After a moment, some little distance to their right, a head appeared above the brow of the hill, and lifted as the man bearing it approached. It was Kensie, as Hal had last seen him, riding in the place Hal had created in his different universe.
Only here Kensie was wearing a Field Commander's uniform in the dark blue of the Exotic Mercenary Forces. But aside from that he was no different than ever, and the warmth of his smile, directed at Tam, went like a wave before him down the slope.
Tam breathed out, a soft, deep breath, and at that same moment another man mounted over the crest of the hill to the left, wearing the black uniform of a Friendly Commandant out of the last century. He was thin and tall, but nowhere near the height of Kensie, and he also smiled. It was a grave, small smile in his narrow face, but it was there, and it, too, was directed at Tam.
Tam stared at Jamethon as he, too, came onward down the slope. But at that moment two more figures came over the hilltop, this time from directly ahead. One was a young woman, looking hardly out of her teens, with black hair and the same sharp features as Tam himself, holding hands with a man who looked no older than she did, but wore the historic battle gray of the Cassidan Field forces. His uniform was without insignia or mark of rank. These two, also, broke into smiles, coming down toward Tam, so that he suddenly ran forward toward them, the woman who had been his sister and the man who had been her husband, David Hall.
So they all came together, all five of them, halfway up the slope from Hal, in the sun, and clustered together there like a family reunited. Tam was all but hidden by the others surrounding him, but Hal, remembering Mor reaching out his hand across the crupper of his mother's horse as they had ridden together in another place of this Creative Universe, could feel what was in the man who had been Director of the Encyclopedia so long.
He turned back and stepped through where his instinct told him the phase-doorway must be, and was suddenly again in the room with the old man, beside the running stream and with the three women, all surrounded by the illusion of the trees.
Below on the Earth's surface, a cloud must have slipped before the face of the sun, for shadow fell about them as Hal stepped forth. Amanda in her long formal dress of that wintry blue that was the color of the Dorsai northern seas, Rukh, all in black, one hand at her throat holding the circle of grafite on its chain, with the simple cross in its gray-white rock, and Ajela in the green, formal Japanese kimono of fleshy silk, embroidered with a design of pine branches with snow on them - these three in their colors seemed to glow somberly in the little dimming of the light like three queens at a state burial.
Hal turned just in time to see those he had left on the hillside, Tam among them, moving close together over the crest of ground and disappearing beyond. - The hill vanished then, and the face of the phase-door was once more silver and blank.
Hal turned to Ajela and the others. "Did you see?" he said. "Did you see how they met him, smiling, and took him away with them?" "No," whispered Ajela. Slowly the other two shook their heads. "I did" The faint words were barely breathed by Tam, but they all heard. Slowly, Tam's eyelids dropped. But a new, faint smile on his lips remained. Ajela ran to him and hugged him, but it was not the desperate embrace Hal had seen her give the dying man in recent times before. It was an enfolding of warmth and joy.
Tam's eyes closed finally, and, as they watched, the tiny lift 'and fall of his chest stopped its movement altogether. The faint smile still remained on Tam's lips, but he had at last stopped breathing. "Lord," said Rukh, "now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."
And in that same moment the cloak, like a creature released, changed back from the white and red it had held for so long, and shone on its basic setting, with all the colors of the rainbow on Old Earth.
Hal stared at it. Amanda had been right. It was the bridge.