The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 33

Hal sat looking at Bleys for a moment. "The crew and officers on your spaceships on patrol outside the shield," he said, "don't live in trenches or dugouts. They aren't sick, or starving. In fact, I'll venture to bet they eat better than their friends back on the home worlds they came from. If they're developing a siege mentality, perhaps it's because you've fed them full on the idea that the people living on Old Earth nowadays are something subhuman, that the Final Encyclopedia is an invention of the Devil, manned by devils, and I'm the chief devil of them all. It seems to me that an effort on your part put to taking those ideas out of their minds would also prevent any chance of a blood bath." "Probably," said Bleys quietly, "but I'm not going to do that. And since I'm not - you'll admit you've considered the danger of such a blood bath?"

Before Hal could answer, he went on. "Forgive me. That was an insulting question. Of course, You've considered all the possibilities, just as I have." "Speculations waste time," said Hal. "You came here to make me some kind of offer. Make it." "I'd like to call off the war," said Bleys. "I'll be damned!" Hal said. "Will you indeed?" answered Bleys. "In that case, try to get word back to me what it's like. No one's ever been able to send any messages back so far, but you might just be able to do it."

Hal hardly heard him. He told himself no one but the Other man could have startled him to this extent. For a moment he even found himself wondering if he had been wrong all along and that Bleys was far superior even to him after all, that the Other could read minds and see around comers. How else could he explain this sudden offer that would concede defeat just as Hal was about to move closer than he ever had been to winning the contest between them? Unless Bleys had somehow sensed Hal's breakthrough of just that morning?

Amid moved a little, involuntarily, in his chair, but no sound came from Amanda, all but invisible in the shadows by the door, and Hal did not move. In the fireplace a burned through log broke and fell into two halves with a soft crash, and the flames shot up above it suddenly, sending shadows dancing on the wall beyond Hal and Bleys.

Hal pulled himself together. There was a price, of course - some impossible price. "In return for what?" demanded Hal bluntly. "Well, you'll take down the phase-shield, of course," said Bleys. "And we'd want to settle some of the Younger Worlds' people on presently unused areas of Old Earth." He sat back comfortably in his chair. "There're tundra areas at both poles and sections of desert that Old Earth's ignored ever since its population stabilized, following the wave of immigration to the Younger Worlds nearly three hundred years ago. You see, I'm willing to leave the dispute between us, you and I, to the verdict of future history, without any use of weapons." "Are you?" said Hal. "You know better than to think I don't know what kind of Younger Worlds people you'd settle there. Their colonies would he enclaves, from which your colonists could work to convert as many as could be, of Earth's own people, to your way of thinking. The end result would be an Earth torn by a division of opinion - and ultimately a worldwide civil war - as much of a blood bath as the invasion you talk about. Why do you suppose I was instrumental in having the shield wall put up in the first place?" "Instrumental's hardly the word," said Bleys. "The shield wall was all your doing. But think about it." "There's no need," said Hal. "Old Earth's awakened to its danger now. It's building ships and training crews for them, with Dorsai help, in greater numbers all the time, and potentially it's still got more resources in materials, manufacturing and people than all the Younger Worlds combined. Let alone the fact it hasn't light-years of lines of communication to maintain support for its fighting ships." "Yes," said Bleys, "what you say's all true. Earth's building faster all the time - but I think not fast enough. I think the Younger Worlds have too much of a head start. We'll be ready to come through the wall before you're ready to hold us off, let alone drive us away."

He stopped talking. Hal had made no effort to interrupt him and continued to say nothing, now. "You disagree, of course," said Bleys, "or perhaps you don't. In any case, I've made the offer. You've no choice but to consider it. "And I've told you," answered Hal, "what you know as well as I do. What would happen if Earth let you colonize like that."

Bleys nodded. "But you know," he said, "that while you and I may ride the winds of history, we're not just completely helpless passengers. Of course what you say is right. But the result of those colonies moving in doesn't have to be what you suggest. Perhaps you can let them in and still bend the winds to your advantage. It's possible." "Possible, not probable. What you suggest is a road downhill to what you want. But for we who want something else, all roads would be uphill if I agreed." "The alternative's invasion and the blood bath-very soon now. "

It was true, thought Hal, even if the invasion Bleys talked of was not likely to come quite as soon as he implied. It was also true, unfortunately, that there was an element of truth in what Bleys offered. It was possible Old Earth could absorb the enclaves Bleys suggested, without war, and the future be settled that way.

But - Hal felt an echo of the same uneasiness he had told Bleys he had felt three years before when they had been face to face in the phase-shield. The feeling nagged at Hal that if Bleys got what he asked for, somehow the road to the Creative Universe that he now thought he saw so plainly before him would be blocked as surely as it would be by Tam's death, unless he found the entrance to it before then. Should Hal reject this now - that might be the answer for everyone now alive - in a gamble on what he might be able to do for them and all generations to come?

He knew which choice he wanted. "Maybe you're right and it would work," he said to Bleys slowly, "but I was never one for shaking hands with the Devil." "I thought," Bleys said, "you were the Devil, the Chief Devil?" "Only according to your doxology," said Hal. "But in any case," Bleys smiled, "what'll you tell Old Earth, when the people there learn they had a chance to be free of the phase-shield and the warships of the Younger Worlds, but you turned it down?" "That'll depend on whether you actually make such an offer officially and publicly," said Hal. He smiled back. "There's nothing official about me, outside the Final Encyclopedia. You'd need to make your proposal formally from the United Younger Worlds to the Consortium of Old Earth governments and give them time to consider it. In the end, you may decide not to make the proposal, after all." "Oh?" said Bleys. He sounded genuinely intrigued. "You think so? Why?"

Hal kept his own smile. "Wait and see," he said. "The pattern of the historic forces changes constantly. You know that as well as I do." "I do, indeed," said Bleys softly. He hesitated for a moment. "I think you're bluffing." "Try me and see," said Hal. "Yes," Bleys nodded, "I'll do that."

He had looked away from Hal and at the fire, musingly for a second. Now he looked back. "Tell me," he said to Hal, "the last time we met, why didn't you carry through? Why didn't you move to resolve what's between us two, at our last meeting? I'd expected that to be the moment of our confrontation. You'd undeniably stolen a march on me. You'd gotten all the people you valued and needed safely hidden behind that phase-shield you'd had built around Old Earth, before I could sweep them up, one by one, or group by group, from their native worlds. When I met you in the wall of the phase-shield, itself, we were at a moment in time when you had a definite advantage. Why didn't you push for a conclusion then?"

Hal remembered again how at that particular last meeting he had noticed how Bleys had become more physically powerful in appearance, how he had put on weight in the form of compact muscle. He and the Other had been about the same height since Hal had come into his growth - that had been the original height of Hal's uncles, Ian and Kensie. Bleys had always been an unusually tall man. But when Hal had first seen him, there had been none of the evidence of physical strength that was part of him now.

Now, Bleys had apparently deliberately built himself up to match Hal. It dawned on Hal that the Other man must have put in an incredible number of hours physically developing and training himself for every possible kind of hand-to-hand conflict, with or without weapons. This, because the extra strength by itself would be only a part of making himself a physical match. for Hal. Therefore he had, for his own reasons, been looking forward even at that meeting in the phase-shield wall, to possible conflict on that level with Hal.

But, even as he realized this, Hal also realized that what Bleys had tried was impossible. No adult could possibly train himself to the point of physically matching a Dorsai of comparable size, age, reflexes and ability, who had been trained from the cradle upward.

Only then did Hal remember, once more, that he now was no match for such a Dorsai either. All his physical training as Hal Mayne had been some of the tutoring from only one of his tutors, as a child of Old Earth, and even that had been a long time ago. He had tried to keep himself in shape since, helped by an active life at times, such as when he had been a miner on Coby, or a member of Rukh's Resistance band on Harmony, but that didn't make him a Dorsai. Recognition and realization took place in his mind in barely the time it took him to start answering. "You come at an interesting time to ask me that," he answered. "Maybe it isn't so surprising though. Many of the historic forces that move you parallel those that move me, and it's natural that we'd come together under coincidental conditions."

"But you didn't answer my question," said Bleys, his eyes steady on Hal. "That's why I say you come at an interesting time," said Hal. "If I'd had to answer you then, there in the phase-shield, I wouldn't have been able to. All I knew then was that I noticed that you were ready for a showdown, and instinct told me to back off from it. I felt - you'd have to call it an uneasiness about accepting any try to settle things there and then. Now I understand why. What I'd realized unconsciously was, as I told you then, that you couldn't win. But, as I later realized, if I agreed to the confrontation, then and there, neither could I. "I don't follow you," said Bleys. "I mean I believe I would've won that contest," answered Hal. "But either of us could have, and, I'll give you this, you might have won after all. We were at a point where, with one of us gone, the other would have had an advantage. Pressed home, that advantage might have given a seeming victory." "Seeming, only?" Bleys' voice was pleasantly curious. "Yes," answered Hal. "Seeming only, because we'd merely be once more repeating a cycle of time-worn history. I learned a long time ago that even having all possible power over all the worlds doesn't make you able to change human nature, and it's that that's been the point of argument between us from the beginning, whether the individual human's nature is going to be changed or not. If I'd won I'd have gained a victory, but it'd have been only a partial victory. As, if you'd won, you'd have had only a partial victory. And the problem with any partial victory for either of us was that final victory, the ultimate victory, would've been closed off from the survivor, forever, or at least until some later generation should create the confrontation once again, and in that future time be wiser in its decision. So I chose to leave things at stalemate so that I could try for the greater victory, in my own time."

As I do again now, he thought to himself. It's the same uneasiness, the same decision. "Did you?" said Bleys. "And, do you see your way to it now?"

Hal smiled. "If I've found the answer, " he said, "it's there for everyone. Go find it for yourself."

Bleys looked at him for a long second. It was strange to see Bleys Ahrens pause like this. He must have done so only at very rare moments in his life. "So," he said at last, "not this time, either. But I think I'll do what you say and find whatever you say you've found, for myself. And I'll meet you at the end of the road, wherever that is. Look for me there when you reach it."

His voice softened suddenly. "Stop the little girl," he said. But Amanda had already been in movement. Her hand closed now over Cee's just as Cee's fingers closed on the glass paperweight containing the miniature pine cone, on Amid's desk. Amanda pried it loose from Cee's grasp. Cee struggled, silently if fiercely, to hold on to it, but her strength was no match for an adult's. Amanda came away with the paperweight. "We don't kill people," Amanda told her. "Ever."

Cee's eyes held Amanda's and the small face was unreadable. "She's decided you're dangerous," Amanda told Bleys. "Don't ask me exactly why. Smelled it in you, possibly, and I can't really blame her. She's right."

She turned her attention on Cee again. "But we don't kill people," she repeated to the girl. "You don't kill people. Leave this man to those who know how to deal with him, like Friend, here."

Bleys was frowning at Cee. "You don't actually mean," he said to Amanda, "she's that dangerous?" "Yes." Amanda still held Cee unwaveringly with her gaze. "Men sent here by you made her that way. Ask your four dead Occupation soldiers - if you can talk to ghosts." "Well... " said Bleys thoughtfully.

He stayed for a moment where he was, facing Hal. He rose, and Hal rose across from him. They stood close as brothers, two tall men under the close, dark ceiling of Amid's office. "Well, I've made my offer." Bleys pulled his cloak closed again around him, and its dark folds swirled and flashed for a second in the firelight. "I'll leave you with it. You might be kind enough to send someone with me to light me down the mountainside path, so I don't go in the wrong direction and fall off a cliff. From the upper side of that stone at the bottom that closes the path, he can easily roll it back into place alone. It's only opening it from below that's a hard job for one man."

He looked over at Amid. "Don't worry," he said, "I'll keep the secret of this place of yours, here, and any of the Occupation Army that's tempted to explore in this direction will find orders disapproving such a move after the pronounced nonsuccess of the late force-leader and his equally late groupman. You can go on living up here in peace. "

He turned back to Hal. "But they're lucky they had you with them." "I didn't kill those soldiers," Hal said. "So you're giving me to understand." Bleys' eyebrows raised. "This child did it for you. I find that a little hard to believe. " "It's true," said Hal.

Bleys laughed. "if you say so." "You see," Hal said, "you're making a mistake. Here, where you're standing, is the cradle of the new breed of Exotics. Exotics who'll be nowhere near as vulnerable to you as they've been in the past. " "If they can kill soldiers, perhaps you're right," said Bleys. "But I'm not particularly worried. I don't think this place and its people have very long to survive, even without a hand being raised against them. Now, what about that guide to light me on my way?"

"You must have rolled the entrance stone aside from below," said Amid suddenly. "How could you do it, alone?"

Bleys glanced at Hal. "How about you?" he asked. "Are you surprised, too? No, you wouldn't be, would you? You could do it yourself. You know that there're ways of concentrating your strength. Have been ever since the first caveman lifted a fallen tree he shouldn't have been able to move, off a hunting companion in a moment of frenzy he didn't think he had in him. But you might not have thought of me before now as being equal to you, physically. I am, though I think, in fact, we're just about equal in nearly all respects, though that's something neither of us will be able to check. " "If there is, it'll show at the end," said Hal. "Yes," said Bleys, more quietly than he had spoken until this moment, "at the end. Where's that guide?"

"I have called for Onete to get someone," said Amid. "Here she comes now."

In fact, the door was opening, and Onete came in through it, followed by Old Man, carrying a powerful fueled lamp, already lit. "Then too," said Bleys thoughtfully, looking at the slim, white-bearded man waiting by the open door, "there might be those about whom there could be a legitimate doubt if they could roll the stone back alone, even from the top side."

Old Man's eyes twinkled back at him. "Then, perhaps not," said Bleys, striding toward the door. "Lead on, my guide." Old Man stood aside to let the Other pass through the door first, then went out himself, closing it behind him. Amanda came forward to the fireplace so that she was together with the seated Amid and the still standing Hal. "You frightened me," said Amid to Hal, "when you told him that this ledge was the cradle of the new breed of Exotics, and right after he'd promised to keep our being here a secret! Do you think he was telling the truth about leaving us in peace?" "Bleys feels himself above ever having to lie," answered Hal. "But I'm sorry you were frightened. I wasn't just being thoughtless enough to raise a doubt in his mind, I was actually confirming his original notion you were harmless. "

Amid's already wrinkled brow wrinkled more deeply in a frown. "I don't understand," he said. "He's a fanatic," said Amanda. "You know his background, surely? You Exotics must have looked into his background. His mother was one of your people."

Amid nodded. "It's true she was an Exotic," said Amid. "But she turned away from us. If we were a religious people, you might have said she was an apostate." "She was brilliant, and knew it," said Amanda. "But not brilliant enough to gain control of all the Younger Worlds, the way Donal Graeme effectively did, back in his time, and fate had caused her to be born into the one Splinter Culture whose people were best equipped to resist manipulation by her." "Yes," said Amid, with a sigh, "at any rate she left us and went to Ceta."

"Yes," said Amanda, "and it was on Ceta, later on, Bleys was born. He's never known who his father was. Actually he was from Harmony. An unhappy older man she seduced merely to see how easily she could do it. But I think she really wanted to believe she was the only one responsible for Bleys, because almost from the day he was born it was plain he had everything in the way of abilities that his mother had liked to think she had herself, but hadn't. So she started cramming him full of knowledge from the time he was old enough to talk, and he was well on his way to being what he is now at only nine years of age, when she suddenly died. Possibly he was responsible for that. He could have been. She'd left directions that if anything happened to her he was to go to his uncle on Harmony. Do you know that part of his history?" "Not all of it," said Amid. "When we looked into Bleys' background, years later, we found out about his mother. She had no Friendly genes in either the maternal or paternal lines of her ancestry. But the man - the Friendly on Harmony he was sent to grow up with - couldn't have been Bleys' uncle! A cousin, a number of times removed, at most." "Well, she called him an uncle and the boy was taught to call him 'uncle.' In any case he was a farmer with a large family, and a fanatic, rather than a true faith-holder. He raised all his children to be fanatics like himself. Some of what Bleys is he caught from that man. Though I don't suppose it was more than a week or two after he got there that the nine-year-old Bleys was controlling that whole family, whether they knew it or not. He controlled them, but his 'uncle,' or all of them, infected him with their fanaticism all the same."

"'It's not easy to tell the difference between a fanatic and what you call a true faith-holder - particularly when you call them so, Hal," said Amid, looking from Amanda to him. "I'd hate to think we simply use the word fanatic for anyone whose views we disagree with. " "There's almost no difference in any case," answered Hal, "between a fanatic and someone of pure faith, though what difference there is makes all the difference, once you get to know them. Basically, they differ in the fact a faith-holder puts himself below his faith and lets it guide his actions. The fanatic puts himself above it and uses it as an excuse for his actions. But for practical purposes, the two are almost identical. The fanatic practically die for what he believes in as readily as a man or woman of faith came back to him a memory of a man who had been a fanatic and tortured Rukh Tamani close to death, but who now served her among the most loyal of her followers and was a Faith-holder. Amyth Barbage had been an officer of the Militia harried and tried to destroy such Resistance Groups as Rukh's on both Harmony and its sister Friendly world of Association.

He and James Child-of-God, Rukh's second-in-command of the Resistance Group, would have seemed, to anyone who did not know them intimately, to have been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Both men were harsh and uncompromising both in attitude and appearance - except that Child-of-God was old enough to be Barbage's father. Both spoke an archaic, 'canting' version of Basic, full of "thee's" and "thou's." Both put what they thought of as their faith before all other things. But Barbage had been a fanatic.

James Child-of-God had been a true faith-holder. He had spent his life fighting against the Militia that the Others had found so useful and put to their own purposes, and he died, alone, behind a small barricade in the rain, deliberately giving his life to slow up the Militia companies that were close on the heels of what had by then become a sick and exhausted Resistance Group, driven by the relentless pursuit of a Barbage who had unlimited troops and supplies at his disposal.

To this day, Hal could not remember lightly his final moments alone with Child-of-God, before he had left the old man to his final battle in the rain with the foe he had opposed so long. Always the memory tightened Hal's throat painfully. On the other hand, the memory of Barbage that had just come to mind was of an entirely different nature, but showed the same kind of utter dedication to a purpose.

This other memory was of a somewhat earlier time when the Group was being closely pursued through a territory of dense Woods by Barbage and the Militia Companies stationed in one of the local Districts through which the Group had been fleeing, and Hal, because of his training as a boy under a Dorsai, had been the best choice to try and slip back quietly to spy on their pursuers. He had silently backtracked and come upon the pursuing companies, temporarily halted for a meeting of their officers. He had worked his way close enough to hear them, coming within earshot at a point where the superior officer of the Companies had gotten himself into a confrontation with the knife-lean, relentless-eyed Barbage, who had apparently been sent out from Militia Headquarters and made into what he was by Bleys' direct personal influence. The scene was suddenly there, now, as he thought of it, in his mind's eye...

"... yes, I say it to thee, " Amyth Barbage had been saying in his hard tenor voice to the Commandant of the Militia, who was a Captain, as Barbage was himself. Hal moved closer behind a small screen of slim variform willows. Barbage was on his feet. The other, junior, officers of the Militia had all been sitting with the Captain himself in a row on a fallen log, between the two men, with the other Captain seated at the far end of their line. "I have been given a commission by authority far above thee, and beyond that by the Great Teacher, Bleys Ahrens himself, and if I say to thee, go - thou wilt go!"

The other Captain had looked upward and across at Barbage with a tightly closed jaw. He was a man perhaps five years younger than Barbage, no more than midway into his thirties, but his face was square and heavy with oncoming middle age, and his neck was thick. "I've seen your orders," he said. His voice was not hoarse, but thick in his throat-a parade-ground voice. "They don't say anything about pursuing over district borders. " "Thou toy man!" said Barbage, and his voice was harsh with contempt. "What is it to me how such as thou read orders? I know the will of those who sent me, and I order thee, that thou pursuest how and where I tell thee to pursue!"

The other captain had risen from the log, his face gone pale with anger. The sun glinted on the forward-facing oval end of the butt of the power pistol sheltered under the snapped down weather flap of the holster at his belt. Barbage wore no pistol. "You may have orders!" he said, even more thickly. "But you don't outrank me and there's nothing that says I have to take that sort of language from you. So watch what you say or pick yourself a weapon - I don't care either way."

Barbage's thin upper lip curled slightly. "Weapon? What Baal's pride is this to think that in the Lord's word thou mightest be worthy of affront? Unlike thee, I have no such playthings as weapons. Only tools which the Lord has made amilable to my hand as I have needed them. So, thou hast called a weapon, then? No doubt that which I see on something thou didst not like y side, there. Make use of it, therefore, since the name I gave thee!"

The Captain flushed. "You're unarmed," he said shortly. "Oh, let that not stop thee," said Barbage ironically. "For the servants of the Lord, tools are ever ready to hand."

He made one long step while the other man stared at him, to end standing beside the most junior of the officers sitting on the log. He laid his hand on the snapped-down weatherflap of the young officer's power pistol and flicked the flap up with his thumbnail. His hand curled around the suddenly exposed butt of the power pistol beneath. A twist of the wrist would be all that would be needed to bring the gun out of its breakaway holster and fire it, while the other Captain would have needed to reach for and uncover his own pistol first before he could fire.

From the far end of the log the Captain stared, his heavy face suddenly even more pale and mouth open foolishly. "I meant... " The words stumbled on his tongue. "Not like this. A proper meeting, with seconds-'' "Alas, " said Barbage, "such games are unfamiliar to me. So I will kill thee now to decide whether we continue or turn back from our pursuit, since thou hast not chosen to obey my orders - unless thou shouldst kill me first to prove thy right to do its thou wishest. That is how thou wouldst do things, with thy weapons, and thy meetings and thy seconds, is it not?"

He paused, but the other did not answer. "Very well then," said Barbage. He drew the power pistol from the holster of the junior officer and leveled it at his equal in rank. "In the Lord's name-," broke out the other man hoarsely. "Have it any way you want. We'll go on then, over the border!" "I am happy to hear thee decide so, " said Barbage. He replaced the pistol in the holster from which he had withdrawn it and stepped away from the young officer who owned it. "We will continue until we make contact with the pursuit unit sent out from the next District, at which time I will join them and thou, with thy officers and men, mayest go back to thy small games in town. That should be soon. When are the troops from the next District to meet us?... "

"The fact that the goal he works for is wrong won't slow Bleys down," Hal said now to Amid. "He'll do what's necessary to accomplish what he wants, just as I will. It's not the goal, but his belief that's important, and that's as strong as if his faith was as right as anyone's ever was."

Amid nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But the fact that he's found me here changes things for me, personally," went on Hal. "I'm afraid I'd better be getting back to Earth and the Final Encyclopedia pretty soon, now." "Not just pretty soon," said Amanda. "Immediately. Now. "

Hal turned to her. "You've been here all this time and you're only saying it now?" he demanded. " She's only saying it to you," Amid said. "She told me the minute she arrived, but you were down in the forest busy rescuing Artur and Cee at the time. Since you've come back, you were first, dead for sleep, then sometime early this morning you seem to have had a revelation or discovery of some kind - and none of us wanted to disturb you until you were ready to be disturbed. What had touched you may have been too important for the future of all of us to be damaged by intrusion. "

Hal sighed, and nodded. "Yes," he said. "Actually, the fault's mine. I should have asked Amanda for news, the minute I saw her, last night." "You were in no shape - last night," said Amanda, "to ask, or hear."

He smiled a little. "Perhaps," he said. "What happened to me at sunrise this morning might have been blocked off by whatever news you've brought that makes it necessary I go back immediately. But I don't think so. I was deaf and dumb with tiredness, though, I'll grant you that. At any rate, now that sunrise and Bleys are both past - what is it?" "It's for your ears only," said Amanda, "all I've told Amid was that you'd have to leave right away. Actually, that's all you ought to need to know yourself, to get moving. I'll tell you as we go-"