Somehow, all these things tied together; but also, somehow his mind failed at the moment to connect them. Particularly, it failed to connect them with Amanda, who was part of the understanding. Amanda, from the moment she had met him on Dorsai, had made him the gift of that insight of hers. The full value of that gift he was yet to know, any more than he could yet appreciate the full implication of the connection of the other bits of discovery afloat in his mind. All he knew about the gift was that it had been a part of herself; and that it was something no one else could have given him, because no one else had had it to give.

It was an awareness of that gift that had stopped him now. Stopped him, because it had made him more perceptive; and that added perception in him now rang a nameless dread of whatever she might have to tell him.

He remembered sitting in her kitchen in the Morgan homestead, Fal Morgan, on the Dorsai world, that first morning after meeting her. There had been a moment there in which he had had a chance to compare her with the telephoned picture of her sister. He remembered then that he had thought to himself that the sister was equally beautiful, but lacked something which Amanda possessed-something which in that moment he had called intensity.

But it had not been and was not intensity. It was something much more. Amanda went beyond. Part of her extended invisibly into another dimension, lived in another dimension. Everyone, it struck him now, had the potential to extend into that further dimension, but only particular individuals chose to do so, and only in some of these could it be seen in them by another individual-as he saw it now, where he had never been able to see it before. Now, remembering Rukh, he realized he had always seen it in her; and perhaps a little even in Ajela and some of the true faith-holders on Harmony, like James Child-ofGod. It had been, now he thought of it, very clearly visible in Ajela, as it was in Tam Olyn; and it had been there in his three tutors-so that he now realized he had learned, partly at least, to recognize it from what he saw in them, without identifying what it was, but imitating it in his own life as he imitated the three old men in other ways.

But it was in other, more unlikely people, too. It was in Cee, surprisingly enough. And it must have been in Jathed. In fact, what he had come here to ask Amid, tired as he was, without knowing why he needed the answer, but knowing he could not sleep until he had it-was whether Jathed had, in those early years down in the forest, had some sort of contact with Cee. Perhaps he had visited her parents? Then the sudden discovery of Amanda here had all but driven the questions from his mind, until he realized, suddenly, that Amanda was connected to them, herself a part of them, in fact.

He went in; and the other two turned at the sound of his boots on the wooden floor. Amid, he was now able to see, had his own extended element; and it came to Hal that both Amanda and Amid, as well as others like them, were not only part of what he had chosen to spend his life finding but part of what he had hoped for when he had let Amanda bring him to Kultis. She would not have identified this specific element as one of the things he needed to discover; but, that strange, almost mystic part of her that had always set her family apart from other Dorsai must have sensed both his need and the location of this, among what else he reached for.

That sensitivity to his need and that which would answer it was part of what made her what she was. So that wherever she happened to be, as now in Amid's office, the perceived universe seemed to fall into order about her, to become sensible and clear of purpose. It was as if she shone with a light that, though invisible in itself, let those about her see more clearly.

He reached her and they held each other for a long moment without saying anything. Then, still holding him with her hands, she stood back a little from him and turned his face to the light of the nearest window. Better, she said, studying it. Yes, you're better. But not all the way back to what you should be. I'm closer, he answered. All the more close now that you're here.

She let him go, and frowned as he put out a hand to Amid's desk for support. He would have fallen otherwise. His legs felt as if they had no strength left in them. The grapevine brought me news of the soldiers coming up here to look around, she said. I came as soon as I could, but I waited for full night to go up to that group you had guarding the rock blocking the trail in. I've been here since about an hour or so after you took your party down there. It was a temptation to follow you down, but if you'd planned what you'd planned without me, there was no point in my barging in and upsetting things. I've been waiting for you since-but you're ready to collapse. You could say that, he told her with a weary grin. But I had a question or two to ask Amid befQre I folded up. Anything, of course, said Amid, getting spryly up from his chair and coming forward. But do you have to have the answers right now? Amanda's right. You're exhausted. Two quick questions, said Hal. Was Jathed around down there when Cee was living with her parents? I believe he was already dead when she began to run wild-but could they have talked to each other, somehow-would they have talked to each other?

Amid frowned. I'm sure he was around, for a couple of years at least, he said. And as for Jathed talking to her, what I've heard of him is-that he would have talked to, lectured at, anyone-all in the same way, regardless of their age or situation. But whether he and Cee actually communicated-I'd have to ask some of the more longtime members of the Guild. I'll do that and let you know tomorrow. The question isn't going to be whether Jathed would talk to Cee, but whether they encountered each other -and whether Cee, young as she was, would be able to understand anything. But maybe she might. She might even have sensed he was no sort of threat to her, or even saw him as special -children can do that. That's what I wanted to know, said Hal.

He turned away from the desk, reeling as he lost the support of it; and being caught and held upright by the strong grasp of Amanda. Sleep for you, she said, this way.

CHAPTER

31

Hal woke to almost complete darkness relieved only by the faint line of light under the door to the bathroom. This alone told him that he was not in his own bed in Dormitory Two, but back in Amid's second office, in which he and Amanda had slept on his arrival at the Chantry Guild. There was someone beside him in the bed; and he turned his head to make out that it was Amanda, deeply sleeping, her hair spread out on the pillow.

It must be deep into the night. He Jay there, trying to remember.

He had no recollection of getting here. He remembered nothing beyond Amanda catching him, holding him up, and telling him he must sleep. He had no memory of being brought to this bed. But now that he tried to recall anything at all after that'there came to him a few flashes from momentary wakings, as seeing a sliver of the rich daylight illumination of Procyon, that had managed to make its way here and there through the blanket she had once more hung over a rod to provide a near-perfect blackout curtain.

In each case he had awakened long enough only to recognize the fact that he was safe and comfortable, then fallen immediately and heavily back to sleep again. He had no memory of Amanda joining him. She would have been quiet so as not to disturb him, of course, as only she could be quiet. But how long had it been since she had come? How long since night replaced day outside his curtained window?

Some diurnal clock deep inside him told him that it had been a long time-that he had slept most of the night through, as well as the day; and dawn was near.

It had been no ordinary sleep. He had put in forty-eight hours of wakefulness under active conditions before this, without falling into such a pit of unconsciousness; and while he might be a few years older since then, and softer, in spite of his daily exercise in the Final Encyclopedia, neither time nor inaction could account for such a heavy, prolonged slumber.

There had to he another reason for it; and even as he formed the question the answer came. His unconscious mind had once more wanted his consciousness out of the way so it could work with perfect freedom, putting together all the things he had learned, one by one-those parts that now almost, but not quite, came together like the parts of a puzzle of many pieces, to give him a complete picture of his goal.

He felt a yearning to stay here, where he was, and put an arm gently over Amanda, coaxing her gently back into wakefulness and the joining that they had always had so few chances for. But at the same time, there was a powerful feeling within him that now and only now the answer he sought, or at least another step toward it, was calling him outside this room. It was waiting for him with the dawn that would be coming; as it had waited all this time he had been here, but he had not yet learned enough to see it.

Quietly, as Amanda must have come to bed quietly, he left it, found his clothes, dressed and let himself out of the room. The corridor was bright-lit and silent; but outside, when he closed the main door of the building behind him, the ledge was in complete darkness. The night was empty except for the chanting of those who walked the circle, invisible to him. Both moons were down and the light of the stars was not enough to let him see his hand at arm's length before him.

But like the Guild members, he now knew the ledge well enough to find his way about it blindfolded. In addition, in this season of summer, even at this altitude, the wind blew toward the ledge across the land below.

Accordingly, he turned his face into the wind and, feeling the familiar slopes and pitches of the ground under his bare feet, went toward the edge.

As he went, his eyes readjusted to the darkness from the bright glare of the hall lights. He was able to see the treetops overhead occulting the stars, the trees that had been deliberately left uncut in patches and clumps so that part of one of them always hid any walkway below it. Almost unthinkingly, he oriented himself by those shapes of the treetops against the pinpoints of light in the sky, and as he got close to the edge he cou see it as a line of demarcation where darkness gave way suddenly to deeper darkness.

He was out here earlier than usual and he did not expect to find Old Man here yet; and in fact, when he got to the place by the pool where he usually sat, the spot the Old Man usually occupied was empty. After all, Hal reminded himself, his fellow watcher was no longer young, and also had just finished putting in much the same hours, at the same activity as had Hal. It would hardly be surprising if he did not show up at all.

Hal sat, therefore, waiting for the paling of the sky that would signal the approaching day and the sunrise. There was a strange blend of expectation and excitement in him.

In patches, where the native vegetation of the pond did not obscure its reflecting surface, the image of the stars overhead looked back up at him-as they also looked down on him through the clear, high-altitude air. He felt enclosed by them as an individual feels warmly enclosed by family or close friends at a gathering of those who were close. The sky about them was beginning to pale, but only beyond the line of the Grandfathers of Dawn in the far distance-that place from which the sunrise would come. Overhead, it was still dark enough for their lights to be clear and sharp against the deep dark.

As far as he could tell, none of those that he could see up there were stars that were suns over the otlier Younger Worlds, or art itself. Those solar bodies were at present in the wrong position to be seen from Kultis-or more accurately, this part of the planet was pointed in the wrong direction. But those he did see stood in for those he knew, in his imagination; so that it was as if they had come here at this important moment to watch him now from both above and below at once, waiting for him to take up his journey once more along the path he had chosen for himself that day of his uncle James's death.

It had been a ridiculously ambitious decision at the time on the part of a half-grown boy, to find and destroy whatever element it was in people that made them selfish and uncaring to the point of brutality and cruelty to each other. The shape of the answer he sought had emerged, little by little from the mists of things undiscovered as he worked his way toward it, trying one route after another, finding his way blocked but learning a little more each time, so that with each fresh start he chose his next route with more wisdom.

So, slowly, he had progressed. Slowly, his certainty had grown that there was a path to humanity's becoming a race of tpeople who would voluntarily refrain from all harming of their fellows, by all actions, from literal killing, to the exercise of the little cruelties of words and sheer thoughtlessness that were so common in human society that they went almost without remark. But now, he was surer than he had ever been, that only a few thin veils-perhaps only one-hid it from him.

As Donal he had found that power and law alone could not force the change he wanted. But the discovery pointed to the r9ad he himself must travel; and, after him, the race. As Paul Formain, back in the twenty-first century, he had found that part of the answer lay outside the known universe and its laws; but that this further universe-the one he had come to call the Creative Universe-was again, only part of the answer.

His last attempt had been the gathering of the best of what the Younger Worlds had gained-from the Exotics, the Friendlies, and his own world of the Dorsai-into safety behind the phase-shield he had caused to be set up, enclosing Earth and the Final Encyclopedia. He had been confident then, that at last, having done this, the next and last step to his goal would be obvious.

But it had not been. What he had achieved had only once more cleared the mists a little way, but left him with no understanding of what was to be done next. It had only shown yet a farther stretch of the road still to be covered.

He had not been wrong in anything he had done so far. Faith, courage, and the ability to think philosophically, all faculties of the human, developed from its animal forebears, and their extended forms, as embodied in the Friendlies, the Dorsai and these Exotics, had been part of the answer. He had not been wrong in that much; but now he saw what was needed was something still hidden by unknowns, still in shadow. He could only be sure now that it was somehow connected with the creativity in every living human.

In his disappointment and weariness, he had become blocked; and believed himself burnt out-a failure. So he had continued to think until Amanda had come to tell him he might find a new

point of view here, on an Exotic world now wrecked and ground down by the forces of an enemy point of view that was trying to kill the growth element of the human spirit and destroy all that had been accomplished.

She had been right. He knew that now with a wholehearted, instinctive certainty, as he sat here, waiting for Procyon's rise over the mountaintops.

Somewhere, with her and among the Chantry Guild members and with his recent part in the rescue of Artur and little Cee, who was of an age with the boy he had been when he had made his original vow, he had once more found a way to go forward. And now, now here, waiting for the sunrise, he felt perhaps only one more large step toward what he sought; perhaps even close at last to the doorway itself, through which he now knew he must pass to find what he sought.

The paling of the night's black sky and the extinguishing of the stars had spread forward from above the distant mountains as he had been thinking, and the light had grown stronger. He felt the approaching dawn like a hand laid upon him; and although the breeze was merely cool, it seemed to blow through his clothing so that he felt as if he sat naked and waiting, his legs crossed, his hands not in prayer position but laid, palms down, one on top of the other in his lap; as he remembered his uncle Ian's massive hands used to lie.

He let his mind go out to his customary imaginings of this daily exercise of body and mind; conjuring up the time of the far future of this Chantry Guild, when the ledge had been filled by a massive structure of stone blocks quarried from the mountain, its flat surfaces paved and gardened and this pool before him enclosed by a rim of pink-veined, light gray rock, with the native plants replaced by imported water-lilies spreading their flat, broad petals on the liquid surface to uphold themselves and their night-closed and sleeping white flowers.

Those flowers of his imagination which would be opening with the coming light of day.

As with some repeated meditation, the envisioned sceneed the reality around him. His ears heard the chanting replac ack of the present and future walkers in the behind his b circle. . . .

The transient and the eternal are the same . . .

Now, the chant seemed to pick him up and possess him. So that he resonated to it as a tuning fork resonates to being struck, with a single pure note. In the pool, the white blossoms were beginning to open as the light flooded forward and the day brightened.

His eyes ignored the unvarying green sweep of the highaltitude forest below him and focused on the distant range of -mountains, the Grandfathers of Dawn. Always the mountains. Always the mountains and the sunrise. These belonged as much to the future of his imagined scene as they did to the present second in which he sat here. To the mountains and the sunrise, the years or centuries in between were unimportant, the moment of a single drawn breath in a lifetime of breaths.

The sun was not yet in sight from behind the range; but the brightness of the sky showed that it was close now, very close.

His eyes were filled with light and he felt the cool air passing in and out of the lungs above his motionless body as he sat. e looked down at the pond and saw that the white flowers were now fully open, some of them showing the drops of the dew that had collected in their tightly closed petal tips earlier. He felt as if some essential but nonphysical part of himself was lifted out of the rest of him and rushed through the airy space between him and the distant mountain range to meet the dawn, seeing nothing else.

At the same time his physical eyes looked down at the pond and focused once more on a single flower, on one white petal of which a dewdrop sat like a blessing. The flower filled his gaze and like a wave through him came a great sweep of feeling, that anything should be so wonderful as the living leaf with the perfect transparency of the dewdrop upon it.

Feeling this, it was as if his flying, incorporeal self reached the upthrust giants of the land that waited, as they had always waited, for him in this moment; and, lifting, it and he saw the first blazing edge of Procyon, which was too bright to look at with the eyes of his body back on the [edge, appear in the bottom of a notch in the rock before him and send the first ray of direct light leaping across the space between range and ledge to touch the pond, to touch the flower.

It touched the dewdrop; and for one second too short for breath to draw or mind to do anything but hold in memory, the drop exploded, scintillating with light like a diamond, radiating off in all directions, including into him, where it shone unforgettable, from that moment on.

He sat, blinded by the vision. Behind him, the voices of the walkers chanted still. . . .

The transient and the eternal are the same . . .

And, suddenly, moving in to replace the wonder within him came the understanding he had waited for. Now, the words of the walkers engulfed him. Suddenly, at last, he understood the truth of what they chanted, what he had so often chanted; that it was not a matter of faith but of actuality.

For the transient and the eternal were the same. He looked at the petal now and the dewdrop was already beginning to shrink, to disappear as the heat of the sun's ray drew it up. In a little it would be gone. The petal would be dry and it would be as if the dewdrop had never been there.

But the dewdrop was always there. Even as this one blazed for a second with incredible light and began to disappear, somewhere in this infinite universe there was another dewdrop just beginning to scintillate, and after that another, and another . . .

And another dawn and another, and another mountain range and another, when this one should be worn down to level dust; and without a pause, another world, which would make another range through which a ray of light would come to another dewdrop on another petal-forever and forever, until time should end.

The dewdrop was beyond destruction. The moment of its brilliance was eternal. It was transient here, but eternal everywhere. Just so, all things were eternal, only waiting to be found, even the doorway to something that had only been his dream all these years.

The physical light of the present day was everywhere about and the vision of the future was gone; but the moment of the explosion of illumination from the dewdrop still filled

He got to his feet and went back, past 11197117.2011k, visible circle of walkers toward the buildings beyond. He felt incredibly Ilight-bodied. As if he could, with little effort, walk up into the thin air. A figure in the ordinary light workshirt and trousers, vmrn by the majority of the Chantry Guild members when they were otherwise occupied than walking in the circle, stepped out from behind some tree trunks to meet him. It was Old Man and he smiled up at Hal as they met and Hal stopped. You weren't there this morning, said Hal. I was there. I sat behind you, said Old Man. Some things are best touched alone.

His smile grew and became almost impish. He reached into a pocket of his trousers and brought out a small mirror, which he held up to Hal's eyes.

Hal stared at the image of his own face. There was a difference in what he saw that he could not pick out at first. Then he saw it-the pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to pinpricks of darkness, like the eyes of someone under drugs. For a fraction of a second the scintillation of the dewdrop seemed to leap out from those pinpricks and the mirror at him, making him feel light-headed, but happily so. How could you tell ahead of time, in the dark9 he asked, as Old Man put the mirror back into the pocket.

Old Man passed his hand from left to right through the air at chest height before him, palm outward toward Hal. I felt it, he said.

Hal stared at him, waiting for additional explanation; but Old Man, still smiling, merely turned and went away from him, back through the trees from among which he had emerged.

CHAPTER

32

He went back to their room and discovered that Amanda had already risen and left. He found her having breakfast by herself at a small table in the building's dining room and joined her.

Actually, he wanted nothing to eat; and she, after a single wise look at him, said nothing, not even good morning. Instead, she merely smiled and continued her own meal, leaving him to sit and do what he wanted, which was merely to enjoy the early day with her, along with the other breakfasters. He let himself be immersed in the chatter in the dining room and the sounds from the kitchen. The sun, shining in through the windows of the room to brighten all around them, wrapped him in an unusual sense of happiness.

When she was done, she rose. He went with her. Taking her tray with its used utensils and dishes to the disposal slot, she pushed it through. Then, smiling again at him, she led him outside and parted company with him, going off herself in the direction of Amid's office.

He was left to his own devices, and found himself happy to be so. Kultis, around him, had never seemed more bright and fresh. Its colors stood out at him, as if just washed by a brief summer shower, from the sky overhead to the gravel of the paths underfoot.

He roamed about the ledge. There was a lightness to his body; and the sense of the illumination he had just received lingered ifi , him. For once, he felt strangely free of purpose. It was as consciousness had been cut loose, like a towed dory from I. .behind a small Miml boat, to drift at the whim of soft winds and gentle waves under a bright sun.

He smiled. The image of the loose dory pleased him. The implications of what he had found were too massive and momentous for his mind to handle logically; and so that part of him had been set free temporarily by the more capacious mental machinery behind it, that moved in creative and other areas where the conscious, with its rigid patterns and logics, could not go.

The day, accordingly, passed like a pleasant dream. Either Amanda, or Amid, or someone among the others must have passed the word to leave him to his own devices. None of the Chantry Guild members approached him or tried to draw him into conversation; for which he was grateful.

His thoughts slid between wonderings at small things in his ,.surroundings -from the quaint shape of a pebble among the gravel at his feet to the living design of a variform leaf or blade of grass, or their native equivalents that he came upon. Architecturally, they were all beautiful; and he was a little surprised he had failed so utterly to appreciate them before.

Interspersed with these were other things observed, or remembered-bits and flashes of scenes from his past. Images from his boyhood and manhood as Donal Graeme, from his brief life as Paul Formain and his present life as Hal; all these came and went in his head like bits of a serial recording.

Something within him guessed, but did not struggle to verify, at the possibility that these things he recalled were reflections of what his deeper mind was fitting into the matrix of his lifelong search, from what he had come to understand this morning. But he did not investigate this, did not question it; and it did not matter. A. 74 ZL

It was like being on a vacation. It occurred to him with a small shock of surprise that he had never really had a vacation, since he had been a schoolboy on the Dorsai. From the time he had left his home world he had never let go of his life's commitment for even a day. It was a strange feeling to be so cut loose now, even for a few hours like this; to be content with the distance he had come so far, when the end was still not yet reached. Though he could see it clearly, now.

As the morning grew into noon, he drifted toward Amid's office. When he stepped inside it at last, he was surprised to find it, for once, empty. Then it came to him that Amid, himself, might well have run short of sleep, these last forty-eight hours, and be in his own quarters, resting.

In any case, he had not come here to see Amid, but because of the memory of the recording of Jathed to which he had listened. He began to search both his memory and the office, and finally came across a filing cabinet with the name Jathed on it. There was a box of recording spindles in the second drawer from the top.

He took the box with him to Amid's desk and seated himself in a chair near it with the control pad Amid had searched for and found earlier. It was a standard desk unit and in a moment he had the first of the recording spindles in the control pad's magazine. Jathed's voice, apparently from several years earlier than the tape Hal had listened to before, sounded immediately in the room.

As he listened, he examined the other spindles. They were dated in order over a period of some twelve years. He started with the most recent ones and began playing them in reverse order to their dates of recording. Sitting in the empty office, he list ned to the resonant, compelling voice of the founder of this reincarnation of the Chantry Guild.

He did not need to listen to more than half a dozen, however, before concluding that there would be little advantage to him in hearing them all. With the exception of two which were histories of Jathed's early life, dictated in an unfamiliar, elderly voice that might have belonged to Amid's brother, they were essentially repetitions of what were basically two or three customary lectures delivered by Jathed to audiences consisting of disciples, or others with an interest in what the cantankerous, but remarkable, man had to say.

In effect, the message of all of these was simple enough. Jathed believed that each person who had the necessary faith and self-discipline should be able to enter a personal, extra universe exactly like the physical one that surrounded him; except that in this other universe, the will of the person involved could accomplish anything wanted by merely determining it should be SO.

Furthermore, if that will was powerful enough, Jathed

apparently believed that the effect produced in the extra universe could be duplicated in the universe of reality by convincing the minds of others that the alteration applied to the physical universe also.

In short, he believed in a personal, extra universe; and that the so-ca rea universe was no more an _agreement among the human minds existing in it.

It was in this latter view, about the real universe, that Hal found himself disagreeing with the other man.

It was true that when he had been Paul Formain, three hundred years before, he had experienced the night of madness brought upon a city by the original Chantry Guild of Earth, under its founder, Walter Blunt-that original Guild which had become the parent of Kultis and its sister world and the whole Exotic culture. It had been a night in which he had seen a monument melting down like wax, a stone lion decorating the balcony of a building lift its head and roar, and a hole of nothingness appear in the middle of a street. A nothingness of such utter blackness that his eyes refused to focus on it.

That, and history was full of miracles witnessed by crowds, as well as smaller, so-called magics seen by small groups of people gathered in confined spaces for just that purpose.

And, finally, there was the sound of the breaking light on the first recording of Jathed Hal had ever heard.

Nonetheless, Hal held to his own view of a single, separate, creative universe that would be a tool, not just a box of conjuring tricks, for humankind.

The only strong point he shared with Jathed was that the other must also have experienced a moment of revelation in which the absolute truth of the transient and the eternal being the same became undeniable. But from that point they had each built different ways, if with much of the same material.

In any case, his mind would not work with the problem right now. It was a refusal, but a different sort of refusal than he had experienced at the Final Encyclopedia before coming here.

That had been a blockage; a painful situation in which he Went over the same answers time and again, on each occasion finding them unworkable. This day was a pleasant moment of rest along a route that he now knew to be correct and to run straight to his goal.

But his mind would not wrestle with that problem-or any problem, just now. He put the spindles in their box back where he had found them, the control pad back on Amid's desk, and went out.

Later he was never able to remember, without a great deal of effort, how the rest of that day went for him. In part'he did not really want to investigate the memory, only recall it fondly as a sort of pleasant blur. At any rate, by the time night had fallen and he had at last taken something to eat and drink, he was back, seated in Amid's office in one of its few armless chairs, with a musical instrument in his hands.

The fire was alight in the fireplace and the instrument was someone's reconstruction of a six-string classical Spanish guitar. It was enough like the instrument he had played and sung with on his trips to Port, during the period when he had been a miner on Coby, to suit him.

The guitar had been offered to him, rather shyly, by one of the Guild members, who had said Amanda had suggested he might enjoy having it for a while. Indeed, he did. He wondered what part of the almost occult understanding in Amanda had prompted her to make such a suggestion.

In any case, he had ended up here with it, seated beside the fire in the evening.

The lights were turned down, so that almost the only illumination was from the fireplace itself. He was letting his mind and his fingers wander together, in whatever direction his memory took him, which for the last half hour had been to the ancient ballads and songs out of the past centuries of Old Earth. Songs he had learned there, as a boy, from books and recordings in the library of the estate where he had been brought up.

Amid and Amanda were seated in chairs before him, listening; and so, too, surprisingly, were a number of the members of the Guild, who had slipped in quietly over the past hour or so. taking more distant chairs-so that they were all but lost in the moving shadows cast on the wall by the flames of the fire.

Most surprisingly, among those there was Cee. He had not noticed her entering. He had only become gradually aware of her sitting with Onete in a couple of chairs against a far wall.

Since that first moment when he had discovered her, she had moved closer and closer to him; until now she was seated on the floor, almost at his feet. He had not caught her in movement once. She had made each tiny shift toward him at a time when his eyes were briefly off her, inching toward him, until she was where she was now.

He was careful not to look directly at her. But now it was not necessary. She was near enough so that he could examine her face out of the corner of his eyes. There was no more friendliness showing in it than there had been during the hard trek up the mountainside with Artur on the stretcher-but a great deal of wonder and fascination.

He had drifted off into the singing of old English and Scottish ballads, learned long ago out of the collection made by Childe in the nineteenth century.

How much such songs could mean to Cee, he had no way of imagining. The Basic tongue universally spoken nowadays on all the worlds was a descendant of the English language as it had been spoken during the latter part of the Technological Age, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its archaic word forms would be a little strange to the young girl, but most of it would still be understandable. Only, what she would make of the medieval Scottish and English accents with which he was pronouncing the words, and with those words which were in dialects now dead and forgotten, he could not guess.

He slid into Sir Walter Scott's Scottish version of The Battle of Otterburn, which was a little less loaded with unfamiliar words . . .

Itfell about the Lammas time, When the muir-men won their hay, That the doughty Earl Douglas went Into England to catch a prey.

He chose the Gordons and the Graemes, With them the Lindsays, light and gay: But the Jardines wadna wi' him ride, And they rued it to this day.

And he has burnt the dales 0 Tine And part of Almonshire, And three good towers on Roxburgh fells He has left them all on fire . . .

This time Hal saw her move. It was a small shift, to only slightly closer to him, but the fact that she had allowed herself to be seen moving was enough to show that she had ceased to care about whether or not he would catch her at it. A new light of interest had come into her eyes. Clearly, this one was to be a song about fighting and destruction. Somehow, by chance-or was it by chance, entirely?-he had picked a ballad that particularly woke her interest.

She was motionless now, watching and listening. He continued to study her upturned features. It was a grim little face, in some ways. Again, he was reminded of the similarity between her protective reaction toward Artur, and his own reaction years before in that moment when, as Donal, he had heard of his uncle James's death. Perhaps his development since was an indication of the development to come in her. It was warming to think so.

He wished that there was some way that he could reach her with words, to tell her that the road she had been forced to follow so far need no longer be the way she must go. That he had followed one like it, himself-, and, even though he had accomplished all he had set out to do in that direction, it had not brought him to the end he wanted.

But he knew that, even now, though she might listen to and enjoy his singing, she would probably not listen if he tried to talk to her-she would probably not even stay close to him if he tried talking to her. If he could stay here at the Guild for a long enough time for her to grow into the ways of the Guild members, the day might come when she would listen. But he could not stay here, just for that, just for her, no matter how strongly in this moment he might want to reach her with the truth. There were larger tasks calling him away. But his progress with them might in some way be a pledge for hers, into the new human future.

From covert glances around him, he read puzzlement and some little consternation on the faces of some of the older Guild members there, listening to this story of iron and blood in this place where both by their heritage as Exotics and by their own choosing, they were committed to an attitude of nonviolence.

Just as it was with Cee, it was impossible to explain to them that the proliferating forces of history, conflicting, joining, altering each other's paths, had shown that the human race was not yet free of violence; that the laws, the authorities, the many ways that had tried in the past to end it, had overlooked the stark fact that it was something that must be dealt with inside each individual, herself or himself. And to deal with it, the individual had to understand it.

So he sang on, letting the verses of the ballad recount its version of that dark and bitter encounter between two armies of men; whose only excuse for fighting each other was that they wished to fight, in a place and at a time where neither land, nor anything else but who should win, was at stake.

He sang about how the Earl Douglas, son of the king of Scotland, having ravaged along the border, came at last to Newcastle, the home of Percy, the English Earl of Northumberland. It had been another Percy-called Hotspur-who had been immortalized as a character in one of the plays by Shakespeare.

At Newcastle, the Scottish force had been stopped. For all their numbers, they had had no way to take the fortification that the castle represented. But there was skirmishing just outside it . . .

. . .But 0 how pale his lady lookd,

Frae off the castle wa, When down before the Scottish spear She saw brave Percy Ja! . . .

. . .And some symbol-a pennon, a sword, something of symbolic value-was taken from the English to be carried back into Scotland as a trophy; something the Percy swore should not happen. So an appointment was made for the two forces to meet at Otterburn, some distance away in the Cheviot hills, where the Scots would wait for the English. . . .

. . .they lighted high on Otterburn,

Upon the bent so brown They lighted high on Otterburn, And threw their pallions down ...

And settled in for the night. But during the deepest hours of darkness, an alarm was sounded to the young Earl Douglas.

... but up then spake a little page,

Before the break of the dawn. '0 waken ye, waken ye, my good lord, For Percy's hard at hand!

'Ye lie, ye lie, ye loud liar, Sae loud I hear ye lie! The Percy hadna men yestereen To dight my men and me ...

There was a small noise during a second's pause of the guitar's ringing and Hal's voice. The door to the office was opened from the outside as someone came in. But, caught up in recalling the lines of the song, Hal did not look to see who it was. For the next verse was one that had rung, echoed and re-echoed down the years, not only in his own ears but those of many other writers and poets . . .

... but I have seen a dreary dream,

Beyond the isle of Skye; I saw a dead man won the fight, And I think that man was I-

He broke off abruptly; and the vibrations of the guitar strings faded away into the silence of the room. For the person who had entered stood cloaked and tall inside the doorway of the room, a darker black shape against the dimness there; and though he could not see its face, Hal knew who it was.

So also did Amanda, for she got up quickly, turning to face the door. Forgive me, Guildmaster, said Old Man, slipping around the figure to stand in front of it, but this visitor says he has come a long way to talk privately with Friend. Yes, said Amid, and the tone of his voice told Hal that he, too, had recognized the newcomer. I'm afraid we'll have to end the entertainment for the evening. I'd suggest the rest of you leave now. No reason for me to interrupt things, said the deep, compelling voice of Bleys Ahrens. I can wait. No, said Amid. If everyone else will please leave?

I'll stay, said Amanda. You might like to stay, too, Amid. I'd prefer to, said Amid. I have a responsibility to all that happens here. He looked at Hal. But I don't want to intrude?

There was a touch of humor in Bleys' voice as he threw back the hood of his cloak and stood, a head and shoulders above everyone standing around him. Everyone can stay, as far as I'm concerned.

But the Guild members were already moving out of the open door behind the tall man. Only Cee stayed where she was, ignoring Onete's beckoning. Cee's eyes on Bleys did not hold the implacable gaze she had turned on the Occupation forceleader and on Hal; but they held the steady look of a wild animal ready to attack if it was approached. Stay, Amid, said Hal, setting the guitar aside. Come in, Bleys. Sit down. Thank you.

He came over and settled himself in the chair directly opposite. He threw back the rest of his cloak, revealing himself in dark jacket, trousers and shirt, in every way unremarkable except for the personality with which he somehow invested these clothes. Amid was still at his desk.

Amanda had moved back, into the fire-thrown shadows over by the exit door. Standing there, she was nearly invisible to those nearer the flames. You can come and sit with us, Amanda ap Morgan, said Bleys. I'm not here to try to do any harm to Hal. He and I know that it'd make no difference to history if either or both of us died. The historical forces are in motion. We're only the aiming point of each side. Perhaps. Perhaps not, answered Amanda's voice. I'll stay here, thanks. It's all right, Amanda, Hal said with his eyes unmoving on Bleys, I don't think he'd try to kill me, here-even if he could. Come now, Bleys smiled, do you think that if I'd come, seriously intending to do away with you, I'd have come at all unless I was sure I could? If you were to try, said Amanda; and her voice had a curious, remote sound, almost an echo to it as if she spoke from a far distance, you'd never leave this room, yourself, Bleys Ahrens. It's really all right, Amanda, said Hal, still without taking his eyes off the man opposite. I'm safe. Perhaps now, if you say so, said Amanda. Five seconds from now, who knows? I'll stay here.

Bleys shrugged and concentrated on Hal. Surprised to see me? he asked. No, said Hal. Clearly, the pictures taken by that flyover were studied after all. Yes. You didn't really expect to leave the Final Encyclopedia for one of the Younger Worlds without my hearing about it eventually, did you? said Bleys. You can't shut off all traffic between the Final Encyclopedia and the surface of Old Earth; and no matter how reliable the people making the trip back and forth, information is going to travel with them. Information leaks; and the leakage reaches me, eventually; since we're always watching you there at Old Earth.

Amid got up from his chair and added a fresh couple of split logs to the fire, which flared up more brightly as the new fuel crashed down among the half-burned wood below it. With the gradual addition of other bodies to the room while Hal had been singing, the temperature had risen in the office; and then, when the door had been opened to let nearly all of them out, cooler air outside had swept in. There was a chill about them, now; and to Hal it felt even as if a breath of coldness had reached out to him from the folds of the cloak Bleys had just flung back.

Hal studied this man, leader of those who called themselves the Others, those who now controlled all that mattered of the Younger Worlds through their powers of persuasion -powers so effective as to seem almost supernatural, and which had set the people of those worlds to the task of conquering Earth.

He had met Bleys in person only at rare intervals in his own life, beginning with the time of the murder of his tutors and his own near capture by Bleys and his gunmen. The last time had been more than three years before, when Hal had first gathered nearly all the people of the Dorsai world, and the wealth and dge of the two Exotic ones, safely within the phaseshield Hal had caused the Final Encyclopedia's engineers to set up, enclosing and protecting it, and Earth.

But all those moments of confrontation were etched unforgettably in his memory-and he thought likely in Bleys' as well-for the two of them were oddly alike in many ways; and both had felt those likenesses, as though they might have been close friends if they had not been predestined foes.

So now, he noted the changes in the other man since their last meeting between the two walls of the tunnel opened in the phase-shield to let them meet. For either to have touched the milky whiteness of these walls, then, would have meant being drawn into it and destroyed, the touching body spread out evenly through the physical universe.

The impression of strength and burliness Hal had noticed for the first time then had developed even further in Bleys-even while in appearance Bleys' height and slimness were still the same. He had been almost elegant in that slimness, when Hal had first seen him, at the killing of Hal's tutors. He could not be called elegant now.

Instead, a force that was invisible, but very powerful, now radiated from him. It was strong enough that Hal could almost feel it, like the heat from the fire; and it challenged by its mere existence, challenged and attempted to dominate all those about Bleys.

For a long moment Hal was baffled at how such a thing could grow in the man he faced-and then he realized. Each time before that Hal had met Bleys, it had been obvious that the Other possessed great personal power. But the difference now was that he had taken a step further, the ultimate step. He no longer possessed nor controlled power. He was power.

Now most of the people of ten Younger Worlds looked and listened to him as if he was, in some way, superhuman. They did not merely obey his commands willingly. They rushed to follow the voice that would send them to die, if necessary, to destroy a Mother World they now believed had never given up an ancient desire to conquer and enslave them-an Old Earth, backed by the black magic of the Final Encyclopedia and ruled by the evil will of an arch-demon named Hal Mayne.

Hal reached for some compensating power within himself, but did not find it. He was not daunted by the strength now in Bleys, and he did not doubt that his mind, his will and imagination, was as strong as the Other's. But he could not feel a similar counterforce in himself. If it was there at all, it was as something entirely different, for all that he stood as Bleys' opposite number, the equal and countering chess piece on the board of History.

At the same time he was grateful that he had not met with Bleys, robed in power and certainty as he was, a couple of months ago when he, Hal, had been at his lowest ebb in the Final Encyclopedia. Or even, that they had not had this meeting before this morning's sudden explosion of understanding in Hal; the revelation that had come as the sun had risen above the mountains and the dewdrop burst into its explosion of light.

As it was, now he looked at Bleys from the viewpoint of eternity and found that which the other possessed to be infinitely small and transitory in that context. What brings you? Hal asked. You can't really be expecting any change of attitude on my part? Perhaps not. Warmth now flowed from Bleys instead of the push of personal power. He could charm, and he knew it; even though everyone in the office at the moment knew that all but a fraction of his abilities in that respect were composed of hypnotic and other techniques developed by those same Exotics Bleys was now trying to destroy. Perhaps not, he said again, but I've always believed you'd listen to reason; and I have an offer, one you might want to consider. Offer? Yes. Let me establish a little background first. One of your tutors, who I most wrongly and mistakenly allowed to be killed-you'll never have forgiven me for that-

Hal shook his head. No, he said, it's not a matter for forgiveness. I can see now why it happened. At the time though, their murder triggered off the way I'd felt about another, earlier death. So I wanted to destroy you, then; as I'd wanted to destroy whoever was responsible, in that earlier time. It wasn't until I had to live through that sort of loss a second time, with you, that I started to understand retaliation's not the answer. No, forgiveness is beside the point, now. Which changes nothing as far as you and I are concerned.

al had seen Bleys' eyes narrow ever so slightly at the mention of an earlier grief; and felt a touch of annoyance at possibly having betrayed himself to the Other's acute mind. No one could match Bleys in catching and pursuing an incautious slip. But then the annoyance evaporated. There was no way, even with Bleys' own self-developed equivalent of intuitional logic, that the man opposite him now could trace Hal back to the life of Donal Graeme. An earlier grief? echoed Bleys now, softly. As I say, it's beside the point now, answered Hal. What about my tutors? One was a Dorsai. He must have made sure you learned something about military history, as far back as civilization tells us anything about it?

Hal nodded. Did he ever mention a man who lived in the fourteenth century, one of the first military captains, condottiere as the Italians named them, named Sir John Hawkwood--

Hal jumped internally, though he kept his face calm. What sort of black magic in Bleys had made him bring up that, of all names? Then his thoughts calmed. Their minds of necessity ran on parallel tracks toward a mutual end. It was not as unlikely as it might seem that they should both have considered the same historical character in the same short span of time. It could mean nothing at all that Bleys had happened to mention him now. Moreover it was Bleys' way to go at things obliquely. He would hardly have brought up his main purpose in coming, this quickly. Best to wait and see what was behind the mentioning of that name. Oh, yes, said Hal. I'm not surprised, said Bleys. A sort of medieval Cletus Grahame, wasn't he? I suppose you could say that. Why? Hal said. There's a story about him-a bit of poisonous gossip, actually; only important really because it could be repeated and believed by some people who didn't know better, even after hundreds of years. I just wondered if you knew it-about two of his soldiers he was supposed to have found quarreling over a nun they had caught-

--and he cut her in half, then said something to the effect that now there was part for each of them? Hal nodded. Nes, I know that particular bit of false history. I can't understand it. Bleys' tone was close to musing. You'd think the sheer physical impossibilities involved would be enough to make anyone see through such a story. I suppose the reader is supposed to imagine that this man Hawkwood neatly divided the victim at the waist with one swipe of his sword, then delivered his single line of dialogue to the two soldiers and walked off, leaving them both stunned and deprived. None of those who repeated the story can have had the least experience with butchering animals for food. I had, as a half-grown boy on Harmony; and I boggle at the idea of hacking through that much flesh and backbone with one swipe of a fourteenth century broadsword. Even if the victim cooperated as much as possible by somehow miraculously keeping in place and on her feet until the operation was complete and the soldiers stood by with open mouths, it's humanly impossible. In real life it could have taken him minutes. More than a few minutes, said Hal, given the mild steel of the weapons of that time; and the probable lack of edge left on his sword after whatever fighting they'd all been in. Since it was only with the soldiers drunk and blood mad after taking a city or castle, that even the worst of them would have indulged themselves in such license. But that's the least of such an event happening in real life.

Bleys looked at him amusedly. The least? he asked. Yes, said Hal. The knowledge stored in the Final Encyclopedia was coming back to his mind. Hawkwood isn't called the first of the modern generals for no reason. He was the most businesslike of the early condottiere. He knew the people he fought against today might be the people he'd be fighting for tomorrow. So he made sure his men never ruffled the sensitivities of local civilians, except under the conditions of outright war. That was one of the reasons for his success; apart from the sensitivities other elements of his life show. He kept a strict discipline over his hired soldiers; and hanged any one of them caught infringing even minor local laws. But of course, said Bleys, as you say this must have happened during the sacking and looting of a just conquered city. in which case he wouldn't have been present at such an incident at all, said Hal. The memory of being Hawkwood as he walked in the circle had come to life again in his head. He was a man of the fourteenth century and a combat professional. His actions and letters don't show him as the type of man who'd do anything as ridiculous as what that story has him doing; any more than a present day Dorsai would slaughter or torture prisoners. I I

The dry note in Hal's voice had not been enough to hide the emotion underneath. To his annoyance once more with himself, he saw Bleys had been quick to hear it. Torture and slaughter were involved in that earlier grief of yours, you mentioned? No, said Hal.

Torture had had no part in the death of James. But evoked now by Bleys' acute question, the memory of Donal's older brother Mor, dead after torture at the hands of the deranged William of Ceta, had come inevitably back to mind. It was a memory he, Donal, should have foreseen arising out of any discussion with Bleys such as he was having now. He had been too deep in the wood to watch out for all the trees. He would never be able to escape the knowledge that he had been at least partly responsible for Mor's hideous death. In any case, he interrupted his own thoughts now, Hawkwood wouldn't have been there in the city at that time under any circumstances. Perhaps you'll tell me why not. Bleys smiled. As you know, my own military education is limited. I wouldn't have thought so, said Hal. But, if you want me to spell out what might have happened-after months of besieging a city, after inaction and boredom, living for weeks on end in the mud and stinks of their lines, with a shortage of food and drink from a surrounding countryside, scoured clean of supplies so that they were almost as starved as the people in the city, the attitudes of the besiegers became as savage as the attitudes of wild animals toward the besieged. One hour after the city was taken, the rank and file of soldiers conquering it would have been roaring drunk and blood mad, on whatever wine or other drink they had managed to loot. Yes. Bleys nodded. That sounds like the human animal I know. What was there to say that their commanders weren't equally drunk and mad among them? The fact that when it was all over, in a day or two, those commanders would need to lead these drunken madmen again, as sober and obedient soldiers, said Hal. But they waited until the drink was gone, the raping and looting was over, and the hangovers had taken charge, before they tried it. Raging wild in the conquered city, any of the troops, even the most loyal and trustworthy, were as likely to turn on their commander as sharks in a feeding frenzy. One of the earliest things a military leader learns, even today, is never give his subordinates an order they might not obey. So the medieval leaders stayed well outside wherever the looting and such was going on after a taking. They couldn't change what was going on in any case-

He broke off suddenly. So, he said. His eyes looked directly into Bleys'. It was a possible sacking of Earth you came to talk to me about. That's right, answered Bleys. Don't tell me you haven't thought of that possibility; once-as it's bound to, eventually -the number of ships we can put into an attack is such they can make a simultaneous jump through the shield and smother any resistance, even that of your Dorsai. This, too, is a siege; and the same sort of attitude we've been talking about is developing on my side of the phase wall.

He paused. I'm willing to do whatever's necessary to put the human race back where it belongs, on Old Earth, for a few thousand years until it's had time to mature properly, he said. But I don't like blood baths either; so I thought we should talk.

And he smiled at Hal.

CHAPTER

33

Hal sat looking at Bleys for a moment. The crew and officers on your spaceships on patrol outside the shield, he said, don't live in trenches or dugouts. They aren't sick, or starving. In fact, I'll venture to bet they eat better than their friends back on the home worlds they came from. If they're developing a siege mentality, perhaps it's because you've fed them full on the idea that the people living on Old Earth nowadays are something subhuman, that the Final Encyclopedia is an invention of the Devil, manned by devils, and I'm the chief devil of them all. It seems to me that an effort on your part put to taking those ideas out of their minds would also Prevent any chance of a blood bath. Probably, said Bleys quietly, but I'm not going to do that. And since I'm not-you'll admit you've considered the danger of such a blood bath?

Before Hal could answer, he went on. Forgive me. That was an insulting question. Of course, You've considered all the possibilities, just as I have. Speculations waste time, said Hal. You came here to make me some kind of offer. Make it. I'd like to call off the war, said Bleys. I'll be damned! Hal said. Will you indeed? answered Bleys. In that case, try to get word back to me what it's like. No one's ever been able to send any messages back so far; but you might just be able to do it.

Hal hardly heard him. He told himself no one but the Other man could have startled him to this extent. For a moment he even found himself wondering if he had been wrong all along and that Bleys was far superior even to him after all; that the Other could read minds and see around comers. How else could he explain this sudden offer that would concede defeat just as Hal was about to move closer than he ever had been to winning the contest between them? Unless Bleys had somehow sensed Hal's breakthrough of just that morning?

Amid moved a little, involuntarily, in his chair; but no sound came from Amanda, all but invisible in the shadows by the door; and Hal did not move. In the fireplace a burned through log broke and fell into two halves with a soft crash; and the flames shot up above it suddenly, sending shadows dancing on the wall beyond Hal and Bleys.

Hal pulled himself together. There was a price, of course -some impossible price. In return for what? demanded Hal bluntly. Well, you'll take down the phase-shield, of course, said Bleys. And we'd want to settle some of the Younger Worlds' people on presently unused areas of Old Earth. He sat back comfortably in his chair. There're tundra areas at both poles and sections of desert that Old Earth's ignored ever since its population stabilized, following the wave of immigration to the Younger Worlds nearly three hundred years ago. You see, I'm willing to leave the dispute between us, you and 1, to the verdict of future history, without any use of weapons. Are you? said Hal. You know better than to think I don't know what kind of Younger Worlds people you'd settle there. Their colonies would he enclaves, from which your colonists could work to convert as many as could be, of Earth's own people, to your way of thinking. The end result would be an Earth torn by a division of opinion-and ultimately a worldwide civil war-as much of a blood bath as the invasion you talk about. Why do you suppose I was instrumental in having the shield wall put up in the first place? Instrumental's hardly the word, said Bleys. The shield wall was all your doing. But think about it. There's no need, said Hal. Old Earth's awakened to its danger now. It's building ships and training crews for them, with Dorsai help, in greater numbers all the time; and potential ly it's still got more resources in materials, manufacturing and people than all the Younger Worlds combined. Let alone the fact it hasn't light-years of lines of communication to maintain support for its fighting ships. Yes, said Bleys, what you say's all true. Earth's building faster all the time-but I think not fast enough. I think the Younger Worlds have too much of a head start. We'll be ready to come through the wall before you're ready to hold us off, let alone drive us away.

He stopped talking. Hal had made no effort to interrupt him and continued to say nothing, now. You disagree, of course, said Bleys, or perhaps you don't. In any case, I've made the offer. You've no choice but to -consider it. And I've told you, answered Hal, what you know as well as I do. What would happen if Earth let you colonize like that.

Bleys nodded. But you know, he said, that while you and I may ride the winds of history, we're not just completely helpless passengers. Of course what you say is right. But the result of those colonies moving in doesn't have to be what you suggest. Perhaps you can let them in and still bend the winds to your advantage. It's possible. Possible, not probable. What you suggest is a road downhill to what you want. But for we who want something else, all roads would be uphill if I agreed. The alternative's invasion and the blood bath-very soon now. I I

It was true, thought Hal, even if the invasion Bleys talked of was not likely to come quite as soon as he implied. It was also true, unfortunately, that there was an element of truth in what Bleys offered. It was possible Old Earth could absorb the enclaves Bleys suggested, without war, and the future be settled that way.

But-Hal felt an echo of the same uneasiness he had told Bleys he had felt three years before when they had been face to face in the phase-shield. The feeling nagged at Hal that if Bleys got what he asked for, somehow the road to the Creative Universe that he now thought he saw so plainly before him would be blocked as surely as it would be by Tam's death, unless he found the entrance to it before then. Should Hal reject this now-that might be the answer for everyone now alive-in a gamble on what he might be able to do for them and all generations to come?

He knew which choice he wanted. Maybe you're right and it would work, he said to Bleys slowly, but I was never one for shaking hands with the Devil. I thought, Bleys said, you were the Devil, the Chief Devil? Only according to your doxology, said Hal. But in any case, Bleys smiled, what'll you tell Old Earth, when the people there learn they had a chance to be free of the phase-shield and the warships of the Younger Worlds, but you turned it down? That'll depend on whether you actually make such an offer officially and publicly, said Hal. He smiled back. There's nothing official about me, outside the Final Encyclopedia. You'd need to make your proposal formally from the United Younger Worlds to the Consortium of Old Earth governmentsand give them time to consider it. In the end, you may decide not to make the proposal, after all. Oh? said Bleys. He sounded genuinely intrigued. You think so? Why?

Hal kept his own smile. Wait and see, he said. The pattern of the historic forces changes constantly. You know that as well as I do. I do, indeed, said Bleys softly. He hesitated for a moment. I think you're bluffing. Try me and see, said Hal. Yes, Bleys nodded, I'll do that.

He had looked away from Hal and at the fire, musingly for a second. Now he looked back. Tell me, he said to Hal, the last time we met, why didn't you carry through? Why didn't you move to resolve what's between us two, at our last meeting? I'd expected that to be the moment of our confrontation. You'd undeniably stolen a march on me. You'd gotten all the people you valued and needed safely hidden behind that phase-shield you'd had built around Old Earth; before I could sweep them up, one by one, or group by group, from their native worlds. When I met you in the wall of the phase-shield, itself, we were at a moment in time when you had a definite advantage. Why didn't you push for a conclusion dien?

Hal remembered again how at that particular last meeting he had noticed how Bleys had become more physically powerful in appearance, how he had put on weight in the form of compact muscle. He and the Other had been about the same height since Hal had come into his growth-that had been the original height of Hal's uncles, Ian and Kensie. Bleys had always been an unusually tall man. But when Hal had first seen him, there had been none of the evidence of physical strength that was part of him now.

Now, Bleys had apparently deliberately built himself up to match Hal. It dawned on Hal that the Other man must have put in an incredible number of hours physically developing and training himself for every possible kind of hand-to-hand conflict, with or without weapons. This, because the extra strength by itself would be only a part of making himself a physical match. for Hal. Therefore he had, for his own reasons, been looking forward even at that meeting in the phase-shield wall, to possible conflict on that level with Hal.

But, even as he realized this, Hal also realized that what Bleys had tried was impossible. No adult could possibly train himself to the point of physically matching a Dorsai of comparable size, age, reflexes and ability, who had been trained from the cradle upward.

Only then did Hal remember, once more, that he now was no match for such a Dorsai either. All his physical training as Hal Mayne had been some of the tutoring from only one of his tutors, as a child of Old Earth; and even that had been a long time ago. He had tried to keep himself in shape since, helped by an active life at times, such as when he had been a miner on Coby, or a member of Rukh's Resistance band on Harmony; but that didn't make him a Dorsai. Recognition and realization took place in his mind in barely the time it took him to start answering. You come at an interesting time to ask me that, he answered. Maybe it isn't so surprising though. Many of the historic forces that move you parallel those that move me; and it's natural that we'd come together under coincidental conditions.

But you didn't answer my question, said Bleys, his eyes steady on Hal. That's why I say you come at an interesting time, said Hal. If I'd had to answer you then, there in the phase-shield, I wouldn't have been able to. All I knew then was that I noticed that you were ready for a showdown; and instinct told me to back off from it. I felt-you'd have to cal I it an uneasiness about accepting any try to settle things there and then. Now I understand why. What I'd realized unconsciously was,'as I told you then, that you couldn't win. But, as I later realized, if I agreed to the confrontation, then and there, neither could 1. I don't follow you, said Bleys. I mean I believe I would've won that contest, answered Hal. But either of us could have; and, I'll give you this, you might have won after all. We were at a point where, with one of us gone, the other would have had an advantage. Pressed home, that advantage might have given a seeming victory. Seeming, only? Bleys' voice was pleasantly curious. Yes, answered Hal. Seeming only; because we'd merely be once more repeating a cycle of time-worn history. I learned a long time ago that even having all possible power over all the worlds doesn't make you able to change human nature; and it's that that's been the point of argument between us from the beginning, whether the individual human's nature is going to be changed or not. If I'd won I'd have gained a victory; but it'd have been only a partial victory. As, if you'd won, you'd have had only a partial victory. And the problem with any partial victory for either of us was that final victory, the ultimate victory, would've been closed off from the survivor, forever; or at least until some later generation should create the confrontation once again; and in that future time be wiser in its decision. So I chose to leave things at stalemate so that I could try for the greater victory, in my own time.

As I do again now, he thought to himself. It's the same uneasiness, the same decision. Did you? said Bleys. And, do you see your way to it now?

Hal smiled. If I've found the answer, he said, it's there for everyone. Go find it for yourself.

Bleys looked at him for a long second. It was strange to see Bleys Ahrens pause like this. He must have done so only at very rare moments in his life. So, he said at last, not this time, either. But I think I'll do what you say and find whatever you say you've found, for myself. And I'll meet you at the end of the road, wherever that is. Look for me there when you reach it.

His voice softened suddenly. Stop the little girl, he said. But Amanda had already been in movement. Her hand closed now over Cee's just as Cee's fingers closed on the glass paperweight containing the miniature pine cone, on Amid's desk. Amanda pried it loose from Cee's grasp. Cee struggled, silently if fiercely, to hold on to it; but her strength was no match for an adult's. Amanda came away with the paperweight. We don't kill people, Amanda told her. Ever.

Cee's eyes held Amanda's and the small face was unreadable. She's decided you're dangerous, Amanda told Bleys. Don't ask me exactly why. Smelled it in you, possibly; and I can't really blame her. She's right.

She turned her attention on Cee again. But we don't kill people, she repeated to the girl. You don't kill people. Leave this man to those who know how to deal with him; like Friend, here.

Bleys was frowning at Cee. You don't actually mean, he said to Amanda, she's that dangerous? Yes. Amanda still held Cee unwaveringly with her gaze. Men sent here by you made her that way. Ask your four dead Occupation soldiers-if you can talk to ghosts. Well . . . said Bleys thoughtfully.

He stayed for a moment where he was, facing Hal. He rose, and Hal rose across from him. They stood close as brothers, two tall men under the close, dark ceiling of Amid's office. Well, I've made my offer. Bleys pulled his cloak closed again around him, and its dark folds swirled and flashed for a second in the firelight. I'll leave you with it. You might be kind enough to send someone with me to light me down the mountainside path, so I don't go in the wrong direction and fall off a cliff. From the upper side of that stone at the bottom that closes the path, he can easily roll it back into place alone. It's only opening it from below that's a hard job for one man.

He looked over at Amid. Don't worry, he said, I'll keep the secret of this place of yours, here, and any of the Occupation Army that's tempted to explore in this direction will find orders disapproving such a move after the pronounced nonsuccess of the late force-leader and his equally late groupman. You can go on living up here in peace. I I

He turned back to Hal. But they're lucky they had you with them. I didn't kill those soldiers, Hal said. So you're giving me to understand. Bleys' eyebrows raised. This child did it for you. I find that a little hard to believe. It's true, said Hal.

Bleys laughed. if you say so. You see, Hal said, you're making a mistake. Here, where you're standing, is the cradle of the new breed of Exotics. Exotics who'll be nowhere near as vulnerable to you as they've been in the past. If they can kill soldiers, perhaps you're right, said Bleys. But I'm not particularly worried. I don't think this place and its people have very long to survive, even without a hand being raised against them. Now, what about that guide to light me on my way? I

You must have rolled the entrance stone aside from below, said Amid suddenly. How could you do it, alone?

Bleys glanced at Hal. How about you? he asked. Are you surprised, too? No, you wouldn't be, would you? You could do it yourself. You know that there're ways of concentrating your strength. Have been ever since the first caveman lifted a fallen tree he shouldn't have been able to move, off a hunting companion in a moment of frenzy he didn't think he had in him. But you might not have thought of me before now as being equal to you, physically. I am, though. I think, in fact, we're just about equal in nearly all respects; though that's something neither of us will be able to check. If there is, it'll show at the end, said Hal. Yes, said Bleys, more quietly than he had spoken until this moment, at the end. Where's that guide?

I have called for Onete to get someone, said Amid. Here she comes now.

In fact, the door was opening, and Onete came in through it, followed by Old Man, carrying a powerful fueled lamp, already lit. ,,Then too, said Bleys thoughtfully, looking at the slim, white-bearded man waiting by the open door, there might be those about whom there could be a legitimate doubt if they could roll the stone back alone, even from the top side.

Old Man's eyes twinkled back at him. Then, perhaps not, said Bleys, striding toward the door. Lead on, my guide. Old Man stood aside to let the Other pass through the door first; then went out himself, closing it behind him. Amanda came forward to the fireplace so that she was together with the seated Amid and the still standing Hal. You frightened me, said Amid to Hal, when you told him that this ledge was the cradle of the new breed of Exotics; and right after he'd promised to keep our being here a secret! Do you think he was telling the truth about leaving us in peace? Bleys feels himself above ever having to lie, answered Hal. But I'm sorry you were frightened. I wasn't just being thoughtless enough to raise a doubt in his mind; I was actually confirming his original notion you were harmless.

Amid's already wrinkled brow wrinkled more deeply in a frown. I don't understand, he said. He's a fanatic, said Amanda. You know his background, surely? You Exotics must have looked into his background. His mother was one of your people.

Amid nodded. It's true she was an Exotic, said Amid. But she turned away from us. If we were a religious people, you might have said she was an apostate. She was brilliant, and knew it, said Amanda. But not brilliant enough to gain control of all the Younger Worlds, the way Donal Graeme effectively did, back in his time; and fate had caused her to be born into the one Splinter Culture whose people were best equipped to resist manipulation by her. Yes, said Amid, with a sigh, at any rate she left us and went to Ceta.

Yes, said Amanda, and it was on Ceta, later on, Bleys was born. He's never known who his father was. Actually he was from Harmony. An unhappy older man she seduced merely to see how easily she could do it. But I think she really wanted to believe she was the only one responsible for Bleys; because almost from the day he was born it was plain he had everything in the way of abilities that his mother had liked to think she had herself, but hadn't. So she started cramming him full of knowledge from the time he was old enough to talk; and he was well on his way to being what he is now at only nine years of age, when she suddenly died. Possibly he was responsible for that. He could have been. She'd left directions that if anything happened to her he was to go to his uncle on Harmony. Do you know that part of his history? Not all of it, said Amid. When we looked into Bleys' background, years later, we found out about his mother. She had no Friendly genes in either the maternal or paternal lines of her ancestry. But the man-the Friendly on Harmony he was sent to grow up with-couldn't have been Bleys' uncle! A cousin, a number of times removed, at most. Well, she called him an uncle and the boy was taught to call him 'uncle.' In any case he was a farmer with a large family; and a fanatic, rather than a true faith-holder. He raised all his children to be fanatics like himself. Some of what Bleys is he caught from that man. Though I don't suppose it was more than a week or two after he got there that the nine-year-old Bleys was controlling that whole family, whether they knew it or not. He

t lled them; but his 'uncle,' or all of them, infected him with their fanaticism all the same.

I 'It's not easy to tell the difference between a fanatic and what you call a true faith-holder-particularly when you call them so, Hal, said Amid, looking from Amanda to him. I'd hate to think we simply use the word fanatic for anyone whose views we disagree with. There's almost no difference in any case, answered Hal, between a fanatic and someone of pure faith, though what difference there is makes all the difference, once you get to know them. Basically, they differ in the fact a faith-holder puts himself below his faith and lets it guide his actions. The fanatic puts himself above it and uses it as an excuse for his actions. Butical purposes, the two are almost identical. The fanatic pract 'I die for what he believes in as readily as a man or woman of

Ili= came back to him a memory of a man who had been a

1@natic and tortured Rukh Tamani close to death; but who now wrved her among the most loyal of her followers and was a Jaith-holder. Amyth Barbage had been ari officer of the Militia ftt harried and tried to destroy such Resistance Groups as Rukh's on both Harmony and its sister Friendly world of Association.

He and James Child-of-God, Rukh's second-in-command of the Resistance Group, would have seemed, to anyone who did not know them intimately, to have been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Both men were harsh and uncompromising both in attitude and appearance-except that Child-of-God was old enough to be Barbage's father. Both spoke an archaic, 'canting' version of Basic, full of thee's and thou's. Both put what they thought of as their faith before all other things. But Barbage had been a fanatic.

James Child-of-God had been a true faith-holder. He had spent his life fighting against the Militia that the Others had found so useful and put to their own purposes; and he died, alone, behind a small barricade in the rain, deliberately giving his life to slow up the Militia companies that were close on the @,heels of what had by then become a sick and exhausted Resistance Group, driven by the relentless pursuit of a Barbage who had unlimited troops and supplies at his disposal.

To this day, Hal could not remember lightly his final moments alone with Child-of-God, before he had left the old inan to his final battle in the rain with the foe he had opposed so long. Always the memory tightened Hal's throat painfully. On the other hand, the memory of Barbage that had just come to mind was of an entirely different nature, but showed the same kind of utter dedication to a purpose.

This other memory was of a somewhat earlier time when the Group was being closely pursued through a territory of dense Woods by Barbage and the Militia Companies stationed in one of the local Districts through which the Group had been fleeing; and Hal, because of his training as a boy under a Dorsai, had been the best choice to try and slip back quietly to spy on their pursuers. He had silently backtracked and come upon the pursuing companies, temporarily halted for a meeting of their officers. He had worked his way close enough to hear them, co ing within earshot at a point where the superior officer of the Companies had gotten himself into a confrontation with the knife-lean, relentless-eyed Barbage, who had apparently been sent out from Militia Headquarters and made into what he was by Bleys' direct personal influence. The scene was suddenly there, now, as he thought of it, in his mind's eye. . @ .

I.. . . yes, I say it to thee, Amyth Barbage had been sayt .ng in his hard tenor voice to the Commandant of the Militia, who was a Captain, as Barbage was himsetf. Hal moved closer behind a small screen of slim variform willows. Barbage was on his feet. The other, junior, officers of the Militia had all been sitting with the Captain himself in a row on a fallen log, between the two men, with the other Captain seated at thefar end of their line. I have been given a commission by authority far above thee, and beyond that by the Great Teacher, Bleys Ahrens himself; and if I say to thee, go-thou wilt go!

The other Captain had looked upward and across at Barbage with a tightly closed jaw. He was a man perhaps five years younger than Barbage, no more than midway into his thirties; but his face was square and heavy with oncoming middle age, and his neck was thick. I've seen your orders, he said. His voice was not hoarse, but thick in his throat-a parade-ground voice. They don't say anything about pursuing over district borders. Thou toy man! said Barbage; and his voice was harsh with contempt. What is it to me how such as thou read orders? I know the will of those who sent me; and I order thee, that thou pursuest how and where I tell thee to pursue!

The other captain had risen from the log, his face gone pale with anger. The sun glinted on theforward-facing oval end of the butt of the power pistol sheltered under the snapped down weather flap of the holster at his belt. Barbage wore no pistol. You may have orders! he said, even more thickly. But you don't outrank me and there's nothing that says I have to take that sort of language from you. So watch what you say or pick yoursetf a weapon-I don't care either way.

Barbage's thin upper lip curled slightly. @W

eapon? What Baal's pride is this to think that in the Lord's *wrk thou mightest be worthy of affront? Unlike thee, I have no JVch playthings as weapons. Only tools which the Lord has made amilable to my hand as I have needed them. So, thou hast called a weapon, then? No doubt that which I see on mething yhou didst not like y side, there. Make use of it, therefore, since th dw name I gave thee!

The Captain flushed. You're unarmed, he said shortly. Oh, let that not stop thee, said Barbage ironically. For the servants of the Lord, tools are ever ready to hand.

He made one long step while the other man stared at him, to end standing beside the most junior of the officers sitting on the log. He laid his hand on the snapped-down weatherflap of the young officer's power pistol and flicked the flap up with his thumbnail. His hand curled around the suddenly exposed butt of the power pistol beneath. A twist of the wrist would be all that would be needed to bring the gun out of its breakaway holster andflre it; while the other Captain would have needed to reach for and uncover his own pistol first before he could fire.

From the far end of the log the Captain stared, his heavy face suddenly even more pale and mouth open foolishly. I meant . . . I IThe words stumbled on his tongue. Not like this. A proper meeting, with seconds-'' Alas, said Barbage, such games are unfamiliar to me. So I will kill thee now to decide whether we continue or turn back from our pursuit, since thou hast not chosen to obey my orders-unless thou shouldst kill me first to prove thy right to do

4s thou wishest. That is how thou wouldst do things, with thy weapons, and thy meetings and thy seconds, is it not9

He paused, but the other did not answer. Very well then, said Barbage. He drew the power pistol from the holster of the junior officer and leveled it at his equal in rank. In the Lord's name-, broke out the other man hoarsely. Have it any way you want. We'll go on then, over the border! I am happy to hear thee decide so, said Barbage. He replaced the pistol in the holsterfrom which he had withdrawn it and stepped awayfrom the young officer who owned it. We will continue until we make contact with the pursuit unit sent outfroon the neq District, at which time I willjoin them and thou, with thy

0 officers and men, mayest go back to thy small games in town. i That should be soon. When are the troopsfrom the next District to meet us? . . .

The fact that the goal he works for is wrong won't slow Bleys down, Hal said now to Amid. He'll do what's necessary to accomplish what he wants; just as I will. It's not the goal, but his belief that's important; and that's as strong as if his faith was as right as anyone's ever was.

Amid nodded slowly. I see, he said. But the fact that he's found me here changes things for me, personally, went on Hal. I'm afraid I'd better be getting back to Earth and the Final Encyclopedia pretty soon, now. Not just pretty soon, said Amanda. Immediately. Now.

Hal turned to her. You've been here all this time and you're only saying it now? he demanded. She's only saying it to you, Amid said. She told me the minute she arrived, but you were down in the forest busy rescuing Artur and Cee at the time. Since you've come back, you were first, dead for sleep, then sometime early this morning you seem to have had a revelation or discovery of some kind-and none of us wanted to disturb you until you were ready to be disturbed. What had touched you may have been too important for the future of all of us to be damaged by intrusion.

Hal sighed, and nodded. Yes, he said. Actually, the fault's mine. I should have asked Amanda for news, the minute I saw her, last night. You were in no shape-last night, said Amanda, to ask, or hear.

He smiled a little. Perhaps, he said. What happened to me at sunrise this morning might have been blocked off by whatever news you've brought that makes it necessary I go back immediately. But I don't think so. I was deaf and dumb with tiredness, though; I'll gmnt you that. At any rate, now that sunrise and Bleys are both p4st-what is it? It's for your ears only, said Amanda, all I've told Amid was that you'd have to leave right away. Actually, that's all you ought to need to know yourself, to get moving. I'll tell you as we

go-

They were well down into the forest and headed away from the direction that would have taken them back to the town of Porphyry and still Amanda had not brought up what she had promised to tell him as they went, whatever it was that was for his ears only. No doubt, said Hal, at length, you had a good reason for not letting me know up there why I had to leave in a hurry; but we're well away, now, and I'd still like to hear.

I'll m sorry. She was walking along, staring at the ground ahead of them a little ways off, and he realized she was frowning. The fact is, I could have let you know long before this. But I've had my head full of the problems involved. Bad news of some kind? asked Hal. Yes, but . . . Amanda hesitated, then her voice picked up briskly. In a word, Tam's sent you a message.

Hal stopped. She stopped also and they turned to face each other. A message? Hal repeated. He's hardly got the strength-

s one word, only, said Amanda. The word is 'tired.' Hal nodded slowly. I see, he said softly. He turned and began walking on again automatically in the direction they had already been headed. Amanda went with him.

Yes, she answered. He said it to Rukh at a moment when she was alone with him. Ajela had been called out of his quarters for a second. He knew Rukh would understand and --pass on the word to me; and I'd get it to you.

Hal nodded. It was bound to be, he said, on a long exhalation of breath. -14e held on as long as he could-for my sake. There's still nothing wrong with him physically? You needn't ask that, said Amanda. Medical science using the Final Encyclopedia could keep his body from ever breaking down. It's his mind that's had too many years. That's-- I know, said Hal, there's more to living than a body that'll go on forever. He's weary of life itself. But he's been holding on . . . Rukh thinks, and I'm sure she's right, said Amanda, that he sent the message because he can't last much longer; though no doubt he's going to try until you get back to see him one more time. If he'd had the life energy for just a few more words she's sure that's what he would have said.

Hal nodded. Yes, he would have, he said. How'd the word reach you? Rukh sent a courier ship to orbit at a distance around this world until it could contact us. Its driver knew approximately how far off-surface Simon's ship would be orbiting, waiting for us. He found Simon, told him, and Simon signaled me. I've got a system of signals that involves things like you saw our first day here after Simon dropped us off-the white cloth I spread out on the tops of bushes where his viewer could spot it from orbit. In this case, Simon sent down a small capsule under power with the message to a spot which he knew I check regularly for word from him. I signaled back. We'll be at a point where he can pick us up in just a few minutes-he'll be tracking us right now from orbit. Good. Hal nodded. And he should have us back to Earth in a couple of days, ship time. Or less, said Amanda. We'll make it in as few shifts as possible-shave right down the probability line of enough error

to lose us among the stars on the way there-unless you've got Some reason not to.

Hal lifted his head and squared his shoulders. Well, at any rate, I've got something to tell Tam, when I see him. He paused, then went on, I might still be able to give him what he wants, in time; enough for him to let go with an easy conscience. You see why I didn't dare break the news to you, even in front of Amid? To too many people, on too many worlds, Tam Olyn's a symbol of hope even bigger than the conflict between you and Bleys. It's not a personal conflict, said Hal gently. I know. Forgive me, she said. I put it badly. But there're too many people who may start to lose the one hope they've hung on to, ever since the Others took over completely on the Younger Worlds. Even there-Bleys' propaganda about you and everything else hasn't been able to shake their hope in Tam. If they think he's close to being gone, now, with nothing found, the heart could go out of a lot of them. That could have been a reason behind Bleys' offer, just now. As long as Tam was still alive, they could hope for a miracle that'd set everything right. They can still hope for one, said Hal. But who's to convince them of that? said Amanda. Bleys has done too good a job of blackening your reputation for them to believe in your word alone; and there's no one else of comparable stature. There's Ajela. Who really thinks much, or even knows much of her, outside of Earth? asked Amanda. Besides, she's the second problem, not the solution-here we are.

They had reached a natural opening in the forest, something that on another world, with a different sort of groundcover from the creeping ground vines of Mara at this altitude, would have been called a meadow. Simon should be here inside an hour-maybe even in minutes, now, she said.

She stopped at the edge of the open area and Hal stopped with her. He studied her face in profile. Why did you say 'the second problern'T' he asked.

She turned to face him. Tam's going to die, Amanda said. Don't you realize what that means in the case of Ajela?

Oh, said Hal, of course. More 'of course' than I think you realize, said Amanda. ..,.O'With Tam's death Ajela's going to collapse; and as things @,stand she's the working executive head of Earth. Who's to fill in for her until she can take control again, and how can we handle things while keeping Tam's death a secret? You're right, Hal answered. I thought about that a little while I was up on the ledge. You've had your own search to occupy you. But now, I think maybe you should set that aside for a moment. Hal, you know everybody's done all each one of them could, to leave you free to search for the answer you were the only one able to find-- Including you taking yourself off to risk your life daily on worlds the Others held in the palms of their hands, just to keep yourself out of my reach? Not just to keep myself out of your reach, she said swiftly. This work I do is too badly needed to be taken on as just an excuse. But at the same time, your search is something you have to do on your own. We all know that. If I was around, I'd be a distraction to you, whether you wanted me to be or not.

Their eyes met. I'm one of Time's soldiers, too, Hal, she said, and it was my duty to be elsewhere. And what if it's to be we never have time for ourselves? Hal asked softly. You asked me that before. We will, she answered. Her eyes still held his steadily. We will. I promise you.

An unreasonable happiness leaped up in him; but just at that moment the air quivered about them like soundless thunder, felt not heard, and they both looked up. A dot was flashing down out of the sky toward them in jumps, growing with each jump more into a visible shape, and nearer. It was Simon Graeme doing what the Dorsai did as a matter of course, but few pilots from Other worlds would risk-phase-shifting down to almost the very surface of a world, so as to avoid any but the briefest sound of a ship coming through the atmosphere to a landing. We'll talk more-later, said Hal hastily. Yes, we will, she answered; as with a sudden brief explosion of displaced air and atmospheric motors, the courier ship landed in the open area less than fifty meters from where they stood.

They went forward, but the entry port swung open before they had reached it and Simon looked out. He gripped Hal's hand briefly as they came aboard, and punched the key that closed the port behind them. We'll have to move fast, he said. There're more Younger World ships in orbit than I've seen here before; and that courier from Earth coming out to contact me was noticed. Find your seats, strap in, and we'll lose ourselves outside Procyon's orbit as soon as possible . . . ...

It was almost two days, after all, before they reached safely through the phase-shield and landed inside the Final Encyclopedia. Simon and Amanda had taken turns driving the ship, so that the next shift to be calculated was always being worked on even as they were making the current jump. So abrupt had been their departure that they had left with nothing but the clothes they had on-in Hal's case, some gray trousers and a light blue shirt that had been made for him at the Chantry Guild. In Amanda's case, they were her standard bush clothes for travel out of sight of the local military: boots, trousers and jacket, both of khaki twill, the shirt with a number of pockets.

Rukh, who was waiting for them in the docking area at the entrance to an access corridor as they stepped out of the parked ship, showed no interest in how they were dressed. She herself was looking unusually, almost ominously formal, in a long black skirt and high-collared white blouse, with her usual lone adornment the steel neckchain with its pendant granite disk incised with a cross, showing in the collar's short opening, in front. Hal! she said.

She hugged him. There was still a remarkable strength in her thin arms. She had seemed made of monocellular cord and steel when he had first known her as a commander of her Resistance Group on Harmony. Now, she felt so light as to be almost weightless in his arms; but he thought now that there was part of that original strength, which had survived the attrition of the days and nights of torture in the Militia cell; and the glow of her faith, which never failed to seem to set her aglow from within. For a second, holding her, he thought he touched the reason she had been so easily able to accept Barbage, her former torturer, as now one of her most dedicated followers. It was not as if she had merely forgiven him. It was something greater than that. It o understand how he could have ks if her faith allowed her t what he was then, and yet suddenly become what he was rgiveness on her side, or So that there was no need for fo '_ iimd to ask for it, on his. But she was striding ahead of them now, drawing away from

Amanda's were so Am in spite of the fact that his legs and longer than hers. urry! she said. We've got his quarters right next to the area, expecting you. rideed, it was only some thirty meters down the silent, .'gwen-carpeted hallway between the dark-paneled walls to the tingle door at the corridor's end; and she led them through into ',_,the rooms of Tam Olyn. The mechanical magic, which could shift areas around within its shell, at will, had brought Tam as dm to their arrival point as possible.

They stepped into the familiar main room, which had been designed long since at Tam's order to look like a woodland glade on Old Earth, the trees barring sight of the walls surrounding giving the illusion of the outdoors on the world below-an illusion reinforced by the small stream wandering down the Center of it, among the massively overstuffed easy chairs that --mere scattered around what seemed to be the grass of a tiny ineadow. Two people were already there. One was Ajela. She was seated, holding one of Tam's veined hands in both of hers, as he occupied the chair opposite.

Tam sat with the utter motionlessness of extreme old age. He was dressed as if for the day's work, in a business suit of the sort he had worn all his life. If the heavy cloak, red and white on one

side and with a dark inner lining, of an interplanetary journalist had been added, there would have been no difference in his dress 'now from the time when he had been just such a newsman, with no plan to ever set foot in the Final Encyclopedia again, after his single early visit to it. Like Hal, he had needed to leave the Encyclopedia in order to find it again. But it had been over a century now since he had been the young man who had made that single visit, at his sister's insistence, and heard the voices as Hal and Mark Torre had done.

Only they three had heard, as they passed through the centerpoint of the globe that was the Encyclopedia; but in the case of each of them, that hearing had changed their lives.

Now Tam sat waiting, holding on to life that had become a burden rather than a pleasure, trying to endure just enough longer for Hal to reach him-and now Hal was here. For the Encyclopedia's sake, he waited for Hal. For Ajela's sake, he would wait as long as he could.

It was Ajela that caught Hal's eyes now. Physically, she had not changed since he had seen her last, but what Tam's steady and obvious weakening was doing to her was made clear in her dress. Whatever the Final Encyclopedia had automatically laid out for her to wear this day, in the program she had set up in it long since to save her time in dressing, as she had come to save time whenever possible, could not have been what she was now wearing. Her choice had clearly been dictated by an unconscious desire to rouse the dying man through his male instincts, if nothing else.

She had chosen to put on a sari-like garment that wound tightly around her waist and hips. It was a hot pink, with yellow flowers imprinted over the base color. Above the sari there was a space of bare midriff, and above that a small, short-sleeved, tight blouse of the same material; while on her arms were multiple slim bracelets and in her ears earrings made of multiple small chained pieces-all these ornaments of bronze-which chimed and jingled at her slightest movement.

But the sari was carelessly draped; and the sound of the bracelets and earrings were lonely in the room as she turned to look, with a shadow of desperate appeal on her face, at Hal and Amanda as they entered.

Clearly, on his part, Tam did not see them enter. Plainly he saw Ajela beside him, but equally plainly he no longer noticed what she wore. His eyes were fixed on something among the trees, or upon his own dreams, or perhaps upon nothing at all. It was not until Hal had walked up to stand almost before his chair, and knelt on both knees, so their faces should be on a level, that recognition came.

Even then, it came slowly; as if it was a great labor for Tam to rouse himself to what he saw before him. But it dawned in his eyes at last and the hint of a smile liftcd the corners of his mouth. His lips parted and moved, but whatever he meant to say was not voiced loudly enough for Hal, or any of the others, to hear it.

Hal reached out and took Tam's free hand between his own two, so that he held it as Ajela was holding the other one.

I'm here, Tam, he said softly. I'm back; and I've found now. Can you hold on just somethiinig I needed. The way's clear _@a matter of hours more) It won't be long. Not long at all. Is small smile saddened. Barely perceptible, but with Tam enough to see, his head moved twice, a few centimeters from side to side. I know, Tam, said Hal I'm not trying to hold you here. I'll only try to work very fast, just in case you're still with us when I reach what we've been after all this time. But it's a solid promise now. The way's clear. The end is in sight. The Final Encyclopedia's at last going to be what Mark dreamed of; what you dreamed of, and 1, too. Maybe it'll happen fast enough-

He broke off as the old head before him made the same minuscule side to side movement. Tam's hand stirred slightly between his two palms; and he was puzzled for a second before he realized the other was trying to return a pressure to his touch.

Once more Tam's lips moved. But this time the ghost of a voice came from them. Hal . . .

But the faint exhalation of breath died, the heavy eyelids wavered and closed. Tam was utterly motionless and the moment of his stillness stretched out and out. . . . Tam! cried Ajela suddenly; and both Rukh and Amanda moved in on the chair where Tam sat. But Tam's heavy eyelids fluttered briefly and rose. For a second he focused on Ajela; and that small attempt at a smile once more turned up the corners of his lips for her.

Hal rose and moved back out of the way, as Ajela slipped forward onto her knees where he had been, threw her arms around Tam and buried her face against the ancient body.

Rukh bent over the gold-haired, kneeling figure. Hal felt a touch on his elbow and looked to see Amanda's eyes meaningfully upon his. He turned and followed her out of the door by which they had just come in. As the door closed behind them, he turned back to face her and they stood, looking at each other. What can I do? said Hal. is there anything I can do at all for her? Not directly, said Amanda. Leave her to Rukh and me. Both of us have been through this sort of experience in our own lives. For me, it was Ian, when I was still young. For Rukh it was James Child-of-God. We can help her. You can't, except by getting on with your own work. Which is what I intend starting immediately, he said. With luck, I can still achieve something before-

He broke off. Rukh had just come through the door and joined them,

11 How is she? Hal asked. She's best left alone with him for now, said Rukh. Later it'll be a matter of getting her away from him to rest for a while. Let's go to her office to talk.

With another brief use made of the Final Encyclopedia's magic, and another short walk down the corridor, they entered the office. It was, like the office of any of the others from Tam on down who worked with the Encyclopedia, merely one room of the personal living space of each within the massive structure that was the TFE. But illusion made the space chosen appear as large as was wished and hid all doors to more rooms beyond, to all but those who knew the quarters intimately.

Sol as with Tam's forest glade, Ajela's working space was a reflection of her own individual identity. As his did, hers had water; but not a stream. Where Ajela worked was a round, shallow pool in which brightly colored fish lazily swam. There was indeed a desk beside the pool but the floor space about it was furnished in lounge fashion; except that the chairs, like the desk, were floats, instead of solidly floor-standing, oldfashioned furniture.

However, the largest difference between the two personalized rooms lay in their general concept. Tam's was a slice of Old Earth. Ajela's was a nostalgic reconstruction of part of a typical Exotic countryside residence; one of those artfully constructed dwellings in which it was possible to move from indoors to outside without having realized it, so well were the two environments integrated in the design and furnishings.

The inside surface of the wall through which Hal, Amanda and Rukh now entered was simple wood paneling. But where the wall connecting to it at an angle on their right would normally be was the seeming of a vertical face of roughly cut, warm brown granite. The wall to their left seemed a trellis overgrown with vine from which hundreds of varicolored sweetpea blossoms looked inward at them. While the wall that should have iven opposite the one through which they had entered appeared not to exist. Instead, they looked out on a vista of green treetops in a bowl-shaped valley lifting in the distance to bluish mountains wreathed in soft tendrils of moving white mist. Let's take the desk, said Rukh. She stepped ahead, leading the way, and went forward and around to seat herself behind the desk. It was a piece of office furniture that could be expanded both lengthwise and in width to make a conference table seating up to fifteen people; but at the moment it was down to its minimal size of a meter in width and two in length. Rukh sat down behind it, in a float near one end, and Amanda and Hal moved, respectively, to the end itself and the front of the desk directly opposite Rukh. Two nearby floats, their sensory mechanisms triggered by the heat of the bodies close to them, moved forward to be used; and Hal and Amanda sat down.

Hal looked at the desk. Its present state was the one thing in the room that did not resonate of Ajela. In all the time Hal had been in tfie Final Encyclopedia, he had seen its surface in either one of only two states. Either it was completely bare and clean, except for a stylus next to the screen inset in the desktop where Ajela usually sat; or it was high-piled and adrift with the flotsam of hard copies of official papers, correspondence, contracts and the like.

Now, it was in neither state. It held a number of hard copies, but they were neatly stacked in orderly piles. Hal looked at these as the desk top opened before both Amanda and himself to make available to each of them a screen and stylus like that now in front of Rukh.

The neatly stacked papers were not the product of Ajela's hands. The desk showed the touch of Rukh. Hal raised his eyes to her. Have you taken over here for her completely, then? he asked. I'm afraid so, said Rukh. It's not official, of course. @jela's authority comes from Tam-I should say, from you, since Tam named you Director, only you've never used the authority. She has. But aside from the fact she's got no right to pass it to someone else while you're alive, we daren't let word get out to Earth or anywhere else that she's not, effectively, at the helm. There're a handful of inner circle secretaries that know, but they keep it to themselves. Not even most of the Encyclopedia personnel realize how much she's out of the picture most of the time. You'd think they'd guess something like that was going on, with Tam as close to the end as he is, said Amanda. They do, said Rukh. They're just loyal enough not to ask embarrassing questions. But Hal-- Her brown eyes leveled on his. They'll feel better now you're back. I never did run things here, said Hal. No, but they know Tam looked on you to finally succeed him, and in fact you were already made Director years ago, when the shield went up. They'll feet better with you actually in the Encyclopedia. How are you managing on your own? Amanda asked Rukh.

The brown eyes moved to meet the turquoise ones. It's all decision-making, said Rukh. The internal problems I turn over to the heads of departments. In special cases, I go to Ajela if I have to. The rest of it, particularly the problems coming up to her from Earth, are usually just a matter of common sense or mediating between two unreasonable points of view In fact, nearly everything that comes up here for decision from the surface is something that could and should have been handled by the people down there. They did, in fact, until they woke up to the fact that we were in a war and the Encyclopedia was the one their defenders were contracted to. Not that I make any military decisions. I leave that up to the Dorsai. But Hal, she turned back to him, these things aren't imp rtant. Tam is. Is there anything, anything at all, you can do for him and Ajela before he has to let go completely? In spite of what you may think by what you saw in there, he'll fight it out to the last minute. It's the way he's made. If there's the slightest chance of you discovering anything, or doing something that would make him feel he was free to go . . . I have found something, said Hal, and I'm going to try to do something. Is Jeamus Walters still with us?

Rukh smiled. Does it seem that you've been gone that long, Hal? Rukh smiled. Right now you ought to find him in his office. Shall I call and find out?

She picked up the stylus.

No. Never mind. I'm going there anyway, said Hal. I'll you both later. He was getting up as he spoke and was already turned toward door. Call on me if you need me, said Amanda. -On all of us, for anything, said Rukh. I will, said Hal, already at the door. He went out. kamus Walters was in his office, as Rukh had guessed. It was typical of the man that his work place sported no illusions wh Iatsoever. Its bare metal walls were completely covered with L shelves holding hard copies of designs and schematic drawings.

His desk threatened to outdo Ajela's at its worst with an overload of hard copies. Jeamus lived for work and work was all ,he lived for. He had been that way, as far as Hal knew, from long before he had become Research Director of the Encyclopedia; and apparently that was the way he always would be.

Now, Hal, who had hardly seen the man in the preceding three years, during which he had been caught up entirely in his own search and work, looked at him clearly for the first time in a long while, and saw changes in him, small but unmistakable.

There was a little less hair with more gray in it, in the circlet that surrounded all but the front part of his skull like an uncompleted wreath. His square mechanic's body and blunt mechanic's hands were the same as ever; his face showed no real signs of aging, but there was a faintly dusty air about him, as if he was a mechanism that had been left unused for some time. He, got to his feet with a sudden start as Hal entered after giving his name to the door annunciator. Hal! he said. His hard, square palm and fingers enclosed Hal's. They made up a smaller hand than the one Hal enclosed them with, but they were hardly less strong. How are you? Is there something we can do for you? Yes, said Hal, there is. I'm up against a time limit, Jeamus-you can guess why. I need something you can build without too much trouble-I think. But I don't want you to boggle at my plans for using it, so I won't tell you those, if you don't mind.

CHAPTER

35

Jeamus frowned at him and hesitated for just a moment. If you say so, he said; then, his frown clearing, everyone knows Tam expected you to take over as Director whenever you felt you were ready. It's just that I've gotten used to taking orders from Ajela- And Rukh.

Jeamus glanced at the door, which was slightly open. It was close enough in the little office, so that he could reach out without getting up. He pushed it closed; and it swung back against the jamb but did not latch. And Rukh, of course, he said, lowering his voice, though most, even here, don't know that. What I was going to say was that I've gotten used to taking orders from both of them; and if you say you think I might boggle at your plans, it makes me think that it's very likely either one of them would boggle, too. They would, said Hal. That's why you have to do this for me without telling them anything about it.

Mentally, he added Amanda to the list of those who might not like what he wanted to do, then backed off a bit from that thought. Amanda's perception was remarkable enough that she would be the most likely of the three women to take him on faith.

Jeamus was distractedly ruffling what hair remained of him.

This is a little uncomfortable for me, he said. Technicalyou're in control here and should be able to order anything . but Ajela has been in charge so long, and in control-it's

to think of not telling her-particularly about something might not think was a good idea. At the same time I hate to -bother her right now . . . ...

He sat for a moment, frowning and ruffling his hair. Hal sat in silence, patiently waiting. All right, Jeamus said at last. You've got my word. Now, ,:.what is it?

To begin with, said Hal, is there a blind corridor xvailable in the Encyclopedia? I mean a short corridor with an entrance at one end but no doors at all leading off of it? Yes. There're several, said Jeamus. They were set up originally to allow for overflow or changes in the personnel aboard. Right now they're all being used as storage areas, but %e could clear one out and store whatever's in it, in some other area-we've got the available space. Good, said Hal. I'll want this corridor to come to my call; no one else's-even by mistake. Can we be certain of that?

Jeamus smiled. All right, said Hal, I hadn't any real doubt, but I wanted to make sure. Would you have such a corridor cleared and call me when it's ready? Then I'll tell you what I want done. Why not tell me now? You'll understand that, when I tell you what I want, said Hal. All right? I'll be in my quarters. Call me when it's ready; as soon as possible, for other people's sakes beside my own. Tam? asked Jeamus, a little grimly. Other people besides me, said Hal. All right, said Jeamus. It'll be a matter of a few hours, ]DO more. Good. As fast as you can. As I say, I'll be in my quarters. You can call me there.

When Hal let himself back into his own apartments, Amanda had not yet returned. This was as Hal had hoped. He seated himself on the carpeting of the carrel that was the workspace of his quarters, and summoned up with his imaging link to the Encyclopedia an image of the range of glowing red lines that was the internal map of the knowledge in that mighty body.

As he had known there would be, changes showed themselves in the lines-small changes, but undeniable ones that were the result of information constantly added, from the state of affairs on Earth, news brought by couriers from outside, and the readings of the many instruments that scanned and kept track of the wings of enemy space vessels prowling the outside of the phase-shield.

His eyes were drawn immediately to each small change, as any change is noticed in a known landscape; or the face of a loved one; and he took a few moments to incorporate all of these in his earlier mental picture of the Encyclopedia's core memory. Then he dismissed the mechanical image, and replaced it with one evolved from his own memory and imagination, comparable now with the latest and most up-to-date image the Encyclopedia itself had formed for him.

Sitting, holding it in the field of his mental vision, he could feel the complete knowledge of the Encyclopedia open to his mind, like some vast storehouse of priceless art objects, too multitudinous in number to be seen in one moment from any one single viewpoint. Then he let the rest of his mind go back, back to the chanting circle, to the first edge of the morning sun

at was Procyon's bright pinpoint orb beginning to show above the far-off mountain peaks, and the single ray lancing into the dewdrop to make the explosion of light that signaled his sudden understanding of the full truth in what he and the rest had chanted . . . the transient and the eternal are the same.

That great and ringing verity echoed in and through him as if e was a tuned piece of metal struck by an invisible padded hammer-and it was not just as if comprehension of all the individual bits of knowledge stored in the memory of the Encyclopedia shrank until they could be contained by his one human mind; but as if the back of his thoughts, his own unlimited unconscious understanding, widened and spread to take in and possess, all at once, all that that warehouse contained.

He was not suddenly filled, as a vessel is brought to the brim with liquid-but it was as if there was nothing known here that he had not known and handled, understood and loved, in its own body and measure.

He sat as if bound, as if part of the workings of the Encyclopedia itself, possessed of all it contained and caught up in the fact like someone mesmerized. For there had been more there than any person could hope to learn in many lifetimes; but-the transient and the eternal were the same. He had one lifetime only, but less than a moment of that could contain eternity, and in that eternity he had had time to possess himself of all that the Final Encyclopedia contained.

At last, the Encyclopedia was ready to be put to its proper purpose, the one Mark Torre had envisioned for it, without even being able to see or name that vision. He could go to Tam now, and tell him that the search was over.

But, there was still the problem of using what he had touched and come to own. All that the Encyclopedia held was no more use locked in his mind than it had been in the technological container that was the Encyclopedia itself. He would use

it-then go to Tam. Surely, there was time for that. . . .

He woke to the surroundings of his carrel to find Amanda standing and watching him. Plainly, she had caused the Encyclopedia to make fresh clothing for her. She was no longer in the bush clothes in which they had left Kultis together, but wearing a plain, fitted, knee-length dress of blue-reminiscent of the color of the wintry seas around the northern islands of the Dorsai that he remembered from his childhood as Donal. There was no way for him to tell, after that timelessness from which he had just returned, how long she had been there, waiting for him to respond to her presence.

He got swiftly to his feet; and she looked up into his eyes with a steady, almost demanding, gaze. Whatever it was you were doing, she said, it worries me.

Do you want to tell me? To tell you it all would take-I don't know how long. Hal smiled at her to reassure her. But I've won through-I've found what Mark Torre and Tam-and I too-have been after all these years. But there's not enough time to tell you now. I have to put it to use, before I go to Tam with the news. Will you trust me and wait a little while longer? It's your doing, you know. The key was that the transient and the eternal are the same. And with this, she said, you're going to do something to make Tam happy before he dies? I think so, said Hal. Though it's only the beginnings of the full answer. But it means the rest of what we need is only waiting to be found. Let's say it'll set him free to let go, content that the end is in sight.

His voice softened, unthinkingly. Ajela's torn apart, isn't she? he asked. She can't bear to lose him, but she can't bear to let him go, either. Yes, said Amanda, and she can't help that. She'll be better off once he's gone; but even if she could face that now, it wouldn't make anything easier for her. I wish you'd give me more of an answer. I've got to keep it a secret for myself, awhile longer, Hal said. He put his hands on her shoulders. Can't you trust me for a little while? You and Rukh can come and see what I'm going to do as soon as anyone can. But if, with all this, it shouldn't work after al I . . . I've felt so close to the full answer so many times before, I want to make sure this time. I'd rather you didn't say anything, even to Rukh, let alone Ajela, before I'm ready to have you tell them.

She stood still, under the grasp of his hands, her eyes now thoughtful. You're going to try something that means gambling your own life, aren't you? Yes, he said. It ,S not for me to stop you . . . ... She moved away from him, and his hands loosened to let her go. They fell to his sides. She turned back and put her arms around him. Hold me, she said.

He enclosed her strongly in his own arms, and she held him tightly. He felt the living warmth of her body against him, and for a moment an unbearable poignancy swept through him. You realize, she said as they pressed together, you can never leave me behind. I know that, he said. He rested his cheek against the top of her bright head, but I can't take you with me now.

Yes, she said, but I'll always follow. You should know that I too. Wherever you go.

It was true. Of course, he knew. There was nothing to be said in answer. He simply held her.

A little over two hours later, when Amanda had finally left to see if she could be of any use to Rukh in Ajela's office, there was the soft chime on the air of Hal's quarters that announced someone wanted to speak to him.

Yes? he said, back to the surrounding atmosphere- The corridor's clear. it was Jeamus's voice. The door at the far left end of the present corridor outside your rooms will

let you into it. ,'I'll be right there, said Hal.

He followed the directions and a moment later stepped into a short corridor with green metal walls, rather like Jeamus's own office without the shelves but stretched out in one dimension. It also smelled faintly of an odor something like mildewed paper, which Jeamus's office did not. We haven'tdone areal cleaningjob on it yet, Jeamus said. I guessed you'd be more interested in getting on with whatever you had in mind. You're right, said Hal, and now I'll tell you why I wanted this space to come and open only to me; and of course, you and whoever needs to be with you to help while you're building it. What I want you to build me is something that I think might be dangerous to someone who could just stumble across it. Dangerous? Yes. I want you to build me a doorway-a phase-shift doorway-that's the best I can do by way of describing it. Essentially, it's to be just a single phase-wall, not the complex affair you made for the phase-shield around Earth. I just want it to disperse whatever touches 'it, spread it out to universal position; and it should fill the corridor from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, about a third of its length from its blind end. Just an out-shift wall? said Jeamus. Where's what you're sending through going to be reconstituted? It isn't, until it chooses to come back through the same wall. Chooses? echoed Jeamus. There's no choice about that. Once dispersed, unless there's a destination at which it can be reconstituted, anything you send simply stays spread out until time ends. That's not the point , said Hal. Can you build it? Oh, it can be built, yes, said Jeamus. Though I think what you're talking about actually would require a double screen, one to disperse, the other to reintegrate. That means the reintegrating screen would have to be in front of the dispersing one, so that you'd need a space here around one side of it, say, to get at the outgoing screen. But what you're aescribing doesn't make any sense. You mean it's departure point would be effectively just a meter or so from the arrival point? if there have to be two screens, yes. The closer the better, said Hal, and, I'm sorry, but don't ask me to try to explain, no@@cll, it can't be any other way. All right. Can you build it? Of course we can build it. Jeamus stared up at Hal. But I can't imagine what sort of idea you've got in mind; and the more I hear of it, the less I like doing it blind. Let me see if I've got it straight. You want to be able to put something through the screen, reducing it to universal position. Then, somehow, it's going to come back by itself, and it has to come through the screen just a step away from it-I suppose you're thinking of what you send as somehow entering the return screen from the other side-and translating back into its original form. Actually, there is no 'other side' in the ordinary sense. What makes you think something like this could happen? I'm going to find out, said Hal. The only question I have for you is, whether you'll make it for me. As I say, we can build what you're asking for, Jeamus said. But there's no way that'll guarantee you'll be able to reconstitute something already spread out through the total universe. That is, it can be built so that if whatever it is gathers itself for re-entry-and how that's going to happen baffles me-then if it does the return screen will bring it back to its original location, which is here. The same way a spacecraft, shifting, returns to its original form at the point where it wants to be. But the ship has been pre-programmed to come out at that specific spot; and the action is essentially timeless-it happens in no-time. So, in effect, if I set up a device to do what you say, the going and returning is going to be instantaneous. The second screen,11 simply cancel out the action of the first, so that in effect whatever you send will only have moved a meter or so, immediately-that is, if it ever comes out at all, which it won't. The point is, what you're planning to have happen is impossible. Not if I'm right, said Hal. What I put through is going to stay awhile and come back when it's ready.

Jeamus shook his head.

It can't happen, he said. The laws of phase-shift physics don't permit it. I don't know how much you know about it ?

........... don't quite understand-

- Never mind, said Hal. You've said you could build it. That's all I need to hear. Now, the next question. How fast can you get it done?

Jeamus stared at him again. You're talking about a crash prograrril he said. Like the building of the shield-wall around Earth? Or faster, said Hal.

Jeamus breathed out sharply and almost angrily through his teeth. I don't understand any of this, he said. Can you at least tell me-has it got something to do with Tam? Yes, said Hal, but it goes far beyond that. All right, said Jeamus. We'll build it for you. There's nothing tricky about the technics of it. Will a matter of hours suit you? A chunk more hours than it took to clear this corridor for you, of course. As soon as you can,' I said Hal. For Tam's sake.

Jeamus looked at him. I'Tam? Tam, said Hal. Jeamus took a deep breath. As soon as it can be done, it'll be done, he said. I'll call you. I I

Hal got up. I'll be in my quarters , he said. He headed back to his quarters, but was hardly back into the corridor containing his door when the transmitted voice of Rukh spoke in his ear. Hal, could you come to the office? Amanda's already here, and the Dorsai Commander-in-Chief.

Hal went. He found them as Rukh had said. Rukh herself was in a float behind the desk and Amanda in one of the padded armchair floats facing it. In another such overstuffed float, placed so that his face could see and be seen by both women was

Rourke di Facino, wearing a blue uniform with a single gold i strip slantwise across each lapel of the jacket, and a gray scarfti underneath, over the collar of the white shirt underneath.

Hal had not seen the little man since he had spoken to most of the Grey Captains of the Dorsai, those who by local agreement spoke for their immediate area of that world; and that had been before the Dorsai had agreed to come and take Over the defense of Earth. Hal, in fact had not kept track of who the commandIng officer of all the'Dorsai in the ships patrolling inside the

phase-shield had been. Now, Perversely, he was glad that it was

Rourke the other Dorsai had elected to this Post.- The sharptongued, sharp-eyed di Facino was oddly reassuring, with his invariable certainty that there was a right way to do everything.

-Good, you came right away, said Rukh, as Hal took one of the floats. We've just had a disturbing incident. Fifty of the

Younger Worlds' warships just made a simultaneous jumP through the phase-shield in formation. We lost two of our own ships and had eight crippled, knocking them out of our own space or forcing them down to surface, where they were captured -I I

The damaged ships,11 be back on patrol in a week, said.di Facino. His light tenor voice was incisive to the point Of abrasiveness. But the two that were killed were lost with

-yone aboard them. We can't afford losses -

e 111 assume, said Rukh, there weren't any Of the newly trained people up from Earth among them?

Di Facino shook his head. All Dorsai. I thought, Rukh went on, the program to train new crc\lv had been going faster than that. 1. keep getting word from below that the recruitment centers are Jarnmed. They are, said di Facino, but without training, the men and wo@ien jamming them are useless. To operate a space war vessel's one thing; to fight it, something else entirely. Even our own people are rusty - It's not the way it was a hundred years ago when there was still war in space between the worlds and actual ship fighting was part of many of the contracts our people were drilled and have the then signing. Still, our people, at least, are hen needed - The attitude . They'll do the right thing N stion marks

Earth are each one of them queall e we get from d in action-and in spite Of .1 they've actually been te5te only a handful axe on ships so in the recruitment centers, sets tone ready to crew the new ves for nal training, let a there.

bly lines down re rolling off the asscm

l aven’t got any trained crew yet from Earth whO're you t any of Your Ships?

rot work on to take over regular Pat 'Rukh stared at him - ,From a world with answered di Facino. it won't Say that, iger ones, there jual to that of the thirteen You' had population ec'who have the right instincts and have hm to be a few we want them to learn. it's a _@@;!training that Is very close to what its regional,

way, that Earth's hung On to @`@-_blessing, in a )nal and so-forth differences all these centuries; sectional, natto d-mass groups have maintained because a few of the larger tan d some of the of a personal space force; an ---the rudiments almost duplicate a sea-nations have underwater warships which dful have come id atmosphere-going ship of war; so a ban I say, are space an Some Of those, as to us already semi-trained. er the undergoing final training irt our ships on duty just unds not the matter of recruitment that shield now.At any rate, it luestion of what this last fifty-sh'p brings me here. It's the 'of what the other side has in mind, incursion means, in term'- .ncredibly wasteful. Their ships The jump into our territory*was 1 ing. Even if they'd been didn't have a chance of gaining anythi have hoped to eur equal, vessel to vessel, what could they ide,

for others of their own s achieve in the way of opening a path ?11 or in the way of doing something to Earth, ia? Amanda '-Could fifty ships destroy the Final EncyclOPed asked Rukh. [ they couldn't, answered Rukh -In fact, Jeamus I'm told Walters' answer to me when I asked him that was that it'd almost be easier for them to destroy Earth. He tells me that they couldn't even pull the suicidal trick of jumping a ship through the Final Encyclopedia's own protective shield; to cause a matter explosion when it reconstituted itself inside the Encyclopedia, on the obvious basis that two solid objects can't occupy the same space at the same moment. It seems there's a shunt mechanism in the Encyclopedia's own phase-defenses that would cause a ship trying any such thing to keep shuttling forever back and forth between the Encyclopedia's inner and outer shield, and never reconstituting. Why didn't they build that same mechanism into the Earth shield when they were at it? di Facino asked. The Earth shield is too big, apparently, said Rukh. According to what Jeamus told me when I asked him that same question. There's a factor that keeps doubling, apparently, as the size of a phase-shield grows, so that only a little less than twice the size of the Encyclopedia is the practical limit for adding the shuttle effect. Obviously, they'd have done it if they could have, said Amanda. But suppose we concentrate on the important point, what this recent and apparently senseless attack means. Hal, you've been sitting there ever since you came in without saying a word, and you know Bleys Ahrens better than any of us. What's your opinion? I can't be much more sure than the rest of you, said Hal, but my instinctive guess is, it's a message, that's all. A message? To Earth? said Rukh. What would it be supposed to mean? I think . Hal hesitated. a message to me, from Bleys. What message? asked the little Dorsai-in-Chief. That he meant what he said, Hal answered, when he talked about the siege mentality and a blood bath on Earth when his forces were finally so overwhelming they'd be able to jump through simultaneously and overwhelm any defense we had. Amanda, did you tell them about what Bleys said when he came to the Chantry Guild? I was just about to when you got here, Amanda put in swiftly. Bleys came and found us where we were on Kultis-- Found you? broke in Rukh. And you got away safely?

She was leaning forward tensely over the desk. It wasn't like that, said Hal. He came alone to a place where we were surrounded by friends. Also, I've told you before that Bleys is as aware as I am that either his killing me, or 1, him, wouldn't change things, except possibly to work against the killer. The real opponents are two forces in the human race that have developed through history to this moment. He and I happen to be in point gg@

With. That's a somewhat simplistics on the forces we're way of putting it, said op. dryly, You'll remember he did bring up the possibiliof his killing you. I was in no danger, said Hal. About the message-, 11 t=Cted di Facino. You're he promised you a blood if and when he finally broke through. I can see it if it finally came to that. But why come to tell you, if this assault was supposed to send the same message? Because he also told me he didn't like blood baths; and I ,:-,;.know him well enough to know he's telling the truth. Telling the truth! said di Facino. He was trying to frighten you into something. A man can't be responsible for something like that and say he doesn't like doing it. Have you ever cut off the leg of someone, without anesthetic, and knowing-as I suppose you don't-anything about such surgery. No, I haven't! snapped di Facino. And you're right about my not knowing anything about how to go about it. But you'd do your best in spite of that, if it was a case of a member of your immediate family and the only way to save that person's life was to cut, immediately, wouldn't you?

Di Facino stared at him. You know I'd do it, he said, and I see what you mean. I wouldn't like it but that wouldn't stop me, if it was a matter of life and death for someone I loved. But you aren't trying to tell me Bleys is in that position in planning a blood bath for Earth? Not exactly, said Hal, but in a position very much like it. . . .

He hesitated. I think I may be the only other human alive who understands some aspects of Bleys, said Hal. You have to realize how differently he thinks from other people. Try to appreciate, for example, what his own existence has been like. He must be the loneliest human being alive. No, lonely's the wrong word. Say instead he's the most isolated of all humans; because he's never experienced anything but complete separation from everyone else and can't conceive of any state that'd be otherwise. So he suffers; but he isn't aware of suffering from this the way you and I would be, because he's never known any other state. He could look around and see other humans who aren't suffering that way, and learn from them that other states of being exist, said di Facino. Learning from them is just what he's shut himself off from, said Hal. From the time he was old enough to notice such things, he had to see that the people around him had limited intelligence compared to his, and couldn't match him in other capabilities. Almost as soon as he knew himself, he must have felt alone in the universe, surrounded by creatures who looked and acted like him but lacked perceptions, and were easily controllable by him without their realizing it. All he had to do was put his mind to manipulating them, and they did whatever he wished. He was walled off by what he was from the rest of the race.

Hal hesitated, unsure whether he was not perhaps talking too much; then he decided to go ahead. There's a couple of lines in a poem by Lord Byron. He was a nineteenth century English poet; and one of his poems was called The Prisoner of Chillon-Chillon being a fortress prison in Switzerland; and the prisoner was in solitary confinement there. The lines come when, after at last managing to get a glimpse of the outside through the high, small window of his cell, the prisoner finds confinement has changed him. The lines go . . .

. . .and the whole Earth would henceforth be

A wider prison unto me . . .

Hal looked at them. Rourke di Facino was looking back with a int of puzzlement. Amanda and Rukh, by contrast, had expressions that were strangely sympathetic. , ,So you see, wound up Hal, while his situation was slightly different, in essence it was pretty much the same, in that Bleys learned almost from birth that all the worlds were only a 'widerprison' for him. He could search in every face he met and not see an understanding of what he felt in himself. Fame and fortune could mean nothing to him because he knew he could have them by merely reaching out his hand for them. He had no friends. Those who thought they loved him, did so without understanding. He had been given a lifetime to spend and nothing to spend it on. So he decided to do what he didn't think anyone MWIMFIV MoMIMMITMITMIUM MoMMMI of future history it would never have taken if he hadn't come along. Even if the turning might mean doing some things he might not like, he'd do it. So, he went to work. And ran into you, said Amanda. I was there. Hal looked back at her.

Amanda merely watched him, steadily. But why the blood bath? said di Facino. If he finally ends up with enough ships and trained men to wipe out our defensive forces, there are certainly ways of taking Earth without that kind of action. There are, of course, said Hal. What's he trying to do, then, frighten you into promoting a surrender for him? No, said Hal. The obvious reason for the talk of a blood bath and this incident to support it is to try to push me into acting hastily. How long, would you say, Rourke, at the rate his forces outside the shield are building, until he gets to the point of having enough in ships to try that sort of mass jump through the shield and assault this world-with some hope of success? I'm not Donal Graeme, said di Facino. He spoke as if the time in which Donal had been known to exist was no more than yesterday, instead of close on a hundred years. It depends on how fast he can drive the Younger Worlds to give him ships and crews for them. Anywhere from six months to five years, absolute time. Let's say six months, said Hal. If we're really only six months from such an assault and blood bath, there'd be some reason to panic. But I don't think we are. I think, as I say, he's trying to prod me to moving too quickly and making a mistake.

They all watched him. This time even di Facino said nothing. You see, said Hal, choosing the words of his explanation carefully, he's not worried about being able to take over Earth. At the last minute, he can always pull a rabbit out of his hat and make the conquest in some unexpected way. He said as much three years ago when he and I met in the thickness of the phase-shield, just after the Dorsai and the Exotics had given all they had to give and the shield had gone into place to keep his ships out. He's worried about me-the fact that I also might pull a rabbit he doesn't suspect out of my hat, before he can out of his. I'm the one person he knows who might do something he can't expect. If he can panic me into moving even a little too hastily, I may fumble and not have time to produce that rabbit. God! said di Facino. What a way to try to pressure someone-with the threat to massacre perhaps billions of people. That threat at its closest is still six months off, said Hal. I You know, the motto of Walter Blunt, who founded the original Chantry Guild here on Old Earth, was destruct. What he wanted was to clear away everything and everybody but a few special people on a specialized Earth, that could then build to a special end. Note how Bleys' aim all along has echoed that. He wants to depopulate the Younger Worlds entirely and reduce the population of Old Earth to a particular group who'll mature over generations to something like himself. What of it? asked di Facino bluntly. Just that the destruction Blunt preached never got off the ground. Instead the Chantry Guild shifted its aims toward nonviolence and an idea of philosophical evolution. That was then. Now's then, too; as the present is always made by and contains the elements of the past, said Hal. Hold on a little longer; don't let your concern over this run away with you for six months yet. Meanwhile, you'll be doing what? I want to have something to show you before I answer that, said Hal. Right now, what I'm chasing has no more substance than a dream-any more than any discovery has before it's made. But I'm sure it's there; and if I'm right, it'll give us an escape hatch from this situation without any massacre and without a shooting war, long before six months are up. I'll let you know when I've some progress to report. Meanwhile, it's important that everyone on our side keep pushing ahead full speed and without any doubts. On faith, said di Facino. Exactly, on faith. There's nothing stronger. Hal glanced for a second at Rukh, then back at the small Commander-in-Chief. Remember, the difference between our camp and his. Finally, that part of the race that believes in going forward and adventuring outward are here, around us; and those who'd turn back and hide their heads from the risk of progress are with Bleys. Everything either side does, from building ships to fighting them,is part of the thrust of that side's purpose; and it's 'going to be needed when the final confrontation comes.

Di Facino stared grimly at him, but sat silent for a long moment. We'll do our part, he said at last, as you know we will. For the rest-you're right. It's going to take faith for us to believe that you and- everyone else is doing theirs-lots of faith!

They talked for a little while longer, but nothing more of importance was said, and the conference broke up.

CHAPTER

36

Sixteen hours had passed.

Ajela, Rukh and Amanda had taken shifts staying with Tam, as he fought to live a little while longer. Hal had returned to his quarters to study the knowledge stored in the core of the Final Encyclopedia and now open to him. He had studied it awhile, then slept, then rose to seat himself again with the mental image of the core before him. His eyes saw it, but his mind was far distant, wandering the reaches of what had been stored in it over the centuries.

It was like wandering through the corridors of an endless museum. Here were the artifacts of creativity. But they were strangely lacking in some invisible element he could not put a mental finger on. Then, it came to him, Where were the souls that had created each of these things? It was strange. You could follow the creation of a piece of art or discovery down through the levels of the craft that made it actual and real. But only up to a certain point. Then you came suddenly to a gap, a quantum jump, beyond which the work became wholly the product of the individual who did it-no one else could have done it just that way-and there was no more craft bridge there to explain the uniqueness of what you saw, heard, or felt. Beyond was simply incomparable, irreplaceable individual talent made manifest, the essence of creativity itself at work, as if it were magic.

There was this gap, this vital element missing, yet. For his rposes in the Creative Universe, it must be touched, even if it Id not be grasped. As one mind could never wholly grasp the tent of another mind, but could touch and understand enough the other's intent to work with that. For some hours now, Hal had turned his unconscious loose to @search for a way to so touch what was needed; while his .conscious still wandered the corridors of the Encyclopedia's storehouse, just as his conscious mind had been left to wander about, that day on the ledge-and at last the answer came to him as something he had almost forgotten.

Three years before, when he had asked Tam about how he, Hal, could learn to do what Tam did, in reading the knowledge core, he found that Tam could not describe how he did it in logical, verbal terms. He referred Hal to an old twentieth century novel, which had ended up by becoming a classic after being nearly forgotten, then rediscovered in the twenty-first century. The Sand Pebbles, written by an author named Richard McKenna, had for its lead character a non-commissioned officer assigned as engineer on a United States of America Navy river patrol boat in China, during a time of great upheaval.

All the other enlisted crewmen aboard had yielded to the custom of hiring unofficial Chinese understudies for their jobs. As a result, the actual work in the engine room was done by Chinese. The lead character, who loved engines and was adamant about handling his duties himself, could not bring himself to do this. He was determined to do his job with his own hands. This earned him the enmity of the Chinese workers, since his decision kept one of their own people out of a job they had come to regard as theirs.

There was a scene in thenovel, Tam told Hal-and Hal later looked it up with the help of the Encyclopedia's memory-in which the lead character, pacing around the engine room while the ship was under way, suddenly found himself stopped and standing over a small trap door that gave access to the steam piping underneath the engine room floor. He had lifted the trap and found that a valve that should have been open was turned down tightly, shutting off the steam through that pipe. An act of deliberate sabotage by one of the workers.

He had opened the valve; and only much later discovered that by doing so he had earned a reputation as a magician among the Chinese workers, since apparently he had gone directly to the deliberately closed valve and opened it, although there was no way he could have known about it.

In a reminiscence by another author of the same period, the other author had told of asking McKenna directly whether, in all the noise of a steamship's engine room, someone could actually hear the difference made by shutting off one small valve. McKenna, who had worked with the engines of navy ships in just that same sort ofjob, had said someone could. He had noticed such changes and corrected them, himself, while on duty, in almost unthinking reaction, so used he had become to the proper sound of the engine.

As the engine sound had been to the man in the engine room, so the stored knowledge of the Encyclopedia had come to be to Hal. What he needed to do was to be able to think with the full knowledge stored in the Encyclopedia available to his mind from his mental image of the lines; and, now, he had found the only missing note in their silent symphony.

The individual notes of creativity, which he would need to reach out to build with, in the Creative Universe, were all around him here, then, and his ear was not yet tuned to them. So far, he had built what his own mind had already created, or a few sounds of creativity from the verse or making of others which had touched his own soul in the past. But that universe would not be truly open until it could hold and he could hear the sounds of others.

But that had been enough to let him create the potentiality of a split in the human race-animal, so that it might-and had-grown into two separately developing entities; one of which embodied the desire to grow and evolve, and one which tried to hold back and stay as it was.

A chime sounded suddenly on the air of his room and a voice spoke aloud in it, summoning him back to the real universe. It did not speak privately, as Rukh's voice had spoken in his ear to summon him to the conference just past. It was the voice of Jeamus. We're ready, Hal Mayne, Jeamus said. You'll find the entrance to the special. corr idor through the door at the left end of the one presently outside your quarters. Coming, answered Hal to the empty air above him. He rose and went out.

e stepped into the blind corridor, what he saw brought udden stop. The two phase-shift constructions Jeamus ised him were there. The nearer one extending i(6it. of the way across the corridor, leaving just room

t to the second one, which, as far as the first .-st It to e lowed him to see, blocked the farther corridor corn-

ut waiting for him there were not only Jeamus and a men in Research dust smocks, but also Rukh and Rukh wore her usual long, high-collared dress, black @,i this time. But Amanda was also wearing a floor-length dress she ust have ordered the Encyclopedia to fashion for her-one he had never seen her in before-of a dark, sea blue. The general effect was vaguely formal, as if they had dressed themselves in authority to come here. I thought, said Hal to Jeamus, I asked you not to say '-anything to anyone else about this? I'm sorry, said Jeamus. It turned out there was a danger we hadn't expected. In the moment of powering up these two -screens, there's a danger of one or both of them trying to interface with the protective screen around the Encyclopedia itself. Once up, there'd be no danger. But in turning them on, there was; and none of us could estimate what might happen. No one had ever set up a phase-window completely within another window before- What about the Encyclopedia's screen inside the one enclosing Earth? interrupted Hal. But they're both double screens; loops, closed circuits within themselves. What you've got here isn't and can't be a closed circuit. Not if you want it to do what you asked for. So I had to turn the Encyclopedia's shield off for just a few seconds while we turned on these; and I didn't feel I could do that without warning Ajela or Rukh. Rukh wanted to know more about what was going on that made me ask for something like that. I suggested she ask, said Amanda. Don't jump on ariyone else, Hal. Something unusual like that had your fingerprints all over it; and when we found out what it was, Rukh and I both wanted to be here. And we've got a right to be. I couldn't lie to Rukh Tamani when it was a direct question, said Jeamus.

Of course not. I don't blame you, Jeamus. Hal took a deep breath. And you're right, Amanda. You and Rukh should be here if that's what you want. How could we not want to, Hal? said Rukh.

Hal shook his head. Of course. All right. I was wrong not to tell you from the start what I wanted to do. It was just I didn't-I still don't know-if it's going to work. It could be an utter failure.

Jeamus had been looking slightly bewildered. I don't understand, he said. Just what is it you're planning to put through this first screen?

-myself, said Hal. Jeamus stared. My God! he said. Do you know what you're talking about doing? Committing suicide! You'll end up spread out through the universe, with no way back. There's that chance, of course, said Hal, but I've got reason to think, in this case, it's not going to happen that way. All the same, said Jeamus, if that's what you've had in mind all along, I'm going to pray that nothing more goes on when you step through the back screen there-that you immediately step back out, facing us, through this near one! Thanks, but I hope not, myself, said Hal.

He turned to Rukh and Amanda. But I might be able to do what I hope to do in what amounts to no-time, like any phase-shift, so that I still come back here right away, he said. On the other hand, it could be that time spent between the screens is the same as time spent here and it'll be awhile before I'll come back. But there's no real doubt in me I'l I be back sooner or later.

Rukh came to him, put her arms around him and kissed hin, on the lips. I should have done that long ago, she said. We'l I wait for you I Hal.

He held her for a moment, feeling his heart moved once again, as it had been when he carried her out of the prison cell on Harmony four years before, by the frailness of her body, even now. Then he let her go and turned to Amanda, who also held him and kissed him. I love you, she said.

A And I love you, he answered. This could be the answer,

last, what I'm going to do. I know, said Amanda, and let him go.

7-1WWWoravie from them, around the nearer screen the second, and stepped through it.

CHAPTER

37

He was everywhere and nowhere.

His senses were no longer working. He could not feel, smell, hear or see. Instead he had an awareness of his surroundings that recognized certain patterns, some of which were in the form of objects and some of which were not; but which in any case were unimportant.

It was a place where time existed, but did not matter. A place where his now changed self had no desire to understand or act. In fact, his ability to do so was limited. He had memory, but no purpose, for he found he could not conceive of the future, and the present was forever. But he could remember; and, remembering, he recalled how he had been through something like this, once before. It had happened when he had been Donal going back in spirit to the twenty-first century, when he had worked by inhabiting the body that had belonged to the dead Paul Formain. Then, he now remembered, something had carried him through what he was presently experiencing. . . . I The memory part of him that was still working gave it back to him. Then he had expected to go beyond this to something else, to a twenty-first century Earth; and the momentum of that expectation had carried him through without realizing the concept of purpose he now lacked.

It was a remembrance of an impossibility that had yet happened. For the Creative Universe he now realized he had visioned both then and now could not, by definition, exist Until he had created it. It did not exist now; and yet he had been ary part of going aware of experiencing it before, as a necess

k to alter the implications of the past.

-this Chaos-that was Under the limitations of this place logic-limited conscious mind was not capable of t to be, his n erstanding the contradictions. Here he could only go on of which were blocked by ith, philosophy and courage, none the limits of his logical mind. With them he could accept the fact that he had been able to experience the Creative Universe once before and use it as a window to the past; because his unconscious had assumed a path back through time for his identity; and by that assumption, like the assumption that creates a poem never expressed before, had caused it to be.

His logical mind had afterwards rejected what, to it, could not be, and tucked the memory out of sight in his unconscious. '2- There it had stayed until now, because the framework of understanding he needed to develop had not yet been there to understand how it could happen. Only now, spread out between time and space, did it all, at last, make sense.

As with the making of a poem, the explanation was that here ,,t all mechanisms must be developed in the unconscious; for the conscious mind could not operate without the arbitrary concepts it had gradually imposed over centuries on the physical universe; to give that universe a shape the conscious mind could work with.

He must now, therefore, not so much make what he wanted in the Creative Universe, as find it within himself; in this place where conscious logic and physics did not naturally apply. He must find it, as he had found poems and other discoveries of meaning and intent, in the past. . . .

He let go, therefore, of his now useless and almost nonexistent upper mind. In effect he passed over into the realm of dreams and daydreams; and a jumble of memories and fancies tumbled through his imaginings, like the unchained thoughts that come in moments just before sleep sets the unconscious completely free.

So, letting go, he passed into what would have been a dream; if it had not been directed by some previous, deep-held sense of purpose that had directed him back to the twenty-first century. He could feel, in this universe-that- was- not, not only that earlier passage, but all the vast information of the Final Encyclopedia. The latter worked on the former. . . .

-And, suddenly, he was where he wanted to be. It was a dream, made real after all. Real, it was, because not only all his senses now reported on the reality of it; but his logical upper mind, that must think in the language of symbols and identities, was once more awake and capable. But it was also a dream, because he remembered how he had first dreamed it, when he had been with the Resistance Group on Harmony, under a younger and strong-bodied Rukh. He had dreamed it then, and at other times since; and now, with the knowledge r f om the Encyclopedia, he had made it actual. It was at the r dream's opening point now, that he, with the faith, belief and courage in him, had resolved the chaos around him into actuality.

Again, he was on horseback, with others also mounted. They were traveling in a group through a lightly forested area of some landscape in the temperate zone of an Earth-like world. They rode without talking, as he had earlier dreamed they had; but now, for the first time, he had a chance to look closely about him and identify those he rode with; and there were none of them he had not known, and all of them were now dead.

Obadiah the Friendly, Malachi the Dorsai and Walter the Exotic-the three who had been his tutors and raised him as Hal Mayne, rode not far behind him. Immediately beside and about him were those of his own-of Donal's-family. Eachan Khan Graeme, his father, now dead for nearly a hundred years, rode at his right side. Beside him on his left was Mary Kenwick Graeme, his mother; and beyond her was his brother Mor, who because of him had been tortured to death by the hands of the demented William of Ceta.

Mor leaned forward in his saddle to look around their mother at him; and Hal braced himself for the look that would be in the other's eyes. But when those eyes met him the look he had expected was not there. Welcome back, Donny, said Mor-and he was smiling, a

r , happy smile. With that, Hal realized that he had indeed become Donal again, in body as well as in memory.

All the other tall menfolk of the Graemes once more Overto ped him, as they sat their saddles around him; and he p was as he had been in his early life. ,.., What's the matter, Brother? Mor said. Did you think I wouldn't understand?

He reached out a hand across the neck of the horse Mary Graeme rode; and, with a moment's hesitation, Hal took it and found his brother's grasp comforting and as warm as his smile. I didn't think it through far enough, he said. I'd never have let him do that to you I if I had, for anything. I know, said Mor, as their grips parted and they straightened up in their saddles, but it brought us to this, and this is best. Isn't it? Yes, said Donal-Hal, it's a new road, at last.

He looked around. In his dream he had not had time to identify faces. Now he saw how Ian and Kensie rode on the far side of Eachan; and how beyond Mor was his other uncle, James, whose death had set him on his life's path to this Moment.

He looked farther back and saw, also riding near him, the . Second Amanda Morgan, eerily like the Amanda he had left behind him beyond the phase-screen. A horde of other members of the family, long since gone, rode with them, including even Cletus Grahame, his great-great-grandfather.

But, farther back, there was also James Child-of-God, Rukh's second-in-command of the Resistance Group, who had died in the rain on Harmony; and the farther he looked, the more faces he recognized. Only now they were come to the edge of the forest, to the brink of a rubbled plain that stretched away toward the horizon, with nothing visible growing upon it and only one shape breaking the horizon line where rocky surface met the gray, unbroken ceiling of the clouds overhead.

That one shape stood darkly upright, so distant that it might have been on the horizon itself; and it was a single tower, black, featureless and solid, with the shape of one of the ancient keeps of the medieval centuries of Old Earth. About it, there was a terrible sense of waiting that held them all silent; as, following his example, they all checked their horses and sat looking at the tower. I go on alone from here, he said to the others.

They answered nothing; but he felt their acceptance of what he had just said. He could also feel that they would wait for him, here, no matter how long it took.

He got down from his horse-as he had remembered dismounting before in his dream-and started out on foot across the endless distance of the plain, toward the tower.

In his dream it had been vitally necessary that he go alone to it; and he felt the same unexplained urgency now. At some time later, he looked back and saw those who had been with him, still sitting their horses, small under the trees, which were themselves shrunken with the distance he had put between himself and them. Then he had turned once more and continued on toward the tower, to which he seemed hardly to have progressed a step since he had left the edge of the wood.

Without warning, something he could not see touched him on the left shoulder.

He whirled about, ready to defend himself, but there was nothing there. Only the waiting forms on horseback, now farther off than ever; though when he turned back toward the tower, still it seemed that he had moved hardly a step closer to it, in spite of all the distance covered.

The pebbles and rocks that made up the surface of the plane were now larger than those onto which he had first stepped. Looking down at them, the wealth of the Encyclopedia's knowledge flowed into him and he identified them as the detritus of an old lava flow, dark igneous rock that had over centuries been exposed to extremes of temperatures; unti I, cracking under the succeeding expansions and contradictions of their composite materials, the solid rock had decomposed and broken into many pieces-pieces which were later covered by a sea, and tumbled one against the other until their sharp edges and corners had become rounded.

His mind encompassed all this-or did it only create it as an explanation, out of the storehouse of the Encyclopedia? In any case he found himself understanding the geological ages that had made the surface he walked on; and without knowing how it could be possible, he realized that the tower toward which he was headed had been built on what had been an island during the period of the shallow sea that had rounded off the rocks. Inconceivably, it had been built before the waters rose to cover the lava plain of cracked and broken stones. Ancient it therefore was, as ancient as the human race itself; and what was within it, drawing him to it, was as ancient.

But it was still a long way off; and he was more concerned with the discovery of its creation. For in fact, it was his dream made real. He had created it only now, but as surely as he had . . .. .1 chaos in which he had found himself. He had created his body and those of his companions and their horses. He had created the thick cloud layer overhead that hid a sun that he had chosen to be a duplicate of the star of Old Earth; illuminating this world that was itself a duplicate of Old Earth; more so than any of the terraformed planets of the Younger Worlds.

He had built it, here in the Creative Universe, that was only a Creative Universe because with the Encyclopedia's help, he had brought it finally into being. For without the ability of the Encyclopedia's knowledge available to his own creative unconsciousness, he could not have made any of this. A poem could not be written without a knowledge of what made poetry-the images, the shapes and the language. Without a knowledge of what was required to produce such works, no original painting could be painted, no cathedral built.

In the creation of the very tower toward which he now made his way, a knowledge of the forces of gravity upon its structure, and of the materials that made its walls, was needed.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the tiny figures waiting behind him now seemed to stand somewhat above him, and in fact the plain between them now had dipped downward, as if he had descended onto the old sea bottom that stretched level until it rose again in the far distance to the higher land of what had been an island when the tower was young. Looking ahead once more at it now, he saw that the sea floor approaching it, which had earlier seemed level to his eyes, actually rose and fell, gradually, in swells and hollows, before it reached the former island of the tower, and that he was now gradually ascending the slope of one of the nearer rises.

Sure enough, a little farther on, when he looked back again, the plain seemed to have descended toward the horizon behind him, and the group he had left there was indistinguishable now from the edge of forest behind them.

He turned his face forward and went on-and an unexpected shadow swept briefly over him, so that he looked up, startled; even as he heard what the Encyclopedia's knowledge now within him identified as the harsh cry of a raven.

Mixed with that cry was something he could not quite be sure he heard. It was as if a sound that was soundless had still somehow managed to signal itself upon his ear. It was like the resonance of a heavy bell, struck twice. Something that somehow echoed back to the time when he had been Paul Formain. Yet it did not belong to the memory of that time, but to the future still before him.

Like a warning note, it reminded him of the possible passage of real time. He did not know whether his time spent here was merely part of a moment of no-time back in the universe beyond the phase-screens, or whether a minute here might not be a day, or month, there.

He stopped suddenly. The rise in the ground he had been ascending had steepened gradually but steadily over the last fifty meters or so, and he was suddenly much closer to the tower. He had adjusted unthinkingly from what was a walking pace to a climbing one; so that he had come to the top of the rise without warning and now he checked, looking down its short, farther, descending side.

It dipped sharply for no more than ten paces before him. At that point it broke off abruptly in an edge as sharp as any cliff's. Beyond it was nothingness, with no sight of farther surface below. He saw only a relatively short distance horizontally to what looked like another cliff edge level with this one, that was visibly the edge of the one-time island with the tower upon it.

He went forward, cautiously. For the downslope was steep and he had to lean back to brace his weight and not slide forward over the edge before him. But even when he stood on the very lip of it, he could see nothing below him; only what appeared to be an endless fall to eternity. He looked at the distance of nothingness between him and the edge of the island; it was just far enough off that he could not quite make out the nature of the rocks that made up the distant land.

He stood, baffled. There was no reason for this space to be here, barring his way. He made an effort to visualize the gap filled in with the same sort of former sea bottom he stood upon. But nothing happened. It was as if here, alone, his creativity could not bring into being a land bridge where there was nothing. It was as if he had nothing to build with, as if what was needed to bridge the space was not in him.

For a long moment he stood, unbelieving. Then his mind began to work, and up out of the back of it came the answer that what he looked at was his own doing. He had created this gap, without ever realizing it, by his own act in going back to be Paul Formain and changing the implications of past history. He had set out to split up the Enemy that had struck at him during the old Chantry Guild's initiation ceremony, so that it became not a semi-living racial force, but a part of every human living.

It had been the only way he had known, then, of making humanity take sides, for either creativity or stasis; and so bring that hidden, inner conflict to an outer resolution.

And he had succeeded-with the Othem as an unexpected and unwelcome by-product. But he had succeeded. And here was another by-product.

The road to evolution of humankind led through the Creative Universe. But to enter it himself was not enough. It must be entered by at least one other human. The tower and what it stood on must be given relevance, as he had been required to find a relevance to feel the souls behind those creations of humankind and time stored in the Final Encyclopedia.

He could not cross the gal) before him, because up to this point was no more than a plac@ he had made himself. Beyond it, on the island and in the tower, he must share this universe with whoever or whatever in the race would oppose him there; for it was there the argument would come to a head and be settled. This place he had created was only an arena for decision, by his own choice he had willed it to be so.

There was only one other person so far alive, besides himself, with the background and experience to move through the phase-screen as he had and create a destination. After that one came here it would become progressively easier for those who would come after. But for now, and for that one person, the time was short. Perhaps, even now, too short.

He turned about quickly and stepped backward-with intent. So it was he stepped not back up the stony slope away from the edge of nothingness, but out through the farther phase-screen into the MUT11 corridor of the Final Encyclopedia, where Jeamus and hisieuAv, with Rukh and Amanda, still waited for him. . . .

Thank the I M11V said Jeamus. How long wm. I gone? asked Hal. No time ai- all, said Jeamus. Perhaps a couple of minutes, then yeii came out of the other screen- Good, he interrupted. Now I want this whole device moved and set Us in Tam's main room, right wma, How fast? I-uh- Jeamus floundered. An hour- Five minutes, said Hal. Five? Or as close to that as you can come, said Hal. I want to get it there while Tam's still alive. Just the minimum of what you have here to make the doorway work. But a minimum's all we ever had--

Jeamus's hands fluttered, half-lifted for a moment, helplessly. Then the meaning of Hal's words seemed to penetrate. He threw up his hands; and his voice hardened. Maybe fifteen minutes . . . or ten? Maybe even . . . five? But Tam's quarters ? Yes. As Jeamus stood uncertain, he added harshly, I'm speaking as the Director. Move it. As fast as you humanly can.

Amanda? Rukh?

He went out of the door. The two caught up with him just beyond it. What is it? said Amanda. He glanced at her as they went, for she had a right to ask. She saw deeper into him than Rukh. Why the special hurry? I was in the Creative Universe, he answered briefly. But someone else besides me has to go there; and only Tam's qualified, because he can read the Encyclopedia's knowledge core-not as well as 1, but well enough. There's a problem? she asked. Yes. What I mentioned-and there's something else. A gap where there shouldn't be one, a gap I can't reach across. I need a bridge. A bridge .

Still striding swiftly down the corridor he turned to look at her. There was a look on her face he knew.

-What is it? he said. The cloak ... I think, she said. Looking past him. I

177 t know why, but the cloak will make a bridge.

But they were already at the entrance to Tam's quarters. Yes, said Rukh, as they turned to go in, after him-he realize d he was back in all the size of his Hal-body, --all thanks to God you came when you did. I have a feeling he's very close to the end . . . very close.

They went as swiftly as the Final Encyclopedia could align their blind corridor with the one leading to Tam Olyn's quarters; and Rukh led them in through the door there without waiting to ask for entrance.

Inside, things had hardly changed. Ajela was dressed now in a Japanese kimono, which Hal noted was perfectly arranged, in contrast to the disheveled sari she had worn earlier. She was sitting upright now, but still held one of Tam's hands, and Tam still gazed off at something beyond their sight; he was now holding his interstellar newsman's cloak, that he had not worn since he had returned to the Final Encyclopedia, over ninety years before. It was still set as it had been since the death of his sister's young husband, on the white and red he had worn the day of David's end.

Hal reached the side of Tam's armchair opposite Ajela in six long strides and knelt beside it, putting his hand on Tam's arm which lay strengthlessly along the top of the padded armrest. Tam! he said in a low voice, but urgently. We've done it! I've been in the Creative Universe. Now, to make the Encyclopedia the tool for everyone, the way we always dreamed, and Mark Torre dreamed, we only need one more thing-one final effort from you. Can you make it? What're you saying? Ajelas voice rang through the forest glade that was actually a room. You aren't going to ask anything of him now?

Hal ignored her. Amanda and Rukh moved in to draw her aside from the chair and speak to her, in low, imperative voices. But he can't do anything now! He can't-

The low-pitched but steady voices of the other two women interrupted her. Hal ignored her. All his attention was focused on Tam, his eyes staring into the faded old eyes only centimeters from his own. Can you do it, Tam? Hal asked again. I've got Jeamus and his people on the way here with the equipment to make it possible. You can go into the Creative Universe and I'll go with you. Now, in the beginning, it has to be done by someone besides me, it has to be used by more than one mind; otherwise, it's just something I've created for myself. But if I can share it with you, we can go on to share it with everyone else, on all the worlds. Do you understand, Tam?

The ancient eyes stared into his. The head moved minimally forward and back again in what could have been a nod. But he can't-he can't do anything! From the sound of her voice, Ajela was crying now as she talked. He hasn't any strength left! You can't ask anything more of him now. It's too late. He ought to be left to die in peace. That's what I'm offering him, Hal answered her without taking his eyes off Tam. That's what it is, Tam. A chance for you to see the end at last; a chance to see it completed. I tell you he can't do anything-he couldn't if he wanted to! Ajela protested behind Hal. I think he can, said Hal. This one last thing. This final effort, Tam. Can't you?

There was a change in Tam's face, so small as to be unreadable by anyone who did not know him like the four now with him. Again, his head moved-in a motion more clearly of agreement now. Good. You remember, Hal said, how the knowledge here in the Final Encyclopedia had to be a requirement. Nothing less would do. Whoever intended to be a creator in the Creative Universe would need a memory bank at least that large.

He paused. Can you hear me, Tam? he asked. Do you understand?

Tam gave another minuscule nod. His eyes seemed to see nothing but Hal's face. I thought there had to be the way in. I thought I'd find it here, Hal went on. But for three years, these last three years, I couldn't find it here. Then Amanda came to suggest I take a fresh look at the problem from outside the Final Encyclopedia; and she was right. I went to a place called the Chantry Guild, on Kultis-a new .1in the Creative Universe without giving up the rules and laws of the real universe we already know. And those rules, by definition, were the last to apply in the Creative Universe, where the first principle of creativity had to apply-that anything and everything conceivable could be made.

He paused; and this time Tam nodded without being asked. There were no rules, said Hal, but there were necessities. First, it was necessary for those who entered the Creative Universe to believe in it. Next, whoever tried to enter it had to believe humans could do so. Last, it could only be entered by a mind willing to put aside the laws and rules of the real universe.

Hal paused, but only to take breath. That was the hardest of all, that last, he said. From the first moment of life, instinct tells us the only laws are the laws of the place where we're born. I don't think I'd have been able to keep going if I hadn't already had my own private proof of a place somewhere with different laws. I had it with my poetry. I had it when I went back, in mind only, to the twenty-first century to alter a future not yet made; the future of the time I'd known as Donal.

He held Tam's eyes with his own and his voice held them both. I was ready to give up when Amanda came. And you know she feels what's right. She was right this time. At the new @@ila , 0anu she was

ul d n Kultis_,A

Chantry Guild, I found it-the belief of another man who'd been as close to the Creative Universe as I'd been. He'd come up with one insight. Only one, but it was enough to point me to where I could finally understand how, just as the physical laws of our universe can be, they can also not-be . . . and that they'r subject to us, not us to them!

He paused once more. Where were Jeamus and the doorways? Tam, his name was Jathed; and his particular battlecry was:

*the transient and the Eternal are the same.' At first it meant nothing to me, logically-only a contradiction in terms. And then I saw the truth of it. I broke through, finally, to that truth-and the whole Creative Universe opened out before me like a flower to the morning sun. For if the Transient and the Eternal could be the same, then all things could. All things were possible. It was only our point of view that had learned to encompass the possibility it wanted, using the knowledge the race already had, to make it real; and that knowledge was there, waiting for us, in the Final Encyclopedia! Jeamus and his people are going to be here in just minutes, with the equipment we need to make the trip, Hal said. He dared not take his eyes from Tam's eyes, and the strength he could see in them that the old man was trying to gather, the ancient fighting spirit of a lifetime trying to rouse for one more effort. But he could feel time slipping away from them, like the running water of the stream beside Tam's armchair. Amanda, Rukh- he called, his gaze still locked with Tam's. Isn't there some way you can call that corridor where we were? Find out how they're coming. Tell them we have to have it-now!

He concentrated on Tam once more. We had the means of going there, all the time, he went on to the still face, behind which the great struggle was going on to rouse a dying spirit. It was in phase-technology. The same thing that gave us the phase-shift and the phase-shield. But maybe even that's not necessary. Maybe it's just an excuse for the mind to go into the Creative Universe. I don't know. But we don't have time to experiment now; and I used it when I went this first time. So--

He was talking without a pause, desperately, as if his words were the lifeline up which Tam was pulling himself to safety. There was a fear within him that if he stopped speaking, even for a moment, Tam would lose his hold,-would fall back, and be lost. You see, he said, you go through a phase-doorway to no set destination; which should end you spread out to infinity-

But at last now, behind him, there was a sound of the door from the corridor banging open with unusual noise and violence; and a moment later Jeamus struggled, sweating, into his field of vision, helping one other man move the framework of one of the phase-doorways. The framework had obviously been made weightless, but they still had to contend with its mass and the awkwardness of its size and rectangular shape. There's a chance- Jeamus panted, as the two of them stopped behind Tam's chair. --there may be a chance you can go-and come through the same doorway-so to save time we

came-with just that. You want to try it'.) if so, where-where . 9do we put it. Yes! snapped Hat. Put it right here, in front of Tam's chair!

He turned back to Tam, seeing them obey out of the comer of his eye. Now we go, he said gently to Tam. We go together. I know you can't get up and walk through the doorway-that's what I did. But when I went back to the time of the first Chantry Guild, I only sent my mind back. Trust me. You can send your mind through that doorway the way I went then.

He looked and saw that Jeamus and the man helping him had just set up the doorway, less than a meter from Tam's feet; and other men he recognized as being from Jeamus's crew were connecting it to some kind of heavy cable that snaked out of sight to disappear among the illusion of trees to their right. All right, he said to Tam, and closed his hand around the wide but bony, cold hand of Tam, come with me, now. Look through that doorway as if it was an opening on wherever you want to go to. In your mind, stand up and step through the frame to that place; and I'll go with you, by your side, holding to you as I am now.

He broke off, and stared then; for the doorway before him had suddenly become not merely a plate of silver blankness, as it had been in the blind corridor for him. Instead it now seemed to open on a green hillside, lifting beyond the doorway for only a few meters, before it reached a crest, beyond which was only the cloudless I light blue of a spring sky. It was the sky of one of the

Younger Worlds Hat had never been on; but he had seen images of it. it was a spring sky over the northern hemisphere of the small, lush world of Sainte Marie, the world on which both Jamethon and Kensie had died.

Hal rose to his feet, letting the dead weight of Tam's hand slip from his own. But-unless it was his imagination-it seemed he still felt it there; though Tam had not stirred and no one stood

visibly beside Hal.

Still, he felt that Tam was beside him, that their hands were linked. Here we go, he said, without looking to his left, where the spirit of Tam should now be; and he stepped forward, through the phase-doorway.

At once he stood on the sloping surface of the hillside under the warmth of the different sunlight. He felt the hand withdrawn from his grasp and, turning, now saw Tam standing with him.

But it was a younger Tam; a Tam in no more than his thirties, wearing green field clothing, except for the newsman's cloak. Tam took a step forward by himself and stood, looking at the hilltop.

His face showed an expression that was a strange mixture of grimness and a hope so painfully deep it barely escaped being a fear. He had let go of Hal. Now he moved away from him. Hat stood where he was and watched.

After a moment, some little distance to their right, a head appeared above the brow of the hill, and lifted as the man bearing it approached. It was Kensie, as Hal had last seen him, riding in the place Hat had created in his different universe.

Only here Kensie was wearing a Field Commander's uniform in the dark blue of the Exotic Mercenary Forces. But aside from that he was no different than ever; and the warmth of his smile, directed at Tam, went like a wave before him down the slope.

Tam breathed out, a soft, deep breath; and at that same moment another man mounted over the crest of the hill to the left, wearing the black uniform of a Friendly Commandant out of the last century. He was thin and tall, but nowhere near the height of Kensie, and he also smiled. It was a grave, small smile in his narrow face; but it was there, and it, too, was directed at Tam.

Tam stared at Jamethon as he, too, came onward down the slope. But at that moment two more figures came over the hilltop, this time from directly ahead. One was a young woman, looking hardly out of her teens, with black hair and the same sharp features as Tam himself, holding hands with a man who looked no older than she did, but wore the historic battle gray of the Cassidan Field forces. His uniform was without insignia or mark of rank. These two, also, broke into smiles, coming down toward Tam, so that he suddenly ran forward toward them, the woman who had been his sister and the man who had been her husband, David Hall.

So they all came together, all five of them, halfway up the slope from Hal, in the sun; and clustered together there like a family reunited. Tam was all but hidden by the others surrounding him; but Hal, remembering Mor reaching out his hand across the crupper of his mother's horse as they had ridden together in another place of this Creative Universe, could feel what was in the man who had been Director of the Encyclopedia so long.

He turned back and stepped through where his instinct told him the phase-doorway must be, and was suddenly again in the room with the old man, beside the running stream and with the three women, all surrounded by the illusion of the trees.

Below on the Earth's surface, a cloud must have slipped before the face of the sun, for shadow fell about them as Hal stepped forth. Amanda in her long formal dress of that wintry blue that was the color of the Dorsai northern seas; Rukh, all in black, one hand at her throat holding the circle of grarite on its chain, with the simple cross in its gray-white rock; and Ajela in the green, formal Japanese kimono of fleshy silk, embroidered with a design of pine branches with snow on them-these three in their colors seemed to glow somberly in the little dimming of the light like three queens at a state burial.

Hal turned just in time to see those he had left on the hillside, Tam among them, moving close together over the crest of ground and disappearing beyond.- The hill vanished then; and the face of the phase-door was once more silver and blank.

Hal turned to Ajela and the others. Did you see? he said. Did you see how they met him, smiling, and took him away with them? No, whispered Ajela. Slowly the other two shook their heads. I did . The faint words were barely breathed by Tam, but they all heard. Slowly, Tam's eyelids dropped. But a new, faint smile on his lips remained. Ajela ran to him and hugged him; but it was not the desperate embrace Hal had seen her give the dying man in recent times before. It was an enfolding of warmth and joy.

Tam's eyes closed finally; and, as they watched, the tiny lift 'and fall of his chest stopped its movement altogether. The faint smile still remained on 'ram's lips, but he had at last stopped b eathing. Lord, said Rukh, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

And in that same moment the cloak, like a creature released, changed back from the white and red it had held for so long, and shone on its basic setting, with all the colors of the rainbow on Old Earth.

Hal stared at it. Amanda had been right. It was the bridge.