"I'm sorry," said Bleys, gracefully, "I don't have a kind. I'm my own unique mixture of Exotic and Dorsai, only."
"No," said Hal. "You did have an Exotic and a Dorsai as parents of your father. But your mother's family, which raised you on Harmony, was pure Friendly, and it's that which dominates in you."
Bleys looked at him as if from an impossible distance.
"In what records did you find that fairy tale?"
"In none," said Hal. "The official records of your birth and movements all show what you fixed them to say."
"Then what makes you say something like this?"
"The correct knowledge," said Hal. "An absolute knowledge that comes from joining together bits and pieces of general records that hadn't been tampered with—because there was no reason to tamper with them—at the Final Encyclopedia. I put them together only a year ago, and then made deductions from them using something I taught myself during my first trial of life. It's called intuitive logic."
Bleys frowned slightly. Then his frown cleared.
"Ah," he said; and was silent for a long moment, looking a little aside from Hal. When he spoke again, his voice was thoughtful and remote. "I believe what you're talking about may be what I've been calling interval thinking."
"The name hardly matters," said Hal.
"Of course not. So," Bleys' gaze came back to him, openly, "there's more to learn about you than I'd imagined. But tell me, why place so much emphasis on the fact that part of what I am by inheritance and upbringing may be Friendly?"
"For one reason, because it explains your ability of charisma, as well as that of those Others who have it to some extent or another," said Hal. "But I'd rather you called yourself faith-holder than Friendly. Because, more than anyone on all the worlds suspects, it's a form of faith-holding that rules you. You never were the bored cross-breed whose only concern was being comfortable during his own brief years of life. That was a facade, a false exterior set up in the first place to protect you from your older half-brother, Danno—who would have been deathly afraid of you if he'd suspected you had a purpose of your own."
"He would, indeed," murmured Bleys. "Not that I'm agreeing with these fancies and good-nights of yours, of course."
"Your agreement isn't necessary," said Hal. "As I was saying, you used it first to protect yourself against Danno, then to reassure the rest of the Others that you weren't just using them for your own private purposes. Finally, you're using it still to blind the peoples of the worlds you control to that personal goal that draws you now more strongly than ever. You're a faith-holder, twisted to the worship of a false god—the same god under a different mask that Walter Blunt worshipped back in the twenty-first century. Your god is stasis. You want to enshrine the race as it is, make it stop and go no farther. It's the end you've worked to from the time you were old enough to conceive it."
"And if all this should be true," Bleys smiled again. "The end is still the end. It remains inevitable. You can think all this about me, but it isn't going to make any difference."
"Again, you, of all people, know that's not so," answered Hal. "The fact I understand this is going to make all the difference between us. You developed the Others and let them think that the power they gained was all their own doing. But now you'll understand that I'm aware it was mainly accomplished with recruits who were simply non-Other, native-born Friendlies with their own natural, culturally developed, charismatic gift to some degree, working under your own personal spell and command. Meanwhile, covered by the appearance of working for the Others, you've begun to spread your own personal faith in the inevitably necessary cleansing of the race, followed by a freezing of it into an immobility of changelessness." Hal stopped, to give Bleys a chance to respond. But the Other man said nothing. "Unlike your servants and the Others who've been your dupe," Hal went on, "you're able to see the possibility of a final death resulting from that state of stasis, if you achieve it. But under the influence of the dark part of the racial unconsciousness whose laboratory experiment and chess piece you are—as I also am, on the other side—you see growth in the race as the source of all human evils, and you're willing to kill the patient, if necessary, to kill the cancer."
He stopped. This time there was a difference to the silence which succeeded his words and lay between the two of them.
"You realize," said Bleys at last, softly, "that now I have no choice at all but to destroy you?"
"You can't afford to destroy me," said Hal, "even if you could. Just as I can't afford to destroy you. This battle is now being fought for the adherence of the minds of all our fellow humans. What I have to do, to make the race understand which way they must go, is prove you wrong; and I need you alive for that. You have to prove me wrong if you want to win, and you need me alive for that. Force alone won't solve anything for either of us, in the long run. You know that as well as I do."
"But it will help." Bleys smiled. "Because you're right. I have to win. I will win. There's got to be an end to this madness you call growth but which is actually only expansion further and further into the perils of the physical universe until the lines that supply our lives will finally be snapped of their own weight. Only by putting it aside, can we start the growth within that's both safe and necessary."
"You're wrong," said Hal. "That way lies death. It's a dead end road that assumes inner growth can only be had at the price of giving up what's made us what we are over that million years I mentioned. Chained and channeled organisms grow stunted and wrong, always. Free ones grow wrong sometimes, but right other times; because the price of life is a continual seeking to grow and explore. Lacking that freedom, all action, physical and mental, circles in on itself and ends up only wearing a deeper and deeper rut in which it goes around and around until it dies."
"No," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to shrug off Hal's words. "It leads to life for the race. It's the only way that can. There has to be an end to growth out into the physical universe, and a change over to growth within. That's all that can save us. Only by stopping now and turning back, only by stopping this endless attempt to enlarge and develop can we turn inward and find a way to be invulnerable in spite of anything the universe might hold.
"It's you who are wrong," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to harden and take on a look of power that Hal had never seen it show before. "But you're self-deluded. Besotted with love for the shiny bauble of adventure and discovery. Out there—"
He stabbed one long finger back into the gray mist that obscured his end of the tunnel, at the upper side of the shield-wall.
"—out there are all things that can be. How can it be otherwise? And among all things have to be all things that must be unconquerable by us. How can it be otherwise? All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword—and this is a sword you keep reaching for, this so-called spirit of exploration and adventure—this leaping out into the physical universe. Is the spirit of mankind nothing more than a questing hound that always has to keep finding a new rabbit to run after? How many other races, in this infinity, in this eternity, do you think haven't already followed that glittering path? And how many of those do you suppose have become master of the universe, which is the only alternate ending to going down?"
His eyes burned on Hal's.
"What will be—" he went on, "what I'll see done will be a final reversal to that process. What you'll try to do to stop it is going to make no difference in that. You've made a fortress out of Old Earth. It makes no difference. What human minds can do by way of science and technology other human minds can undo. We'll find a way eventually through that shield-wall of yours. We'll retake Earth, and cleanse it of all those who'd continue this mad, sick, outward plunge of humankind. Then it'll be reseeded with those who see our race's way as it should be."
"And the Younger Worlds?" Hal said. "What about all the other settled planets? Have you forgotten them?"
"No," said Bleys. "They'll die. No one will kill them. But, lit
tle by little, with the outward-seeking sickness cured, and the attention of Earth, of real Earth, on itself as it should be—these others will wither and their populations dwindle. In the long run, they'll be empty worlds again; and humanity'll be back where it began, where it belongs and where it'll stay, on its own world. And here—as fate wills it—it'll learn how to love properly and exist to the natural end of its days—or die."
He stopped speaking. The force that had powered his voice fell away into silence. Hal stood, looking at him, with nothing to say. After a long moment, Bleys spoke again, quietly.
"Words are no use between us two, are they?" he said, at last. "I'm sorry, Hal. Believe what you want, but those who think the way you do can't win. Look how you and your kind have done nothing but lose to me and mine, so far."
"You're wrong," said Hal. "We haven't really contested you until now; and now that we're going to, we're the ones who can't lose."
Bleys reached out his hand and Hal took it. They did not grasp in the ordinary fashion of greeting, but only held for a moment. The Other's flesh and bones felt strange in Hal's hand as if he had taken the hand of a condemned man. Then they both turned and each went off his own way, in opposite directions into the mist.
Chapter Sixty-eight
His mind was so full of the conversation just past, that he was hardly aware of reaching the end of the tunnel, making the jump into the airlock of the vehicle waiting, and being driven back to the Encyclopedia. Once parked back in the bay again, he thanked Simon absentmindedly and went off towards his own suite, brushing aside the people he encountered along the way who had matters they wanted to talk to him about.
He reached his suite, stepped in, and drew a breath of relief on finding it empty as far as he could see into it. He went through to the spare bedroom, saw Ajela was still asleep in the same position, and left her, going through his own bedroom to the small room beyond—the carrel in which his private work here at the Encyclopedia would be done.
He stepped into the carrel, closed the door behind him and sat down within the four walls that were all screen. He touched a stud on the control panel before him and suddenly, as far as the eye could tell, he hung floating in space—beyond the Earth, beyond the Encyclopedia and beyond the shield-wall.
The unchanging stars looked back at him.
Alone at last, he was free to remember the letter from Amanda; and with that all thought of Bleys and related matters was plucked from his mind. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought out the envelope waiting for him there.
For a moment, with the stars around him, he held it unopened. The sight of it had suddenly brought, on the intuitive wings of his mind, an unusual feeling of sorrow and apprehension. The Dorsai-made, thick, slightly grayish paper of the envelope reminded him of the mist in the iris tunnel.
He slipped his thumb under the sealed flap and tore the envelope open. Within it was a sheaf of pages, and the first one was dated five days, absolute, just past.
He read.
May 36, 342 Dorsai/2366 Absolute
My dearest:
I kept avoiding telling you when I'd be coming to Earth in the Exodus, because I had a decision to make. Forgive me. But it's now made, and I will be standing by it.
We belong to our duties, you and I, for some little time yet. Yours is there, in the Encyclopedia; but mine isn't there with you, much as I'd give anything I have or may have—except you—to be where you are.
At Earth, I could be no help in the things that are going to need to be done, except to provide one more body to the ramparts. My real usefulness now is anywhere but there. At this moment, we're entering a time in which there'll be nothing in the large sense but two things, the citadel and the territory of the enemy outside it. My usefulness is also outside, in that enemy territory.
In the years that will be coming, as important as it'll be to hold the citadel against all attack, it's going to be equally important to make sure those who're now under the will of the Others don't forget what freedom is. The human spirit will never endure chains long, any more than it ever has; and there are going to be spontaneous uprisings against the rule of those like Bleys, in addition to those left on the Dorsai and on the Friendlies, who'll hide out in the back country and other areas from which they will be difficult to dislodge; and they'll continue to fight, perhaps indefinitely.
From Earth, you'll be sending out people and supplies to help support groups like these on all the Younger Worlds. You'll also need people already out there who know how such fighting and surviving should be done; and who you know are going to think the way you do, in terms of what has to be accomplished to prepare for the day when you can come back out of the citadel and take back what's been lost.
If you've thought at all about the needs to come, as I know you must, you've already recognized the need for people to go out now to advising and organizing such groups and that the natural choice for such people would be from our ranks on the Dorsai. We faced that necessity ourselves early here, in making our general plans for the Exodus; and a number of us have already volunteered for this work, myself among them.
By the time you get this letter, I'll be between the stars; on my way, or already at, a destination that I've no way at this moment of knowing; and I'll have already begun my work, using contacts provided for me through Friendlies, Exotics and other people generally, who understand what needs to be done to help those who will still want to resist, outside Old Earth. But wherever I am when you read these words, you'll know at that moment, as always, I'll be carrying the thought of you and my love for you like a fireside warmth inside me, to warm me always, wherever I go and whatever I do.
If and when you find yourself in contact with those of us who are out there and can send a message to me, write and let me know that you understand what I've done and why I did it, in spite of all it would have meant to be there with you. I won't need to hear from you to know you understand, but it's going to strengthen me to read that you do, just the same.
And now, let me tell you how I love you…
The page blurred before his eyes. Then it cleared, and he sat reading the letter, page by page, as if the words on them had the power to draw him down into them. At length, he reached the end of it; and sat gazing down at it with the eyes of the stars upon him.
The last five lines above her signature burned themselves into the patterns of his mind and soul.
You know I've loved you, and we've loved each other, longer than others would ever understand. You know as I know that nothing can part us. You know we are always together, no matter where our bodies may happen to be. Reach out at any time and find me. And I will do the same to you.
All my love,
Amanda
He reached.
Amanda… ?
It was as if one wave spoke to another, a call from the one washing the eastern shore of one continent reaching the one washing the western shore of another, half a world apart, but joined by the ocean to which both waves belonged.
Hal…
Her response returned to him, and they touched across the vast space between them, touched and held. It was not in words that they spoke, but in surges of feeling and knowing.
After a time, they parted; and he felt her withdraw. But the warmth of her, like the fireside warmth she had spoken of early in her letter, stayed with him, strengthening him.
He looked at the stars and down at the control panel under his hands. His fingertips began to move and words lighted themselves into existence against the dark and stars' points before him.
In morning's ruined chapel, the full knight
Woke from the coffin of his last night's bed …
The poem drew him into the work, and the work enlarged in him, taking him over at last completely. He grew to be part of it as it grew in him; and gradually, alone with the stars, he left behind all else except the warmth of the link to Amanda, and became fully occupied with what at last held and engrossed him, beyond all other
things.
Afterword
The Door into Darkness
by Sandra Miesel
"Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
—John 3:3
All creation is in flux. Every particle of matter, every living person is a pilgrim in a fluid universe. Each child's growth in body, mind, and spirit retraces that immeasurably ancient racial archetype, the Way. However many seasons wheel onward to mark the years, our progress from birth to death still shapes the myths we live by. All of us are destined to make the night-journey, endure the difficult passage, and seek entry through the narrow gate.
The first clear footprints on this path appear during the Ice Age, 25,000 years ago. In those days, Paleolithic cave-dwellers would crawl for hours through labyrinthine corridors to reach ceremonial chambers deep in the stony womb of Mother Earth. The life-defining rituals they celebrated there have left us trail markers in the form of splendid art at Lascaux, Altamira, and hundreds of other sites.
As millennia passed, initiation became the universal story, the tale of the hero of a thousand faces. The initiate's path rose in stages: to the plateau of tribal membership, up the heights of some specialized skill, ending on a lone peak of spiritual perfection. The higher one climbed, the farther one could see—and be seen as a scout by those below.
This age-old symbolism survives in the teachings of historic religions. The West speaks of passing over from bondage into freedom, the East of escaping the sorrowful wheel of existence. But whether the road be described as linear, cyclic, or spiral, salvation remains fundamentally a transit. Our quest for transcendence began as soon as human consciousness emerged. Pursuing it has made us what we are and suggests what we may become.