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 rubbed 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, until, 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 ...
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.