Simon and Hal clasped hands.
"I'm indebted to you for letting me be at Foralie," Hal said.
Simon smiled. He had a slow, but strongly warming smile.
"You did the old house honor by stopping there," he said, softly.
"No," Hal shook his head. "Foralie is something more than any single person can honor."
Simon's grip tightened briefly again before he released Hal's hand.
"I appreciate your saying that," he said. "So will the rest of the family."
"Maybe a time will come when I can meet the rest of the family," said Hal. "You'll be Ian's great-grandson, then?"
It was an incautious question, coming from someone who bore the family resemblance as plainly as Hal; and Hal saw a certainty wake and settle permanently in Simon's eyes.
"Yes," Simon answered. The words he did not speak—and your own relationship to Ian, is… ? hung on the air between them.
"I'm ready to go this moment if you want," Simon said. "There's nothing in particular for me to stop home for. Would you want to lift right away?"
"I'm afraid time is tight," said Hal. "I need to leave for Mara as soon as possible, now things are settled here. Now, about the costs involved in your services and this ship—"
"No, Hal," said Amanda, "any costs are part of Dorsai's obligations under the contract, now. Simon'll take you where you need to go and stay with you from now on. Any expenses concerned with him or the ship should be routed back through our Central Accounting."
"Why don't all three of us have lunch, then," said Hal, "and after that, you can take care of whatever last minute details there are with the ship? It'd give us a chance to talk, Simon."
"You did say you wanted to leave as soon as possible?" Simon asked.
"I'm afraid so."
"Then I think I'd better go directly to see about the vessel," said Simon. "I had a late breakfast in any case, and we'll have time to talk on our way, Hal Mayne. You two don't mind eating by yourselves, do you?"
Hal smiled.
"Of course not. Thank you," he said.
"Not at all," said Simon. "I'll see you at the ship, then. Excuse me."
He swung away. Hal felt Amanda's hand close on his, down between their bodies.
"He's thoughtful," said Hal. "I think he knew I wanted you to myself for a little longer."
"Of course," said Amanda. "Now, come along. I know where we'll eat."
The place she took him to was within the terminal itself; but except for the occasional, muted sound of a liftoff or landing and the sight of the spacepad beyond the one wall that was a window, the small room was as remote from the business of travelling as any restaurant they might have found in Omalu. It held only four tables; but whether because of arrangement by Amanda, or chance, the other tables were all empty.
The four tables sat next to a balcony on a sort of terrace which occupied most of the room; and looked down across a small reflecting pool at the window wall that showed the landing pad and space vehicles ready to lift. Among them, in the middle distance, Amanda pointed out the small silver shape of the courier ship assigned to Hal.
"I was found in a ship that size," said Hal, half to himself, "a much older model, of course."
He looked back to her from the field in time to see her draw her shoulders slightly into her body, as if she had felt a sudden chill.
"Will you ever have to do it again, do you think?" she asked.
Her voice was very nearly a whisper; and her eyes were focused not on him but past him. She gazed at some point in infinity.
"No," he answered, "I don't think so. This time I should go on being Hal Mayne until I die."
Her eyes were still fixed on that far, invisible point. He reached across the table and took her hand, that lay on the table's surface, into his own.
Her fingers tightened about his and her eyes came back to his, watching him strangely and longingly, like someone watching a loved one on a ship which is at last pulling out from shore.
"It's going to be all right," he said. "And even if it shouldn't, it wouldn't make a difference for us."
Her fingers tightened. They held together, as in the night just past, building a moment around themselves that made time once more seem to stand apart. And so they continued to sit, their fingers interlocked, with the clean air, the reflecting water and the field beyond the window's transparency enclosing them.
Again, as he had sensed it standing before the Grey Captains just a little while past, he felt the turning of the universe, the inexorable sweep of events forward into a future. That sweep was all about them now but it did not reach them. They stayed, as two people standing upon a floating hub might stay, unmoved by the spinning of the great wheel surrounding the place on which they were temporarily at rest.
Chapter Fifty-eight
In the sunlight of Procyon, Mara floated below the courier ship like a blue ball, laced with the swirling white of clouds. Its resemblance to Earth, and the thought of Earth, itself, touched off a loneliness and sadness in Hal, mingled with the secret and bitter knowledge of guilt. If it had not been for the lack of a moon there would be little to identify Mara as not being Earth, the two worlds were so close in appearance and Mara so slightly larger. Even knowing it was not Earth, Hal was tempted to imagine that he was watching the planet on which, only a handful of years back, he had grown to physical maturity; and it came to him for the first time how deep was the emotional bond that tied him to the Mother World.
They had been holding on station for some twenty minutes; now the vessel's speaker system woke with the voice of a surface traffic control unit.
"Dorsai JN Class Number 549371, you're cleared for self-controlled descent to referenced intersection, access code Cable Yellow/Cable Orange, private landing pad. Link for coordinates, please."
Simon Khan Graeme tapped the white access button of the vessel's navigation equipment to link it to the control unit's net; and under his hands, the small ship began to drop toward the surface far below. Hal had all but forgotten the advantage of a Dorsai ship and pilot that could take him to the very doorstep of his destination on any world, rather than hanging in orbit around a world and making him wait for shuttle service. He looked at the long, powerful fingers of Simon, resting their tips lightly upon the direct control keys, touching… pausing… touching again.
The face of Mara came up toward them. Then they were suddenly through a high cloud layer, over blue ocean and slanting in toward a coastline. They were over land and dropping, and without warning, there was snow in the air about them. Below, dusted with snowcover, were rolling woodlands from horizon to horizon, with only the occasional white patch of a meadow-clearing to interrupt them; and their ship fell at last toward the still, ice-held ribbon of a minor river, and to what looked like an interconnected clump of graceful, pastel-colored buildings sitting back a small distance from its bank.
They sat down at last on a small weather-controlled pad, showing the bare concrete of its surface to the clouded sky. Hal stepped out, followed by Simon, and found Amid, in a light gray robe, waiting for them.
"Amid, this is Simon Khan Graeme," Hal said, stepping aside to let Simon come forward. "He's driving me around these days, courtesy of the Dorsai."
"Honored to meet you, Simon Khan Graeme," said Amid.
"And I, you," said Simon.
In the Exotic fashion, Amid did not offer his hand; and Simon did not seem to expect it. Hal had forgotten how tiny the older man was. Seeing him now, as he stood looking up at Simon's face, Hal registered their difference in size with a mild emotional shock. It was almost as if Amid had aged and dwindled since Hal had last seen him. Standing together on the pad, there was only still dry, warm air surrounding them; but, beyond, about the house, over the river and above the trees, the snow was quietly sifting down in large, soft flakes.
It was strange to see it. Somehow, Hal had always thought of the two Exotic worlds as caught in an endless summer of blue skies and green fields.
With Simon, now, he followed Amid off the pad and into the house—if that was really the right word for such a wandering and connected collection of structures—and almost immediately found himself, as usual, without any way of telling whether he was indoors or outdoors, except for an occasional glimpse of snowy surface beyond a weather shield.
Simon was left behind in a suite of rooms that would be his until he left; and Amid took Hal on to find Rukh.
They located her after a little while, wrapped in what looked more like a colorful, antique quilt than anything else, seated by the side of a free-form pool surrounded by tall green plants that arched long, spade-shaped leaves over the lounging float upon which she was stretched out.
She threw off the quilt and sat up when she caught sight of them, her float adjusting to her new posture. She was wearing an ankle-length Exotic robe of maroon and white, the ample folds of which helped to hide how she had lost weight. Her olive skin looked sallow but her face, in its gauntness, was more beautiful than ever. They came up to her and Hal reached down to kiss her. It was still a wire-strong young body that his arms enclosed; but thin, thin…
He let go of her as Amid brought up floats for the two of them; and they sat down together.
"Thank you, Hal," she said.
"For what?" he asked.
"For being God's instrument to set me free."
"I had reasons of my own for doing it." His voice sounded roughly over the quiet pool—but hid, and effectively reburied, the chill of fury momentarily reawakened in him by the sight of how frail she was. "I needed you—I have plans for you."
"Not you, only." She looked at him closely. "You're a lot older, now."
"Yes." A soberness in him had replaced the first stirrings of remembered emotion. "I still need to explain to you, though, why it was I did something different than I told you I was going to do—back when the Militia was after us all, there outside Ahruma."
"You don't have to explain." She smiled. "I understood it, later. How you'd taken the only way there was to protect the rest of us and get the explosives safely into Ahruma, out of the Militia's reach. Once I understood, we scattered, and lost them. We stayed scattered until it was time to gather together again to destroy the Core Tap. But by doing what you did for us, you delivered yourself up to the Militia."
And she put one narrow hand softly on his arm.
"They carried me around on a silver platter in that jail—" he said, suddenly and bitterly, "compared to what they did to you!"
"But I was enguarded of God," her voice reproved him, gently. "You were not. There was no way they could touch me with anything they might do; any more than anything you might have done could have touched Amyth Barbage in the courtyard there, afterwards."
An uncomfortableness moved in him—something as yet not understood, as the scene she spoke of came back to him. But she smiled at him again, gently and tolerantly, the way a mother might smile at a child who did not yet understand some completely ordinary matter, and the uncomfortableness was forgotten.
"You say you had reasons for doing what you did?" Her brown eyes watched him gravely. "What reasons were these?"
"I've still got them," he said. "Rukh—there's a place that needs you more than Harmony does."
He had expected her to object to that, and he paused, waiting. But she merely continued to look at him, patiently.
"Go on," she said.
"I'm talking about Old Earth," he told her. "The Others have been holding back from an all-out effort at getting control of the people there, because so many show that strong, apparently innate resistance to their charismatic talent. You know about that. So Bleys and the rest have been marking time, hoping they could figure out a way around the problem, before trying to move in. But time's getting short for them, as well as us. They'll have to start pushing onto Old Earth, any time now."
"But they've already got people there, haven't they?" Rukh asked. "We were told on Harmony that a secret group of unknown but influential Earth locals are afraid of them; and that these've been running a campaign to prejudice the general mass of Earth's people against them?" She looked at him closely. "Or was that report just a divide and conquer technique, on Bleys' part?"
Hal nodded.
"But if they're not going to be able to convert any important percentage of the populace there, in any case," she went on, "why worry about them? Even if they put on what you call a push, it wouldn't look as if they'd have much luck."
"I'll tell you why." Hal sat back on his float. "When they had me in that Militia cell, I was running a high fever and I hit a decision point in my life. The result was, I went into what you might want to call a sort of mental overdrive; and I realized a number of things I hadn't been able to see earlier."
She reached out to put her hand on his, softly, for a moment.
"You don't need to feel for me," he told her gently in return. "I told you they carried me around on a silver platter there, compared to what they did to you."
"No one seems to understand you—how you fight in a battle larger than any of ours," she murmured. "But I know."
"Some of us have some idea, I think," murmured Amid.
Hal curled his fingers around hers.
"One of the things I suddenly understood, then," he went on, "was that the charismatic talent, instead of being some special gift of genetic accident, given only to those who were Others, was really just a developed form of an ability that had been already sharpened to a fine edge on your own worlds, Harmony and Association. It was the ability to proselyte and convert—worked over, refined, and raised to a slightly higher power. The only ones among the Others who really have it are those like Bleys Ahrens who are at least partial products of the Friendly Worlds."
"Friendly? The records say Bleys is a mixture of Dorsai and Exotic," Amid put in.
"I know he's claimed that; and that that's what the records say, as far as they say anything about him," answered Hal; "and I've got no hard evidence to the contrary. But I've met him; and in some ways I think I know him better than anyone else alive. He's all three Splinter Cultures—"
He broke off, abruptly. He had been about to say—just as I am myself—and had stopped just in time. Somehow, since the night with Amanda, he was not only more open to the universe, but also less self-guarded. But neither Rukh nor Amid seemed to notice the check in what he had been about to say. He went on.
"The point is," he said, "your culture, Rukh, like the cultures of the Exotics and the Dorsai, ties back into Old Earth cultures at their roots; and there've been times in history before this when the faith-holders have managed to stampede the general culture around them. Look at the rise of Islam in the Near East in the seventh century, or the Children's Crusade, in the thirteenth. The Others won't need to control the Exotics directly, any more than they'll need to control the Dorsai, as long as the rest of the inhabited worlds are under their direct control. But Old Earth is a different problem than the Dorsai or the Exotics. It's like the Friendlies in that the Others can be satisfied there with a division of opinion about them that effectively keeps the world as a whole from organized opposition. But on Earth, unlike Harmony or Association, the Others can't afford open civil war. A peaceful Old Earth is still necessary as an economic pivot point for interworld commerce—which will have to go on. But if they can prevent Earth from becoming a potential enemy, short of crippling her economic roles, they'll control absolutely the interworld trade in skills—the base of our common interplanetary credit system that's let all our worlds hold together in one common community of humanity this long."
He looked at Amid.
'The Exotics have always known that, haven't they, Amid?"
The wrinkles in Amid's face rearranged with his smile.
"We've known it for three hundred years," he said. "That's why, from the first, we made it our major effort—in a secular sense—to dominate interplanetary trade, so as to protect ourselves."
He sobered.
"That's why, Hal M
ayne," he said, "you'll find us probably more hard-headed about this situation with the Others than anyone else. We know what it'll mean to have them in power, and we've known it from the first move they began to make as a group."
Hal nodded, turning back to Rukh.
"So," he said, "you see. The one world it's absolutely necessary for the Others to neutralize is Earth. The reason they've got to do that goes beyond the obvious fact that, in spite of the way the Old World was plundered and wasted in the early years of the early centuries of technological civilization, it's still far and away the most populous and resource-rich of the inhabited planets. The further reason's that, quite literally, it's the storehouse of the original gene pool, the basic source of the full-spectrum human being, from which we all came."
He stopped, and waited to see if she wanted to respond to all this he was saying, but she simply sat, relaxed and still, waiting for him to go on.
"If successful opposition to the Others is possible from any people at all, in the future," he went on, "it's most possible from the people of Old Earth. They've got their past all around them—there's no way they can be blinded to what the Others would take from them. Also, as their history shows, they're intractable, imaginative and—if they have to be—capable of giving their lives for what they consider a necessary goal, practical or otherwise. For the Others, the necessity is obvious—Earth is the one citadel which must be taken and controlled, to ensure a permanent end to all opposition to them. As a last resort—but only as a last resort—they'll destroy it rather than have it go against them. They've got no choice, if it comes to that." He paused. Rukh watched him. Amid watched him.
"In the long run, the Dorsai can be starved to death. The Exotic Worlds can be rendered helpless. The Friendlies can be kept fighting among themselves to the point where they never emerge as a serious threat. But Earth has to be either cancelled out or destroyed, if it's to be taken out of the equation at all. Nothing less's going to answer for what the Others need."
He stopped talking, hearing the echo of his own words in the following silence; and wondering if he had gone too far into rhetoric, so that Rukh would instinctively recoil from him and from what he was about to ask her to do. But when he paused she still merely sat silent, her gaze going a little past him to the greenery around the further bend of the pool, then turned her eyes back a little to look onto his.