The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 31

Hal woke to almost complete darkness relieved only by the faint line of light under the door to the bathroom. This alone told him that he was not in his own bed in Dormitory Two, but back in Amid's second office, in which he and Amanda had slept on his arrival at the Chantry Guild. There was someone beside him in the bed, and he turned his head to make out that it was Amanda, deeply sleeping, her hair spread out on the pillow.

It must be deep into the night. He lay there, trying to remember. He had no recollection of getting here. He remembered nothing beyond Amanda catching him, holding him up, and telling him he must sleep. He had no memory of being brought to this bed. But now that he tried to recall anything at all after that there came to him a few flashes from momentary wakings, as seeing a sliver of the rich daylight illumination of Procyon, that had managed to make its way here and there through the blanket she had once more hung over a rod to provide a near-perfect blackout curtain.

In each case he had awakened long enough only to recognize the fact that he was safe and comfortable, then fallen immediately and heavily back to sleep again. He had no memory of Amanda joining him. She would have been quiet so as not to disturb him, of course, as only she could be quiet. But how long had it been since she had come? How long since night replaced day outside his curtained window?

Some internal clock deep inside him told him that it had been a long time - that he had slept most of the night through, as well as the day, and dawn was near.

It had been no ordinary sleep. He had put in forty-eight hours of wakefulness under active conditions before this, without falling into such a pit of unconsciousness, and while he might be a few years older since then, and softer, in spite of his daily exercise in the Final Encyclopedia, neither time nor inaction could account for such a heavy, prolonged slumber.

There had to he another reason for it, and even as he formed the question the answer came. His unconscious mind had once more wanted his consciousness out of the way so it could work with perfect freedom, putting together all the things he had learned, one by one - those parts that now almost, but not quite, came together like the parts of a puzzle of many pieces, to give him a complete picture of his goal.

He felt a yearning to stay here, where he was, and put an arm gently over Amanda, coaxing her gently back into wakefulness and the joining that they had always had so few chances for. But at the same time, there was a powerful feeling within him that now and only now the answer he sought, or at least another step toward it, was calling him outside this room. It was waiting for him with the dawn that would be coming, as it had waited all this time he had been here, but he had not yet learned enough to see it.

Quietly, as Amanda must have come to bed quietly, he left it, found his clothes, dressed and let himself out of the room. The corridor was bright-lit and silent, but outside, when he closed the main door of the building behind him, the ledge was in complete darkness. The night was empty except for the chanting of those who walked the circle, invisible to him. Both moons were down and the light of the stars was not enough to let him see his hand at arm's length before him.

But like the Guild members, he now knew the ledge well enough to find his way about it blindfolded. In addition, in this season of summer, even at this altitude, the wind blew toward the ledge across the land below.

Accordingly, he turned his face into the wind and, feeling the familiar slopes and pitches of the ground under his bare feet, went toward the edge.

As he went, his eyes readjusted to the darkness from the bright glare of the hall lights. He was able to see the treetops overhead occulting the stars, the trees that had been deliberately left uncut in patches and clumps so that part of one of them always hid any walkway below it. Almost unthinkingly, he oriented himself by those shapes of the treetops against the pinpoints of light in the sky, and as he got close to the edge he could see it as a line of demarcation where darkness gave way suddenly to deeper darkness.

He was out here earlier than usual and he did not expect to find Old Man here yet, and in fact, when he got to the place by the pool where he usually sat, the spot the Old Man usually occupied was empty. After all, Hal reminded himself, his fellow watcher was no longer young, and also had just finished putting in much the same hours, at the same activity as had Hal. It would hardly be surprising if he did not show up at all.

Hal sat, therefore, waiting for the paling of the sky that would signal the approaching day and the sunrise. There was a strange blend of expectation and excitement in him.

In patches, where the native vegetation of the pond did not obscure its reflecting surface, the image of the stars overhead looked back up at him - as they also looked down on him through the clear, high-altitude air. He felt enclosed by them as an individual feels warmly enclosed by family or close friends at a gathering of those who were close. The sky about them was beginning to pale, but only beyond the line of the Grandfathers of Dawn in the far distance - that place from which the sunrise would come. Overhead, it was still dark enough for their lights to be clear and sharp against the deep dark.

As far as he could tell, none of those that he could see up there were stars that were suns over the other Younger Worlds, or art itself. Those solar bodies were at present in the wrong position to be seen from Kultis - or more accurately, this part of the planet was pointed in the wrong direction. But those he did see stood in for those he knew, in his imagination, so that it was as if they had come here at this important moment to watch him now from both above and below at once, waiting for him to take up his journey once more along the path he had chosen for himself that day of his uncle James's death.

It had been a ridiculously ambitious decision at the time on the part of a half-grown boy, to find and destroy whatever element it was in people that made them selfish and uncaring to the point of brutality and cruelty to each other. The shape of the answer he sought had emerged, little by little from the mists of things undiscovered as he worked his way toward it, trying one route after another, finding his way blocked but learning a little more each time, so that with each fresh start he chose his next route with more wisdom.

So, slowly, he had progressed. Slowly, his certainty had grown that there was a path to humanity's becoming a race of people who would voluntarily refrain from all harming of their fellows, by all actions, from literal killing, to the exercise of the little cruelties of words and sheer thoughtlessness that were so common in human society that they went almost without remark. But now, he was surer than he had ever been, that only a few thin veils - perhaps only one - hid it from him.

As Donal he had found that power and law alone could not force the change he wanted. But the discovery pointed to the road he himself must travel, and, after him, the race. As Paul Formain, back in the twenty-first century, he had found that part of the answer lay outside the known universe and its laws, but that this further universe - the one he had come to call the Creative Universe - was again, only part of the answer.

His last attempt had been the gathering of the best of what the Younger Worlds had gained - from the Exotics, the Friendlies, and his own world of the Dorsai - into safety behind the phase-shield he had caused to be set up, enclosing Earth and the Final Encyclopedia. He had been confident then, that at last, having done this, the next and last step to his goal would be obvious.

But it had not been. What he had achieved had only once more cleared the mists a little way, but left him with no understanding of what was to be done next. It had only shown yet a farther stretch of the road still to be covered.

He had not been wrong in anything he had done so far. Faith, courage, and the ability to think philosophically, all faculties of the human, developed from its animal forebears, and their extended forms, as embodied in the Friendlies, the Dorsai and these Exotics, had been part of the answer. He had not been wrong in that much, but now he saw what was needed was something still hidden by unknowns, still in shadow. He could only be sure now that it was somehow connected with the creativity in every living human.

In his disappointment and weariness, he had become blocked, and believed himself burnt out - a failure. So he had continued to think until Amanda had come to tell him he might find a new point of view here, on an Exotic world now wrecked and ground down by the forces of an enemy point of view that was trying to kill the growth element of the human spirit and destroy all that had been accomplished.

She had been right. He knew that now with a wholehearted, instinctive certainty, as he sat here, waiting for Procyon's rise over the mountaintops.

Somewhere, with her and among the Chantry Guild members and with his recent part in the rescue of Artur and little Cee, who was of an age with the boy he had been when he had made his original vow, he had once more found a way to go forward. And now, now here, waiting for the sunrise, he felt perhaps only one more large step toward what he sought, perhaps even close at last to the doorway itself, through which he now knew he must pass to find what he sought.

The paling of the night's black sky and the extinguishing of the stars had spread forward from above the distant mountains as he had been thinking, and the light had grown stronger. He felt the approaching dawn like a hand laid upon him, and although the breeze was merely cool, it seemed to blow through his clothing so that he felt as if he sat naked and waiting, his legs crossed, his hands not in prayer position but laid, palms down, one on top of the other in his lap, as he remembered his uncle Ian's massive hands used to lie.

He let his mind go out to his customary imaginings of this daily exercise of body and mind, conjuring up the time of the far future of this Chantry Guild, when the ledge had been filled by a massive structure of stone blocks quarried from the mountain, its flat surfaces paved and gardened and this pool before him enclosed by a rim of pink-veined, light gray rock, with the native plants replaced by imported water-lilies spreading their flat, broad petals on the liquid surface to uphold themselves and their night-closed and sleeping white flowers.

Those flowers of his imagination which would be opening with the coming light of day. As with some repeated meditation, the envisioned scene changed the reality around him. His ears heard the chanting replace ack of the present and future walkers in the behind him in circle....

The transient and the eternal are the same...

Now, the chant seemed to pick him up and possess him. So that he resonated to it as a tuning fork resonates to being struck, with a single pure note. In the pool, the white blossoms were beginning to open as the light flooded forward and the day brightened.

His eyes ignored the unvarying green sweep of the highaltitude forest below him and focused on the distant range of mountains, the Grandfathers of Dawn. Always the mountains. Always the mountains and the sunrise. These belonged as much to the future of his imagined scene as they did to the present second in which he sat here. To the mountains and the sunrise, the years or centuries in between were unimportant, the moment of a single drawn breath in a lifetime of breaths.

The sun was not yet in sight from behind the range, but the brightness of the sky showed that it was close now, very close.

His eyes were filled with light and he felt the cool air passing in and out of the lungs above his motionless body as he sat. He looked down at the pond and saw that the white flowers were now fully open, some of them showing the drops of the dew that had collected in their tightly closed petal tips earlier. He felt as if some essential but nonphysical part of himself was lifted out of the rest of him and rushed through the airy space between him and the distant mountain range to meet the dawn, seeing nothing else.

At the same time his physical eyes looked down at the pond and focused once more on a single flower, on one white petal of which a dewdrop sat like a blessing. The flower filled his gaze and like a wave through him came a great sweep of feeling, that anything should be so wonderful as the living leaf with the perfect transparency of the dewdrop upon it.

Feeling this, it was as if his flying, incorporeal self reached the upthrust giants of the land that waited, as they had always waited, for him in this moment, and, lifting, it and he saw the first blazing edge of Procyon, which was too bright to look at with the eyes of his body back on the ledge, appear in the bottom of a notch in the rock before him and send the first ray of direct light leaping across the space between range and ledge to touch the pond, to touch the flower.

It touched the dewdrop, and for one second too short for breath to draw or mind to do anything but hold in memory, the drop exploded, scintillating with light like a diamond, radiating off in all directions, including into him, where it shone unforgettable, from that moment on.

He sat, blinded by the vision. Behind him, the voices of the walkers chanted still....

The transient and the eternal are the same...

And, suddenly, moving in to replace the wonder within him came the understanding he had waited for. Now, the words of the walkers engulfed him. Suddenly, at last, he understood the truth of what they chanted, what he had so often chanted, that it was not a matter of faith but of actuality.

For the transient and the eternal were the same. He looked at the petal now and the dewdrop was already beginning to shrink, to disappear as the heat of the sun's ray drew it up. In a little it would be gone. The petal would be dry and it would be as if the dewdrop had never been there.

But the dewdrop was always there. Even as this one blazed for a second with incredible light and began to disappear, somewhere in this infinite universe there was another dewdrop just beginning to scintillate, and after that another, and another...

And another dawn and another, and another mountain range and another, when this one should be worn down to level dust, and without a pause, another world, which would make another range through which a ray of light would come to another dewdrop on another petal - forever and forever, until time should end.

The dewdrop was beyond destruction. The moment of its brilliance was eternal. It was transient here, but eternal everywhere. Just so, all things were eternal, only waiting to be found, even the doorway to something that had only been his dream all these years.

The physical light of the present day was everywhere about and the vision of the future was gone, but the moment of the explosion of illumination from the dewdrop still filled.

He got to his feet and went back, past visible circle of walkers toward the buildings beyond. He felt incredibly light-bodied. As if he could, with little effort, walk up into the thin air. A figure in the ordinary light workshirt and trousers, worn by the majority of the Chantry Guild members when they were otherwise occupied than walking in the circle, stepped out from behind some tree trunks to meet him. It was Old Man and he smiled up at Hal as they met and Hal stopped. "You weren't there this morning," said Hal. "I was there. I sat behind you," said Old Man. "Some things are best touched alone."

His smile grew and became almost impish. He reached into a pocket of his trousers and brought out a small mirror, which he held up to Hal's eyes.

Hal stared at the image of his own face. There was a difference in what he saw that he could not pick out at first. Then he saw it - the pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to pinpricks of darkness, like the eyes of someone under drugs. For a fraction of a second the scintillation of the dewdrop seemed to leap out from those pinpricks and the mirror at him, making him feel light-headed, but happily so. "How could you tell ahead of time, in the dark?" he asked, as Old Man put the mirror back into the pocket.

Old Man passed his hand from left to right through the air at chest height before him, palm outward toward Hal. "I felt it," he said.

Hal stared at him, waiting for additional explanation, but Old Man, still smiling, merely turned and went away from him, back through the trees from among which he had emerged.