Dorsai!

Secretary For Defense

Flashes of clarity began to return.

For some time, now and again, they had been calling him from the dark corridors down which he walked. But he had been busy, too busy to respond until now. But now — slowly — he let himself listen to the voices, which were sometimes those of Anea, and Sayona, and Ian, and sometimes the voices of those he did not know.

He rose to them reluctantly, slow to abandon the halls of darkness where he traveled. Here was the great ocean he had always hesitated to enter; but now that he was in it, it held him warm, and would have possessed him except for their little voices calling him back to petty things. Yet, duty lay to them, and not to it — that duty that had been impressed on him from his earliest years. The things undone, the things ill-done — and what he had done to William.

“Donal?” said the voice of Sayona.

“I’m here,” he said. He opened his eyes; and they took in a white hospital room and the bed in which he lay, with Sayona and Anea and Galt standing beside it — along with a short man with a mustache in the long pink jacket of one of the Exotic psychiatric physicians.

Donal swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. His body was weak from long idleness, but he put the weakness aside the way a man puts aside any irritating, but small and unimportant thing.

“You should rest,” said the physician. Donal looked at him casually. The physician looked away; and Donal smiled, to ease the man.

“Thanks for curing me, doctor,” he said.

“I didn’t cure you,” said the physician, a little bitterly, his head still averted.

Donal turned his glance on the other three; and a sadness touched him. In themselves, they had not changed, and the hospital room was like similar rooms had always been. But yet, in some way, all had dwindled — the people and the place. Now there was something small and drab about them, something tawdry and limited. And yet, it was not their fault.

“Donal” began Sayona, on a strangely eager, questioning note. Donal looked at the older man; and he, like the physician, looked automatically away. Donal shifted his glance to Galt, who also dropped his eyes. Only Anea, when he gazed at her, returned his glance with a child’s pure stare.

“Not now, Sayona,” said Donal. “We’ll talk about it later. Where’s William?”

“One floor down… Donal—” the words broke suddenly from Sayona’s lips in a rush. “What did you do to him?”

“I told him to suffer,” said Donal, simply, “I was wrong. Take me to him.”

They went slowly — and, on Donal’s part, a little unsteadily — out the door and down to a room on the floor below. A man there lay rigid on a bed like the one Donal had occupied — and it was hard to recognize that man as William. For all the asepsis of the hospital, a faint animal smell pervaded the room; and the face of the man was stretched into a shape of inhumanity by all known pain. The skin of the face was tautened over the flesh and bones like cloth of thinnest transparency over a mask of clay, and the eyes recognized no one.

“William—” said Donal, approaching the bed. The glazed eyes moved toward the sound of his voice. “Mor’s trouble is over.”

A little understanding flickered behind the Pavlovian focusing of the eyes. The rigid jaws parted and a hoarse sound came from the straining throat. Donal put his hand on the drum-tight brow.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be all right, now.” Slowly, like invisible bonds melting away, the rigidity began to melt out of the man before them. Gradually he softened back into the shape of humanity again. His eyes, now comprehending, went to Donal as if Donal’s tall form was one light in a cavern of lightlessness.

“There’ll be work for you to do,” said Donal. “Good work. All you ever wanted to do. I promise you.”

William sighed deeply. Donal took his hand from the brow. The eyes dropped closed; and William slept.

“Not your fault,” said Donal, absently, looking down at him. “Not your fault, but your nature. I should have known.” He turned a little unsteadily, to the others who were staring at him with new eyes. “He’ll be all right. Now, I want to get to my headquarters on Cassida. I can rest on the way. There’s a great deal to do.”

The trip from the Maran hospital where both Donal and William had been under observation, to Tomblecity on Cassida, passed like a dream for Donal. Waking or dreaming, he was still half in that ocean into which at Mor’s death he had finally stepped, and the dark waters of which would never entirely leave him now. It was to become finally a matter of living with it — this sea of understanding along the margin of which he had wandered all the young years of his life, and which no other human mind would be able to comprehend, no matter how long his explanation. He understood now why he understood — this much had the shock of Mor’s death brought him. He had been like any young animal, hesitant on the edge of the unknown, before his own uncertain desires and the sharp nudge of circumstance combined to tumble him headlong into it.

He had had to learn first to admit, then to live with, and finally to embrace his difference.

It had been necessary that what was uniquely Donal be threatened — first by the psychic shocks of the phase shifts during the attack on Newton; and second by the manner of Mor’s dying, for which only he knew how truly he was responsible — in order that he be forced to fight for survival; and fighting, discover fang and use of claw. In that final battle he had seen himself at last, full-imaged in the un-plumbed depths; and recognized himself at last for what he was — a recognition no one else would ever be able to make. Anea, alone, would know without needing to understand, what he was; it is Woman’s ancient heritage to appreciate without the need to know. Sayona, William, and a few such would half-recognize, but never understand. The rest of the race would never know.

And he — he himself, knowing and understanding, was like a man who could read, lifting the first small book from a library the shelves of which stretched off and away to infinity. A child in a taller land.

Anea, Sayona, Galt and the others came with him back to Tomblecity. He did not have to ask them to come with him. Now, they followed instinctively.