1. 1 said lap it! snapped lban. Not drink it, Kaspar. Lap it! My tongue's too short, said Hal mildly, sticking his tongue down into the glass to show it could not reach the liquid within. You! said Than to Mario, without turning his head. Get a saucer!

Mario obeyed, putting the saucer without orders on the table in front of Hal. Pour it into the saucer, Kaspar, said lban. That's right. Now lap it up like a good dog-

He shoved his chair back suddenly, its legs screeching on the bare floor, and got up.

--And just in case you don't know how to lap, I'm going to teach you, he said over his shoulder, going through an inner doorway into the unlighted room beyond and around a corner out of their sight. His voice came back to them from the empty doorway. It's a useful trick for a dog like you to have, you know?

He came out again, carrying a power pistol, which he brought with him back to the table. He sat down, resting the thick, dark barrel of the pistol on the edge of the unvarnished tabletop, so that the large thumb-sized hole in its muzzle pointed directly at Hal. Now, this is how we do it, he said. I say lap, and you bend your head down and start lapping with your tongue from the saucer until it's all gone. Ready? Now, lap!

Hal bent down and began to lap. It was a clumsy way of getting the liquid into his mouth, but finally he got most of it swallowed. Now I ick the plate clean. That's right. Lift your head up. Than poured more of the liquor into the saucer. You didn't do so good, last time, so we'll try it again. That's the way we do things in the Occupational Troops. Now-- Oh, don't make him drink another one! said Amanda.

Than turned his attention on her. So did Hal, in case the words were supposed to convey some hidden message to him. Our brother Court drank some of that once, said Amanda, and it made him awfully sick!

She might, thought Hal, have had a little more faith in his common sense. He was hardly about to take the man's gun away and break his neck, here in the very house where the other had been quartered; in spite of his unexpected earlier flare of fury. Then he realized that the message was not what he had assumed. What she wanted was for either one of them to put this man harmlessly out of action; and she was giving him a chance to do it whatever way he had in mind, first. Well, he should have gone right back and tried it again, Lily, said lban. That's the point. You've got to practice, practice, to learn things like that. Now, we don't want to make that mistake with Kaspar, here, do we?

He stared hard at her for a long moment, then let his stubbled face relax into another grin. But of course, for you, Lily, if you don't want Brother here to lap any more, of course I don't want to make you feel bad. So I won't do it. How do you like that? Thank you. Thank you very much, said Amanda. Of course. Anything to make you happy. Because I want to make you happy, you know that? Than leaned forward toward her and, finding the table in the way, beckoned her. Bring your chair around here, beside me.

Amanda obeyed. Hal permitted himself a slight scowl. You leave my sister alone, he said to lban. If you don't I'll put the bad eye on you. You'll be sorry. The bad eye? echoed Than absently, not even looking at Hal, but into the eyes of Amanda, which were now less than a quarter of a meter from his own. Then the words seemed to penetrate. He turned his gaze on Hal. The bad eye! What kind of stupid superstition's that? If I look in your eyes you'll be sorry. My eyes'll eat you up. Oh, they will, will they? Than turned and stared directly into Hal's eyes, The eyes of the soldier were a muddy brown in color, the whites bloodshot. All right, I'm looking in your eyes. Now, you better be able to eat me up or you're going to be sorry you said anything like that. Well, what're you waiting for? Go ahead. Eat me up! The aualitv of merev is not strained, said Hal in a soft voice, but one which carried clearly across the table to the other man, it droppeth as the gentle rain from hea.ven- What?

11 _upon the place beneath. That quality of mercy is strong within you, lban. You are greater than any normal man in that which you have inside you. You are large, generous, compassionate; and you have a duty to yourself to make sure that all other people know this and bow down before it . . . ...

Hal went on talking, in the same soft, persuasive voice, until at last he stopped. When he did, Than sat still, his eyes still fixed on Hal's. His gaze remained fixed on the place where Hal's eyes had been even when Hal leaned back in his chair and looked over toward Amanda. Oh, oh, said Hal. I got Mario, too.

Slightly off to one side, standing a couple of steps behind Iban's chair, Mario was also motionless, with the same, unmoving gaze. Mario, said Hal sharply. No! Not you! Come out of it!

The older woman blinked and stirred. She stared at the three of them. What . . . ? she said. An Exotic and susceptible to a hypnotic trick like that? said Hal. For shame. It was an Exotic that taught it to me, and a half-Exotic tried it on me once.

-I . . . I never learned, said Mario. Was that what it

11

Of course, said Hal. You sit down now and relax. He turned back to lban.

-Listen to me, lban, he said. Are you listening? Look at me.

Yes, Kaspar, said Than quietly, quitting the fixed focus of his eyes to turn their gaze on Hal. Listen to me now and remember this for a long time. Today, when you were having a day off-

Hal broke off, turning to look at Mario. That's what it was, today, wasn't it? he asked her. A day off duty for him? Yes, Mario said. He goes back on at eight tomorrow morning. He's on day-duty, not nights, like the other . . . I thought so. He turned back to Than IhAn vnii werp having this day off; and late in the day, who should come to the front door but a couple of lost children? It seems their parents were visiting here, by special permission, from another place -they were too young to tell you what their parents' names were, who the relatives were they were staying with, or anything but their names-which you've since forgotten. You were feeling generous, so after amusing yourself with making the little boy take a few drinks, you gave them permission to stay here overnight and their parents could be found tomorrow. Have you got that? Oh yes, every word, Kaspar, said Iban, nodding. Good. Now, the children fell asleep in a corner and you forgot about them and went to sleep yourself. You slept clear through until the next day, except for a moment or two about midnight when there was a knock at the door and the parents showed up looking for the children. You gave them the children-you were too sleepy to ask them for any names or papers-and went back to bed. You went right back to sleep, and slept through until time to get up the next morning, after which everything went as usual-except for one thing.

He got up, took the bottle of liquor and poured it out in the kitchen sink. He came back to stand at the table and put the empty bottle in front of lban. When you got up, he said to the other man, you found you'd drunk the whole bottle by yourself the evening before -and you didn't even have a hangover. That'll be something to tell when you get over to the garrison. A whole bottle and not even a trace of a hangover. It really will be something to tell them, won't it? It sure will, said lban. Now, said Hal, since you finished off the bottle, maybe you better get some sleep to be ready for duty tomorrow. Y'right, said Than thickly. He got to his feet, got himself turned around and wavered unsteadily back toward and finally into the room from which he had brought out the power pistol, They heard him fall on the bed. Hal picked up the pistol and took it to the doorway and tossed it in to fall beside the man's bed. Iban! he said. Iban, answer me! You can still hear me, can't you?

Yesss, sighed the voice thickly from within. Remember how this shows that Mario's good luck for you. No hangover's just a sample of the kind of good luck you've had since getting quartered here. It's all due to Mario. You're good luck for each other. She knows that, that's why she takes such good care of you. You've got to remember to take good care of her if you want that good luck to keep going. You'll remember that, won't you, lban? You like Mario; and even if you didn't, she's such good luck for you, you want to keep her well and happy, isn't that right? Yesss . . . All right, you can go to sleep now.

This time the answer was the first of a steady succession of snores.

Hal turned back into the room. Mario burst into tears where she stood and Amanda moved to put her arms around the older woman.

Mario was weeping hoarsely and deeply. Amanda led her ott into the back of the house, through another door that evidently opened, from what Hal glimpsed, on another small bedroom. The door closed behind both women.

Hal went up to it. I think I'll take a bit of a walk, he said through the door panel. Fine. Get back here before twenty-two hundred hours. That's curfew, Amanda's voice answered him. I will.

He went out. The streets outside were full of hurrying people in sackcloth robes, none of whom paid any attention to him or each other. They gave the impression of racing against a deadline. Hal estimated that perhaps one in ten had the word DESTRUCT painted on his or her robe. He wandered the streets, trying to get the feel of the community about him.

It was a strange feel. The locals had all the appearance and attitudes of a populace so downtrodden that it lived in fear and without hope or dignity. And still, there was something innately independent and stubbornly survivalistic about the controlled voices, the courtesy with which interactions went on@ from the apparently welcome, if brief conversations between encountering individuals who seemed to be friends, to the chance collisions of those hurrying so that they bumped into each other before they could stop.

Much was gone, but something yet remained. The words from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses came back to him. The question in his mind now was whether what remained was something upon which an Exotic structure could still build-or was this once-powerful Splinter Culture finished forever?

He could not tell. It was tempting to hope, but . . . he saw it was getting close to eighteen hundred hours and he was still some distance from Mario's residence. He had automatically mapped his wanderings in the back of his head so that he knew he had about eight blocks to go to get back to it.

He turned toward it. Amanda was sitting on the cushioned picnic bench in the front room when he got there. There was the snell of cooking in the air. She got up as he came in, shutting the front door behind him. Where's Mario? he asked. Asleep, said Amanda. I waded into the supplies here and cooked food for the three of us. But I think she needs sleep more than she needs something to eat-though she needs that badly enough. I'll leave her food in dishes in her room; and she can eat it cold, or warm it if she likes, whenever she wakes during the night. She's bound to wake sometime. Meanwhile, you sit down and we'll have ours.

Hal sat. The meal Amanda dished up for them was nothing like the fare an Exotic house might have given a visitor once upon a time; but it was a solid dinner, with beans and local vegetables in a sort of curry, highly spiced, with local corn bread to go with it and water to drink. The water's safe enough, I suppose? said Hal, lifting his glass. The water systems put in by the Exotics still take care of that, said Amanda. Hal, they evidently caught Nier and the Groupman that was quartered here in some resistance action against the Occupation. Or at least, in something more than a breach of one of the smaller laws. They're undoubtedly both dead. All Mario knows is that a squad of soldiers came to the house one day when the Groupman was here and took them both away. Mario says Nier told her that the Groupman was being transferred to a job for which he'd have to live in the garrison from then on; and he'd found a good job for Nier there, too, so she wouldn't be at home anymore. Mario knew she wasn't telling the truth-just trying to make Mario feel better. The squad went off with them; and no one's seen either of them since.

Hal shook his head. So that's how it is, he said. Yes, that's how it is, answered Amanda. Their eyes met. Do you think the suggestions you gave Than about being kinder to Mario are going to last? Anything like that wears off in time, said Hal. You know as well as I do how strong the powers of recovery are of both mind and body; and that's true even for characters like lban. But maybe by the time it wears off, he'll have convinced himself 'it pays to be decent to Mario. Or it may even have become a habit. He's going to have to excuse his better treatment of her to his fellow soldiers; and people like him tend to end up believing their own excuses, to avoid admitting they could be wrong about anything. But nothing lasts forever. He'll be moved out of this house, sooner or later; and someone else'll be quartered here. Yes. Well, we can hope for the best. Who was the half-Exotic you said tried to hypnotize you? Bleys Ahrens, said Hal, and he almost did, I was very young then, and he's very persuasive. But he was hypnotizing a good-sized group at the time and didn't know I was one of the people he was working on. I see, she said. Well, give me a hand cleaning up-- I can do that by myself, said Hal. Why don't you see if you can't find some clean sheets and blankets for that bed of lban's We'll need sleep ourselves if we want to be gone before he wakes up tomorrow, and there's no good reason for letting him have the bed. He can sleep on the floor, the way he is now, and never know the difference. Where're you going to put him? asked Amanda. Out here, I think, said Hal, getting up and going back into lban's bedroom. He lifted the slack body of the sleeping man, carried it out into the main room and dumped it on the cushioned picnic bench. lban's body was a little large for the piece of furniture, but he did not seem in any immediate danger of rolling off. You've got him programmed to believe he got up and answered the door in the night, said Amanda. Won't he wonder in the morning when he wakes up in this room instead? And if you try to carry him back to his bed before we go, by that time he may be sober enough to wake up. You're right, he probably would wake up. Not that I couldn't just put him back to sleep again if he did. But we don't need to bother with putting him back in his own bed. He'll just think he didn't make it any further back than the bench before folding up. Hal corrected himself. No, you're right. Of course, he may wonder a bit. But I'm counting on his puffed-up ego over drinking a whole bottle and not having a hangover to knock everything else but that out of his mind. If he regularly drinks his way through his day off, he'll be expecting to wake feeling like a three-day corpse. The fact he doesn't ought to be enough by itself to keep him from any dangerous selfquestioning. Now, for those dishes and pots.

He had already turned away, when a question occurred to him. He turned back in time to catch her before she left the room for the bedroom. Amanda, he said, what's happened to them, inside, as a result of all this-the Exotics here, I mean?

She smiled at him. You tell me what you think, she answered. And then I'll let you know if that agrees with my own ideas. Remember? I brought you here to see for yourself. If it'd simply been a matter of telling it, I could have told you back at the Encyclopedia. You tell me; and then I'll let you know how that agrees with what I think I've noticed. The Exotics I've always known, said Hal, were calm, intelligent, reasonable people, all of them. But nearly all of them also had a sort of philosophical arrogance underneath their gentle exteriors. It seems to me these people've had that arrogance planed off them; and they're almost a little surprised to find that the philosophy's still there. Like someone who's had a stand of large and valuable trees burned off land they own. Their first feeling is that they've lost everything. Then they reafiaiized thAt the oArth thov owned kz @fill there And therfore, no reason the trees can't be regrown. Maybe even taller and stronger, because of the ashes enriching the soil.

Amanda smiled. I'd agree with that, she said. Did anything about the occupying soldiers strike you, by the way? I haven't seen enough of them to tell, said Hal. They're sweepings-no good military commander would figure thent worth having. Sorry, said Amanda. I put that badly. I should have said-does anything about the way the soldiers react to the Kultans strike you? I haven't really seen enough of that, either. But Mario seems-they all seem to have made some sort ofimpression on the soldiers. I can't make out yet just what. Nothing specifically useful to the Exotics. Just a sort of moral ascendancy; which the troopers seem to be acknowledging whether they're consciously aware of it or not.

Amanda smiled again, and nodded. He smiled back at her and turned again to the kitchen as she went off to see about something clean and unused with which to make up lban's bed.

When Hal came in there, after cleaning up in the kitchen, he found that she had covered the existing layers of bedding with extra blankets; and put down some more for cover, if needed. She was already asleep on the side of the bed against the wall when he got there. Now that he let himself feel it, a strong weariness was in him as well.

He laid himself down softly beside her and closed his eyes. He was ready to sleep; but once his body became inactive, a tribe of unanswered questions that had erupted into his mind at various times of the day came back at him like a mob, clamoring for attention. Ruthlessly, he pushed them from his mind; but they crowded in again.

The difference in the Exotics he had seen here must be onN part of what was obviously in process of change about this whole world. Perhaps he should have gone down to Earth from the Final Encyclopedia, this last year, to see for himself how the people there were really changing; as Ajela and Rukh had seemed convinced they were. The coming of the Others appeared to have had a much wider effect on humanity than even he had given it credit for. . . .

He smiled to himself, harshly. Almost he had forgotten that he had given up trying to reach an understanding that would give him the key to the Creative Universe. With an effort he blanked his mind to all these questions and possibilities and, in the dark void that remained, the sleep that his body reached for came easily.

CHAPTER

12

A touch woke Hal. He looked up at Amanda. Time to leave? he asked. . Yes, she said. The gates'll be open in about twenty minutes. There'll be a crowd waiting to make the most of the day outside the city by getting out as soon as possible. We're safest leaving with them.

The day before had been cloudless. This one had scattered tufts of white moisture afloat, it seemed, just beyond arm's reach, with the mountains toward which they headed looming over all. The day warmed with the sun, but the road climbed steeply almost from the time they lost sight of the city gates in the vegetation behind them; and the air was thinner and drier than it had been on the previous day's walk. Not many people are headed this way, commented Hal, after they had been on their route for about an hour. Soil's not much worth farming as we get higher, said Amanda. Look, you can notice the change in forestation.

Indeed, Hal had. And over that day and into the next, he watched the changes in their surroundings. From the scattered stands of taller timber and the plenteous bush and scrub trees of the uplands, they moved into more open woods of variform evergreens whose ancestral seeds had been imported from Earth; mixed, still, with some native varieties. By the way, I left Mario some inonev so she could reolace the food we ate without Than being any the wiser; and also so she'd have a little extra for her own use. Money? said Hal. He had had so little use for money, beyond the letters of interstellar credit he had carried in his younger years, when he was trying to stay one jump ahead of Bleys Ahrens and the Others, that he simply had not thought of money in connection with this trip to Kultis. What sort of money do they have here? Scrip issued by the occupying authorities, now, said Amanda. Arranged to further put the squeeze on the native Exotics. Theoretically, anything else-even interstellar credits in any form-isn't legal tender anymore on this planet and on Mara. Where'd you get scrip? I didn't see any when the guard at the gate dumped your bag to see what was in it. I'd picked some up on my earlier trips, and brought it out with me, she said. At the Encyclopedia your friend, Jeamus Walters, copied me a large stock of it. Most of it's still in the ship; but I'm carrying a young fortune sewn into the hem of my robe.

She paused. Your friend Jeamus seems to be able to do anything. With the help of the Encyclopedia, Hal said. Also, before I went to steep, Amanda went on, I stole a small, but useful, amount from lban. Not so much that he'll notice the loss, but enough to help out what I gave Mario. A man who stuffs scrip into any pocket that's handy doesn't usually keep an account book in his head. That's true enough, said Hal. I could have given Mario a lot more, of course, she continued, but the Authority strictly limits the amount of scrip in circulation, to tighten up the shortages being forced on the people. If Mario had a lot to spend, she'd stick out like a sore thumb. I can do a lot more good by giving small amounts to a large number of people, spread across a wide area.

Hal nodded. How far is it to this Chantry Guild? An easy day's walk from here to the Zipacas. Though this isn't a route I've taken lately, said Amanda. From there, a short climb to the Guild itself-

She broke off in midsentence. They had both halted reflexively at a faint sound that it was impossible to identify.

Amanda gestured with a hand toward her ear, in a signal to continue listening. Hal nodded. He had lost the noise and at first heard only the sound of the insects and the breeze in the trees around them. Then he became aware of an undertone that was a human voice talking steadily in a low, unvarying pitch. The voice was too far off for them to distinguish words; but it was undeniably the sound of someone speaking, steadily and without pause or change in emphasis. It's up ahead, said Amanda. Yes, said Hal.

They went on up the road, which here curved to its left through a stand of the local evergreens. Mounting a small rise, they looked down a short, relatively open, slope into a clearing that held the ruins of one of the former Exotic villas.

Vegetation had not yet encroached upon those ruins, but there was little enough left of the home that had been. Back some short distance from the road were the low remains of firedestroyed walls, partly shrouded with vines and weeds. Most such places, and this one was no exception, had owned white walls; and the fire-blackening had oddly and arbitrarily seemed to paint what was left standing of these, so that the impression was of an end to the home that had come about by age rather than by flame.

Hal remembered that he had felt something medieval about the moment in which they had waited at the gates of Porphyry. Today, the ruins of the houses they had passed had struck him with a feeling from an even earlier period in history. They had made him think, for some strange reason, of how the ruins of Roman villas must have looked in ancient Britain, after the military power of that mighty but decaying Empire was withdrawn; and the barbarians flooded in to loot, slay and destroy what had been.

There was no obvious reason for such a thought to arise now. Nonetheless, it was strong in him as the two of them started down toward what was left of the home in the clearing, and the man they saw there.

He wore the ordinary penitential robe and had let his graying hair and beard grow. These were clotted into locks from lack of washing; and his robe, even from a distance, showed that it had not been cleaned for a very long time. He was a thin man, whose hollowed cheeks looked sucked in above the beard that mounted his face toward the cheekbones; and his arms and legs, protruding from the robe, were skin and bone.

He stood before what had once perhaps been a decorative fishpond in the forecourt of the villa. It was a round body of water with a red-tiled edging, some four meters across in size and undoubtedly quite shallow, since mounds of something peeked here and there above the surface. The breeze blowing across it up the slope toward Hal and Amanda brought a smell sick with the stink of organic decay.

The area around the pool itself, a circular terrace of gray stone with white stone benches and a stone pedestal about chest high to the man-before which he stood-had been meticulously restored, cleaned and cared for. Everything sparkled in the clear upland light, with two exceptions, besides the appearance of the man himself.

One, was the dark opaque waters of the pool, which seemed to swallow all light falling on it; and the other was a row of decorative flowerpots all around its edge. Those in the flowerpots to the man's right held many-branched plants of some sort, that had been stripped down to bare branches and twigs, as if in the depths of winter.

The contrast of these with the potted plants on the man's left was startling. The latter were of the same size and shape, but bore small, heart-shaped green leaves, and a profusion of flowers in a variety of reds and pinks, the tiny petals of the cup-shaped blossoms curving upward together to make a bouquet that in the case of each plant made it look like a Horn of Plenty made of fine, tinted lace. These gleamed in the sunlight, the soil at their base black from recent watering.

On the pedestal in front of the man was one of the pots with the flower-bearing plants in it. As they approached he stood there, continuing to talk-apparently to it, since there was no one else in sight-in a steady stream of words so run together as to be individually indistinguishable and incomprehensible.

As he did this he slowly, delicately and methodically, one by one, took hold of petals from the blossoms of the plant on the pedestal before him and tore them off, dropping them into the decay-smelling waters of the pond before him.

Hal and Amanda came into the forecourt itself and walked up to him. But he took no notice of them; only went on methodically destroying the plant before him. As the final petal of the last blossom fell to the dark water below, he began stripping and shredding the leaves of the plant, one by one. Fugga, mugga, shugga . . . , he seemed to be muttering.

Understanding woke suddenly in Hal's mind and, turning to Amanda, he saw that the same comprehension had come to her. What the man was intoning was a litany of obscenities, so many times repeated that the syllables of the words had run together to the point where the words themselves had lost all meaning. Hello, said Amanda clearly, almost in the man's ear.

He took no notice of her. Whether he did not hear, or whether he heard but paid no attention, was impossible to say. His robe was so grimed and worn that Hal had paid little attention to it originally; but now he made out the fact that at some time in the past, the word DESTRUCT! had been painted on it, both front and back.

As they watched, the man finished stripping the last leaves from the flower bush he had been denuding. He fell silent, turned from it, still ignoring Hal and Amanda, and went down to the end of the last of the pots with the stripped branches. He picked this pot up and carefully carried it back into the ruins of the house.

They followed him. He went completely through what had been once the closed rooms of the dwelling, and came out into an open area which was filled with scores of plants in pots like his current burden.

They were in all stages from utterly bare of leaves and flowers through the buds of new leaves and flowers to full-blooming individuals. Still ignoring them, he found a place to set down the pot holding the stripped plant, then went to another part of the area and chose a plant overflowing with blossoms. Carrying this as carefully as he had carried the stripped plant, he went back toward the front of the house, out into the forecourt, and put the blooming plant at the end of the line of those on the left of his pedestal.

He dusted the palms of his hands together as he went back to the pedestal. He lifted on to it the nearest of the row of blooming plants, putting it side by side with the one he had just stripped. Leaving them there, he began moving over, one by one, the other pots of unharmed plants, then the row of bare-limbed ones. Finally, he took the plant he had just stripped and lifted it down into the vacant place now available just to the right of his pedestal.

He straightened up and began stripping the petals from the nearest bloom of the fresh pot before him, dropping the petals into the thick water of the pond. The stream of nonsense syllables came again from his lips. All through the time they had been beside him he had never once shown any awareness of Amanda or Hal. There's nothing we can do for him, said Amanda. We might as well go.

They turned away and went on toward the mountains. But gazing at those toward which they traveled it occurred to Hal for the first time that if, as Amanda had said, the edges of the rock forming the valley floor had been uptifted by the molten, interior rock rising from below, then it was very old rock that now essentially plated the new at the base of the mountains. As his mind reached out to conceive of the possible millions of years of difference between the two ages of rocks combined into one single entity that was the range, a strange and unexplainable shiver ran on spider-light feet up his spine. And then was gone.

But the memory of its passing stayed in the back of his mind, even as the image of the man they had just left displaced it in his present thoughts and continued with him as they went. Hal saw the image in his mind, only. There was nothing interfering with his physical eyes, which took automatic note of his surroundings; including the road that now had dwindled to a foot trail of packed earth, and had begun to follow the contours of small, but fairly steep, hills as it continued to work its way upward.

Their surroundings now varied from open patches to heavily forested slopes, both above and below their way. The open spaces were covered with knee-high versions of ferns; and for the first time Hal was conscious of these being stirred by the passage of occasional small animals. He pointed the movement out to Amanda. Rabbits, said Amanda. You remember I mentioned them'? The Kultans imported a variform to be fartned for meat protein, for those of the Exotics who weren't on purely vegetarian diets. Some got loose . . .

She waved her hand at the forest about them. Yon we the readt - @hv @Aid -N(i witimfl nrethti)nz to keen them in check. They spread over this whole land mass. At any rate, they've turned out to be a boon to the locals as the major source of meat available; and since protein isn't easily got by any but the military, the native population's become meat-eaters out of necessity, to balance their diet.

Hat nodded, and turned his mind to other observations of their surroundings. Procyon was high in the sky above them and the last of the puffs of clouds seemed to have burned away in the heat of the air at this upper altitude. He saw all this, but his thoughts were not on it. He had returned to trying to imagine himself in the mind of the man they had just seen.

This business of imagining himself as being someone else he had met had begun as a game when he had been a child, and grown from there to a practice, and from a practice almost to a compulsion. He had come to count it as a failure when he could not imagine himself seeing all things as any other person might see them.

It was more difficult to put himself in the other's shoes than it would be with almost anyone else. The man was obviously insane. But he should be able to do it with sufficient effort.

He had probably been driven into that state by whatever the Occupation soldiery had done when they destroyed his house; and it was because he was so plainly mad that they had not bothered to move him away from the ruins into the town, since then, as they had with the other Exotics.

Hal focused his inner vision DOW on the thought that it was he himself standing there, plucking the blossoms, destroying the flowers. It was slow . . . but the image of the scene took shape in his mind's eye at last.

It was always necessary to understand; and to really understand it was necessary to actually feel himself being somebody else. A complete empathy. Empathy was a good word for the process of other-being. Good . . . and necessary. Complete empathy produced in the end complete responsibility. Complete responsibility became in the end universal and instinctive-an automatic consideration before any action involving other human beings.

With full and instinctive responsibility in all humans, James would not have died, Tam would not now be at the brink of death with three men's deaths still crushingly upon his conscience.

Now, to himself, he was the madman; and to him, the destruction of the plants was the destruction of what had destroyed his sanity. Bit by bit, he was trying to balance the books, to climb back to where he had once been. But the path he had chosen was circular. He would never get there.

Unless, perhaps unless, Hal could unlock the Creative Universe for him, along with all other people.

Somehow the mad man, lban, the Exotics, the Encyclopedia, the war, Old Earth, the Younger Worlds-they all came together like lines converging to a point. He could all but feel the convergence right now as a living thing, held in his hands, like the willow twig of a divining rod. Oddly, he felt it in his mind as if it converged toward this place he had never seen, the place toward which he now moved. The new Chantry Guild.

Strange how the one person it was at once easiest and hardest for him to be was Bleys.

His inner eye watched the thing of greater importance, the thin fingers dropping the torn petals into the dark water. His mind went far, far back into his childhood as Donal Graeme, a century before. You're thinking, said Amanda, after some time.

He started, broken out of his thoughts into the world about him again. Yes, he said. That man back there . . . I was like that, once.

They continued walking. His eyes were on the trail ahead of him, but at the edge of his vision he saw her head turn and her eyes look at him gravely. You? she said. When? When we got the news of James's death-my youngest uncle. I told you, once, didn't l? Yes, she said. You were eleven years old; and Kensie came and found you in the stable, afterward-in a cold rage. What would you have done, even if you'd had the man responsible there, in that stable? Try to kill him-at eleven years old, as you were then? Probably, said Hal, watching the mountains ahead. Pure destruction is a circular action. It trapped me then, as Donal, and I've spent all my time since growing out of it. I know, she said softly. You see, he said, looking at her, it's got no place to go but back upon itself. It can only replace, the way that man replaces his plants, over and over, never adding to what's there. Creativity's the opposite, a straight line projecting endlessly forward. The trouble is, the urge to destruction is a racial instinct, useful for testing the individual's ability to control his environment. Children vandalizing a school are doing exactly the same thing as that man we passed. It's instinctive in each new generation, as it becomes conscious of time, to want to sweep away everything old and make everything new. It's instinct in them to feel that all the past went wrong; and now they're going to start the race on the right path from then on. But the circularity of destruction traps everyone who does that; and they end up blamed, along with the rest of all history, by the generations that follow. That's why, even with the historic forces endlessly seeking a balance, Bleys and the Others have to lose eventually; because they'll be left behind while the creative people move forward. And evolution happens when that takes place. You're saying, said Amanda, that Bleys is out to destroy Old Earth and the best products of the human Splinter and other cultures, as nothing more than some sort of surrogate for what he really wants to destroy'? Like the man with his flower petals? Not exactly, said Hal. His philosophy's sensible enough if you accept his premises; primarily, that humanity in the past let technology run away with it and went too far, too fast, too soon. No, it's not a ritual, instinctive reaction that moves him, but faulty reasoning- because he lacks empathy, and therefore a sense of responsibility. It's just that he could have gotten started toward it from the same sort of targetless fury as I did, like the man back there maybe did. Bleys could have begun turning into what he is, out of rage at a universe that gave him everything-brilliance, will, mental, moral and physical strength-and then, like the uninvited witch at the christening in the children's story, capped it all with the fact he could never find any other human being to share what he made with him. You think so? said Amanda. I don't know, answered Hal. But it could be. And it might be important.

Almost, he had become lost in his thoughts again. What brought him out of them this time was a glimpse he thought he had, momentarily, of an expression on Amanda's face. He came back to his surroundings and looked narrowly at her. Were you smiling? he asked. Why? Was IT' said Amanda, her features now perfectly composed. She tucked an arm through his and squeezed it. If I was, it was because I love you. You know, it's time we stopped somewhere along here to eat. Help me look for a good place.

CHAPTER

13

They found such a spot, shortly. A small, fern-carpeted open area where a tiny stream of cold, drinkable water crossed the trail, from among the bushes and trees on the route's upper side. Seated there, they looked down a clear space of hillside to a heavily treed valley a hundred or so meters below. Amanda unpacked dried fruit and pieces of cornbread. The other food consisted mainly of sandwiches, the taste of which carried the flavor of the pith Hal had eaten before. They went well with the icy water of the stream, which must have its source in the mountains above.

They spent no more than twenty minutes at the most, eating. Procyon was already only an hour or less from the tops of the mountains that could be seen towering above the treetops ahead of them. The mountains looked only a few hundred meters ahead in the clear air, when they must be much more distant than that, Hal thought. He and Amanda went on their way. We haven't seen anyone else, except the man by the pond. for hours, said Hal. Aren't there any people at all up this way? Not as far as I know. That's why the Chantry Guild is back in here. There's nothing much to support a population, answered Amanda. Oh, there're mountain meadows that could be used for grazing animals, but the Exotics were never herdsmen, even in their early years here; and of course the living's so easy, particularly here at the edge of the tropics, that they've never had any need to. Even before the Occupation, you'd have found it empty up here, except for an occasional traveler. But now the Occupation doesn't let natives make trips without special reason-and special permits. So from here on until we hit the Chantry Guild we shouldn't run into anyone.

Hal was ready to believe her. The road had long since become a foot-track, which had in turn become a trail, and now was nothing at all. It was as if Amanda was setting her course across open country, by memory or some other unseen means. Hal watched the ground carefully as they covered it. Tracking had been one of the many skills drilled into him by his tutors, so his eye was skilled enough to pick up even small signs of others having passed this way. In fact, he did so, from time to time-things as small as a scuff mark in the dirt or a broken twig-though those were few and inconspicuous.

He ceased to look, therefore, for sign and let himself simply enjoy the walk through the open country.

Enjoyment was there, to anyone raised in the mountains -and Hal was doubly so. As Donal he had grown up in the mountains holding his home, Foralie, on Dorsai; and as Hal he had been raised until he was sixteen among the Rocky Mountains of North America, on Earth. Being among them now brought an exhilaration to him that no other kind of country could evoke. Unthinkingly, his head lifted, his eyes read the lands and heights around him, his nostrils sniffed the clean, clear air . . . and his stride lengthened. You can slow down now, Amanda said. We'll be following along a stream course for a little distance, and it's almost level. Oh. Was I pushing the pace? said Hal. He was embarrassed. Not for me. But we've got a way to go yet and the last part's a literal climb. Better take it easy.

Even as she said this, they were already among the unbroken strip of trees and bush, interspersed with leafy stalks of bright green fern, a meter or more in height, that filled the nearly even floor of earth between two steeply upward-sloping and wooded hillsides.

Here, for the first time in some while, the trail they were following became once more visible as it wound between the trees. Obviously it was in regular use, to have had enough traffic to keep it from being overgrown. What was it doing here, in a region that did not usually host ordinary travelers-

A faint touch on his left arm brought him back to his surroundings. He looked at Amanda, and she briefly brushed the outside corner of her left eyebrow with a forefinger, as if some small insect had landed there.

This was one of the signals from the short- language and signals she had asked him if he remembered, back when they were about to leave the courier ship. She had just signed that something was watching them and paralleling their course on the side indicated. Whatever it was, was doing so deliberately, for it was at once keeping up with them, and keeping out of sight among the trees and brush off to their left.

Without looking directly to his left, Hal set himself to seeing what he could pick up out of the corner of his eyes. It took a little time, but eventually he became aware of whatever it was, more by the faint noises and small movements of the ferns and branches it pushed aside in its passage-though it was apparently trying to move as quietly as it could-than by actual sight of it.

He glanced at Amanda and questioned her with a raised eyebrow.

Amanda shook her head in puzzlement, and her hands moved in small movements, quick but unobtrusive signals. It's human-a child, or child-sized, I think, she said in this silent fashion. It's interested in us for some reason. There's an open spot of nothing much more than bush and fern just ahead. Let's sit down there as if we're taking a break and try to tempt it out into the open.

Hal blinked a signal of agreement at her, and a few moments later when they had emerged into the open area she had referred to and reached close to the center of it, she yawned, stretched and stopped. Hal stopped with her. Let's sit down a bit, she said clearly. Whoever was shadowing them could not have failed to overhear. There's no hurry.

She had stopped by a small bank overgrown with fern-a tiny variety rather than the larger growth that had been interspersed with the trees earlier. This was, in fact, a natural stopping place. It occurred to Hal that these would make an excellent bed for Amanda and himself to stretch out on, together. They sat down on the bank now, cross-legged and facing each other. Chit! said Amanda. Reelin.

She had switched now to the audible short- language. On the Dorsai a number of code words were generally known by everyone, since these could come in useful if two Dorsai on a foreign planet wanted to exchange information within the hearing of others when they did not wish to be understood. In addition, each family tended to have its own private code of made up words; and the members of the Morgan and the Graeme families, growing up and playing together as children, knew most of each others' private codes. As youngsters, there had also been a particular pleasure in being able to exchange secret information under the noses of nonunderstanding adults. So the codes were always improved upon by each new generation.

In effect, what Amanda had just said was, Let's talk in a

way our shadower can't understand. Maybe we can trick whoever it is into coming closer to try and hear better, andfigure out what we're up to. Right, said Hal. There was no particular reason not to use a plainly understandable word in answer, and a few understandable words might increase the temptation of the listener to come in close and hear enough of them to make out what the tenor of conversation was. Muckle minny cat, he added.

He was pointing out that there were two of them, and since whatever or whoever it was that had been shadowing them was not large, one of them ought to be able to catch it while the other blocked its escape in this direction. Implied was the question of who should chase and who should block.

Amanda smiled, slightly but firmly. One! (I'll be the one to chase), '' she said. Home snapback (you stay here and get ready in case whoever we're chasing doubles back this way.) R, he said, agreeing. She would be faster and more agile at broken-country running than he. Mark!

The last word was to remind her that their listener had crept close enough so that now an effort might be made to catch him or it. R, said Amanda. One-C.

The last code word reasserted the fact that she was in Command; and, as the chaser, she would pick her own moment to begin pursuit. Meanwhile, with their gazes apparently only upon each other, they were both using their peripheral vision to try and observe something about their watcher, who had indeed slipped closer to them to try to understand their strange conversation. Whisper stonewall (I've heard some talk about this person, but I could never get an 'v definite information),'' said Amanda. They both had their shadower plainly in view out of the corners of their eyes now. Y'un.

That she was a young-one, a half-grown girl, was inarguable, since-except for a length of what looked like dark green, dried vine, with half of a split open pod in the middle of it, knotted around her waist-she was completely unclothednaked was not a word that suited, since she wore her lack of clothes as unselfconsciously and naturally as an animal wears its pelt of fur. The vine seemed more an ornament than any attempt at a piece of clothing; although at the moment she was apparently using the split-open half of the pod as a sort of pocket for carrying what looked like small rocks, about half the size of her own fist. She was certainly under the age of twelve or thirteen, unless she was a case of arrested physical development. Carry! said Amanda-which broadly translated into 'we've got to get her out of here and to some place where she can be caredfor! R, said Hal.

His agreement was automatic, while waiting for her to start the pursuit-and in fact he had hardly got the last codeword out before she had sprung to her feet and dashed off in pursuit of the little girl.

Amanda was fast-very fast. But the child was almost literally like the wind. Also, plainly, she knew every foot of the ground. She zig-zagged like a hare in flight, leading the way through openings in the forest growth large enough for someone her size to slip through, but too small for one of adult size. In seconds they were both out of Hal's sight among the farther trees.

The sound of their passage, however, turned once more in his direction, and he suddenly caught sight of the little girl backtracking at full speed. She looked likely to cross the trail some twenty meters ahead of Hal. He jumped to his feet and ran to intercept her.

She zigged and gained on him, zagged and made it back and across the trail after all. He followed her out of sheer stubbornness for perhaps fifty meters, and then accepted the fact that she had been gaining on him with almost every step and was plainly now lost beyond question. He walked slowly back to the trail and Amanda, catching his breath as he went.

Amanda was standing waiting for him on the bank where they had been sitting. It'd take a hunting party of a dozen, with nets, to surround that one and get her, Amanda said as Hal came close. She had already gotten her wind back, which was more than he had. The climate's mild year 'round at this altitude. But still, how she's survived by herself, God knows. She couldn't have gotten this wild and skillful in Just one summer. She's like an animal-maybe more animal than human, by this time. One way or another, it's the Occupation that's responsible for this, too. In Exotic times, she'd have been found and brought in long before this. R, said Hal, trying not to pant. He was once more annoyingly conscious of how unfit he was, in spite of his daily exercise sessions at the Final Encyclopedia; and being lashed in the face by branches that were just at the right height to be run under by the child, but not by him, had not made him any happier. I suppose we might as well be getting along. Might as well, agreed Amanda.

They took up their way in somber silence. The streambed they had beera following had been inclining more and more steeply with every step they took these last few minutes. Suddenly, they came through a small, thick cluster of trees and there was the face of the mountain itself; a near-vertical brown limestone wall of rock looking as if it had grown up suddenly through the ground before them, to tower on up and back, until it was out of sight.

The forest came almost to that wall. Amanda led Hal forward and he saw that the lower part of the near-vertical rock was pitted and indented with concavities. This way, said Amanda, leading him to one dark opening, which they had to bend double to enter. Hal followed her in, thinking that they were moving into a cave, which made no sense-but suddenly their way turned under the rock and he saw light before him. They came out, into sunlight once more, somewhat higher up, into a sort of gouge in the steep rock face itself.

Hal noticed as they emerged that a large, semi-round boulder was perched to one side of their exit. It looked as if it-were balanced so that it could be rolled to fall with its bulging side into the place where they had just come out, like a stopper into a bottle. Amanda led him into the gouge, and they continued upward, now climbing as much as walking, working their way around bosses of the naked brown limestone. They stopped to rest for a while on a small level area. How much farther? asked Hal, shading his eyes to look up the rock face they were climbing. I can't see any sign of anything built up there; and-- He switched his gaze to Procyon in the west. --the sun is going to be behind those peaks in a hurry-I'd guess no more than another fifteen minutes. You don't see anything because nothing's supposed to be seen, said Amanda. But you're right about the fifteen minutes. We'll make it.

Hal looked up and for the first time saw, only a dozen meters or so higher up, that what he had assumed to be an unbroken, steep slope above them, actually ended in the lip of a ledge. The ledge ran off out of sight on either hand around the bulge of the mountainside. Its rock had blended in appearance very well with a slope behind it that he now realized must be at some distance from the edge he saw.

He had not noticed it before because the light of the descending sun had added to the illusion of a single, unbroken, upward face of rock. Now the sun was down enough that shadow lay on the rock face under an overhang of the upper slope beyond, as it lay on the two of them, here. The ledge itself must still be in sunlight, for what had caught his eye at last had been that its lip was now rimmed with light.

Seeing it, and aware of the waiting level just above them, the reality of the place that was their destination became suddenly solid and undeniable in his mind. His thoughts moved together into an undeniable conclusion, and he knew that finally he must have the answers he had wanted from Amanda earlier. Wait! he said.

He had stopped; and now, ahead of him, Amanda stopped and turned to face him. What is it? she asked. This may be my last chance to talk to you alone for a while. The words seemed to sound stiff and awkward even as he said them-but they had to be said. When Tam Olyn told you to have faith back at the Final Encyclopedia, what was he talking about? And what was it you turned back to say to Rukh and Ajela, just before we left?

She gazed down at him for a long moment with an unusual intentness, as if she was trying to search for something deep within him. Tell me, she said at last, are you going on up? Or are you turning back, even at this point? Why should I turn back? Would you-now?

He thought about it for a moment. No, he said then, I wanted to come here. I still do. Good, she said, because you had to come here of your own decision, your own free will. Because you wanted to come. I did. You know that. I had to make sure, she said. She hesitated for a second. You see, she said, when I stopped to talk to Rukh and Ajela, it was to tell them it would be all right now, that there was hope you'd find the Creative Universe after all.

He stared at her. How could you promise them something like that? he said. I've no guarantee there's hope-you knew that. And even if I did, no one can know certainly, one way or another! Oh, Hal! She threw her arms around him suddenly, pressing her head against his chest. Don't you understand? You've worn yourself thin trying to get through a wall at a point where there was no way in. Back at the Final Encyclopedia, you could see how everybody else had been worn thin; but you wouldn't face it in yourself! You've got to step back from the problem and wait for another way to come to you. That's why you had to come here! And as for the other question: I only know what Tam saw. He was seeing more than I ever had, because, just as he said, he was halfway through the door to death. But when he told me what he'd seen, I could see it, too-a time in which I'd need to believe in you, and why. Because you'd have won after all-but at a greater price than any of us had ever imagined. And the way to that's here; I can feel it! What price? He was almost glaring at her, he knew, but he could not help himself. I don't know! she said, still holding him. I said it was beyond imagination; for me-and I think even for Tam. He only knew the fact of it. But when he told me, I could feel it the way he did; and I understood something else-that I couldn't tell you, until you'd committed yourself by actually coming here.

She stopped, as if she had suddenly run out of breath. What else? he demanded. Your next step on the road to what Tam made me see. You've committed yourself now by coming to the Chantry Guild here, of your own free will and choice. If I'd told you before this, it might have affected what you keep calling the Forces of History.

She let go of him then, but kept a hand on his arm as if a living connection was necessary for the message she still had to reach him with. Hal, she said, listen to me! Tam has to die completed if you're ever to do what you first set out to do. You have to find the Creative Universe before he dies. Only that'll justify his life in his own eyes; and he must die justified. If he doesn't, you'll never find it!

He stared at her. Don't ask me why! she said. I don't know why! I only know what Tam believes; and-I know he's right.

Hal's mind clicked and slid, from premise, to odds, to conclusion. Now that his intuitive logic was given what it needed to work with, it was offering up answers where it could offer none before. What Amanda said made sense.

Until the Final Encyclopedia should be put to its final, practical use, the shape of that use would be undefined. It had been passed on, undefined, as no more than a dream, from Mark Torre to Tam and from Tam to him. The chain of cause and effect of this unreal and as-yet- unshaped, but powerful, cause could break at Tam's death, if he believed he had died without it reaching at last to its goal. It would mean to him that all his life, and everything effected by it, had been a wrong working of the developing historical fabric; a working to a dead end, that now would be abandoned.

Hal felt suddenly weak, with the weakness of shock. It had just been shown to him that he alone, of the three of them, had been in a position of choice. Neither Torre nor Tam could have turned from their work once they had taken it up. He could have-had to have been able to, before being given the chance to find the answer they all had sought-or else there was no free will. Otherwise, the fabric of future history was pre-determined.

And it was not. Not fixed. Only the past was that. So he alone had had the power of choice-and he had almost chosen wrongly.

No, never that.' Succeed or fail; but to give up as he had thought himself ready to do was unthinkable after the torch had been carried this far. Fail, if he must, but the only decision he could live with was to stick with it to the end. Otherwise, all he had ever believed was false and useless.

He turned his face again to the ledge above them and felt Amanda's hand slip down his arm to take his hand. Together, they went up into sunlight.

CHAPTER

14

The sunset exploded in their eyes as they came up over the rim onto the ledge, for a moment all but blinding Hal as his eyes struggled after the dirnness of the shadowed slope below. His legs felt strange and weak to be once more on level ground. Gradually, visual adjustment came and he began to make out what was around them.

They had stepped up onto a level space that ran back a hundred meters or so before the mountain face resumed its upward thrust. The ledge was at least five times as wide as it was deep and it was a crowded, busy place.

For a moment, still dazzled by the rays of the setting sun, Hal could not make out the details. Then his vision made a sharper adjustment, and all that was there seemed to stand out with a particular depth and clarity, as if he was seeing it in more than three dimensions.

There were several openings in the mountain face at the back of the level space; whether to caves, or interior continuations of the ledge, it was impossible to tell from where he stood. He and Amanda stood only a little way to the right of a small pond, fed by a stream which angled across the flat rock of the ledge floor from a near waterfall spilling down the farther face of the mountain. The pond must drain from its bottom, he thought, since there was no other obvious exit, and the water probably emerged elsewhere on the mountainside or as a spring in the forest below.

Directly ahead, on the right of the tiny stream as Hal looked toward the back of the ledge, were three large buildings. The one farthest in was slightly larger than the one next to it; and the one closest was a structure so small that it seemed hardly more than a cabin by comparison with the other two.

All three buildings had been built of logs. The face of the mountain behind was in the process of being quarried for blocks of brown limestone, and some of these blocks had already been set up on the other side of the stream, marking the outline of what promised to be a greater structure that would eventually fill and use all the space at the back of the ledge. Away from the stream on both sides, and otherwise in lines about the ledge as well as against the upslanting rock walls of the mountain--so steep their upper branches touched the stone-were numerous variform pine, with a scattering of native evergreens. Pine needles were scattered everywhere, and made a carpet over all the ledge itself.

People in robes were moving purposefully everywhere, along paths under the lines of trees. The only exception to this, in the sharp sunset light, was a ring of individuals walking in a circle, a little beyond and behind the pond. They walked, one behind the other, chanting; a chant that Hal now realized some acoustical trick of the rock below the level of the ledge had kept him from hearing until this moment. But now it came clearly to his ears.

They intoned it as they walked, but it carried no clear message to him in this first moment. But for a reason he could not identify, something about it rang a deep note of certainty in him. It was right.

The last of the sunset was disappearing with the swiftness that was to be expected on a world under such a tiny seeming circle of light. The star was, in fact, far from Kultis and MaraProcyon was a much larger, as well as brighter, star than Earth's Sun. At the distance from it that Earth was from its Sun, a world like this would have been uninhabitable.

The evening shadow seemed to fall across all the world at once; and as it did so, Hal's mind finally registered the sense of what the walkers were repeating. That what they repeated had taken this long to become intelligible to him had not been because the words had not been spoken in Basic-Basic was what everyone on all the human worlds normally used nowadays. Nor was it because they had run the words together, or in any way sounded them differently.

it had only been because of their method of chanting. They intoned the phrase they used, not in chorus, but as if each one was repeating it solely to himself or herself. Sometimes the voices blended on the same sound at the same moment; and sometimes they did not. But at any rate, now he clearly heard and understood them. There were only eight words to what they repeated.

The transient and the eternal are the same . . . The transient and the eternal are the same . . .

So suddenly did they become understandable to him, that it was as if they had abruptly been translated from some language he did not know into one he had spoken from his earliest years.

It was not so much the words in themselves that registered so strongly on him, but the burden of their meaning; which he could not identify clearly, but which stirred him strangely. As unfamiliar music might move him unexpectedly and strongly even at the first hearing.

It was like a sound heard around a corner and out of sight, striking some powerful meaning in him; but exactly what and why was not immediately clear. Still, for the present it did not matter. The knowing would come, at its own pace, but in time to,be useful. All that mattered now was realizing that it rang a deep chime of truth in him.

It continued . . .

The transient and the eternal are the same . . . The transient and the eternal . . .

. . .and so it went, on and on, echoing in him as if his mind was one great unlighted cavern and it was speaking to him with the voice of all the universe at once. Echoing and speaking, echoing and speaking. . . .

His body tensed to make an instinctive step toward the circle; then checked. He held back, his eyes focusing for some reason on one walker with a long, white beard, silky on a thin, bony face beneath oriental eyes. The man he watched had just completed the turn of the circle, after having been facing away from Hal, but now came back toward him. For a moment his features were clear in spite of the steadily deepening shadow that seemed to wash the colors from the walker's patterned robe of thin, smooth cloth, unlike the rough garments the other walkers wore. Hal turned to Amanda. He saw her face looking up at him, concerned. He looked back down and smiled to reassure her. You were right, he said. I needed to come here. Good, she said, the concern relaxing from her eyes. Come along then. Where? he asked.

The face of the ]edge was busy with people moving to and fro between its buildings. Some of these smiled at Amanda; but none seemed surprised to see her. They extended their smile in a welcome to Hal himself in a manner so like that of the Exotics as Hal remembered, that he felt a sudden, small pang of sadness. Amanda was leading the two of them toward the smallest of the buildings. First you've got to meet the one in charge here, she said, an old friend of yours. Old friend? He tried to think of Exotics who might fit that description. Nonne?

Nonne had been the Exotic representative -theoretically to the Final Encyclopedia, but actually, as both the Exotics and Hal had clearly understood, to Hal himself, since he had been the one who had won their allegiance to the cause of Old Earth in a debate against Bleys, broadcast to both Exotic worlds.

That had been at the time of the movement of the Dorsal people to Earth's defense, and it had resulted in the donation of Exotic wealth and knowledge to the same end. The time of the activation of the phase-shield. It was also the fact that Nonne had been sent with him to voice any objections the Exotics might have to Hal's later arrangements, as a kind of single last voice of the Exotic Splinter Culture.

Norme had stayed the first year with him at the Final Encyclopedia. But it had become more and more obvious that Hal was concerned, not with the management of Earth's defense, but only with the work he pursued alone in the carrel of his suite. So she had gone home, leaving the actual uses of Exotic funds and skill to Ajela; and the actual execution of that defense to the Dorsai.

She had ridden out through the phase-shield with one of the Dorsai advisors, like Amanda, who had been returning to the Exotics after a brief, necessary visit to Earth. Hal, at least, had heard nothing of her since.

She had been a waspish, angry woman by nature, very nearly the exact opposite of what other cultures thought of as Exotic. But Hal had appreciated the sincerity and single-mindedness of her point of view; and her sharp-faced, middle-aged image rose again in his mind now as he said her name. It had not struck him until this moment that she might be the one he should come to meet here in this place. I'll let you find out for yourself, was all Amanda answered. She led him on toward the entrance of the first, and smallest, log building.

However, before they reached it a figure that was not Nonne's but even more familiar to Hal appeared around the edge of the building. Walking beside him was a man as large as Hal. Both wore the penitential robes. But Hal's eyes fastened on the small body and wrinkled face of the smaller of the two, who had been his closest companion during the time when he had been struggling to bring the Exotics to give all they had to the cause now fought for by Earth. Amid! he said. But you're not at the Final Encyclopedia anymore,?

He corrected himself. No, of course not, he said. Forgive me. I've been so out of touch with people this last year, even at the Encyclopedia, that I forget. That's right, about eight months ago one of the advisors from Kultis, here, brought word your brother was sick. You left to go to him, didn't you? But I didn't realize you'd stayed.

A smile energized all the lines in the face of the little man so that he seemed to shine with good humor. Hal! he said, hurrying forward to take Hal's hand with both of his own. I'd hoped-but I didn't really think there was a chance Amanda could bring you here!

Hal smiled back. It would have been next to impossible not to.

As you see, he answered. But you found a job to keep you here? I'm sorry. Seeing you- He broke off. I suppose I ought to explain that Kanin wasn't actually a brother of mine, by blood-the way the word's used on other worlds. In my generation, we still ran to large communal families. But he was as close to me as if he had been, physically, my sibling. Perhaps closer. And I called him brother'. So of course I came back here as soon as I heard. And stayed, obviously, said Hal. Yes. Amid let go of Hal's hand, but continued to beam up at him. For one thing, he'd died by the time I got here, and I was needed. For another, for a long time I'd been bothered. I was sitting there, safe and useless behind the phase-shield, in the comfort of the Encyclopedia while my people were suffering. So your brother was one of the people here? He was Guildmaster, said Amid. Now, I am. By default, more or less. That's not true, said the tall man. No one could have filled Kanin's shoes, his brother's shoes, but Amid. I'm sorry, said Amid. I should have introduced Artur, here. He's Assistant Guildmaster. Artur, you know Amanda. This is Hal Mayne.

Artur extended a hand and Hal clasped it, feeling from the sudden heartiness of the grasp confirmation of what his instinctive perceptions of emotion in others had already suspected. Artur was an i mpressive- looking individual; nearly bald, with a narrow waist and massive, smooth-skinned arms and legs showing beyond the short sleeves and the hem of the robe he wore. But he would far rather have been a smaller man.

Hal had been aware that, in the first moment of their seeing each other, Artur had automatically measured himself physically against Hal's size and apparent strength. However, it had been a reflexive, unwilling measurement. Artur was undoubtedly strong, even in proportion to his height and weight, but he apparently was one of those who found the gifts of both size and strength as only crosses to be borne.

Like certain other large men Hal had met, Artur clearly had an unhappiness over the attitudes of those smaller, who assumed that because of his size he did not suffer from their fears, their sensitivities to the pains and dangers of life. He felt that everyone expected him, because of his size, to do more, to endure more, to enjoy what they thought of as an unfair advantage. An advantage he, himself, would happily have foregone if he could only be treated as no different than everyone else.

It was an unhappiness which Hal had been lucky to avoid, largely because of his upbringings, both as Donal and Hal. Also because with the Dorsai, just as physical training and skill could more than compensate for differences in power, they also rendered unimportant any advantages of extra size. Strength, there, was irrelevant, in comparison with the will and soul inside the person-large or small, old or young, man, woman, or child-on whom others might have to depend; and the Dorsai culture took for granted an understanding of this. Come in. Come in and let's talk! Amid was saying.

He stood aside to let Amanda go before him and then followed her through the doorway of the small building. Hal was about to follow, when Artur spoke behind him. Hal Mayne? Yes? Hal turned. I'm sorry . . . you're the Hal Mayne, of course. I should have recognized you at once. Amid's talked about you often.

There was embarrassment, but also relief in Artur's voice; and Hal understood. Artur could not be expected by anyone to compete against someone with Hal's reputation. Recognizing anyone right away from nothing more than verbal descriptions is pretty good, said Hal.

He turned and went in, hearing Artur behind him. Inside, the building seemed almost entirely given over to what appeared to be a single meeting, eating, and working room. The last of the sunset was almost gone behind the rocky peaks almost directly over them, in just these few minutes. But the lingering brightness of the sky still glowed into one side of the large room they had just entered, touching it through a number of the small, square windows spaced evenly around the walls. Interior lighting was just beginning to supplement this.

The artificial light came from a combination of candles, and three of the common, portable, hundred-year lamps, affixed to the rafters which openly crossed the space overhead under the steeply pitched roof.

Solar-charged lamps like these would be left over from before the coming of the Occupation Forces to Kultis, which brought an end to what relatively little manufacturing the two Exotic worlds had done for themselves. In addition, there was an open fireplace, contained within a square of four knee-high walls of reddish brick. There was a hood over it of some metal which looked like, and well might be, copper; undoubtedly likewise salvaged from earlier days on this world. The hood reached up to a chimney pipe of the same metal.

The fire already burning in the fireplace gave little light of its own; but what there was of it softened the rather harsh illumination from the hundred-year lamps, which were originally designed primarily for outdoor and commercial uses.

In the partition wall opposite the door they had just come in were two other doors, both partially open at the moment. One gave a glimpse into a small bed area, and the other, a bathroom. Around the large room were wooden chairs, homemade obviously, but padded and comfortable; and one large table end-on to them, that had its farther end piled with papers.

The four of them moved instinctively toward the chairs closest to the fireplace, for though the sun had been hidden for only a few minutes, it seemed that a chill was already penetrating into the building from the open air beyond the front door. These are my quarters, said Amid as they sat down, but I've also got another office in one of the two dormitory buildings, which can double as a bedroom. I'll let you two have that for the night, if you like, since we aren't set up for guests in the ordinary way of things. But sit down, sit down! You've come just at dinner time. Will you eat with me? We'd be glad to, Amanda said. Artur got up again, hastily. I'll take care of it, he said, and went out. He's a good Assistant Guildmaster, said Amid, as the door closed behind the big man. If I hadn't had him to help me take charge here, I don't think I could have managed. Do you mind if I ask why you did take over? Hal asked. I can see you staying, for the reasons you gave a moment ago. But why take on the job of Guildmaster? I was drafted into it, in a manner of speaking, said Amid. Those who'd known Kanin wanted me simply because I'd been his brother. They seemed to think there was something in common between us that fitted the job. And, to tell you the truth, I did know something of how Kanin thought in many ways. Even though we hadn't seen each other for fifteen years. I flattered myself my decisions would be his decisions. Because he made this place work. He didn't found it, you understand-or has Amanda told you all about the Chantry Guild already? I've told him nothing, said Amanda. I see. Amid looked at Hal. His lined old face was shrewd. Why did you come, Hal? Because Amanda said it was something I should do. She was right, said Hal.

I I You just wanted to see it? Originally, it was probably more of an excuse than a want, said Hal. But now, if you'll have me, I'd like to stay awhile. I take it, said Amid, you might want to walk in the circle then? If that's allowable, Hal answered.

Amid grinned. He did not smile, he grinned. For anyone else there'd be a period of observation first, a sort of apprenticeship; and a vote to be taken at the end of it, on him or her by all the members here, he said. But I think we could do without that, since you're who you are.

He sobered. In fact, no one but Artur and I knew you might be coming. It's probably best to keep your real identity secret as long as we

can-which won't be too long. I think the other members will let you walk on my recommendation alone, if that's necessary. No, said Hal. Yes, said Amanda. Amid, Hal doesn't know Kultis as it is now. Hal, you'd be doing the people here a favor to at least give them the excuse that they were never told who you really were.

Amid nodded, looking over at Hal. She's right, he said. Besides, it's not as if your coming in on the Guildmaster's recommendation alone was something otherwise unheard of. We've had people before this who were deserving, who've been let into the circle incognito. But--

He turned back to Amanda. It won't be more than a matter of weeks before they'll have guessed who he is, anyway. Secrets aren't easily hidden in a place as small as this ledge. in a matter of weeks, the situation could be entirely different, said Amanda. For now, let's do what we can to protect everybody concerned. Will Artur have spoken to anyone about who Hal is, when he went out just now to get the dinner? No, no. Not Artur, said Amid. He volunteers no information. Besides, he's a highly intelligent individual; and even one who wasn't would have the sense to know the danger to Hal-and to us all, as you say-if it were known he was here on Kultis. In any case, said Hal, I won't be here too long. But-Amanda, you were right. There's something here for me to find, in that circle. You were going to tell me about the one who started it? Yes, said Amid. It was a Maran Exotic you'll never have heard of, named Jathed. He was a student of historic philosophy to begin with. He was ahead of his time in speculating that we

Exotics might have gone astray from our original path. He spent twenty years, after he finished studying at various of our universities, examining our beginning-the Chantry Guild of Walter Blunt in the twenty-first century. How much do you know about that? A fair amount, as it happens, said Hal. Good, then I won't have to go into too many details for you, Amid went on. You know a chantry was a place, or an endowment for a place, where prayers could be said for a dead person, or persons; and that Walter Blunt chose this name for his organization back in the twenty-first century because by its very nature a chantry implies a relation of past, present, and future? Yes, answered Hal. Well, it was that relationship as Blunt applied it that attracted Jathed. As I say, he spent his life studying the original Chantry Guild, You can see how the idea of a connection of past, present and future, now and forever, could lead to the concept of the transient and the eternal being the same. Jathed even went to Old Earth for a while. When he came back, he set himself up more or less as a hermit on the outskirts of a little town near here called Ichang-

Hal looked at Amanda. It's about forty kilometers from Porphyry, Amanda said. We could have come through it on our way here, instead of through Porphyry; but Ichang's not a garrison town. I mean, it doesn't have a garrison of Occupation troops. The Porphyry troops have a contingent quartered there, but that's all. I wanted you to see what a garrison town on the Exotics, under the Occupation, was like. This with Jathed was some years before the Occupation, said Amid mildly. As I say, he became something of a hermit. You're probably already aware it's quite possible to live off the country in areas like the one just below us. There's enough insect, animal, bird, and vegetable life to keep anyone alive with just a couple of hours of food hunting a day. That's how Jathed lived. He deliberately wanted solitude to 'think through,' as he said, the proper direction of what should have grown from that original Chantry Guild.

Artur came in, followed by two men and a woman, all carrying loaded trays. Artur directed the setting of these at the far end of the table as Amid went on. Now, of course, since the Others, and particularly since the Occupation, he said, every one on our two worlds has necessarily begun to rethink the direction we Exotics took in our attitudes and our thinking after we emigrated to these planets. But Jathed was considerably in advance of them all. At any rate, he moved farther and farther back into the woods, to get away from even casual contact with people; and eventually-we don't quite know when-he found his way up to this ledge here.

--By that time, he'd acquired a few-disciples, let's call them. Yes, Artur? Everything's ready on the table. And hot. We'll be right there. Wait-- For Artur had turned to follow those who had come in with him out the door. You're to eat with us. That's an order. I want you to be a part of everything we decide with Hal, here. By the way, just to reassure us all, you didn't mention who Hal is to anyone9 Of course not, Guildmaster! That's his way of reproving me, said Amid to Hal and Amanda, when he calls me by my title. The reproof is for even needing to ask. We'll be at the table in a moment, Artur. Meanwhile, come and sit with us; and if I forget to tell Hal part of the story of Jathed, break in and fill the gap, will you? If you'd like me to, said Artur. Thank you. No thanks needed, said Amanda. You should have taken the invitation for granted, I'm sorry, said Artur, seating himself with them.

And no apologies are needed, either, said Amanda. Go on, Amid. Where was IT' said Amid. Oh, yes, Jathed had started the walking down in the forest. He continued it up here, specifying the rules under which it was to be done; particularly the rule about how they were to chant. They were not to chant in unison, or try to walk in step, unless these things happened by accident. The idea was that they should be studying by themselves, even though they were in company. Above all, they were to utter nothing but the Law-about that last he was most emphatic. You'll have to remember that at all times, Hal. It's not a ,mantra' you're hearing from those people outside. Not a prayer, hymn, or incantation of any kind. Jathed hated the word 'mantra' and wouldn't allow it used by anyone around him; and he was a violent man about getting his own way. He used to drive people off with a staff, put in Artur, though he did that more when they were down in the forest-or have you told them about the earliest Chantry Guild in the woods below us, Amid? No. I mentioned it, then went right to the ledge, said Amid. Now you see why I wanted you here? Jathed's first incarnation of his Chantry Guild was, as Artur says, down in the wild country below us; close to these cliffs, but not overly close. He already had a number of disciples by that time, and he set them to walking the circle he, himself, had earlier worn ankle deep. Of course, there were new people coming every day wanting to join. But as I say he wasn't easy to get along with. One mistake and the would-be member was out-chased out, in fact. Jathed walked around with the staff Artur mentioned, and anyone who showed what he considered 'incomprehension'but particularly the fault of calling the Law a 'mantra'-got chased out, with Jathed running behind them hitting them with his staff to keep them going at a good pace. He called it a Law? asked Hal. Yes. Amid looked penetratingly at him for a moment. He called it a Law and he meant it to be a Law, as clearly acknowledged as the Law of Gravity. And he was furious with anyone who wanted him to teach them. He claimed all that was needed was for each of them, individually, to study the Law. 'The transient and the eternal are the same,' '' said Hal. Yes, said Amid. I don't fully understand it myself, either, Hal; but like many people who've come into contact with the Law, I can feel there's a power there; and I think Jathed was right, too, about the fact it can't be taught. Whatever's in it has to be found by individual effort to understand its meaning. You know, he said a strange thing. He said that in two generations everyone-and he meant everyone in the human race, not just those here on Kultis-would know the Law, and many would already have started to put it to use.

He shrugged. One generation of those two has already gone by; and there's few enough even among us Exotics who ever heard of it or Jathed; and it hardly looks like that'll change in the next twenty years or less. But that's what he said. Now is a time of change, said Hal thoughtfully. True. But for something like the Law to be accepted, let alone put to use, under present conditions where the human race is at civil war with itself . . . the Others certainly aren't going to take to the Law in any case; and wouldn't, even if it came from some other source than an Exotic. You realize the Others are literally out to kill us off-all of us on these two worlds? The only reason they don't simply bring in armed soldiery and shoot us down is because a massacre like that couldn't be kept secret from the other Younger Worlds and it might give rise to anti-Other attitudes out there. I know, said Hal. in fact, I had Bleys Ahrens tell me about his goals, once. The only thing that's forced Bleys to try to accomplish his ends here by genteel starvation and casual individual murder by his Occupation troops, said Amid, is the fact that there're only a handful of Others, a mere few thousands, to control all the Younger Worlds. We here at the Chantry Guild have been overlooked, rather than specifically allowed to survive. But, back to Jathed and the history of this present incarnation of the Guild-- Amid, said Artur, might I mention the dinner again The food's getting cold, as I said. We could talk as we eat, Of course. Of course, you're right! said Amid. I'm getting more single-minded every day. Let's move to the table, everybody.

They moved.

CHAPTER

15

At any rate, said Amid a few minutes later, when they had started to eat from a number of dishes of vegetables, the contents of which, cooked and uncooked, were in large bowls on the table before them, with chopsticks laid out neatly at each seating place, as Artur reminds me, it wasn't until perhaps three years before the Occupation began that Jathed moved the walking circle up here to the ledge and shortly after that, he died. Kanin was one of his disciples- 'The Master's leading disciple, said Artur. 'Well, well, perhaps, said Amid. Jathed didn't assign ranks to his followers. At any rate, Kanin, foreseeing something like the Occupation, moved everyone connected with the Guild-not just the walkers-up here and started building for permanent occupation of this place. Then, last year, he died . . .and I've already told you how I came to be with him-too late; and was asked to take over as Guildmaster. The only possible choice-, began Artur, but Amid interrupted.

-Perhaps, as I say. But what you need to know, Hal, if you're going to stay here awhile, is that we're an open democracy in this place, everybody having a vote on everything and the majority ruling. In practice the Guildmaster has a veto over anything voted, but- In practice, put in Artur firmly, no one would think of questioning the Guildmaster's veto, or an order by the Guildmaster. Well, well. The point is, Hal, you'll be moving in as one of the members of the Guild. That means you'll have a vote, of course, but I'd suggest you wait until you understand this place better before you begin using it. You'll stay in one of the dormitory buildings, in the singles' quarters. There are rooms for couples here as well, but they're all full right now and we haven't had time to build more; that's why I suggested you use my office as your room for tonight. Thank you, said Amanda. We appreciate it. Yes, indeed, said Hal. The office would only be empty otherwise. I sleep here, nights. Amid made a dismissing gesture with his chopsticks. Now, about the circle itself. Every Chantry Guild member, which means everyone on the ledge, has a chance to walk in it, in regular rotation. He or she can pass up the turn when it comes, if they want. Both Artur and myself have to, most of the time, because of the administrative work to be done. For the rest, it's a matter of each one waiting for his or her turn, then joining the small group of waiters beside the circle-did you see the group of those waiting their turn as you came in?

Hal thought back. There had, indeed, been a handful of men and women on the far side of the circle of walkers, but he had thought they were simply people who had stopped for a moment to watch. The rule as laid down by Jathed, you see, went on Amid, is that once you begin to walk the circle you can keep walking as long as you wish. The circle goes twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, so if it was physically possible, a single person could hold his or her place in it indefinitely. But in reality, exhaustion would eventually put an end to anything like that; and the truth is, even those walking normally seem to reach a point far short of exhaustion, at which they decide to step out and let someone replace them. I don't mean they stop as a

matter of fair play or good manners; but simply because something in them feels it has accomplished, or absorbed, or whatever you want to call it-what it set out to do. As if a good day's work had been done and they were satisfied with what had been achieved after the time and effort expended.

Can they tell you afterward what it was that made them decide to stop? What it was they'd accomplished? Hal asked.

Amid glanced at him suddenly. That's an interesting question, he answered. No. They can't. But they'll tell you that they feel . . . completed. In fact, that's the way I've felt after walking. I see, said Hal thoughtfully. What this means, said Amid, is that while I can recommend your immediate access to the Guild members i you'll still have to go out there and join those standing by, and wait your turn when it comes. Unless someone ahead of you offers you his or her turn; and of course, this assumes that those in-between you and the one offering don't mind you going before them, too. No one, I think, would object to Hal being given priority, said Artur. In fact, even not knowing him, they wouldn't object if a fellow Guild member wanted to trade places backward. Well, in theory they've got a perfect right to object, and I Want Hal to understand that. I do, said Hal. In fact, said Amid, almost fiercely, what you may actually find when you join the waiters is that they'll each offer you the chance to step ahead of them, so that you may be the first one to take the next opening in the circle. But that's up to them. They'd have to do that. I can't, in conscience, even recommend it. I understand, said Hal. Guildmaster, said Artur, I think you may be leaning over backward a little in all this. Hal should also be reminded that it would only be showing a proper appreciation to accept if anyone offers him a chance to move up. Well, yes, answered Amid. You're right of course. I'm sorry if I seemed to imply that you shouldn't accept if anyone offers, Hal. You didn't, said Hal. Good, then, said Amid. He turned to Amanda. Amanda, you've hardly said a word. Now what, now that You've brought Hal here? Will you be staying, too? If so, there'll be a question of quarters. I'd gladly let you have my office for an indefinite number of nights, but sometimes we do need to work over there, when I've got a lot of our people doing some large project or other here; and in any case- In any case, said Amanda, I'll he staying only a few days to see how it works out for Hal. Then I'll be getting back to my own work in the district below. Whatever you want. Although, said Amid, I'm oldfashioned enough not to like the idea of your teaching Exotics to physically fight for their rights. Only if they ask for it, said Amanda. You should have understood by this time that what I teach them mainly is survival-how to survive if hunted, how to survive under the noses of the garrison troops. Your Exotics are never going to rise and drive off these invaders. On the other hand their own culture, given a little help in some instances, arms them with ways to deflect trouble, avoid trouble or defend themselves, if trouble unfairly comes looking for them. I'm relieved to hear that, said Amid. As far as your staying temporarily, we won't be needing the office evenings and nights for several weeks, anyway; and in the case of your coming back for a few days unexpectedly, we can always work out something. But you haven't anything to say about what we're talking about? About Jathed and the history of our Chantry Guild here? I'm interested-but this is Hal's area, said Amanda. I'l I just go on listening, if you don't object. Object? Certainly not. This isn't a place where people object to things. Also we're not discussing anything at all secret.

Amid turned to Hal. And since the subject of your area's come up, he said, I ought to admit to you, Hal, that we've got a selfish motive for having you with us; particularly since Amanda can't stay. The Occupation Forces would wipe us out in a moment if they suspected we were here. We avoid their finding out as much as possible by having contact with only three people from Porphyry, who come up this way every so often on the excuse of gathering fruits or berries from the wild plants. But there's always a danger that something might cause the local garrison to investigate this area. It'll be a relief to us to have someone with some military training on hand, even though the chance of their hearing about us up here is remote. We'll sleep a little easier until you leave. I'm afraid, said Hal, in a colder tone than he had intended, you're under a misapprehension. Maybe Amanda could be some real help to you, but I'm no Dorsai.

He avoided Amanda's eyes directly as he said these last words but he was aware her gaze was on him. She said nothing. Oh, you aren't, we all know that, said Amid swiftly, but I understand you had a Dorsai as one of your tutors and you're a good deal closer to one than anyone else on the ledge here -except Amanda, of course. But if the soldiers find us and it comes to an actual conflict- Oh, that- Hal shrugged. Certainly, anything an individual can do, since I'm your guest. Of course.

He smiled a little, not happily. It's a good thing you didn't ask me that a couple of years ago, he said. At that time my answer would have been that I'd become a little like the rest of you, in that philosophically I'd moved away from the area of violence. But now I'm free to be useful to you up here in any way I can. Ah, said Amid gently, of course, you're entitled to live by your beliefs, just as much as the rest of us. If it'd be imposing on those- No! said Hal, and was surprised by the sharpness of his own voice. More gently, he added, it's perfectly all right. I'm at your disposal, body and mind. We appreciate it, Amid answered.

Amanda still said nothing, and Hal thought he was aware of an aura of disapproval emanating from her silence. Tell me more about Jathed, he said, to change the subject Give Amid a chance to eat, Hal, Amanda spoke finally, then you can ask all the questions you want. No, no. That's quite all right. I eat very little, said Amid. About Jathed-what specifically do you want to know about him? If you don't mind, Guildmaster, said Artur, I've been sitting here just eating and listening; and I've pretty well finished. Why don't I answer while you eat? If there's anything important, you can always speak up. But you should eat. I'll eat, I'll eat! said Amid. You'd think I was a prize goat the way they're always trying to stuff more food down me!

I'm sorry, Guildmaster. We do overdo it, of course- Never mind. I'll eat. You talk, said Amid. But if there's anything I want to say, I'm not going to let a piece of fried root keep me from it. All right. I'm sorry. You're right. Talk. I'll eat.

He began taking pieces of food from the various serving bowls and putting them on his plate. If Jathed didn't believe in teaching, what did he do? asked Hal. Did he walk in the circle, himself? Not in the memory of anyone who became a disciple of his, said Artur. Apparently he had for years, all those years he was alone in the jungle living like a hermit, because, as I may have mentioned, there was a rut-in fact, you might even want to call it a ditch-worn outside the hut he'd built for himself by the time he began to admit disciples. In fact, it was already so deep that they'd shortly have worn it down until they were walking around out of sight below ground level, if some of them hadn't started to fill it in surreptitiously when he wasn't around. He came and caught them at it once, but didn't object. So they filled it back up to ground level, and kept it that way. You could never tell, apparently, what he was going to approve of or object to.' , But he, himself, had stopped walking by the time anyone began to live with him? Hal asked. He said he didn't need to, any longer. That the Law was in his mind all the time now-it had worn a rut there as well as in the ground. That was one of the questions he answered from someone, once, instead of simply shouting 'Stupid!' and chasing whoever it was off with his staff. But what did he do, if he didn't teach and he didn't walk? In his later days, said Artur, after he had acquired disciples, there were lots of times when he talked to them. I don't want to give the impression he was unreasonable all the time. In fact, most of the time he was pleasant, even witty, and perfectly willing to discuss things. The only problem was that if you made a mistake you got chased away for good. Someone he ran off couldn't come back later? Amanda asked.

Artur shook his head. There weren't any warning shots, any second chances, he said. Evidently it' you asked the wrong question you were showing you didn't belong there, and out you went. Some of the people he chased away tried to form their own groups, but none of them got anywhere. Jathed could be, and was, interrupted Amid suddenly, not only informative but charming. It didn't take a question to get him talking. A bird, a falling leaf, anything or nothing at all, might bring a comment from him and he'd go from that into a sort of informal lecture. Theoretically, as Artur just told you ' asking the wrong question got you thrown out; but his disciples noticed that during one of these informal lectures of his, questions were a lot safer to ask. Then, he seemed more willing to explain than at other times. Some of these 'lectures' were recorded by those there at the time-Jathed didn't seem to object to that, either, under those conditions . . . Artur, where's that control pad? I thought I had it on the table, right here, unless I knocked it off. . . .

He was searching around the end of the table. I 'I'll find it, Amid, said Artur. I think I saw it over by that chair you usually sit in.

He went back to where they had all been sitting around the fireplace, lifted a transparent glass paperweight, showing a small, green pine cone, about the size of a hen's egg, and took a control pad from underneath it to set it down by Amid. Thank you, said Amid. My memory's as good as it ever was, except for little things like this. You work too hard, Guildmaster. I do what has to be done-never mind that, now. Ah, I've got it!

He had been fingering the pad. Suddenly a surprisingly resonant, pleasant, deep bass voice sounded in the room. . . . different universe. My universe is not your universe. For example, in my universe I will now get up-watch me-walk across the room, up the wall and stand head down, talking to you as I am now. That's because in my universe it's possible for me or anyone else to do that.

There was a long moment of silence, finally broken by a somewhat timid-sounding, young male voice. Jathed? Yes, Imher?

Pardon me ... but it seems to me ... that is, you're still sitting in your chair. You talked about moving but you didn't move. Of course not-in your universe. But in my universe, I did exactly what I said. You didn't see it because you're not in my universe, you're in your own. Make an effort and step into my um .verse, and you'll see me standing on the ceiling talking down to you.

There was another pause. You can't do it? said Jathed's voice. Of course not. You don't believe in yourself enough to believe that you can enter someone else's universe. But there're people even on the inhabited worlds today, Imher, who have enough faith in themselves to step into someone else's universe. Faith and-yes, courage-which you also lack, all ofyou here. Am I correct that none of you see me standing on the ceiling at this moment?

There was yet another pause. Well, speak up, speak up! A chorus that was very close to a shamefaced mutter of no's answered Jathed. But I can! I can, just now. It just happened. Jathed, I can see

YOU UP there.'' Do you indeed, Imher? Very well, as reward for your faith and courage, you may come up and join me. Come on up. Come up?'' Wasn't that what I said?'' Yes, Jathed.

There was a moment of absolutely soundless silence. I ... I made it. LIAR! Out! Out! Out of my sight! Out of this place and never let any of us see you again! Go! Go!

There was a thump, a scrabbling noise and the sound of shod feet running away. A door slammed.

There was a further lengthy moment of silence, then the voice of Jathed again, now a little breathless. Intolerable! Outrageous! Now, where was I? Oh, yes, on the ceiling. I'll just go back up there ... try to watch me this time and see me. Now, here I am again, hanging head down; though of course it's not head-down to me, all the rest of you are

wrong-side up-ah, but what have we here? Someone who actually has courage andfaith. Well, don't sit there on the edge of your chair, trembling! If you think you can do it, Reho, come up and join me. Should l?'' said a different voice, doubtfully -female this time. Of course I think -you can, numbskull! Would I invite you up if I didn't see-you were i .n my universe? Come at once!

-All right . . . '' Silence again. I'm here! said the voice, full of wonder. Where did you expect to be? Now, for the benefit of all those below us who still lackfaith and courage, to prove to them you're actually with me, reach back into your own universe and break the ceiling light just to your right, there.

A hesitation. Then the smashing and tinkling impact of light fragments on a hard surface. Very good. We'll go back down now. That's right.'' I ... I,In afraid of heights. I didn't stop to think before I came . . . being upside down with nothing to hold me-'' NOT IN MY UNIVERSE! You are not afraid of heights in my universe, Reho! Do you hear me? Yes, Jathed. '' Good. Go down.''

Silence again. Well? said the voice of Jathed. Now that Reho and I are back in our seats, none of you saw anything at all out of the ordinary-except the inexplicable breaking of the light unit, two meters above vour heads '9

No, Jathid, said the chorus. Well, you all have something to hope for, then. Each one of you pick up a ftagment of that broken ceiling light and take it away with you to help you study. Ponder. Think. Do that success f your ./u/A and you, too, mav one day become aware o own universe as distinctfirom others.- Jathed?'' It was yet another female voice. Yes, Katchen '9

We didn't-I mean I didn't-see you go up the wall to the ceiling in your universe. But when Reho broke the light in her uni.verse, we all saw it break. Why could we see something that happened in her universe but not in yours? Think.' Answer 'your own question. Why? Think! Can't you think of the answer yourself?''

No, Jathed.- You didn't see Reho break the light in her universe-that's the answer! But . . . But what? But the light's broken. We can all see its parts on the floor there. We all saw it break.'' Where? Where?'' Don't parrot me. I said 'where?' Now you tell me-where did you see the light break?

There was an extended silence. You each saw it happen in your own universe, you idiots!'' snapped Jathed. You didn't have the faith and courage to believe that I could walk up a wall and stand on the ceiling, in your universes. That's impossible. But you could believe that a light could be broken. Because lights break. That's poss-ee-ble! He drew the last word out sarcastically. When 1, Jathed, told you that the light would be broken, so that you'd all have evidence Reho had been with me on the ceiling, THEN you believed! Numbskulls! Reho broke the light in her own universe, only. You-each of you-because for a moment you believed it was possible-broke it yourselves in your own unt .verses, to make what I promised you actual.

He stopped talking. No one else said anything. All right. Understand then, that You have a universe, that you can do with it what you will-look at the piece of broken light in your hand, those of you who've already picked a piece up-the rest of you pick one up and look at it. Think. You did that, without getting upfrom your chair, without even walking up a wall and standing on the ceiling! Do you understand now? Do you comprehend how your universe is a place where you can do anything you want, ifyou've got what's needed to do it, thefaith, the courage-and the knowledge, which in this case is the knowledge that a light will break easily? If I'd said Reho would punch a hole in the ceiling, you might not have been as quick to believe and make it happen in your own universe.

--Would you turn it off?. said Hal. Well, do as I sa 'v, pick up-The voice of Jathed broke off abruptly.

That's curious, said Amid. Why did you want the recording stopped, and stopped just there, Hal? Because he said something very interesting. As you just remarked. Hal smiled at the older man. I'd like some time to think about it. And what was it that was so interesting in particular, if I might ask? Amid said. What he said about everyone being in their own universe, said Hal. Don't ask me why just now, if you don't mind. The only answer I could give you would be too long and complex and right now I'm not even sure it'd be satisfactory. If you wish, said Amid. This tape, and others of Jathed, are here any time you want to listen to them. Thank you, said Hal. Now, since dinner's over-for which, thank you-perhaps Amanda and I had better make our move over to that office of yours, for the use of which, also thanks. It's been a long day, all of it uphill. I can imagine, said Amid. Good night, then. It's very, very good to see you both. You particularly, Hal, since I hadn't been sure, until Amanda talked to me about bringing you, that I'd ever see you again after I'd left the Encyclopedia. No meeting is ever impossible, said Hal. True. Good night, then, as I say. Artur will show you where the office is, and make sure you're properly settled there. Won't you, Artur? Of course, said the big man.

CHAPTER

16

Amid's office-the Guildmaster's office, as Artur somewhat apologetically explained it should be referred to, when they spoke about it to anyone but Amid-was large enough for two work positions, and that was about all. It did, however, have enough floor space to allow the folding down of an oldfashioned mattress, which during work hours folded up against one of the walls. It was a generously sized double mattress, for which both Hal and Amanda were thankful, having had to do with a few ordinary-sized beds in their time. Well, said Amanda, sometime later and just before they fell asleep. Do you want to tell me why that recording of Jathed made you feel so good'? I could feel you radiating cheerfulness right across the dining table. I probably could have felt it clear outside that roorn.- It was what I told Amid, what had struck me in what Jathed had said, Hal answered, about there being a universe for every individual person. I haven't lacked for evidence. I was on the right track in my search for the Creative Universe. But I haven't had any new evidence for several years now; and, suddenly, along comes a man who agrees with me. How agrees with you? said Amanda. They were lying on their backs in the darkness, side by side, with all of the cloth covers with which the bed was furnished laid aside, since they were both rather sweaty. They were also holding hands. He talked about a lot of universes. You've always talked about just one. It doesn't matter, said Hal. One big universe with room in it for everybody to create what he or she wants, or one universe each in which to create what each one wants. It amounts to the same thing-

He broke off suddenly. What is it? asked Amanda. Just hearing myself say that both conceptions amounted to the same thing. The transient and the eternal are the same. The likeness reminded me of Jathed's Law, that's all. Anyway, Jathed evidently had hold of a corner of the same blanket I've got a corner of. It does cheer you up to have your findings corroborated. I'm happy for you then. Amanda gave his hand a squeeze But to be truthful, I still don't follow that business of the broken light. Would it be 'not-broken' to someone who hadn't been there, who just walked into the room, afterward . . . or what? I don't know, said Hal. Maybe that's why I'm right about it being one large universe with room for unlimited creations to be built in it, rather than an unlimited number of private universes, like Jaffied said; and that's what's wrong with his theory, the fact that the question you just asked can't be answered. Or it may be that he was right in that some things done in the Creative Universe acquire existence in this one-for example, a painting's made in the mind of the artist, but it appears in what people will probably always call the real universe. But you know why it appears in the real universe. You can watch it being painted, No, said Hal, what you watch are materials of various colors being applied to an even, vertical surface. When do you see the painter put into the painting whatever it is that makes those colors have a profound emotional effect on you? Or take music for example- Never mind, said Amanda, I see what you're driving at. I'm still glad you find him corroborating you; but the fact is I wasn't too impressed with him. He seemed more interested in showing off than anything else. Still, said Hal, he was using the Creative Universe consciously and deliberately, which is something I can't do. He was entering it. All down the centuries, these artistic examples I'm always giving have been cases of creativity being used onk on the unconscious level. It's as if the artist can reach through into the Creative Universe with his arms and hands only in it, and has to work there by touch alone. I want to go into it completely-step into it as if it were another place to be stepped into. I have to do that, to make a battleground where the Enemy and I can finally have it out; and to make an opening so that other people can enter after me, wholly and consciously, to work with it in the future. But you're right about miracles being a bad way to teach anything, let alone this. I rejected that method of teaching its existence the first time I discovered the Creative Universe-but I've told you about that. I wish, said Amanda, you'd stop telling me you've told me things that you haven't told me. You've never said anything to me about when you discovered the Creative Universe. I'm sorry, said Hal. I do a certain amount of going over things in my mind, with you there in imagination-effectively bouncing problems off you; and unless I deliberately stop to remember when I did that on a specific topic, I get the imaginary talks with you mixed up with the real ones.

Amanda turned her head on the pillow and kissed his cheek. What was that for? he asked. Nothing. Go on, she said. You're going to tell me, actually this time, when you first discovered the Creative Universe. It was back when I was Donal, said Hal. You remember I showed you Sayona the Bond back at the Encyclopedia? It was some time before then. I'd just quit being War Chief for the two Friendly worlds after a rather unfriendly scene with Eldest Bright, who was head of the United Council of Churches for the Friendlies-in fact, he threatened me with summary trial and execution. I had to shoot three of his guards he ordered to arrest me; and remind him that his capitol city was full of enough of my mercenaries, who could appreciate the bloodless victory I'd just given them, to make it unwise for him to try doing such a thing. He'd accused me of being bought by the Exotics, over whose forces I'd just given him the victory; and it turned out he hadn't wanted it bloodless. He'd wanted blood and lots of it, specifically Exotic blood.

So he had to let me go; but his last words were that I should go and look for work with the Exotics. I'd already decided to do just that, anyway; and so I contacted them. That led to an inter-view with Sayona, who hired me, but also made the suggestion I become an Exotic. One of the things he said was that he, at least, believed I was the kind of person who could walk on air if I really wanted to. I turned him down on being an Exotic, but . . .

In the quiet office-turned-bedroom Hal could hear his voice echoing differently from the walls, now, as he remembered how it had been, being Donal. It was Donal's voice in his present ears; and it brought a strangeness over him. Telling Amanda about it, he found himself reliving that time, now more than eighty years in the past. . . .

. . .deep in thought, he had returned to his own quarters in the city of Portsmouth, on Mara, which then held the Military Command Base for the two Exotic worlds. Portsmouth was in what on Old Earth would have been the temperate latitudes; but the nature of Procyon, the same sun that shone on Kultis, was such that the night which hadjust en/bIded that city as he came back was tropical.

The soji illumination of his room had come on automatically as he entered; but it was so adjusted that itfailed to white out the overhead view of the stars. These shone down through the open wall of the loggia that was his bedroom.

Standing in the center of this loggia, his mind still full of the conversation with Sayona, Donal frowned. He gazed up at the gently domed roof of the loggia, which reached its highest point at two meters above his head. He frowned again and turned to search through the writing desk in the room until he found a seff-sealing signal-tape capsule. Then, with this in one hand, he turned to look toward the ceiling again, and took one rather awkward step up off the floor.

His foot found purchase in the air. He stepped upward, putting his weight on it. Slowl -v, step by step he walked up through nothingness to the high point of the ceiling. Opening the capsule, he pressed its self-sealing edges against the white surface of the ceiling, where they flung. He stood there a second in the air, staring at them. Ridiculous!'' he said suddenlv-and just as suddenly, he wasfalling. He gathered himself with the instinct of long training in the second of drop and, landing on hands andfeet, rolled over and came erect like a gymnast against a far wall. He got up, brushing himself off, unhurt-and turned to look up at the ceiling. The capsule still clung there.

Suddenly he had laughed, cheerfully and out loud. No, no, he said to the empty room. I'm a Dorsai!

You rejected it, said Amanda in the darkness. Why? I handled all things by intuitional logic, then, said Hal. I ran the probabilities forward and found they went nowhere-at least as far as going where I wanted to go, which was to lead the human race to a time when none of them would ever do the sort of thing that had caused the death of my uncle James. But you do see-

He turned to look in her direction. Although there was some light leaking around the door that led to the interior of the building and the bathroom facilities, there was not enough to read the expression on Amanda's face.

--how I'd entered the Creative Universe, and used it, I'd had to, to be able to put that message capsule on the ceiling. From that, I realized there must be an aspect of things I'd never taken into account before; and the concept of the Creative Universe grew from that. But you turned away from it then? she said. My first thought was that it was only good for parlor magic tricks. It never crossed my mind it could be useful. Remember, at that time, as I say, I still believed in the way of getting physical control of all the worlds and making the people on them live by laws that would end the sort of situation that'd killed James. At that time I didn't see any reason it wouldn't work.

He hesitated. But that was the first time I'd entered the Creative Universe, he said more slowly, and, like everyone else since time began, I did it unconsciously. I said to myself, 'let's see if I can't walk on air,' and tried it; and found I could. The potential of that came back to me once I got control of all the Younger Worlds and found laws alone wouldn't change human nature.

He laughed. Breathtaking discovery, wasn't it? he said. At any rate, then it occurred to me for the first time to go back to the twenty-first century and change the direction of history. My full appreciation of what the Creative Universe could mean for the race was born in my search for a way to do that. To begin with, it offered me a way to put my mind back into the past-and bring it back eighty years later than when it had left, in a two-year-old body.

He lay for a moment without saying anything. Amanda waited patiently. But even then I was making use of the creative forces largely unconsciously, without really understanding them. It was only when I had to recognize the Others as a result of the changes in intent I made in the estab I ished -frozen by time-historic forces of the twenty-first century, that I began to see the real shape of the job I had to do. It was then I really looked at the Creative Universe; and saw its ultimate possibilities, and the absolute necessity for them. Tell me, said Amanda thoughtfully, you don't use intuitional logic anymore? No, said Hal. It doesn't help what I'm doing now and hasn't helped much with anything I've done for a long time. It's a Donal-style tool, about as useful as the ability to do calculus instantly in your head. Idiot savants have done things comparable to it for centuries without giving the race a chance for improvement; let alone helping it grow, the way I hoped--

He stopped, on a note in his voice that left what he had been saying uncompleted. But while my mind was back in the twenty-first century, he said, under the influence of Walter Blunt and what the Chantry Guild was then, as well as by my own will, I entered the Creative Universe deliberately. Earlier, I'd just passed through it to get back in time. It was because I was there that I could be, and was, struck at by the Enemy. Otherwise, I'd never have begun to see what the conscious, willing entry into that universe promises everybody. But there's no way you can use intuitional logic to see your way to the Creative Universe? Amanda asked. It doesn't work for that sort of problem. It's essentially a tool of' the real universe, bounded by logic. It can't jump gaps-only go through the logical steps faster. I know I've been saying I have to find the way to the Creative Universe; but perhaps what I ought to be saying is that I have to make a way to it. If there was already a way, the kind of way I need, to the Creative Universe, intuitional logic could find it. But there isn't one yet, and intuitional logic not only can't find what isn't there, It can't make anything on its own. I understand then, Amanda said thoughtfully. You're saying you can't see ultimate consequences to anything? That's right. I can't. All that's visible to it is what ordinary logic would predict if ordinary logic had all the elements of the problem and unlimited time to work them to a conclusion. Intuitional logic not only doesn't work in the creative area, it doesn't work in the personal one-for instance, I can't see my own death; because like all reasonably healthy persons, I can't, on the unconscious level, conceive of myself as dead and the universe going on without me-

Amanda did not move physically. The years of her upbringing, both as a Dorsai and as the prot6g6 of the Second Amanda, held her still'. But her profound emotional reaction reached out to Hal with shocking impact, through that same channel by which they could touch each other across light-years of space. Swiftly he gathered her into his arms, holding her tight against him. She lay still there, too, but now he could feel the trembling inside her. Amanda! he said, what is it?

-I don't know. I can't tell you . . . she said between teeth clenched tight. It's as if the edge, just the edge, of some terrible sadness brushed me. Oh, my love-hold me '

-I've got you, said Hal. Tell me you won't go away, ever! I'll never leave you, said Hal. Oh, thank all heavens, all gods Amanda clung to him. He held her tight; and, in time, they slept-still close together.

CHAPTER

17

Dawn through the uncurtained windows of the office woke them both. They dressed and found their way to the dining hall of the dormitory building they were in. They were seated across from each other at an end of one of the long picnic-style plank tables, having breakfast, when Amid joined them. Someone told you we were here, said Amanda, as the old man sat down next to her. He looked more diminutive than ever side by side with Amanda, Hal noticed. It was as if the last year or so had shrunk him even further, only without harming him. He was a little kernel of a man, but hard and alive. Quite right. He beamed at her. I'd left word with those on kitchen duty in both buildings to let me know when you were up for breakfast.

He looked over at Hal. I thought I'd take you out and see you started in the circle myself, he said. Isn't that possibly going to mean a long wait for you? asked Hal. Ordinarily, yes, said Amid. But it seems things are out of my hands. Word about a visitor here is already around; and those currently waiting have all volunteered to let you go first. We'll only have to wait until the first person to step out of the circle after we get there does so. Then you step in; Amanda and I go about our business.

Your business? Hal looked from Amid to Amanda. 'Well, I about my business, said Amid. I was merely using the expression. What Amanda's immediate plans are, I've no idea. I assumed you'd know. I'm staying for a day or so, said Amanda, so I can watch Hal at the start. I'll just wait around-unless you've got something I can do to help pay our way with you here? I know everyone on this ledge works at something or other. You're our guest, said Amid. That rule doesn't apply to you or Hal unless you want it to.

I As I told you, said Hal, I'll do my share of whatever's to be done. There you are, said Amanda. That takes care of him. Now, what have you got that I can be useful at? Thank you, then, said Amid. All right, you can drop by our infirmary, if you want to. We don't have much sickness here, but small accidents will happen. Old Man is walking right now, so we could use someone who knows something about acupressure for pain relief and such-the sort of thing you Dorsai all know. A place like this, on an Exotic world, said Hal, and you need the skills of a Dorsai for battlefield-style medical handling? Amanda radiates the will to recover more than most, as I imagine you know, said Amid. We have one person here, as I just mentioned, who calls himself simply 'Old Man,' he does the same thing; but even he's not as good at it as Amanda.

Oh? said Hal. I'd like to meet him. You'll see him when you get out to the circle, said Amid. He's got a sort of aura about him that seems to make people heal themselves faster and more comfortably. Actually, his name is Laoren, which, I gather, is Chinese in origin. But when he came here he asked us to simply call him by its translation in Basic, which is 'Old Man.' He's somewhat unusual; an Exotic from a family that had preserved their ethnic purity for more than a century and a half. You know how, on these two worlds of ours, we've always approved rather of mixing ethnic strains than keeping them separate. I believe I saw him, as we came in, said Hal. He frowned with the memory of the sunlight flooding his eyes.

It wouldn't be surprising if you had, said Amid. He does rather stand out. Also, you probably noticed he wasn't repeating the Law aloud as he walked. That's another thing about him. He only speaks when he has to and we've gathered he appreciates people not trying to draw him into conversation. I don't mean to suggest he's withdrawn, socially. He's probably one of the most genuinely merry people I've met. But he just.doesn't talk much.

Hal and Amanda finished their breakfast and they all went outside. In the fresh mountain air of the new day, Procyon beamed down at them out of a cloudless sky and the temperature was rising with that swiftness that promised a warm, if not hot, afternoon. Come to think of it, said Amanda, with a glance at the sky, have you had a solar radiation shot in the past three years, Hal? Because Procyon's not like Sol-- I'm up to date, said Hal. He glanced at her exposed arms and legs, normally so pale, that were now a smooth, light tan. How about yourself? You look as if you might be letting the local star get to you. Oh, I'm up to date, too, said Amanda. I wouldn't slip up on that. It's just that I'd stand out like a bright light among all these Exotics if I'd stayed my usual skin color. So I amended it, to help me fit in.

Ahead of them, the circle was moving as it had been the evening before, and Hal now particularly took note of the small cluster of men and women off to one side, who were obviously the waiters. There were no more than half a dozen or so of them. Do those in the circle deliberately cut their time short, if they see a lot of people waiting? Hal asked. They could, of course, said Amid. But I don't think it happens very often. Once in the circle and once in the proper frame of mind, you see what's going on around you but it doesn't seem to have much, if any, importance-I can tell you that from personal experience. I think we've got one or two in the waiting group there, though, that are just out here to see you. I I

They had been walking toward the circle as they talked. You're sure word of who I am hasn't been mentioned? I'd be the tirst one any of the people here would come and tell, if they thought you were who you are, said Amid. Some may have seen a picture of you; but if so, since you haven't been announced, they're doing the polite thing and keeping it to themselves. A picture of me? Yes, said Amid. It's been spread all over the Younger Worlds as part of the Others' propaganda against Earth. I don't mean they've published it separately. But there've been references, of course, to you, Ajela, Rukh and some other people, as charges against them were publicly made. Not you so far, Amanda, by the way. Good, murmured Amanda. I'd just as soon my picture wasn't too wel I known. Yes. But I'm afraid, in your case, Hal, said Amid, there's a whole generation of children on the Younger Worlds growing up who're being taught to spit after saying your name. You're supposed to be the evil sorcerer crouched spiderlike in your lair in the Final Encyclopedia, cooking up evil things for good people on all the Younger Worlds.

They had joined the waiting group by the time Amid had finished saying this; all of the people in the group, with typical Exotic politeness, avoided looking directly at Hal and Amanda, or in any way appearing to attract the attention of the newcomers. As those walking passed, Hal had time to notice individuals. There was a drinking water fountain just beyond the far end of the circle, and three small buildings that were obviously personal waste-disposal units for the walkers. Three? Hal asked Amid, pointing at them. Yes. Oh, I see what you mean, Amid laughed. No, it's not that we've got three sexes around here, but you'll find when you get in the circle that you don't think of stopping for anything until something reminds you. Then you may be in a hurry. What we've found that tends to happen here is that someone will make a comfort stop and inadvertently set off what you might call a chain reaction. Jathed would have sneered at such niceties as drinking fountains and chemical waste-disposal units here; but my brother thought otherwise-by the way, there's Old Man turning the far corner, now.

Hal looked and saw the oriental-appearing walker who had attracted his attention when they had first arrived, the day before. As Amid had said, Old Man was just now coming around the far end ofthe circle, on its side that was closest to the waiters, so that he was now walking toward Hal and the rest of the waiting group.

True to what Hal had been told, the eyes of those in the circle-and Old Man was no exception -seemed to take in all that was visible before them, but show no particular interest in it. Old Man's eyes looked at and through Hal as he strode toward him. Has he been walking all night? Hal asked. I believe so, said Amid. You saw him in the circle when you came in? Yes, said Hal.

It was hard to believe Old Man had been at this for hours. He moved with a particularly light and springy step, as if he was about to leap into the air with the next stride; and Hal guessed that for all his long white beard and white mustaches, the other could run like a deer if he had to. In fact, in spite of his skinniness and the evidence of his age, there was an impression of power and youth about him. It was startling, for in appearance alone, he was almost frail. He was hardly taller or heavier than a twelve-year-old boy, except for the largeness of his hands and a surprising width of shoulders under the robe he wore, which Hal now saw figured with white blossoms upon a background of a red color so dark as to almost seem black. Old Man's hair was as white as his beard and so sparse that the skin of his round skull under it was visible in the sunlight. He's in remarkable physical condition, Amid was saying, beside Hal. He has a sword of sorts he brought here with him; and he exercises with it when he isn't otherwise occupied. It's very graceful. It looks as if he's dancing, when he does it.

They fell silent. There was something about the words, repeated and repeated in their ears, that not only made conversation unnecessary but drew their minds, if not their bodies, into the circle of those who moved before them. Hal found his thoughts running over the oriental schools of martial exercises with the sword that he could remember, He made a Mental note to watch Old Man at his exercises the first chance that made itself available.

Hal was still at this when one of the walkers left the circle. He was a vonnPer man with (lose-cia reddish hair anti a fi]77 Of reddish beard. He had been walking with all the appearance of normality, but after taking several steps away from the circle, he stumbled and his feet dragged, like those of someone exhausted, but still driving himself to move. One of those waiting was almost immediately at his side and helping him toward one of the nearer of the two dormitory buildings. In you go, Hal, said Amid. I'm waiting for Old Man to come around, said Hal. I'd like to walk behind him. If you like, said Amid.

Old Man came around and Hal stepped in behind him. The next walker in the circle fell back a little distance to give room. Hal followed Old Man and, opening his mouth, began to repeat the Law:

The transient and the eternal are the same .

Almost immediately the rhythm of the walking and the intoned phrase took him over.

It was as if he had stepped on to the back of some powerful bird, which now took off with him. The words were like a living thing that lifted him and carried him away. The beating of his heart was in synchrony with the heartbeat of the bird; and a pressure he had not been conscious of feeling, but which had pressed down on him before, was suddenly released, so that he felt light and free.

He ascended within himself on the wings of the feeling that bore him, that had been outside him to begin with but which was now working itself inward on him, staining into him. He felt the words resonating in his throat and all through his body. He could not say what they meant, any more than he had understood more than their ordinary, everyday meaning before. But he felt something additional in them now, even though he could not reach through to something of deeper import yet-like a vast mountain in the distance, somewhere beyond him.

It was as Amid had said. He did not lose sight of, or touch with, his surroundings. He saw Amid and Amanda still standing, watching him for a little while before they turned and went off together, leaving only the small group of those who waited their turn in the circle. He saw and felt all that he ordinarily would have seen and felt, but it was irrelevant to what he was experiencing with his own movement and the repetition of the words.

The bird carrying him was his image and he let himself go with it. He felt the softness and warmth of the back feathers under him, felt the vibrations through them of the powerfully pumping wings, saw far distant on the horizon the triangular, mist-white shape of the Grandfathers of Dawn mountains that was his destination. The clean, thin air of the heights drew deep down into his lungs, searching out their very bottom crannies and corridors. And, without warning, he understood.

He understood that the weight that had dropped away temporarily from him as he stepped into the circle had been the weight of defeat. It had accumulated, layer by layer, day by day this last year, surrounding him, but held off from closing in on and crushing him by his strength of will, which grew and toughened like muscle in response to the demand placed upon it. So that his lack of success and his strength of will had increased together-until at last the limits even of his will were. approached; and he had begun to give under the weight.

So despondency had finally begun to touch him. He had fought well and won, fought and won, again and again-and again and again victory had left him with the decisive encounter yet to be. Fear and its stepchildren, self-doubt and self-hatred, still tore and destroyed in the innermost parts of all human beings. He had conquered one wall only to find another, and another after that, and after that another, with his foe still alive and protected . . . until there seemed no end to the walls, and he felt the beginnings of an end to his strength.

He was aware that others had taken up this challenge in times before him, and all had failed in the end. But like each of those who had gone before, he had said, we have come so far. We have won this much. Now, finally, we ought to be ready to reach the final battleground; and put an end to what plagues us.

Donal had won . . . and the final battle had turned out yet to be fought. Paul Formain had won . . . and the final battle still awaited. Hal Mayne had saved what must be saved of the human race, safe for a little while until the final battle could be fought-and the final battle was still beyond the horizon, still out of reach.

There must be an end, as there must have been a beginning. For the first time he wondered about the moment of beginning of the historical forces that had brought him and the human race to this moment. He had used the Creative Universe for the first time, as Donal, to go back to where he thought he could set up the forces that would bring about a final encounter. As Paul Formain he had found them in the twenty-first century. But neither then nor now had he ever thought of trying to reach back and find the absolute beginning of that last battle in which he would be a solitary warrior.

He reached out, mentally, now, to find that moment of beginning; and it led him to a place and a time, to a scene in which he became an Englishman in armor at the lowest point of his own life's long battle. It was a day of victory for the Black Prince of England, the battle of Poitiers; and its sights, its sounds, its feel came to Hal not only through this knight who had been his unconscious forerunner in this centuries-long contest, but also from a dying soldier of the other side. Hal was both men-, and looked through the eyes of each to see the face of the other.

. . .Sir John Hawkwood hadfought the long day's fight, and fought well-but none of rank or worth on his own side had been there where he hadfought the best qf the other side, to note what he did. He had taken a prisoner, but it was a prisoner who was a Fre ch knight of small holding; and the ransom would not make Sir John rich. As ransoms had made rich Sir Robert Knolles, and the notice of the Black Prince had made famous Sir John Chandos. He was weary and the anesthesia of the winefront the night beft)re, and of the early morning before the battle, had long since worn off, leaving him weary and wasted inside. Aimlessly, on a battlefield on which the main acti .on was over, he rode up one side of a little rise; over the top of which, on the Jarther downslope, lay the tanner's son.

The tanner's son lay dying in the bright September sunlight. About him was the odor of crushed grass and the stink of the blood and the intestines of a horse who had been disemboweled and la-v nearby. The tanner's son was a crossbowman from Lombardy. He wore leather hose and a leather smock of, sorts to which chain links had been sewn. He was tall and lean, with a swarthyface and straight black hair. He was in his early twenties and still had most of his teeth. His mouth was wide and mobile. He had an English arrow completely through his right side under the ribs; and he had worn the feathers completely off its shaft, since he had gone out of his head unsuccessfully tr 'ving to draw it out the way it had entered. He had bled a great deal; but in spite of that he continued to lie supporting himself on one elbow with such a wild look on his face that none of the English archers or men at arms had paused to cut his throat. Besides, he lay off to one side himself where there were no wounded French knights or such worth taking prisoner; and the battle had gone awayfrom him.

His eyes no longerfocused on thefield. Occasionally he would cry out weakly in the dialect of his native Genoa, forgetting he was now in the foreign fields of France. Help! Help for the tanner's son!

Beyond him, at some little distance, the bearded, blooddaubed English archers and other foot-soldiers hurried by, rooting among the d -ying and the deadfor a prisoner worthy Of ransom. There were slim pickings here, for the more adventurous of their fellows had already covered the ground, cutting throats with quick boarlike jerks of their knives, when a candidate proved worthless or too wounded to promise to live. The wild, calling crossbowman, with the lank black hairfialling half over his face, the-v had passed by out of a sort of instinct-two or three had even crossed themselves in passing. For, by a trick (if its entering angle, the arrow appeared to anyonefrom a distance to have driven squarely through the crossbowman's heart. It seemed that he must already be dead; but still propped up and calling; whereas lie was actually only dying, like all the rest.

Beyond the unfocused eyes of the crossbowman was part of the field of Poitiers, in the midwest of France. Up a slope behind him was a rubble of hedges and new-dug mounds, considerably torn about and beaten down now, which had been the original Position of the English. Out beyond in the other direction was the little vallev with the wood of St. Pierre to his left. In another part of thefield, at the edge of that same wood, the banner of Edward of England, the Black Prince, wasflyingfrom a tall tree, to serve as a rallying signal for those English pursuing the French retreating to the moment of their slaughter below the prudently, locked gates of the city of Poitiers. Below thatflag, the tent of the Black Prince had been pitched; and in it, the Prince, Sir John Chandos and some others were drinking wine.

In afarthersection of thefield Geffroi de Charny hadjust been killed, and the banner of France, which he was holding, tottered to the ground. Behind him, King John oj'France, his dead lords about him, his fourteen-Year-old son Philip beside him, felt his weary arms failing at the effort to lift and strike with his battle axe once again. The English were crowding close, eager to capture a King, shouting at him to surrender. He turned to one strong young man, pushing toward him, who had called out to him in good and understandable French. The moment oj'his capture was near.

Meanwhile, unknowing of all this, the crossbowman wept a littlefrom his unseeing eyes, propping himse@f on his elbow, and called out to the great pain in his body and the sun, like a brilliant furnace at high noon over his head in the cloudless sky:- Help! Help for the tanner's son

And so he cried-as he had criedfor a long time without am, response, but more weakly as time went on. Until, from somewhere he heard the approaching thudding oj'hooves that came to him, and stopped; and a following thud as two mailed feet came one after the other to earth beside him. For a moment nothing happened: and then a voice in all English the crossbowmail could not have understood even before he got all arrow through his bod -v, spoke above him. Who's a tanner's son. I

A couple of iron-sheathed knees came to earth beside the crossbowman. The crosshowman felt the weight of his upper bod 'v lifted off the supporting elbow. Through the delirium of his pain, a feeling oj'b(,ing rescued penetrated to him. He stopped cr-ying out and made a great effort to focus his eyes.

A circular shape peaked at the top steadied and unblurred before his eyes. He looked from a distance of inches up into a lean, rectangular-jawed jace, unshaven and surmounted by all iron skullcap with a cloth skullcap showing dark- blue and rather ragged edges underneath the metal edge. The jace of John Hawkwood had a deep-set nose, fine blue eyes under straight brown eyebrows, and a straight, angular nose that had never been broken. The jace had the clear, even color of naturally blond skin tanned and dried by the sun until its surface had gone into tiny, premature wrinkles around the corners of the eyes and indented deeply around the mouth. The mouth itself was thinlipped but level of expression, the nostrils thin-andfirom them came a strong exhalation of breath laden with the odor of wine gone stale. Who's a tanner's son? repeated the lips, this time in the mixed argot of the military camps. But the crossbowman now comprehended nothing but the dialect of his childhood. He understood only that someone had come to his aid; and because the man who held him was clean-shaven he thought, not of a knight who might need to breathe unencumbered inside his clumsy headpot of a helm, but that the one who held him was a priest. He thought the priest was speaking to him in latin and exhorting him to confess. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . he whispered.

The man who held him had been able to make out the business of the tanner's son; but this further whisper in the Genoese dialect left him at a loss. Vaguely, he caught the sense of the word sinned but that was all ' What the hell,'' he said, in the camp argot, a little thickly,

we're all sinners. But we aren't all tanner's sons. He sat back on his heels and lowered the head of the crosshowman on to his knees. He lifted the cloth and metal skullcaps of the bassinet off his head together and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. I'm a tanner's son, myself.

He broke off and looked down, for the crossbowman had begun to speak again; and the rhythm of the phrases oj' the confessional were familiar. Well, he said in English, I can do that much for you. One Christian to another, eh?

He put the bassinet back on his head and listened, though what the other said was all but incomprehensible. The crossbowman was trying to remember his sins; but he confused the pain in his body with the pain of disease, which he associated with the evilnesses of his relations with women. To describe these, he had of necessity to use words more common and understandable to the man whose knees he rested on-and who nodded, hearing the words. That's it, said the man. That's it. Not much like that in Hedingham Sibil, in Essex where I was a tanner's son-or wherever you hail from, I suppose. But enough ql'ii here. He listened awhile longer. He noticed the lips of the crosshowman were darkened and dried. Use a little wine, here,'' he muttered. None with ine though, damn it. Go on, go on . . .

But the crossbowman hadfinished his conftssion; and now he had begun to weep once more. He hail thought that, having confessed himse@f, he would find himself forgiven and the pain taken away. But it was still with him. Ile pluckedj@ebly tit the now smooth end qf the arrow. Help! he husked, once more, in a barely audible voice. ''Help, jor the tanner's son . . . Damn you. ' swore the man holding him, blinking his own eyes suddenly and pulling the plucking hand from the unmoving arrow's nocked end. ''What do you want me to do for vou That's no good.

The crossbowman wept. His mind had wandered again; and now he imagined he was a boY again and the pain was because he was being punishedfor something. You made your peace, growled the man holding him. ''Gel on with your dying. He looked at the arrow. ''A hard wa -v out is it. He blinked again. Poor filth. A// right, then. ''

He reached down and drew a short, heavy-hilted daggerftom a scabbard on his swordbelt. ,.Misericord, '' he said. ''God forgive this wretched sinner, and give him quick relieffirom payment for his sins, amen.

He leaned over with his lips close to the crossbowman's right ear, thinking perhaps it would give the sinner the goodjeeling (?f a little pride before his death. A knight kills you, man. I I

But the crossbowman did not in an v wa v understand the words. A deeper understanding had come to him. He hadfinall ' understood that he was dying. His mind had fled back to imagining he was with a priest again; and when he saw the insubstantial, glittering shape ql'the misericord lied up before

ft his eyes, he thought it was the Cross being given him to kiss, and he felt a holy joy. I am ready to die, Lord, he thought he prayed. ''Only let it be fast.

It was fast.

CHAPTER

15

Hal woke to find himself stumbling over the level ground, which seemed to heave and billow under his feet like the ocean surface. From the position of Procyon, overhead, it was midmorning; he was no longer in the circle. Amanda held him by one arm, supporting and guiding him. Old Man held and supported him on the other side with equal strength. As Hal turned his head to see the other, Old Man looked up, smiled fleetingly but warmly and then looked ahead again to the dormitory building containing Amid's office, to which the two were taking Hal. What is it? said Hal. What's wrong?

To his own surprise his voice came out like a whisper. His throat was raw from repeating the words that still thrummed in his mind. You walked for twenty-three hours, Hal! said Amanda. I think you'd have killed yourself the way a horse can run itself to death, if we hadn't pulled you out of the circle. Now, lean on us. We'll have you in bed in a minute.

Suddenly, he felt a longing to be where she had promised. Horizontal, on a flat surface, in the darkness of a quiet, closed room. Consciousness of the exhaustion of his body flooded in on him. His knees gave at every step and his legs wobbled with weakness. He staggered on between Old Man and Amanda to the dormitory building and the outside entrance that led directly to the office, to the bed . . . and onto it.

Thank you, said Amanda to Old Man. He smiled back at her, then went softly and swiftly out. She took a blanket from the bed and hung it over the windows on a rod above them that had not been there when Hal had last seen them. The blanket did not completely shut out Procyon's intense light, but it dimmed the room and Hal luxuriated in the dimness.

Amanda went around to the other side of the bed and lay down on top of the bedcovers beside him. She put her arms around him. Now, sleep! she commanded.

He closed his eyes, and sleep swooped down to carry him away.

When he woke, the room was totally dark. Amanda slumbered beside him, now tucked in under the covers in ordinary fashion. She opened her eyes as he stirred. He laid his hand on her shoulder, lightly. You sleep, he whispered. I'll be back in a while.

He got up, found his clothes-Amanda or someone had obviously undressed him while he was still too deep in sleep to notice-and let himself into the outer air on the other side of the office door.

Beyond the walls and the blanket that served as a curtain over the window, he found the first faint light of dawn. He guessed it at about four in the morning. He must have slept for nearly as long as Amanda had said he had walked. His body worked better now than it had on its way to bed from the circle, but it still held a feeling of having been used and overused. He was not so much weak as drained of strength.

A few lights were on in the two dormitory buildings, particularly in the part of each one which held kitchen and dining facilities. The mountains to the east were a distant darkness beyond the lip of the ledge, and a few figures moved about the area with the intentness of those on duty of one kind or another. But in the near distance, where two lights still could be seen burning, paled by the approaching day's illumination, the circle still turned. Those in it still chanted and four people stood in a small group, waiting their turn.

He walked away from the building, toward the circle and those who waited. But he stopped back a little from joining the waiters; and stood, merely watching them and those in the circle for a few moments. Then he turned and went on, parallel with the stream beyond them, toward the edge of the ledge. At the point where the stream emptied into the pond, he found a level space of ground beside it and sat down; looking across it toward the end of the ledge, only some five meters beyond, and at the black ridge of the Grandfathers of Dawn, distant, their upper edges now a jagged, glowing line from the ascending sun hidden behind them.

Slowly, as he sat watching that glowing line, he found himself beginning to understand how Tam's dying, with his guilt still unexpiated in him, could stop Hal from ever finding the Creative Universe.

Amanda had been right. The way he searched for was to be found out here among people; rather than back there in that artificial, if valuable and special, atmosphere of the Encyclopedia.

What would happen if Tam died unfulfilled, in his own mind unforgiven, for his responsibility for the deaths of his sister's young husband, David Hall, of Jamethon Black, who had sacrificed himself to stop the attack that Tam had mounted against the whole Friendly culture, and the assassination of Kensie by a political group on Ste. Marie as a direct result? Unless Hal found the Universe in time to prove to him that, if nothing else, these things had had a purpose to a good end, for all the race? Lacking that, plainly, Tam was determined to leave life as the legendary King Arthur had, in sadness and remorse.

If Tam died that way Ajela would die with him, in spirit; and that part-death would make her unable to continue running the Final Encyclopedia, precious as it had always been to her, as to Tani. If that happened, who else was there who could guide and order it? Rukh had helped out to a great degree, these last months, but it was not herjob.

Rukh's job was the kindling of a faith in the new future to be, in the people of all the worlds; and that was a larger, more important duty than steering the Final Encyclopedia. He, Hal, should not, because his job was also elsewhere, leading those who would be the pioneers into this new untouched infinity of potential that the Creative Universe would be-if he ever achieved it. But if Ajela could not, Hal must. It was a special trust, handed into his keeping by Tam, who had gotten it from Mark Torre in equal trust. And that would be an end to his search for the Creative Universe. As Amanda had now shown him, the way to that was to be found not in special places but out among people.

Sitting, waiting for the dawn, he was aware of the presence of Tam, keeping him company. It was not an unpleasant awareness.

The sky had brightened, though the sun was not yet in sight above the Grandfathers of Dawn. Below, the valley was a deep lake of white mist hiding everything, but thinning as he watched. Slowly, as he sat with the daylight growing stronger all about him, he felt himself gradually enclosed by peace. Behind that peace came the order and reason he realized now he had needed for some time.

Just as his frustration at the Final Encyclopedia had made him blind to Tam's completion being necessary to the completion of his own search, so he had been blind to the obvious fact that what had blocked him in his search at the Final Encyclopedia must have been implied in the historic beginnings of that search.

He knew of the man he had envisioned while walking the circle, from his military studies as Donal and his readings as the young Hal. And he doubted that any histories held the moment he had relived while walking the circle. That had been a creative reconstruction of his own imaginative unconscious. He had not been able to enter the Creative Universe, except in his dreams; but he had been able to reach into it from the circle to build something that must fit closely with the known facts.

Historically, therefore, his fight against the Enemy had had its roots in the chronicled life of a man known to history as Sir John Hawkwood, citizen of fourteenth century Europe, and English knight in the early years of the Hundred Years War between England and France. A man destined to become one of the earliest of the great condottieri- professional military captains of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in Italy-and the individual some later military historians were to call the first of the modern generals. The circle and the Creative Universe had at last led him to this man. Not to Hawkwood's whole life; but that special moment of it, on a field of victory, which paradoxically had been the lowest point of the dreams and hopes in Sir John's life-as the past year had been Hal's lowest.

At Poitiers, Sir John had been entering into middle age, a knight with only a modest name as a military captain and no fortune to show for the scars of twenty years in arms and armor.

And with the final defeat now of the French, let alone the caeture of King John of France which Hawkwood at that moment had not yet known about, the war that had promised him a way to better himself was apparently over. He had stood empty-handed in the middle of his life and looked, it seemed, nowhere but downward into old age, penury and oblivion.

IBut from the chroniclers, Hal knew, as Sir John then had not, that from here the knight would go over the mountains into Italy, entering not only into more wealth than he had ever had before, but into the pages of history. Unknowingly, at this moment on this battlefield where his future looked most bleak, ahead of him lay his marriage to Donina Visconti and the most important period of his life. His name would come to mean more at the English court, once he was in Italy, than it ever had during the long years he had been in France.

The only question now might be whether Hal's case was really comparable to Hawkwood's, as his vision had implied.

It must be. The parallels were too close. As the predawn light grew, Hal's belief strengthened with it. Even though he could no more see his own future than Hawkwood at Poitiers could have seen his, what he had just envisioned assured him, once More, that his coming here had been the way he needed to go. Just as going over the mountains into Italy, with the White Company of mercenaries, after Poitiers, had been the right way in which Sir John had needed to go.

Moreover, all this fitted together with, and was reinforced by, his own strong reaction to the circle and the Law, from the moment he had first seen and heard them.

As for Tam, the instinct in Hal that had caused him to associate the older man's state of mind with the lines from Tennyson's poem on the death of Arthur Pendragon, must be trusted as well. It fitted too well with the story and character of Jathed, and the Hawkwood episode. Part of Hal's error, he told himself now, had been to ignore Tam as still an important factor in the search for the Creative Universe, beyond the point of his retirement as Director of the Encyclopedia.

Even as Hal thought these things, the sun broke its top edge clear of the Grandfathers of Dawn, on the far horizon. Procyon looked blindingly over them at him for the merest fraction of a second before he could lower his eyes from that blazing tiny circle of light; and in that same fraction of a moment he realized what he must do. What was necessary to him here was Jathed and Jathed's philosophy, even though Hal instinctively felt it was not entirely correct. What was here, that was nowhere else to be found, was the Law.

Hal could walk the circle and say the Law, as the others did. But it was not enough to use it as a tool to put himself into flights of exploration of his inner mind. What he must do was understand it-completely understand it.

The transient and the eternal are the same

He knew what the words said. But what, in their completeness, did they really mean?

He did not know-yet. There was an understanding needed here that must be made by the deeper parts of his mind, by his creative unconscious. Sudden excitement lifted him to his feet. It might be that in this greater understanding was exactly what he had sought for so long, a way into the Creative Universe. Certainly, it had let Jathed through; and Jathed had not the reason to go there that Hal had, nor the vision of what going there could make.

Filled with wonder, the first direct rays of the sun already warming his back through his robe, he went lightly and swiftly as Old Man might have gone, back to the office where he and Amanda had spent the night,

CHAPTER

19

He reached the office and found it empty, the blanket down from the window, the bed made and tilted up into its storage position against the wall. There was something finished and over with about the room that brought a sadness like the pain from the thrust of a dull knife, deep into him. He turned and went through the office's inner door and along a corridor to the dining area of the building the office was in.

Amanda was not there. The room was all but empty of breakfasters. Friend? The server on duty behind the counter with its trays of breakfast foods called to him. Hal turned. You're to go to Amid's Reception Building, said the server. Amanda's waiting for you there, with another new visitor. Thanks, said Hal.

He left and went to the small building which had been the first he had entered here on the evening of his arrival. Amid was there, seated with Amanda, and not only Artur, but Simon Graeme as well, around a fireplace that now in the growing warmth of day held no fire in it, only a few blackened ends of Wood and the ashes, cold and gray, from the previous night's blaze. The pine cone paperweight gleamed on the desk in the daylight.

There you are, Amanda said as he came in. Come sit by me, here.

He went to the empty chair beside her and sat down. She put out a hand to him and for a second he held it and then their grasp fell apart. How do you feel? asked Amid. A little washed out, said Hal. Nothing another night of ordinary sleep won't cure.

He looked back at Amanda, and Simon just beyond her. Hello, Simon, he said. You look a little washed out yourself. Hello, Hal. Simon smiled, a little ruefully. Mountain climbing, even down - mountai n's, not something I'm in training for.

Hal's gaze turned on Amanda. You're leaving? If I can trust you to take care of yourself in that circle from now on, said Amanda. Simon can go back to the near vicinity of Old Earth, and fire off a millisecond message to the Final Encyclopedia telling them how we're settled, then immediately jump clear of the Solar System and come back to stand sentinel over us from orbit. I've got a full district I ought to be covering locally, since no one's seen me since I left to go back and get you. It'll take a month to cover it all, but I'll never be more than a couple of days' march from here. So if you need me, signal Simon with our cloth display system; and he'll either' go get me, or pass the word to me to make it back here. What about it? Do you think you might need to stay as long as a month? I could, very possibly, said Hal. He looked at Simon. Where's the ship? In a crack up back in the mountains, out of sight from here or anyone below, Simon answered, his heavy-boned Graeme face under its dark brown, thick hair lit up with a wry smile. Amanda put out the signal late yesterday and I landed last night; but I had to wait for near day to climb down to you if I didn't want to break my neck in the dark. How much of a climb is it back up to it? A couple of hours, at most, Simon arswered. Slower up than down.

Hal nodded. He reached out for Amanda's hand again, and felt her fingers close with his. I hate to see you go, he said. I know, she answered softly. But I'm not needed here, and I am out there.

He nodded. I guess that's it then, he said. If anything changes or develops for me, here, I'll call you back. And I'll not waste any time coming-oh, before I forget it again, said Amanda, turning to Amid, I Ive been meaning to mention this. A few hours' walk from the bottom of our mountain, here, there's a wild little girl in the woods who came out to take a look at us but was too quick for us to catch. Someone ought to be looking after the child. Do you suppose some of the people from here could go down there and catch her? It'll take a dozen at least. She's fast, and woods-wise. Hmm, said Amid. Maybe I'd better let you answer that, Artur?

The big man shifted uneasily in his chair as the rest all looked at him. You see, Amanda, said Artur slowly, we-I know all about that girl. Her name's Cee. Actually, she's my niece. Your niece? Amanda was staring at him. Then why haven't you done something about her before this? Artur has, and does- Amid was beginning, but Artur lifted a hand. I'd probably better explain it all, he said. My sister, her husband, and Cee-Cee was only seven years old, then-lived fairly close to here. In fact, where you saw Cee probably wouldn't be too far from where their home was.

His face clouded and he clenched one hand into a heavy fist with which he beat softly on the arm of the chair he sat in. The trouble was, I was so bound up in the Chantry Guild-we'd just begun to use the ledge here, but we hadn't yet really moved up to it-that all those first seven years of her life, I hardly saw my sister's house, and Cee . . . There's no point in blaming yourself for what's past, said Amid. We've discussed that a number of times. I know. But if I'd just dropped by half a dozen times a year, iust enou2h so that the Pirl woidd realize I was one of the family . . . only I didn't; and you're right, it does no good to keep going over and over that fact now.

He hesitated. The point is, he said to Amanda, Cee never got to know me. I've never been anything more than a stranger to her; and she doesn't trust strangers. With good reason. 'Good reason,' have anything to do with our friends, the Occupation troops? asked Amanda.

Artur looked at her brilliantly. I thought you might guess that, he said. Yes, just after we'd hidden ourselves up here on the ledge, the Occupation went around killing all the relatives of people known to belong to the Guild. There was no warning for any of them. One day up here, we heard explosions and, using a scope screen, we found troops in the woods less than half a kilometer from here. Some of us went down to the place where my sister's home had been-this was before they destroyed all the country homes and moved people into town-but there was nothing left but a pile of rubble. We found enough of my sister and her husband to know they had been killed by the explosions that destroyed their house. We searched for Cee, found nothing there or anywhere near; and when she didn't show up, we checked and made sure there was no one alive under the rubble. The soldiers were going back and forth below us frequently in those days. It wasn't practical to really dig into the rubble without giving away the fact we'd been there. So we assumed she was dead under it somewhere. So we gave up temporarily; and then. some of us, slipping into the towns nearby for things we needed occasionally, began to hear about a wild little girl in the woods up this way. I

He stopped. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. It wasn't until nearly a year later that I began to believe that the stories were anything more than that, and that the wild girl might be Cee. I went down to find out; and I soon found you could look forever and not locate her, because she'd be seeing you long before you saw her and keeping out of your way. So I started going down there and just sitting. I sat; and after a number of trips, when I was sitting, I began to catch glimpses of her, getting just close enough to watch-and gone at once, if I turned my head to get a square look at her.

He beat his fist softly on the chair arm again. He was looking past Amanda now, at nothing unless it was his own memories of those times he had sat, hoping that the little girl would move into his field of vision. I kept that up. It was incredible she'd survived, all by herself that way; but as you know, you can live off the country, here, the year around. And we've got no real winter. The temperature hardly varies. The only problem is rain, which isn't a problem unless it comes in the winter months and then it comes down pretty steadily. But all she'd need would be some place to get in out of it; a cave, or even a hollow tree. Anyway, it was true. My little niece had become like a wild animal. She was old enough when her parents died to know about other people, said Amanda. You'd think she'd have gone looking for, if not you, for someone she knew who'd been a friend of her parents. They hadn't-my sister and her husband weren't hermits by any means, said Artur. But they believed in being as self-sufficient as possible@ living off the land and making what little money they needed out of their wood carvings-they were both sculptors. Also, like me, my sister tended to tie into an idea and see nothing but that. They didn't have any close friends, they were off in the woods by themselves-and I really think that their deaths, the way it happened, did something to Cee. She's not really sane, I suppose. Still

He fell silent. Go on, said Amid gently, tell them the rest of it. There were beads of sweat still on Artur's forehead. Aside from that, his face showed no particular expression. But now his hands clenched on the ends of the chairarms beneath them. I sat for weeks, he said, and gradually she began to come closer to me, a little at a time. She'd stay at a certain distance for days; and then, one day, she'd be just a bit nearer. I'd learned by that time not to watch her, except out of the corners of my eyes; and I never showed in any way that I knew she was gradually closing the distance between us.

He laughed, a little shortly, but his forehead was still damp and his hands still gripped the ends of the chairarms. I got to be very good at pretending not to notice-so good I could almost convince myself I wasn't the least bit interested in her-and all the while, day and night, I was carrying around a load of guilt because I hadn't searched harder for her after the explosion that killed my sister and her husband. I got very good at listening. I could hear her, quiet as she was, when she started to get very close behind me. And still I never moved, I didn't give her any cause to suspect that I was just waiting for her to get within arm's reach.

He stopped and wiped his brow with the back of one hand. She finally came right up to me, he said. His voice had acquired a strange deadness, as if what he was starting to tell them now was beyond emotion. She came up right behind me, and I felt a touch-oh, what a light little touch it was-against the back of my robe. Just a moment's touch, and no more. But still I didn't move. I was still waiting; and, after a long while I began to see something out of the corner of my left eye. She was inching around to look at my face up close. And I let her come . . .

He stopped. This time Amid said nothing. They merely all waited. After a long moment, he went on. She came around. She was moving by twitching her heels a tiny distance sideways, then twitching the front ends of her feet next, in the same direction. I didn't move. I hardly breathed. When she came around by my left knee, so that she was in plain view, just inches away, I still kept staring straight ahead, as if she was unimportant, as if she wasn't there. And so she came all the way round in front of me, so that I had to look into her face or move my eyes. And we looked at each other .

He broke off. Go on, man. Tel I them! said Amid, as the silence went on and on. Wonderingly- The word came out like a gasp. She looked at me so . . . wonderingly, as if she was searching rny face for something to find that she'd know. I never should have tried what I did. I should have known better. From the beginning I should have realized it'd take someone more patient. Old Man could have done it. He'd have waited. He knows how to wait. I've seen him put the tip of one of his fingers slowly under a moth perched on a twig and pick it up on that finger, off the twig, so softly and easily that the moth doesn't fly away. But she belonged to me . . . she was my niece, all that was left of my sister's family.

He stopped talking for a moment. Then brought his gaze back to focus on Amanda, and went on. And so, he said, when she finally stood there in front of' me, right in reach, searching my face with those eyes of' hers-hazel eyes they are and large-without really thinking, supposing that somehow she'd conic to understand later and everything would be all right once I'd brought her up here-I reached for her. I grabbed at her.

He hesitated, but just long enough to draw a deep breath, this time. She was fast, he said. I can't believe how fast she was. I could have sworn no hurnan bein(l could come that close within my reach and not be caught. But my hand barely touched her. And she was one.

He stopped. fie breathed, another si-h that this time was so deep it seerned to erripty him, and his large body slumped in its chair. And since then, she won't conic near you, said Amanda.

He nodded. I sit-I've sat for two years since then, Artur said. And she comes. Sometimes I just catch a glimpse ot'her, but whether I see her or not, I know it' she's there. But she*s never conic within ten meters of me, since. And sooner or later, something'll g wrong. Something will bring soldiers by; and 'o one of thern-she always comes to look at anyone who goes by-some soldier*ll shoot her. Or she'll get sick and hide herself in some hole where no one can find her, and die. She's all alone down there-

He broke ofl'on a single, hoarse, dry sob that shook his heavy chest. I can't do anything, he said. She won't come near me. Of course not, said Amanda gently. What do you expect'? When you reached for her that way, you just confirmed whatever it is that makes her what she is. She'll never come close to anyone as long as you're around. What can I do? Artur looked at her. I can't just forgret about her and leave her alone down there! Send a woman, said Amanda. -Didn't you ever think of' that? I'd guess even your Old Man wouldn't have a chance at her now. Also now that I know what her story is, it's plain my idea of a group taking her would be the last thing to try. It'd probably destroy whatever chance there is of her becoming half normal again, if she was taken by force. But a woman, startin.., from scratch, could get close enough to make friends with he,. Note, I said make friends with, not grab. The day she'll come home to you safely will be the day she comes up to this ledge of her own free will, holdin- the hand of someone she trusts.

Amanda stopped. Artur stared almost blindly at her. I'd do it myself, said Amanda, but I've got other responsibilities@ and she's still only one life, while there're hundreds of lives within two days' walk of here who can use nl\ help. It'll take time to do, probably. time I can't spare for that alone, in any case. But there must be a woman member of the Guild who could help you.

She reached out to put a hand on his arm. The hard part for you, she added, is going to be stavill(I away while the woman makes friends with her. Yes . . . Artur's face twisted, then straightened out. woman' I'd never thought of that.- You should have. said Amanda. The soldiers were probably all men, judging by what I've seen of the Occupation forces. And she wits well enough up in years to know the difference and what she is, herself. You can try it. I will. Thank you, I will. His face twisted again forjust a second. -But it'll be hard not going down to see her, day after day, just as you say.

He stood up. Never mind. ThaCs what I'll do. If you'll excuse me. Amid. I think I'd like to Oo and look for someone to help me with Cee right now. just a second, said Amanda. Before you go, can you te) I

T me what the idea was of that vine around her waist, and what it is she carries in the pod in the middle of it? Rocks, said Artur. My sister, Mila, and Petay, her husband, used to hunt rabbits as part of their food. Petay Could throw a rock accurately enough to kill a rabbit front some little distance. He'd wait until one sat up with its head above the ferns to look around and then airn at its neck. It' he was a little high he'd still get the head. it' he was a little low he'd still strike a shoulder area and slow the creature down so that he could run it down and catch it.-

They weren't pure vegetarians, then, your sister and brother-in-law' '` Amanda asked. No, said Artur, luckily for Cee. She's got no access to diet supplements. Mila preferred to use a sling-you know like the sort of sling they used on Old Earth in ver@ ancient times. Whether Cee learned from the two of them, or practice made her good at hunting since she's been on her own, I don't know@ but she kills rabbits regularly for her own eating, both ways. She can throw very hard and accurately with a sort ot'sidearni swing: or she can use the vine and pod, or something else as a sling, to kill from a greater distance. When you tried to catch her, did she make any motion to use the vine, or take one ofthe rock's out of' it? No,- said Hal.

Artur nodded. She wasn't too frightened ofyou, then. She must have been sure she could get away. But she does know what she can do with those rocks-as I say, whether she had lessons from Mila or Petay or not-and I've always been afraid that if' soldiers came up here and chased her she might try to use the rocks on them. Then they undoubtedly would shoot her!

He turned abruptly to Amid. Forgive me. Amid, he said, unusually brusquely for an

Exotic, but the sooner I find someone as Amanda suggests . . . Go ahead, -o ahead! said Amid. When the door had closed behind Artur's back, fie turned to Amanda. I don't think you'll ever know how much of a help that suggestion of yours was to Artur, just now. Well, never inind that, now. HOW soon had you planned to leave 'Right awav, she answered. Both Simon and I'll be going our separate ways.

She looked at Hal and smiled a little, regretfully. Let's step outside and have a word by ourselves, betore you go, Hal said to her. Amid, Simon-you'll foroive us'? We won't be more than a few minutes.'* By all means, said Simon, we've get all the time there is. Take what you want.

Amid simply waved them out. Once in the open air and the sunshine beyond doors, Hal began to pace toward the ledge. Amanda walked along it[i him. Their hands joined automatically. They walked without speaking until they came near the edge and turned. so that the\ walked along it, with empty air on their left and the further, vertical clifr-face of rock behind the ledge some distance to their right. There's everything to say, and no good way to say just part of it, murmured Hal finally.

-I know. It doesn't matter. said Amanda. You'll find what you want; and then I'll be back. And Simon'll take us back to the Encyclopedia, then we'l! be apart again. Or will you even be coming back with me'.' There's no real need, if you're tied to your work here. if I can be of use, I'll -o anywhere with you, my Hal,'' she said. You know that. If I'm not really needed by you, though. I am needed in other places. Yes. Hal had it sudden mental picture of how they InList look to the Guild members outside the buildings who happened to look this way. The tall man and the tall woman, holdiriL, hands, their heads close together in conversation as they walkcj along the edge of the emptiness beyond the cliff edge. Somewhere, sornewhen, there's oot to be time for just being together. Time to shut ourselves away from anything else, without ha\,in,, to keep an eye on the need to go back to duties.

He searched her face with his eyes. Life ought to owe us that much for ourselves. shouldn*t it' Are you asking Amanda who loves you, or Amanda-\vho-

Both, said Hal. Arrianda-who-loves-you promise,,, some day vx'll ha\c the rest of' our live,, to(,cthcr.

-And Arnanda-who-sees' Her face -,re\,k verv still. That's one thinL, Arnanda-\vho-sccs isn't able to see. She ,,topped and turned to face him. Oh, hut I trust Amanda. Don't you trust her, too'? She trusts you. 'Always. He smiled down at her. I always trust her. first and foremost. , ,

Thev went back to walking again. Do you have any idea at all of how lorilg you'll he here'! asked Amanda after a moment.

He shook his head. I'm at the point now where I'm beginning to pull strings together in my own mind. Which strings'? I think, mainly, the strings to Western and Eastern thinking. in spite of the three hundred years the race has been on worlds beyond Old Earth, those two schools of human thought still need to be reconciled in lots of ways. Then, there're the strinps to the past, to the present, and the future, to be brought togcth@r: and the strings to the real universe and the Creative Universe. Many, many strings. Too many. actually, to hope I could pull them all together, here and now. All I can hope is to tic enough of them in with each other so I can move up the line and begin tying in the rest. But you do feel I was on the right track, bringing you here'? said Amanda. Yes, he answered. There's something necessary to be learned in this place, at this time. Something I need, in this whole idea of a second Chantry Guild and particularly in Jathed's I-aw. I've (,of to understand that Law, understand it absolutely. But you know, there're probably other things I don't recognize yet as important to everything I work for, that are here, too, and need takino into account. here was a researcher once, long ago. who said that whenever a source or a reference was really needed, it*(l manifest itself out of the continuum. And centuries auO, back in the old days of magazines, editors used to talk about the fact that all of I sudden a number of writers would sirnultancousl@ submit stories about the same idea-writers who in many cases didn't even know each other. Then, of' course, there're the historical facts about important inventions, or technological advances, appearing at the hands Of two or more entire]\,, separate inventors or workers, at almost the same tinic-and aFOuirients about Who Caine LIP with Ahat first. I don't see how simUltaneltv like that tics, into vour problem, said Amanda. Oh, sorrv, said Hal. -You're the only person who hits to suffer this fi@orn me-1 oet to thinking out loud around vou. What I'm driving at is that I have to go on the premise that wherever I am there may be historically important forces at work in making me see what I see. Forces I should recognize things like Old Man, Artur, or even the little girl, Cee.

Amanda 1rowned. I don't see any connection, myself, between any of' thoso, people and what you're after, she said. But now we're in your work area. not mine. Anywav . . .

She stopped, turned to him anol reached up to put her arnis around his neck and kiss him. I've got to get moving, she said. It's a good two days' walk to the little town I want to go to first; and part of today has already been used up. Does it make all that much difference' said Hal wistfully. You, of all people, to say that! replied Amanda, starting to lead them back to where Amid and Simon waited for them. How would you like it it'you got to a town Just one hour too late to save sorneone's life'' ' Yes, said Hal. Of course. You're right. But that can*t he something that happens often-never mind. You're quite right. It' it only happens once, that*s reason enough for not wastinp time.

He smiled at her. But there's a human firnit to the amount ot'help anyone can give, he said.

-You say that She linked arms with him and they went back in a shared silence that, though warm, was both deep and thoughtf'4 and still in it. returned to the small building that was the Guildmaster's main office.

CHAPTER

20

Over the weeks that he had now been at the Chantry Guild, Hal's sitting by the pond to watch the sun rise when he was not walkino in the circle at that time had become a ritual. Seated, he unchained his rnind to its own ways of abstracting his thoughts; ways that produced inner thoughts and visions also. Although those evoked as he sat by the pond tended to be of a different character than those he produced lor himself' in the circle.

One morning he had Just seated hinisell' while the world beyond the ledge was still lost in the grayout of predawn. when a figure materialized from the dimness at his back and also settled by the pond. not far frorn him and also facing the mountains over which the sun would rise.

It was Old Man. He and Hal looked at each other companionably. Hal. however, found himself vaguely disturbed. Not by the other's presence, but by something about it that felt not quite right. He puzzled over this teeling for several moments and then understandino came to him.

Old Man was sitting on his heels, quite conAortably but undeniably squatting, rather than seating himself cross-leo as Hal had: and if there was anyone on the ledge whom al would have expected to sit naturally in a cross-legged positio it would be the white-bearded older man now beside im. Moreover, Old Man had obviously Joined Hal and the natural thing would have been for hirn to sig ,nal the fact by taking the same posture.

But years had gone by since Hal's early training by the Exotics among the three tutors he had had as a boy@ and the occasions on which a lotus position might have seemed appropriate for him to assume had become fewer and fewer. He had become careless. His legs were almost in the half-lotus position, but his toes were not tucked in behind the calves of the opposim-, legs the way they should have been. With an old-fashioned sort of politeness, Old Man had evidently taken the position he had to avoid seeming to go Hal one better by sitting down in a proper half-lotus himself.

Hal was out of practice, but not so much that the half-lotus was impossible to him. He tucked his toes in. Old Man dropped immediately into the same position with one fluid motion. Hal bowed gravely from the waist to him. Old Man bowed as gravely back. They both turned their attention to the mountains over which would come the sunrise.

Hal's gaze went away beyond the cliff edge. For him. the Chantry Guild and the place it occupied had now effectively ceased to exist. He knew the names of the area that surrounded hirn as anyone would know his own, familiar neighborhood.

He sat on the eastern face of' the range of the Zipac@j mountains. Behind him, the thickness ofthat range ran eastward until it was out of sight. But Hal now knew it descended at last to high, nearly perpendicular cliff,, overhanging the coastal forest. which was too steamy and hot to be more than sparsely inhabited. That forest was called the Tlalocan-the land ofsea and mist'' in the ancient Mayan language of Old Earth. It reached to the shores of' the Zephry Ocean, which stretched some thousands of miles onward to the next large continental mass of Kultis. At his feet lay the Mayahuel Valley, up which Amanda had led him to this place; and beyond where he sat now, the Zipacas continued, angling in so that they, and the Grandfathers ofDawn, opposite, became one range to the north. after the upland forest below had given way to high altitude desert. It was the Grandfathers over which the star Procyon Would rise to bring daylight to the Chantry Guild and the people in the valley below.

Watching the far dark bulk of the distant mountains, as their details began gradually to emerge from the mist under the steadily brightening overhead, he let his mind flow in whatever direction might attract it, as water seeks its own way down a slope. This was not his way in the circle. where he deliberately turned his mind over to understanding the Law he repeated as he walked. Here and now, he only set it free like a hawk to soar with the waking day.

It had come to him some mornin-s since, seated in this place, that for the first time since he had been a young boy and dedicated himself to ending that which had killed his uncle James, he had a chance to step back and add up the gains and losses of his own lives.

They were part-lives, really; for Donal Graerne had ceased to be before middle age, so that he could become Paul Formain. And Formain had existed only a few years as a shell for him who had once been Donal, before he had been abandoned, along with the rest of the already-dead twenty-first century. From there, what was essentially both Donal and now Hal had returned to the courier ship of the twenty-second century: and to the timeless wait of eighty years that had passed before he became the two-year-old child who had grown into what he was now.

But all those lives had been aimed and controlled by a single mind and a single purpose; and they had achieved some things and failed to achieve some others-so far, at least. It was ironic

11 that at the Final Encyclopedia for three years, where he had had nothing to do but concentrate on his goal, that he had never found time to do this sort of self-survey. And now, immersed in walking in the circle, watching the sunrise. serving food, fixing, cleanino-he had been set free to do just that.

He had Lrown smaller in the eyes of his race and larger in dimensions7where the vision of other people did not penetrate. It was as it' to grow as a human being he had needed to give up more and more of what other humans had desired and admired. On all the worlds only a handful now knew him, in any real sense of that word; and nearly all on the Younger Worlds had known Donal, in Donal's later years.

He had started out to kill a dragon, and had ended up striving to climb a mountain others could not even see, to a doorway they had yet to imagine. And yet, to him his goal had become more concrete and infinitely more worthy and solid as it became progressively more invisible and inconceivable to others. Yet it was the same goal-only now, sitting here, he seemed for the moment to see it clearly while in the beginning, like all the rest, he had seen only that false fao;ade within the real universe that was a tiny part of it.

Now, all the universe had become his classroom: and everyone and everything in it, subjects of his study.

The first isolated sparks of sunlight were beginning to find crevices in the top line of the mountains. He reached out to the limits of his imagination, now, then stretched on beyond the veil at the end of known limits, reaching through it metaphorically with both hands, into the Creative Universe he could not yet wholly enter@ and with his hands hidden from him he molded the place he now sat into the place of its own future.

About him, in his mind, the ledge changed. The few heavy blocks of stone that had so far been hewn from the mountains and polished, multiplied and fitted themselves together to make the finished structure for which they were destined. The House of the Chantry Guild, constructed of the warm, green-threaded marble of the mountain that contained it, was lifted up, roofed itself, and sent walls and pathways forward to enclose that space of the ledge not covered. The little stream ran now between narrow borders of native grasses and flowers to the pool, which had become enclosed by a rim of stone terrace. On that rim he sat, now in the far future. Behind him, he heard the timeless chanting of those in the circle. He sat, young and waiting for a sunrise, centuries ahead in time.

The surface of the pool now showed white flowers upheld on the surface of the waters by flat green leaves. Variform lilies. stirred only occasionally when their stems, reaching down underwater, were brushed by the passing of' one of the fish among those living in the pool; raised there, then as DOW, to be part of the food for the Guild members. Then, as now, the sun had just joined together its sparks of light into one line of illumination marking the chain of the mountaintops.

He sat, in lotus position, waiting for the sunrise as he did every morning. Behind him the walker adults chanted and turned@ and the brightening day drew his attention to the clouds of the sky reflected in the pool beside hirn, and to a Hower on its surface, almost within arm's length.

There was a particular spark of light from one white petal.

Procyon had climbed high enough to strike a diamond glitter off a dewdrop on the blossom of a flower. There was somethint, powerfully memorable about that, but he could not divine what it was. He looked away once more, back out to the crest of' mountains itself, and watched the actual breaking through of the sun, its upper edge reaching at last over the barrier of the mountains to look directly onto the ledge, at the Chantry Guild and at him. Then with one crescendoing upsurge of light it burst fully and directly into his eyes and made him blind to all about h i m.

He blinked and looked away. His eyes met the eyes of Old Man. They exchanged a smile, and got to their I'cet, parting as they went their separate ways into the daytime activities of the ledge.

Hal turned his mind from the sunrise just past, and back to the present practical requirements of life. Fie had now been here seven weeks, nearly double the time Amanda had asked if he intended to stay. In itselfthis should be no great time. but in his mind he could see the iniage offam, fighting ofF death, hour by hour, waiting, and he fell the urgency like a hand pressing always on his back.

He was to begin a walk in the circle again early this afternoon, but first, this inorninu, he was scheduled to go with a foraging party to collect edible wild fruits and vegetables growing in the forest below. The foragino group was to consist of' six people and meet at Amid's reception building. He turned in that direction, accordingly, and the sight of it, together with the thought of the land below, brought back to his thoughts the matter ofCee. Ever since Amanda had first suggested it, Artur had let one of the fernale Chantry Guild members, a roundfaced, brown-haired, cheerful young woman named Onete, go down to sit in the forest. But not seem(,, his niecc-at least not being able to feel her presence there, and have direct personal evidence ofthe fact she was alive and well-had been painful to Artur.

The pain had been evident; but he had borne it with a quietness and patience that made no lessening of his usual activities in the Guild. It wits behavior which had reminded Hal ol'something he had almost forgotten. The Exotics, for all their ori6nal aoparent softness and tendency to surround themselves with what many thought of as luxuries, had proved to have the inner strength Hal had seen in them, that was even now making, at it hard for the Occupation to kill them off. It was a strength th ' had its roots in the constancy of their individual philosophies, regardless of how each one might and did interpret it, that was as characteristic of them, as unflinching faith was of the best of those on the Friendly worlds, and courage was of the Dorsai.

He remembered with a sudden pang of sadness and loss, even after all these years, Walter the InTeacher, who had been the Exotic among his tutors. as Malachi Nasuno had been the Dorsai and Obadiah Testator the Friendly-until Bleys' thugs had gunned the three of thein down, that one warm, late summer afternoon in the mountains of Earth, years ago. Walter, who had ordinarily seemed the most persuadable of the three old men who had brought Hal up, had been in fact the most unyielding, once his mind was made up. So it was with the best of his fellow Exotics under the heel of the Occupation.

Remembering this, Hal found he had reached Amid's reception building and that he was in advance of his fellow foragers. There was no one else waiting outside. The thought of Cee returned to his mind@ and, since he was here, he knocked at the door of the building, Come in-corne in, anyone ' called Amid from within. Hal pushed open the door and went in, closin(I it softly behind him.

Amid was seated on one side of' the fireplace, in which ;I small fire, probably built against the chill ofthe early hours, was now' burning doAn unheeded to it few glowim, coais. His chair had been pulled around to face two other chairs. in which Sat ArtUr and Onete.

-Ah, it*S you.'' Said Amid. I'd almost have bet it'd he vou. Hal. Come join us. Sit down. I Was OinO to C@Ill WLI in on this. anyway.

Am I that prediadble'.' asked Hal. entering and takimg a chair which he also Pulled around. so that thev sat in a rouoh circle, he and the three others. You sit out there to watch the sun come up every morning, said Amid. As soon as the sun's up. you oo to whatever dutv you've got. That duty's foraging below, today. So you were bound to come here. weren't you'?

But not necessarily to knock at your door, said Hal. You're ahead of tirne-watching the sun come up makes you that way. said Amid. What are you going to do, stand around alone out there'? Or am I so unapproachable'? You know I like talkino to you.

Hal smiled. When you've (,of time to spare, he answered. But of course, I'd forgotten. You sit here all day doing nothing, just hoping for someone to stop and talk to you, he said. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask about how things are progressin- with Cm and you've got the sources of information right with you. It's Cee we're concerned about, said Artur. What's aone wrong'.) Nothing, as far as my trying to win her trust is concerned, said Onete. But while I was down there, yesterday, Elianone of the people from Porphyry-came looking for me. I've got in the habit ofsitting in the same place down there every day; and the local people have come to know I'm there. He wanted to pass on the word that there was some interest, none of the townspeople knew why. about the Guild aniong the soldiers in the garrison. You see, said Artur to Hal, we thought they'd given up looking for us Ion- ago. No one knows the location ofthis ledge but the Guild members, Amanda and yourself'. Even the local people below onl@ Know that we live out there, somewhere; and even thev've -ot no idea how man@ of us there are or anything, else pertinent about LIS. The garrison soldiery hunted for the better part ofa year for us, after thc@ first moved in here. But we stayed Lip Oil the ledge. except in eniergcncics, and they finally gave up looking-for good, Ac thought. Our -Liess was they'd assumed we'd left the district, if not this part of Kultis. completely, and scattered. But noA , according to Elian, said Onetc. ''the soldiers arc talkin(-, about some sort of new hunt of the arc:i here for LIS.

-T@c trouble is, Said Amid. -if the soldiers begin making an org anized sweep through here, they're almost certain to catch si(yht ofCce, because she'll come to look at them. It'she wanted to, She could probably dance all around and through them and none of them would @now she was there. But she -won't realize the danger of being seen. She won't realize that with enough people, acting in concert, there's a dan-er that she can be surrounded and caught. And there's no way for us to make her understand this, said Artur.

-Any thoughts on the matter, Hal')- Amid asked. Hal shook his head. Short of' our capturing the girl first, ourselves-, he began.

-No, said Artur and Onete simultaneouslv. She'd never recover from that, Artur added. Amanda was right. Then I haven't anything to suggest, Hal said, at the moment, at least.

-We may just have to wait and hope, said Amid. - liowever, a little knowledge of what the present situation is wouldn't do any harm. You're the tactical expert here, Hal. I'd like you to go down with the forapers just as you were supposed to do. But don't stay with them. When they get down, break off by yourself and take a look around the area as far as you think you can in the time you've got to give it. You might consider delaying your normal turn at the circle so that you could put in the whole day down there?-

-Of course, said Hal. .. Thank you, said Amid. Thank you, said Artur, almost simultancousiv. ..There*s nothing needing thanks in that, said @al. As far as that goes, I'm walking the circle in the back of' my mind all the time I'm awake anyway-and for all I know most of the time when I'm sleeping. Are you?- said Amid. That explains why we now have two ofyou, Old Man and yourself, who walk the circle without saying the Law aloud as they go. It's interesting. That's exactly what Old Man told me, when I asked him why he didn't repeat the Law aloud as he walked. I'd been obliged to ask him because others in the Guild had asked me if it was correct for him to do that. Old Man said the same thing-he didn't need to say the Law aloud. It repeated itself' in his head all the time, no matter what he was doing. Jathed would never have stood for either one of you walking in his circle and not repeating the proper words. But you will, said Hal.

Amid smiled. I will, because I think ruy brother Kanin would have. Kanin had a tremendous admiration for Jathed-as I may have said, Kanin was his chief disciple. But Kanin, like any true Exotic, had a mind of his own.

Hal's car had been picking up the slight sounds of voices beyond the closed outer door of the building. I'd better be going, he said. it sounds like the others are ready, outside. I'll go too. said Onete, also rising, since we'll be traveling the same way for the first part of' it. Unless there's some reason for me to stay awhile yet, Amid? No. Go ahead. Thanks.

Hal and Onete went out, joined the rest of the foragers and they all started down the mountainside. Where's your gathering bag, Friend?- one of the men in the mixed group asked Hal. It occurred to Hal that he had become so used to answering to the name Friend that he had almost not recognized his own when Amid had used it during the conversation just a few mornents past. He had been planning to pick up a bag after speaking to Amid-but there was no point in doing that now.

I've been given a separate job, he said. Oh. ..

They were too polite, both its Exotics still and as Guild members, to question him about what the task might be.

When thel, reached the forest below they split up, the foragers spreading out to the north and Hal and Onete going together southward. down toward Porphyry. I never did (let to ask how you're (letting on with Cee. Hal said once the two of them were alone. I'm inakina progress. Onete smiled. What a magnificent little thino she is! I used to wonder how she could survive down there all by herself. But she really owns that forest. She knows everv foot of it. I'll bet she could run throu-h it blind if she had to. @Llt what you want to know is have I oot her to come reallv close to me'? That's about it. said Hal. I have, said Oncte. Oh, I don't inean close enough to touch, thouoh if she'd stand still for it. she comes near enough to me, nowadays, so that I could probably stand up, reach out and touch her. But that's not what I'm after. It's curiosity that brings her close, You know. She wants to touch my clothes, and me, as much as I'd like to touch her-, but she doesn't dare. She doesn't trust me enough yet. Artur grabbed at her, eventually--well, you know that@ and ofcourse she's expecting me to do the same thing. She's going to have to actually come up and touch me and walk away again without my moving, a number of times. before she'll begin to put me in a different category. Poor Arturl

-Yes,- said Hal. He couldn't help it, of course. He'd wanted to hold her so long, that he just didn't have any patience left, when she came in reach. I can tell how he must have felt, by the way I feel myself@ and she's not part of my extended family, the only part that's left. But I'll wait. I think if I wait long enough, Cee'll not only initiate the touchino, she'll start to lead me around and sho me

things. Then, I can perhaps see if' she'll let rne lead her places: and so finally I can bring her up to the ledge and safety. But not before these soldiers come, said Hal. You think they'll really make a search through here? Onete looked up at his face as they walked. Yes, said Hal.

He did not say to Onete what he had also not said to Am,(!. only because Artur and Onete had been there, which was that hc was afraid it was because of him that the search would come.

CHAPTER

21

Yes, thought Hal, Bleys would indeed come. The Other had his own, personal version of intuitional logic, as he had told Hal when the two had talked together briefly in the cold and misty tunnel through the phase-shield, soon after the shield had gone up. Intuitional logic, or its counterpart, would not tell Bleys where Hal was, but he would be able to read from the general situation that Hal was up to something and probably not on Earth. Undoubtedly, on all the Younger Worlds, right now, the police. the military and all other paramilitary under the control of the Others, were looking into formerly closed files and commencing to examine groups and areas left unexamined for some time.

Particularly on these two Exotic worlds. A little serious thought, let alone an intuitional logic, would rule out one by one the other worlds beyond Old Earth. Hal would not return to either of the Friendly worlds, where he was too well known. There would be no reason that was likely to take him to the mining world of Coby or the older worlds of Mars and Venus, which had been settled early and never fully developed. Newton, the scientists' world, almost alone among the Younger Worlds, held no groups actively resisting the Others, from which Hal could get aid and protection. Also, Newton and its counterpart, Cassida, were sterile for the purposes of Hal's aims, at this time in history. There were no strong historical forces among the populations of Ceta, Ste. Marie, New Earth and Freiland; and there was no point in Hal's returning to the all but empty world of Dorsai. By default, therefore, there were left only Mara and Kultis, either one.

There would have been a command, originating with Bleys, himself, and filtering down through the hierarchy of political and military authorities the Others controlled. It would have started the military and paramilitary forces on the two Exotic worlds searching for any group or people who could give shelter or assistance to someone like Hal. The important thing to Bleys would be not so much to find Hal as to find what it was that could have brought him out from behind the shelter of the phase-shield. Whatever Hal was after, by definition it would be something which Bleys would prefer he did not have. So the order would have gone out.

And the military in Porphyry, like such organizations everywhere, would have begun by first searching what was easy to find and close at hand, going farther and farther afield as they found nothing, until their inquisitions brought them, finally, once more to this part of the valley, and possibly to the very foot of these cliffs.

Hal did not think they would find the hidden entrance to the ledge. They would pass by, and retire at last, empty-handed, to their garrison again. But meanwhile, anyone like Cee would definitely be in danger. What he must do now was find some evidence of how far out they had gotten in their searching and their planning to search. . . .

As he had been thinking these thoughts, he had been carrying on a casual conversation with Onete; and now they had come at last to the soft, vine-covered hummock of decayed wood which served as Onete's chair during the time she sat and waited for Cee, who was possibly watching them at this very moment. Hal closed his eyes briefly and tried to feel if there were eyes watching Onete and himself at the present moment. But he felt nothing and opened his eyes again quickly enough so that Onete did not remark on his having closed them. Well, said Onete. You'll be on your way, I suppose. I'll settle down here the way I always do. If you come back this way. you might be quiet and cautious approaching this spot, just in case Cee is being unusually daring or extending herself in some new way. We don't want to frighten her off.

I'll be careful, said Hal.

So they parted and Hal took off through the forest, still in the direction of Porphyry, but now alone. As soon as he was well out of sight of Onete, he took off his sandals and hung them on a handy bush, leaving himself barefoot. Earlier, he had accommodated his pace to that of the foragers and Onete while he was with them, but now he would need to cover ground if he hoped to see as much of the local territory as he had planned, this day. He broke into an easy lope.

Like most of the other Guild members, he had fallen into the habit of walking the circle barefoot, and the soles of his feet were hardened to travel without footwear. Just as the weeks of work and walking up on the ledge had put him back into shape, physically. The best of the gym equipment for exercise seemed never to give the results that actual walking, running and hard hand-labor did.

He smiled to himself as he loped along, feeling the enjoyment of stretching his legs after . . . how long? He had done his running at the Encyclopedia on a hidden treadmill, with the illusion of a countryside unreeling about him at the pace he was traveling. It had been almost, but not quite the same thing. For one instance, his feet had come to know the artificial irregularities and bumps of the illusory path beneath them. Here, they were continuously new and real.

Privately, he would have liked to go down to the valley below to do distance running, but it was plain the Guild members avoided leaving traces of their presence below as much as possible; and although he was sure Amid would have given him permission to go, he did not want special consideration. The members of the Guild had gotten used to seeing him at his various exercises about the ledge; and, being Exotics, would never have dreamed of anything but accepting whatever was his personal choice of a way of life. He smiled again, thinking of the Guild members. With them, during these few weeks, he had come closer to understanding Exotics than at any other time in his lives. Like so many individuals of the other Splinter Cultures, and like nearly all of the people on Old Earth, itself, he had taken the Exotics' nature and their philosophical search for an evolved human pretty much for granted.

He had not realized what that search had meant to them in terms of an active pursuit, or how much it had altered them as a people. For the first time he saw their culture for what it was and realized the real change it had made in them. There was no doubt in him now that it was equivalent to the changes the Dorsai had made in becoming what they were, and the Friendlies in becoming what they had become.

That change was not just a matter of surface manners, politeness and consideration. These people actually saw life from the standpoint of their philosophical search for an improved human race; and strove to find the materials for that improvement in themselves. Thinking back now, he realized his first actual acceptance of that fact had been in what he had seen in those around him on the road to and in the town of Porphyry. They had been subjected, but not changed. Even oppressed, all but a very few of them had remained the Exotics they had been before the soldiers from off-world had come.

It had been a great discovery. He felt now, for the first time, that there was something to learn; something that-although it might be that in following it up he was going away from his problem-might in the long run end by bringing him back to it by a better route. The Exotics wanted an evolution in humankind, per se. What he, himself, wanted was specifically a moral, an ethical, evolution in humanity. Surely the two desires were close, if not united in purpose?

But it was his survey of the land down here he should be thinking of now. He began by swinging to his left in an arc that brought him back to a path. It was not really a path, here, but a trail which could be followed by woods-wise eyes, the trail that he had taken with Amanda when she had first led him to the ledge. He followed this barely perceptible trail backward toward Porphyry, accordingly, still at a lope, and it was not long before it grew into what was a visibly used path.

In this early stage it could even be a path worn by larger animals, who, like humans, took the easest route on their first time through unknown territory and then tended to repeat their steps on subsequent trips. Of course, there were no such wild animals on this world. He had been thinking too much as Hal, who had seen such game trails on Old Earth. Younger World troops would not think of anything but human feet having made such a trail, when they came across it.

After a while the trail gave way, in small stages, to a regularly maintained road, even though narrow and unsurfaced.

So far he had seen no evidence of recent passage this way by soldiers, or by any group of people, organized or unorganized. There was no possible way soldiers, particularly the poorly trained troops of the Occupation, could have gone up the unsurfaced trail without leaving sign of their passage in the way of bootprints and damaged vegetation, on either side of it. No leaving sign of their passage, to Hal's eyes at any rate, in its soft surface. The early part of it he traveled, accordingly, must also be territory to which they had not penetrated for some time. It was not far down the road, however, before he rounded a curve, descended a small slope and came upon not merely sign, but a deliberate announcement of their recent visit this far from Porphyry.

He had reached the home of the madman who spent his days stripping blossoms from the rapidly growing plants he cultivated in pots around the pool before his house and in the space behind it.

But the man was not plucking blossoms now-and plainly had not been for a couple of weeks, at least. Local scavengers had been at his body. What was left of it now swung in the light breeze, suspended by the noose from which he had been hung.

Below him was a printed sign showing large block letters in red on white.

DO NOT TOUCH OR REMOVE, BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDANT OF THE GARRISON.

Hal was suddenly reminded of such executed corpses dangling from makeshift roadside gallows in Hawkwood's time, with similar notices. The idea then, of course, had been that the body of the individual who had been hung should serve as a warning and a deterrent to other criminals. Here, where deterrence was not the object, the sign was simple savagery and sadism on the part of the Occupation troops.

Hal did not touch the body. There was no use; and to do so would merely serve as an announcement to any soldiers returning this way that others besides the madman existed in this area. He turned and headed back up the road at the same pace he had used since he had parted with Onete.

Only the morning had gone by. He decided to use the rest of the day in generally surveying the terrain, not only so he would know it in the future, but so he could make some informed guesses as to how the troops would spread out and move through it, when and if they came.

Accordingly, he now made side excursions to right and left out from the trail. The soldiers, under the impression that the Chantry Guild would be in the forest rather than above it, would look for evidence of signs of traffic to and from the location of its headquarters. Not even they would expect an obvious connection of trails linking that headquarters with the visible footpath he now followed. They would be likely to simply follow the footpath as far as it seemed to them to exist. Only after it had disappeared would they then probably form a skirmish line and begin to sweep through the greenery area beyond; which they would have divided on their map into blocks of territory, running right to the foot of the cliffs.

It was well that Onete had chosen a place to sit for Cee that was some distance beyond and off the line of the trail toward the cliffs. It was not so good that she had chosen a spot relatively close to the entrance under the huge boulder, leading up to the ledge.

There were advantages in such a close position, of course, She, like the foragers, could literally be watched from the ledge, using a viewscope adjusted for distance viewing; in fact, lately, Artur spent what moments he had to spare during the day doing just that, to catch what glimpses he could of Cee. Also all Guild members, when they were below, were trained to glance up at regular intervals to where they knew the ledge to be.

Although the ledge was invisible from the lower ground, to someone who knew where its outer edge should be, it was still easily locatable; and if whoever was below saw a bush growing on that edge where normally no bush grew, the warning to get immediately back up to safety was clear.

Even Hal himself had been checking the position of the ledge, hourly, without being more than barely aware he was doing so. Reminded of the warning bush now, he looked for it, even though the most recent hour was not up; but there was no bush there.

No, Onete's location was admirably suited from the standpoint of' Onete's own safety. But if the soldiers had anyone among thern who could read even the most obvious of sign, the marks of Onete and Cee's visits to that location would tell whoever it was that people had been there, recently. The soldiers, accordingly, would search more carefully in the region about that spot, including up to the cliffs, the boulder and the secret entrance.

Hal did not really think that even such a tracker, if they had -one, would suspect that the apparently small shadowed hollow under the great boulder was anything more than that. The slope of loose rock just below that entrance did not hold the marks of the goings in and out of Guild members, who were always careful to move some distance on the rock, along the base of the cliff, before they left it individually at different points to enter the jungle.

The chances of the soldiers finding their way to the ledge, consequently, were slim. But unfortunately the evidence of Onete's meetings with Cee would still have directed attention to ,this area; and if there were some of the Others on the Exotic worlds they might have the imagination the soldiers lacked-to direct a search closely along the cliff-front, investigating every nook and cranny until they crept in under the boulder and found the route to the ledge. To Bleys Ahrens, himself, the evidence of Cee and Onete's meeting would simply suggest immediately the likelihood of a secret dwelling place on the cliffs above.

However, there was no quick way now to hide that evidence. There remained the business he was engaged in now, which was putting himself empathically in the boots of the soldiery; and from their point of view working out how they would go about covering the terrain he was now surveying.

He had automatically -one back to his training as the young Donal, and that of the young Hal under the tutorship of the Dorsai, Malachi Nasuno, on Old Earth. For the moment everything else had been put aside and he thought and reasoned only according to that early training. As a result something connected with that way of thinking came automatically to his mind. It was a part of the multivolume work on tactics and strategy, which had been the lifework of Cletus Grahame, Donal's great great-grandfather. . . . the importance of knowing the terrain where encounters with enemyforces are likel -y is impossible to underrate,'' Cletus had written in the volume titled FIELD USE OF FORCES. The commander. whether he exnecrv to have to onerale deftnsively or offensively over that terrain, gains a tremendous advantage by knowt .ng t.t personally and intimately. It is not merely enough to glance at a visible area and relate it to a map displayed in a viewer. Large elements, such as rivers, gullies, i.mpenetrable undergrowth and such, are obvious features to be committed to memory-but this is only the beginning of the advantage to be derived from the Commander's going out in person to cover the area. If this is done, then a great many smaller, but infinitel.v useful bits of knowledge may be acquired that may well make the difference between success andfailure in any action. The qualit). of mud on the riverbank, the exact depth of a gull 'v, the character Of the impenetrable undergrowth -such as a tendency of part oJ' its vegetation to stick to the clothing of enemy passing near it or a empti .ng to penetrate it-all these are items oj'information that ma_ ,be turned to account; not only in helping to build a picture of how the enemy will be channeled and directed, delayed, or aided in moving through the area, but in deciding how the enemy forces may be led or forced into a situation where theY must surrender, or ma 'v be easil-v taken prisoner, giving the bloodless victory that is the hallmark oJ' the fully capable commander. . . .

Hal frowned for a second as he loped along, his eyes noting and his memory automatically cataloging what he saw as he wove back and forth through the jungle across the route the soldiers would be led, by conditions of the terrain, to come.

Something was nagging at the back of his mind. There should be something more to the passage from the text than that. Something that was of importance, not to the present moment, but to his larger, lifetime search; and yet, he had the page of the ancient text from the Graeme library on Dorsai clearly in his mind Is eye and those paragraphs were the extent of what was pertinent there to what he was doing at the moment. He made a mental note to search his memory again on that subject when he had leisure and turned his whole attention back to the business of studying the ground he was covering.

He was almost to the cliffs by this time. The next pass would take him past the foot ofthem. He broke off his traveling to and fro to make a turn back to where he had left his sandals on the bush. Since this took him close to where Onete was sitting, he swung wide in his approach, and covered the last hundred meters or so silently and cautiously so as not to disturb Cee if she were there.

He had seen no sign of Cee, however, by the time he had retrieved the sandals. Instead of putting them on immediately, he gave in to the temptation to move with unusual care closer in to where Onete would be sitting; and after a few moments he came within sight of the spot and saw her.

Cee was indeed with her, standing directly in front of Onete; and, it looked to Hal, well within reach of Onete if the latter had wished to reach for the girt. As Onete had said, however, she plainly had no intention of doing so; and Cee apparently now trusted her in this, because she stood relaxed before the grown woman, almost as if they were in casual conversation-as perhaps they were, in one fashion or another.