The Chantry Guild

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 Marlo some money so she could replace the food we ate without Iban 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 Iban. Not so much that he'll notice the loss, but enough to help out what I gave Marlo. 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 Marlo 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 Marlo 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 uptilted 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 farmed 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. "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, Iban, 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 I?" 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. "