The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Forty-two

He sat at a table in the large kitchen of Fal Morgan while Amanda fixed dinner. It was a square, high-ceilinged room panelled in some pale wood gone honey-colored with time, which reflected the house lights that had seemed to strengthen as the outside twilight faded. It had two entrances; the one to the hall by which he had gone to the living room and by which they had come back in, and one to a presently-unlighted dining room in which Hal could dimly see dark panelling, straight-backed chairs, and part of a long, dark table. In the kitchen the cooking surfaces, the food storage cupboards, and the phone screen hanging high on one wall were modern and technological. Everything else was home-built and simple. Amanda moved about with an accustomed dexterity and speed. His own hands were idle.

"I could give you something to make it look like you're helping," she had told him as they had come in, "but there's no point to it. There's nothing you can do here that I can't do faster and better myself. So just sit back out of my way, and we'll talk as I go. More whiskey?"

"Thank you," he had said. Sitting with a glass in his hand at least gave him the appearance of a reason for sitting still while she worked.

He had expected to feel self-conscious sitting there, nonetheless; but the essential magic of the house, the warmth of the kitchen with her movement about in it, made all things right. Only, for a second, and reasonlessly, watching her now, he felt an unusually sharp stab of that loneliness that had been always part of him these last four years. Then he put that aside too, and merely sat, sipping the dark, fierce whiskey, wrapped in the comfort of the moment.

"What do you like - mutton or fish?" she asked. "That's our choice, here."

"Either is fine," he said. "I don't eat much."

Strangely, this had been true since his time in the cell on Harmony. His familiar, oversize appetite had been lost somewhere. On the trip from Harmony to Mara, he had eaten only when meals were pushed upon him; and on Mara itself the indifference had continued. It was not that food did not taste good to him once he began to eat - it was just that hunger and appetite had somehow lately become strangers to him. He did not think of eating until he had been some time without food; and then just enough to take the edge off his immediate need was all he would find himself wanting.

He became aware that Amanda had paused at his answer, and was looking back intently across the room at him from the food storage cupboard she had just unsealed.

"I see," she said after a second. She went back to taking things from the cupboard. "In that case why don't we have both? And you can tell me which you like best."

Hal watched her as she worked. It seemed that Dorsai cookery had something in common with that on Harmony. Here, as there, a little meat was made to go a long way by adding a lot of vegetables. Fish, however, was used somewhat more freely. There appeared to be a fair amount of preparation to all the dishes Amanda made; but each came together and went onto the cooking surface with surprising speed.

"Well, tell me," she said, after a few minutes, "why do you want to see Foralie?"

The memory of the burial dream floated unbidden to the surface of his mind. He pushed it back down, out of consciousness.

"Malachi, the tutor I mentioned," he said, "told me a lot about it - about Donal and the other Graemes."

"So you came to see for yourself?"

He caught the unspoken question behind the one uttered out loud.

"I had to come to the Dorsai anyway," he told her. A desire to be open with her, more than he had intended, stirred in him for a second; but he repressed it. "Only, when I got here, I found I wasn't ready to get down right away to what I'd come for. So I thought I'd take a day or two and come here first."

"Because of the stories Malachi Nasuno told you?"

"Stories mean a lot when you're young," he answered.

She sat down at the table opposite him with a cutting board and began to chop up what looked like variforms of celery, green pepper and chives. Her glance came across the table at him. In the warmly yellow illumination of the lights off the golden panelling, her eyes flashed like sunlight on turquoise water.

"I know," she said.

They sat in silence as the bright blade of her knife rocked up and down on the board, dividing the vegetables.

"What was it you wanted to see there?" she asked, after a bit, sweeping the chopped vegetables into a pile together and getting up to carry the board with them back across the room.

"The house, mainly, I suppose," he smiled to himself, talking to her slim, erect back, "I'd heard so much about it, I think I might even be able to find my way around it blindfolded."

"Your Malachi may have been one of the officers the twins or Donal used to use a lot on their contracts," she said, almost to herself. She turned back to face him again. "I've got to visit one of my sisters tomorrow morning. I'll give you a horse - you can ride, I suppose, from what I saw earlier?"

He nodded.

"I can take you to Graemehouse, let you in, go on to make my visit and come back afterwards. Then after I'm back, if you like, we can go around the house and its land, together."

"Thanks," he said. "That's good of you."

Without warning, she grinned at him.

"You haven't been here long enough for people to tell you that neighborliness doesn't require thanks?"

He grinned back.

"Malachi told me about neighborliness on the Dorsai," he said. "No one since I landed has had time to go into the details for me, though."

"One of the ways we survive here is by being neighborly," Amanda said, sobering, "and we Morgans have survived here since the first Amanda, a good number of years before Graemehouse was even built."

"The first Amanda?" he echoed.

"The first Amanda Morgan - who built this house of Fal Morgan and brought our name to this part of the Dorsai, nearly two hundred and fifty standard years ago. That's her picture in the hall."

"It is?"

He watched her, fascinated.

"How many Amandas have there been?" he asked.

"Three," she said.

"Only three?"

She laughed.

"The first Amanda was touchy about her name being pinned on someone who couldn't live up to it - she was a person. No one in the family named a girl-child Amanda until I came along."

"But you said there were three. If you're the second - "

"I'm the third. The second Amanda was actually named Elaine. But by the time she was old enough to run about, everybody was starting to call her Amanda, because she was so much like the first. Elaine-Amanda was my great-grandaunt. She died just four years ago last month; and she'd grown up with Kensie and Ian, the twin uncles of Donal. In fact, they were both in love with her."

"Which one got her?"

Amanda shook her head.

"Neither. Kensie died on Ste. Marie. Ian married Leah; and it was his children who carried on the Graeme family line, since Kensie died unmarried, and neither Donal nor his brother Mor lived to have any children. But after his sons were all grown and Leah had died - in her sixties - Ian used to be over here at Fal Morgan all the time. I remember when I was very young, I thought that he was just another Morgan. He died fourteen years ago."

"Fourteen years ago?" Hal said automatically calculating in his head from what he knew of the chronology of the Graeme family. "He lived a long time. How old was your great-grandaunt when she died?"

"A hundred and six." Amanda finished putting the last dish on the cooking surface; and came back to sit down with a cup of tea at the table. "We live a long time, we Morgans. She was the Dorsai's primary authority on contracts, right up to the day she died."

"Contracts?" Hal asked.

"Contracts with whoever on other worlds wanted Dorsai to work or fight for them," said Amanda. "Families and individuals here have always made their own agreements with governments and people on the other worlds; but as the paperwork got more complicated, an expert eye to check it over became useful."

"I'd have thought all the contract experts would be in Omalu," said Hal. The purpose of his being on this world stirred in the back of his mind. "Who's the leading expert on contracts on the Dorsai, now?"

"I am," said Amanda.

He looked at her.

"Oh," he said.

"It's all right to be surprised," Amanda told him. "We Morgans not only put in long lives, we tend not to look our age. I'm not as young as I might seem; and the second Amanda saw to it I cut my teeth on contracts. I was reading them when I was four - not that I understood what I read until a few years later. The Second Amanda's also the one who saw to it my parents named their oldest daughter Amanda; and she took me over almost as soon as I was born. In a way, I was always more hers than theirs."

"If she hadn't pushed it, they wouldn't have given you that name?"

She grinned again.

"Otherwise no member of this family would've risked giving a child that name."

A timer chimed from the cooking surface and she got up to take care of something.

"Everything's ready," she said.

Hal got to his feet, turning toward the dining table in the still-unlit room.

"No," she said, glancing back over her shoulder at him at the scrape of his chair legs on the floor. "We'll eat in here, since there's just the two of us. Sit down. I'll bring things."

He sat down again, pleased. The kitchen was more attractive to him at this moment than the dim room with the long dining surface that must have been capable of feeding a dozen people or more.

"That's quite a table in there," he said.

"Wait until you see the one at Graemehouse," she said, carrying dishes to the table. She got the food brought and arranged and sat down herself. "I'll fill a plate for you to start you out since you won't know any of these dishes. Eat what tastes good, and tell me what you think. As far as the size of the table goes, when there's a contract to be estimated, even tables like that can be all too small."

She passed the laden plate to him, and started to fill one for herself from the dishes between them.

"You don't understand?" she said.

"Contract estimating takes space?" said Hal.

"It takes space to work with the sub-contractors," she answered. "A large military contract could take a week and more to put together; and during that time everyone's living with it around the clock. Try some of the red sauce on the fish, there."

Hal did.

"Suppose," she said, resting her elbows on the table, "someone like Donal Graeme had been asked by a local government on Ceta if he'd put together a force to take military control of some territory that's currently under dispute; and hold it while its true ownership is negotiated between that government and the other claimants. He'd first sit down and make a general plan of how the job might be done and what he would need to do it - troops, transport, housing, weapons, medical, supply units… and so forth."

Hal nodded.

"I see," he said.

"Do you? Well, having made his own preliminary, general estimate, he'd then call other individuals, or even families, from around the Dorsai, with whom he may have worked in the past, and whose work he'd liked; and ask each of them if they'd consider working under him on the contract on which he was currently putting together a bid. Those who did would come to Foralie and they'd all sit down together, take his general plan and break it down into particulars. On the Dorsai, every officer is a specialist. We Morgans, for example, tend to be primarily field officers with infantry experience. One or more of us, for example, might take the part of Donal's plan that called for infantry in the field and look at it from the standpoint of what they'd need to do that part of the overall job. They'd tell Donal what they thought would work and what wouldn't, in that area, and how much it would require and cost to do that part successfully. Meanwhile, the other specialists would be working with other parts of the plan… and so it'd eventually all be put together; and Donal'd have the hard figures of what it would cost him to fulfill the contract."

"Not simple," said Hal.

The food - everything he tasted - was very good. He found himself eating steadily and hungrily as he listened.

"Not even as simple as I make it sound, actually," said Amanda. "The fact is, that whole process I just told you about would have to be gone through twice, at least. Because the first figures they'd come up with would have been arrived at according to orthodox military practices; and what that would give them would only be what any responsible mercenary commander would have to charge as a bottom figure - just to break even. But then, once they had that - the competition price - they'd sit down and begin to come up with unorthodox ways of cutting the expenses they'd just figured, or ways of achieving their objective faster, until they'd end with a total that would both underbid any competitor and allow them a profit that made it worth their while to take the contract. It'd take a week or more with the pressure on each specialist there to pull rabbits out of his or her hat; and each bright new idea that was produced could force everyone else to adjust and refigure."

"I see," said Hal, "and all this took place on the dining table?"

"Ninety per cent of it," said Amanda. "The table'd be piled halfway to the ceiling with maps, schematics, sketches, models, gadgets, notes… and, occasionally, food - when they'd call a break long enough to eat. And all that's only the business use for a large dining room table. It's also the place where the whole family gets together, and family decisions are made. But that's enough talk of tables. What's your preference at this one? The fish, or the mutton?"

"I can't tell you. Both." Hal came very close to answering with his mouth full.

"That's good," said Amanda. "Just help yourself, then."

"Thank you. You're really a remarkable cook."

"Growing up in a house with a lot of people to feed every day, anyone gets good at cooking."

"I suppose…" Hal thought for a second of his own solitary childhood. "You said the Morgans were here even before the Graemes? How did the Morgans happen to come to the Dorsai?"

"The first Amanda," this Amanda said. "She's the answer to most questions about the family. She came from Earth in the early days when emigration to the newer worlds first became practical; and when everyone was leaving, or thinking of leaving, to make a new society somewhere."

"What made her come to the Dorsai?"

"She didn't, at first. Her husband died shortly after they were married. His parents had power and credit; and by pulling legal strings they got her young son away from her. She stole him back, and left Earth so that they couldn't get him again. She emigrated to Newton and married a second time. When her second husband died, Jimmy - the boy - was half-grown. She took him and came to the Dorsai. She was one of the first permanent settlers on this world - the very first in this area. When she came, Foralie Town was only a sort of transitory tent-city headquarters for the out-of-work mercenaries, who were camping out in the hills around here, until they could get taken on by some outfit…"

Hal ate and listened, only occasionally asking questions. It was a strange, dark unrolling of the years that she described for him; the hard times and the hard world gradually producing a people to whom honor and courage were as necessary tools for the making of their living as plow and pump might be to settlers elsewhere - a people shaped by their own history, until it finally began to be said of them, over a hundred years ago, that if they chose to fight as a unit, not all the military forces of the other worlds combined could stand against them.

It was a flamboyant statement, Hal thought now with a part of his mind, listening to Amanda. In the end, numbers and resources could not be withstood in the real universe; and against the military strengths of all the other settled worlds, combined, those of the Dorsai would not be able to win - or even hold out very long. But an odd, small truth within the statement remained. Given that the Dorsai could not win in such a confrontation, it might still be correct to say that the worlds combined would always be slow to test their strength against them. For though the fact that the Dorsai could not win or survive such a test was undeniable, the fact that they would fight against any odds, if attacked, was certain.

Gradually the history of the Morgans, which was also in a sense the history of the Dorsai itself, began to take shape for Hal. The Morgans and the Graemes had lived side by side for generations, had been born together, grew up together, and fought together, with the special effectiveness that such special closeness made possible. They were separate families, but a common people; and, as he touched the life of the Morgans from their beginnings now, in this particularly living way through the voice of Amanda, he found himself brought closer than he had ever been before to the life of Donal, to the lives of Donal's uncles, Kensie and Ian Grahame, to that of Eachan Khan Graeme - Donal's father - even to the life of Cletus Grahame, the ancestor of all of them, who had written the great multi-volume military work on strategy and tactics which had made the effectiveness of the specially-trained Dorsai soldier possible.

" - Now, is there anything else I can offer you?" The voice of Amanda, interrupting herself, brought Hal's mind back from the place into which it had wandered and almost gotten lost.

"I beg your pardon?" said Hal, then realized she was speaking about food. "How could I eat any more?"

"Well, that's a question, of course," said Amanda.

He stared at her, then saw the smile quirking the corners of her mouth, and woke to the fact that every serving dish on the table was empty.

"Did I eat all that?" he said.

"You did," Amanda told him. "How about coffee and after dinner drinks, if you want them, in the living room?"

"I… thank you." He got to his feet and looked uncertainly at the empty dishes on the table.

"Don't worry about that now," said Amanda. "I'll clean up later."

She got up, herself, put coffee, cups, glasses and whiskey once more on the tray she had carried back from the living room earlier. They went out of the kitchen and down the hall.

The lights in the kitchen went out, and those in the living room went on, softly, as sensors picked up the traces of bodies leaving and entering. Amanda put the tray on a low table before the fireplace and picked up a torch-staff that was leaning against the stonework there. She held it to the kindling and logs already placed. A little flame reached out from the tip of the staff and licked against the shavings under the kindling. The shavings caught. Fire ran among the kindling and along the underside of the laid logs, then blossomed up between them. Amanda leaned the staff back against the stonework.

The new light of the flames had picked out four lines of words carved into the polished edge of the thick slab of the granite mantelpiece. Hal leaned forward to read them. They were cut so deeply into the stone that shadow hid from him the actual depth of their incision.

"The Song of the House of Fal Morgan," said Amanda, looking over his shoulder. "The first verse. It's a tribute to the first Amanda. Jimmy, her son, wrote it, when he was a good-aged man."

"It's part of a song?" Hal looked at her.

"It is," she said.

Unexpectedly, softly, she sang the words cut in the stone. Her voice was lower-pitched than he would have thought, but it was a fine, true voice which loved singing, with strength behind the music of it.

"Stone are my walls, and my roof is of timber,

But the hands of my builder are stronger by far.

My roof may be burnt and my stones may be scattered,

Never her light be defeated in war."

The words, sung as she had chosen to sing them, triggered off a sudden emotion in Hal so powerful that it approached pain. To cover his reaction, he turned back abruptly to the tray on the table and made a little ceremony of pouring some of the whiskey into a glass and sitting down in an armchair at one side of the fire. Amanda gave herself coffee and sat down in an identical chair facing him on the fire's other side.

"Is that all of the song?" Hal asked.

"No," said Amanda. Self-consciously, he was aware of her watching him again, closely - and he thought - strangely. "There're more verses."

"Sometime," he said quickly, suddenly afraid that she might sing more, and wake again whatever had momentarily touched him so deeply, "I've got to hear those, too. But tell me - where are all the Morgans and Graemes, now? Graemehouse is empty and you're - "

"And I'm alone here," Amanda finished the sentence for him. "Times have changed. For the Dorsai people, life's not easy now."

"I know," Hal said. "I know the Others are working to keep you from getting contracts."

"They can't keep us from all of them," said Amanda. "There aren't enough of them to interfere with all the contracts we sign. But they can stop most of the big ones, the top ten per cent that brings in nearly sixty per cent of our interstellar credit. So, since times are difficult, most of us of working age are either out on the fisheries or at some other job on the Dorsai that ties in with surviving on our own resources. Others have gone off-world. A number of individuals, and even families, have emigrated."

"Left the Dorsai?"

"Some think they don't have any choice. Others of us, of course, would never leave. But this world's always been one where any adult's free to make his own decisions, without advice or comment unless she or he asks for it."

"Of course…" said Hal, hardly knowing what he was saying.

He was caught up entirely in what he had just heard. Since the hours in the cell on Harmony he had known that the time of the Splinter Cultures was over. But for the first time, with what Amanda had just told him, the knowledge hit deeply within him. The Dorsai world without the Dorsai people was somehow more unthinkable than the same thing on any of the other Younger Worlds. All at once, his mind's eye saw it deserted; its homes empty and decaying, its level lands, oceans and high mountains without the sound of human voices. His whole being tried to push the image from him; and still, in the back of his mind, the certainty of it sat like a certainty of the end of the universe. This, too, had to end; and the concept that had been built here with such labor must finally vanish with it, not to come again.

He roused himself from the feeling that had suddenly crushed him like the grip of some giant's icy hand, into a perfect silence. Across the table with the tray holding glasses, cups, coffee dispenser and whiskey decanter, Amanda still sat watching him almost oddly, as she had watched him in that first moment of their meeting.

He was conscious of something, some current of feeling that seemed to wash back and forth between them, virtually unknown to each other as they were.

"Are you all right?" he heard her ask, calmly.

"I'd kill time if I could!" he heard the words break from him without warning, shocking him with their intensity. "I'd kill death. I'd kill anything that killed anything!"

"But you can't," she answered, softly.

"No." He pulled himself back to something like normal self-possession. The whiskey, he told himself - but he had drunk very little, and alcohol had always had only small power to touch him. Something else had driven him - was still driving him to speak as he just had. "You're right. Everyone's got a right to his own decisions; and that's what creates history - decisions. The decisions are changing and the times are changing. What we were all used to is going to be put aside; and something new is going to be taking its place. I tried to tell that to some Exotics before I came here; and I thought if anyone would listen, they would."

"But they didn't?"

"No," he said, harshly. "It's the one thing they can't face, time running out. It sets a limit to their search - it means that now they'll never find what they've been looking for, all this time since they called themselves the Chantry Guild, back on Earth. Strange…"

"What's strange?" he heard her ask, when he did not go on.

He was staring into the dark, firelit pool of whiskey in his glass, kneading it between his hands again. He looked up from the glass at her.

"Those who ought to see what's happening - the people who could do something - refusing to see. While everyone who can't do anything about it seems to know it's there. They seem to feel it, the way animals feel a thunderstorm coming."

"You feel it yourself, do you?" she asked. Her eyes, darker now in the firelight, still watched him, and drew him. He talked on.

"Of course. But I'm of those caught up in it," he said. "I've had to face up to what's happening, and will happen."

"Tell me, then," said Amanda's voice softly. "What is it that's happening? And what is it that's going to happen?"

He pressed the hard shape of the whiskey glass between his hands, staring now into the flames of the fireplace.

"We're headed toward the last battle," he said. "That's what's happening. No, call it a last conflict, because most of it won't be a battle in the dictionary sense. But, depending on how it comes out, the race is either going to have to die or grow. I know - that sounds like something too large to believe. But we've made it that big ourselves, over the centuries. Only those in the best position to understand how it could happen, wouldn't ever look squarely at the situation. I couldn't see it myself until my nose was rubbed in it. But if you look back at what's been happening in just the last twenty or thirty standard years, you see the evidence all over the place. The Others appearing…"

He talked on, almost in spite of himself. The words ran from him like dogs unleashed, and he found himself telling her about everything that he had come to understand in the cell on Harmony.

She sat quietly, asking a brief question now and then, watching him. He felt a tremendous relief in being able to uncap the pressure of that explosion of understanding. It was a pressure that had been growing steadily in him lately, as his mind developed and extended its first discoveries. His original impulse had been to do no more than sketch the situation for her; but he found himself being drawn, by the way she listened, from that to the people and things that had led him to understanding. He felt captured by her attention; and he heard his own voice going on and on as if it had developed an independent life of its own.

Once, it crossed his mind again to wonder if the Dorsai whiskey had something to do with it. But once more he rejected the idea. It had been in his first year on Coby that he had found that alcohol did not affect him in the same measure as it seemed to affect the other miners. When they had finally drunk themselves into silence and even slumber, he would be still awake and restless, so restless he had been driven to those long, solitary walks of his down the endless stone corridors. It had been as if a part of his mind had withdrawn a little farther with each step his body took toward intoxication; until he had existed apart from the moment, wrapped in a sadness and a sense of isolation that would drive him eventually out, away from the unconscious others to walk those lonely distances.

But what he was feeling now, with her, was if anything the opposite of that sense of isolation; and, in any case, there was a reasonable limit to the strength of alcoholic liquors made for the pleasure of drinking. Beyond a certain proof they were uncomfortable to the palate and throat; and that point the Dorsai whiskey, though strong, had not exceeded. Nor was the amount he had drunk at all great, measured by the meterstick of his experience…

He found himself telling the third Amanda about Child-of-God, and the effect of Child's death upon his own understanding.

"… When I first met him," he was saying, "I thought he was another Obadiah - I told you about my other two tutors, didn't I? Then, as I got to know him, I began to have less and less use for him. He seemed to be a fanatic and nothing more - not able to care or feel, not interested in anything but the rules of that religion of his. But then, he was the one who spoke up when the local people wanted the Command to send me away; and for the first time I began to see a pattern to what he was; and it was larger - much larger - than I'd thought."

"You were still young," said Amanda.

"Yes," he said. "I was young. We're always young, no matter how old we are. And then, when he insisted on staying behind to slow down the Militia; and I couldn't stay with him - knew that it wasn't for me to stay with him - and that he understood that, this man I'd thought had no sensitivity, no understanding beyond the church rules he lived by, then it all opened up for me. I knew the difference between someone like him, then, and someone like Barbage, who was my jailer in that Militia cell, the man whose life I'd saved in the mountain pass…"

The lights of the living room blinked once.

"Curfew," murmured Amanda. "We save power, nowadays, for those who most need it."

She got to her feet. The hard fabric of her riding pants whispered lightly, leg against leg, as she stepped to the fireplace once more; and the firelight, reflecting from the polished apron of black stone before it, sent glitters of light into the small wave of her bright hair, where it clung close against the tanned skin of her neck. She lit the stubs of two large candles that stood on supports on either side of it. They looked from their thickness to have been as long as her forearm to begin with; and the stands they rested on were tall, lifting the candle flames even now above Hal's eye level as he sat in his armchair. The candles themselves seemed to be made of grayish-green, waxy-looking seeds, pressed together into sticks. As the generous flamens rose from their wicks, the built-in lighting of the room dimmed itself gradually into extinction. Shadow moved in from the corners of the room, until Hal and Amanda were in a little illuminated space constructed by candlelight and firelight alone. A faint, piny odor reached Hal's nostrils.

Amanda sat down again. Even as close as she was to him, the darkness of her outdoor clothing lost itself against the shadows of her chair, so that the whiteness of her face seemed to float in a friendly gloom, watching him.

"You were telling me about someone whose life you saved in a mountain pass," she said.

"Yes," he said. "Barbage's life. I didn't understand then the sort of things the Militia did to anyone from the Commands that they got their hands on; and what Barbage himself must have done to prisoners from the Commands, while he was working his way up through the ranks to Captain. And still, there wasn't anything false about him, either. He was - he is wrong. I think I know why now - but he was what he was. That's why the other Militia officers were afraid of him. I saw him face down another Militia Captain, the one time I managed to get close to their camp…"

He talked on. The candles burned lower; and, imperceptibly, he found he had drifted from telling her about those he had met to telling her about himself. Something within him, some small alarm sensor, was trying to catch his attention, but the force pushing him to talk was too great to be denied. Amanda hardly needed to ask questions, now; and in the end he found himself telling her about what it had been like for him when he was very young.

"… But what was it, specifically," she asked, finally, "that made you identify so with the Graemes?"

"Oh, well," he said, staring into the fire, his mind adrift in the flame-lit darkness and carried on by the force within him, "you've got to remember I'm an orphan. I've always been… isolated. I suppose I identified with Donal's isolation. You remember how when he was at the Academy, they used to speak of him as an odd boy, different from anyone else - "

- Something happened in the room. He looked up swiftly.

"I'm sorry - " he gazed at Amanda but she was exactly as she had been a moment before. The small alarm sensor was now obvious within him. Deliberately, he forced it from his consciousness. "Did you say something?"

"No," she answered. Her eyes were steady on his in the dimness of the room. "Nothing."

He tried to pick up the thread of what he had been saying.

"You see he had always been alone inside, always…" His voice ran down. He put his hand to his forehead, felt dampness, and took it away again. "What was I saying?"

"You're probably tired," Amanda leaned forward in her chair. "You were saying Donal was always alone. But he wasn't. He married Anea of Kultis."

"Yes, but that was his mistake. You see, he was hoping then that, after all, he could still live an ordinary life. But he couldn't. He'd been committed so early… it was something like the mistake Cletus made with Melissa Khan; although that was different, because all Cletus had to do was finish his book…"

His thoughts slipped away from him once more. He wiped his forehead with his hand and felt the cool dampness of perspiration.

"I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am tired - it's been a large day…"

He was, he realized suddenly, exhausted, sodden with fatigue.

"Of course it has," said Amanda, gently. "I'll show you how to get to your room."

She rose, taking one of the candles from its stand, and led the way into a corridor beyond a further doorway in the wall to the left of the fireplace. He lifted himself woodenly to his feet and walked after her.