Ace Books by Gordon R. Dicbon

ALIEN ART ARCTURUS LANDING

THE ALIEN WAY

COMBAT SF THE FAR CALL THE FOREVER MAN HOME FROM THE SHORE

IN IRON YEARS JAMIE THE RED (with Roland Green)

LOVE NOT HUMAN MASTERS OF EVERON NAKED TO THE STARS

ON THE RUN SPACEPAW THE SPACE SWIMMERS

SPACIAL DELIVERY TIME TO TELEPORT/DELUSION WORM

WAY OF THE PILGRIM

THE EARTH LORDS

The Childe Cycle Series

DORSAI! LOST DORSAI NECROMANCER SOLDIER, ASK NOT THE SPIRIT OF DORSAI TACTICS OF MISTAKE THE FINAL ENCYCLOPEDIA THE DORSAI COMPANION

THE CHANTRY GUILD

THE

CHR TRY

GUILD

fil AGE BOOKS, NEW YORK

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THE CHANTRY GUILD

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PRINTING HISTORY Ace hardcover edition / October 1988 Ace mass market edition / June 1989

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CHAPTER

A little before dawn, Amanda Morgan woke in the front room of the tiny apartment rented by the family which had risked giving her shelter. A young girl shared the front room floor with her; but she still slumbered, as did the rest.

Amanda had slept in the shapeless brown smock that had been all but forced on the inhabitants of this world and its sister planet of Mara by the Occupation Forces now ruling them. She rose now without putting on her ankle-high bush boots, and squatted on her heels beside her borrowed sleeping mat, and rolled it up.

Stowing it in a corner of the room and picking up the boots in one hand, she quietly let herself out into the hall. Still carrying the boots, she went along it to make use of the communal bathroom at the hall's end; then descended the narrow wooden stairs into the street.

Just inside the tenement's street door, she stopped to put on the boots. The smock had a hood, which she now pulled up over her head to hide her face. Silently, lifting the latch of the door, she slipped out into the mist-dimmed, pre-dawn light of the empty streets of Porphyry. It was a small town in the subtropical uplands of Hysperia, the northeastern continent of the Exotic planet of Kultis.

Through those streets between the graying, unpainted wood faces of the tenements, she went swiftly. Most of the local Exotics, rooted out of their countryside homes, had been brought here and required to build these dwellings for their own shelter, close under the eye of authority; and the fact that the required design and materials of the buildings made them firetraps had not been entirely unintentional on the part of the designers. For the plan behind the Occupation was for the Exotics of Mara and Kultis to die off-as much as possible by their own doing.

She thought of those sleeping within; and felt a sensation as if her heart moved under her breast at the thought of leaving them, as a mother might react at having to leave her children in the hands of brutal and antagonistic caretakers. But the word that had been sent her was the one message that could override all else; and she had no choice but to go.

After several turnings down different streets she slipped between two buildings and emerged into the open yard-space behind them. Just before her lifted the six-meter height of the wooden fence that now enclosed the town; and which those who inhabited it had also been forced to build.

At the foot of this fence she stopped and, reaching in through a slit in her robe, loosened something. As she gave her body a shake a coil of loose rope dropped about her feet. She stepped out of it and bent to pick it up by the running loop already worked into one end.

She gathered up the rest of the rope and dropped it by arm-lengths back onto the sparse grass of the untended ground at her feet, shaking it out and recoiling it up again into loose loops in her left hand, to make sure there were no kinks in it. Then, taking the last meter or so of the other end with the running loop into her right hand, she shook the loop sliding through that eye of rope to a larger circle, swung it a few times to get the feel of its weight and balance, and took a step back from the foot of the wall.

She looked up at the fence, past the flimsy walkway that allowed it to be patrolled by those on guard, with no more than their heads showing above the pointed ends of the uprightly placed logs that made it.

Selecting one particular log-end, she swung the captive loop in her right hand in a couple of graceful circles and then let it fly upward. She had been handling a lasso since her early childhood on the distant planet of her birth, one of the few Younger Worlds

THE CHANTRY GUILD 3 where a variform of horses had flourished. The loop flew fair and true to settle over the upper end of the log she had chosen.

She pulled it tightly closed, and tried her weight on the rope. Then, with its aid, she walked up the inner face of the wall until she could pull herself onto the walkway. Loosening the loop from the log-end, she enlarged it and put it around her so that it formed a loop diagonally about her body from one shoulder and around and under her opposite hip. Doubling that loop with more of the rope, she threw the long end of it down the wall's far side, climbed over the fence and proceeded to rappel down its outside face, mountaineer fashion. Once solidly on the ground she pulled the rest of the rope around the log-end overhead and down into her hands. Recoiling it around her waist over her robe as she went, she headed for the darkness of the forest, only a short distance away.

The forest hid her and she was gone. But she had not left unobserved. One of the early waking inhabitants of a building, looking out a back window, had seen her go. By bad luck, he was one of the few locals who tried to curry favor with the Occupation Forces-for there were good and bad Exotics, as there were people of both kinds in all cultures. His attention had been caught by a glimpse of a figure moving outside while the curfew of the night just passed was still in effect. Now he lost no time in dressing and hurrying himself to Military Headquarters.

Consequently, she was almost to her destination when she became aware of being followed by green- uniformed, booted figures, with the glint of metal in their hands that could only come from power rifles or needle guns. She went on, not hurrying her pace. They wei-e already close enough to kill her easily with their weapons, if that was what they wanted. They would be waiting to see if she would lead them to others; and in any case their preference would be to take her alive; to question her and otherwise amuse themselves with her before killing her. However, if she could only gain a few minutes more, a small distance farther . . .

She walked on unhurriedly, her resolve hardening as she went. Even if they tried to take her now before she reached her intended destination, still all might not be lost. She was Dorsai, of the Dorsai; a native of that cold, hard, meagerly blessed planet whose only wealth of natural resources lay in its planet-wide ocean and the scanty areas of arable and pasture land on its stark islands, upthrust from the waves like the tops of the underseas mountains.

For generations, the Dorsai had seen their sons and daughters leave home to sell their military services in the wars of the other Younger Worlds; and so earn the interstellar credits the Dorsai needed to survive. While those behind her now were the sweepings of those other worlds. Not real military; and spoiled beyond that by the fact that the Exotics they were used to dominating did not know how to fight, even if they were willing to do so to save their lives. So that those who followed her now had come to believe that merely to show a weapon to any unarmed civilian produced instant obedience.

So, at close quarters, if those behind did not first cripple her with their power or needle guns, she could handle up to half a dozen of them. In any case, it would be strange if in the process she could not get her hands on at least one of their weapons. If she did that, she would have no trouble dealing with even a full platoon group.

But she was almost to the place toward which she had been headed; and they were still some meters behind her. It became more and more obvious they were merely following, unsuspecting that she might know they were there, and hoping she would lead them to others they could capture as well. She had been working here as an undercover agent from Old Earth for three years now; helping the local populace endure, and wherever possible, resist these followers of Others-the new overlords of the Younger Worlds. These soldiers would at least have heard rumors of her. Undoubtedly it was inconceivable to them that she could be alone and elude them that long-that she must have some organization helping her.

She smiled a little, to herself'. Actually, her most active work in those three years had amounted to occasionally rescuing a prisoner of these same jack-booted imitation soldiers, when this could be done without giving away her true identify. Mostly, her job had been to provide reassurance to the local Kultans. So that they, like the other dominated peoples of' the Younger Worlds, would know they had not been entirely forgotten by those still holding out behind the phase-shield of Old Earth. Holding yet, against the

THE CHANTRY GUILD 5

combined strength of the Younger Worlds and the self-named, multitalented Others who ruled them.

But now, her hopes lifted. Those following had delayed almost too long. She had at last reached the little hillock of flourishing undergrowth and young trees, which she had transplanted here three years before with great care and labor. She stopped; and, almost casually, began to tear up a strip of turf between two of the trees.

That, she thought, should intrigue them enough to keep them from rushing upon her too swiftly. The turf came free, as it had been designed to do; being artificial, rather than real, like the rest of the vegetation in the hillock. Below it was the metal face and handle of a ship's entry port.

At last, she moved swiftly, now. A second later the door was open and she was inside, closing it behind her. As she turned the handle to locking position, the blast from a power rifle rang ineffectively against its outer side. She took two strides, seated herself in the chair before the command panel and laid hands on the controls.

A Dorsai courier vessel did not need time to warm its atmosphere drive before responding, even after three years of idleness. Almost in the same moment as she gripped the control rod, the ship burst from the hillock, sending an explosion of earth, grass and trees in all directions. On ordinary atmosphere drive she lifted and hedgehopped over the nearest ridge. As soon as she knew she was out of her pursuers' sight, she phase-shifted the craft clear of the planet in one jump. Her next shift was almost immediate, to two light-years beyond the sun just now rising, which was the star called Beta Procyon by those on Old Earth.

Out at last in interstellar space, she was beyond pursuit and discovery by any ship of the Younger Worlds. Here in deep space, she was as unfindable as a minnow in a world-wide Ocean.

She glanced around the unkempt interior of the vessel. It was hardly in condition for a formal visit to Old Earth, let alone to the Final Encyclopedia. But that was beside the point. What mattered was that she had got away safely past whatever ships had been on guard patrol around the Worlds under Beta Procyon. Ahead of her still lay the greater task, the matter of reaching Old Earth itself-, which would mean running the gauntlet of the Younger Worlds' fleet besieging that world. Somehow she must slip safely through a thick cordon of much better armed and ready battleships, to which her own small vessel would indeed be a minnow by comparison.

But that was a problem to be dealt with when she came to it.

CHAPTER

2

Through the library window, the cold mountain rain of early winter in the north temperate zone of Old Earth could be seen slanting down on the leafless oaks and the pines around the little lake before the estate building that was the earliest home he could remember, as Hal Mayne. Overhead, obscuring the peaks of the surrounding mountains, the sky was an unbroken, heavy, gray ceiling of clouds; and the gusts from time to time slanted the rain at a greater angle, and made the treetops bow momentarily. The darkness of the day and the lowering clouds made the window slightly reflective; so that he saw what was barely recognizable as an image of his face, looking back at him like the face of a ghost.

An unusually early winter had commenced upon the Rocky Mountains of the North American continent. An early winter, in fact, was upon the whole northern hemisphere of the planet. Outside, the day was chill and dismal, sending forest creatures to their dens and holes. Within the library a fire burned brightly in the fireplace, with the good smell of birch wood, started by the automatic machinery of the house on a signal from a satellite overhead. The ceiling lighting was bright on the spines of the antique books that solidly filled the shelves of the bookcases covering all the walls of the room.

This was the home where the orphan Hal had been raised by his tutors, the three old men he had loved-and the place where he had watched those three killed when he had been sixteen eleven years ago. It was an empty house now, as it had been ever since; but usually he could find comfort here.

They're not dead, he reminded himself. No one you love ever dies-for you. They go on in you as long as you live. But the thought did not help.

On this cold, dark day he felt the emptiness of the house inescapably around him. His mind reached out for consolation, as it had on so many such occasions, to remembered poetry. But the only lines of verse that came to him now did not comfort * They were no more than an echo of the dying year outside. They were the lines of a poem he had himself once written, here in this house, on just such a day of oncoming winter, when he had just turned thirteen.

Now, autumn's birch, white-armed, disrobedfor sorrow, In wounded days, as that weak sun slips down From failing year and sodden forest mold, Pray for old memories like tarnished bronze;

And when night sky and mist, like sisters, creeping, Bring on the horned owl, hooting at no moonMourn like a lute beneath the wotfskin winds, That on the hollow log sound hollow horn.

-A chime rang its silvery note on his ear. A woman's voice spoke. Hal, said the voice of Ajela, conference in twenty minutes. I'll be there, he said.

He sighed. Clear! he added, to the invisible technological magic that surrounded him. The library, the estate and the rain winked out. He was back in his quarters at the Final Encyclopedia, in orbit far above the surface of the world he had just been experiencing. The rain and the wind and the library, all as they would actually be at the estate in this moment, were left now far below him.

He was surrounded by silence -silence, four paneled walls and three doors; one door leading to the corridor outside, one to his bedroom, and one to the carrel that was his ordinary

THE CHANTRY GUILD 9

workroom. About him in the main room where lie stood were the usual padded armchair floats and a desk, above a soft red carpeting.

He was once again where he had spent most of the past three years, in that technological marvel that was an artificial satellite of the planet Earth, the Final Encyclopedia. Permanently in orbit about Earth. Earth, which in this twenty-fourth century its emigrated children now called Old Earth, to distinguish it from the world of New Earth, away off under the star of Sirius and settled three hundred years since.

Around him again was only the silence-of his room, and of the satellite itself. The Final Encyclopedia floated far above the surface of Earth and just below the misty white phase-shield that englobed and protected both world and Encyclopedia. Too far off to be heard, even if there had been atmosphere outside to carry the sound, were the warships which patrolled beneath that shield, guarding both the satellite and Earth against any intrusion by the warships of ten of the thirteen Younger Worlds, beyond the shield.

Hal stood for a moment longer. He had twenty minutes, he reminded himself'. So, for one last time, he sank into a cross-legged, seated position on the carpeting and let his mind relax into that state that was a form of concentration; although its physical and mental mechanisms were not the usual ones for that mental state.

They were, in fact, a combination of the techniques taught him as a boy by Walter the InTeacher-one of those three who had died eleven years ago-and his own self-evolved creative methods for writing the poetry he had used to make. He had developed the synthesis while he was still young; and Walter the InTeacher, the Exotic among his tutors, had still been alive. Hal remembered how deeply and childishly disappointed he had been then, when he had not been able to show off the picture his mind had just generated, of the birch tree in the wet autumn wood. The raw image of the poem he had just written.

But Walter, usually so mild and comforting in all things, had told him sternly then that instead of being unhappy he should feel lucky that he had been able to do it at all. The ability Walter had said, was not unknown, but rare; and few people ha@ ever been able to conceptualize on that level. He had explained that the difference between what most could manage and what Hal had evidently been able to do was the difference in the creation of what Walter gave the name of vision, as opposed to an image -quoting an ancient artist of the twentieth century who also had the capability. Most people can, with concentration, evoke an image, Walter had told him, and, having evoked it, they can draw it, paint it, or build it. But an image is never the complete thing, imagined. Parts of it are missing because the person evoking it takes for granted that they're there. While a vision is complete enough to be the thing, itself; if it only had solidity or life. The difference is like that between a historic episode, thoroughly researched and in the mind of a historian, ready to be written down; and the same episode in the memory of one who lived through it. Now, is it an actual vision you're talking about? Yes. Yes! Hal had said eagerly. It's all there-so much you can almost touch it, as if it was solid. You could even get up and walk around it and see it from the back! Why can't you try harder and see it? Because I'm not you, Walter had answered.

So, now, under the pressure of his concentration, but for the last time, there seemed to take shape in the air before Hal a reproduction of the core image of the Final Encyclopedia's stored knowledge.

Its shape resembled a very thick section of cable made of red-hot, glowing wires-but a cable in which the strands had loosened, so that now its thickness was double that it might have had originally-it appeared about a meter in cross section and perhaps three meters in length.

In this mass, each individual strand was there to be seen. Not only that; but each strand, if anyone looked closely enough, was visibly and constantly in movement, stretching or turning to touch the strands about it, sometimes only briefly, sometimes apparently welding itself to another strand in what seemed a permanent connection.

Originally it had appeared before him like this thanks to the same technological magic of the Encyclopedia that had seemed to place him in his old home, below. With the broadcast image he had formed this continually updated vision in his room so that he could study it. But over the years, as he had come to learn each strand of it, he had begun to be able to envision it by concentration alone.

He had begun this study after seeing Tam Olyn, then Director of the Encyclopedia, standing in the data control room and examining the same image perpetually broadcast there. For all Hal knew, at the moment that room and image could be next door to him now. There was no permanent location within the Encyclopedia to any of its parts, because it moved them around at the convenience of its occupants.

Tam Olyn had been Director of the Encyclopedia for nearly a hundred years. Before that he had been an interstellar newsman, who had tried for his own personal revenge to turn the hatred of all the occupied worlds upon the peoples of Harmony and Association, the two self-named Friendly Worlds colonized by the Splinter Culture of both true faith-holders and religious fanatics.

Tam had blamed them, then, for the death of his younger sister's husband-to avoid facing his own guilt for that death. When he had failed to make the Friendlies anathema to the rest of the human race, he had at last seen himself for what he had become. Then he had come back here, to the Encyclopedia, at which he had once shown a rare talent. Here, he had risen to the Directorship; and he alone had learned to identify the knowledge behind each apparently glowing strand, merely by gazing at it, without the help of the instruments used by the technicians who were always on duty in the core room.

So it had been Tam's example that fired the imagination of Hal. For a moment even the vision before Hal now dimmed, overlaid in his mind by the gray shadow of the old man. Tam would be sitting alone, now, in those quarters of his; that had been transformed by the Encyclopedia into an illusion of a woodland glade with a stream running through it, its day and night always as the surface of Earth directly below him saw the sun or not.

Tam would be alone now because Ajela, the Assistant Director, had left him to hold the conference. Alone, and waiting for death, as someone weary at the end of too long a day might wait for steep. Waiting, but holding death, like sleep, at bay; because he still hoped for a word from Hal. A word of success Hal had not been able to bring him.

Three years before, Hal had had no doubt he would bring that word, eventually. Now, after those slow years with no progress, the time had come when he must face the fact he never would. He must announce it at the conference of which Ajela had reminded him. He could not be late, after his unusual offer to attend, when for so long he had avoided such administrative discussions between Ajela and Rukh Tamani, the faith-holder and kindler of Old Earth's awakening.

Now, Hal tried once more to concentrate on his vision of the knowledge store. He had gone beyond Tam in the reading of it. Like Tam he could know from a particular part of a glowing wire which specific bit of knowledge it represented. But, more than Tam, he had been able to reach through to 'hat knowledge directly; though he had failed at becoming able to read it.

It would not have been a conscious reading in any case. What the knowledge was, would have simply, suddenly been available there in the back of his memory. A dead and buried bit of memory; but one which, with an effort, he would have been able to bring alive to his conscious mind. It was not that he lacked mental space to hold so much information. He had tried, and found that that same back of the human mind-though not the consciousness up front-could contain all the knowledge the Encyclopedia itself held; which was all the knowledge remembered and known on the world below.

But so far it was still, to him, an untouchable knowledge ' To bring it back to life required its being put to use consciously; and this final step his conscious mind had proved incapable of. The human conscious could only tap stored wisdom along the straight-line, simple route of concrete thought-one piece at a time.

For the last year and a half he had struggled to find ways to put to conscious use the whole of the stored knowledge. But he had found none, and in consequence the doorway to the Creative Universe he believed in had remained closed to him. Yet he knew it was there. All the art and inventions of recorded history attested to that fact; each piece of art and each invention was an existing proof that a purely Creative Universe, where anything was possible, could be reached and used. He had made use of it himself to create poems-good or bad, made no difference, as long as they had had no existence in the known universe until he made them. And they had not. But still they came only from his unconscious.

So, the doorway was there. But he could not enter it. What he wanted was to physically put himself inside it, as he might put himself inside another physical universe. The bitter part was to know it could be entered, but not know how. Since he had been born as Donal Graeme, the Dorsai, he had several times entered it; but always without knowing how he did so. Once, had been his return to consciousness among the historically fixed events of the twenty-first century. In that instance he had made use of a dead man's body to move about, had heard a carved stone lion roar like the living animal; and he had come back from that past time to a moment eighty years later than he had left, physically changed from an adult man to a two-year-old boy.

The doorway had been there for him to pass through then, seemingly simply because he had believed then he could do it. Why could he not find that belief again, now? Unless he could; and unless he could enter it at will, knowing how he had done it, all he had accomplished and experienced in three different personas had been wasted.

He told himself grimly, now, that the goal he had set himself a hundred years in the past as Donal Graeme could only have been a false one. All he had achieved had been to prod the historic forces of humanity into giving birth to the Others, and the eventual certainty of Old Earth's conquest and destruction.

He could not go on this way, possibly only making matters worse. But, even thinking this, he had weakened. Now, even with Ajela and Rukh waiting, he was going to try to find the doorway one more time before giving up forever. He sat, filling his mind with the storehouse of knowledge represented by the image before him, until it was all within him.

He tried, once more, to use it, to enter the place where he could use it.

And . . . Nothing. He sat unchanged, unenlightened. The knowledge lay like a dead thing within him, useless as books forgotten as soon as they had been read, cloaked in an eternal darkness. Hat, said the voice of Ajela, Rukh and I are already here in my office. Are you coming? Coming, he answered; and put the image of the knowledge core, together with all the hopes of his lifetime, away for good.

CHAPTER

Sorry I'm late, Hal said. He came in and sat down in the empty float remaining of the three that were pulled up to Ajela's large desk, now awash with paper. That had never been the case up until the last year. Now, with Tam almost helpless physically -not because his body had been damaged, or lost any of its natural strength, but because the living will in him to move it was fading-Ajela begrudged every moment she could not be by his side. You weren't tempted to change your mind about coming? Ajela asked. Her blue eyes were sharp upon him. No, said Hal.

As usual, the controls of the Final Encyclopedia had aligned his quarters with the corridor that led for a short distance past the Director's office, which Ajeia had used since Tam had quitted it permanently, two years before, naming Hal to succeed him as Director. Hal had had to walk only a few meters to get here. No excuse. No delays. I just forgot the time.

Rukh Tamani, he saw, was also looking at him penetratingly. The two women had been talking as he came in-something about Earth, of which Ajela had, somewhat unwillingly, become, de facto chief executive. This, because simply as a practical matter, with Hal leaving everything to her in order to search for a way into the Creative Universe, she controlled the Final Encyclopedia. More importantly she had defacto control of the Encyclopedia's contract for the services of the Dorsai.

For the Dorsai, when they had come to the defense of Earth at Hal's urging, had been too wise from over two hundred years of experience not to insist that they would refuse to give their lives without the usual contract for their military use.

Knowing history, and the minds of those on worlds that had employed them, they had made their contract with the Encyclopedia; ignoring all the frequently quarreling local governments of Earth, itself. That had meant that, in theory, at least, the defense of Earth took its orders from this desk of Ajela's.

Hal knew, and the two women at the table knew, that the Dorsai would have come to put their lives and skills at the service of the Mother World, in any case. The contract they had signed called for compensation for two million trained men and women, warships and equipment, which represented a fully prepared space force only a full world with the resources of Earth could afford to pay for; and even that, over an extended period of time. But whether the Dorsai would ever actually collect their final pay or not made little difference. They all knew that, barring a miracle, the odds were there would be few of them left to collect when the time came.

Without the breakthrough that Hal had been unable to make, these three now in this room, at least, were aware that the Others, with all the war resources of the Younger Worlds ava' lable, must, in the end, prevail. Driven by the remarkable intelligence and destructive intentions of their leader, Bleys Ahrens, eventually that fleet outside the shield would grow large enough to break through; and, dying in droves if they must, overwhelm the more skillfully crewed, but less numerous, ships that could be put up in opposition by the Dorsai alone.

Thirty-one hundred and sixty-two fighting ships, operated around the clock by a scant two million people divided into four shifts-three of them working and one rotating in reserve at all t1mes-were few enough to patrol the inner surface of a globe lar@eenough to enclose, not only the Earth itself, but the orbit of the Final Encyclopedia. The day had to come when the Younger Worlds' fleet would phase-shift through the shield in incredible numbers; and the end be sealed.

The fact that the Dorsai would be dead before the forces of

THE CHANTRY GUILD

17

the Others owned the skies over a helpless Earth would be little consolation to Earth's people when that day came. To catch you up on what I've just been talking over with Rukh, said Ajela, 11 we've got unexpected good news from below in the shape of the latest statistics.

The concept of good news jarred on Hal in the face of what he knew and had come here to say. But, surprisingly, he saw that Rukh was clearly in agreement with Ajela's assessment. Both women were looking at him with what seemed to be lifted spirits-and the difference was particularly noticeable on Rukh's part. She had been pushing her frail physical strength to the limit by adding much of Ajela's office work to her already excessive speaking engagements down on the surface, so as to free the other woman, Ajela, to have as much time as possible with Tam in his last days.

The least Hal could do for them, he told himself now, was to listen first to what they had to tell him before delivering the bad news of his own hard decision. Tell me, he said.

Ajela picked up a paper from the desk before her. These are statistics from Earth as a whole, compiled from all the areas, she said; and began to read: '. . food production as a whole up eight per cent-' (in spite of all those wild complaints we've had that the phase-shield cuts down on needed sunlight over growing areas-) 'metals production up eleven per cent. Metals directly required in spaceship production up eighteen per cent. Production of warships, fullyfitted, armed, and test-flown, now up to an average of one every three and a half days. Enlistment in the training camps for spaceship crews by Earth-born applicants, up'-listen to this, Hal-'sixty-three per cent! Graduation of fully trained but inexperienced crew people up eleven per cent ' ' *'

She continued to read. Rukh was also watching her now, Hal saw. He sat listening to Ajela and watching them both. Rukh's dark-olive face seemed to glow with an invisible but palpable inner light from under her black crown of neat, short hair.

That light had always been there, since he had met her in the camp of the guerrillas she had led on Harmony. But it seemed to stand out more now, because she had never really recovered Physically from her weeks of torture at the hands of Amyth Barbage-then an officer of the Harmony Militia, and now, ironically, her most dedicated disciple and protector.

It was an index of the power of her faith that, simply by being what she was, she had been able to turn that lean and fearless fanatic from what he had been to what he was now. Strangely, also, her unbelievable beauty had been heightened rather than lessened by that ordeal in the prison. She seemed in some ways to Hal-and he knew that those who flocked in their thousands to hear her felt it even more strongly-more spirit than flesh.

Underneath the wine-colored shift she wore, with its long sleeves and collarless neck, Hal knew she now weighed only slightly more than ten pounds over the weight she had been reduced to when he had carried her, more dead than alive, out of the Militia prison on Harmony. The skin was still stretched taut over her meager flesh and bones. And at that moment there was a glint from the narrow column of her neck, as the highly polished lines of a cross incised in a gray-white disk of Harmony granite, hung from a steel chain-the only thing resembling an ornament he had ever seen her wear-caught the overhead lighting of the room. It flashed momentarily with a light not unlike the light behind her dark eyes.

There were no circles under those eyes, no tightening of the skin over her cheekbones-if that were possible-to show the exhaustion that must be within her. But Hal knew she was tired, self-driven to the point of near-collapse; for she would not refuse the hosts of people down on all parts of the Earth who begged to see her in person. And she would not step back from the work she had taken to herself up here, too.

Nor could he blame Ajela for allowing her to take over the work at this desk. Ajela had not asked to be the ultimate authority over a clamoring, bickering Old Earth that was only now beginning to wake from its illusions. At last, now that it was possibly too late, Earth was beginning to realize that, if not for those who had come to its aid unasked, it would have been as vulnerable-or more-than any other of the human-inhabited planets.

Like Rukh, Ajela showed no obvious physical signs of the strain she was under; but the responsibility of her position, plus the gradual, inevitable slide toward death of the old man she loved more than anyone else on all the inhabited worlds, was gradually conquering her. In short, both of the people on which the Encyclopedia depended for control, were closer to reaching their limit, in Hal's opinion, than they realized-or were ready to admit.

It showed particularly in Ajela's case, in these last few months, that what she chose to wear had been different from the commonsensical clothes she had always worn and programmed the Final Encyclopedia to have ready for her at the beginning of each workday. Strangely, for someone Exotic-born, these last few months she had begun to dress flamboyantly-sexily, to be blunt about it-although Tam was almost the only person who saw her much. . . .

His thoughts were wandering. He tried to pull them back to the statistics she was reciting, but they insisted on straying again . . . certainly, as she was costumed now, no one could appear in greater contrast to Rukh than Ajela, unless it might be Amanda. Hal hastily thrust the thought of Amanda from his mind.

Ajela still looked almost as young as the day he had first met her here in the Encyclopedia, when he had been running from the killing of his tutors, on his estate, eleven years ago. Her skin was still as fair; and her hair around her bright face as literally golden and long-in fact, perhaps lately she had worn it even longer. She wore a brown brocade tunic over silky gold blouse and pantaloons that all but hid the cinnamon -colored slippers on her feet. There was no necklace around her neck, but earrings of a honey-colored amber; and on the middle finger of her right hand shone a ring with a large, irregular chunk of the same color of amber, containing tiny seeds encased there, looking alive and ready to sprout, even after the hundreds of years since the amber had been gathered.

Her face was round, her skin fresh. But in her he thought he saw the tightness around the eyes that was not visible in Rukh. No single sign, but her whole self, to him who knew her so well, betrayed an inward-held but growing desperation; growing, he knew, from her inability to keep Tam from death.

She had come originally to the Encyclopedia from Mara, one of the two Exotic worlds, where part of the philosophy had been the hope that an evolved human race would outgrow any need of death except by choice. Thoughts of those same two Exotic worlds brought Kultis and Amanda to his mind again . . . almost savagely, he pushed her out of his thoughts.

-Ajela had come here as a young girl of twelve, with her parents' permission; in love with the idea of the Encyclopedia. which Exotic funds had largely financed. She had stayed to rise to the position of Assistant Director, under Tam Olyn; and to also fall in love with Tam, himself, although already by that time he was old enough to be her great-grandfather.

Now she and Rukh sat together at this desk with its load of paper piled over all its surface except the small rectangles of the viewing screens inset there before each of the three of them. All these screens right now showed a view of space directly above and about the Encyclopedia.

The white opacity of the shield wall was directly overheadand it thinned off in every direction, as the screens' angle o@ vision began to slant, revealing both the inner and outer walls of the shield, until finally there were only the lights of the stars against the black of airless space. The sun, Hal thought inconsequentially, must be directly overhead, to be hidden by the greatest thickness of the mist-wall. It could not be they were nightside now, for it had been afternoon at the estate, almost directly below them-

He woke suddenly to the fact that Ajela had stopped talking and both Rukh and Ajela were looking at him. Like an echo half heard lingering on his ear, he realized that Ajela had laid down her paper and asked him something. I'm sorry, he said, and his voice came out more harshly than he had intended, under the gaze of those waiting eyes, I didn't catch the question.

The faint indentation of a frown line, if that was what it was and not an expression of puzzlement, appeared between Ajela's hazel eyes, followed immediately by an expression of concern. Hal, she said, tell me-do you feel all right?

Concern was showing on Rukh's face as well. Their reactions doubled the sense of guilt in him. I'm fine, he said. I just wasn't listening as I should hale-that's all. What was it you asked me, just now? I said, said Ajela, that we'd thought of checking with one of the Dorsai Sector Commanders. But since you said you were coming today, we thought we'd rather ask the question in-house. You just heard that remarkable list of how the Earth is finally realizing it has to help defend itself, and beginning to build some muscle. Do you think there's a chance, now, if we

keep on improving this way, building ships and training crews for them, that we can put up a fleet as big as anything the Younger Worlds can throw at us? And, if so, how long would it take? Can we match them before they're ready to try a mass breakthrough of the shield? I can only guess, he said.

Ajela looked disappointed. Not so much, Rukh. We thought . . ., Ajela said, because you told us how you were really Donal Graeme to begin with . . . I'm sorry, Hal shook his head. You two are the only people outside of Amanda who know about my past and my being first Donal, in the last century, then Paul Formain, two hundred years before that. But now Donal's only an old part of me and deeply buried. Much of what he was I've worked to get away from. But even Donal could only have guessed. What would he have guessed, then? asked Rukh.

Her voice came at him so unexpectedly, for some reason, that Hal almost started. He looked at her. He'd guess-pretty strongly I'm afraid, he answered slowly, --that it wouldn't matter what the answer to your questions would be, because it wouldn't make any difference, even if you were able to match the Younger Worlds' ship power. I I

He hesitated. It was hard to dash their hopes this way, too, when he had come to dash them as well in another. :'Go on, said Ajela. 'It wouldn't matter, Hal said, because Bleys Ahrens doesn't want victory. He wants destruction. He's as determined to destroy the Younger Worlds as he is to reduce Earth's population to just those who'll follow him. In the case of the Younger Worlds, he plans to depopulate and impoverish themso humanity will eventually die off there. Or be reduced at Iasi to a handful of people who, lacking communication with other civilized worlds, will degenerate into savagery and eventually die. Die, because they'll be moving backwards from, not forward toward ,civilization. At the same time he and his mere handful of Others can move in and take control of a depopulated Earth.- He's said that, I know, said Ajela, but he's not insane. He can't really mean- He does, said Hal. He means exactly what he says.

That's why he doesn't care how he bleeds the Younger Worlds to conquer Earth. All that matters is the conquest. So he'll throw his ships through the shield at you eventually; no matter what defensive position you're in. I think you'll find your Dorsai knew this and faced it from the start. Thou art saying, said Rukh-and her rare use of the canting speech of her religious sect was evidence enough that she was deeply moved, --that there's no way Earth can win.

Hal took a deep breath. That's right. There isn't, in any ordinary way. I can never accept that, said Rukh-and with her words Hal again remembered her as he had first seen her, on Harmony, in all the physical strength and purpose of her earlier years. The power pistol she had worn strapped to her hip, then, had not been as strong as the sense of will and purpose that drew followers to her. For Bleys to win he must extinguish God; and that he or no one else can ever do. Think, Hal, said Ajela. Earth's got as great a population still as all the Younger Worlds combined. It still has as massive resources of metal and other materials as all the Younger Worlds, combined. If we can match their strength, or even come close to it, why can't we fight them off even if they jump through in mass attack? Because it'll be a suicide attack, said Hal. That's the measure of Bleys' control over the crews of the ships he'll be sending in. Each one will be a weapon of destruction, aimed at any target it can reach. The greatest number of them will only take out one of our ships. But some are going to reach the surface of the Earth. Only a few, maybe, but enough to kill off billions of Earth's people in the phase-explosions of their impacts.

Rukh was looking hard at him. Hal, she said, you're talking very strangely. You're not telling us to give up? No, he said. That is, not you. But I'm afraid I came here today-I've got something rather hard to tell you both. What? said Ajela. The single word came at him like a command. I'm trying to say he began.

The words sounded suddenly clumsy in his mouth, and he felt heavily the effort of continuing. . . . that maybe it's out of our hands to a certain extent. The phase-shield, the Dorsai coming, the contributions of wealth and knowledge from the Exotics, all the true faith-holders from Rukh's two worlds-in the end they all came here only to buy time while I found an answer to Bleys' plan. They were both staring at him. He went on. That's been the only possible plan, ever since, as Donal, I found out that in welding the Younger Worlds into a political unit-and playing with the laws of history, as Paul Formain -I'd produced an unexpected side effect-the emergence of the Others, the most able of the crossbreeds between the Splinter Cultures.

He looked at them. He had expected some response-at least a protest that it had not been him alone that they had all been depending upon. But neither of the other two said anything; only sat, watching and listening. A group like the Others, he said, has always been outside our control. Something neither the commercial skill of the Exotics, the Faith of the Friendlies, nor the fighting abilities of the Dorsai were equipped to stop. Because the Others attack the instinct of the human race to grow and progress in a new way. A way no one had foreseen. He stopped, but neither of them said anything. He went on. We dreamed of superpeople and, God help us, we got them, he said, only too soon and with a few things like empathy and a sense of responsibility to the race, missing. But they've been unstoppable from the first because their powers are powers of persuasion, which work on a majority of humanity. You know all this! Otherwise, why would the only immune ones be the true Exotics, the true faith-holders among the Friendlies, the Dorsai, and that majority of full-spectrum humans on Earth who've got that in-born cantankerous individualism that's always rejected any persuasion?

He paused a moment, then went on. So it's been necessary from the first that a new answer be found for this new threat. And it's been up to me to find it. I thought I could lay the devils I'd raised. Well, I was wrong. That's what I've come here to tell YOU today. I've faced it now. I've failed.

There was a moment's utter silence. Ajela was the first to react.

You! said Ajela. You, of all people, Hal-you're not going to sit there and tell us there's no such answer! And if you tell us so, said Rukh, I will not believe thee; for it cannot be.

She spoke in a voice that was completely serene. As serene as a mountain, barring a pathway.

CHAPTER

4

Hal gazed at Rukh, almost helplessly. No, he said. No, of course not. It's not that the Others can't be stopped; it's just that I can't stop them, in the way I hoped to. The rest of you haven't failed. I've failed. Thou art alive, said Rukh. The mountain was as impenetrable as collapsed metal. Thou canst not therefore use the word failed-yet. I could go on trying indefinitely, said Hal, but it'll be best for everyone under the phase-shield if we face facts and I Stop trying. Now. But wh 'y should you stop? said Ajela. Because for a year now, I've tried to take the final step, and I can't do it. Ajela, you understand how the memory of the Final Encyclopedia works. But Rukh-'* He turned to the other woman. --how much do you understand'? Call it nothing, said Rukh, calmly. Some scraps of understanding I've picked up in my time here. But essentially I know nothing. Well, I want you to understand as well as Ajela, Hal said, because it's not easy to explain. Rukh, briefly, the Encyclopedia's memory is, for all practical purposes, bottomless. It already holds all the available knowledge of the human race. Theoretically, it could hold no one knows how many times that much more, added to what's there already. You see, like the phase-shift we use to travel between the stars in our ships, and the phase-shield that protects Earth, now-to say nothing of the earlier one that's guarded this Encyclopedia for twenty years-it's a product of phase mechanics. I know nothing of phase mechanics, Rukh said. No one else fully understands it, not even our own Jeamus Walters, here, said Hal. You know him? The Head of Technical Research at the Encyclopedia, answered Rukh. And you've seen the representation of that stored knowledge in the Operations Section down below us? Hal said. I've seen it, yes, said Rukh, like a mass of iron wires red hot. And the people working with it made some attempt to explain it to me; but I still understood almost nothing. Basically, said Hal, what it represents isn't the knowledge itself, but the so-called 'tags' that identify each piece of information stored in the Encyclopedia. The information itsell can be as extensive as a book-set of encyclopedias, or larger; but the tags are each represented by only a tiny section of the knowledge-chains that look like wires in the display. Yes, said Rukh, Irememberthem telling methatmuchat least. And you know Tam was unusual in that, by just looking at the image, he could to a certain extent read it? Yes. Rukh frowned. Wasn't there something about his finding evidence that at least two of the visiting scholars from Earth had been spies for Bleys? Back at a time when the Encyclopedia was always open to qualified scholars from all the Worlds?

Hal nodded. That's right, he said. But you have to understand something, The addition of any new information always causes a slight movement in one of the chains--the apparent wires. There were tiny differences of position that gave away to Tam that the knowledge store had been systematically searched across wide fields of knowledge, in a way no one scholar would have needed to do. But if you'd been there and asked him, he wouldn't have been able to tell you what the knowledge was they'd examined. He could read the display, but not what it represented, not the actual information itself, and in spite of three years of trying, neither can I.-

He stared hard at her. Do you follow me? The difference is the way it would be between having an encyclopedia in a set of books but with each book locked closed, so that you couldn't get at the information in it. Ah, said Rukh. She looked back at him appraisingly. So Tam could see, but not read? And you-? I was only able to go a little further, said Hal. I spent two years at it; and I got to the point where I could hold the whole display in my mind, as I had last looked at it. But the information's still locked away from me, too. Now I don't follow you, saidAjela, leaning forward across the table toward him. Why do you need to do more than that? Or even that much?

He turned to her. Because two things are needed to create anything-say, a great painting. The concept, which is the art of it, and the skill with colors and brush that's the craft behind its making. To have a great dream is one thing. To execute it in real elements calls for a skill with all the elements involved; and that requires knowledge.

Ajela was frowning, he thought doubtfully. Look, he said, you could tell yourself 'I'd like a castle.' But to create that castle in the real universe, you'd have to know many things; the architecture of its structure, all the crafts of building with different materials, even knowledge about the ground that would have to support its weight. To physically enter a creative universe you have to first create at least some kind of Physical place to support your presence there. To do that, you need to know everything about the surface below your feet, the atmosphere around and above you, what kind of sun you want in the sky overhead . . . and a long, long list of other things. I see, then,- said Rukh. So that was why you wanted to be able to read from the knowledge of the core image directly? I'd have to be able to, said Hal. It's impossible otherwise. In effect, Ajela said, her voice sharper than usual, you were hoping to enter the Creative Universe and use there any or all of the information stored in the Final Encyclopedia-by ma ing some use of phase mechanics, using your mind, alone?

Hal nodded, slowly. Very well. I now understand the size of the problem. But why give up now? demanded Rukh. Why, at this particular point? Because I believe the sooner I'm gone, the sooner my quitting is likely to improve the odds for all the rest of you. What makes you say that? Ajela's voice was even more sharp.

He was a little slow answering. He had been carried away by the unusual emotion behind his own last few words. I'm hoping that with me gone, the pressure I've exerted, balancing the pressure of Bleys in the historical forces, will be removed; and the sudden vacuum will cause the forces to react against his side of the argument, rather than ours. It might even . . . be the cause of our winning, after all, by some different route. What would you do, then? Rukh's voice was abruptly soft.

Hal smiled grimly. Take a new name for the last time, perhaps, he said. Go down to the surface and enlist with the real Earth-borns who'rc signing up for training by the Dorsai. Anything, so that as a major force I'd be permanently out of the picture. I could probably be useful on one of those new warships they're turning

Z_ out so fast. Thou wouldst go looking for death, said Rukh, which is a sin in the Name of God. And how would doing anything like that be best for the rest of us? I think it might rectify a mistake I made, attempting to influence the historic forces, Hal answered. That's no answer, said Ajela with an absolutely nonExotic near-approach to exasperation. It was, thought Hal 'a sign of the exhaustion in her finally beginning to wear her to the quick. To make an excuse out of something the workings of which apparently only you fully understand! I've never claimed I fully understand the historic forces, Hal said. I doubt if anyone in the human race will, for generations yet. There're simply too many factors operating in every case. But I thought you, at least, did-enough to understand why I'm doing this, Ajela. I thought I did too, she replied, but evidently I don't. You've talked about it many times, and explained it I don’t know how often. Let me see what I remember. You've said something to the effect of-'the course of history is determined by the cumulative effect of all the decisions resulting in physical acts of the people alive in the race at any given time. It used to be thought that only a few people made decisions. We now realize that these people are influenced by the people around them, and those people by more people around them, until in effect every person may have had an influence on decisions made, and therefore on the course of history. Thefarther back in history we go, the slower the influence of the mass of the people concerned, on any decision point. ' That last bit's the crucial one, said Hal. In earlier centuries it often took a very long time for mass decision to shape history; though it always did, in the end. The difference between then and now is communications. Present communications make it possible for the effect of mass attitudes and actions to have an effect almost immediately within the chain of human interaction. The minute I leave here permanently and this becomes known to the worlds in general, attitudes will change throughout the race and the effect of those changes be noticed very quickly. As I say, my going will leave a vacuum opposing Bleys; and the instinctive inertia of the historic forces should cause the racial momentum to react against him and for us. How? said Ajela. You know what I've been after from my beginning as Donal, said Hal. I've been trying to push humanity toward a greater instinctive sense of responsibility. Apparently this last effort, trying to access the Creative Universe, was too much force in one direction. The historic forces pushed back by Producing something new, that none of the present human social groups could fight against. The Others, with their ability to influence any political structure from behind the scenes. They Push away from responsibility, toward instinctive obedience.

He stopped, unsure about whether he had made sense to them Or not. And? said Rukh. And so you've got the present situation, with Bleys heading up the other faction, and me, until now, heading up ours.

I'll in still waiting to hear, said Ajela-but she said it patiently' this time--what this has to do with your giving up and going off, as Rukh said, to look for death.

It removes me as the spearhead on our side, said K.%@. That gives Bleys and the Others too much of an advantage That means, as I said a few moments ago, he'll be the one wh(-, pushing against the balance of forces; and they'll react agair,t him. What'll happen? said Ajela. I don't know, said Hal. If you start to estimate sonic thing like that, you have to begin by estimating the influence of my leaving on people, like you, immediately around me. Then you have to figure in the impact of your reactions on the larger group of humans around you, and then on those around theiii. and so on and on-until you're into backlash reactions; and in the end you have to take everyone in the human race into account. Have you forgotten Tam? interrupted Rukh. All these years he's been like Simeon, in the Gospel according to Luke, in the Book of God. You know the story of Simeon? Yes, said Hal, both his memory and his work with the core of the Encyclopedia bringing the passage back to his mind. I don't! said Ajela. Tell me.

Rukh turned toward her, but Hal knew that her words were still aimed at him. '. . . And behold,' '' said Rukh, as steadily as if she were reading from pages open before her, 'there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel; and the Hol1v Ghost was upon him. 'And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost that lie should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. 'And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to dofor him after the custoin of the law, 'Then he took him up in his arms, and blessed God and said, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace accordt.ng to thy word, , , 'For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.'

Rukh paused, and Ajela turned her gaze unwaveringly back to Hal. If you give up now, Hal, said Rukh, what about Tarn. whose whole life has been waiting for you to fulfill the promise he found in you?

Hal felt the pain of her words as if it was a physical thing inside him. I know what it'll do toTam, he said harshly. But the race has to come first; and the only hope for the race I can see now is for me to step out of the equation. I've got to go; leaving the natural actions of the historic forces to guide us to what I couldn't reach by myself. Those forces have kept the race moving forward and upward from the beginning. It was my own good opinion of myself that led me to think I was necessary to moving it where it needed to go. But what about him, when he learns you've quit? said Ajela fiercely. What about him, I say? Let him . . . The words were painful to Hal, but he had to say them. Let him go on thinking I'm still trying . . . to the end. It's the kindest thing; and there's no choice about my going. I have to keep repeating-un less I actually remove myself, the pressure on the historic forces won't change. Rukh-

He turned to her. You understand now, don't you? he said. All that can be done is let me go; and hope . . .

But, surprisingly, Rukh was no longer listening to him. Instead, she was looking down at the screen inset in the desk-top before her. There's someone outside-a very small ship dodging around outside the shield, trying to get inside right now, she said to Ajela, as if Hal was not only not speaking, but no longer there. There is? said Ajela.

She looked down at the screen before her and her fingers began to fly on the control pad beside it, tapping out commands. We've talked before, you'll remember, said Hal, hoping that if he spoke on quietly, they would give up whatever had fascinated them on the screens and return to the important matter at hand, about how the human race is, in some ways, like a single composite organism-a body made up of a number of separate and individual parts, the same way a hive of bees or an ant colony can be considered a single individual-

But they were not listening. Looking into his own screens, Hal saw the focus there was now all on the movements of the small ship Rukh had mentioned. At Aiela's tvved commands the screens were using the capabilities of the Encyclopedia to cancel out the visual blocking of a direct sight at the phaseshield, so that the ship outside it they watched was clearly visible, dodging among the enemy vessels.

Puzzled, Hal watched it, also. Its driver-no one who was familiar with spaceships used the ancient word pilot anymore -was phase-shifting in small jumps. His or her craft, a midge among the warships on patrol out there, was obviously trying to keep the gathering enemy from getting into formation around it. Meanwhile, it was jockeying for a position where it might be able to jump through the screen.

Just at that moment, in fact, it achieved the position it wanted, and jumped through. It was instantly englobed by two wings of defensive ships, driven by Dorsai commanders much more capable than those in the enemy ships outside-besides having had the advantage of being able to lie in wait for the small craft.

The enemy warships did not attempt to shift through in pursuit. They probably, thought Hal, had orders not to in any case@ but if they had they would have been easily destroyed by the better Dorsai-built craft and their more capable crews. The incoming vessel lay still in the midst of the defending vessels, making no effort to escape.

There was a chime on the air of the office. Forgive this interruption, Ajela, said a masculine voice. I know you're not to be disturbed during conferences; but this is a ship asking to be allowed into the Encyclopedia, and you left orders- It's small enough to get into one of the locks? Ajela cut in. Yes, said the voice.

The vessel entrances of the Encyclopedia, Hal knew, had been designed for the shuttles that carried people up from the surface of the Earth and back down again, or out to other ships. By ordinary warship standards the lock dimensions were impossibly small. For any regular space warship, it would have been like a bear trying to get into a badger hole. Good. Permission to come in granted. Almost in the same breath she went on. Hal, she said.

He raised his head at the sound of his name. Hal, I want you to put this decision about giving up on hold, for a few days at least. This ship coining in is one I've been expecting. It just may have some information that could change the way you think. If you don't mind, I want to talk to the driver alone. So would you mind leaving the office, now? Rukh, wait for a minute, will you? There's something more I want to say to you.

Hal looked back, surprised. Ajela had not merely asked if he would wait a few days before making his decision-a decision he had believed he had already made-she had, in effect, ordered him to wait. Not only was that unExotic, it was totally unlike her; and to top it off, she had no authority to order him to do, or not do, anything. Technically, she was his assistant. Though in justice he knew how little he had actually run the Encyclopedia; and how fully she had.

She could probably force him to stay, for a while, at least, by refusing him transportation to the surface; but the thought of the situation coming to that pass was ridiculous.

However, of course he would wait; for as long as she wanted. Or rather, for any reasonable length of time. Anything else was unthinkhble. But the way she had put it was strange. It had to be her exhaustion talking. As, come to think of it, was her excluding him from whatever business she had with the driver of this incoming ship. The driver was almost certainly one of those who had volunteered to go out as a spy on to one of the Younger Worlds; so that Earth would have some idea of how matters stood out there. Though how apything so learned could affect his present decision to leave . . . however, there was no point in worrying about it now. Of course, he said.

Getting up, he went out of the office, back toward his own quarters. There was, in fact, one more thing he was going to do in any case; though there was no telling if it would do any good. That was to write down and make sure it was stored in the Encyclopedia itself, all he knew or had learned, surmised or come to believe, about the Creative Universe and the possible ways into it.

He would include an account of the ways he himself had tried and failed. It might save whoever took up the work someday Some time that otherwise might be wasted in duplicating efforts that had proved useless.

Behind him, neither Ajela nor Rukh even looked up from their screens as the door closed.

CHAPTER

5

Amanda had made it to the system of Earth's Sun in five phase-shifts, where any non-Dorsai would have taken ten and she herself would have broken it into at least seven, under more leisurely conditions. The last shift brought her back into specific location deep enough in the gravitic shadow of Jupiter to hide her vessel from the instruments of the ships besieging Earth. From there, she paused to examine the situation.

There were more enemy craft on patrol about the whitely gleaming sphere of the phase-shield than there had been when she had last had a report on the situation of the Home World.

It was to be expected. But Amanda chilled as she watched. It was that strange part of her which occasionally saw, or felt-neither word was quite right-what would or might be. In this case, it was the sight of the ever-growing military power of ten worlds massing for invasion about the single planet that was their Mother World, Old Earth; and she envisioned what was coming not as clear pictures in her mind, but as massive shapes half seen, moving in a clammy mist which obscured all things.

In this instance, what she sensed was something like a huge tidal wave, growing, growing, ready to smash down on sleepy small homes and other buildings, which would be wiped clean from the surface of the land, as if a giant's hand had passed. And it would come, as soon as the wave was large enough, ordered to its hammer-strike by that small but all-powerful

group of highly intelligent but self-indulgent men and women who, under Bleys Ahrens, controlled all the Younger Worlds.

But there was some little time before that, yet. For now, the enemy ships blocked entrance by any others to the sphere whose surface they dared not touch; and their coverage was good. She studied them in her viewer screen. They were divided into Wings of six ships each, and each Wing patrolled a curved, rectangular sector of the globe that was the phase-shield.

Theoretically, that gave them complete coverage. But Amanda noticed that they cut inside the comers of their rectangles when a Wing's patrol route took them past one. There was a way of making a sharp corner with a spaceship in such a situation, but it required a minuscule space shift each time.

It was not that there was any difficulty involved in calculating or making such a tiny shift. But each time, the ship making it took a one in a million chance of being lost in mid-shift. Phase-shift technology was based on the Uncertainty Principle of Werner Karl Heisenberg, which said essentially that either the position or velocity of a particle could be known at any time, but not both.

The early twenty-first century, becoming informed on antimatter and a number of such things that had only been speculated about earlier, discovered that a particle's change of Position involved it passing through a phase of positionlessness -in theory, it was spread over the whole universe for a moment of no-time, before it came into being again at its specific new Position.

From this understanding had developed a way around the limits of the speed of light, which until then had seemed to make travel between stars so slow as to be almost impractical. Humanity had once more gone around a problem, instead of through it. Spaceships did not actually move by phase-shifting. Rather, they simply abandoned one defined position, became undefined, and then redefined at a new position.

The only drawback was that once in a countless number of such movements, they failed for some reason to redefine at their destination; and stayed instead, undefined. In effect, they had been disintegrated.

SO, said the history books, Donal Graeme had met his end. Attempting to move in any way except by phase-shift through a phase-shield made such a result certain. Otherwise the odds of reaching the desired destination were very good-but not perfect.

Once in a million times was not bad odds; but to risk them a large number of times a day, every day, was enough to make more than a few spaceship commanders and crew uneasy. There was, consequently, sometimes a reluctance to move closely into the comer of a patrolled rectangle and have to make that extra shift.

The patrols could of course have covered those corners or normal drive. But, at the velocities with which they must move to patrol their area, an abrupt, large change of direction would make jelly of anything as insubstantial as human bodies inside the turning ship. It was better to curve a little inside the comer,

Accordingly, the corners of the rectangles Amanda studied were weak areas. She sat at her calculations for a while, then put her craft into the series of shifts she had precalculated*

Her first shift was to a space just a thousand kilometers outside the shield above the south polar regions of Earth. This was far enough so uncertainty of the besieging ships as to exactly where she would be after her next shift would lessen her vulnerability. She quickly followed this shift, accordingly, with another precalculated shift to above the north polar regions.

She paused there for the seconds required to choose which, of several destinations she had picked as possible for her next move. She chose, reappearing suddenly above the Equator in an unprotected corner area, keyed in her precalculated shift through the phase-shield and appeared just inside the open corner.

As soon as she was inside, she brought her ship to a halt, and dropped its defenses. It was well she was as swift as she was in doing it; for eight great, slim shapes of the battle cruisers which made up a Dorsai fighting Wing were suddenly completely surrounding her.

Her ship-to-ship talk light was already blinking on the panel before her. She thumbed the stud that opened it from her end. and the tank of her vision screen came alight with the face ofa Dorsai she did not know, a woman verging on middle age with an oriental face and high-arched eyebrows. Amanda Morgan, said the other. We were told to expect you. Hold still for a retina check . . . Good. You can proceed,

I'm Li Danzhun. You've never met me, but I know you from pictures and your reputation. I'm honored you'd recognize me from that little after these years here, said Amanda.

Li Danzhun smiled at her. It may be none of us will ever see our homes again, she said, but we're still Dorsai. And you're still one of the Grey Captains. Nonetheless, said Amanda, thank you. Now I'm honored-- The other glanced off-screen for a second. We just got the release signal from Escort Leader. Go with all luck, Amanda Morgan. And you, said Amanda.

As suddenly as they had surrounded her, the cruisers were gone. She turned and drove northeasterly across the skies of the Home World until a mist-enshrouded sphere, looking like a miniature of the phase-shielded Earth, as seen from space, appeared on her screen, seeming to grow as she approached it. She was close now, and the mist was evaporating over a metallic port which itself was dilating to let her ship inside.

Her vessel was tiny by the standards of interstellar craft, but not so by the standards of the opening before her. Even for her small ship there was little room to spare at the entrance. Her ship could be brought in, but even with all her ship-handling experience it was going to be a tight fit.

But she made it. The vessel settled with a clang into its landing cradle. Amanda sat back in her control chair, relaxing for the first time in some days. A voice spoke on the interior atmosphere of the vessel. This is Ajela, it said. Come as soon as you can. Just follow the corridor beyond the door to the interior of the Encyclopedia. It's being aligned with my office right now and You'll find the entrance at its end will let you directly in here. Just walk in. Rukh's with me. We're alone.

Amanda nodded to herself. She had already changed clothes before shifting close to the star that lighted Old Earth, wearing the bush jacket and skirt she thought of as her shore-going wardrobe. She got to her feet, opened the ship's lock and stepped out into the clangor and bright lights of the port chamber. The ramp that led to the interior of the Final Encyclopedia was almost beside her ship, She had never been here before, but as an educated person she knew about the Encyclopedia's design and peculiarities.

The ramp led into a suddenly quiet, narrow, blue-carpeted corridor that looked exceedingly short-but, she had learned, distances would be not only variable but sometimes illusory within the Final Encyclopedia. There was a door at the far end, some twenty meters from her. She went to it, opened it without bothering to give her name to the annunciator above it, and stepped inside. Hello, she said, smiling at the two women sitting at the desk at the far end of the room. It's about time we met. I'm Amanda Morgan.

Take a float at the desk, here, Ajela answered, looking at the tall, remarkably young-looking woman, whose hair was so light blond it was almost white. There's one waiting for you.

As Amanda came from the door, which had provided some measure of her size, her height became less apparent. The length of her arms, legs and body, and her breadth of shoulder, so well matched her size that only by some kind of contrast was it noticeable. She was, thought Ajela, like Hal in that. You did not realize how large he was, either, until someone you knew to be of ordinary size stood close to him. She was wearing serviceable, neutral-colored clothing that somehow did nothing to detract from her presence,

What Ajela found herself noticing in particular was the lightness with which Amanda moved. She had the body balance of a dancer; and that trait was curiously in harmony with the otherwise difficult to believe youthfulness she seemed to project. She could pass, thought Ajela, for a girl in her teens-and yet Ajela knew her to be certainly older than Hal; and possibly older as well than either Rukh or herself-not that either she or Rukh were out of their twenties.

The appearance of youth in the newcomer was so unbelievable it could be appreciated only when you were actually looking at her. After she had gone, memory would be doubted. That, taken together with the classical quality of her from beauty-even her shoulder-length fair hair and theaptaurrtquoise eyes somehow fitted-seemed to set her a little veryone else. And yet, even the sum of all the e i erent elements failed to explain the strongest effect she ma on a viewer. There was a power in her.

It was a quality which words failed as memory would. But it was like something Ajela had never felt before in anyone, It was curiously comparable to, though not the same as she fel t there to be in Hal when close to him. In his actual presence she had always been able to feel a concern in him for those around him that was like the warmth radiated by a lighted fireplace.

With Amanda it was something different. The closest Ajela could come to expressing it, was that in the other woman there was something which strongly reminded Ajela of the strength and clean white lines of an Ionic pillar, in a temple of classical Greece.

To Amanda, on the other hand, as she approached the desk, Rukh and Ajela were both much as she had pictured them from Hal's descriptions. She had wanted to see them for herself, for a long time. Not only because of what they were, but obviously because of what they each in their separate ways meant to Hal; and because it was also obvious that Hal's affection for each was deep and strong-running.

It was not that she feared competition for his love of her. She was the Third Amanda in eight generations of Morgans ;and she had been hand-picked by the Second Amanda as a baby, in the other's old age, Hand-picked, and with her natural abilities trained until she was set apart from the mass of people around her, like a queen.

In this there was more to it than the fact there had been only three Amandas in eight generations of the Morgans of Foralie, on the Dorsai. In a very real sense, there had only been three Amandas since the human race began; and it had fallen to her to be the last and strongest'With or without Hal, she would be that. But she loved him.

However, now that she saw them in person, she knew that she would like them; and they would end up liking her-though Ajela would be the slower of the two to come to it. They were both strong women; and life had also made each of them the equivalent of royalty, in her own right. Moreover, Ajela had now had experience in the possession and exercise of great authoritv.

She was dressed in what seemed more like leisure than working clothes. She wore a sleeveless tunic of medium brown, ornamented with gold brocade over a blouse of filmier material with balloon-shaped sleeves, above darker brown pantaloons. Amber bracelets were on her wrists and amber earrings in her ear. Still, the way she sat and the level gaze of her hazel eyes made these garments and even her jewelry seem to fit her like a uniform of authority. @ Rukh, on the other hand, had been born, as Amanda knew, with unusual strength of spirit in her, but plainly counted it as nothing in her own scale of values. Far outranking any personal power of her own, the quality that was in her of what she called Faith shone through the dark lantern of her body, even through the long, high-collared, wine-red dress she was now wearing, like the light of a candle through the horn windows of some ancient lantern, illuminating everyone around her. Also, Rukh was older than Ajela in her experience of life and death; and, like Amanda, had been a warrior. In fact she was still a warrior, for all that she lived and preached peace. She always would be. In that one element, if in no other, it was immediately recognizable to both of them as their eyes met, that they were alike. I came right away, as soon as the message reached me, said Amanda, taking the empty float. She looked at the others sympathetically. It would not have been easy for either of these to admit to themselves that they were helpless; and that she might do what they could not. Faster than we expected, said Rukh. We didn't dare say so in the message, but it's Hal, of course. We knew you'd read that between the lines and come quickly.

Amanda smiled. It was clear enough, what you wanted to tell me, she said. You'd know it would take something like that to bring me back like this. What is it with Hal? He's a case of burn-out, said Ajela bluntly.

She checked herself, rubbing her fingers for a second over her eyes. Would you explain to her, Rukh? With Tam and all . . . I think you'll do a better job of it than I can, right now. He wants to go looking for death, said Rukh, or tells himself that's what he wants, because, you know as well as I, it's not in him to do that. He's just told us he wants to give up his search for the answer we all need, the search he's been on all his life. What brought him to this? said Amanda. Frustration- Ajela broke off. Sorry, Rukh. I asked you to tell it. Go ahead. But you Ire right, said Rukh. She turned her gaze back to Amanda. Ever since he got the necessary people back here on Old Earth and the phase-shield up, he's been expecting at any moment to find the last step to the Creative Universe he's dreamed of reaching for so long. He's been working at it without a break, all that time. In the process, he's found a way to make all the knowledge of the Final Encyclopedia available to his mind. But even with that and all else that's in him, he's made no progress at all. Now he believes he's got to find a breakthrough, give up, 0, go insane; and, as all of us know, hC won't accept insanity as a way out. So he plans to quit. Leave. Enlist with the Earthborns under another name for Dorsai training. «The first Dorsai that sees him will recognize who trained him-pick him out in two seconds from the rest,» said Amanda. Would that Officer force him to reveal himself as Hal Mayne? Rukh's voice was level.

There was a moment's silence. No . . . Of Course not, said Amanda then. Not if Hal didn't want it. That's not our way-if he had Personal reasons for not being recognized or promoted, no explanation from him would be necessary. But even at that, it's only a short matter of time until Bleys would find out who and where he was and then all the worlds would know. Hal wants the Worlds to know, said Ajela. He says it's a matter of the fabric of historic forces. He believes his going would leave a vacuum that'd work against Bleys. He could be right in that, said Amanda slowly, after a moment. But he's wrong in giving up. Besides, he can't quit. For him, that's impossible. He must have just worked himself' blind enough to make himself believe he can go hunting the dragon.

Hunting the dragon? echoed Rukh. It's a Dorsai saying, said Amanda absently. It means

roughly . . . taking on something you know you can't handle, deliberately to arrange for your own end.

She looked at them, Because, you realize, if he did that, she went on, there'd be no more cause for Bleys to hold off trying to kill him. He'd be safe here, muttered Ajela. You'd think common sense- No place is safe, if Bleys really wanted to get him. Up until now he's shared Hal's point of view; that if either one took the simple way to a solution by killing the other, it wouldn't alter the confrontation of historic forces between the two halves of the race. And that's the only reason Bleys has held off, until now? Rukh asked. I thought there was something personal there. There is, in a sense. Amanda looked at her, at the slim cross cut into the circle of granite at Rukh's neck. We, all of us, each have something. But Bleys has nothing, and never has had-except in Hal. How--in Hal? Ajela leaned forward, intrigued. They're worst enemies, said Amanda, which is close, in a strange way, to being best friends. Because what makes them enemies is so much larger than anything personal between them, that Bleys is free to admire Hal-and he admires no one else in the human race, alive or dead.

She became more brisk. However . . . tell me when this started, she went on. When did he start giving up? He didn't mention it until today-in fact, just before you got here, answered Rukh. But in himself he must have givcn up some months ago, Earth time. It showed that far back-to Ajela and myself. We did what we could; and when nothing helped, finally we sent for you. You got here just in time. How many months?

Ajela and Rukh exchanged glances. Ajela remained silent, so

Rukh turned again to Amanda. My best guess would be he started giving up about half a year ago. Ajela?

Aiela made a small, almost helpless gesture with one hand.

I only really noticed it after you brought my attention to it, three or four months ago. I've been tied up with trying to get the Earth-born to pull all together, for the first time in their history. The trouble's been for the first couple of years, most of them couldn't actually believe THEY could really be under attack. But what with that problem . . . and Tam

She subsided. I'd say he started thinking he wouldn't ever be able to find what he was looking for, roughly a half year ago, Rukh went on in a level voice. At what point he actually gave up, if he really did-internally, I mean-I don't know. I agree with you. He hasn't, really, even now. It's just that he's reached the point where he feels he has to do something, and it looks to him as if every way's blocked but back; so he's made a conscious decision to go back, by giving up. What do you think?

Amanda looked past them. I think you're right, she answered. He chose as a child to go after it-this thing he has to find. It's far too late now for him to turn away from it. He can make his body and conscious mind leave it alone; but that won't help. His instinct's to attack a problem and keep on attacking it as long as he's alive and it's still there. But my guess is his trouble may not be quite what you've believed. I don't think he could really have gotten stuck in a dead-end corridor. I think he created it. How? said Rukh. I'm not sure I follow you, Amanda Morgan. I'm sure, said Amanda slowly, he thinks he's been trying all sorts of ways to reach through to what he wants to find and that he could go on trying forever and still not find it. But that can' t be the real case. What is the real case then? Ajela leaned forward. Perhaps, just that he's trying to prod himself to break out and find a new angle of attack, answered Amanda. Unconsciously, I think he knows he's chased this problem until he's lost his perspective on it. He's become frustrated; and his instinct to attack's betraying him. He's gotten himself trapped into a circular path, making the same attack at the same no-answer over and over again; and telling himself it's a different route each time.

She stopped. The other two sat looking at her,

If that's it, said Rukh at last, in that same level voice, what's to be done with him? Help him to stand back and take a look at the problem from a wider angle. How? asked Ajela.

Amanda looked hard at her. I just walked through that door a few minutes ago, she said. Up until then I hadn't heard what was wrong with him, let alone what the symptoms are. I'll think. The two of you might be thinking also.

There was another silence, this one with a certain sharpness to it. You're right, said Ajela. I'm sorry, Amanda. I've gotten a little too much in the habit of snapping out questions and orders, these last few years. I'll be frank. I don't see any answer at the moment; and I get the feeling if there is one it won't be quick or easy to find. Yes, said Rukh, and I think something else. I think it's not something that's going to come calling in answer to puzzling over it. Whoever finds it is going to have to feet her way to it. And the most likely candidate to do that is you, Amanda. Yes, said Ajela, you've got the advantage. He loves you, Amanda. You mean, I love him, said Amanda evenly. Yes, said Ajela, meeting her gaze squarely, of course that's what I meant.

Rukh's voice interposed itself between them. Aside from any aspect of feelings, she said calmly, we've seen him every day-well, almost. Ajela and I may be too close to this part of the problem, ourselves. You're going to be looking at him for the first time in some time. Over three years, said Amanda.

Rukh looked at her shrewdly. You're not saying you're out of touch- No, he and I have never been out of touch, answered Amanda. Don't you both know people you haven't seen for a long time; and still, when you do get back together again, you pick up just where you left ofP That . . . only stronger. He can have changed. I can have changed. But there won't be any new

d; fr- ---- tt- - -'t -Lp iin in fine @tpn an(] one moment.

No, the fact we've been separated's not going to be a problem. The problem will be getting him to accept a solution to hi@ situation besides the one he's come to himself. The Graemes aic a hardheaded lot; and Donal has never been turned aside froin his decisions by any other human being. You think there's that much of Donal Graeme left in Hal? said Ajela. Of course there is, Ajela, said Rukh gently to hei. Nobody can ever escape what they've been. Have you forgotten how much of you is still Exotic? And you left Mara for the Encyclopedia when you were twelve years old, didn't you?

Ajela smiled a little wanly. Perhaps too often, I forget, she said. No, you're right. Rukh. It's just that I've always just known him as Hal; and being an Exotic, I probably don't understand what all the rest of you know about violence-sorry, Amanda. I know that's the wrong word. No, it's not, said Amanda. Is it, Rukh Tamani? No, said Rukh. Whoso thinketh violence, knoweth violence. It was in God's name, but I knew violence. But to get back to what we're talking about, said Amanda, Rukh's right. I'll have to feel my way to the answer. That doesn't say I'll find it. Either one of you may be the one to find it.

She smiled at them. So you'll both keep after it, too? You know we will, Amanda, Rukh said. It was the first time she had used Amanda's given name only. Amanda smiled in acknowledgement and appreciation and got a

3mile back that took account of the bond of experience between them. Of course, Amanda said. I shouldn't have even asked. Well, then, if you've told me all you want to say for the moment, can I go to Hal now? I'll call to say you're coming-

Ajela's hand, which had been reaching out to the control studs on her desk, checked as Amanda interrupted. if you don't mind, I'd rather simply appear, she said. Can you just direct me to wherever he is at the moment? Of course, said Ajela. That's a good idea, in fact. You may well learn more from him, suddenly appearing without warning. He's in his rooms. I'll align this corridor outside with them. First door to your right, then, as you go out. Thanks, said Amanda, getting up from her float. We'll talk again shortly? As soon as you want. It may be a quarter or a half an hour, usually, before I can get loose, if I'm tied up talking to someone, or in some kind of conference with the people down on the surface; but just as soon as I can, I'll be available. Tell Rukh whenever you want us three to meet again. You can reach me anytime using the internal communication system of the Encyclopedia, put in Rukh.

Amanda was already on her way to the door. She stopped and turned back for a moment. Good, I'll do that, she said, and smiled once more at them. It's been very good meeting you both, at last. Don't worry. I trust in Hal-the inner Hal. You should, too.

Ajela, unlike Rukh, did not return the smile. We always have, said Ajela emptily, but if after all this time he gives up and leaves us, what hope is there for Earth, for the race? For everyone?

Rukh turned and looked across the desk at her. There is hope in God, she said strongly, who never leaves us.

Neither Amanda nor Ajela spoke. There was silence in the room. Then Amanda turned once more, and went, decisively, toward the door. I'll talk to you both shortly, she said, and went out

As the door clicked softly shut behind her, Amanda thought that it might not be all as simple as she had made it sound when she was inside talking about Hal. One of the other two-it might have been either or both-might have been putting pressure on him, all these months, without realizing it. Well, she would deal with that if she came across it. Ajela in particular might have been guilty of pressuring without knowing it. She turned right, as Ajela had directed. Ten meters down a somewhat longer corridor than the one she remembered walking in on the way to Ajela's office, she found the door the other woman had mentioned. Without announcing herself, she touched its latch button and stepped inside as it slid open before her. Hal was sitting at his desk and he looked up to stare at her sudden appearance.

She stopped just inside the door, which slid closed again; and stood smiling at his startled face some five meters away from er. So you've forgotten what I look like already, she said. The humor and her lightness of tone were a cover for the moment; for in that second she had seen him for the first time in three years. What she saw was a big man-for when he had chosen to regrow from babyhood as Hal Mayne, he had come back not in the bone and flesh of the man he had been as Donal

6raerne, but like one of his towering twin uncles Kensie and Ian. The Dorsai were not by any means all big-though statistically they averaged more in height and weight than those of the other Younger Worlds and Old Earth. But there were some families, like the Graemes and the ap Morgans, who tended to run large compared to that average; and some among these were arger yet. Even grown, Donal had felt like a dwarf among his own family. Therefore the imitation of Ian.

It was a small vanity. Amanda, who had known Ian in his old age, had teased Hal gently about it. But she did not feel like teasing him now. The man before her no more showed obvious physical signs of stress than Ajela or Rukh had; but Amanda, who knew him so and could look into his soul better than anyone else alive, saw him there, as gaunt and sharpened by his inner struggles as a hermit.

But nearly all of that was hidden within him. Outwardly, he showed only the familiar strong-boned face, with clear green eyes under thick black eyebrows and straight, coarse black hair; his large and sinewy hands dwarfing the control keys beside the screen inset in the top of the desk, on which he was composing some piece of writing.

But the look of startlement lasted only a second. An almost imperceptible tap of his finger erased whatever he had been working on and he was up and around the desk, coming toward her. They met in the middle of the room. I had a report to make-, she began; but his arms were already around her and his mouth on hers was cutting off the rest of the words, with a fierce hunger she had never felt in him before. She responded for a long moment; then pulled her head back forcibly and laughed up at him. You won't even give me a chance to tell you how I happen to be here she said.

It doesn't matter, he answered. He kissed her hungrily again, drowning himself in her. He had wanted her here for three years, as someone lost in a desert would want a drink of water; but there was now also something else. Something new in him this last year, that had feared her coming. For he knew now that he had been refusing to face the consequences as far as they two were concerned, of the decision he had just announced to Ajela and Rukh, his decision to give up.

There was no other way it could be. His leaving the battle while she was still in it, must part them for good; whether either of them might want it that way or not.

CHAPTER

7

Hal woke without opening his eyes, without moving. He felt the weight of Amanda's upper body and head come down again on the bed beside him. He would see her if he opened his eyes. This was no pressure field they slept upon, but, at his own choice, an antique form of spring and mattress such as was still used on most of the poorer Younger Worlds-which included the Dorsai. In a pressure bed he would not have been able to feel her movements a millimeter distant.

So-she had just now again lifted up to look at him as he slept, in the starlight and the light of the new moon shining t

r hrough the illusion of a skylight in the room's ceiling. She had done that often, these last three nights. She was skillful enough to raise herself without waking him, but the return to a prone position was impossible without doing so. He wondered what she had seen in those dark moments, how much discovered?

For three days and nights he had avoided talking to her about what he knew he must talk to her about, eventually. It had been cowardice to have held off from it this long, the first deliberately cowardly act in all his lives. But the thought of making it final, by putting it into words that they must go away from each other-seemed to close off his throat and make him speechless every time he tried to make himself speak of it.

Or had she read it all in his face as he Jay sleeping? He did not underestimate her. She was capable of reading deeper into other humans, including him, than anyone else he had ever known. Yes. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the stars in their true positions as seen from here, artificial illusion though the skylight was. We should talk.

She rose on her elbow again and the darkness of her head and shoulder occulted part of the skylight. In the dimmer illumination of her own shadow, her features were just barely visible. Her hair, unloosed, fell over her shoulder and brushed with faint fingers at the left side of his face. For a moment she looked down at him. Then she lowered her head and kissed him gently on the lips. Then raised again and stayed looking down at him. I should have told you the moment you got here, he said. But . . . It's al I right, dear, she said. I know. Rukh and Ajela told me. You think you have to stop searching for an answer.

Of course. They would have told her as soon as she got here, when he had just before that announced it to them. Yes, he answered. I've been here for three years, Amanda; and in all that time-not one step forward.

Her dark head nodded slowly against the stars. I see. Her voice was thoughtful. Up until a year ago, he said, I still didn't doubt. I was still sure I'd find a way into the Creative Universe. I know it's there. I know if I could have found a way in, the advantages would have been overwhelming and obvious to anyone-to everyone on Old Earth, to begin with. If nothing else, it'd be a place to which the people could escape, if the force of the Younger Worlds does finally break through the phase-shield. And at best? Why, at best-but haven't I told you all this before? You've told me very little. A bit about what you hoped to reach, said Amanda's voice softly. A good deal about what made you start reaching, a lot about the past, but little about the future. I guess-yes, said Hal. You're right. I never did tell you much of what I hoped for. But that was because I didn't want to promise anything I couldn't . . .

He ran out of words. He was fumbling for the words he wanted. An unusual thing for him, and an unusual feeling.

You didn't want even me to get my expectations up, in case you weren't able to do it, Amanda said. I suppose so. Yes, he answered, 11 you're right. That was why- Even you. Didn't it ever cross your mind you didn't have to prove yourself to me by success? I don't know. He hesitated. Maybe I was afraid of just what's happened. I mean-not afraid that I wouldn't be successful; but that I'd have to decide to stop trying while there was still life in me to try with.

He waited for some response. But she said nothing to help him. He turned again to face her dark shape. You know this is different, he said. No matter what you feel, and I feel, you know we have to go different ways; if I turn away, take myself out of the equation while you're still in it. And you know you'll stay in it. You're what you are. The Third Amanda could never turn her back on worlds full of people needing her, simply to follow me into nothingness, for my own sake. What you were born to be and all you were trained to be won't let you. Isn't that so? It would be so, she said slowly, if you did turn away yourself. Yes.

It was almost a relief to hear her say it, and know that it was at last stated, out in the open, final. That's why I've delayed like this, telling you, he went on. Oh, Amanda . . . Amanda . . .

His throat closed up on him. He could not say any more. Her hand reached out and stroked his forehead, gently, soothingly, as if he was a child with a fever. You're not gone yet, she murmured. But that's just it, he said, able to talk again, although talking was painful. I've already delayed too long. There's more to it. It's not just me stepping away from an insoluble situation before it drives me insane. If it were that alone, I'd keep trying until they had to carry me off. But every day I wait, I hold back the time when Bleys finds out I'm gone. One day longer to the change that has to come when the historic forces move into the vacuum where I was. Are you sure when they do move, that'll be for the good of' what we've all worked for'? What if it's for the worse? I don't know what'll happen, of course, he said. There's only one thing I know. My quitting's going to leave an imbalance. One that the forces-which are the result of the reactions of all the people on all the worlds-won't be able to tolerate. By going I leave Bleys unopposed, too strong. I explained that to Rukh and Ajela. The imbalance has got to react against Bleys, where up until now the forces of history were working for him and the Others. You're sure of that? she said. How can it be or have been any other way? He stared through the darkness at her, wanting to see the expression of her face more clearly. In all our history, no one person, one side, ever held the race to its own will for any length of time. Sometimes inside a generation-or less-all that a great conqueror took, or builder erected, was gone. Something else had come to replace it. You can say the civilizations of Egypt, the Dynasties of China, the Roman Empire, lasted for hundreds of years. But steadily, even while the names lasted, what they stood for changed. Always. Even the great religions grew, splintered, altered-until from one generation to another, even a hundred years later, they'd all have seemed very, very different to someone used to their earlier forms.

Amanda said nothing. She continued to stroke his forehead. You know this is true! he said. When the balance leans too far one way, it automatically swings back. If I go, Bleys can never have what he's fought for-a single, unchanging Old Earth, where all the humans alive are permanently under the control of him and his kind. The historic forces will make an adjustment -hopefully for the better. It must happen, just as a child grows into an adult and an adult grows into old age and death -inexorably. Without the constant change that brings adaptation, the race can't survive.

Still she said nothing. Her hand continued to stroke him, that was all. It seemed she was ready to listen eternally. I never hoped to stop that ceaseless back-and-forth, that oscillation, he said. My only hope was to take advantage of its momentum to break through to some kind of permanent improvement in people; a growth, not in anything put together by men and women as a society, but already waiting in the very hearts and souls and natures of each one of them, individually. So that on the next swing each living human would have more be more, and choose more wisely. And this improvement would have to have come inevitably, as the value of the learning and self-discipline acquired by each individual, as the price of being able to use the Creative Universe. If only I could have found the way into it for them, that pass through the mountains!

He stopped talking, out of words. They stayed as they were a little while, Amanda's hand still gently soothing his forehead. At last, however, she ceased; and took her hand away. You've thought of what your leaving is going to mean to Tam, of course? she said. Of course, he answered, his voice thick with self-anger and disgust. He had faith in me, in my finding a solution. I've been holding off telling him just as I held off telling you. But perhaps it's better to, now. But it'll be hard on him, after struggling to live all these years until an answer could be found. I know it. But I can't delay leaving any longer. Bleys is driving the Younger Worlds to produce ships and man them, to the point where it'll kill them. Of course, he wants them to die. And that makes it only a matter of time before he has what he needs for a massive breakthrough. As the time before that event shortens, the time in which my quitting can begin to cause a change in the balance of forces gets smaller and smaller. I have to tell Tam now, and go-now.

He hesitated. I'd rather do anything than face him with that news. Anything, but not face him with it. You think it means only disappointment to him? What else? he said. He counted on me to find it. He counted on me to take over the Encyclopedia. I can't do either. If I stayed here, there'd be no true vacuum of power created, and affairs would haul me back into position again. But only disappointment, that's all you think it'll mean to Tam?

He stared through the darkness at her, at the face he could not read. What else would there be? What do you mean? he demanded.

She said nothing for a second. Then, when she spoke, her voice was a little different, almost detached. Do you know the children's story of the Great Dark Place? she asked.

His mind drew a blank, made an automatic half-effort to call up the knowledge center of the Encyclopedia to find it; but he was too sick a9d weary inside for the effort. Besides, he knew Amanda must have some reason for wanting to retell it herself, or she would not have mentioned it so. No, he said.

«The sun, the rain and the wind happened to meet one day, she said softly. And the rain was upset-so upset that he was almost turning into sleet.

«It's just terrible» he told the sun and the wind, 'I've come from seeing something I wouldn't have believed if anyone had told me about it. A Great Dark Place. I've never seen a place so dark and terrible. I got away just as fast as I could. It scared me to death.' The wind laughed. 'Come on, now,' the wind said, 'no place can be that frightening. In fact, I don't believe it even exists. You're making it up. Isn't he, sunT 'I certainly can't imagine any such place,' said the sun.

'You go see for yourself then,' said the rain. 'Anyway, I know it's there and I'm not going anywhere near it, ever again. The very thought of it chills me clear through-look how my drops are freezing at the thought of it!' 'Poo!' said the wind. 'Where's it supposed to be-back the way you just came? I'll go see for myself, right now!' and off he went. The sun went on his regular way, because it was important that a day always have the right number of minutes in it for the day it was; and he'd almost forgotten about the rain's fright and story, when the wind came up to him. And the wind was so shaken he was blowing in irregular gusts. 'Calm down, now,' said the sun. 'What's wrong?' 'What's wrong?' said the wind. 'I'll tell you what's wrong! I went to look for that Great Dark Place the rain talked about-and it was there! Just as rain said! The greatest, darkest place you ever-well, there's just no describing how terribly great and dark it was. I'll never get over the fright it gave me-never!' 'Come, come,' said the sun, for he was a very large and comforting person, by nature, 'it just isn't possible for any place to be that frightening. How about this? I'll go have a look for myself, right now. There may have to be a few extra minutes in this day, but we can't go having the rain and wind all upset like that. The weather will turn crazy, if it's sleeting in the middle of summer and you're blowing a gusty gale when you ought to be cooling everybody's brow with gentle breezes. I'll be right back.' Off he went. But he didn't come right back. In fact, he didn't come back for quite a while indeed; and when he did, he was exhausted. While the wind had been waiting the rain had come up to join him and they both watched the sun approaching. 'WellT called the rain, as the sun got close enough to hear. 'Now, you see? Isn't it the most terrible and greatest Dark Place you ever sawT 'It certainly is not!' replied the sun as he reached them. He was hot and more than a little cross, for now the day would have at least an extra hour in it it never should have had-unless moon could be talked into shortening the night by that much. 'In fact I don't believe there ever was any such place. The two of you made it up to send me on a wild goose chase. I looked high and low. I looked into everything and under everything-and there's no dark place at all, anywhere! If there was, I couldn't have missed finding it. I don't think it ever existed in the first place, and that's the last time I go looking for something like thad'

Hal had been lulled almost into drowsiness by the soft, regular voice of Amanda as she told the story. Besides being natural singers, the Morgans of Fal Morgan were gifted storytellers, and Amanda had all the family skills in that area. Now, the sudden stopping of her voice woke him suddenly, to the night and what he had himself been talking of before. And this dark place, he said to her, it has some particular application to me? You know why the sun couldn't find it, of course, said Amanda. The dark place was there, but the sun saw only his own light when he looked. Tam has a dark place, even after all these years; but when you look at it, you see it so fully lighted by your own vision, you don't or won't see it as a dark place, because it echoes a dark place very like it, in you. The memory of your responsibility for how your brother Mor died.

Hal closed his eyes reflexively -because Amanda's last words had slapped him like a physical blow. Yet again his mind broulzht him the sieht of William. the finallv defeated and now fully insane Prince of the great planet Ceta, as he pressed the button that opened double doors to reveal the tortured body of what had once been Mor-the image was as fresh as if it had been yesterday, instead of a century past.

He made himself open his eyes again. Tell me what you mean, he said. No one you ever knew dies-for you, said Amanda; and the eerie near-echoing of what he had told himself, standing surrounded by the image of the library on the estate back down on Earth in the mountain rains, just a few days before, was part of what she always seemed able to do. Similarly, for Tam, your uncle Kensie and Jamethon Black, and even David Hall his brother-in-law-will never have died. Tam's lived with his part in those deaths longer than you've lived with Mor's death. He's carried his guilt about them more than a century; and the only hope he's had was that your finding what you've been after would prove that there were other causes-that it was one of the necessary happenings that made possible your discovery of a way into the Creative Universe for all people.

She paused. So, that's what you're going to be taking from him, when you tell him you're giving up: his last hope of some forgiveness from the darkness, before he dies. For Ajela, for the Encyclopedia, even for you in your own right, he's fought to live that long. But mostly for hope of pardon for what happened to David and Kensie and Jamethon. Nearly a hundred years of service here hasn't won that pardon for him. But you might have. This one thing of all things you couldn't see-because his darkness echoes yours too closely. When you got close to seeing it, it woke your own guilt over Mor; and so you didn't want to look deeply into him where his trouble lay.

Hal lay stiffly still in the bed. You make leaving harder, only, he said. No, I didn't realize that about Tam; but knowing it now makes no difference. What can I do that I haven't done already? Did it ever strike you, said Amanda softly, that you've been going at the problem of entry to the Creative Universe in what amounts to a head-on attack-like an attempt by pure force on a fabric or situation, to break through it. Maybe you could back off for a moment; and try to find a way of approaching the problem obliquely, in a way that wouldn't provoke so much resistance.

He propped himself up on one elbow to stare at her. By God! he said. Even in this you see more than anyone else can- He broke off and slumped back. But there is no other way. I've tried them all. You've been too close to the problem even to see them all, she said. You think so? He was silent for a long moment. No, he said, I can't believe that. It's too easy an answer.

She let him think in silence for a while. If you don't mind a suggestion . . . she said at last. I might have known! He smiled grimly at her, aware that the moonlight showed his face to her clearly. No-of course I want a suggestion! Then suppose I tell you that on Kultis, where I've been working underground, the people have found their own way of resisting the armed forces Bleys sent to occupy the Exotic worlds? A way that doesn't mean giving up their commitment to nonviolence? Would it make a difference if I could show you a small corner on that world where a new kind of Exotic is coming into being?

He stared through the darkness at her, letting her words resound and re-echo in his mind, the implications of what she had just said flying out like sound waves from each stroke of a clapper against the metal side of some heavy bell. New? he said. You mean a development-upward? Yes. Possibly upward. But new-I'm sure. Totally new, unmistakably different. And better? I think so, said Amanda, there's a group who've revived the old name of Chantry Guild for themselves; the name of the organization back in the twenty-first century, that you were once concerned with as Paul Formain. The organization from which the whole Exotic culture sprang; changed as it was from its beginnings. It would mean He rolled over once more on to his back, talking to the ceiling as much as to her, again. It would mean one more sure indication the race as a whole is on the brink of a step forward. But the Exotics were a Splinter Culture, like the Friendfies and the Dorsai. More than the Friendlies and Dorsai, they were deliberately trying to improve all people. But to make that improvement now, under these conditions, when everything they have has been given away, or taken from them . . . it's incredible.

He shook his head. And even if you're right, would it work here? These are Old Earth people, the laggards of the laggards . . .

He fell silent, his own mind answering him with the memory of how for this last year or so Ajela had been pointing out evidence that on the world below its peoples, too, had been changing, giving up-more and more of their millennia-old sectionalism. Ajela had talked of how for the first time they were beginning to think and act as a unit. Rukh had insisted, not once but many times repeating what was said by those who had come from Harmony and Association to help her speak out against the nihilism of those who preached support of Bleys' and the Others' attitudes. These Friendlies had said that, even among those who did not flock by the hundreds of thousands to see

Rukh herself in person, some still showed an openness, a willingness to see that it was not really the Younger Worlds, like some horde of enemies, that threatened them; but a destructive attitude on the part of Bleys and the Others that was the core and heart of their opposition,

He had thought that by saying these things Rukh and Ajela were merely trying to lift his own dulled spirits. But perhaps they had been honestly reporting. Perhaps, even here on Old Earth, there was a new wind of thought, bringing together the established, self-centered, divided and often opposed-to-eachother peoples of a world which for some hundreds of years had trailed behind the rest of the race in its thinking.

If that was true . . . then it could suddenly be important what was happening on Kultis. If the Exotics were indeed, even in one small spot, anywhere near breaking through to a new and better form of their particular Splinter-culture type of social human. If that was the case, he badly wanted to see such a thing for himself. The problem was, however, he reminded himself, that even if this was true and meaningful, he could see no way now that it could help him, personally, with the problem that had stopped him dead in his tracks these last three vears.

His spark of momentary excitement had gone out. And into that void Amanda once more spoke as if she had been thinking his thoughts with him. Suppose, she said, you put off telling Tam-say, for the two months it would take you to go to Kultis, see for yourself what I'm talking about-and return? Yes, he said slowly, as he thought about her suggestion. Even though his excitement had cooled, he found he could cling to the thought that, in any case it was two more months for Tam, Ajela and the rest to hope in. Even Amanda might hope. She had not asked for herself, but then she would not; although she and he were so close that he could not avoid knowing how it would cost her to lose him, just as it would cost him to be parted from her. I'd like you to go with me, he said to her. I'd planned on it, she said. I'd have to guide you to the people I've been talking about, anyway. They're hidden as well as they can be from the Others' occupying military. Once there, though, I'd have to leave you with them and just drop back at intervals. It's my district and I've got responsibilities there. Also, in this case, I better not carry you to Kultis by myself. We'll need a driver. So long as you get someone who can keep a secret. About the fact you're gone from the Encyclopedia? she said. Did you think I wouldn't'? Leave all that to me; and we'll get under way as soon as possible.

- All right then, he said, but two months only, including travel time. Including travel time. Yes, she said.

He nodded and smiled-for her sake. But it was no use, said the inner part of him. It was a false hope, only delaying the inevitable, while shortening vitally necessary time. Desperately, he wished he could find some way of estimating when the Younger Worlds would have enough properly crewed ships outside the phase-shield to try a breakthrough to Earth.

But it was no use hoping for that. Even Bleys could not know. It would depend on how much flesh and blood could stand on the Younger Worlds; how fast the people there could be driven to produce what the Others needed.

CHAPTER

You're leaving immediately? said Ajela the next morning. Hal---it's bad enough you're going. Don't tell me you're planning to leave in the next minute! We'd better, I'm afraid, said Hal. I said two months, which may make time short enough as it is, at the Kultis end. I don't want to waste any more going and coming than I have to.

He turned to Amanda. You've got gear on board 'for me, Amanda? he asked. All you'll need, said Amanda. Simon's been taking care of that, haven't you, Simon?

She was speaking to Simon Graeme, the great-grandson of Ian, who had been Donal Graerne's uncle. It was a small double miracle that Amanda had been able to find him to be their driver. There had been none in her being able to find him on such short notice, even after three years of her being away from her own people. The Dorsai forces' location system, if greatly less sophisticated, was almost as swift as the system in the Final Encyclopedia.

But the first of the small miracles came from the fact that he had not gone out like Amanda to an undercover job on one of the Other-controlled worlds. Like her, he had had considerable contact with off-Dorsai people, which ideally suited him for such work.

The second had been the fact that the patrol duty slot he was in, here at Old Earth, was one he was willing and able to leave. They've got a robe Exotics are required to wear, Simon told Hal, something like a civilian uniform, all but required by the forces occupying them-you'll see. I duplicated the one Amanda's been wearing in a somewhat anger style, t an s to the Final Encyclopedia here. Footwear's the real problem; but a lot of the Exotics moved back and forth to other worlds, including Old Earth, and some of the earlier stuff's still worn, since everything's hard to get for the native population these days.

His voice was a slightly deeper bass than Hal's. Otherwise, considering the distance in time and relationship between them, they were remarkably alike.

Simon, of course, could have no way of knowing that Hal had once been Donal. As far as ordinary information went, the Dorsai could only know what all the worlds knew: that Hal had been rescued as a baby from an antique courier-size spacecraft that had drifted into the near-vicinity of Old Earth; and that after being rescued, Hal had been raised on that world by tutors from the three Splinter Cultures. But Ian had lived long enough that Simon had been ten years old when Ian died. Simon could not fail to see Ian's likeness in Hal.

If nothing else, Simon must almost necessarily guess they had some kind of relationship. It was possible he took Hal for a descendant of a child on another world whom Ian had never acknowledged fathering. But Hal suspected that his somewhat distant and generations-younger cousin had actually guessed at something more than that.

But in any case, he had never said anything of what he might have concluded. In person, there were obvious differences between them. Simon was shorter than Hal, stockier, with a more wedge-shaped face and dark brown rather than black hair.

But for all that, the feeling of family was strong between them, as always among the Graernes of Foralie; and from their first moment of meeting three years earlier, Simon had shown that he felt it, as did Hal. As far as appearances went they might have been-not brothers perhaps, but cousins-though their similarity was most visible, oddly enough, when either or both were in motion. Simon's body movements were more fluid and bitlanced, as suited someone who had been born on the Dorsai and never out of training. Hal's were in some sense innate; and had-strange as the word might sound-something almost spiritual about them. But when the two men moved side by side, the attention of anyone watching was somehow drawn to the same heavy-boned leanness, and cragginess of feature, in them both.

Amanda had located Simon in two hours, Encyclopedia time; and he had been delivered to them within three hours after that. In the single hour since, he had got Amanda's ship ready to take them to Kultis. Thanks, Simon, Hal said now. A thought struck him. Would you answer a question for me, come to think of it. You've had three years here. What do you think of the Old Earth people? I mean, the ones you've had to deal with since you've been here?

Simon frowned. They're different from any of the people on the Younger Worlds I've met, he said, and than I'd imagined them. It's hard to put my finger exactly on how.

He still frowned. It's as if they're all very aware of the ornamental things of life; I mean, the things you've got time for after you've won the daily struggle for existence. C riainly, they've rebuilt Earth itself in the past hundred years into a green and pleasant world. But, particularly this last year or so, I get a feeling from them of a hunger, of sorts. As if they were lacking something but didn't know exactly what. Rich but unsatisfied, says it maybe. Perhaps that's why, in spite of belonging to a million different sects, groups and so forth, they all flock so to listen when Rukh, or one of her people, lectures them on faith and purpose. I don't know. I'd have said myself that they were in an evangelically ready state, said Ajela. There's no doubt about the hunger behind their coming to listen to us. But Simon Graeme is right. They don't really know what it is they're hungry for. Yes, said Hal. You've noticed changes, too, then. All right. Another reason to take a look at Kultis. Also, come to think of it, another reason why we need to get moving as soon as possible

He reached out to hug Ajela, who was closest; but the golden-haired woman pulled back from him. You will not-I tell you flatly, said Ajela, you will not leave without seeing Tam before you go.

Her tone was angry, but there was something more than anger in what she said. I hadn't intended to, of course, said Hal softly. I wouldn't leave the Encyclopedia without seeing him. Can I talk to him now, or is he resting? I'll see, said Ajela, still with an edge in her voice. She got up and went out of the room by another door than that by which the rest had all entered-a door behind her desk.

She was back within the minute. It's all right, she said. You can see him now, Hal. Amanda, do you mind if I just take Hal in by himself9 Tam tries to respond to everyone who comes to see him; and he hasn't got the strength for more than one person at a time, really. Of course not, said Amanda-and smiled. Not that I imagine you'd let me in, even if I did. Of course not. But, I'm sorry-you may have another chance later to meet him and he's not strong . . . these days. -

Take Hal in and don't worry about my being upset over missing a chance to meet him, said Amanda. Common sense first. Thank you for understanding, said Ajela. She turned and went to the door she had just come through, and Hal followed her. The door opened, and shut behind them.

Within, suddenly, Hal found himself in a dimness. No, not actually a dimness, he realized, but a dulling of the light after the level of illumination of Ajela's office and the corridors. For a moment it baffled him-as if a thin mist had sprung up to obscure all that was around him.

Then he remembered that these quarters of Tam's were kept always on a lighting cycle matched to the day and night of the Earth directly below the Encyclopedia@ as Hal's illusion of his estate had been under the same rain and wind as the actual place itself would have been at that time.

On the Earth's surface, directly under them now, it would now therefore be the ending of the day; a time of long shadows, or of no shadows at all if the anoroachinp evenim, was closim, in behind a sky obscured by clouds, as it must be. The light was going from the surface underneath them, and from this room alike.

Aside from that, the room itself was as he had always remembered Tam keeping it-half office, half forest glade, with a small stream of water flowing through it. Beside that stream were the old-fashioned overstuffed armchairs, and Tam in one of them; though that particular chair had become elongated and more slantwise of back, so that it was almost as much bed as chair. In this Tam sat, or lay, dressed as he had been every time Hal had seen him, in shirt, slacks and jacket. Only this time a cloth of red and white, its colors garish in the lesser light, lay across his knees.

As his eyes rested on it, he saw Tam's index finger make a sideways movement; and Ajela came hastily around Hal and went swiftly forward to take up the cloth and carry it away out of sight beyond the trees. It was only then that Hal recognized it as the Interplanetary Newsman's cloak Tam had been qualified to wear before he came back to the Encyclopedia for good. The cloak was still set on the colors of red and white Tam had programmed it for over a century ago, before the death of David Hall, his young brother-in-law; for whom Tam had considered himself responsible, and for whose death at the hands of a Friendly fanatic Tam had never forgiven himself.

Hal looked into the old man's eyes, and for the first time saw the stillness there. A stillness that echoed like a sound, like some massive blow in a tall, dark, many-chambered structureso that the echoes came back, and came back again; bringing Hal strangely, in sudden, powerful emotion, a vision of the weary King Arthur Pendragon, at the end of Alfred Tennyson's poetic Idylls of the King. Without warning the room was overlaid in Hal's mind with even darker shadows from the vision built by the poet's lines about that last battle by the seashore.

. . .but when the dolorous day

Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came

A bitter wind, clearfirom the north, and blew The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Brake in among deadfaces, to andfro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shiver'd brands that once hadfought with Rome, And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be....

For a long second Hal could not think what had brought these lines and Tam together in his mind. Then he realized that, like Arthur then, Tam now looked out and saw no one but the dead. They were all dead, all those he had known as a child, as a young man, as a man of middle age. He had left them all behind. in the closed pages of history, long since.

Hal chilled. For in the same way those he had known as Donal were now gone, all dead. Including Kensie, his uncle, who was one of the deaths Tam carried on his conscience. And as he looked at Tam now, a whisper came and went in Hal's mind, a question-will 1, too, come to this?

He shook himself out of the vision, went forward and took one of Tam's hands, where it lay in Tam's lap. It had been an old hand when Hal had first touched it, years ago; and it was hardly older looking now. Except that perhaps the skin had sunk a little more between the tendons, and made the veins stand out more on the back of it. Tam looked up at Hal. Here you are, he said. His voice had been hoarsened by years, long since. Now it was faint in volume as well. Is she with you? I'm here, said Ajela. Not you, said Tam, faintly still, but with a hint of his old asperity. The other one-damn my memory-the Dorsai! You mean Amanda? said Hal. She just got here, but she's leaving right away, again. I'm going with her for two months to Kultis-if you can wait for me that long. She thinks she's found Exotics there who are evolving-that's what I came

to tell you. Bring her in here, said Tam. Tam, too many people-, Ajela began. It's my life still, whispered Tam. I have to see her. I want Ajela went off. Tam's eyes sought Hal's. You should go with her, yes, he said, his voice strengthening; so that almost, as Hal stood holding the ancient hand still in his, there now seemed almost no change at all between this moment and that when Hal had first taken it, those long years past when he had come here in flight. He had been running then away from Bleys and the murder of his tutors; and toward a maturity that would begin with more than three years working in the mines of metal-rich Coby. Only now, the full weight of the hand he held hung strengthlessly against the palm of his own larger one. I knew she was here. I knew you'd be going off for a while. Got to talk to her, said Tam; and for the moment-for just the moment now-his eyes were looking no longer on the dead but on the living. She'll be right here, said Hal; and in fact at that moment Ajela brought Amanda through the door behind him up to the chair. Tam, said Ajela, here she is. Amanda Morgan.

Tam's hand pulled away and slid out of Hal's grasp. It reached for Amanda and she took it in her own. Lean close, Tam said to her. Bastard doctors! They're so proud of giving me eyes like a twenty-year-old in perfect health; and I still can't see what I want unless I have people close. There, I see you now.

Their two faces, the dark, aged mask of Tam and the taut-skinned, perfect features of Amanda, were now only inches apart as she leaned down to him. Yes, said Tam, looking into her eyes, you'll do. I knew you were here. You see things, don't you? Yes, said Amanda softly. So do I,- said Tam, with a hoarse, tiny bark of a laugh, but that's because I'm halfway through the door to death. Do you believe me, Amanda Morgan? I believe you, she said. Then believe in your seeing, always. Yes, I know you do that now; but I want to tell you to believe always, too; except for one time. You love him, of course. Yes, said Amanda. The time's going to come . . . one time, when what you'll see will be what is to be; but that one time you'll have to remember not to believe it. You'll know the time I'm talking about when you come to it. But, do you hear me? One time, only. You'll see him then, and your seeing will be right; but if you believe what you see, you'll, be wrong. So, don't believe, that one time. Have faith. Believe in what you believe, instead.

Amanda's face was very still. What are you telling me? she whispered. When the time comes, and you see him in something that must not be, don't believe it. Promise me. At the hardest moment, the worst time, even though what you see is true, don't believe. Because he'll need to know you won't believe, then. Not believe . . . she echoed. Promise me. Yes, she said, and her hand tightened on his. I don't understand, but I'll be ready. If it comes to that, I'll have faith beyond any seeing. Good, said Tam on the exhale of one weary sigh. His hand slipped out of her grasp as it had slipped from Hal's, to lie again in his lap. He spoke without looking away from her. Did you hear her, Hal? Yes, said Hal. But I don't understand you, either. For you, it doesn't matter. ,' Tam turned his head away. You've got to go, said Ajela, moving forward. He's worn out. He's got to rest now.

They turned away from the old man, who was no longer looking at them, as if he had already forgotten their presence; and Ajela herded them out of the room.

CHAPTER

Amanda's ship, with Simon at the controls, hung in orbit above the night side of Kultis.

Only one of the planet's moons was in the sky with them. Once, when the Exotics had been the richest of the Younger Worlds, this, like its sister world of Mara, had owned a

space-approach warning system that would have signaled the appearance of any craft within a hundred thousand kilometers of its surface. Now the men and women who had manned that system were dead or gone, and the very system itself had been cannibalized of its parts or left to grow dusty in uselessness.

Below, the planetary night side was a round shape of darkness occulting the stars and the smaller of the two moons beyond; but the instruments aboard the ship cut through the darkness and the cloud cover separating them from the surface and showed it as bright as if daylit. The screen showing that surface was already on close magnification that gave them a view of northern tropical uplands mounting to the foothills of successive ranges of sharply rising mountains, tall enough to have their peaks snow-capped even in this climate and season. As they continued their descent the viewer showed a road running upcountry past what had been homes and estates, scattered Exotic-fashion with plenty of land around them; through a small city and on into the mountains. Amanda was instructing Hal and Simon; particularly, at the moment, Simon.

We'll be following the route of that road, approximately, she was saying to him. The Chantry Guild is in the Zipaca Mountains, that range to our left there. The more lofty range to the right are the Grandfathers of Dawn, and the flat valley-floor in between them that widens as it comes toward us is the Mayahuel Valley. There's a more direct route to where we're going; but I want Hal to get the context for it all, first-I want him to see some of the rest of Kultis as it is now. So we'll make a couple days' walk out of it. You set us down, here . . .

Her words were precise and clean-edged on Hal's ear, so that they stood out as if in italics. She had changed, he thought, listening, since that moment with Tam just before they left. She was more authoritative, more intense.

Without any specific alteration in her tone or her manner, her voice now seemed to carry the burden of a purpose that took precedence over everything else. As if she was now driven by something she had committed herself to carry through at any and all cost.

The difference in her had become apparent to him almost immediately they had left Tam's quarters for the ship. His first awareness of a difference in her had been when they were almost to the ship; when she had fallen back from walking at his side, turning and stopping Ajela and Rukh who were following them, so that his next few steps carried him beyond the point where he could hear what she said to them, briefly and in a low voice, before turning to catch up with him once more.

He had felt an unreasonable, but for a moment very real, flash of irritation. What was it she had to say to them that he could not be trusted to hear as well? As they had boarded the ship and all the way to where they were now above Kultis, he had waited for her to give him some explanation of what she had stopped to tell the others. But she had said nothing. In fact, she had acted as if that moment had never taken place; but since then he had noticed this driven quality in her, this difference.

It must, he thought, have something to do with Tam's vision about which he had warned her. Had some sort of private spark leaped between the two of them in that moment, without his seeing it? He told himself it was nothing; it was none of his business, in any case. But the memory and the difference in her now gnawed at him regardless.

She was reaching out now to touch the screen and a blue circle came to outline the place she had indicated; and then another, smaller screen suddenly showed a magnified view of the place she had touched. In that screen they saw things as if they hung only four or five meters above the ground, over a small patch of bushes just off the road, whose ruts were black, the higher surfaces between them palely contrasted in the cloud-filtered moonlight. The road was only some ten meters away from their point of view. You see this? Amanda said to Simon, holding up a white rag of a cloth, grayed from many launderings and slightly longer than it was wide, with ragged edges forming a roughly rectangular shape. I've made a micrograph of this, so your viewer can identify even an edge of it, if that's all that's visible. You know our general route. Search along it each night, in the area of where a day's walk should have taken us. I'll try to display this somewhere every day or night we stop. I'll put it where the viewer can sight it-tangled in the branches or laid on top of one of those bushes down there, for example. One corner should always be folded under; and that corner will point in the direction we're headed, in case we have to vary from the original route. You should be able to find it displayed every night, except if we're overnighting in the city. It's too likely to be suspected as a signal there; so in the city I may not display it. If you can't find it for one night, don't worry. After three nights in a row without seeing it or any sign of us you can investigate-if you think it's reasonably safe for you to do so. Otherwise, don't try. No otherwise, said Simon. Simon, said Amanda. You're our driver on this. You take orders. Not where it comes to any chance that doing nothing might cost us Hal, said Simon. He held up a hand before she could speak. It's what he means to our side, not just the personal connection between us-or the business of never leaving one of your own behind when you don't know what happened to them.

Slowly, she nodded. Hal felt he should say something to refute such an opinion but there was no easy short way of doing it. In any case, it was too late. Amanda was already answering. All right, she was saying, I wouldn't be around to stop you, anyway, if it comes to that. Now, if you're satisfied you've got everything you want to know before we take off, you can start setting us down- She tapped the screen where the closer view now revealed in one comer the fire-blackened wall of some ruined homestead, rather than the living villa they had scerned to view from a higher point of inspection. Right away, ma'am, said Simon, sitting down to the controls. Hat, said Amanda. Come on back and get dressed. Redressed, you mean, don't you? said Hal, following her into the stateroom. I've already got clothes on. Redressed by all means, if that's the phrase you prefer, said Amanda, handing him a brown sackcloth penitential robe, similar to the one in which she had left Kultis. She started to slip out of her coveralls and back into a robe of her own. How about you? she went on. Are you satisfied you know everything you need to know? You aren't rusty on your short-language and signals after three years at a desk?

She was referring to what was basically a secret language built up and passed down from one generation of children under twelve years of age to the next. It gained and lost words from generation to generation, and was different from family to family. But the children of neighbors as close to each other as the Graemes and Morgans of Foralie had practically a language in common. The reference to signals was to the silent body language, varying from minute to large physical movements, which the Dorsai as a Splinter Culture had refined into a second tongue they could use to converse, unnoticed, even as bound prisoners under the noses of captors. Not in the least, said Hal. Be sure then to pay attention if I shout 'court,' whatever else you do. The people manning the garrisons that the Others put in here live for reprisals.

She was specifically alluding to the effective, short, one X Ilable descendant of the ancient cry of quarter ; which the Dorsai professional soldiers had early put to use to advise each other in the midst of combat that they should disable only, and if possible avoid killing, those with which they happened to be fighting at the moment.

I'll be listening, said Hal. Don't worry. I never worry, said Amanda; and he was sensible enough not to argue the point with her.

Dressed in their unflattering garments, and carrving bags with drawstring tops that held all their other possessions, they stepped out of the ship twenty minutes later into the spicily soft and warm night atmosphere of Kultis.

Amanda had picked their landing spot well-not that Simon would have done badly if the decision had been left up to him. A tall stand of trees shielded them from the road and they had landed in the darkness of one roofless room of the burned villa they had seen in the vision screen. Its walls lifted above the spacecraft and hid it further in shadow. Good luck, said the voice of Simon from the darkened port. The outer lock door of the port closed and the ship fell silently upward, out of sight.

Amanda's fingers caught hold of the sleeve of Hal's robe, held and towed him out of the shadow into the relative illumination of the cloud-dimmed moonlight; and from there, on through a ruined doorway into further shadow again-

And suddenly they were under attack. The sounds of feet rushing across grimed flooring, the rustle of clothing, were adequate warning; along with the stink of breath and uncleaned bodies. The outburst of yells that came as their attackers closed around Hal and Amanda was clearly intended to be one of triumph; and in fact Hal found himself caught by at least three people at once, two aiming at his upper body and one at his legs. At the same time, high-pitched to carry over the other voices and noise, came the sound of Amanda's voice. Court!

Hardly fair, thought Hal, more than a little irritated, as he spun away from those trying to hold him, breaking the finger of one who would not loosen his hold and throwing a second into a tangle with the third, leg-level attacker. Here he was, in almost total darkness, barely hours after the three years at the desk Amanda had talked about, set upon by an unknown but certainly large number of attackers; and within moments of landing, she was telling him not to hurt these people too seriously. Those who were now earnestly trying to grab and hold them did not smell like garrison soldiers who might be eager for an excuse to indulge in acts of reprisal-

His first feeling of annoyance was wiped out without warning in a sudden upsurge of something like joy within him. Joy at having something real and physical to come to grips with after the past years of fighting imponderables and unknowns. His reflexes from his training under Malachi Nasuno, the Dorsai who had been one of his tutors as the boy Hal Mayne; an I his far greater training as the young Donal, growing up and working as a professional soldier-these all but forgotten memories took him over. He began to whirl among his foes, tangling them up with one another and putting them down with throws wherever possible.

An excruciating and sudden bang on the right side of his skull changed things abruptly. The lightless room seemed to spark for a moment within his own head and then gray out around him, abruptly chan .ging his feelings to a simple, instinctive yearning for survival. The only thought that stirred in his suddenly dulled brain was that he should have sensed coming the blow that had hit him, and avoided it. Reflexively, he had already dropped to the floor, gathering himself into a ball as he did so and rolling sideways. He came up against something and hastily spun away. The Exotics, he knew from experience, had liked homes with large rooms in them; and the houses he had seen in the screen of the ship from above had been empty shells. Therefore, there should be nothing much between the walls to impede him unless it was some other human being. Moreover, it only made sense that those who attacked him and Amanda would have let them get into the center of a room, so as to come at them from all sides at once.

He did not think all this out consciously as he was spinning away from whoever or whatever he had touched. Rather, it was a conclusion reached just above the level of instinct. He needed time for his head to clear.

It did, and with his return to clarity came the beginnings of a

burning anger at himself, as well as a return of the unhappiness that had been growing in him this last year and more. The fact he had been given no more than part-time instruction by a

Dorsai as a growing boy on Old Earth; and that it had been a hundred years since, as Donal, he had been personally in action, did not excuse him. His lacks were clear.

He was no longer a Dorsai in the sense of the fighting potential of that name. Any adult, properly schooled Dorsai would have been moving with his ears open, would have built and carried in his head as he fought a lightless mental picture of what his opponents were doing@ and been ready for that blow.

He did know that it had been no thrown fist that had hit him; but something used as a weapon-a length of wood, perhaps.

He listened for a second longer, translating the sounds around him into that mental picture he now remembered being taught to form. Amanda had cleared away all who had come close to her and was now nearly at the farther door out of the room. The ones not still engaged in trying to reach her were feeling around, trying to find him-evidently under the assumption that whoever hit him had knocked him unconscious.

Then he was on his feet again, a portion of his attention continually updating the picture frorn the sounds he heard and looking for a pattern in the actions of his attackers. There was always a pattern, made up in separate parts by those who were ready and willing to come to grips; followed by those who would become willing once the combat began; and those who only wanted to hang around the edges safely until the prey had been secured by the strongest of their group and it was safe to pile on, shouting as if they had been in the action from the beginning.

Now he was ready to move through them to join Amanda. This time, he met what he had expected. About thirty seconds of contact were enough to satisfy him now that the group which had jumped them was no more than a dozen adults, of which only four or five were daring enough to offer real threats.

Almost as soon as the deduction was completed in the back of his head, the three full-effort fighters he had encountered on his way to the door were either all put aside or bypassed. Amanda, his ears told him, had already gone through the farther exit. He followed her; and his ears told him those they had left behind did not follow.

Amanda's soft whistle asked if he was all right. He whistled back, went toward the sound she had made, and they came together. No problem, messaged Amanda's fingers, tapping his cheek. We can go on with no more trouble now. Follow me.

She led him farther through the darkness and they emerged after a bit into an area of no shadows at all, just as the clouds thinned slightly overhead; and he was able to see that they were now outside the walls of the ruined villa. Some illegal farmers, I think. A family or families who came out to work their field at night, said Amanda in a normal voice. They didn't have the slightest idea who we might be, except that in these clothes we obviously weren't garrison soldiers and there might be something in our sacks that could be used by them. So those were some of the native Exotics-after only two years? Hal demanded. A sudden suspicion stirred in him. Did you know they were there, when you leci me into that place? No, she said, but it was likely we'd run into some like that along the way.

She did not elaborate; and his unspoken question was answered. There had been a reason she had wanted him to experience that particular type of new Exotic; so different from what she had promised to show him, back at the Encyclopedia. He tucked the fact away. Her reasons would become apparent soon enough. Now, she said, as they emerged from the shell of the building into the moonlight. Across a ruined level area that must once have been either a lawn or garden, the surrounding trees made a semicircle of darkness, with a gap and the hint of what might have been a road or path curving off to the left to be lost in them. We go this way.

She led into the woods to the right of the path. A driveway, once, she said. It'll connect with the road a few dozen meters over. But we'd better stay off the road proper. We'll just travel alongside it; and we ought to be within an easy day's walk of the city you saw on the screen -Porphyry's its name. We won't make it before sun-up. When daylight comes we'll have to be careful in our travel and avoid reaching the town at the wrong time of day.

It was a not unpleasant walk by moonlight, for the cloud cover soon thinned to nothingness, and disappeared completely shortly after that; they moved easily under Sofia, the more brilliant of Kuitis's moons.

The moonlight revealed, but also hid things. Almost it was possible for Hal to imagine that there had been no changes since he had been there last; and this illusion persisted except when they would come upon the shell of some sad-looking, wrecked and burned-out habitation. In the bright but colorless light, these remains of what had once been homes seemed almost magically capable of summoning up in Hal a memory of the lightness and beauty that the Exotics had put into their habitations. As if they wrapped around themselves now the ghosts of the beauty with which the Exotics had always seemed to try to make up for the abstractness of the philosophy that was their obsession as one of the three largest and most successful of the Younger Worlds' Splinter Cultures.

There were the noises of night birds, and some insects, and other stirrings, but no sounds of large creatures. The Exotics had not imported the genetic starter material for variform animals of any size, beyond what was necessary for the ecology, except for some domestic animals. Their philosophy looked askance at the keeping of pets; and most of the things they couldn't do themselves, they were wealthy enough to buy machinery to do, or to hire off-planet workers-animals were not needed except for the stock of the dairy farms or sheep ranches.

The total effect of the night, the different darktime sounds and the soft, scented air, gave Hal a feeling of dreamy unreality which was still underlaid with his return to unhappiness, and only partially affected by the growing headache from the blow to the side of his head. He had been lucky, at that, he thought, even as he automatically began to exert some of the physical self-disciplines he had been taught in both his childhoods. His efforts were not as much to get rid of the pain, as to put it off to one side, mentally, so that it could be ignored by the normal workings of his body and mind. A little farther forward and it would have come against his temple, where that much of a blow, even from a length of tree limb, could-

He woke suddenly to the potential of what he was feeling and stopped walking suddenly. Amanda checked herself in midstride beside him. What is it? she asked. I took a hit on the head, back there, he said. Something more than someone's fist. Maybe a staff or a club of wood. I didn't think too much of it until just now- Sit down, said Amanda. Let me take a look.

He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the earth below him; and was rewarded by a new shock of pain in his head at his body's impact with the ground. Right side of my head, he said.

Amanda's fingers went among his hair, parting it as she bent over him.

This moonlight's bright enough so I ought to be able to see . . .

She found something by his sudden feel of her touch-a cut, at least. No noticeable swelling about the scalp, she said, but it's the swelling inside the skull we've got to worry about. Did it feel as if it might be enough to cause a concussion? What can you tell about it from the inside? How hard were you hit? I couldn't tell you-it dazed me a bit, he said, for maybe a dozen seconds, no more. It didn't knock me off my feet. I remember dropping deliberately and rolling away from the action. Now . . .

He probed his own sensations for information. It was ironic, here on this world, that the techniques he was using were as much Exotic as Dorsai. The two Splinter Cultures had been on a parallel track in these matters; and when they realized it, information had been freely passed back and forth between them. Basically, there was much the body could tell the mind that drove it, if the mind could discipline itself to listen along ancient pathways of nerve and instinct.

He sat motionless, inwardly listening in this fashion. Amanda sat beside him. After a bit, he spoke. No, he said, I don't think fluid's going to accumulate in the brain, at least to any point where pressure on the brain by the skull is going to cause real trouble. But I think I'd better stop; and not try to travel any more for the rest of the night. Absolutely, said Amanda. She looked around. We're out of sight of the road. Lie back. I'll make you a bed of twigs and large leaves; and you can shift to that when it's ready.

He lay back, suddenly very grateful to be able to do so; resting his head on a half-buried root emerging from some large native plant, a sort of tree-sized bush. He closed his eyes and concentrated his attention, not merely on isolating the pain, but on holding back the natural responses of his body that wanted to pour fluid into the bruised area beneath the unyielding bone of his skull.

Awareness of his body, of its pressure against the naked ground, the moonlight on his eyelids, and all his other feelings, began to dwindle into nonexistence. He was relaxing. The pain was dwindling too. The forest around him ceased to be and time began to lose its meaning. He was only automatically and distantly aware of Amanda helping him to shift over a half meter or so to his right, on to a soft and springy bed a little above the surface on which he had been lying.

All things moved away from him into nothingness and he slept.

Out of that same nothingness he came into the place he had dreamed of twice before. He was aware that he dreamed now, but it changed nothing; because the dream was reality and reality was the dream.

He was once more on the rubbled plain, the small stones underfoot long since grown to giant boulders. Far back, on his last visit here, he had passed the vine-covered gate of metal bars through which he had seen Bleys, who was unable to pass through and be on the same side as he was . . . of what? A made wall of stone? Some natural barrier of rock? He could not remember, and it did not matter now.

What mattered was that he was at last coming close to the tower. Always, it had seemed to recede from him as he worked his way toward it; but now it was undeniably close-although how close that closeness was, there was no telling. A kilometer? Half or a quarter that distance? Double or more that distance?

But it was close. Undeniably, no longer distant. It loomed over him, with its black, narrow apertures that were windows. He should be able at last, now, to reach it with just a little more effort.

But that was the problem. He was close to weeping with frustration. He lay on the lip of a steep but short drop to the bottom of a trench perhaps twenty meters wide; with as steep an upward sweep on its far side. It was perhaps four times his height in depth; but its sides were not absolutely vertical. He could slide down this side and go up the other on his hands and knees.

Only, he could not. A terrible weakness had come on him, gradually, over the long distance he had traveled. That was why he lay on the rocks now like a man half dead. Now he lacked the strength even to rise to his feet. The trench was nothing, easily passable ordinarily to anyone with even half his normal strength; but that was just what he did not have. A lack of strength like that of the dying Tam Olyn held him where he was.

He concentrated, trying to drive his body with everything that he had been taught as Donal, and as the bov Hal Mavne. bv all of his tutors. Sheer fury alone should have been enough to move this dead carcass that was his body, at least down the slope before him.

But it would not. He realized slowly that the enemy this time was within him. He could fight what lay outside; but it was himself who kept him from crossing the trench; though every fiber of his being and all his life was concentrated and dedicated to the effort of getting through and beyond it to the tower.

He struggled to isolate that inner enemy, to bring it to grips; but it was everywhere and nowhere in him. Desperate, still fighting, he slipped at last back into the grayness of slumber and slept until daylight woke him to the reality that was Kultis.

When he woke, the sun was already well above the horizon. It was unlike him to sleep so heavily and long, out in the open. On the other hand, his headache was greatly reduced. As he came to he had not been conscious of it at all-, but then it began to make itself felt, growing in intensity; and he had expected it to mount to the sharpness he had felt the night before. Clearly, though, the blow on his head had done no real harm.

However, the headache had stopped growing at a level that required hardly any concentration to put it aside from his attention. Still, since he wanted the whole of his mind free to concentrate on whatever they might run into, he made the mental effort to shift it out, off to the fringes of his consciousness. There it perched like a bird in a tree, at roost-still with him, but easily ignored except when a deliberate attempt was made to check on it.

Amanda had evidently been out gathering some of the wild fruit and vegetable products of the forest for their breakfast. She had them piled on a large lime-green leaf, others of which she had used to make a covering over the twigs which had provided the springs for Hal's forest bed. He recognized some variform bananas, custard apples, and ugli fruit among the eatables she had gathered; but most were probably variforms, or hybrid varieties, of the native flora, adapted to be usable by the human digestive system.

Among these were a number of thick roots of various shapes and sizes, and what seemed to be several varieties of fruit with thick skins bristling with spines. They had all the unfriendly appearance of the Old Earth cactus pear. And there was something that was neither fruit nor root, but looked like the white pith stripped from inside the stems of some plant.

Cautiously, Hal sat up, prepared for his headache to explode in protest at the motion. But it did not. He moved forward and sat cross-legged at the edge of the leaf. Amanda was already seated, cross-legged herself, on its other side. Breakfast, she said, waving at the scattering on the leaf. I've been waiting for you. How are you? Much better, said Hal. In fact, for practical purposes, I couldn't be much better. Good! she said. She pointed to the produce on the leaf before her. Tuck in, she said.

Hal looked at the food Amanda spread out. With all this why do they need to come out at night to plant fields?

Because they want and need a more balanced diet, she answered. Also they want to store supplies for those days when the Occupation authorities won't let them get out into the woods to gather. Those allowed days have been set up so that if the local people depended on gathering alone they'd starve to death. Their passes simply aren't validated for enough so-called 'travel' days-days they're allowed outside the walls of the town. I see, said Hal. Also, out here there're only a few variform rabbits and other small wild animals they can catch and kill to supplement the protein of which they don't get enough-they need garden

2 ve etables to make that loss up. Plus they need the root @etables that are best raised in quantity in a plot. Those people who attacked us last night probably thought we were either there to rob their plot, or we were hunters who might have meat with us they could legitimately take-since legally we're on their ground. It'd have to be one or the other, since there's nothing left to scavenge out here. You knew they were there, said Hal. That's why you called 'court.'

I know of that family, she said, and when they jumped us I guessed it was one of the nights they stayed out. They leave town and simply don't go back until the evening of the next day; and either bribe one of the curfew patrol to report them in, or take their chances on being found out. I forgot, said Hal, this is your work district, isn't it? Right up to the Zipaca Mountains, she answered. So that's why I had Simon set us down where he did. I wanted you to see something. That while they still believe in nonviolence and try to practice it, there's some things some of them'll fight for now; and one of those is survival. I don't mean all of thern'll fight, even for that; but more than you'd think. It's one of the changes you needed to see firsthand, for yourself. Hardly a change for the better, said Hal, from their point of view, I'd think. Wait until you've had time to see some more of them before you make up your mind about that, she said. For now, it's enough that you've seen that much change. You'd better get some food into you.

Some small, sudden alteration in the tone of her voice made him look more closely at her. He thought he detected something nearly mischievous hiding in the corners of her eyes and mouth, at odds with the usual matter-of-factness of her appearance.

A suspicion stirred in him. The Morgans and the Graernes, growing up as close as cousins, had never been above playing small tricks on each other. It was strange, but somehow mind-clearing, to leave the puzzle of changes in the Exotics and his own frustrated search to think of himself for once in that youthful, long-ago context. You shouldn't have waited, Hal said, calmly enough. He waved at the food spread between them. Here, you go ahead.

She raised her eyebrows slightly, but reached out, picked up one of the strings of what looked like pith just before him and began eating. Evidently, it was more chewy than it looked. Otherwise her face told him nothing about its spiciness, bitterness, or any other aspect of its flavor. By the way, he said, as he reached for some himself, and bit cautiously into the whitish cordlike length, what kind of taste-

His mouth puckered instinctively, as if he had bitten into a lemon.

Quite pleasant, actually, if a little bland, she replied cheerfully. Of course, you have to be careful to eat it only when it has those pale yellow streaks like that-oh, that's too bad, you must have hit one that wasn't quite ripe yet, by mistake. Here, spit it out. There's no point trying to eat it at that stage. Try one of the others with the faint yellow streaks. I'm sorry!

He got rid of what was in his mouth. I'm sure you are! he said-but she was smiling; and then suddenly they were both laughing. So much for the sensitivity and kindness of an Amanda! Playing tricks like that on someone who might have had a concussion. You didn't give me a chance to warn you, she said. Oh? And it was pure chance nearly all the ones without yellow streaks are on this side of the leaf? Well, what do you know! she answered with a perfectly straight face. Those on your side are, at that!

Hal carefully took one of the strips with pale yellow streaks -which were, in fact, almost invisible-and bit cautiously into it 'The pith from the ripe plant was as bland-tasting as Amanda had said, with a flavor like bread and a decided texture. It was, indeed, more like chewing a crusty home-baked loaf than anything else he could think of. From now on, he told her, I expect you to warn me as I go, if something's going to be flame-hot or anything else. I will, she said. Her voice was suddenly serious. I'm sorry, Hal. You should have known me when I was young-but I forget, you couldn't have. Anyway, I didn't have all that much time to play, even then. There was always too much to learn. You're sure your head's going to be all right? Positive, he said. An unusual softness and gentleness made itself felt in him suddenly. I'll bet you didn't have much time to play, at that, when you were small. You didn't either, she said, almost fiercely.

He opened his mouth to disagree, then realized that she was right. From the time word had come of his uncle James's death, little of his time had gone into recreation, compared to that of the boys and girls his own age around Foralie. That was different, he said. I deliberately chose my life. Do you think I didn't choose mine? she said. The Second Amanda may have picked me to follow her when I was too young to have any say in the matter. But she picked me because of what I was when I was born. I was too young to know what I wanted to drive myself toward; but the driving was already in me, and working. But she saw it, even then, and gave it a goal, that was all. After that, I worked the way I did for her because it was what I wanted to do; not because it was something I had to do. I'd have been the third Amanda among the Morgans, no matter what my name or my training! Well, he said, still gently, we are what we are now, in any case.

They finished eating and took up their traveling again. The day warmed as the sun rose, but it did not become so much warmer as to be actively uncomfortable. Still, with Procyon now a white point too bright to be looked anywhere close to, in the greenish-blue sky overhead, Hal found himself grateful for the fact they could walk in the shade of the vegetation alongside the road.

That vegetation was thick, but not tangled. It was undeniably tropical or perhaps it could be called subtropical, but if the latter, barely so. For one thing they were at a considerable altitude above sea level; for another, the angle of the planet to its orbit was something just over ten degrees less than that Old Earth made to its orbit, so that the tropical zone here was wider. Down in the steamy lowlands near sea level, the wild vegetation could honestly be called impenetrable jungle. Here, in spite of the fact it supported tropical fruits and warm-country plants, it had more of the openness of a forest. It would be possible to move through it at good speed without cutting one's way, as they would have had to do in the coastal jungle. There were even small, open, natural glades, as well as those areas that had been cleared for homes and their surrounding grounds.

But the roadside trees were tall enough-both the natives and those variforms which had been imported and found a home here-that the shade was pleasantly thick. The brilliant sky above was cloudless; and both before and behind them were the two ranges of mountains-what had Amanda called them? Oh, yes, the Zipaca and the Grandfathers of Dawn. It was the Zipaca that held the new Chantry Guild, and lay before them. The Grandfathers were behind.

Both were sharp-peaked. Geologically young ranges, clearly, by their appearance. They seemed to diverge to the far left; though this could not be established certainly, for in that direction the land became lost in distance and a blue haze. By the same token they seemed to angle together at the right, though this could also be an illusion of the distance. Ahead of Hal and Amanda, the land lifted gradually upward toward the Zipacas. But only gradually. In the main, between the ranges it was tableland; flat, with only an occasional swell or depression. Where's the river? Hal asked.

Amanda turned to smile at him. So, she said, you've been figuring out the terrain. We're all but surrounded by watersheds in the shape of those ranges, Hal said. And the general landslope is against us. There should be a fair number of smaller streams off the mountain slopes -particularly that of the Zipacas, ahead, to a large river running downward and back past where we landed. , ,Right you are, said Amanda, there is. It's called the Cold River; and we landed just about half a kilometer this side of it, so we've been angling away from it. We'll also be crossing a few small streams today, but that's all. The place I'm taking you to is short of the next large stream off the mountains that feeds into the main river.

Hal nodded. From what I've seen so far, he said, this valley land ought to be overlaying older, sedimentary rock, younger than the ranges. I I

Right. The ranges are young and still growing, answered Amanda, and you're right, the rock under us here is sedimentary. In fact, you'll see the lower reaches of the mountains, when we come to them, are mainly limestone and sandstone, sheathing the granites and other igneous rocks that pushed up inside it. That's the reason the mountains seem to rise so suddenly from the valley floor. What you'll be looking at are slabs of the valley rock broken off and upended by the mountain rock lifting beneath it. The Exotics liked the contrast of building the peaceful sort of homes they made, in a geologically dramatic area like this one. Little good it's done them, said Hal, looking at the road alongside them. They've ended up getting drama with a vengeance.

Into the tar-black, melted-earth surface of the road, deep ruts had been gouged. The garrison people drove heavy machinery along these roads deliberately to break them down, Amanda said. It's part of their organized plan of destruction. Bleys isn't waiting for the normal effects of time, and the war with Earth, to manage his 'withering away' process for Kultis and Mara. The Exotics produce nothing he needs; and the Occupation troops he sent have all but explicit orders to keep trying to squeeze the local people until the last one's dead. Squeeze them? Well, you see the road, said Amanda. In addition to that kind of destruction, they've burned down all the country homes they didn't have a use for themselves; and made the people who had lived in them move into the nearest town or city. There, they've made them live in row house apartments they forced them to build for themselves, quickly and out of flimsy materials. Also, the town or city populace is under all sorts of rationing and restrictions. Every day the people there have to stand in line for hours for their chance to buy the barest necessities. I mean they're deliberately forced to stand in line for not enough of anything to go around, available from stores that can only be open too few hours a day to supply everyone who needs things. Then, there's a curfew at night and strict laws even about how and where you can move about in the towns during the day-that's why we're timing this little walk to get to the gates of Porphyry just a little before they close for the day, at sixteen hundred hours-not much more than midafternoon, here. We're catching up with someone, Hal said, pointing ahead. That's right, said Amanda. You'll see more and more traffic as we get close to town. All the former off-planet workers here-they were mainly from Ste. Marie-- Ste. Marie was a somewhat smaller agricultural world a little farther out from Procyon than the two planets of the Exotics. -were shipped home; and most of the large farming areas they operated on both Mara and Kultis are deserted now, with no Exotics allowed to try and run them. The locals here can only get permits to go out of their town for about three hours a dav. on certain davs. To farm family plots of land that're too small, or too useless otherwise, to do them much good anyway. That's why we ran into that bunch last night, who were undoubtedly staying out overnight, breaking curfew so they could get some real work done on an illegal extra field, by moonlight. They just hope a surprise housecheck doesn't turn them up missing, meantime. It's part of the game to quarter the soldiers on the civilian populace, to the advantage of the soldiers and a better surveillance of the populace.

They had almost caught up now with the traveler ahead of them, who was a thin, balding man in middle age, pushing a handcart. He nodded in answer to their greeting as they passed but said nothing, evidently saving his breath for the job of maneuvering the wheels of the handcart amongst the ruts on the road-the cart being too wide for the more shady edge on which Hal and Amanda were traveling. There was nothing more than a scattering of sweet potatoes in the bottom of the cart; but the cart itself was obviously homemade, and clumsy as well as heavy. The man was streaming with sweat from pushing it in the sun. He's taking the potatoes home to eat, or to sell? Hal asked, once they were far enough past to be out of hearing. Either that, or to barter with a neighbor, said Amanda. He'd do better to put a bunch that smal I into a sack. Against the law, said Amanda. All produce, to be legal inside the city, must he brought in by cart, theoretically to let the gate guards inspect it for amount, which is limited, per trip; and possible plant diseases, of which there aren't any.

They went on their way, and traffic, as Amanda had predicted, increased. All were people headed into the city, rather than away from it. A fair share of those were men or women with handcarts, like the man they had seen. Others simply carried sacks which, Hal assumed, contained something of value that was not produce. More than a few had the word DESTRUCT! marked in large letters with black paint on the front or back of their robes. A lot of town-to-town travelers, said Hal. No, they're local, too. Anything personal has to be brought in by the sack that's forbidden for produce-another law. The ones carrying those are townspeople who're taking advantage of the regulation that lets them use their free hours outside the city to scavenge the ruins of their old country property for anything useful inside town-not that anything really valuable will get by the gate guards. If there was, it'd be taken 'for inspection' to ensure there's nothing contraband hidden inside it. Scavengers are what we're supposed to be, you and 1. I've got a fake address to give the gate guards. Theoretically, you and I have been out hunting through what's left of our old homestead. I see, said Hal. They went on.

A sadness that seemed always to lurk inside him lately was beginning to grow once more to uncomfortable strength, as it had when he had stood in his quarters at the Encyclopedia, surrounded by the image of the estate as it had been at that moment down on Old Earth.

Now, sister birch, white-armed . . .

Essentially, the ruined buildings, the destroyed and harassed people she pointed out to him, were his doing. Doubly his doing, for it was his going back in spirit to animate the body of Paul Formain in the twentieth century that had helped lead to this. If he had not done that, there would not have been the splitting apart of the investigative animal instinct in every human, one part to adventure and grow, one to hold back, to stay safe and unchan.-ed. He had set humanity free, for this.

He had done it only so that the inner conflict could become an outer one. So that the two conflicting urges could choose up adherents of individual humans and resolve the eons-old argument in an open conflict-from which would come what he had then been sure would be an inevitable victory for the part of humanity that wanted to grow.

But he had underestimated, even then, the complexity and strength in the balance of historic forces; the interweaving of every interaction between every human. That interweaving sought stability; and to get that stability, it had responded to his efforts by giving birth to those maverick, talented individuals who called themselves the Others; and whom none of the three great Splinter Cultures could conquer or control. Not the Exotics who had grown from the original Chantry Guild of Formain's time; nor the Friendlies, who had grown from the pureiv sectarian fanaticisms of Old Earth into the nonulations of two worlds which had produced true faith-holders like Rukh: nor yet the Dorsai, who had evolved from brutal soldiers-forhire to a people who placed independence, honor and duty above all other things.

The Others had come; and utterly conquered, in effect, all the Younger Worlds except those of the Dorsai, Friendlies and Exotics. So these last, they had done their best to ruin. And he, Hal Mayne, who had been born the Dorsai Donal Graeme, had compounded the damage he had done as Paul Formain, by leaving the remaining populations of those Splinter Cultures helpless before the Others, while he withdrew the best that each of the three Cultures had to the defense of Old Earth. An Old Earth that was only now just beginning to appreciate what had been done for it.

And to what end? All this sacrifice had been made so that he, himself, should be free to find what no one else had ever been able to find before-a magic, hidden universe that would at once confound the Others and open a new stage of evolution for the human race. It had been a vain sacrifice. In the end, he had failed everyone else, after they had given the best of what they had, only to provide him with the chance. Worst of all . . .

The pain mounted in him. It was the deep hurt now inside him that was the personal retribution the historic forces had brought upon him for the damage he had done; and he had not even let himself recognize it untiIlast night, when he had taken a blow on the head no adult combat-trained Dorsai would have taken, through his own ineptitude. . . .

So now he must face it. He was no longer a Dorsai. He realized now that he had not been one for a long time; but for that same long time he had refused t( face the fact. Now, it was inescapable. There were the Dorsai, and there was Hal Mayne, who had been Donal. But Donal was gone, and Hal Mayne had never been one of them, for all that he had believcd himself to be so. He was separated from them as surely as Bleys had been locked away, once in a dream of Hal's, behind a gate of iron bars.

He half closed his eyes at the agony of realization. But it mounted still inside him, until he suddenly found his elbow caught, and the forward motion of his walking body stopped in its tracks. He was turned, and looked down into the face of Amanda. What is it? she said.

He opened his mouth to tell her; but he could not answer. His throat was so tight that no words were able to force their way out.

Amanda flung her arms around him and pressed herself against him, pressing her face into his shoulder. My dearest dear, she said. What is it? Tell me?

Instinctively, his own arms went around her. He held to her, this one living link with humanity that he had; as if to let go would be to lose not only that life, itself, but all eternity before and after it. His voice came, brokenly and hoarsely, out of him. I've lost my people . . .

It was all he could manage to say. But somehow she read through them to what was in him. She led him away from the road, out of sight of it. There, she made him sit down with his back to a tree and fitted herself to him, as if he was dangerously chilled and she would warm him with her body. He held her, and they lay together wordlessly.

He felt a tremendous comfort in her presence and her closeness to him. But it brought peace only to the top level of his mind. Below that was an ever-widening wound; as if he was a figure cut out of cardboard in which a hole had been made with a pinprick, which was now being enlarged and torn apart into a long rip by a pressure too great for him to resist.

But his gratitude for her comfort at this time was immeasurable. After a little while, still unable to speak, he lifted one hand and began to slowly stroke the shining curve of her hair. It seemed so wonderful to him that she should be this beautiful and this near to him; and so quickly understanding of what was breaking him apart inside.

After a long silence, she spoke. Now, listen to me, she said. You've lost nothing. Her voice was low and soft, but very certain. I have. His voice was ragged with tears he did not know how to shed. First I sold my people into a death contract; then I lost them. You did neither. she said. in the same soft, even tones.

Do you remember when you came to the Dorsai to talk about our folk coming-as many as could-to help defend Old Earth? And I met you, he said. You met the Grey Captains, and I was one of them. You arranged for the rest to meet me, he said, and I sold them a contract with the Encyclopedia, to die, defending Earth. You sold nothing, she said, her voice unhurried, unchanged. Have you already forgotten that the chance of death was always a part of any Dorsai military contract? Of those who met with you, only two others besides myself had never actually been in the field. Do you think, even not counting those three, that the men and women you talked to had not realized, long before, that one day they would have to face the Others? It was only a question of where or how.

She paused, as if to let her words sink in. You showed them those things, as you had to others, when the part of you that was Donal broke through to your surface, she went on, and made it plain to all of us; as he had always made things plain to people. Has your opinion of the Dorsai mind fallen so low that you think they-the Grey Captains -thought they could forever put off an eventual conflict with the Others? When it was the Others who wanted everything humanly owned, including the Dorsai itself? Our people couldn't become the assassins that the Exotics asked them to be, to kill the Others one by one; because life isn't worth certain costs, particularly if that cost is the abandonment of what you believe in. But you showed them a way to fight in the way they knew how to fight; and they took that way. How could it havc been otherwise?

He could not answer. What she said went through and through him; and, if it did not heal the great rent in him, it at least stopped its growing. And you've lost no one, she went on after a while, still quietly. You've only gone on ahead of everyone else a little way; so that you've passed over a hill which blocks your view of the rest of us when you looked back. You've stared at that hill so long now, you've come to believe it's all space and time. But it's not. You've lost no one. Instead, you've joined in the whole human race, of which the Dorsai were always a part-but only a part. You've gone on from where Donal stood, alone and solitary.

They continued to sit for some while after that, neither of them speaking. Slowly, what she had just said soaked into him, as sea water slowly soaks into a floating length of timber, until at last it can hold no more; and so, water-logged, it begins to sink slowly and quietly to the far bottom.

So, in time, what she had told him brought relief. He could not believe her, much as he would have liked to do so. Because, much as she was Amanda and understood, he thought he recognized his own life, and his own failure, in a way no one else could. But the very fact that she had tried to warm the chill of despair from him like this, as she might have warmed him back from a death-chill, helped him. So that in time he came back again to her and all other things. The pain that had come from the great torn place inside him was still with him; but it had at last become bearable, as bearable as his headache from the blow had become, when he had pushed it away from the center of his attention, out to the fringes of his consciousness. We'd better go on, he said at last.

They got up and went back to the edge of the road, and continued along it under the pale brilliant star of Procyon toward the destination she had in mind for him.

Procyon had started to lower in the sky, but the Kultan evening was still quite distant when they came out of a belt of trees to sce the edge of the village of Porphyry before them. The last hall' mile or so, traffic on the road had increased heavily in comparison to what it had been earlier; but those they passed, or who passed them, moved at some little distance from each other. Enough so that any of the travelers who were moving together could talk privately merely by lowering their voices.

Hal had been roused from the oppression of his own inner feelings by his interest in those sharing the road-and apparently their destination-with them. They had seen no one headed away from Porphyry. And these people were all Exotics. They showed it in many little ways-their calmness of feature and economy of movements, for instance. But Hal noticed that none of those they caught up with, or were passed by, seemed to be indulging in conversation simply for conversation's sake. In fact, none they passed seemed to feel it necessary to greet Hal. Amanda, or each other. At most they only acknowledged the presence of others with a gentle smile or nod.

But versions of these elements had been part of the Exotic character as long as Hal, or Donal, had known members of this Splinter Culture. What he noticed now, and a startling difference it seemed to him, was that there was something extraordinarily self-contained about these sharing the road with them. It was hard to say whether it was a change in the direction of growth or not. It was as if each had drawn inside himself or herself, and now lived a private life behind the drawn curtains of their calm faces. There was an individualism that was new in them; an individualism noticeably different from the communal feeling that had always appeared to be an integral part of the Exotics he had known; from Padma the Outbond, when he had been Donal, to Walter the InTeacher, Hal Mayne's tutor. In no way did those about him seem a beaten or conquered people, in spite of their circumstances.

But at the same time, he got a feeling from them now as if part of the warmth that had always characterized the Exotics was now withdrawn. Not gone; pulled back away inside them, coiled like a spring under tension-but, somehow, not gone. We'll be at the gate in a few minutes, Amanda said, interrupting his thoughts; and he looked ahead to see a tall wooden wall, evidently recently built, surrounding what was plainly their destination. It reached to the side and back as far as Hal could see in either direction, and their road led to a wide gate as tall as the wall itself. Let me do the talking to the guards, Amanda said. You're my idiot big brother; I mean, you're literally a little slow-witted. The cliches that work best are the old cliches. Look stupid.

Hal obediently slumped his shoulders, let his face go slack and his mouth hang slightly open. There was a jam-up of people at the gates, of course; but those coming in gathered close together and waited with little talk, and without raising their voices when they did speak, any more than they had on the road. It was reasonable, Hal thought, that they should b Those he watched would have been brought up as child.e.. to never abandon a conversational tone and volume; and in spite of their present condition, that training would persist in them.

And yet, thought Hal again, watching them behind the mask of his loose jaw and expressionless face, there was something more going on here than just childhood training. There was something quietly in opposition to the uniformed men who were checking them. It was not a quietness of fear in any sense, but one of strength that the uniformed men did not have, or even understand.

It was curious. At the same time, he was aware of something that was going on for him, personally, him alone. It had nothing to do with what he believed he had just seen in the people around him. It was totally unrelated to it-or was it?

It was a curious sensation of having been part of just such a scene as this, once before. He could not say why; but he felt an element that was medieval about the wooden walls, the wooden gates, the swarm of people in their rough and unlovely clothing, waiting their turn to be passed inside by the guards. It triggered off a conviction that somehow, somewhere, he had lived through this before. Not him, but someone very like him as he now was, had stood almost as he was now standing, seen much what he was now seeing, and waited with such a crowd in such a place as this. . . .

The guards, thought Hal, concentrating on them to get his mind back on ordinary channels-if these were typical of the garrison troops here, they were poor stuff indeed. They were neatly enough uniformed, in black, with power pistols bolstered on their hip and swagger sticks at their belt or under their arms; but they were not really soldiers.

Hal Mayne had never seen actual soldiers on duty. Soldiers who were purely that; instead of half-police, like the Militia that Rukh's Command had fought against on Harmony. But Donal Graeme had been brought up to work with troops; and to anticipate that his life might depend on his ability to read their value at a glance.

It was Donal's eye, therefore, that now told Hal that the eight men he saw on duty at this gate were not only useless; but for practical purposes untrainable to be anything better than the bullies of unarmed civilians they presently were. Ian, Donal's uncle, who had trained troops for Donal after the assassination of Kensie, Ian's twin, would have stripped all eight of their uniforms on sight.

If the rest of the soldiers in garrison here were like these, it was likely that, weapons and all, they would break and run in the face of any serious riot; even a riot of Exotics, who, had they been any other people, would have risen against any such flimsy oppressors, long since.

But he and Amanda had now reached the gate, at the head of the crowd of waiting people. He concentrated on looking as harmless as possible for one of his size and appearance. Open up, said the uniformed man confronting them. lie was obviously from one of the Friendly worlds. Hal had learned to recognize such in any guise, after his experience on Harmony -though this one's appearance on his surface was completely at odds both with the people Hal had met around Rukh, and his present uniform. He was oriental, young, round-faced and innocent-looking. Nonetheless, he went through the contents of their two sacks with reasonable efficiency. All right. Go on in. Home address? Sixteen, thirty-six, seven, Happiness Lane, answered Amanda. Downstairs apartment.

The gate guard repeated the address into his wrist recorder and turned away from them to the two bag-carrying women behind him. Hal and Amanda were free to go. What about that address? Hal asked as soon as they were far enough down the road within the gates that they were no longer too closely surrounded by others to speak without being overheatd. It's the home of three brothers, none of which look at all like you, she answered. I mean, why did he ask for it? They do an automatic check to see that people who've left for the day are back in their homes that night by curfew. But what'll happen when they find they don't even know of us at that address? The one checking is going to figure the guard at the gate transposed a couple of numbers, or otherwise got the address wrong. Then he'll forget about it. They don't worry that much about people getting in, they worry about them getting out. I see, said Hal. Where are we headed, then? There're a few serious resistance people in every town, said Amanda. We're going to one named Nier. She lives alone with her mother and a soldier who's quartered on them. He's a sub-officer who likes night duty@ so he's not there after sundown, ordinarily. The result is, they've got room to put us up overnight; and, in addition, Nier's made someth ing 0 a friend of the sub-officer; which gives them a few advantages including freedom from a housecheck under normal conditions. I want you to talk to Nier.

Does she live anywhere near Happiness Lane? asked Hal dryly.

Amanda laughed. The other side of the town, she said. Come on. The streets within the walls had not beer. rutted and were in good shape. They had entered at what was evidently an older part of it, for the buildings were large and faced with white stone. Their fellow travelers went off in different directions among the streets of this section and there were few sackcloth robes to be seen after several blocks. There were, however, a number of uniformed soldiers who seemed to be off duty, either moving about the streets or going in and out of buildings that Hal thought might be either restaurants or drinking places. Amanda noticed Hal watching one clearly inebriated soldier entering one of the latter. Alcohol's the only intoxicant ailowed-even to the troops, she said. Probably because of the difficulty of enforcement. You can ferment almost any vegetable into a beverage with at least some alcohol in it. Adding a sugar of some kind helps, of course. So since they can't stop the making of illegal liqueurs by their own people, they let their soldiers drink the best the planet can produce. The civilians, of course, are officially Exotics who don't drink; though that's changed for a few of them in the last two years. There was a joke among the troops on Ceta, a cousin who'd been on a contract there told the rest of us in the family once, Hal said absently, dropping back into Donal's memories. That you could even make an alcoholic drink by fermenting dead rats. Impossible, of course, but the idea was to talk new recruits into drinking a home-brew, then tell them a story that'd make them sick . . . ...

He was completely in Donal's persona for the moment, Amanda noticed with some satisfaction. She had hoped to trigger some of those older memories by what she would show him. That part of him that was Donal had uses he had been too quick to forget.

They came finally to the new section of town, where the controlled locals lived. In less than two years it had become an obvious slum, its only redeeming feature being a cleanliness which was a result of ingrained habit in the older Exotics, which had caused the streets and building fronts to keep a relative decency of appearance. Here and there, a small bunch of flowers had been put in a window, or an attempt had been made to plant something decorative in the small strip of earth between the edge of the street and the front wall of a house.

Amanda turned in at the door of one of the innumerable look-alike row houses and knocked. There was no response. She waited for what seemed to Hal an unusually long time, then knocked again. They waited. At last there was the sound of shoeleather on bare wooden flooring beyond the door, and the door itself swung back.

It opened just enough to show a woman in her fifties with a face the sagging flesh of which told of recently lost weight. Her gray hair was cut relatively short, pulled back and tied more in a ponytail than a bun, though its bunching at the back had something of the characteristics of both. She stared at them blankly. Mario! said Amanda. Don't you know me? It's me, Corrin; and Kaspar, one of my brothers. Is Nier here? I'd like her to meet him. No. No, she's not.

The woman Amanda had called Mario had opened the door just enough so that the width of her body blocked it. She raised her voice as if she wanted someone inside to hear her answering. She doesn't live with me anymore. She went to work and live at the garrison-

A man's voice shouted something unintelligible from inside. Nothing! she called back over her shoulder. Just some people asking about Nier. I told them to go -find her at the barracks.

She looked back out at Hal and Amanda, and her face contorted suddenly into a grimace of desperate warning. She jerked her head minutely, as if to signal them to move on up the street.

But already there were the sounds of steps on the floor behind her. The door was pulled all the way open and a somewhat overweight man of medium height appeared as he pushed the old woman aside. He was wearing black military slacks and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. His face was made up of small features-small eyes, small nose and small mouth. It showed a full twenty-six hours of stubble. He was in his late thirties or early forties and his red hair was graying. Through the stubble, freckles could still be seen on the weathered skin of his face and the backs of his small, soft-looking hands. well, well, he said, in a voice that had a bullfrog-like croak to it. He was not drunk, but there was a slight thickening to his words that showed he was on his way to being so. Look at this. An oversize bull, and an oversize cala lily. And you used to be friends of our dear, departed Nier, were you? She barely knew Nier. This is her brother, who's never met Nier, said Mario quickly. Well, well, what of it? said the soldier. I'm Corporal I an. Where's your manners, Mario? Invite these good friends of Nier's inside!

He stood back from the door. I'm Corrin, said Amanda as they came into a small room that was at once kitchen, dining and living room. My brother's name is Kaspar.

The kitchen sink, cooking surface and cupboards occupied the corner to the right of the door as they entered. Before them was a kitchen table with one straight chair drawn up to it, and on it a bottle of clear glass three-quarters full of colorless liquid, standing beside a half-empty tumbler. Beyond were three more chairs like the one at the table and a porch bench with back, which had been furnished with cushions, obviously homemade. Well, now, you're really a cala lily, Corrin, said lban. He ran his eyes over Amanda, grinning a little. You don't know what a cala lily is, do you'? But I do. It's an Earth flower. I've seen a picture of one; and you're a cala lily, all right. Yes, you are.

He gestured widely to the table. Sit down, he said, taking his own seat in the one chair that was already at the table. Pull up chairs. Let's get to know each other.

Mario hastened to help with the chairs. I didn't say you could sit down! lban's voice was abruptly ugly and his eyes were on Mario.

Suddenly a small coal of anger glowed in the ashes of Hal's inner unhappiness with himself, so that for a moment the unhappiness was forgotten. Perhaps he could no longer think of himself as Dorsai; but nonetheless there was still the strength and knowledge in him to lay his hands on this soft-muscled bully; and by the very power and capability of the grip make the other aware that he could be broken like a dry stick. This much he could do-

Hal forced the unexpected reaction from him. That was not the way. He had learned it long since. I was just going to help . . . Ah, that's all right, then. Yes, help. Help yourself to a drink, Lily; and you-whatever your name is. Get some glasses, woman!

Mario hurried to get two more tumblers. His name's Kaspar, said Amanda. Kaspar. You told me that. Kaspar- Abruptly Than laughed and drank, and laughed again. Seeing the other two tumblers were now on the table, he poured a small amount from the bottle into each one. Drink up.

Amanda took a delicate sip from hers and put the tumbler back down again in front of her. It's strong, she said. Oh yes, it's strong, said lban. Hal was trying to place the man's origins. He was neither Exotic, Friendly, Dorsai, nor a mix of any of those sub-cultures. Not educated enough for someone from Cassida or Newton. He might be from New Earth, where there was still a polyglot of subcultures, or Ceta, where there was even more. Than suddenly turned on him. You, Kaspar! said Than sharply. You drink!

Hal picked up his tumbler and swallowed the inch or so of liquid inside it. It was a high-proof distilled liquor, a little too smooth in taste to have been made in some backyard still; unless on the Exotics nowadays they had some very good backyard stills. He thought that if the other had any idea of amusing himself by watching as the stranger got drunk on an unaccustomed (as alcohol would be to most Exotics) intoxicant, he would find himself very mistaken. Hal had not had a drink in over three years, but he had discovered in the Coby mines that it took more to get him drunk than it did most people. Kaspar, said lban. He poured a somewhat larger amount into Hal's tumbler. That's a dog's name. Good Kaspar. Lap that up, Kaspar.

Hal picked up the glass.