one position. Throats were cleared, here and there. Hands were placed on the table.
"Hal Mayne," said Miriam Songhai, finally. "Just what plan do you have for yourself? I mean, what do you, yourself, plan to do next?"