The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Forty-five

"I'd better get you home," Amanda had said.

Dazed and numbed, he had not objected. The sensation had lasted through most of their ride back to Fal Morgan, so that he remembered little of it. Only when they were nearly to Fal Morgan did his head clear and he became conscious of the fact that he felt hollowly weak; drained as if by some emergency physical effort that had taken all his strength.

"I'm sorry," he said to Amanda, when he had stumbled at last into the living room of Fal Morgan, "I didn't mean to be a problem. I just seem to be knocked out… "

"I know," she said. Her eyes were steady on him, almost grim, and unfathomable. "Now, you need rest."

She turned him about like a child and steered him down the hall, into the room he had used the night before and to a seat on the edge of the bed. Hal did not see her signal the sensors, but the drapes came together over the windows and the room dropped into semi-darkness.

"Sleep now," said Amanda's voice clearly out of the gloom.

He heard the door close. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, but now he fell back. Chilled, he turned on his side and reached out to pull over him the heavy quilt that topped the bedding, then fell instantly asleep.

He did not wake until the following morning. Pulling himself out of bed, he dressed and went in search of Amanda. He found her in an office off the living room, at a desk stacked with what appeared to be bound printouts of contracts. She was gazing at a screen inset in the desk surface, stylus in hand, apparently making corrections on what was being shown her on the screen. She lifted her head as he looked in.

"Come along," she said; and he came in. "How do you feel?"

"Wobbly," he said. In fact, he felt as if he had hardly slept at all since dismounting from his horse after the ride back from Foralie.

"Sit down, then," she said; and herself laid down the stylus she had been holding.

He dropped gratefully into an overstuffed chair. She eyed him keenly.

"You'll have to be quiet for a few days," she said. "What can I do for you?"

"Tell me how to arrange for some transportation back to Omalu," he said. "I've imposed on you long enough, here."

"I'll tell you when you've imposed," Amanda said. "As far as Omalu goes, you're in no shape to go anywhere."

"I've got to go," he said. "I've things to do there. I've got to go about seeing whoever it is that represents the Dorsai."

"You want the Grey Captains."

He stared at her.

"Who?"

She smiled.

"It's an old term," she said. "Grey spelled with a 'e,' incidentally. I don't think anyone knows where it came from, originally. It was back in Cletus' day we stopped using the term Captain as a military rank anywhere but on spaceships. What the name's come to mean here is someone who's a leader, confirmed and accepted, a woman or man other people trust - and trust to make decisions. The first and second Amanda were Grey Captains."

"And the third?" He looked at her.

"Yes. The third, too," she said, unsmiling. "The point is, though, that it's the Grey Captains you want to talk to; and they aren't usually in Omalu. They're wherever they live on the Dorsai."

"Then I've got to go talk to them individually and get them to agree to get together so I can talk to them all at once."

She watched him for several seconds without speaking.

"If you were in shape," she said at last, slowly, "which you're not, that'd still be the wrong way to go about it. As it is, right now you're not up to talking to anyone. The first thing you do is get your feet back under you - and that means about a week."

He shook his head.

"Not that long," he said.

"That long."

"In any case," he put his arms on the arms of the chair, ready to get up, "this can't wait - "

"Yes, it can."

"You don't understand." His hands fell away from the arms of the chair. "To begin with, I've got an important message for the Dorsai people generally, from the Exotics. But, even more important, I've got to talk to these Captains, myself. There's something I've got to make them understands - that what we're headed into may destroy everything the Dorsai's stood for, and most of everything else… I don't know how to make you understand - "

"You already have," she said.

He stared at her with the uneasy feeling that matters were being rushed upon him.

"The first night you were here." She watched him, unwaveringly, and there was no end to the turquoise depths of her eyes. "You told me all about it."

"All about it?" he said. "All?"

"I think, all," she said. There was that several second pause, again, as her eyes watched him. "I know what you need done; and I know - which you don't - the way to do it. Before you can meet with the Grey Captains, they're all going to have to come together at some place. That place might as well be Foralie."

"Foralie?" He stared at her.

"Why not?" she said. "It's got the space to handle a meeting that size and it's not being used right now."

She stopped speaking and sat watching him. He did not say anything for a moment, himself. There was a cold feeling inside him at the thought of his speaking to these people in Graemehouse and for a moment he almost forgot she was there. Then his mind and his eyes came back to her, to find her still watching.

"I can call the Captains for you; and get some help from around the district, here," she said, "if it's needed to take care of the situation. It shouldn't take more than a day, unless some of them need to stay overnight before starting home."

He hesitated.

"You could suggest they come?" he said. "And you think they'd come?"

"Yes." It was a blunt statement. "They'll come."

"I can't - " words failed him.

"Can't what? Can't impose?" She smiled a little. "It's for our benefit, isn't it?"

"It is…" he said. "Of course. Still…"

"Then it's settled," she said. "I'll send the word out to the ones who should be here. Meanwhile, you can get rested up. You need a week."

"How long does it take to get them together?" he asked, still with the uneasy feeling that matters were being rushed upon him.

"Six hours in an emergency," she looked at him almost coldly. "In the case of something like this where there's no emergency, at the very least a week to find a time when most of them can get together. In a week you ought to be able to talk to at least two-thirds of them."

"Only two-thirds?" he said. "Is two-thirds enough?"

"If you can convince most of the two-thirds," she answered, "you'll have no trouble carrying most of the full number in the long run. Each one is going to make up his own mind; but they're all sensible people. If they hear sense most of them will listen to it and pass it on to their own people."

"Yes," he said. He was still unsure about all that she had said; but this talk, mild as it had been, had exhausted him.

"Then I'll take care of it." She looked keenly at him. "Can you fix yourself something to eat? I've got my hands full at the moment."

"Of course," he said.

She smiled for a second and her face transformed. Then she was level-mouthed, level-eyed, all business again.

"All right, then," she said, picking up her stylus again, and turning her attention back to the screen in her desk. "Don't hesitate to call if you need me."

He stood looking at her for a second more. There was something odd, here. When he had first come, she had been a friendly stranger, polite but open. Now, she was at once much closer and at the same time walled off from him - encased in some armor of her own. He turned and went off to the kitchen, conscious of the rubberiness of his legs and the labor of moving his body along the passageway with them.

He ate and immediately was avaricious for sleep again. He went back to his bedroom and fell on the bed, rousing later, briefly, to eat and sleep once more.

Amanda had been right. It was almost a full three days before he began to feel like himself again. It began to look as if the week until the Grey Captains could be gathered together would be welcome to him after all.

It was a different weakness that had gripped him, this time. Undoubtedly, the remnants of the physical attrition he had endured on Harmony were still with him. Nonetheless, the essential nature of his exhaustion right now did not seem merely physical, but something more - something he considered labelling with the word psychic, then drew back from the term.

What was undeniable was that what had done this to him was the purely non-physical experience in Graemehouse; and his mind, which could never leave anything alone, but was forever digging at things and taking them apart to find out how they worked, would not get off the subject of what had happened to him in the dining room.

There were all sorts of possible explanations.

One that stood up to examination was that he had found exactly what he had gone looking for - an understanding of the Graemes in general, and Donal in particular, so intense that for a moment he had been able, subjectively, at least, to relive an episode out of Donal's life. But there was another one that brought back the chill and the lifted hairs on the back of his neck. He shied away from it, turning back defensively to the first explanation.

Given his training in concentration, and the creative instinct that had led him into poetry, the moments in which he had become Donal, in the bedroom and in the dining room, were not impossible. But still… he found he could start comfortably down the route of a sensible explanation - adding together his mental techniques, his young desire to identify with Donal, his hangover of physical exhaustion from Harmony, and the emotional effect of his disappointment on Mara - but in the end he came to a gap, a quantum jump, in which something unknown, something not explainable, had to have happened in addition, to produce what he had experienced.

Something above and beyond knowledge - something almost like magic - had been at work there. And yet, was there not something very much like that sort of quantum jump, or magic, involved in the creation of any piece of art? You could follow down the line of craft and skill only so far - and then something would happen which not even the best craftsman could identify or explain; and the result was art.

In the same way, he had come to a quantum jump-point - first, in his dream of James' burial, back on Harmony, and again in Donal's bedroom, but much more so than either earlier instance, in the dining room - which was unidentifiable and unexplainable. It was easy to tell himself that it had all been the result of a sort of self-hypnosis, a self-created illusion. But deep within himself he did not believe it.

Deeply within himself, he knew better. He knew it the way he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, sometimes, that the lines of poetry he had just put on paper said something more than the total of their individual words could explain. The poem that worked, that involved the quantum jump, opened a doorway on another universe, which could be felt - as he had felt himself to be Donal.

In the same sense there had been more to the moment in the Graemehouse dining room than all the unconscious memories of what he had heard about the Graemes could account for. Deep within him, too deep for any denial, he knew - as he knew that he lived - that what he had experienced in the dining room was not what could have happened the night of Donal's graduation from the Academy, but what had happened.

In the day or two that followed, as he began to shed his drained feeling, as the inner reservoir of physical and psychic energy began to be replaced, he began to turn more of his attention to Amanda. She was up before dawn, taking care of the house, the stable and everything else around the place. By ten in the morning she would be at work in her office with contracts; and outside of ordinary interruptions in the way of phone calls, meals and other duties around the house, or occasional necessary trips outside it, she worked steadily through until late at night.

Her efficiency was unbelievable. Clearly, she had developed the most economical technique possible for each thing she had to do; and when the time came, she did it swiftly and surely. But none of the things she did were done with the sort of habitual, machine-like response that such a conscious approach often produced. On the contrary, her executions were as easy as breathing, with the unconscious grace of an accomplished artist in the practice of her art.

On the morning of the second day, however, because his conscience bothered him, he cornered her as she started out to the stable.

"Can I help?" he asked.

"I'll tell you if you can," she said; then, watching him, her voice and expression softened. "Fal Morgan is mine. You understand?"

"Yes," he said; and stood aside to let her go.

By the third day his normal energy and strength had largely returned. He had spent most of the time sitting around, reading and thinking; but by that evening a physical restlessness began to build up inside him like water building up behind a dam. After dinner, Amanda went as usual back to her office and he tried again to read; but his thoughts wandered. The teeth of unanswered questions gnawed at him. As the days passed, he had felt something inside himself reaching out to her more and more; and his instinctive perceptions of her had sent back the message that she responded to this reaching out. But if anything, since the day at Foralie, she had drawn more and more back behind the brisk armor of her duties - and the reason for this eluded him.

Also, whatever else had taken place there, he had gone to Foralie with the purpose of finding the truth in his dream; and he had found it, only to realize that it concerned Donal Graeme - and that Donal had been an untypical Dorsai - as Cletus had been before him - and the experience in Graemehouse had been no help in bringing him to feel that he could make himself understood to the Grey Captains.

After nearly three days of circular thinking on these topics, the protest of his body at the long stretch of inactivity that had held him lately rose to an uncontrollable pitch. He put the cube he had been reading after dinner abruptly aside, and went to look through the half-open door of Amanda's office, to see if she was still at work.

She was. He left the office door and went to the closet by the back door of Fal Morgan, where an assortment of work clothing, sweaters and jackets occupied pegs on a wall-long rack. There was no jacket there quite big enough for him, but one of the sweaters, a loosely-knit bulky affair, was ample in size. He put it on, and stepped out into the night.

His intention had been only to go for a walk in the immediate vicinity of the house. But the Dorsai's single moon was nearly full and high in the sky, and the landscape around him showed clear and bright with moonlight. He walked to the edge of the open area in which Fal Morgan sat and looked down into the gully below him. Its tangle of light and dark, and the rocky upslopes beyond, attracted him; and he went down into it.

He had no real fear of getting lost. The surrounding mountain peaks were visible from any position below them; and they made excellent fixed reference points, particularly to someone raised in such territory. He crossed the gully he had chosen and continued up the slope beyond into a bare rock area of small cliffs and passes.

He lost himself in roaming the rocky area. After several days of walking only between rooms, to move freely in the open air was a relief. He had forgotten - even on Harmony when they went through the mountains, he had forgotten - how he had felt as a boy in the Rockies. Now that feeling came back. The peaks above him were not ominous and unknown shapes brooding upon the moonlit horizon; but, as they had been on Earth, sheltering giants within whose shadow he felt a freedom not to be found anywhere else. His stride lengthened, the breath in him came from the depths of his lungs, and from far inside him came a longing to cut loose from all larger duties and purposes and simply work to live, in such a place as this.

He woke, finally, to the fact that he had been walking for at least a couple of hours. Unnoticed until now, the night had chilled; and he had chilled, even with his exercise and clad in the heavy sweater. Also, now that he came down from the feeling that had uplifted him among the mountain peaks, he became conscious of the physical weariness in his not-yet-recovered body. He turned back to Fal Morgan.

As he approached the house, he carried the mountains still with him in his mind; and as he laid his hand upon the back door of Fal Morgan to open it, he discovered himself nursing a small, irrational resentment that, self-barricaded from him as she now was, Amanda had become someone he could not tell of his walk and how it had made him feel. He laughed softly and wryly to himself at the disappointment in him at that discovery, quietly opened the door and went in.

The house held the stillness of the hours toward midnight. He thought suddenly to look at his chronometer, and was startled to see that he had been outside almost three hours. Amanda would certainly have finished work by this time and be in bed.

Although there was no danger of her hearing him from the other end of the house, he went softly, out of a touch of conscience, through the kitchen and into the corridor to the living room. As he entered it, he realized that there was still light in the living room - and he hesitated. Then he realized, from the waxing and waning of its illumination, that it must be the light of the fire, still burning in the fireplace; though it was not like Amanda, in her automatic housekeeping, to go to bed with the fire still burning.

She might have left it burning for him; or she might still be up. He went forward quietly, on the chance that the second possibility was correct; and before he was halfway down the corridor he heard the sound of her voice, singing very softly, as if to herself, in the firelit room.

He was suddenly unsure; and he stopped. Then he took off his boots and went forward; not merely quietly, but with the utter silence of his early training in movement. He reached the corner of the entrance to the living room and looked cautiously around it toward the fireplace.

The fire had burned low; but flames still flickered along the dark lengths of the heavy back logs, painting the near floor of the room with ruddy color. Amanda, a half-empty cup beside her which must have originally been full of tea, for it had a milky color and she drank her coffee black, sat cross-legged on the dark red, rectangular carpet directly before the fireplace, gazing into it, her wrists on her knees and her hands relaxed, palm-upwards.

She sat like a slim, erect shadow against the light of the fire. He looked at her almost from the side, but slightly ahead. She was wearing the dark brown work pants and the soft yellow shirt she had had on earlier at dinner; but her shirt had been opened at the neck, and the wings of the collar lay out on her shoulders. Her hair was untied from its earlier, workaday restriction and lay loosely on her neck. Her face was tilted slightly toward the fire, and pensive. Close as he was now, in the silence of the house, he could hear the clear magic of her voice, in spite of its softness, plainly singing:

"… green flows the water by my love's bright fancy.

Green are the pools at the foot of the falls,

Dark under willow - and past is the sleeping.

Light in the morning, a little bird calls …"

He drew back abruptly into darkness, closing his ears to the rest of the song. It was as if he had come upon her naked and sleeping. Silently, he retraced his steps to the kitchen; and stood, uncertain.

From the living room, the murmur of her singing ended. He took a deep breath, stooped to put his boots back on, then stepped back without a sound and reached for the door by which he had entered earlier. He opened it silently, closed it noisily, and walked forward without carefulness through the passage and into the living room.

She was standing by the fire as he entered, looking in his direction as he came through the entrance into the room. Her eyes focused on the sweater he wore and widened a little. He stopped, facing her with a little distance between them.

"I went for a walk," he said. "I grabbed this off one of the pegs to wear. I hope that was all right?"

"Of course," she said. There was a second's hesitation. "It was Ian Graeme's."

"Oh, it was?"

"Yes. One he knitted for himself, one winter." She smiled just a little. "We tend to keep our hands busy in the winter here, when we're snowed in."

There was another brief pause.

"You're feeling more lively, then?" Her eyes, darkened in the firelit room, watched him.

"I was. I'm ready for sleep now." He smiled back at her. Their eyes met for a second, then glanced aside.

"Goodnight," he said, and went on into the corridor leading to his bedroom, hearing her answer "goodnight" behind him and leaving the large room, the firelight and her, behind him.

He reached his own room, went in, and closed the door. He was conscious of the weight of the sweater, still upon him. He took it off and proceeded to undress, then lay down on his back on the bed. A wave of his hand over the night table signalled the sensor there to turn off the lighting; and the bedroom around him was plunged in darkness.

He lay there. After a while the sound of her steps came down the hall, passed his bedroom and went on to her own. Silence claimed the house. He continued to lie, awake, staring into the darkness, his heart torn by a sorrow and longing he did not dare to investigate too closely.