The Chantry Guild

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 room." "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 Jathed 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 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 interview 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 had just entered that city as he came back was tropical.

The soli illumination of his room had come on automatically as he entered, but it was so adjusted that it failed 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 self-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. Slowly, 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 hung. He stood there a second in the air, staring at them. "Ridiculous!'' he said suddenly - and just as suddenly, he was falling. He gathered himself with the instinct of long training in the second of drop and, landing on hands and feet, 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 established - 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 protege 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.