The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fifty-eight

In the sunlight of Procyon, Mara floated below the courier ship like a blue ball, laced with the swirling white of clouds. Its resemblance to Earth, and the thought of Earth, itself, touched off a loneliness and sadness in Hal, mingled with the secret and bitter knowledge of guilt. If it had not been for the lack of a moon there would be little to identify Mara as not being Earth, the two worlds were so close in appearance and Mara so slightly larger. Even knowing it was not Earth, Hal was tempted to imagine that he was watching the planet on which, only a handful of years back, he had grown to physical maturity; and it came to him for the first time how deep was the emotional bond that tied him to the Mother World.

They had been holding on station for some twenty minutes; now the vessel's speaker system woke with the voice of a surface traffic control unit.

"Dorsai JN Class Number 549371, you're cleared for self-controlled descent to referenced intersection, access code Cable Yellow/Cable Orange, private landing pad. Link for coordinates, please."

Simon Khan Graeme tapped the white access button of the vessel's navigation equipment to link it to the control unit's net; and under his hands, the small ship began to drop toward the surface far below. Hal had all but forgotten the advantage of a Dorsai ship and pilot that could take him to the very doorstep of his destination on any world, rather than hanging in orbit around a world and making him wait for shuttle service. He looked at the long, powerful fingers of Simon, resting their tips lightly upon the direct control keys, touching… pausing… touching again.

The face of Mara came up toward them. Then they were suddenly through a high cloud layer, over blue ocean and slanting in toward a coastline. They were over land and dropping, and without warning, there was snow in the air about them. Below, dusted with snowcover, were rolling woodlands from horizon to horizon, with only the occasional white patch of a meadow-clearing to interrupt them; and their ship fell at last toward the still, ice-held ribbon of a minor river, and to what looked like an interconnected clump of graceful, pastel-colored buildings sitting back a small distance from its bank.

They sat down at last on a small weather-controlled pad, showing the bare concrete of its surface to the clouded sky. Hal stepped out, followed by Simon, and found Amid, in a light gray robe, waiting for them.

"Amid, this is Simon Khan Graeme," Hal said, stepping aside to let Simon come forward. "He's driving me around these days, courtesy of the Dorsai."

"Honored to meet you, Simon Khan Graeme," said Amid.

"And I, you," said Simon.

In the Exotic fashion, Amid did not offer his hand; and Simon did not seem to expect it. Hal had forgotten how tiny the older man was. Seeing him now, as he stood looking up at Simon's face, Hal registered their difference in size with a mild emotional shock. It was almost as if Amid had aged and dwindled since Hal had last seen him. Standing together on the pad, there was only still dry, warm air surrounding them; but, beyond, about the house, over the river and above the trees, the snow was quietly sifting down in large, soft flakes.

It was strange to see it. Somehow, Hal had always thought of the two Exotic worlds as caught in an endless summer of blue skies and green fields. With Simon, now, he followed Amid off the pad and into the house - if that was really the right word for such a wandering and connected collection of structures - and almost immediately found himself, as usual, without any way of telling whether he was indoors or outdoors, except for an occasional glimpse of snowy surface beyond a weather shield.

Simon was left behind in a suite of rooms that would be his until he left; and Amid took Hal on to find Rukh.

They located her after a little while, wrapped in what looked more like a colorful, antique quilt than anything else, seated by the side of a free-form pool surrounded by tall green plants that arched long, spade-shaped leaves over the lounging float upon which she was stretched out.

She threw off the quilt and sat up when she caught sight of them, her float adjusting to her new posture. She was wearing an ankle-length Exotic robe of maroon and white, the ample folds of which helped to hide how she had lost weight. Her olive skin looked sallow but her face, in its gauntness, was more beautiful than ever. They came up to her and Hal reached down to kiss her. It was still a wire-strong young body that his arms enclosed; but thin, thin…

He let go of her as Amid brought up floats for the two of them; and they sat down together.

"Thank you, Hal," she said.

"For what?" he asked.

"For being God's instrument to set me free."

"I had reasons of my own for doing it." His voice sounded roughly over the quiet pool - but hid, and effectively reburied, the chill of fury momentarily reawakened in him by the sight of how frail she was. "I needed you - I have plans for you."

"Not you, only." She looked at him closely. "You're a lot older, now."

"Yes." A soberness in him had replaced the first stirrings of remembered emotion. "I still need to explain to you, though, why it was I did something different than I told you I was going to do - back when the Militia was after us all, there outside Ahruma."

"You don't have to explain." She smiled. "I understood it, later. How you'd taken the only way there was to protect the rest of us and get the explosives safely into Ahruma, out of the Militia's reach. Once I understood, we scattered, and lost them. We stayed scattered until it was time to gather together again to destroy the Core Tap. But by doing what you did for us, you delivered yourself up to the Militia."

And she put one narrow hand softly on his arm.

"They carried me around on a silver platter in that jail - " he said, suddenly and bitterly, "compared to what they did to you!"

"But I was enguarded of God," her voice reproved him, gently. "You were not. There was no way they could touch me with anything they might do; any more than anything you might have done could have touched Amyth Barbage in the courtyard there, afterwards."

An uncomfortableness moved in him - something as yet not understood, as the scene she spoke of came back to him. But she smiled at him again, gently and tolerantly, the way a mother might smile at a child who did not yet understand some completely ordinary matter, and the uncomfortableness was forgotten.

"You say you had reasons for doing what you did?" Her brown eyes watched him gravely. "What reasons were these?"

"I've still got them," he said. "Rukh - there's a place that needs you more than Harmony does."

He had expected her to object to that, and he paused, waiting. But she merely continued to look at him, patiently.

"Go on," she said.

"I'm talking about Old Earth," he told her. "The Others have been holding back from an all-out effort at getting control of the people there, because so many show that strong, apparently innate resistance to their charismatic talent. You know about that. So Bleys and the rest have been marking time, hoping they could figure out a way around the problem, before trying to move in. But time's getting short for them, as well as us. They'll have to start pushing onto Old Earth, any time now."

"But they've already got people there, haven't they?" Rukh asked. "We were told on Harmony that a secret group of unknown but influential Earth locals are afraid of them; and that these've been running a campaign to prejudice the general mass of Earth's people against them?" She looked at him closely. "Or was that report just a divide and conquer technique, on Bleys' part?"

Hal nodded.

"But if they're not going to be able to convert any important percentage of the populace there, in any case," she went on, "why worry about them? Even if they put on what you call a push, it wouldn't look as if they'd have much luck."

"I'll tell you why." Hal sat back on his float. "When they had me in that Militia cell, I was running a high fever and I hit a decision point in my life. The result was, I went into what you might want to call a sort of mental overdrive; and I realized a number of things I hadn't been able to see earlier."

She reached out to put her hand on his, softly, for a moment.

"You don't need to feel for me," he told her gently in return. "I told you they carried me around on a silver platter there, compared to what they did to you."

"No one seems to understand you - how you fight in a battle larger than any of ours," she murmured. "But I know."

"Some of us have some idea, I think," murmured Amid.

Hal curled his fingers around hers.

"One of the things I suddenly understood, then," he went on, "was that the charismatic talent, instead of being some special gift of genetic accident, given only to those who were Others, was really just a developed form of an ability that had been already sharpened to a fine edge on your own worlds, Harmony and Association. It was the ability to proselyte and convert - worked over, refined, and raised to a slightly higher power. The only ones among the Others who really have it are those like Bleys Ahrens who are at least partial products of the Friendly Worlds."

"Friendly? The records say Bleys is a mixture of Dorsai and Exotic," Amid put in.

"I know he's claimed that; and that that's what the records say, as far as they say anything about him," answered Hal; "and I've got no hard evidence to the contrary. But I've met him; and in some ways I think I know him better than anyone else alive. He's all three Splinter Cultures - "

He broke off, abruptly. He had been about to say - just as I am myself - and had stopped just in time. Somehow, since the night with Amanda, he was not only more open to the universe, but also less self-guarded. But neither Rukh nor Amid seemed to notice the check in what he had been about to say. He went on.

"The point is," he said, "your culture, Rukh, like the cultures of the Exotics and the Dorsai, ties back into Old Earth cultures at their roots; and there've been times in history before this when the faith-holders have managed to stampede the general culture around them. Look at the rise of Islam in the Near East in the seventh century, or the Children's Crusade, in the thirteenth. The Others won't need to control the Exotics directly, any more than they'll need to control the Dorsai, as long as the rest of the inhabited worlds are under their direct control. But Old Earth is a different problem than the Dorsai or the Exotics. It's like the Friendlies in that the Others can be satisfied there with a division of opinion about them that effectively keeps the world as a whole from organized opposition. But on Earth, unlike Harmony or Association, the Others can't afford open civil war. A peaceful Old Earth is still necessary as an economic pivot point for interworld commerce - which will have to go on. But if they can prevent Earth from becoming a potential enemy, short of crippling her economic roles, they'll control absolutely the interworld trade in skills - the base of our common interplanetary credit system that's let all our worlds hold together in one common community of humanity this long."

He looked at Amid.

'The Exotics have always known that, haven't they, Amid?"

The wrinkles in Amid's face rearranged with his smile.

"We've known it for three hundred years," he said. "That's why, from the first, we made it our major effort - in a secular sense - to dominate interplanetary trade, so as to protect ourselves."

He sobered.

"That's why, Hal Mayne," he said, "you'll find us probably more hard-headed about this situation with the Others than anyone else. We know what it'll mean to have them in power, and we've known it from the first move they began to make as a group."

Hal nodded, turning back to Rukh.

"So," he said, "you see. The one world it's absolutely necessary for the Others to neutralize is Earth. The reason they've got to do that goes beyond the obvious fact that, in spite of the way the Old World was plundered and wasted in the early years of the early centuries of technological civilization, it's still far and away the most populous and resource-rich of the inhabited planets. The further reason's that, quite literally, it's the storehouse of the original gene pool, the basic source of the full-spectrum human being, from which we all came."

He stopped, and waited to see if she wanted to respond to all this he was saying, but she simply sat, relaxed and still, waiting for him to go on.

"If successful opposition to the Others is possible from any people at all, in the future," he went on, "it's most possible from the people of Old Earth. They've got their past all around them - there's no way they can be blinded to what the Others would take from them. Also, as their history shows, they're intractable, imaginative and - if they have to be - capable of giving their lives for what they consider a necessary goal, practical or otherwise. For the Others, the necessity is obvious - Earth is the one citadel which must be taken and controlled, to ensure a permanent end to all opposition to them. As a last resort - but only as a last resort - they'll destroy it rather than have it go against them. They've got no choice, if it comes to that." He paused. Rukh watched him. Amid watched him.

"In the long run, the Dorsai can be starved to death. The Exotic Worlds can be rendered helpless. The Friendlies can be kept fighting among themselves to the point where they never emerge as a serious threat. But Earth has to be either cancelled out or destroyed, if it's to be taken out of the equation at all. Nothing less's going to answer for what the Others need."

He stopped talking, hearing the echo of his own words in the following silence; and wondering if he had gone too far into rhetoric, so that Rukh would instinctively recoil from him and from what he was about to ask her to do. But when he paused she still merely sat silent, her gaze going a little past him to the greenery around the further bend of the pool, then turned her eyes back a little to look onto his.

"There's only one way for them to do this, as things stand," he told her. "They've got to work inside the social structure and pattern of Earth if they want to bring about a large enough division of opinion there to keep its people as a whole stalemated. And that's what they've been trying to do from the start with the individuals they've already got there, talking up their cause. But with things on all the other worlds moving to a showdown - "

He paused and shrugged.

Somewhere in the depths of the garden a soft chime rang once, and a small sound in Amid's throat intruded on the silence. Hal turned to look at the smaller man.

"I'm afraid I've been waiting for a chance to tell you something," Amid said. "You remember, you wanted it arranged for you to talk to the Exotics as a whole. A gathering of representatives from both Mara and Kultis are here, now; and they're ready to listen to you as soon as you can talk to them; by using single-shift phase, color code transmission, we're going to try to make it possible for everyone on both worlds to see and hear you as you talk - this may not work, of course."

"I understand," said Hal. As phase shifting went, the distance between the two worlds under the sun of Procyon was easily short enough to be bridged in a single shift. But the problem here would be the tricky business of ensuring that the distance between disassembly point and reassembly point of the transmitted data was bridged exactly at all moments during transmission. Even with no more than a single shift, and orbital points whose positions were continuously calculated from outside referrents like that of Procyon itself, keeping precise contact over that distance for any period of time at all would be a staggering problem.

"However, what I really have to tell you is that Bleys Ahrens is here, here on Mara - here with us." The voice of Amid held no change of expression. "He seems to be remarkably lucky at making guesses; because he apparently assumed you'd be coming to speak to us at this time. Under the circumstances, the sooner we finish talking here and let you go to that talking, Hal, the better. Everyone's ready, including Bleys. He's asked for a chance to address us, himself. We said yes."

"I wouldn't expect you to do anything else," answered Hal. "As far as his ability to guess my being here to talk, he could be using an intuitional logic, like the one Donal worked with."

Amid's eyes narrowed, and his gaze sharpened.

"You think the Others have that, too, now?"

"No… not the Others as a group," Hal said. "Bleys alone might - but almost certainly no one else. Or, he could just have made a lucky guess, as you say. It doesn't disturb me that he's going to talk. Before me - or after me?"

"Which would you prefer?" Amid's voice was still expressionless.

"Let him speak first."

Amid nodded; and Hal turned back to Rukh.

"As I was saying," he went on, "there's no real alternative for the Others, then. They're going to have to send to Earth some of their own number, plus as many disciples as they can who seem to be able to use something of the charismatic talent. With these they can try to make an all-out effort to enlist enough of Earth's population to build a division of opinion large enough to block anything that might be done by Earth people who could realize what the Other's control of the civilized worlds will mean."

She nodded.

"So," he said, "Bleys knows he's got people with the talent to do that; and his assumption will be we've got no one to stop them. But we do - we've got you Rukh; and those like you. I escaped from the Militia by getting out of an ambulance that was taking me to the hospital; and the reason I could escape was because the ambulance was caught in the crowd listening to you speak in that square at Ahruma. I heard you that day, Rukh - and there's nothing permanent in the way of changing minds Bleys or any others of his people can do, talking to an audience, that you can't match. In addition, you know other true holders of the Faith who could join you in opposing the crowd-leaders Bleys will be sending to Earth. Those others like you are there - on Harmony and Association. They'd never listen to me, if I tried to convince them to come. But you could - by coming yourself first and sending your words back to those who're left behind you as well as those you'll be speaking to on Earth."

He stopped speaking.

"Will you?" he asked.

She sat, looking at and through him for a little while. When she did begin to speak, it was so softly that if he had not been straining to hear her answer, he would have had difficulty understanding her.

"When I was in my cell alone, there, near the end of the time I was prisoner of the Militia," she said, talking almost as if to herself, "I spoke to my God and thanked Him for giving me this chance to testify for Him, I resigned myself once more to His will; and asked Him to show me how I might best serve Him in the little time I thought I had left."

Her eyes came back and focused penetratingly only on him.

"And His answer came - that I should know better than to ask. That, as one of the Faith, I already knew that the way I must travel at any time would always become plain and clear to me, once it was time for me to take it up. When I accepted this, a happiness came over me, of a kind I hadn't felt since James Child-of-God left the Command to die alone, so the rest of us might survive. You remember that, Hal, because you were the last to speak to him. I understood, then, that all I had to do was wait for my path to appear; for I knew now that it would do so, in its own good time. And I've been waiting, in peace and happiness, since then - "

She reached out to take Hal's hand.

"And it's a special joy to me, Hal, that you should be the one to point it out to me."

He held her hand; wasted, weak and fragile within his own powerful fingers and wide palm; and he could feel the strength that flowed between them - not from him to her, but the other way around. He leaned forward and kissed her again, then got to his feet.

"We'll talk some more as soon as I've done what I came here for," he said. "Rest and get strong."

"As fast as I can." She smiled; and smiling, she watched them go.

The amphitheater into which Amid brought Hal was deceptive to the eye. Hal's first impression was that it was a small place, holding at most thirty or forty people in the seats of the semicircle of rising tiers. Then he caught a slight blurring at the edges of his vision and realized that in any direction in which he looked, the faces of those in the audience directly in focus were clear and sharp; but that beyond that area of sharpness and clarity, there was a faint ring of fuzzily visible faces. He seemed to be looking across an enormous distance at mere dots of people. With that he realized that the smallness of amphitheater and audience was a deception; and that a telescopic effect was bringing close any area he looked at directly to give the impression of smallness to an area that must hold an uncountable number of individuals - who each undoubtedly saw him at short distance.

Padma, the very aged Exotic he had met before, was standing on the low platform facing up at the seats of the amphitheater, dwarfed by the slim, erect, wide-shouldered shape of Bleys, now dressed in a loose, light gray jacket, over dark, narrow-legged trousers, and towering over the aged Exotic. The illusion Hal had encountered so frequently - of Bleys standing taller than human - was here again; but as Hal himself approached the two men, it was as if Bleys dwindled toward normal limits of size. Until at last when they were finally face to face, as it had also happened the last time they had met, he and the leader of the Others stood level, eye to eye, the same size.

It registered in Hal's mind that Bleys had changed since that last meeting, in some subtle way. There were no new lines of age in his features, no obvious alteration in any part of his features. But nonetheless there was an impression about him of having become worn to a finer point, the skin of his face drawn more taut over its bones. He looked at Hal quietly, remotely, even a little wistfully.

"Hal Mayne," said Amid at Hal's elbow, as the two of them reached Padma and Bleys, "would prefer that Bleys Ahrens speaks first."

"Of course," Bleys murmured. His eyes rested for a moment longer in contact with Hal's. It seemed to Hal that in Bleys' expression, there was something that was not quite an appeal, but came close to being one. Then the Other's gaze moved away, to sweep out over the amphitheater.

"I'll leave you to it, then," said Hal.

He turned and led the two Exotics back off the platform to some chair floats that were ranked on the floor beside it. They sat down, the back of their floats against the wall that backed the platform. They sat, looking out at the amphitheater and the side and back of Bleys.

Standing alone on the stage, he seemed once more to tower, taller than any ordinary human might stand, above audience and amphitheater, alike.

Unexpectedly he spread his long arms wide, at shoulder height, to their fullest extent.

"Will you listen to me?" he said to the Exotic audience. "For a few moments only, will you listen to me - without preconceptions, without already existing opinions, as if I was a petitioner at your gates whom you'd never heard before?"

There was a long moment of silence. Slowly, he dropped his arms to his side.

"It's painful, I know," he went on, speaking the words slowly and separately, "always, it is painful when times change; when everything we've come to take for granted has to be reexamined. All at once, our firmest and our most cherished beliefs have to be pulled out by the roots, out of those very places where we'd always expected them to stand forever, and subjected to the same sort of remorseless scrutiny we'd give to the newest and wildest of our theories or thoughts."

He paused and looked deliberately from one side of the amphitheater to the other.

"Yes, it's painful," he went on, "but we all know it happens. We all have to face that sort of self-reexamination, sooner or later. But of all peoples, those I'd have expected to face this task the best would have been the peoples of Mara and Kultis."

He paused again. His voice lifted.

"Haven't you given your lives, and the lives of all your generations to that principle, ever since you ceased to call yourselves the Chantry Guild and come here to these Exotic Worlds, searching for the future of humankind? Not just searching toward that future by ways you found pleasant and palatable, but by all the ways to it you could find, agreeable or not? Isn't that so?"

Once more he looked the audience over from side to side, as if waiting for objection or argument; and after a moment he went on.

"You've grown into the two worlds of peoples who dominated the economies of all the inhabited worlds - so that you wouldn't have to spare time from your search to struggle for a living. You've bought and sold armies so that you'd be free of fighting, and of all the emotional commitment that's involved in it - all so you'd have the best possible conditions to continue your work, your search. Now, after all those many years of putting that search first, you seem ready to put it in second place to a taking of sides, in a transient, present-day dispute. I tell you frankly, because by inheritance I'm one of you, as I think you know, that even if it should be the side I find myself on that you wish to join, at the expense of your long struggle to bring about humanity's future, I'd still stand here as I do now, and ask you to think again of what you have to lose by doing so."

He stopped speaking. For a long moment there was no sound at all; and then he took a single step backwards and stood still.

"That's all," he said quietly, "that I've come here to say to you. That's all there is. The rest, the decision, I leave to you."

He stopped speaking and stood in silence, looking at them a moment longer. A long moment of silence hung on the air of the amphitheater. Then he turned and walked off the platform to the chairs from which Hal, Amid and Padma rose to face him.

Behind him, in the amphitheater, the silence continued.

"I'd like to speak privately to these people," said Hal.

Bleys smiled, a gentle tired smile, nodding.

"I'll see to it," said Amid, answering even before Bleys had nodded. He turned to the Other. "If you'll come with me?"

He led the tall man out by the door in through which he had brought Hal, a short few minutes earlier. Hal stepped up on the platform, walked to the front of it and looked at the audience.

"He doesn't hope to convince you, of course," Hal said to them. "He does hope he might be able to lull you into wasting time which his group can put to good use. I know - it's not necessary to point that out to you; but having been in the habit of being able to take the time you need to consider a question sometimes makes it hard to make decisions in little or no time."

He was searching his mind for something to say that would reach them as he had finally reached the Grey Captains at Foralie; and he suddenly realized that what he was waiting for was some response from them to what he had already said. But this was not a single room with a handful of people all within easy sight and sound of his voice. Here, he must simply trust to his words to do the job he had set them, as Bleys had been forced to do a few moments before. He remembered the mental image that had come to him in his final moments before parting with Amanda - of being for a brief time at the hub of a great, inexorably turning wheel. But this place in which he now stood was no longer at that hub - nor were these who sat here as his audience.

"The river of time," he said, "often hardly seems to be moving about us until we see the equivalent of a waterfall ahead or suddenly find the current too strong for us to reach a shore. We're at that point now. The currents of history, which together make up time's current as a whole have us firmly in their grip. There's no space left to look about at leisure for a solution, each in his own way. All I can do is tell you what I came to say.

"I've just come from the Dorsai," he said. "They've made their preparations there now for this last fight. And they will fight, of course, as they've always fought, for what they believe in, for the race as a whole - and for you. What I've come to ask you is whether you're willing to make an equal contribution for the sake of what you've always believed in."

He suddenly remembered the first stanza of the Housman poem, carved above the entrance to the Central Administrative Offices in Omalu on the Dorsai. He shook off the memory and went on.

"They've agreed to give up everything they have, including their lives, so that the race as a whole may survive. What I've come to ask of you is no less - that you strip yourselves of everything you own and everything you've gained over three hundred years so that it may be given away to people you do not know and whom you've never spoken to; in the hope that it may save, not your lives, but theirs. For in the end you also will almost surely have to give your lives - not in war, like the Dorsai, perhaps - but give them up nonetheless. In return, all I have to offer you is that hope of life for others, hope for those people to which you will have given everything, hope for them and their children, and their children's children, who may - there can be no guarantee - once more hope and work for what you hope now."

He paused again. Nothing had changed, but he no longer felt so remote from his audience.

"You've given yourselves for three hundred years to the work and the hope that there's a higher evolutionary future in store for the human race. You haven't found it in that time; but the hope itself remains. I, personally, share that hope. I more than hope - I believe. What you look for will come, eventually. But the only way to it now is a path that will ensure the race survives."

The feeling of being closer to his audience was stronger now. He told himself that he was merely being moved by the emotion of his own arguments, but nonetheless the feeling was there. The words that came to him now felt more like words that must move his listeners because of their inarguable truth.

"There was a time," he said, "in the stone-age, when an individual who thought in terms of destruction could possibly smash in the heads of three or even four human beings before his fellows gathered about him and put it beyond his power to do more damage. Later, in the twentieth century, when the power of nuclear explosive was uncovered and developed for the first time, a situation was possible in which a single person, working with the proper equipment and supplies, could end up with the capability of destroying a large metropolitan area, including possibly several millions of his fellow human beings. You all know these things. The curve that measures the destructive capability of an individual has climbed from the moment the first human picked up a stick or stone to use as a weapon, until now we've come to the point where one man - Bleys - can threaten the death of the whole race."

He took a deep breath. "If he achieves it, it won't be a sudden or dramatic death, like that from some massive explosion. It will take generations to accomplish, but at its end will be death, all the same. Because for Bleys and those who see things as he does, there is no future - only the choice between the present as they want it or nothing at all. He and those like him lose nothing in their own terms by trading a future that is valueless for them for a here and now that sees them get what they want. But the real price of what they want is an end to all dreams - including the one you all have followed for three hundred years. You, with all the wealth and power you still have, cannot stop them from getting what they want; the Dorsai can't stop them, nor, by themselves, can all the other groups and individuals who are able to see the death that lies in giving up dreams of the future. But all together we can stop them - for the saving of those who come after us."

He let his eyes search from one side of what he saw as the amphitheater to the other.

"So I'm asking that you give me everything you have - for nothing in return but the hope that it may help preserve, not you, but what you've always believed in. I want your interstellar credit, all of it. I want your interstellar ships, all of them. I want everything else that you've gained or built that can be put to use by the rest who will be actively fighting the Others from now on - leaving you naked and impoverished to face what they will surely choose to do to you in retaliation. You must give it, and I must take it; because the contest that's now shaping up can only be won by those who believe in the future if they work and struggle as one single people."

He stopped talking.

"That's all," he said, abruptly.

He turned and left the platform. There was no sound from the audience to signal his going. Amid had returned and was standing waiting for him with Padma.

In silence they left the amphitheater through a doorway different from the one by which they had entered. Hal found himself walking down a long, stone-walled corridor, with an arched roof and a waist-high stretch of windows deeply inset in the full length of wall on his right. They were actual windows, not merely open space with weather control holding the cold and the wind at bay; and their glass was made up of diamond-shaped panes leaded together. The stone was gray and cold-looking; and beyond the leaden panes, he could see in the late-afternoon light that the white flakes were still falling thickly, so that the snow was already beginning to soften and obliterate the clear outlines of trees, paths and buildings.

"How long, do you think, before the vote will be in, from both worlds?" Hal asked Amid.

The small, old face looked sideways and up at him.

"It was in before you landed."

Hal walked a few steps without saying anything.

"I see," he said, then. "And, when Bleys appeared, it was decided to hold up the results until everyone had heard what he had to say."

"We're a practical people - in practical matters," said Amid. "It was that, of course. But also, everyone wanted to see and hear you speak, before a final announcement of the decision. Wouldn't you, yourself, want to meet the one person who would deal with the end of everything you'd ever lived for?"

"All the same," said Hal, "the option was reopened for them to change their minds, if Bleys was able to bring them to it. Well, was he?"

"Except for a statistically insignificant handful, no, I'm told." Amid's eyes rested on him as they walked. "I think that in this, Hal Mayne, you may fail to understand something. We knew there was nothing Bleys Ahrens could say that would change any of us. But it's always been our way to listen. Should we change now? And do you really think so badly of us that you could believe we'd fail to face up to what we have to do? We here have our faith, too - and our courage."

Amid turned his gaze away from him, looking on ahead to the end of the corridor, to the double doors of heavy, bolted wood, standing ajar on a dimness that baffled the eye.

"It'll take a day or two for our representatives to get together with you on details," the small man went on. "Meanwhile, you can be discussing with Rukh Tamani your plans for her crusade on Old Earth. In three days, at most, your work will be done here, and then you'll be free to go on to wherever you've planned to, next. Where is that, by the way?"

"Earth…" said Hal.

But his mind was elsewhere; and his conscience was reproaching him. He had felt a small chill on hearing that Bleys was here; and that chill had come close to triggering an actual fear in him when he saw the man standing before those assembled in the amphitheater, and heard him speak. It was no longer a fear that Bleys might have the talent and the arguments to out-talk him; but a fear that the Exotics, even recognizing the falsity of Bleys' purpose, would still seize on what the Other said as an excuse not to act, not to join the fight openly until it was too late for them and everyone else.

He had been wrong. From the time he had been Donal, he thought now, one failing had clung to him. With all he knew, he could still find it in him to doubt his fellow humans; when, deeply, he knew that anything that was possible to him must be possible to them, as well. For a little while, there in the amphitheater, he had doubted that the Exotics had it in them to die for a cause, even for their own cause. He had let himself be prejudiced by the centuries in which they had seemed to want to buy peace at any price; and he had forgotten their dedication to the purpose for which they had bought that peace.

Now he faced the unyielding truth. It was far easier for anyone simply to fight, and die fighting; than to calmly, cold-bloodedly, invite the enemy within doors and sit waiting for death so that others might live. But that was what the people of Mara and Kultis had just voted to do.

Amid had been right in what he had just said.

With this last act, all of them, including the unwarlike little man now walking beside him, had demonstrated a courage as great as any Dorsai's, and a faith in what they had lived for during these last three centuries, as great as that of any Friendly. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched Amid moving down the corridor; and in his mind he could see - not himself - but the ghosts of Ian and Child-of-God walking on either side of his ancient and fragile companion.

"Yes," he said, breaking the silence once more as they came to the double doors. "Earth. There's a place there I've been trying to get back to for a long time now."