"Yes; it's on a world I made."
"You are going?"
"Yes. I must."
"Green Green is, I believe, Gringrin-tharl of the city Dilpei. He hates you."
"Why? I don't even know him."
"That is unimportant. Your existence offends him, so naturally he wishes to be avenged for this affront. It is sad."
"I'd say so. Especially if he succeeds. But how has my existence served to offend him?"
"You are the only alien to be a Name-bearer. At one time it was thought that none but a Pei'an could master the art you have learned--and not too many Pei'ans are capable, of course. Gringrin undertook the study and he completed it. He was to have been the twenty-seventh. He failed the final test, however."
"The _final_ test? I'd thought that one pretty much a matter of form."
"No. It may have seemed so to you, but it is not. So, after half a century of study with Deigren of Dilpei, he was not confirmed in the trade. He was somewhat exercised. He spoke often of the fact that the last man to be admitted was not even Pei'an. Then he departed Megapei. With his training, of course, he soon grew wealthy."
"How long ago was that?"
"Several hundred years. Perhaps six."
"And you feel hess been hating me all this time, and planning revenge?"
"Yes. There was no great hurry, and a good piece of revenge requires elaborate preparation."
It is always strange to hear a Pei'an speak so. Eminently civilized, they nevertheless have made revenge a way of life. It is doubtless another of the reasons why there are so few Pei'ans. Some of them actually keep vengeance books--long, elaborate lists of those who require a comeuppance--in order to keep track of everyone they intend to punish, complete with progress reports on the status of each vengeance scheme. A piece of vengeance isn't worth much to a Pei'an unless it's complicated, carefully planned and put into motion, and occurs with fiendish precision many years after the affront which stimulated it. It was explained to me that the fun of it is really in the planning and the anticipation. The actual death, madness, disfigurement or humiliation which results is quite secondary to this. Marling once confided in me that he had had three going which had lasted over a thousand years apiece, and that's no record. It's a way of life, really. It comforts one, providing a cheering object of contemplation when all other things are going poorly; it renders a certain satisfaction as the factors line themselves up, one by one--little triumphs, as it were--leading up to the time of fulfillment; and there is an esthetic pleasure to be had--some even say a mystical experience--when the Situation occurs and the carefully wrought boom is lowered. Children are taught the system at an early age, for full familiarity with it is necessary for attaining advanced old age. I had had to learn it in a hurry, and was still weak on some of the finer points.
"Have you any suggestions?" I asked.
"Since it is useless to flee the vengeance of a Pei'an," he told me, "I would recommend your locating him immediately and challenging him to a walk through the night of the soul. I will provide you with some fresh _glitten_ roots before you leave."
"Thank you. I'm not real up on that, you know."
"It is easy, and one of you will die, thus solving your problems. So if he accepts, you will have nothing to worry about. Should you die, you will be avenged by my estate."
"Thank you, _Dra_."
"It is nothing."
"What of Belion, with respect to Gringrin?"
"He is there."
"How so?"
"They have made their own terms, those two."
"And ... ?"
"That is all I know."
"Will he see fit to walk with me, do you think?"
"I do not know."
Then, "Let us regard the waters in their rising," he said, and I turned and did so until he spoke again, perhaps half an hour later.
"This is all," he said.
"There is no more?"
"No."
The sky darkened until there were no sails. I could hear the sea, smell it, and there was its black, rolling, star-flecked bulk in the distance. I knew that soon an unseen bird would shriek, and one did. For a long while, I stood in a pertinent corner of my mind, examining things I had left there a long time ago and forgotten, and some things which I had never fully understood. My Big Tree toppled, the Valley of Shadows faded and the Isle of the Dead was only a hunk of rock dropped into the middle of the Bay and sinking without a ripple. I was alone, I was absolutely alone. I knew what the next words that I would hear would be; and then, sometime later, I heard them.
"Journey with me this night," he said.
"_Dra_ ..."
Nothing.
Then, "Must it be _this_ night?" I said.
Nothing.
"Where then will dwell Lorimel of the Many Hands?"
"In the happy nothing, to come again, as always."
"What of your debts, your enemies?"
"All of them paid."
"You had spoken of next year, in the fifth season."
"That, now, is changed."
"I see."
"We will spend the night in converse, Earthson, that I may give you my final secrets before sunrise. Sit down," and I did, at his feet, as in days far away through the smoke of memory seen and younger, younger by far. He began to speak and I closed my eyes, listened.
He knew what he was doing, knew what he wanted. This didn't keep me from being frightened as well as saddened, however. He had chosen me to be his guide, the last living thing that he would see. It was the highest honor he could pay a man, and I was not worthy of it. I hadn't used what he had given me as well as I might have. I'd screwed up a lot of things I shouldn't have. I knew he knew it, too. But it didn't matter. I was the one. Which made him the only person in the whole galaxy able to remind me of my own father, dead these thousand-pIus years. He had forgiven me my trespasses.
The fear and the sadness ...
Why now? Why had he chosen this time?
Because there might not be any other.
In Marling's estimation, I was obviously off on a venture from which I would probably not be returning. This, therefore, would have to be our final encounter. "Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side." --A good line for Fear, though Knowledge spoke it. They've a lot in common, when you stop to consider it.
And so the fear.
We did not speak of the sadness either. It would not have been proper. We spoke for a time of the worlds we had made, of the places we had built and seen populated, of all the sciences that are involved in the feat of transforming rubble into a habitation and, ultimately, we spoke of the art. The ecology game is more complicated than any chess game, goes beyond the best formulations of any computer. This is because, finally, the problems are esthetic rather than scientific ones. All the thinking power within the seven-doored chamber of the skull is required, true; yet a dash of something still best described as inspiration is really the determining factor. We dwelled upon these inspirations, many of which now existed, and the night sea-wind rose up so shrill and cold that I had to secure the windows against it and kindle a small fire, which blazed then like a holy thing in that oxygen-rich place. I can remember none of the words that were spoken that night. Only there, preserved within me, are the soundless pictures we shared, memory now, glaced over with distance and time. "This is all," as he'd said, and after awhile there was dawn.
He fetched me the _glitten_ roots when the faint falsedawn occurred, sat for a time and then we made the final preparations.
About three hours later, I summoned the servants and ordered them to hire mourners and to send a party ahead into the mountains to open the family burial crypt. Using Marling's equipment, I sent formal messages to the other twenty-five Names Which Lived, and to those he'd specified among friends, acquaintances and relatives that he wished to be present. Then I prepared the ancient and dark green body he had worn, found my way down to the kitchen for breakfast, lit a cigar and walked by the bright seaside where purple and yellow sails once more cut the horizon, found me a small tidal pool, sat down beside it, smoked.