The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 3

"Sorry I'm late," Hal said. He came in and sat down in the empty float remaining of the three that were pulled up to Ajela's large desk, now awash with paper. That had never been the case up until the last year. Now, with Tam almost helpless physically - not because his body had been damaged, or lost any of its natural strength, but because the living will in him to move it was fading - Ajela begrudged every moment she could not be by his side. "You weren't tempted to change your mind about coming?" Ajela asked. Her blue eyes were sharp upon him. "No," said Hal.

As usual, the controls of the Final Encyclopedia had aligned his quarters with the corridor that led for a short distance past the Director's office, which Ajela had used since Tam had quitted it permanently, two years before, naming Hal to succeed him as Director. Hal had had to walk only a few meters to get here. "No excuse. No delays. I just forgot the time."

Rukh Tamani, he saw, was also looking at him penetratingly. The two women had been talking as he came in - something about Earth, of which Ajela had, somewhat unwillingly, become, de facto chief executive. This, because simply as a practical matter, with Hal leaving everything to her in order to search for a way into the Creative Universe, she controlled the Final Encyclopedia. More importantly she had defacto control of the Encyclopedia's contract for the services of the Dorsai.

For the Dorsai, when they had come to the defense of Earth at Hal's urging, had been too wise from over two hundred years of experience not to insist that they would refuse to give their lives without the usual contract for their military use.

Knowing history, and the minds of those on worlds that had employed them, they had made their contract with the Encyclopedia, ignoring all the frequently quarreling local governments of Earth, itself. That had meant that, in theory, at least, the defense of Earth took its orders from this desk of Ajela's.

Hal knew, and the two women at the table knew, that the Dorsai would have come to put their lives and skills at the service of the Mother World, in any case. The contract they had signed called for compensation for two million trained men and women, warships and equipment, which represented a fully prepared space force only a full world with the resources of Earth could afford to pay for, and even that, over an extended period of time. But whether the Dorsai would ever actually collect their final pay or not made little difference. They all knew that, barring a miracle, the odds were there would be few of them left to collect when the time came.

Without the breakthrough that Hal had been unable to make, these three now in this room, at least, were aware that the Others, with all the war resources of the Younger Worlds available, must, in the end, prevail. Driven by the remarkable intelligence and destructive intentions of their leader, Bleys Ahrens, eventually that fleet outside the shield would grow large enough to break through, and, dying in droves if they must, overwhelm the more skillfully crewed, but less numerous, ships that could be put up in opposition by the Dorsai alone.

Thirty-one hundred and sixty-two fighting ships, operated around the clock by a scant two million people divided into four shifts - three of them working and one rotating in reserve at all times - were few enough to patrol the inner surface of a globe large enough to enclose, not only the Earth itself, but the orbit of the Final Encyclopedia. The day had to come when the Younger Worlds' fleet would phase-shift through the shield in incredible numbers, and the end be sealed.

The fact that the Dorsai would be dead before the forces of the Others owned the skies over a helpless Earth would be little consolation to Earth's people when that day came. "To catch you up on what I've just been talking over with Rukh," said Ajela, "we've got unexpected good news from below in the shape of the latest statistics."

The concept of "good news" jarred on Hal in the face of what he knew and had come here to say. But, surprisingly, he saw that Rukh was clearly in agreement with Ajela's assessment. Both women were looking at him with what seemed to be lifted spirits - and the difference was particularly noticeable on Rukh's part. She had been pushing her frail physical strength to the limit by adding much of Ajela's office work to her already excessive speaking engagements down on the surface, so as to free the other woman, Ajela, to have as much time as possible with Tam in his last days.

The least Hal could do for them, he told himself now, was to listen first to what they had to tell him before delivering the bad news of his own hard decision. "Tell me," he said.

Ajela picked up a paper from the desk before her. "These are statistics from Earth as a whole, compiled from all the areas," she said, and began to read: "...food production as a whole up eight per cent - (in spite of all those wild complaints we've had that the phase-shield cuts down on needed sunlight over growing areas) - metals production up eleven per cent. Metals directly required in spaceship production up eighteen per cent. Production of warships, fully fitted, armed, and test-flown, now up to an average of one every three and a half days. Enlistment in the training camps for spaceship crews by Earth-born applicants, up' - listen to this, Hal - 'sixty-three per cent! Graduation of fully trained but inexperienced crew people up eleven per cent..."

She continued to read. Rukh was also watching her now, Hal saw. He sat listening to Ajela and watching them both. Rukh's dark-olive face seemed to glow with an invisible but palpable inner light from under her black crown of neat, short hair.

That light had always been there, since he had met her in the camp of the guerrillas she had led on Harmony. But it seemed to stand out more now, because she had never really recovered physically from her weeks of torture at the hands of Amyth Barbage - then an officer of the Harmony Militia, and now, ironically, her most dedicated disciple and protector.

It was an index of the power of her faith that, simply by being what she was, she had been able to turn that lean and fearless fanatic from what he had been to what he was now. Strangely, also, her unbelievable beauty had been heightened rather than lessened by that ordeal in the prison. She seemed in some ways to Hal - and he knew that those who flocked in their thousands to hear her felt it even more strongly - more spirit than flesh.

Underneath the wine-colored shift she wore, with its long sleeves and collarless neck, Hal knew she now weighed only slightly more than ten pounds over the weight she had been reduced to when he had carried her, more dead than alive, out of the Militia prison on Harmony. The skin was still stretched taut over her meager flesh and bones. And at that moment there was a glint from the narrow column of her neck, as the highly polished lines of a cross incised in a gray-white disk of Harmony granite, hung from a steel chain - the only thing resembling an ornament he had ever seen her wear - caught the overhead lighting of the room. It flashed momentarily with a light not unlike the light behind her dark eyes.

There were no circles under those eyes, no tightening of the skin over her cheekbones - if that were possible - to show the exhaustion that must be within her. But Hal knew she was tired, self-driven to the point of near-collapse, for she would not refuse the hosts of people down on all parts of the Earth who begged to see her in person. And she would not step back from the work she had taken to herself up here, too.

Nor could he blame Ajela for allowing her to take over the work at this desk. Ajela had not asked to be the ultimate authority over a clamoring, bickering Old Earth that was only now beginning to wake from its illusions. At last, now that it was possibly too late, Earth was beginning to realize that, if not for those who had come to its aid unasked, it would have been as vulnerable - or more - than any other of the human-inhabited planets.

Like Rukh, Ajela showed no obvious physical signs of the strain she was under, but the responsibility of her position, plus the gradual, inevitable slide toward death of the old man she loved more than anyone else on all the inhabited worlds, was gradually conquering her. In short, both of the people on which the Encyclopedia depended for control, were closer to reaching their limit, in Hal's opinion, than they realized - or were ready to admit.

It showed particularly in Ajela's case, in these last few months, that what she chose to wear had been different from the commonsensical clothes she had always worn and programmed the Final Encyclopedia to have ready for her at the beginning of each workday. Strangely, for someone Exotic-born, these last few months she had begun to dress flamboyantly-sexily, to be blunt about it - although Tam was almost the only person who saw her much...

His thoughts were wandering. He tried to pull them back to the statistics she was reciting, but they insisted on straying again... certainly, as she was costumed now, no one could appear in greater contrast to Rukh than Ajela, unless it might be Amanda. Hal hastily thrust the thought of Amanda from his mind.

Ajela still looked almost as young as the day he had first met her here in the Encyclopedia, when he had been running from the killing of his tutors, on his estate, eleven years ago. Her skin was still as fair, and her hair around her bright face as literally golden and long-in fact, perhaps lately she had worn it even longer. She wore a brown brocade tunic over silky gold blouse and pantaloons that all but hid the cinnamon-colored slippers on her feet. There was no necklace around her neck, but earrings of a honey-colored amber, and on the middle finger of her right hand shone a ring with a large, irregular chunk of the same color of amber, containing tiny seeds encased there, looking alive and ready to sprout, even after the hundreds of years since the amber had been gathered.

Her face was round, her skin fresh. But in her he thought he saw the tightness around the eyes that was not visible in Rukh. No single sign, but her whole self, to him who knew her so well, betrayed an inward-held but growing desperation, growing, he knew, from her inability to keep Tam from death.

She had come originally to the Encyclopedia from Mara, one of the two Exotic worlds, where part of the philosophy had been the hope that an evolved human race would outgrow any need of death except by choice. Thoughts of those same two Exotic worlds brought Kultis and Amanda to his mind again... almost savagely, he pushed her out of his thoughts.

Ajela had come here as a young girl of twelve, with her parents' permission, in love with the idea of the Encyclopedia, which Exotic funds had largely financed. She had stayed to rise to the position of Assistant Director, under Tam Olyn, and to also fall in love with Tam, himself, although already by that time he was old enough to be her great-grandfather.

Now she and Rukh sat together at this desk with its load of paper piled over all its surface except the small rectangles of the viewing screens inset there before each of the three of them. All these screens right now showed a view of space directly above and about the Encyclopedia.

The white opacity of the shield wall was directly overhead and it thinned off in every direction, as the screens' angle of vision began to slant, revealing both the inner and outer walls of the shield, until finally there were only the lights of the stars against the black of airless space. The sun, Hal thought inconsequentially, must be directly overhead, to be hidden by the greatest thickness of the mist-wall. It could not be they were nightside now, for it had been afternoon at the estate, almost directly below them.

He woke suddenly to the fact that Ajela had stopped talking and both Rukh and Ajela were looking at him. Like an echo half heard lingering on his ear, he realized that Ajela had laid down her paper and asked him something. "I'm sorry," he said, and his voice came out more harshly than he had intended, under the gaze of those waiting eyes, "I didn't catch the question. "

The faint indentation of a frown line, if that was what it was and not an expression of puzzlement, appeared between Ajela's hazel eyes, followed immediately by an expression of concern. "Hal," she said, "tell me - do you feel all right?"

Concern was showing on Rukh's face as well. Their reactions doubled the sense of guilt in him. "I'm fine," he said. "I just wasn't listening as I should have - that's all. What was it you asked me, just now?" "I said," said Ajela, "that we'd thought of checking with one of the Dorsai Sector Commanders. But since you said you were coming today, we thought we'd rather ask the question in-house. You just heard that remarkable list of how the Earth is finally realizing it has to help defend itself, and beginning to build some muscle. Do you think there's a chance, now, if we keep on improving this way, building ships and training crews for them, that we can put up a fleet as big as anything the Younger Worlds can throw at us? And, if so, how long would it take? Can we match them before they're ready to try a mass breakthrough of the shield?" "I can only guess," he said.

Ajela looked disappointed. Not so much, Rukh. "We thought..." Ajela said, "because you told us how you were really Donal Graeme to begin with..." "I'm sorry," Hal shook his head. "You two are the only people outside of Amanda who know about my past and my being first Donal, in the last century, then Paul Formain, two hundred years before that. But now Donal's only an old part of me and deeply buried. Much of what he was I've worked to get away from. But even Donal could only have guessed." "What would he have guessed, then?" asked Rukh.

Her voice came at him so unexpectedly, for some reason, that Hal almost started. He looked at her. "He'd guess - pretty strongly I'm afraid," he answered slowly, "that it wouldn't matter what the answer to your questions would be, because it wouldn't make any difference, even if you were able to match the Younger Worlds' ship power. "

He hesitated. It was hard to dash their hopes this way, too, when he had come to dash them as well in another. "Go on," said Ajela. "It wouldn't matter," Hal said, "because Bleys Ahrens doesn't want victory. He wants destruction. He's as determined to destroy the Younger Worlds as he is to reduce Earth's population to just those who'll follow him. In the case of the Younger Worlds, he plans to depopulate and impoverish them, so humanity will eventually die off there. Or be reduced at least to a handful of people who, lacking communication with other civilized worlds, will degenerate into savagery and eventually die. Die, because they'll be moving backwards from, not forward, toward civilization. At the same time he and his mere handful of Others can move in and take control of a depopulated Earth. - "He's said that, I know," said Ajela, "but he's not insane. He can't really mean-" "He does," said Hal. "He means exactly what he says. That's why he doesn't care how he bleeds the Younger Worlds to conquer Earth. All that matters is the conquest. So he'll throw his ships through the shield at you eventually, no matter what defensive position you're in. I think you'll find your Dorsai knew this and faced it from the start." "Thou art saying," said Rukh - and her rare use of the canting speech of her religious sect was evidence enough that she was deeply moved, "that there's no way Earth can win. "

Hal took a deep breath. "That's right. There isn't, in any ordinary way." "I can never accept that," said Rukh - and with her words Hal again remembered her as he had first seen her, on Harmony, in all the physical strength and purpose of her earlier years. The power pistol she had worn strapped to her hip, then, had not been as strong as the sense of will and purpose that drew followers to her. "For Bleys to win he must extinguish God, and that he or no one else can ever do." "Think, Hal," said Ajela. "Earth's got as great a population still as all the Younger Worlds combined. It still has as massive resources of metal and other materials as all the Younger Worlds, combined. If we can match their strength, or even come close to it, why can't we fight them off even if they jump through in mass attack?" "Because it'll be a suicide attack," said Hal. "That's the measure of Bleys' control over the crews of the ships he'll be sending in. Each one will be a weapon of destruction, aimed at any target it can reach. The greatest number of them will only take out one of our ships. But some are going to reach the surface of the Earth. Only a few, maybe, but enough to kill off billions of Earth's people in the phase-explosions of their impacts. "

Rukh was looking hard at him. "Hal," she said, "you're talking very strangely. You're not telling us to give up?" "No," he said. "That is, not you. But I'm afraid I came here today - I've got something rather hard to tell you both." "What?" said Ajela. The single word came at him like a command. "I'm trying to say..."he began.

The words sounded suddenly clumsy in his mouth, and he felt heavily the effort of continuing. "...that maybe it's out of our hands to a certain extent. The phase-shield, the Dorsai coming, the contributions of wealth and knowledge from the Exotics, all the true faith-holders from Rukh's two worlds - in the end they all came here only to buy time while I found an answer to Bleys' plan." They were both staring at him. He went on. "That's been the only possible plan, ever since, as Donal, I found out that in welding the Younger Worlds into a political unit - and playing with the laws of history, as Paul Formain - I'd produced an unexpected side effect - the emergence of the Others, the most able of the crossbreeds between the Splinter Cultures."

He looked at them. He had expected some response - at least a protest that it had not been him alone that they had all been depending upon. But neither of the other two said anything, only sat, watching and listening. "A group like the Others," he said, "has always been outside our control. Something neither the commercial skill of the Exotics, the Faith of the Friendlies, nor the fighting abilities of the Dorsai were equipped to stop. Because the Others attack the instinct of the human race to grow and progress in a new way. A way no one had foreseen." He stopped, but neither of them said anything. He went on. "We dreamed of superpeople and, God help us, we got them," he said, "only too soon and with a few things like empathy and a sense of responsibility to the race, missing. But they've been unstoppable from the first because their powers are powers of persuasion, which work on a majority of humanity. You know all this! Otherwise, why would the only immune ones be the true Exotics, the true faith-holders among the Friendlies, the Dorsai, and that majority of full-spectrum humans on Earth who've got that in-born cantankerous individualism that's always rejected any persuasion?"

He paused a moment, then went on. "So it's been necessary from the first that a new answer be found for this new threat. And it's been up to me to find it. I thought I could lay the devils I'd raised. Well, I was wrong. That's what I've come here to tell YOU today. I've faced it now. I've failed."

There was a moment's utter silence. Ajela was the first to react.

"You!" said Ajela. "You, of all people, Hal - you're not going to sit there and tell us there's no such answer!" "And if you tell us so," said Rukh, "I will not believe thee, for it cannot be."

She spoke in a voice that was completely serene. As serene as a mountain, barring a pathway.