He paused, then went on.
"He faced that, after he'd done what he'd gone back to the twenty-first century to do. He'd set in motion the very factors that are now bringing the internal struggle of the race animal out into the open and forcing everyone to take sides, with the Others or against, for the survival of us all. But he'd done it, in a sense, with a certain blindness; and it was because of that blindness that he couldn't foresee someone like Bleys and the growth of power behind him. After he returned Paul Formain's body to the ocean bed from which he had lifted it, he realized how he had gone wrong—although he couldn't yet foresee the consequences, that hold us in a vise right now. But he understood enough finally to see what his great fault had been."
"His great fault?" said Amanda, almost harshly. "And what was that great fault?"
"Just that he'd never had the courage to give up the one apart corner of himself, to abandon standing apart from everyone else." Hal turned his head to look directly at her. "He'd been the 'odd boy,' according to his teachers. He'd been the small and different ugly duckling among the Graemes. He'd been born with the same sort of mind that led Bleys Ahrens to put himself lightyears apart from the rest of the race. Donal, too, had been born an isolated individual, suffered from that isolation, and come to embrace it, as Bleys had embraced it. With his development of empathy, Paul Formain could begin to feel what someone else might be feeling, but he felt it as any human being might feel a frog's hunger for a passing fly. The soul of him still stood alone and apart from all those he had thought early had cast him out."
Again, he paused.
"I was afraid to be human, then," he said. He did not look at her, but he felt her arm go around his waist and her head come to rest on his shoulder.
"Not any more," she said.
"No.'' He heaved a very deep sigh. "But it was literally the hardest thing I ever had to do. Only there was no choice. There was the commitment. I had to go forward—and so I did."
"By coming back as a child," she said.
"As a child," he agreed. "Starting all over again without memory, without strength, without the skills of two lifetimes to protect myself with in an arena I'd built and didn't know I'd built. So I could finally learn, once and for all, to be like everybody else."
"Was it so absolutely necessary to do that?" he heard her asking from the region of his shoulder.
"It was critical," he said. "You can lead or drive from the outside, but you can only show the way from inside. It's not just enough to know how they feel—you have to feel it with them. That was the mistake I made being Formain and thinking empathy alone was going to give me what I needed to get the work done. And I was right—all the years of being Hal Mayne have proved how right I was, this last time. I was born Donal, and nothing I can do can ever leave him behind, but I can be a larger Donal. I can feel as if I belong to the community of all people—and I do."
He stopped and turned his head to look down into her face.
"And, of course," he said, "it brought me you."
"Who knows?" she said. "You might've come to it anyway by a different route, eventually. I still feel things—the historic forces, as you call them—would've brought us together in the long run, one way or another."
"I thought you'd thought it could go either way, and you'd just left it up to fate," he said.
"I did," she answered. "But looking back on it, I was certain you'd be back. I've learned to trust myself in things like that. I know when I'm right. Just as I know…"
She did not finish the sentence.
"Know what?" he asked.
"Nothing. Nothing worth talking about, right now, anyway. Nothing to worry about." He felt her shake her head, briefly. "In ancient times they would have called feeling like that second sight. But it's not giving me anything you ought to be concerned about. Tell me something else. When you talk about the race-animal, do you really mean some entity, actual and separate from us all?"
"Not separate," he said. "Oh, I suppose you could call it separate in that it might want something that you or I as part of it doesn't want. No, as I say, it's just the self-protective and other reflexes of the race as a whole, raised to the level of something approaching a personality because it's now the reflex-bundle of an intelligent, thinking race, as opposed to the same sort of thing in the case of the race, or genus or species of, say, lions or lemmings—or you name them."
"And that's all it is?" she said. "Then how do you justify talking about it as if it was a sort of wilful individual personality that had to be dealt with?"
"Well, again, that's the difference that's come into it because we, who make it up, while we're a race of intelligent individuals, are also a conglomeration of willful individuals. Because we think, it thinks—after our fashion. Try this for an explanation. It's a sort of collective unconscious, as if all our individual unconsciousnesses were wired together with something like telepathy—again, there's been evidence for that sort of wired-togetherness in the past."
"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "The empathy between twins. Or between parent and child, or any two adults in love, that allows them sometimes to feel at a distance what's happening to the other. I can agree with that. You know, we—you and I—have that, I think."
"All right, then," he said. "But there's one difference from us in the lower orders—particularly in the examples of the bee hive or the ant hill—in our case. It's that we can not only want something different from what the race-animal wants, we can actually try to change its mind and its course, by convincing the unconsciouses of our fellow-individuals. If we can get enough of them wanting what we want, the race-creature has to turn that way from whatever other route it's chosen."
"How do you convince the unconsciousness of others, though? There's nothing there to take hold of. The conscious mind of someone else you can talk to. All right, I know the Exotics do a beautiful job of mending sick minds by talking to the conscious and getting the corrections filtered down to the unconscious. And, for that matter, Bleys' charisma and that of the Others—that's working directly with the unconscious of others. So's hypnosis. But none of those thing have a lasting effect unless what's being put into the subject really agrees with what was there in the unconscious in the first place. There's no direct way to hold converse with other human's unconscious."
"Yes, there is," he said, "and it's a way that's been used at least since a prehistoric people lived in the caves of the Dordogne, back on Old Earth—you can talk to the unconscious of other people through the mediums of art."
"Art…" she said, thoughtfully.
"That's right," he said. "And you know why? Because art—real art—never tells anyone something. It only lays it out there for whoever comes to pick up."
"Perhaps. But it certainly makes whatever it has to say as attractive as possible to whoever comes along. You have to admit that."
"Yes, all right. If it's good. And if it isn't good, it doesn't offer anything to the unconscious of a viewer, reader, or listener. But the difference between that and conscious attempts to persuade is the difference between an order and a demonstration. The maker of the piece of art doesn't convince the person experiencing it—the person experiencing it convinces himself or herself, if they decided what's laid out in the art is worth picking up. That's why I worked my way back down the ladder from Donal, as you put it. All of Donal's strength couldn't move the race one millimeter from its already chosen path. But if I go first and leave footprints in the snow, some may follow, and others may follow them."
"Why?" she said. "I'm not against you, my love, but I want to see the reasons plainly. Why should anyone follow you?"
"Because of my dreams," he said. "Donal dreamed at James' death of a time when no more James' would be killed for stupid or selfish reasons. I've come to dream farther—I see the old dream of the race as a whole, now possible."
"And what does a race dream of?" she asked, so softly that anywhere but in this quiet and private room he would not have been able t
o hear her.
"It dreams," he said, "of being a race of gods. From the beginning, the individual part of the race, shivering in the wet as a stone-age savage, said, 'I wish I was a god who could turn the rain off,' and, finally, generations and millennia later, he was such a god—and his godlike power was called weather control. But long before that the urge to command wetness to cease had produced hats, and roofs and umbrellas—but always the push in the human heart went on toward the original dreams of being able to just say, 'rain, stop!' and the rain would stop."
He looked down through the dimness at her.
"And that's how it's been with everything else the individual, and therefore the race-animal, dreamed of—warmth when it was cold, coolness when it was too hot, the ability to fly bird-like, to cross great distances of water dry-shod, to hear and talk at as great or even greater distances, to block pain, defy disease and death. In the end, it's added up to one great desire. To be all-mighty. To be a god."
He paused, having heard his voice grow loud in the room and went on more quietly.
"And always the way to what was wanted's been found in a dozen small and practical ways before the single command, the wave of a godlike hand, was developed that could simply make it happen. But always the dream has run in advance. Hunters and cities, conquerors and kings, all succeeded in being and were superceded. The dream was always achieved first in art, time and again, and never forgotten until it was made real. Slowly, the human creature was changing, from a being that lived and died for what was material, to one who lived and died—and fought and died—for what was immaterial; for faith and obligation and love and power, power over the material first and then power over fellow-creatures, and finally, last and greatest, the power over self. And the dreams have gone always ahead, picturing what was wanted as something already possessed; until it became a truism to the race-animal that what could be conceived, could be had."
He stopped talking, finally.
"And you say these dreams were kept in the language of art?" she said.
"Yes," he answered, "and still are. The footprints I want to leave in the snow lead off toward the reality of what has only been barely dreamed of yet. The universe in which to understand a thing is to have it. Do you want a castle? You can have it merely by wanting it—but you have to know and own the materials it'd be built of, the architecture that'll ensure it'll stand, not fall, once it's built, and the very nature and extent of the ground on which it stands. If you know that much, you can have your castle right now, by means already known. But you want more than just the physical structure. Your castle must have those immaterial qualities that made you desire its castleness in the first place. These are not to be found in the physical universe, but in the other one that we all know and reach for, unconsciously. So, such a universe offers much more than the fulfillment of material dreams, it offers satisfaction of that original dream to be a god—the chance to cure all ills, to learn all mysteries, and finally to build what has never been dreamed of by any of us before now."
"You want everyone to dream your dream," Amanda said.
"Yes," he said. "But my dream is their dream, already—unless they shut it out as Bleys and his kind have done. I just articulate it."
"But maybe it never will be articulated, except in your own individual mind," she went on. "And when you're gone, it'll be gone."
"No," he said, strongly. "It's there in other minds as well, too strongly for that. It's there in the race-creature itself, along with the fear of trying for it. Haven't you felt it yourself—haven't you always felt it? It's too late now to hide it or kill it. Four hundred years ago, the race-animal was forced to face the fact that the safe, warm world it was born on was only an indistinguishable mote in a physical universe so big that anything conceivable not only could, but almost certainly must, exist in it. It could try to close its eyes to what it had been brought generally to know, or it could take the risk and step out into the alien territory beyond its atmosphere."
"It hadn't any choice," she said. "Overpopulation of Old Earth, for one thing, drove it out."
"Overpopulation was a devil it knew. The unlimited universe was one it didn't. But it went—in fear and trembling, talking of things 'man was not meant to know,' but going; and it scattered its bets as best it could by turning loose all the different cultural varieties of itself society has produced up until then, to see which, if any, would survive. Toward whatever survivors there were, it would adapt. Now that time of adaptation is on us; and the question is, which of two choices is it going to be? The type that'd stop and keep what we have—or the type that'd go on risking and experimenting? Because the human equation that's involved can stand for only one solution. If the dominant survivor is the Bleys type, with its philosophy of stasis, then, for the first time since we lifted our eyes above the hard realities of our daily lives, we stop where we are. If it's yours and mine, and that of those like us—we go on reaching for what may make us or destroy us. The race-creature waits to see which of us will win."
"But if the choices are either-or," she said, "then maybe the race-creature—you know, I've got trouble with that clumsy double word you thought up, you really should try to come up with something better—would be doing the right thing in going with Bleys and the Others if they win."
"No," said Hal, bleakly, "it wouldn't. Because it's a creature made up of its parts, and its parts aren't gods—yet. They and it can still be wrong. And they'll be wrong to choose the Others, because neither they nor it seem to realize that the only end to stasis is eventual death. Any end to growth is death. Never having stopped growing from the beginning, the race-creature's like a child who can't really believe he'll ever come to an end. But I know we can."
"You could still be the one who's wrong."
"No!" he said again. He stared down at her. "Let me tell you about this last year. You know I went back to the Final Encyclopedia; and with what I know now as Paul Formain and Hal Mayne this time I used it as Mark Torre dreamed of it being used—I made poetry into a key to unlock the implications of the records of our past—and the dream of godhood I've been talking about, personal godhood for every individual human, is there in the record. It explodes for the first time, plainly, in the constructs of the Renaissance. Not just in the art, but in all the artifacts of human creation from that period on."
He stopped and looked hard at her.
"You believe me?" he asked.
"Go on," said Amanda, quietly, "I'm still listening."
"Even today," he said, "there's a tendency to think of the Renaissance only in terms of its great art works. But it was a time of much more than that. It was a time of a multitude of breakings-out, in the forms of craft innovations and social and conceptual experimentation. I told you about the Theater of Memory which prefigures the Final Encyclopedia, itself. It wasn't just by chance that Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer. Actually, what we call the technological age had already begun in the pragmatic innovations of the later Middle Ages—now it flowed into a new consciousness of what might be possible to humans. From that, in only six centuries came the step into space… and everything since has followed. In each generation there were those who wanted to stop where they were, like Bleys, and consolidate. But did we? At any time along that uncertain and fearful upward way, did we stop?"
He himself stopped.
"No," said Amanda. "Of course, we didn't."
She turned and darted upwards slightly at him—and he jerked his head away from her. He stared grimly at her.
"You bit my ear!" he said.
"That's right." She looked at him wickedly. "Because that's enough of that for now. There'll be time yet to worry about the enemy before he starts beating at our gates. For now, I'm hungry and it's time for breakfast."
"Breakfast?"
Involuntarily, he glanced at the window and what she had just said was true. They—or rather he, he thought ruefully—had talked the moon down; and the darkness outside was beginning to pale toward day.
He could see the grayish scree of the slope behind the house more clearly, looming like a slightly more solid ghost of the future.
"That's what I said." She was already out of bed, had seized his wrist and was hauling him also to his feet. "We've had a large night and we've got a large day ahead of us, starting not many hours off. We'll eat, clean up, and then if you can nap, you take a nap. Your meeting with the Grey Captains is set for noon."
"Meeting?" he echoed. He watched her begin to dress and mechanically reached for his shorts to follow her example. "I didn't even ask you yet about setting one up."
"A notice was sent out to all of the Captains as soon as the Commander of the ship that brought you in sent word you were aboard," she said. "That was what kept me in Omalu yesterday, putting the last minute finish to the paperwork for the meeting. I brought some meat up here with me, Hal Mayne. Not fish this time—meat! How about a rack of lamb for a combination breakfast and the proper dinner you probably didn't get around to having last night?"
Chapter Fifty-seven
Amanda lifted her little air-space jitney off the ground of Foralie with the two of them aboard; and Hal watched Foralie fall and dwindle swiftly away below them, feeling an emptiness in him. It was a moment before he associated that emptiness with how he had felt on his first days on Coby, and how he had felt as Donal, leaving this same house to go out to the stars.
"I'd thought I'd be staying at least a week," he said. Her profile was sharply sculpted against the steel-blue sky beyond the jitney's side window. "But if I can settle things with the Grey Captains today, I'd better get moving as soon after that as possible. Can we stop at the Spaceport by Omalu long enough for me to find out when the next ship is due to be headed back toward Sol and the Final Encyclopedia?"
"That won't be necessary," said Amanda. She was wearing a dark blue linen suit of skirt and jacket, light blue blouse and a single strand of small blue-gray coral beads; and somehow her dress today gave her distance from him and authority. "We're giving you a courier ship and pilot."