But this was a different thinness. With his admission at last to Amanda of his first identity as Donal Graeme—that identity that had been withheld from him deliberately by his Donal-self until he should pass through the learning process of growing up as Hal Mayne—he had finally come very close to replicating Donal's old physical abilities and strengths, though he still necessarily fell short of the strength and skill of an adult Dorsai who had maintained his training daily since birth. Still, what he had accomplished flew in the face of all physiological experience among the Dorsai. That after twenty-odd years of living untrained by Dorsai standards (even giving him credit for what Malachi Nasuno had taught him up into his sixteenth year) it was simply beyond reason that in only a few months he had been able to achieve reflexes and responses that came at all close to being as effective as Simon Graeme's, for example.
Simon himself had commented on it. It had been impossible to hide the development in Hal from the other man, under the conditions of the close-knit existence they shared aboard the courier vessel with Amid. The old Exotic had been riding with them as a necessary living passport for Hal to the Exotic embassies from which they drew information and assistance. That development was, as Simon hinted, at once impossible and an obvious fact, and Simon had compared the achievement with that of some of the martial artists down through history who had become legendary in their own times. Beyond that comment, the current titular head of the Graeme family seemed content to leave the matter for later explanation. Hal had no choice but to do the same; although to him, too, it was a cause for wonder and a puzzle not as easy to accept as it seemed to be for Simon.
His own temporary conclusion was that it could be some sort of psychic force at work upon him in response to Donal's emergent identity; a psychic force that could shape even bone and muscle, if necessary. Cletus Grahame, nearly two hundred years before, had been supposed to have rebuilt a damaged knee of his by some such means. At the same time, something in Hal strongly insisted that there was more to it than the simple term "psychic force" implied; and the unknown element nagged at him.
But there had been no time to ponder this currently; and there was certainly none at this present moment. Running easily but steadily, like a hunger-gaunted wolf dodging through the dark and odiferous passages that hardly deserved the names of streets and alleys in this quarter of ruined buildings, Hal felt the intuition that had been Donal's numbering and placing in position about him the pursuers that were now closing in.
He had gotten inside the spaceship yards he had gone to Freiland to see; and identified the vessels being built there as military transports. But after these many months the forces controlled by the Others on all their worlds were alerted and on watch for him; and he had been both identified and pursued by the so-called "executive" arm of the Novenoe police. His only hope of escape from them lay in the courier ship waiting for him in the yard of a decayed warehouse. He was leading his pursuers toward it now, simply because he had no other choice. The invisible calculations of intuitive logic that had woken in him from the Donal part of himself told him there was no way he could reach the vessel before those hunting him would close in on him.
His estimate was that there were between thirty and forty of the "executives"—and they would know this part of Novenoe better than he did.
He ran on—steadily, still at three-quarter speed, saving his strength for the moment in which he would need it. The last leg of his journey led over broken, but still high, security fences; and across forgotten yards full of abandoned equipment rusting in the darkness. As, still running, he reached the last fence but two, flung up a hand to catch its top edge and vaulted over, he heard ahead of him the small, impatient sounds of at least two police in wait for him in the darkness of the littered yard.
He crouched down and went like a ghost, feeling his way ahead and around the debris, large and small, that littered his way. His aim was to bypass those in wait for him if he could; but one of them—evidently cramped and weary with waiting—rose and blundered directly into his way as Hal tried to pass.
Hal felt the heat of the body approaching and both smelled and heard the other's breath. There was no time to go around, so he rose from the ground and struck out, swiftly.
The "executive" dropped, but grunted as he fell; and immediately a thin, rapier-like guide-beam of visible light, of the sort used to direct the night-firing of a power weapon, began playing about the yard like a child's toy searchlight. Hal snapped a shot with the silent, but low-powered, void pistol that was the only weapon he carried, at the source-point of the light and the beam vanished. But the damage was done. The darkness now would be alive with the electronic screaming of alarms and communications, pinpointing his position to his pursuers.
He went to full speed. Even then, clearing the fence before him into the yard next to the one where the courier ship waited, his senses of hearing and smell counted five of those who sought him, on hand to block his way. They were too many to slip by. He could hear each now, plainly, while they would not be able to hear him; but they would have heat-sensing equipment and with it could see him as a glow amidst the scattered junk filling the yard; a glow imprecise in outline and occulted by the shapes of the junked vehicles and trash filling the yard, establishing his general position, nonetheless.
The choice was no choice. If he wanted to reach the ship, there was no way to do it unobserved. He must fight his way through those who were here to take him. He dropped to the gritty earth underfoot to catch his breath for a second.
It needed little enough thought to see how he had to do it. His position was hardly different from that of a man in a river, and about to be swept over a waterfall, who calls to a friend safe on the bank to jump in and help him. But the hard facts of the matter were, he knew he was more important to the large work yet to be done than was Simon Graeme. Nor would Simon—or any other Dorsai—thank him for not calling for help when it was needed, under such circumstances.
Savagely, he pressed the button at his waist that would send out a single gravity pulse to the ship's sensors and summon Simon to his aid.
Having called, he gave himself wholly over to survival, dropping flat in the dirt of the yard and squirming his way forward toward the further fence. He could hear the five men closing in upon him; and knew that they would shortly be reinforced. He stopped, suddenly, finding himself boxed. To move in any direction from the ruins of a tractor behind which he was presently sheltering was to put himself into the open field of fire from one of the "executives." Now, he must make gaps in their circle about him, if he wanted to pass through.
He did not need a visible guide-beam for the weapon he carried. He could aim accurately by ear; and the silentness of the void pistol in use would help to hide the point of origin of its killing pulse. He shot one man, and shifted quickly into the gap this made, only to find himself boxed again. And, so it began…
It was an ugly little battle, fought in the dark, at point-blank range, with his opponents' numbers being reinforced faster than his accurate fire could clear them out of his way. A bitterness stirred inside him; the bitterness of someone who has had to fight for his life for too many years, on too many occasions, and who is weary of the unceasing attacks that give him no rest. Crouching and moving through the dark, he felt for the first time in his experience the burden he carried—not the physical but the emotional weight of his three lifetimes.
He had fought his way now for half the remaining distance between him and the last fence. He was less than five or six meters from it; and the number of his enemies in the yard had grown to more than fifteen. He stopped in passing over the body of one of those he had just taken out of the action and picked up the heavy shape of the power rifle the man had been using. And at that moment, Simon came over the wall from the ship.
Hal heard him come; and knew who he was. The "executives," hearing nothing, suspecting nothing, were caught by void pistol fire from a new angle and assumed that Hal had reached the fence.
They changed direction to move in on the position Simon now held.
Hal gave them a slow count of five. Then, standing up in the darkness and holstering his nearly depleted void pistol, he triggered the power rifle he had picked up onto continuous fire; and swept it like a hose of destruction across the front of those making the sounds of movement through the yard.
There was sudden, appalled inactivity among the weapons of those still left unhurt among the attackers. In that moment, Hal threw the power rifle from him, far across the yard, to where the clatter of its fall would draw any fire well away from Simon and himself—and ran for Simon's position, hurdling the barely-seen obstacles in his path.
They were suddenly together, two patches of darker dark in the gloom.
"Go!" grunted Simon.
Hal went up and over the fence, without pausing, checked on the far side, and swung about, void pistol held high over the fence to cover Simon as the other followed, landing beside him. They ran together for the courier ship. The outer airlock door yawned before them, with Amid ducking hastily back out of their way, then closed behind them. Simon hurled himself at the controls; and the courier ship bucked explosively into motion—upward into the night sky.
There were police craft holding station overhead, in positions up to four kilometers of altitude. But barely above the rooftops, Simon went into phase shift; and suddenly the silence of orbital space was around them. Hal, who had been standing, holding to the back of the co-pilot's seat against the savage acceleration off the ground, let go and sagged limply backward into one of the backup seats of the control compartment.
He felt a touch on his elbow, turned his head to look into the face of Amid, standing beside him.
"You need sleep," said Amid.
Hal glanced again at Simon, but Simon had already finished his plot for a second shift, and the stars jumped as they watched, to a new configuration in the screens about them. Ignoring them, Simon reached to the plotting board for the next shift and Hal stood up.
"Yes…" he said.
He let Amid lead him back into his own compartment and stretched out in the bunk, unprotestingly letting Amid pull off his boots and his heavy outer jacket. Exhaustion was like a deep aching, all through his body and mind. He lay, staring at the gray metal of the compartment ceiling, a meter and a half above his bunk; and Amid's head moved into his field of vision, between him and it, looking down.
"Let me help you sleep," said Amid; and his eyes seemed to begin to grow enormously as Hal watched.
"No." Hal shook his head, fractionally. It was a great effort even to speak. "You can't. I have to do it for myself. But I will. Just leave me."
Amid went, turning out the compartment lighting, closing the door behind him. Hal stared up into sudden lightlessness; feeling again the weight of his lifetimes, which had come upon him in the darkness of the yard. He turned his mind like a hand holding up the stone of consciousness, letting that stone fall from the grasp that held it, fall into darkness… and fall… and fall… and fall…
It took them five days, ship's-time, to make Earth orbit. Most of that time Hal slept and thought. The other two left him alone. When they parked at last in Earth orbit, Hal called up a jitney to take him down to the planet's surface.
"And Amid and me?" asked Simon. "What do you want us to do? Wait here?"
"No. Go and wait for me at the Final Encyclopedia," answered Hal. "I'll be a day—at most two. No more."
Chapter Sixty
Riding the upcurrent above the brown granite slope of the mountainside in the late afternoon, high above the grounds of the Mayne Estate, the golden eagle turned his head sharply to focus his telescopic vision on the flat area surrounding the pool behind the building. There had been movement there—animal movement different from the movement of grass and twigs in the wind—where there had been no movement for a very long time.
His eyes fastened on a dark-clad, upright man-shape, tiny with the distance between them. There was no profit to be found in this, then, for a knight of the air like himself. The eagle cried harshly his disappointment and wheeled off, away from the estate and the mountainside, out over the thick green of the upland conifer forest.
Hal watched him go, standing on the far edge of the terrace overlooking the lake. A little, cold breeze rippled the gray surface of the water, and, above him, in the declining afternoon light, the blue of the sky was the blue of ice. Here, in this northern temperate zone of Old Earth, summer still held to the lowlands; but up in the mountains the first cutting blasts of winter's horn could be faintly heard. The cold, moving air chilled the exposed skin surfaces of his body and out of old days and memories came a piece of a poem to fit itself to the moment…
O what can ail thee, knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing…
It was the first verse of the original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci—"The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy"—a poem by John Keats about a mortal ensorcelled by a fairy, but without the limiting term to that ensorcelment found in its poetic ancestor—True Thomas. The older poem had been written by Thomas of Erceldoune back in the thirteenth century, from even older versions of the legend passed down by word of mouth.
For that matter, he thought, the coming of the technological age five hundred years ago had brought the old tale to a newer version still; the concept of the Iron Mistress, that artifact of work that could capture a human soul and never let it loose again to live naturally among its own kind.
It was an update of an Iron Mistress, that historic purpose, which held him captive now; and had held him from his beginning.
He shook off the self-pitying notion. Ever since he had been last on the Dorsai, he had been missing Amanda, deeply and unyieldingly. The pain of not having her within sight and hearing and touch was a feeling of deep wrongness and loss, like the pain of an amputated limb that would not grow again. No, he corrected himself, it was as if the pain and sense of loss from an earlier amputation had finally made him aware of it. The feeling was something that could be buried temporarily under the emergencies of the moment, during most of his waking hours. But at times when exhaustion stripped him down to bones and soul, as aboard the courier ship leaving Freiland recently, or when he was alone, as now, it came back upon him.
What were the later six lines in Keats' poem—about the hillside and the pale kings and warriors, with their warning? Oh, yes…
… The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hillside.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all
Who cried—"La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"
"… The Iron Mistress hath thee in thrall! …"
Once more, he pushed the feeling of depression from him. There was no need for this. The time would not be too long before he and Amanda would be together, permanently. It was not like him to waste time on gloomy thoughts, fantasies of despair summoned up out of old writings. He made an effort to examine why he should be acting like this, now; but his mind shied away from the question.
It was only his coming back here and finding the estate so empty, he told himself. For that matter, when poetry could hurt, poetry could also heal. The heart of the same ancient story had been dealt with less than thirty-four years later by another poet, Robert Browning, in the first volume of his Men and Women. Browning had written Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, a poem similar in subject—but with all the difference in the universe, in theme. As an antidote to the earlier verse, Hal quoted the last verse of Browning's poem to himself aloud, softly, into the face of the chill river of air coming at him across the cooling water of the lake—
… There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all.
And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
Browning had been a Childe all his life—an aspirant to a greater knighthood—although that part of him had passed, invisible before the conscious eyes of almost everyone, with the exception of his wife. As Hal was, himself, a Childe now, though in a different time and place and way, and never as a poet. It was no Iron Mistress that drove Browning, and perhaps even himself, after all, but the fire of a hope that would not let itself be put out.
At the same time, even with this small bit of understanding, the emptiness inside him that reached for Amanda echoed back the emptiness of this place he had known so well, but from which the three old men who had given it life and meaning were now departed. The estate had not become strange to him. He had become a stranger within it.
But an instinct had drawn him back to spend the night here; and spend it, he would. He turned back from the terrace and toward the French windows that would let him into the house, glancing through them, instinctively, down into the library where already the automatic lighting had gone on; and where, the last time he had looked in, he had seen Bleys and Danno standing toe to toe.
He opened one of the windows and stepped through, closing it behind him. The warmth of the atmosphere within, guarded by that same automatic machinery that had kept the place so well that all these years its caretaker had needed only to glance occasionally into the surveillance screens in his own home, five miles away, to make sure all was well, wrapped itself around him. He was enclosed by the still air, the smell of the leather bindings on the hundreds of old-fashioned books, dustless and waiting still on their long shelves of polished, honey-colored wood. He had read them all in those early years, devouring them one after the other, whenever he had the chance, like some starving creature fallen into a land of plenty.
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