"I'll be going from here to the Final Encyclopedia," he said. "There's where most of the information is, that I still need, for an effective understanding of the situation. Once I've got a complete picture, I can give you a specific plan of action."
"And meanwhile?" said Ke Gok, ironically. "You're merely asking us to hold ourselves in readiness for your orders?"
Hal felt a despair. He had failed, once more; and there was no magic, no ghosts were here, to save the day. This was reality; the incomprehension of those who saw the universe limited to what they already knew. Unexpectedly, an exasperation erupted in him; and it was as if something put a powerful hand on his shoulder and shoved him forward.
"I'm suggesting that you hold yourself in readiness for orders from someone," he heard himself answer, dryly.
There was a shock in hearing it. The voice was his own, the words were words he knew, but the choice and delivery of them was coming from somewhere deep within him; as far back as the ghosts he had heard speaking at this table. He felt a strength move in him.
"If I'm fortunate enough to be the one who first gets on top of the situation," he went on in the same unsparing voice, "they could indeed come from me."
"No offense, Hal Mayne," said di Facino, "but may I ask how old you are?"
"Twenty-one, standard," said Hal.
"Doesn't it seem, even to you," went on di Facino, "that it's asking a lot of people like ourselves, who've known responsibility on a large scale for twice or three times your lifetime, to take you and what you suggest completely on faith? Not only that, but that we should mobilize a planetful of people in accordance with that faith? You come to us here with no credentials whatsoever, except a high rating according to some exotic theory—and this world is not one of the Exotics."
"Credentials," said Hal, still dryly, "mean nothing and will never mean anything in this matter. If I find the answers I'm looking for, my credentials are going to be obvious to you, and to everyone else as well. If I don't, then either someone else is going to find the answers, or no one will. In either case, any credentials I have will be very much beside the point. The Exotics knew this."
"Did they?" said di Facino. "Did they tell you so?"
"They showed me so," said Hal. The strange sense of strength in him carried him forward irresistibly. It was as if someone else spoke through him to them; and the exasperation within him had given way now to a diamond-hard sense of logic. "Sending me here with their message, which they had little hope you'd agree to, guaranteed I'd have a chance to give you my side of things, without their having in any way endorsed it. If it turned out you accepted me, they'd have no choice but to accept me, too, in the long run. If you didn't, they had no responsibility for what I said to you on my own."
"But," said Ke Gok, "we haven't accepted you."
"You'll have to accept someone, if you're going to deal with the situation," Hal said. "You were the one who just said a few moments ago that you'd have stopped the Others before this if you'd known how. The plain fact is you don't know how. I do—perhaps. And there's no time to wait around for other solutions. This late in the day, even all the strength that can be joined against the Others may not be enough. You and the Exotics are in the same camp whether you like it or not—if you don't face that, you and they are going to perish singly, as you're both on the road to perishing now. Only unlike the Exotics, you Dorsai are a people of action. You can't close your eyes to the need for it, when that need crops up. Therefore, the only hope for you and them is that someone will come along who can lead you both, together—and no one has, but me."
"The necessity to accept someone," said the cadaverous man, "hasn't been proven, yet."
"Certainly it has." Hal looked directly into the almost-black pupils of the other's eyes. "The Dorsai is already beginning to starve. Slowly… but it's beginning. And you all know that starvation is being caused deliberately by the Others, who are also doing other things to other people. Clearly, this is no problem that can be kept contained between you and the Others, only. It's a case of one part of the human race, spread over many worlds, against the other part. You don't need me to tell you that, you can see it for yourself."
"But," said Lee, softly, "there's no guarantee it has to explode into Armageddon, with what that would mean for all our people—who are the fighters."
"Take another look if you believe it doesn't have to," said Hal. "The situation's been developing for over thirty years. As it develops, it grows exponentially, both in numbers of peoples involved and in complexity. How else can it end except in Armageddon? Unless you and the Exotics and those like you are willing to abandon everything you've believed in, to suit the Others; because that's the only thing the Others'll settle for, in the end."
"How can you be sure of that?" said Lee. "Why shouldn't the Others stop before they push it that far?"
"Because if they do, they'll be the ones to be wiped out in a generation; and they know it," said Hal. "They're riding a tiger and don't dare get off. There's too few of them. The only way to make life safe for themselves, as individuals, is to make the worlds—note, I said worlds, all the worlds—safe for all of them together. That means changing the very face of human society. It means the Others as masters and the rest of humanity as subordinates. They know that. For everything you love, you have to know it, too."
There was a long moment of silence in the room. Hal sat waiting, still strangely gripped by the clarity and fierceness of thought that had come on him.
"It's still only a theory of yours—this idea of historical confrontation between two halves of the human race," said Miriam Songhai, heavily. "How do you expect us to trust something like this, that no one ever proposed before?"
"Check it out for yourselves," said Hal. "It doesn't take Exotic calculations to see when and how the Others started, how they've progressed, and where they must be headed. You know better than I how the credit and other reserves of your society are dwindling. The time's coming when the Others'll own the souls of everyone who might hire you, off-world. What happens to the Dorsai, then?"
"But this idea of them as a historical force, with all the dice loaded in their favor against us," the cadaverous man said, shaking his head, "that's leaving common sense for fantasy."
"Would you call it a fantasy, what's already happened on all the worlds but Old Earth? And it hasn't happened there only because the Others have to get the other worlds under control first," Hal answered. "The Others' specialty is to attack where there's no counter. There's no present defense against them. How else could they explode the way they have, into a position of interstellar power in just thirty standard years?"
He paused and looked deliberately around the table at all the faces there. There was a strange brightness, almost a light of triumph in Amanda's eyes.
"Against their charisma, and the pattern of their organization," he went on, "none of our present cultures have any natural defense. If you could put all of the Others on trial in an interplanetary court right now, I'd be willing to bet you couldn't find legal cause to indict one of them. Most of the time they don't even have to suggest what they want done. They bind to them people with exactly the characters they want, put each in the specific situation each one is best suited for, and each one does exactly what the Others want, on his or her own initiative."
Hal turned to speak to the table as a whole.
"Look at the large picture, for your own sakes," he said. "Think. The Exotics could have handled in its beginning any ordinary economic attempt to dominate all the worlds. You could have handled early any purely military threat. But against the Others you've both been helpless; because they haven't attacked in those forms. They've attacked in a new way, one never anticipated; and they're winning. Because the pattern of human society is changing, as it's always done; and the old, as always, can't resist the new."
He paused.
"Face that," he said. "You, the Exotics, the Friendlies, everyone else who lives by an older pattern, can'
t resist the Others as you've resisted other enemies until now. If you try going that way, you'll lose—inevitably—and the Others will win. But the possibility is there for you to resist them successfully, and win, if you let yourself become part of the new historical patterns that are shaping up into existence right now."
He paused again; and this time he waited for comment or objection, a response of any kind. But none came. They sat silent, watching him.
"The Others aren't aliens," he said. "They're us, with a difference. But that difference can be enough to give them control as things stand. Again, as I say, it's simply one more instance of the old giving way to the new; only the problem in this case is that the new way the Others want to bring in is a blind alley for the race. Humanity as a whole can't survive in stasis, with one Master to millions of slaves. If it's made to go that way, it'll die."
He paused. None of them made the slightest movement or sound. They only continued to watch him.
"We can't allow that," he went on, "but not allowing it doesn't mean we can keep things as they are. That would also mean stasis—and a race death. So, we have to acknowledge simply what is. Once more, the face of human society is changing, as it's always done; and as always we'll have to change with it or go by the boards. Here on the Dorsai you're going to have to be prepared to let go of many things, because you're a Splinter Culture that always held to tradition and custom. But that adaptation will have to be made, for the sake of your children's children. Because, I tell you again, what's at stake isn't the hard-won ways of the Dorsai, or those of the Friendlies or the Exotics, but the survival of the whole human race."
Chapter Forty-eight
Hal stopped talking at last, and waited for a response. But this time, the silence from his listeners continued. They were looking now at the tabletop before them, at the wall or window opposite them, in any direction, in fact, but at him or at each other.
"That's all I have to say," he told them, finally.
Their eyes went to him, then. Miriam Songhai sighed.
"It's not an easy picture to look at, the one you've just painted," she said. "I believe I need to think this over."
There was a mutter of agreement around the table. But the cadaverous man got to his feet.
"I don't need to think it over," he said, looking directly at Hal. "You've answered every question I could have asked. You've convinced me. But the only answer you have isn't for me."
He looked for a moment around the table.
"You know me," he said. "I'll do anything necessary for my people. But the Dorsai as it is now is what I've lived and fought for all my life. I can't change now. I won't have any hand in making it and its people change. The rest of you can travel this new road we've just been hearing all about, but you'll do it without me."
He turned toward the door. Two other men and one woman pushed their chairs back also and got up. Ke Gok started to rise, then sat down again, heavily. In the doorway, the cadaverous man stopped and turned back for a moment.
"I'm sorry," he said to Hal.
Then he was gone and the three others followed him out.
"I gather," said Hal, in the following hush, "that most of you, like Miriam Songhai, want to think about what I've said. I can wait on Dorsai up to another week, if any of you want to talk to me further. Then, as I said, I'll be leaving for the Final Encyclopedia."
"He'll be at Fal Morgan," said Amanda.
The meeting broke up.
Hal had assumed that he also would now be heading back to Fal Morgan. Instead, he found the living room half-filled with fifteen of the Grey Captains who wanted to talk to him further about the situation as he saw it. Ke Gok, surprisingly, was one of them.
They were, Hal learned from what they had to say, those who had already brought themselves to a belief in the historical situation as Hal had explained it—though not necessarily to him or whatever plan he might develop for dealing with it. He found discussing matters with them to be a clean mental pleasure after the uncertainties and secrecies of the Exotics. They were people who were used to taking problems apart and dealing with them either in section or in whole; and clearly they had accepted him as one who worked in the same manner.
At the same time he was uneasy, conscious of a difference as he talked to them informally in the big living room. For a little while in the dining room he had found himself wearing a cloak of certainty so strong that he had not even needed to think of the words to use. What he had wanted to say had simply come to him out of the obviousness of what they needed to understand. Now, in the living room, with an audience already half-convinced, that diamond-brilliant clarity and conviction was gone once more. His own, usual abilities of expression were still more than adequate to the occasion; but the difference in that from what he had tapped for a short while in the dining room was jolting; and he made himself a promise to find out what it had been that had so touched him then, as soon as he had time to examine his memory of it.
In the end it was five hours later when he and Amanda rode back through the early evening to Fal Morgan.
"What were these strong reasons you hinted at, according to Rourke di Facino?" he asked her, when they and their horses were lost to sight from Graemehouse.
"I told them I was convinced you had greater ties with the Dorsai than it might seem in this situation."
He considered that answer for a few seconds as their horses walked, side by side.
"And what did you say to the ones who asked you what those ties were?"
"I told them it was a perception of mine, that they were there." She turned her head as she rode and looked at him squarely. "I said they could take my word and come, or doubt it and stay away."
"And most came…" He gazed at her. "I owe a lot to you. But I'd like to know more about this perception of yours, since it's about me. Can you tell me about it?"
She looked away again, back out over the ears of her horse.
"I can," she said. "But, in this case, I don't think I will."
They rode on in silence for a few seconds more.
"Of course," he said. "Forgive me."
She reined her horse to a standstill so sharply it tossed its head against the pressure of the bit. He pulled up also and turned to see her almost glaring at him.
"Why do you ask me?" she said. "You know what happened to you at Graemehouse!"
He studied her for a second.
"Yes," he said, finally. "I know. But how could you?"
"I found you there," she said, "and I knew something like it was likely to happen."
"Why?" he said. "Why would you expect anything to happen to me at Graemehouse?"
"Because of what I saw in you, your first night here." Her voice was challenging. "You don't remember, do you? Do you at least remember telling me that you felt an identity with Donal—because he'd always been considered such an odd boy by his family and his teachers at the Academy?"
The echo of his own words sounded in his memory.
"I guess I did," he said.
"How did you know that about him?"
"Malachi, I guess," he said. "Malachi must have told me. You said yourself he'd probably been involved in contracts taken by the Graemes."
"Malachi Nasuno," she said, "would never have known. The Graemes never talked about each other to people outside the family. They didn't even talk about each other to Morgans. And no teacher at the Academy would discuss a student with anyone but another teacher, or the student's parents."
Hal sat his horse, saying nothing. There was nothing in him to say.
"Well," she demanded, at last. "What made you think Donal was isolated? Where did you get the idea that his teachers referred to him as an odd boy? Are you going to tell me you made it up?"
Still, he could find no response in him. She started walking her horse again. Automatically, he put his in motion to follow her; and they rode on again, side by side.
After a while, he spoke; not so much to her as to the universe in general, star
ing forward meanwhile at the route they followed together.
"No," he said, somberly, "whatever else may be, I didn't make it up."
They rode on. His mind was suddenly so full it blinded him, and Amanda did not intrude upon his thoughts. When they reached the stable door at Fal Morgan and dismounted, she took the reins from his hand.
"I'll take care of the horses," she said. "Go and think things out by yourself for a bit."
He went into the house. But instead of continuing on down the corridor to the privacy of his bedroom, he found himself turning into the living room. The lights there went on automatically as he entered, and the brightness jarred on him. With a wave of his hand at the nearest sensor, he turned them off. The living room was left dimly lit by only the light from the corridor to the kitchen down which he had just come. The gloom was comforting. He walked in and dropped into a chair before the unlit fireplace, staring sightlessly at the kindling and logs laid waiting there.
There was a strange mixture of emotion in him. Part of it was a large feeling of relief and triumph; but another part was a dark sadness he had never experienced before. Once again, he was conscious of his own isolation from everyone else. The memory of the cadaverous man turning in the doorway to say he was sorry would not leave him. He was inescapably aware of all that the other man had to lose. In fact, he was aware of how they all would lose, if they followed him into the struggle against the Others. But they would lose even more if they did not join him. Still, with him, they would lose much; and he could not turn away from the fact there was no way to temper what would be, just to protect them from their pain.
He heard, with the corners of his consciousness, the kitchen door open and close and the sound of Amanda's footfalls come down the corridor to the living room, enter, and stop suddenly.
"Hal?" Her different, unsure voice erected the hairs on the back of his neck. "Is that you—Hal?"
He was on his feet, turned about and standing over her, where she had backed against the wall next to the entrance, before he realized he had moved.