The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Forty-one

A brisk chime commanded Hal's attention to the communications screen in one wall of his stateroom. The screen stayed blank, but an equally brisk feminine voice spoke from it.

"Give me your attention, please. Take your place in the fixed armchair by the bed and activate the restraining field. Control is the red stud on the right armrest of the chair."

He obeyed, a little surprised, aware that activating the field would register on a telltale in the control room, forward. But the order had caught him deep in his own thoughts and for the moment, automatically, he returned to them.

A corner, at least, of that dark shadow of defeat and depression, which had come to touch him in the garden below the balcony at Amid's home on Mara, had stayed with him through these five standard days of ship's time it had taken for his journey to the Dorsai. He had not met the woman who was evidently the pilot of this small courier-class vessel, on which he seemed to be the only passenger; and she had not come back from the restricted control area forward to make any sort of self-introduction. As a result, he had been free to think, uninterrupted, and there had been a great deal to think about.

Now, however, when they must be almost upon the Dorsai… he found those thoughts interrupted by the unusual demand that he put his body under control of a restraining field, something ordinarily requested of passengers only when their vessel was docking in space, as the jitney had been when it brought him to and into the Final Encyclopedia.

But this Dorsai light transport was no spaceliner, of course, and the commanders of Dorsai vessels had their own way of doing things, as all the fourteen worlds knew. He reached out and flicked on his room screen to see how close they actually were to going into a parking orbit.

What he saw made him sit up suddenly. They were indeed close enough to go into parking orbit. Blue and white, the orb of the Dorsai loomed large on his stateroom screen, the edge between night and day of the dawn terminator sharp below them. But, far from parking, the ship was still phase-shifting inward toward the surface of the world below. Even fifty years before, the psychic shock of a rapid series of shifts such as these would have required him to medicate himself in advance. But research at the Final Encyclopedia itself had found a way to shield from that shock. So there had been no warning.

It was a second before Hal recalled that the Dorsai - unlike pilots from other planets - had a habit of trusting themselves to shift safely right down into the atmosphere of any world on which they had good data; in fact, to within a few thousand meters of its surface. It was a skill developed in them as part of their normal training in ship-handling, as a practical matter of cutting jitney and shuttle costs on their far-from-wealthy world. The protective restraint was merely a routine precaution against some passenger panicking under such unusual approach maneuvers and getting hurt as a result. In fact, a moment later they came out of a series of very rapid, successive shifts with a jerk that would have thrown him from the chair, if the protective field had not held him anchored.

They were now no more than a thousand meters up, at most, and beginning to descend on atmosphere drive toward a spaceport misted with early morning rain under gray skies; a spaceport larger in area than the small city to which it was adjacent. Clearly, they were about to land at what Amid had earlier told Hal was the intended destination of the ship - the closest thing to a capital city that the Dorsai possessed. This was the city of Omalu, which housed the central administrative offices of the United Cantons, the districts into which the Dorsai had come to be organized for purposes of local self-government.

Actually, however, as Hal knew as well as the Exotics who had sent him here, these offices formed no more than a library and storage center for contractual records; and a contact point for discussion of matters that could not conveniently be discussed and settled locally in or between the cantons concerned. The Dorsai had even less than the Exotic Worlds in the way of a central government.

In theory, the cantonal officers had authority over the individuals and families living within the boundaries of the individual canton; but in actuality even this authority was more a matter of expressing local public opinion than otherwise.

Neighborliness - a word that held a special meaning on the Dorsai - was what made a social unit of this world. The cantons, even in theory, had only a courtesy relationship to the central administrative offices of each island on this world of islands, large and small. And the island offices did no more than communicate with the United Cantonal Offices here in Omalu. It was the only way a world could operate on which families, and individuals in those families, were constantly dealing on a direct and independent basis with off-planet governments and individuals scattered over all the other thirteen worlds.

Ironically, Hal had been sent out at Exotic expense to speak to representatives of a world which had no representatives, at least officially. It was ironic because the Exotics, who trusted nothing they could not test and identify, had in this case simply trusted the people of the Dorsai world to bring Hal somehow to those to whom he should speak.

But the spacecraft was now landing at the port, almost as precipitously and economically as it had phase-shifted to within a breath of ground level. As it settled down and became still, the sign winked out over the door. Hal shut off the restraining field. He got to his feet and collected a shoulder bag supplied and filled by Amid, and containing necessary personal clothes and equipment. Amid had reminded him - unnecessarily - that the Dorsai was one world where it was not always possible to buy suddenly needed clothes and other personal necessities conveniently close at hand.

Leaving his stateroom, he had to squeeze his way past crates of Exotic medical machines of various sizes and complexity, stacked even in the central corridor of the craft. A majority of these were new, replacements for worn-out units in Dorsai hospitals; but a fair number were older machines which had been taken back to their designers on Mara for repair or the additions of improvements beyond the training of the local Dorsai technicians doing ordinary maintenance on them. There were even more of these filling the vessel than Hal remembered encountering when he had come aboard. It had been remarkable that a craft this small could lift from the surface, packed with this much cargo.

Finding his way out of the entry port at last, Hal stepped into the cloudy morning and the gusting rain above the landing pad. Descending the ramp to the pad, Hal found at the foot of it a tall, lean, middle-aged woman in gray coveralls, in brisk conversation with a lean-faced, older man riding a small hovertruck.

" - You'll need bodies!" she was saying. "The way that equipment's packed in there, you're not going to get it out alone, even with handlifters. Even the two of us can't do it. We're going to have to lift three things to get one clear enough for you to carry it off."

"All right," said the man. "Back in five minutes."

He turned his truck and slid off swiftly across the pad toward a blurred line of gray buildings in the distance. The woman turned and saw Hal. Saw him, and stared at him for a long moment.

"Are you Dorsai?" she said, at last.

"No," said Hal.

"I was about twenty meters away from you, over by the truck, unloading, when they took you on board," she said. "You moved like a Dorsai. I thought you were."

Hal shook his head.

"One of the people who raised me was Dorsai," he said.

"Yes." She stared at him for a moment more. "So, then, you've never had ship-handling. There ought to have been two of us on a trip like this, and I wondered why you didn't come up front and offer to give me a hand. But I had my own hands full; and when you didn't, I took it there was some reason you wanted privacy."

"In a way," said Hal, "I did."

"Good enough. If you couldn't help, you did just what you should have by staying out of my way. All right, no harm done. I made it here well enough by myself, and you're where you wanted to go."

"Not exactly," said Hal. "Foralie's where I wanted to go."

"Foralie? On Caerlon Island?" She frowned. "Those Exotics told me Omalu."

"They were assuming something," said Hal. "I'll be coming back to Omalu here, eventually. But for now, I want to go to Foralie."

"Hmm." The pilot glanced over at the buildings. "Babrak'll be back in a moment. He can give you a ride to the terminal and they can tell you there how you might get to Foralie. You'll probably have to change boats several times - "

"I was hoping to fly straight there," said Hal. "I've got the interstellar credit to pay for it."

"Oh." She smiled a little grimly. "Interstellar credit's one thing we can always use these days. I should have guessed you'd have some, since you came aboard on one of the Exotics. Well, as I say, Babrak'll be back shortly. Let's get in out of this weather; and meanwhile, how about giving me a hand clearing enough space just inside the entry port for him to get started?"

Less than two hours later, Hal was airborne in the smallest jitney-type space and atmosphere craft in which he had ever ridden. He sat side by side with the driver before the control panel; there were two more empty seats behind them, and beyond that only a small cargo space.

"It's about a third of a circumference," said the pilot, a thin, brisk, black-haired man of about thirty in a fur-collared jacket and slacks. "Take us something over an hour. You're not Dorsai, are you?"

"No," said Hal.

"Thought for a moment you were. Hold on." The jitney went straight up toward the upper edge of the atmosphere. The pilot checked his controls and looked over at Hal, again.

"Foralie Town, isn't it?" he said. "You know someone there?"

"No," answered Hal. "I've just always wanted to see Foralie. I mean, Foralie, itself. Graemehouse."

"Foralie's the property. Graemehouse's the name of the house on it. Which is it, the property or the house you want to see?"

"All of it," said Hal.

"Ah."

The driver watched him briefly for a moment longer before returning his gaze to the stars visible above the far, curved horizon of the daylit surface below, visible beyond the vehicle's windshield. They were headed in the same direction as the rotation of the planet. The brilliant white pinpoint of the local sun, Fomalhaut, which had been behind them on liftoff, began now to catch up. "You didn't happen to have a relative who was a Graeme?"

"Not as far as I know," said Hal.

The dry tone in which he had unthinkingly answered had its effect. The driver asked no more questions and Hal was left in the dimness of the jitney's interior to his own thoughts once more. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. When he had been very young one of his fanciful dreams had indeed been that his parents might have been related to the Foralie Graemes. But that sort of wishful thinking was long past now. The pilot's question had still managed to touch an old sensitivity.

However, now that he was actually headed toward Foralie, he found himself strangely uneasy with his decision to go there first, before doing anything else on the Dorsai. He had no sensible reason for making this trip now - only his early fascination with the history of the Graemes and the stories Malachi had told him of Ian and Kensie, Donal, and the others.

No, it had simply been that, darkened by the shadow which had come over him in the garden on Mara, he had felt a reluctance to move too swiftly here on the Dorsai - in his execution of the commission that Nonne and the other Exotics had asked him to undertake, or anything else; and in the face of that feeling, on the trip here, he had decided to do what he had always wanted to do since he had been a child, and that was see the Foralie which Malachi had so many times mentioned to him.

The deeper reason was less clear, but more powerful. It was that of all his dreams and fever-visions during the period in the cell, the one that still clung in his mind and moved him most strongly was the dream of the burial. Its events were solid and real in his mind even now - the tearing sorrow and the commitment. He did not need to hunt out points of evidence within that dream to know that it had been about some place and people on the Dorsai. To someone raised as he had been, the fact was self-evident - the very color and feel of what he had dreamed was Dorsai. So powerful had been its effect on him that he felt it like an omen - to be disregarded at his peril; and since Malachi had been the last of his own family, there was no place on that world to which Hal could relate strongly but the household of the legendary Graemes of which he had heard so much in his young years.

It was true, he had always wanted to see the birthplace of Donal Graeme. But something more than that was at work in him, now - something beyond his present understanding of that vision of death and commitment - that was still hidden from his conscious mind and which drew him instinctively toward some place or time strongly Dorsai, for a fuller understanding.

Besides, it was curiously apt that he should go there now. Malachi, or the shade of Malachi which he had conjured up with those of Walter and Obadiah four years past at the Final Encyclopedia, had told him that there would be no reason for him to go to the Dorsai until he was ready to fight the Others. Well, he was at last ready to fight them; and it had been from the starting point of Foralie that Donal Graeme had gone in his time to gain leadership of the whole fourteen worlds. An almost mystic sense of purpose seemed to beckon Hal to the same place of beginning.

Also, he was in a mood that needed support, even mystic support. He had failed dismally to get the Exotics to listen to him or help him. There was no reason to expect the Dorsai to do more. In fact, considering the independence of its people on that harsh world, there was less reason. What had happened to him in Amid's garden as he had waited for their decision had been something outside his experience until that moment. A certain belief in himself with which he had emerged from the Militia cell on Harmony, and which he had then thought impregnable, had been struck and weakened by the blindness of the Exotic attitude.

It had not been merely the fact that they had not listened. That had been only the final assault that had breached the inner fortress of his spirit. But the breach had been made only after a number of recent blows that had already cracked and weakened what he had always thought was unbreakable in him. Where he had once taken for granted that whatever he defended was unconquerable, he now could see defeat as a real possibility.

Granted, there were excuses. The emotional pain of having to trick and abandon his friends in the Command, his illness at the time, his driving of his body far beyond its physical limits and, finally, his rite-of-passage - as Amid had referred to it - alone in the Militia cell, had all had their effect. Even the arguments of Bleys, which, even denied, had weakened him in preparation for this final blow that was the Exotic refusal to hear what he had to say. Of all peoples, he had expected the men and women of Mara and Kultis to understand, to recognize something once it was pointed out to them.

But knowing these things did not help. The grayness, the feeling of defeat remained. He looked at his life and could not see that from the start he had achieved anything. His early dreams, put to the test out on the worlds, had vanished like pricked soap bubbles.

Who was he to think that he was anything but a minor annoyance to the Others - a mouse dodging about under the feet of giants who would sooner or later crush him? He was nothing; not Friendly, not Exotic, not Dorsai. He had no reason even to believe that he had any claim to belong to Earth. That ship in which he had been found could have been coming from anywhere; and been headed to anywhere. What was this present trip to Foralie, but a clutching at a straw floated to the surface of his mind by a dream? He had no real proof that he was not, indeed, a crossbreed, as Bleys had said. He had no identity, no home, no people. He was a stranger in every house, a foreigner on every world, his only known family three old men who had been no actual relations; and even they had only been with him for the first, early years of his life.

He had wanted to stay at the Final Encyclopedia, and his feeling that he must strike back at the Others had driven him from it. He had found a way of life as a miner; then, to save his life, had been forced to run and leave that way of life behind. He had found friends, almost a family, in Rukh's Command; and he had deliberately made the choice to abandon them. The Exotics had had no place or use for him except as a messenger; and there was no hearth waiting for him here on the Dorsai, where there were not even relatives of Malachi's to sit with for a moment and tell about Malachi's death. To have found even one other person who could have shared his grief over the loss of Malachi and the others, would have strengthened him to bear the dry emptiness of his solitary position in the universe.

He drew a deep, slow breath. Long ago, Walter InTeacher had told him how to deal with psychic pain like this; and he had remembered dutifully, if without great interest, seeing that the technique was for something that he could not imagine happening to him. Walter's instruction had been not to fight the depression and the self-condemnation, but to go with them and try to understand them. In the end, Walter had said, understanding could drain the destructive emotion from any situation.

He made an effort to do this now; and his mind slid off into a strange area, without symbols, where he seemed to feel himself tossed about by the vectors of powerful forces he could not see - like someone swept overboard from a ship in a hurricane. It went against his instincts not to fight these pressures; but Walter had emphasized the absence of resistance. Sitting in the thrumming near-silence of the jitney, hurling itself through the space where air and void meet, he forced himself into passivity, searching and feeling for some pattern to the situation that held him…

"Going down now," said the voice of the pilot, and Hal opened his eyes.

They were back into the atmosphere, descending fast over what seemed open ocean. Then a point of darkness near the horizon became apparent, enlarging as the jitney fell in a long curve toward it, until it was clearly visible as land. A few moments later they were low above mountain meadows and stony peaks; and shortly thereafter they dropped vertically to earth, on a concrete pad at the edge of what had seemed to be a small village beside a river.

"Here you are," said the driver. He punched a control on the panel before him and the entry to the jitney swung open, steps sliding down and out to the pad surface. "Just head up that road there. Center of Foralie Town's beyond the trees and the housetops, there."

"Thanks," said Hal. He reached for his case of credit papers, then remembered he had paid for this trip before leaving Omalu. He got up, taking his shoulder bag with him. "Is there a central office or - "

"Town Hall," said the driver. "It's always in the center of town. Just follow that road in. You can't miss it and it'll have a sign out front. If you do get lost, ask anyone."

"Thanks again," said Hal, and left the jitney, which took off before he had covered half the width of the pad to the road the driver had indicated.

They had flown forward into mid-afternoon. No breeze stirred. The trees that the jitney driver had mentioned were variform maples, and the color on them spoke of autumn. But it hardly needed that to tell Hal of the time of the year in this part of the Dorsai; for the clear, clean light of fall spoke of the season in every quarter. Under an almost cloudless sky, the still air was scentless, cool in the shadow but hot in the sun. The shadows of the trees and, after a bit, the shadows of the wooden buildings when he had passed through the trees and found himself in the streets of Foralie Town itself, seemed hard-edged, they lay so crisply where the brilliant sunlight was interrupted. The colors of the houses glowed, clean and bright, as if all structures there had just been freshly washed and painted against the oncoming winter.

But the town itself was still and quiet, and the relative silence of it touched Hal strangely. He felt an emotion toward its houses and its streets that was an unusual thing to feel to a place never seen before. No one was in the streets through which he walked, although occasionally he heard voices through the open windows he passed. He came after a few moments to a central square; and, facing him at the far end, was a white building of two stories, its lower level half-sunken into the ground. There were two doors visible; one at the top of a flight of six steps to the upper story, the other preceded by a shorter flight, down to the floor below.

The white building plainly showed its difference in design from the obvious homes that fronted on the other three sides of the square. Hal went to it; and as he got close, he saw the word Library above the door to the semi-basement entrance. He went up the stairs to the higher door and touched its latch panel. It swung open and he entered.

Inside was a space about ten meters square, divided by a room-wide counter with a gate that marked off the back half of the space into an area with three desks and some office equipment. A thin, handsome boy about ten or twelve years old got up from one of the desks and came to his side of the counter as Hal walked up to the front of it. He stared at Hal for a moment, then visibly pulled himself out of his first reaction.

"I'm sorry," he said, "my aunt's the Mayor and she's out in the hills at the moment. I'm Alaef Tormai - "

He broke off, gazing at Hal, penetratingly once more.

"You're not even Dorsai," he said.

"No," said Hal. "My name's Hal Mayne."

"Honored," said the boy. "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I thought - I thought you were."

"It's all right," said Hal. For a moment, a sort of bitter curiosity moved in him. "Tell me what made you think so?"

"I - " the boy hesitated. "I don't know. You just do. Only something's different."

He looked embarrassed.

"I'm afraid I'm not too good an observer. After I get through my training - "

"It's not you," said Hal. "A couple of adult Dorsai have already had to look twice at me to see what I was. What I'm hoping is to get up in the hills myself and take a look at Foralie. Not for any particular purpose. I've just always wanted to see it."

"There's no one there now," said Alaef Tormai.

"Oh?" Hal said.

"I mean, all the Graemes are off-world right now. I don't think any of them are due back for a standard year or so."

"Is there any reason I can't go up and look around, anyway?"

"Oh, no!" said Alaef, uncomfortably. "But there'll be no one home…"

"I see." Hal thought carefully for a second about how to phrase his next question so as not to hurt the other's feelings. "Isn't there someone close to the Graemes I could talk to? Someone who might be able to show me around?"

"Oh, of course!" Alaef smiled. "You can go talk to Amanda. Amanda Morgan, I mean. She's their next door neighbor. Fal Morgan's her homestead - do you want me to show you how to get there?"

"Thanks," said Hal. "I'll have to rent a vehicle."

"I'm afraid there's nothing in town here you could rent," said Alaef, frowning. "But that's all right. I can slide you up there on our skimmer. Just a minute, I'll call Amanda and tell her we're coming."

He turned to a screen on one of the desks and punched out call numbers on its deck of keys. A line of printing flooded across the screen in capital letters. Hal could read it from where he stood.

"GONE TO BRING IN THE BRUMBIES."

"She's gone after wild horses?" Hal asked.

"Not wild." Alaef turned back to him from the screen and looked embarrassed again. "Just the stock she's had running loose for the summer in the high pastures. That's what we mean when we say brumbies, here. It's time to bring them in to shelter for the winter. It's all right. We can go ahead. She's got to be back before dark; and she'll probably be home by the time we get there."

He started out the gate to Hal's side of the counter.

"What about the office?" Hal asked.

"Oh, that's all right," Alaef said. "This late in the day, no one's likely to come by. I'll leave word with my aunt on the way out of town, though."

Hal followed him out, and five minutes later found himself a passenger in an antique-looking ducted-fan skimmer being piloted up one of the slopes enclosing the valley that held Foralie Town, headed toward the high country beyond.

The sun was reaching down toward the mountaintops and a time of sunset, when they came at last over a little rise and Hal saw before them a high, open spot surrounded in front and on both sides by wooded gullies like the one from which they had just emerged; and, beyond that, having a small open field that lifted at the far end to a treed slope, enclosed by the omnipresent mountainsides. In the center of the open area stood a large, square two-story building with walls of light gray stone, accompanied by what seemed to be a long stable, some outbuildings and a corral, all of log construction.

"I guess she isn't back yet, after all," said Alaef, as he brought the skimmer up close to the house. "She's left her kitchen door ajar, though, to let people know she'll be right back."

The skimmer's fans died and the vehicle settled to the grassy earth outside the partly open door with a sigh.

"Do you mind if I just leave you here, then?" said Alaef, looking at Hal a little anxiously. "It's hardly polite, I know, but I told my aunt I'd be home in time for dinner. Amanda's got to get those brumbies in corral before sundown, so she'll be along at any minute; but if I wait with you I'll be late. You can just go in and make yourself comfortable."

"Thanks," said Hal, standing up from his seat in the open skimmer and stepping down onto the earth. "I think I'd just as soon stand out here and watch the sunset. You get on back; and thanks for bringing me up here."

"Oh, that's just neighborliness. Honored to have made your acquaintance, Hal Mayne."

"Honored to have made yours, Alaef Tormai."

Alaef started up the fans, lifted the skimmer on them, spun it about, waved and slid off. Hal watched him until the vehicle and youngster dipped into a gully and were lost from sight. He turned back to look at the sun.

It was touching the tops of the mountain range with its lower edge and the light was red and full. For a moment the color of it brought back a memory of another sunset with the red light upon the water of the private lake of the estate on which he had been brought up; a sunset-time in which he had been racing the edge of moving sun-shadow across the water and Malachi and Walter had been standing on the terrace of the house…

He shivered, slightly. There was something stark and real about this Dorsai landscape that let the mind and the emotions run full out in any direction that beckoned them. He looked about once more at the edges of the tabletop of land on which he stood, alone with the Morgan house and outbuildings. If this Amanda was indeed sure to be in before dark, she would have to be putting in an appearance very shortly.

Barely a couple of seconds later, his ear caught a sound of distant whooping, followed by an increasing noise of hoofbeats and torn brush; and, as he watched, horses boiled up over the edge of one of the gullies, flanked by a blue-capped rider who passed them up and raced flat out before them toward Hal and the clump of buildings.

By this time, somewhere between a dozen and fifteen loose horses were up on the flat, being chivvied forward by two other riders, who looked to be no older than Alaef. Meanwhile, the one in advance had galloped to the corral and was unlatching and swinging open its gate, throwing one quick glance at Hal as she passed.

This, he thought, had to be the Amanda Morgan he was here to see, although she did not look much older than her two assistants. She was tall, with the breasts and body of a grown woman, in spite of her slimness; but an amazing litheness and an indefinable general impression of youthfulness made it hard for him to believe that she was much beyond her middle teens.

She swung the gate wide. The other two riders were already driving the loose horses toward the corral. These thundered past Hal at less than ten meters of distance. One gray horse with a white splash on its face balked at the gate, dodged and spun about, bolting toward Hal, the house and freedom beyond. Hal ran forward, waving his arms at full length on either side of him and shouting. The gray checked, reared, and dodged aside again only to find its way barred by one of the young riders, who turned it finally back into the corral.

They were all in, and the sun's upper edge disappeared as the gate was swung to and locked. Suddenly shadow and a breath of coolness flooded over all the level land. Amanda Morgan said something Hal could not quite catch to the two younger riders. They waved, swinging their mounts around, heading off at a canter in the direction from which they had come.

Hal, fascinated, watched them down into the gully and out of sight. He looked back, finally, to find Amanda dismounting in front of him. For the first time he got a good look at her. She was as square-shouldered as she was slim, dressed in tan riding pants, heavy black-and-white checkered shirt and leather jacket, with a blue, wide-billed cap pulled low over her eyes as if to still shade them against the direct sunset light that had now left them. Twilight filled the area below the surrounding mountains.

She took off the cap and he saw that her barely shoulder length hair, gathered and tied behind her, was white-blond; her face was slim-boned and regular with a beauty that he had not expected.

"I'm Amanda Morgan," she said, smiling. "Who're you, and when did you get here?"

"Just now," he answered automatically. "A boy called Alaef Tormai from the Foralie Town Hall office brought me up on a skimmer. Oh, I'm Hal Mayne."

"Honored," she said. "You've got business with me, I take it?"

"Well, yes…"

"Never mind," she said. "We can talk about it in a moment. I've got to put Barney here into the stable. Why don't you go into the living room and make yourself comfortable? I'll be with you in twenty minutes."

"I - thank you," he said. "All right, I will."

He turned and went in, as she led the horse off by its reins toward the long, dark shape of the stable.

Through the door, the interior air of the house was still, and warmer than the first night-coolness outside. The lights in the ceiling came on automatically and he saw he had stepped into a large kitchen. He turned right from it down a short corridor that had a large painting on one wall, apparently of the woman he had just met - no, he corrected his thought on stopping to examine it more closely, the woman pictured was at least in her thirties, but so alike to the Amanda Morgan he had met outside that they could have been sisters, if not twins. He went on into another room furnished with large couches, overstuffed chairs and occasional tables, all of them articles of solid furniture, with nothing of float construction visible.

At his left as he entered was a wide fireplace, the mantlepiece above it filled with small, apparently homemade bits of handicraft, ranging in artistry from obviously childmade objects such as a long-skirted woman's figure made of dried grass stems tied and glued into shape, to the bust of a horse, its head and arched neck only, carved in a soft reddish stone. The lifelikeness of the horse was breathtaking. Hal was reminded of some early Eskimo carvings he had seen in the Denver museum on Earth, in which an already wave-formed rock had been barely touched by the carver's tool, to transform it into the figure of a seal, or that of a sleeping man. The same kind of creative magic had been at work here, even to the red graininess of the rock evoking the texture and skin-coloring of a roan horse.

In a multitude of small ways, he thought as he took one of the comfortable chairs, it was the kind of room he had not seen since he left his own home on Earth. Not just the noticeable lack of modern technologies created this feeling. There had been none at all to be seen in the farmhouses that had put him up, together with the other Command members, on Harmony. But there was something different, here. A deliberately archaic feel lived within the walls surrounding him - as if it had been a quality consciously sought for and incorporated by the builders and owners of this place. The same sort of feel had been evident to an extent in Foralie Town also, and might be typical of the Dorsai in general for all he knew; but here, it amounted almost to a fineness, like the warm sheen upon cherished woodwork, lovingly nurtured and cared for over the years.

Whatever it was, like Foralie Town itself, it touched and comforted him like a home long familiar to which he was just now returning. The emotion it raised in him relieved some of the depression he had been feeling ever since the garden on Mara. Sitting in the armchair, he let his thoughts drift; and they slid, almost in reflex, back into a maze of memories from his own early days, memories that for a change were happy ones, of the years before Bleys had appeared.

So caught up in these memories was he that he only woke from them with the entrance of Amanda into the room, her cap and jacket removed, carrying a tray with cups, glasses, a coffee pot and a decanter on it that she set down on a square, squat table between his chair and the one facing it.

"Coffee or whiskey?" she said, sitting down facing him on the other side of the table.

Hal thought of getting used to one more taste-variety of coffee.

"Whiskey," he said.

"It's Dorsai whiskey," she said.

"I've tasted it," he said. "Malachi - one of my tutors - let me taste some one Christmas when I was eleven."

He saw her raised eyebrows.

"His full name was Malachi Nasuno," he added.

"It's a Dorsai name," said Amanda, tipping some of the dark liquor into a short, heavily-walled glass, and handing it to him. Her eyes studied him with an intensity that tightened the little muscles in the nape of his neck. Her gaze reminded him of the way young Alaef Tormai had stared in the first moment of their meeting at the Town Hall. Then she bent the silver crown of her head and poured coffee for herself, breaking the moment of her glance.

"I had three tutors," said Hal, almost to himself. He tasted the whiskey, and its fierce burn brought back more memories. "They were my guardians, as well. I was an orphan and they raised me. That was on Earth."

"Earth - so that's how you know about horses. That - and being raised by a Dorsai, explains it," she said, looking up and meeting his eyes again. He noticed the color of hers, now. Under the indoor lighting they were a clear, penetrating bluish green, like deep sea waters. "I took you for one of us at first glance.''

"So have a number of other people since Omalu," said Hal. He saw her glance was questioning. "I landed there from Mara, just a few hours back."

"I see." She sat back in her chair with the coffee cup, and the color of her eyes seemed to darken as they met his now in the last of the twilight that was flooding the room through its wide windows. "What can I do for you, Hal Mayne?"

"I wanted to see Foralie," he said. "Alaef said none of the Graemes were home, but you were their closest neighbor; and I could talk to you about looking at the place."

"Graemehouse's locked up now; but I can let you in, of course," she answered. "But you won't want to go tonight. Aside from anything else, you'd see a lot more in daylight."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow, by all means," she said. "I've got an errand to run, but I can leave you there on the way over and collect you on the way back."

"That's good of you." He swallowed the rest of the whiskey in his glass, breathed deeply a moment to get his voice back, and stood up. "Alaef ran me up here, but he had to be back in time for dinner. I don't want to impose on you but do you know anyone I can call for transportation back to Foralie Town?"

She was smiling at him.

"Why? Where do you think you're going?"

"Back to town, as I said," he answered a little stiffly. "I've got to arrange for a place to stay."

"Sit down," Amanda said. "Omalu has a hotel or two, but out here we don't run to such things. If you'd stayed in town, the Tormai or one of the other families there would have put you up. Since you're out here, you're my guest. Didn't your Malachi Nasuno teach you how we do things, here on the Dorsai?"

He looked at her. She was still smiling at him. He realized suddenly that, as they had talked, he had completely lost his earlier image of her as a barely-grown young woman. For the first time he began to consider the possibility that her chronological age might be even greater than his own.