The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 22

"I can't begin to give you even guesses by way of answers," said Hal, "until I get some information. How many soldiers are there in the garrison'? Have you any idea how many of those would be free enough from other duties to make up a search party large enough to comb the district out here'? Do they have a tracker among them?" "Tracker?" Amid frowned. "Someone who can tell whether people have been moving through wild country like that below us by reading sign - recognizing part of a footprint, or what a broken branch means, and so forth." "Ah! I see," said Amid. "I don't know if they have or not." "There must have been other searches, in this district and others. Did they ever use anyone like that to try to locate the people they were hunting?" "Not to my knowledge," said Amid. "No, I'm sure they didn't. In fact I doubt they've got someone like that. It would be common knowledge if they did." "If it isn't, it only means they've got no one outstanding in that sort of ability," said Hal. "it doesn't necessarily rule out the fact that some of them may be a little more knowledgeable about the woods and quicker to notice a footprint or other sign, that's open and obvious. For example, there'll be no hiding the fact that Onete's been sitting in that little clearing for some weeks now, and meeting Cee there." "No. I've been worrying about that, but I don't know anything that could be done to erase the marks of their being there. Do you?" "I haven't been able to think of anything so far," said Hal. "I'm particularly concerned - not merely for Cee, but for the Guild as a whole," said Amid. "We've been safe until now up here, but there's no getting around the fact that if they find the entrance under the boulder and follow it up, they'd have us all in a trap." "No weapons up here, I suppose?" Hal asked. "Here?" Amid looked at him sternly, "Certainly not. We're Exotics! I suppose you could count Old Man's sword as a weapon, if he'd let someone else use it that way. He won't hurt anything or anyone, himself." "Too bad," said Hal. "The soldiers would be very vulnerable, climbing up here after they got past the boulder. For all practical purposes they'd have to come single file. With even a few weapons, you might be able to ambush the whole party on the way up and take them prisoner. Of course you'd have the problem of what to do with them, once you'd captured them. I take it for granted you wouldn't be able to bring yourselves to murder them in cold blood, even if some of them have done just that, effectively, to people like that insane man down the road." "No, we wouldn't hurt them, of course," said Amid. "And as I say, we've no weapons, anyway. Is there any way we could take them prisoner, if we had to, without weapons?" "I'd strongly advise against trying it," said Hal. "The Guild members probably outnumber any search party that'd be sent by at least two to one. But barehanded against soldiers like that-"

He grinned. "Now, if you were all Dorsai," he said. "Or even true, faith-holding Friendlies..." "Please," said Amid, "let's be serious." "Serious is that you simply can't afford the search party's discovering the entrance under the boulder." "Yes." Amid frowned down at the drawing on his desk for a Moment, then raised his eyes again to meet Hal's. "Only about five of all the Guild members even know it," he said, "but besides the boulder that's there beside the opening now, we long ago cut a second piece of rock of the right kind into the necessary rectangular shape and buried it just beside the boulder. The spot where it's buried has been grown over, since, just like the other spot near it that holds a block and tackle and levers for moving the block. We can fit it into the opening and it'll look, and feel, like part of the cliff behind the boulder. In fact, the block's got weight and mass enough so that even a couple of searchers - and there isn't room under the boulder for more than two at a time - couldn't push it backward and out of their way by hand, even if they suspected it of blocking a way through. But there's no reason they should." "Very good!" said Hal. "What it means, of course," said Amid worriedly, "is that once it's in place they can't get in, but we can't get out, except for those who know enough about mountain climbing to go down the open rock face. We've got a few who could do it. Not that we'd want to get out while there're soldiers down there." "You're vulnerable to being seen from above," said Hal. "I know the brush you've got growing on the roofs of the buildings and the rest of the camouflage hides the fixed elements of what you've brought to this ledge. But a satellite in orbit looking directly at this area on its scope, or even a ship in orbit, could see people moving about if they made the effort-the circle, for example, always has people in it, and even if it was empty you'd have to cover the worn area of ground with something. And with all that, even if you knew they might look, and hid everything and kept everybody inside, a close study by an expert of a picture taken of the ledge in daytime would find evidence of human occupation here." "You're telling me we're going to be found, eventually," said Amid unhappily. "Only if they look. As long as none of them ever think of the possibility of your being up here, you can last forever. That's why making sure they don't find anything below to make them think of it is crucial." "Yes," said Amid. The deep wrinkles of his forehead were even deeper than usual. "I know. We'll talk some more with Onete about what that Elian from Porphyry told her. He may have said something that would give us more information about the character of the search party, how large it might be, when it might come - and information about the garrison troops generally, their number and so on. Meanwhile I'll also try to locate anyone else among the members who's talked to someone from Porphyry lately, and if they've got anything of value to tell you, I can bring them in to talk to you. Meanwhile, you were going to walk in the circle today, weren't you? You might as well go ahead and do that. You won't mind if I interrupt your walking if I feel I need to talk to you before you stop of your own accord?" "Of course not," said Hal. "Anything I get mentally occupied with there, I can always get back into at a later time." "Good. "

Hal went out, picking up the utensils of Amid's lunch as he went. These reminded him that he, himself, had not yet eaten today. When he got to the nearest of the dormitory kitchens, he found it, now in the early afternoon, almost empty. He ate a quick lunch and went on, out to the circle. There were only two people waiting there, a thin, tall, elderly man named Dans, with dark brown eyes that always seemed to give him a stare, and a small, athletic young woman with blond hair, known as Trekka. "I think duty took you out of your normal turn, Friend," said Dans. "Trekka's first, but would you care to go before me?" "Before me, as well, Friend," said Trekka.

Hal grinned at them. "No, you don't," said Hal. "I can get put in your debt like that once, but I'm too clever to be caught twice. I'll follow Dans. "

As it turned out, however, several of those currently walking were very close to the point where they wanted to stop. Hal and the other two were all walking the circle within five minutes of his arrival.

As always, when he began this, Hal shed his concern with daily matters as he would drop a winter cloak after stepping into a building's warmth. There was nothing special about the circle to facilitate this, or even anything metaphysical about it, since he had been able to do it since childhood. It was no more than the extent to which anyone lets go of their pattern of directed thoughts, when he or she slips off into daydreams.

But on this occasion, the urgency of the possible coming search by the troops and its attendant problems may have lingered a little in his consciousness and directed the otherwise free flight of his mind, for he found it once more occupied with the passage from Cletus Grahame's work on tactics and strategy that he had called up from memory in his reconnaissance below. Once more he felt tugging at him the feeling that there was more to the passage than he had read off the printed page in his memory.

Now, freed by the movement and voices of the circle to go seeking, he traced down the source of that feeling. He was a boy again, the boy Donal, back on Dorsai. There, in the big, shelf-walled library of Graemehouse, filled with old-fashioned books of printed and bound paper, there had been a number of large boxes on one shelf which had held the original manuscript of Cletus's writings. As the boy Donal, once he had mastered reading, which he had done so early that he could not remember when he had first started to read, anything written was to be gobbled wholesale.

Those had been the days when he could so lose himself in reading that he could be called to dinner by someone literally standing at his side, and not hear the voice of whoever it was.

During that period of his life he had ended up reading, along with everything else that was there to be read in Graemehouse, the manuscript version of Cletus's work. It had been handwritten on the grayish-white, locally made Dorsai paper, and here and there, there had been corrections and additions made in the lines. In particular, in certain spots whole passages had been crossed out. Notes had not been made by Cletus on the manuscript, usually, when such a passage was deleted, and Hal had often played with trying to figure out why his great-great-grandfather had decided not to include it. In the case of the neatly exed out section of the remarks on terrain, the note in the margin had said - "of utility only for a minority of readers."

Of utility only to a minority? Why? Hal had puzzled over that reason, set down in the time-faded, pale blue ink of Cletus's round handwriting. He remembered going into the office which had been Cletus's to begin with, and that of the head of the family ever since, and sitting down in the hard, adult-sized, wooden swivel chair at the desk there, to try it by imitating Cletus as Cletus had worked, he could divine the meaning of the note.

Why only a minority of readers? As a boy, the phrase had seemed to threaten to shut Hal out. What if he would be among the majority who would not understand it'? He had read the deleted passage carefully and found nothing in it that could conceivably be useful, but there was, unfortunately, no way for him to test himself with its information in practice until he was grown up and an officer, himself, facing a specific terrain to be dealt with.

He had not even asked any of his elders about the passage, afraid that their answer would confirm his fear that he might be among those who could not use what Cletus had originally planned to include in his work.

Later on, when as Donal he had been grown up and an officer in fact, the deleted passage had become so deeply buried in his memory that he had almost forgotten it, and, in any case, by that time he had evolved intuitional logic, which in every way that he could see did all and more that Cletus's passage had promised.

The deleted passage itself was short and simple enough. Now, walking the circle, Hal had left awareness of the ledge and the Chantry Guild far behind, and he found himself, as in the earlier case with Sir John Hawkwood, being both Cletus, seated at his desk and writing that passage, and someone watching the slim, unremarkable man with his sleeves rolled up, writing away.

"If, having fully surveyed and understood the terrain," the deleted passage had read, "the officer will concentrate on it, resurveying it in memory, and imagining enemy troops or his own moving across it, eventually he will find the image in his mind changing from a concept to a vision. For the purposes of which I write, there is a great difference between the two - as any great painter can attest. A concept is the object or scene imagined in three dimensions and as fully as is humanly possible. But it remains a creature of the mind of the one imagining it. It is, in a sense, connected with the mind that created it. But a completed mental picture, once brought into existence, has an existence entirely separate from the one who conceived it. A painter - and I speak as a failed painter, myself - can point anything he has conceptualized, adapting or improving it as he wishes. But with a completed mental picture it will have acquired a life of its own. To make it otherwise, even in the smallest degree, would be to destroy the truth of it. He has no choice but to point it as it exists, which may be greater than, or different from, his original concept. I would guess that the same phenomenon occurs in the case of the writers of fiction, when they speak of the story as taking control of itself, taking itself away from the author. Such situations in which a character, for example, in effect refuses to be, say, or do what the author originally intended, and insists that he or she will be, say or do something else instead. "As painters and authors come to have such completed mental pictures and learn to trust them, instead of holding to their original conceptualizations, so effective field officer must learn to trust his own tactical or strategic visions, when then, develop from his best conceptualization of a military situation. In some way, more of the mind, spirit and capability of the human having the vision seems to be involved with the problem, and the vision is always therefore greater than the mere conceptualization. "For example: in the case of the management of available terrain, the officer may find the ground he has surveyed apparently hanging in midair, in miniature, like a solid thing before him, and he will be able to watch as the enemy forces, and his own, move across it. Further, as he watches it, these envisioned characters may create before him just the tactical movements that he needs to bring about the result he desires. "This is an ability of almost invaluable use, but it requires concentration, practice and belief, to develop it. The crossed-out section ended.

Now, suddenly, nearly a hundred years after he had read the handwritten manuscript, as he still watched and was Cletus under the influence of walking the circle, Hal understood what he had not, before.

In his own time, Cletus had needed to achieve some actual successes in the field to prove to the experienced military that his theories were something more than wild dreams. Those tactical successes were a series of bloodless victories achieved where his superiors would have considered them impossible. Hal had studied these, years ago, to see if Cletus had been using an earlier form of intuitional logic, and had concluded that Cletus had not. He had seen his way to the unexpected tactical solutions he achieved by some other method.

Just what method, Hal had never been able to determine until now. Hal himself knew that his intuitional logic was not unique to him. Chess grandmasters had undoubtedly used versions of it to foresee sequences of moves that would achieve victory on the playing board for them. What he called intuitional logic was only a somewhat refined and extended activity of that same pattern of mind use.

Cletus had clearly made a similar extension of the artistic function he used in painting. His description of the miniature battlefield hanging in midair and the tiny soldiers acting out a solution to a tactical problem, apparently on their own, could be nothing else than a direct application of the unconscious mind to the problem. In short, Cletus, as well as Walter Blunt of the original Chantry Guild - and Jathed, and who knew how many others whose names were lost in history - had been making deliberate use of the Creative Universe to achieve desired ends. Like Blunt, and possibly Jathed, Cletus had used the Creative Universe without realizing its universality, but only the small application of it to what at the moment he wanted to do. But it was startling and rewarding to find further proof of what Hal, himself, sought - and on his own doorstep, so to speak.

At the same time, he realized he still lacked a sure answer to the question of why Cletus had deleted that passage. Hal was suddenly thoughtful. Since Cletus himself had set down the way, why couldn't he, Hal, use his own creative unconscious to try and ask him'?

He looked hard at his own vision of the man who was seated at the desk, writing. Cletus was lost to time. There was no way of actually reaching the living man, himself. But if the transient and the eternal were indeed the same - even though he, Hal, had yet to feel that fact as an absolute, inward truth - then it ought to be possible to talk to the spirit of his great-great-grandfather by the same creative mechanism Cletus himself had described.

Hal concentrated... and although the solid-looking, threedimensional figure he watched continued to sit and write, a ghostlike and transparent version of it turned its head out of the solid head to glance at Hal standing by the desk. Then the whole ghostlike body rose up out of the solid form of Cletus at the desk and walked around the corner of it to face Hal. It was Cletus, as much or more than the solid figure was, and, as Cletus, it sat down on the edge of the desk, folded its arms on its chest and looked at Hal. "So you're my great great-grandson," the spirit of Cletus said. "The family's put on some size since my time." "In my original body as Donal Graeme," said Hal, "I was only a little larger than you. This was the size of my twin uncles, who were unusually large even for my time. But you're right. As Donal Graeme, I was the small one among the men in my family. " "It's flattering to hear I'll have descendants like that," said Cletus. "Though of course I'll never really know of it, since you and I are at this moment just a pair of minds outside both my time and yours. You understand, I'm not just a projection of your own self-hypnosis, as your dead tutors were when you evoked them to advise you as a boy in the Final Encyclopedia, when you first started to run from this man called Bleys Ahrens.

I, the Cletus you're looking at now, am actually more alive than the one seated at that desk, writing. He's a product of your imagination. I, since you brought me to life in what you call the Creative Universe, have a life of my own. I'm Cletus Grahame. not Hal Mayne's concept of Cletus." "I wonder," said Hal soberly. "Maybe I've done you a disservice. What happens to you when I go back to awareness of my own world and time?" "I don't know," said Cletus, "any more than you do. Perhaps I go out like a blown-out candle. Perhaps I wait for you in the Creative Universe until you find your own way there, as you should, eventually. I'm not worried about it. You wanted to know why I deleted those few paragraphs of my writing on the use of terrain?" "Yes," said Hal. "I deleted it because I wanted as many people as possible to read and benefit from my writing," said Cletus. "No one's completely without unconscious prejudices. If, in reading. someone runs across mention of something that offends one of these unconscious prejudices, they tend to find faults to justify a rejection of the writing, whether the faults are actually there or not. I didn't want my work rejected in that way if it could be helped. -

"Why should they find fault with your idea of a vision being something more than a concept?" "Because I was speaking about something that's supposed to be a sort of magic that takes place only in great artists - writers, sculptors, painters, and so forth. The majority of the race, unfortunately, tends far too often to have given up on the possibility of creativity in themselves, either without even having tried to make use of it, or after an early failure. Once something like that's been rejected by an individual, he or she tends to resent anyone who tries to tell them they still have it. Because of that resentment, they'll or make some ground to reject any suggestion it still exists in them, and that rejection, being emotional, would probably force them to reject my writing as a whole, in order to get rid of the unwanted part. So, I took out the passage." "What about those who could have benefited from it?" said Hal. "Those who wouldn't be looking for an excuse to reject the idea?" "They'll find it eventually on their own, I'm sure," said Cletus. "But if a man puts a patch over one eye and goes around trying to convince not only everybody else but himself that he was born with only one peephole on the universe, I've not only got no duty, but no moral right, to pull the patch off and force him to face the fact he's wrong." "History could force you to do it," said Hal. "History hasn't required that of me, in my time," said Cletus. "if it has of you in your time, I sympathize with you. Brace yourself, my great great-grandson. You'll be hated by many of those you give a greater vision to."

Hal smiled a little sadly, remembering what Amid had told him about children on the Younger Worlds being taught to spit after saying his name. "I already am," he said-

A hand had caught Hal by the arm, and at the touch his attention returned suddenly to the circle, the ledge and the outside situation. It was Amid.