"Please do," I said. "And the sooner the better."
"It will be soon enough," said Bright.
We said good-bye again and I left for my hotel. There, I found my things had already been packed; and, as Bright had said, passage had already been booked for me on a spaceliner leaving that evening for Earth. Jamethon was nowhere to be seen.
Five hours later, I was once more between the stars, shifting on my way back toward Earth.
Five weeks later, the Blue Front on St. Marie, having been secretly supplied with arms and men by the Friendly worlds, erupted in a short but bloody revolt that replaced the legal government with the Blue Front leaders.
Chapter 20
This time I did not ask for an interview with Piers Leaf. He sent to ask for me. As I went through the Guild Hall and up the elevator tube to his office, heads turned among the cloaked members I passed. For in the two years since the Blue Front leaders had seized power on St. Marie, much had changed for me.
I had had my hour of torment in that last interview with my sister. And I had had, while returning from that to Earth, the first dream of my revenge. Afterward, I had taken the two steps, one on St. Marie, one on Harmony, to set that revenge in motion. But still, even with those things done, I had not yet changed inside me. For change takes time.
It was the last two years that had really changed me - that had brought Piers Leaf to call upon me, that had caused the heads above the capes to turn as
I passed. For in those years the power of my understanding had come full upon me, in such measure that it now seemed by contrast to have been a weak, newborn and latent thing, even up through the moment in which I shook hands and said farewell to Eldest Bright, three years before.
I had dreamed my primitive dream of a revenge, sword in hand, going to a meeting in the rain. Then for the first time, I had felt the pull of it, but the reality I felt now was far stronger, stronger than meat or drink or love - or life itself.
They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams - and still calls for more.
They are fools who think otherwise. No great effort was ever bought. No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was ever raised into being for payment of any kind. No Parthenon, no Thermopylae was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone. The payment for the doing of these things was itself the doing of them.
To wield oneself - to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand - and so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin - that is the greatest pleasure known to man! To one who has felt the chisel in his hand and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt the sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body of his mortal enemy - to these both come alike the taste of that rare food spread only for demons or for gods.
As it had come to me, these two and more than two years past.
I had dreamed of holding the lightning in my hand over the sixteen worlds and bending them all to my will. Now, I held that lightning, in sober fact, and read it. My abilities had hardened in me; and I knew now what failure of a wheat harvest on Freiland must mean in the long run to those who needed but could not pay for professional education on Cassida. I saw the movements of those like William of Ceta, Project Blaine of Venus, and Sayona the Bond, of both Exotic Worlds - all of whom bent and altered the shape of things happening between the stars - and I read their results-to-be clearly. And with this knowledge I moved to where the news would be, and wrote it even as it was only beginning to happen, until my fellow Guild members began to think me half-devil or half-seer.
But I cared nothing for their thoughts. I cared only for the secret taste of my waiting revenge, the feel of the hidden sword in my grasp - the tool of my Destruct!
For now I had no doubts left. I did not love him for it, but Mathias had seen me clearly - and from his grave, I worked the will of his anti-faith, but with a power he could never have imagined.
Now, however, I was at Piers Leaf's office. He was standing in the door of it, waiting for me, for from below they would have warned him I was on my way up. He took my hand in a handshake and held it to draw me inside his office and close the door behind us. We sat down not at his desk, but to one side on the floats of a sofa and an overstuffed chair; and he poured drinks for us both with fingers that seemed thinned by sudden age.
"You've heard, Tam?" he said without preamble. "Morgan Chu Thompson is dead."
"I've heard," I said. "And a seat on the Council is now vacant."
"Yes." He drank a little from his glass and set it down again. He rubbed a hand wearily over his face. "Morgan was an old friend of mine."
"I know," I said, though I felt nothing for him at all. "It must be hard on you."
"We were the same age-" He broke off, and smiled at me a little wanly. "I imagine you're expecting me to sponsor you for the empty seat?"
"I think," I said, "the Guild members might think it a little odd if you didn't, the way things have been going for me for some time now."
He nodded but at the same time he hardly seemed to hear me. He picked up his drink and sipped at it again, without interest, and set it down.
"Nearly three years ago," he said, "you came in here to see me with a prediction. You remember that?"
I smiled.
"You could hardly forget it, I suppose," he said. "Well, Tam-" He stopped and signed heavily. He seemed to be having trouble getting down to what he wished to say. But I was old and experienced in patience nowadays. I waited. "We've had time to see things work out and it seems to me, you were both right - and wrong."
"Wrong?" I repeated.
"Why, yes," he said. "It was your theory that the Exotics were out to destroy the Friendly culture on Harmony and Association. But look at how things have gone since then."
"Oh?" I said. "How? For example?"
"Why," he said, "it's been plain for nearly a generation now that the fanaticism of the Friendlies - acts of unreasoning violence like that massacre that took your brother-in-law's life on New Earth three years ago - were turning opinion on the fourteen other worlds against the Friendlies. To the point where they were losing the chance to hire out their young men as mercenary soldiers. But anyone with half an eye could see that was something the Friendlies were doing to themselves simply by being the way they are. The Exotics couldn't be to blame for that."
"No," I said. "I suppose not."
"Of course not." He sipped at his drink again, a little more heartily this time. "I think that was why I felt so much doubt when you told me that the Exotics were out to get the Friendlies. It just didn't ring right. But then it turned out to be Friendly troops and equipment backing that Blue Front revolution on St. Marie, right in the Exotics' back yard under the Procyon suns. And I had to admit there seemed to be something going on between the Friendlies and the Exotics." He stopped and looked at me.
"Thank you," I said.
"But the Blue Front didn't last," he went on.
"It seemed to have a great deal of popular support at first," I interrupted.
"Yes, yes." Piers brushed my interruption aside.
"But you know how it is in situations like that. There's always a chip on the shoulder where a bigger, richer neighbor's concerned - next door or on the next world, whichever. The point is, the St. Marians were bound to see through the Blue Front shortly and toss them out - make them an illegal party as they are now. That was bound to happen. There were only a handful of those Blue Front people, anyway, and they were mostly crackpots. Besides, St. Marie isn't set up to go it alone, financially or any other way, in the shadow of two rich worlds like Mara and Kultis. The Blue Front thing was bound to fail - anyone outside the picture had to see that."