A harsh, ragged sigh of relief tore itself past the gates of his throat and his arms went around her, one hand closing about the soft turn of hip, one sliding beneath her to cradle her upper body, his forearm beneath her shoulder and his fingers in the softness of her hair. With one simple effort, he lifted her to him.
"You came…" he said, just before their lips met, and their bodies pressed strongly together.
He returned, after a while, to the rest of the universe—he came back gradually, drifting back. They were lying side by side now on the bed, with no cover over them; and the moon had moved some distance in the sky, so that its light had abandoned the center of the room, and now shone full upon them.
"Now everything is different," he said.
He lay on his back; and she lay half-turned toward him, her head on the pillow, so that he could feel her eyes watching him even though he stared at the ceiling and the moonlight.
"Is it?" she said, softly. Her right arm lay above her head and the fingers of that hand wandered caressingly, through his own black, coarse hair. Her other arm lay across his chest, white against the darkness of the matted hair there. She moved closer to him, fitting her head into the hollow of his shoulder; and he turned toward her, laying his left arm over her. He saw his own thick wrist and massive hand lying relaxed upon the gentle rises of her breasts and felt a wonder that she should be here, like this; that out of all times and places they should find each other in this moment when the worlds were beginning to burn about them.
The wonder grew in him. How was it that at a time like this he could feel so close to someone else and happy; when only a handful of days past on Harmony—
He shuddered suddenly; and her arms tightened swiftly about him.
"What is it?" she said.
"Nothing…" he said. "Nothing. An old ghost walking over my grave."
"What old ghost?"
"A very old one," he said. "Hundreds of years old."
"It's not gone," she said, "it's still with you."
"Yes," he said, giving up. The core of him was still cold, even though she warmed him with her arms; and the words came from him almost in spite of himself.
"I've just come from the Friendlies," he said. "I'd gone there to get a Harmonyite named Rukh Tamani—did I tell you about her when I was here before? There's a work she's needed for on Earth, for all the worlds. But when I got there the Militia at Ahruma had her in prison."
He stopped, feeling the coldness grow within him.
"I know about the Militia on the Friendlies," Amanda said.
"I got the local resistance people to get her out. We went into the Militia Headquarters after her. When I found her, she'd been left in a cell…"
The memory grew back into a living thing, about him. He talked on. The coldness began once more to grow in him, as it had then, spreading out through his body. The bedroom and Amanda seemed to move away from him, to become remote and unimportant. He felt himself reentering the memory; and he grew ever more icy and remote…
"No!" It was Amanda's voice, sharply. "Hal! Come back! Now!"
For a moment he teetered, as on a sharp-crested rock, high above a dark depth. Then slowly, clinging to her presence, he began to retreat from the place into which he had almost gone a second time. He returned, farther and farther… until finally he was back and fully alive again. The coldness had melted from him. He lay on his back on the bed and Amanda had him in her arms.
He breathed out once, heavily; a sound too great to be called a sigh; and turned his head to look at her.
"You know about it?" he said. "How do you know?"
"It's not uncommon here," she said, grimly. "The Graemes had their share of it. It's called a cold rage."
"A cold rage…" He looked back up at the shadowy ceiling overhead. The phrase rang with familiarity in his ears. His mind took what she had just told him and ran far into the interior of his own thoughts, fitting it like a key to many things in himself he had not yet completely understood. He felt Amanda releasing the fierce grip she had maintained on him until now. She let go the tension of her arms and lay back a little from him. He felt her watching him.
"I'm sorry." The words came from him in a weary gust of air. He was still not looking at her. "I didn't mean to put it off on you, that way."
"I just told you," she answered—but her tone was more gentle than her words, "it's not uncommon here. I said the Graemes had their share of it. How many nights out of the past three hundred years, do you think, has one of them, man or woman, laid talking to whoever was close enough to tell, as you did now?"
He could think of nothing to say. He felt ashamed… but released. After a little while, she spoke again.
"Who are you?" she asked softly.
He closed his eyes. Her question struck heavily upon him at his recognition of a knowledge he had not expected her to have. There was nowhere he could turn to hide the rest of things from her—now that he had just tried to go as far as human mind could take him from her and she had brought him back in spite of himself.
"Donal." He heard his voice say it, out loud in the night silence. "I was Donal."
His eyes were still closed. He could not look at her. After a long moment he asked her: "How did you know?"
"Knowing runs in the Morgan line," she answered. "And the Amandas have always been gifted with it, even more than the others in the family. Also, I grew up with Ian around. How could I not know?"
He said nothing for a little while.
"It's Ian you look like," she said. "But you know that."
He smiled painfully, opening his eyes at last and gazing up at the ceiling. The relief in having it out in the open was so great that adjustment to it came hard.
"It was always Ian and Kensie I wanted to be like—when I was growing up—as Donal," he said; "and I never could."
"It wasn't Eachan Graeme? Your own father?"
He laughed a little at the thought.
"No one could be like Eachan Graeme, as I saw it then," he said. "That was too much to expect. But the twins—that seemed just barely possible."
"Why do you say you never were?" she said.
"Because I wasn't," he said. "As the Graemes go, I was a little man. Even my brother Mor was half a head taller than I was."
"Two lifetimes…" she said. "Two lifetimes bothering over the fact that you were shorter than the other men in your family?"
"Three lifetimes," he corrected her, "and if you're male, it sometimes matters."
"Three?"
He lay silent again for a moment, sorting out the words to say.
"I was also a dead man for a time," he said at last. "That is, I used the body and name of a man who'd died. I had to go back in time; and there was no other way to do it."
It was the last thing he had meant to do, but he heard the tone of his own voice putting up a wall against further questions from her about that second lifetime.
"How long have you known who you were… this last time?" she asked.
He had been speaking without looking at her. But now he opened his eyes and turned toward her; and, her own eyes, pure blue now in the moonlight, drew him down to her. He kissed her, as someone might reach out to hold a talisman.
"Not until these last two years—for certain," he said. "I grew up until I was nearly seventeen years old on Old Earth, not knowing. Then later, when I was in the mines on Coby, I began to feel the differences in me. Later, on Harmony, there began to be moments when I did things better than I should have known how to do. But it wasn't until I got here to Graemehouse on my first trip—when I was in the dining room there—"
He broke off, looking down into those eyes of hers.
"You must have known, then," he said, "or suspected, when you found me there when you came back, and saw how I was."
"No," she said. "It was the night before, that I felt it. I knew then, not who you were, but what you were."
He shook slightly, remembering.
"But I wasn't reall
y sure then, myself. I didn't even understand how it could be," he said, "until this last year at the Final Encyclopedia. Then, when I began to use the Encyclopedia for the first time as a creative tool, the way Mark Torre had hoped and planned it would be used, I put it to work to hunt back and help me find out where I'd come from."
"And it showed you," she said, "that you'd come from the Dorsai?"
A coolness—different from the coldness she had rescued him from before, but equally awesome, blew through him.
"Yes," he said, "but also much more than that, very much, much farther back than that."
She watched him.
"I don't understand," she said.
"I'm Time's soldier," he said softly. "I always have been. And it's been a long, long campaign. Now we're on the eve of the last battle."
"Now?" she asked. "Or can it still be sidestepped?"
"No," he said, bleakly. "It can't be. That's why everyone's in it who's alive today, whether they want to be or not. I'll take you to the Encyclopedia one day and show you the whole story as it's developed, down the centuries—as I've got to show it to Tam Olyn and Ajela as soon as I get back."
"Ajela?"
"Ajela's an Exotic—only about my age." He smiled. "But at the same time she's Tam's foster-mother. She's in her twenties now, and she's been taking care of him since she was sixteen. In his name she does most of the administrating of the Encyclopedia."
Chapter Fifty-six
Amanda asked nothing more, for the moment. A temporary silence closed around them and by mutual consent they turned back to each other and into the universe and language that belonged only to the two of them. Later they lay companionably quiet together on their backs, side by side, watching the last of the moonlight illuminating a far corner of the room; and Amanda spoke.
"You didn't expect it at all, then, that I'd be waiting at the spaceport when you came back?"
He shook his head.
"I couldn't expect that," he said. "It would have been like expecting to grow up to be like Eachan Khan Graeme—too much to imagine. I just thought that when I came I'd look you up, wherever you were. I only hoped…"
He ran down into silence. Amanda said nothing for a moment.
"I've had more than a year to think about you," she said.
"Yes," he smiled, ruefully. "Has it been that long? I guess it has, hasn't it? So much has been going on…"
"You don't understand."
She raised herself up on one elbow and looked down into his face.
"You remember what I tried to tell you when you were here the last time?"
"That you were like the other two Amandas," he said, sobering. "I remember."
He looked up at her.
"I'm sorry I was so slow to realize what you meant," he went on. "I do now. You were telling me that, like them, you're committed to a great many people, too many to take on the possible conflict of an extra commitment to someone like myself. I understand. I've found out how little I can escape from my own commitments. I can hardly expect you to try to escape from yours."
"If you'll listen," she said, "I might be able to tell you what I'm trying to tell you."
"I'm listening," he answered.
"What I'm trying to say is that I had a chance to think about things after you were gone. You're right, I sent you off because I didn't think there was any room in my life for anyone like you—because I thought I had to be what the second Amanda had been; and she'd sent Ian away. But with time to think about it I started to realize there was a lot there I hadn't understood about both the earlier Amandas."
He lay waiting, listening. When she paused, he merely continued to look up at her.
"One of the largest shocks was realizing," she said, almost severely, "how little I'd understood about my own Amanda, the second one, in spite of being raised by her. I told you I grew up with Ian around the house so much of the time that as a young child I thought he was a Morgan. He and Amanda were both at a good age then, his children were grown and had children of their own; and his wife, Leah, was dead. He and Amanda, eventually in their old age, had come to be what life and their own senses of duty had never let them be until then—a love match. This was all right there, under my nose, but I was too young to appreciate it. Being that young and romantic-minded, all I could see was Amanda's great renunciation of Ian when she was younger, because of her obligation to the people of the Dorsai."
She paused.
"Say something," she demanded. "You are following me, aren't you?"
"I'm following you," he said.
"All right," she went on. "Actually, when I began to see Ian and Amanda as the human beings they really were, I was finally able to see how there'd been a progression at work down the Amanda line. The First had her obligation only to her family and the people of this local community. My Amanda had hers to the Dorsai people as a whole. The obligation I carry, I think, is the same as yours, to the human race as a whole—in fact, I think that's one of the forces that's brought us together now, and would have brought us together, sooner or later, in any case."
He frowned a little. What she had last said was an obvious truth that had never occurred to him.
"I realized finally," she was going on, "that, far from our personal commitments making us walk separate roads, they probably do just the opposite. They were probably going to require us to walk the same road together, whether we wanted to do so, or not; and if that was so, then there was no problem—for me, at least."
She stopped and looked down at him with an almost sly smile he had not expected and did not understand.
"Are you still following me?" she demanded.
"No," he answered. "No, to be honest, now you've lost me completely."
"My, my," she said, "the unexpected limits to genius. What I'm telling you is, I decided that if it was indeed inevitable that the factors involved were going to bring the two of us together, then it was just a matter of time before you came back here. If you never did, I could simply forget about the whole matter."
"But if I did come back? What then?" he asked.
She became serious.
"Then," she said, "I wouldn't make the mistake I'd made the first time. I'd be waiting for you when you got here."
They stared at each other for a long moment; and then she took her weight off her elbow, lay down and curled up against him, her head in the hollow of his shoulder. He put his other arm over and around her, holding her close. For a moment or two neither of them said anything.
"The last thing in the universe I expected," he commented, at last, to the ceiling. "It took me two tries at life to realize I had to develop the ability to love, then a third try from a standing start to actually develop it. And now, when I finally have, at a time when it ought to have been far too late to do me any good—here you are."
He stopped talking and ran the palm of his hand in one long sweep down her back from the nape of her neck to the inner crook of her knee.
"Amazing," he said thoughtfully, "how you can fit yourself so well to me, like that," he said.
"It's a knack," she answered, her lips against his chest. There was a second's pause. "Except all these hairs you have here tickle my nose."
"Sorry."
"Quite all right," she said, without moving. Another momentary pause. "I won't ask you to shave them off."
"Shave them off!"
She chuckled into his chest. They held each other close for a little while.
"I shouldn't do that sort of thing," she said in a different voice, after the time had passed. "I don't know what makes me want to tease you. It's just that it's like being able to ride a wild horse everyone is afraid to get close to. But I can feel something of what it must have been like for you, all those years and all those lives. It's so strange it doesn't show on you more, now that you know who you were and what you did."
"Each time was a fresh start," he said, earnestly. "It had to be. The slate had to be wiped clean each time so there'd be no danger of w
hat had been learned before getting in the way of the new learning. I set myself up fresh each time. That way I could be sure I'd only remember what I'd known before after I'd progressed beyond needing it in my newer life. I've been learning—learning all the way."
"Yes, but hasn't it been strange, though?" she said. "Everybody else starts at the bottom and works up. Actually, what you've done is start at the top and work down. From Donal, controller of worlds, you've struggled your way down to being as much like an ordinary person as you can."
"It's because the solution's got to be for the ordinary person level—or it's no solution. Donal started out to mend the race by main force; and he learned it didn't work. Force never really changes the inner human. When Genghis Khan was alive, they said a virgin with a bag of gold could ride from one border of his empire to the other end and no one would molest her, or it. But once he was dead, the virgins and the gold started moving again under heavy armed guard, as they always had before. All anyone can ever do for even one other human being is break trail for him or her, and hope whoever it is follows. But how could I even break trail for people unless I could think like them, feel like them—know myself to be one of them?"
His voice sounded strange in the quiet nighttime room and his own ears.
"You couldn't, of course," Amanda said gently. "But how did Donal go wrong?"
"He didn't really," Hal said, to her and the shadowy ceiling. "He went right, but without enough understanding; and it may be I don't have enough understanding, even yet. But his start was in the right direction and what he dedicated me to as a child is still my path, my job."
The Final Encyclopedia Page 74
