The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 11

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

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

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

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same time, he got a feeling from them now as if part of the warmth that had always characterized the Exotics was now withdrawn.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hal picked up the glass.

"I said lap it!" snapped Iban. "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 Marlo, without turning his head. "Get a saucer! "

Marlo obeyed, putting the saucer without orders on the table in front of Hal. "Pour it into the saucer, Kaspar," said Iban. "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 Iick 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 Iban. "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 Iban. "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 quality of mercy 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 heaven- "What?"

"_upon the place beneath. That quality of mercy is strong within you, Iban. 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, Iban 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 Marlo, too."

Slightly off to one side, standing a couple of steps behind Iban's chair, Marlo was also motionless, with the same, unmoving gaze. "Marlo," 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 never learned," said Marlo. "Was that what it?"

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

"Listen to me, Iban," 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 Marlo. "That's what it was, today, wasn't it?" he asked her. "A day off duty for him?" "Yes," Marlo 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 Iban "Iban you were 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 Iban. "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 Iban. "Now," said Hal, "since you finished off the bottle, maybe you better get some sleep to be ready for duty tomorrow." "Y'right," said Iban 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 Marlo'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 Marlo. 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, Iban? You like Marlo, 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. Marlo burst into tears where she stood and Amanda moved to put her arms around the older woman.

Marlo was weeping hoarsely and deeply. Amanda led her 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 Marlo'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 smell of cooking in the air. She got up as he came in, shutting the front door behind him. "Where's Marlo?" 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 Marlo knows is that a squad of soldiers came to the house one day when the Groupman was here and took them both away. Marlo 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. Marlo knew she wasn't telling the truth - just trying to make Marlo 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 Iban about being kinder to Marlo 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 Iban. But maybe by the time it wears off, he'll have convinced himself 'it pays to be decent to Marlo. 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 Iban'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 Iban'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. Iban'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 realize that the earth they owned is still there and there isn't any 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 them 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 Marlo seems - they all seem to have made some sort of impression 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 Iban'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 on the 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.