Amanda was already on her way to the door. She stopped and turned back for a moment. "Good, I'll do that," she said, and smiled once more at them. "It's been very good meeting you both, at last. Don't worry. I trust in Hal - the inner Hal. You should, too."
Ajela, unlike Rukh, did not return the smile. "We always have," said Ajela emptily, "but if after all this time he gives up and leaves us, what hope is there for Earth, for the race? For everyone?"
Rukh turned and looked across the desk at her. "There is hope in God," she said strongly, "who never leaves us."
Neither Amanda nor Ajela spoke. There was silence in the room. Then Amanda turned once more, and went, decisively, toward the door. "I'll talk to you both shortly," she said, and went out.
As the door clicked softly shut behind her, Amanda thought that it might not be all as simple as she had made it sound when she was inside talking about Hal. One of the other two - it might have been either or both - might have been putting pressure on him, all these months, without realizing it. Well, she would deal with that if she came across it. Ajela in particular might have been guilty of pressuring without knowing it. She turned right, as Ajela had directed. Ten meters down a somewhat longer corridor than the one she remembered walking in on the way to Ajela's office, she found the door the other woman had mentioned. Without announcing herself, she touched its latch button and stepped inside as it slid open before her. Hal was sitting at his desk and he looked up to stare at her sudden appearance.
She stopped just inside the door, which slid closed again, and stood smiling at his startled face some five meters away from her. "So you've forgotten what I look like already," she said. The humor and her lightness of tone were a cover for the moment, for in that second she had seen him for the first time in three years. What she saw was a big man - for when he had chosen to regrow from babyhood as Hal Mayne, he had come back not in the bone and flesh of the man he had been as Donal Graeme, but like one of his towering twin uncles Kensie and Ian. The Dorsai were not by any means all big - though statistically they averaged more in height and weight than those of the other Younger Worlds and Old Earth. But there were some families, like the Graemes and the ap Morgans, who tended to run large compared to that average, and some among these were larger yet. Even grown, Donal had felt like a dwarf among his own family. Therefore the imitation of Ian.
It was a small vanity. Amanda, who had known Ian in his old age, had teased Hal gently about it. But she did not feel like teasing him now. The man before her no more showed obvious physical signs of stress than Ajela or Rukh had, but Amanda, who knew him so and could look into his soul better than anyone else alive, saw him there, as gaunt and sharpened by his inner struggles as a hermit.
But nearly all of that was hidden within him. Outwardly, he showed only the familiar strong-boned face, with clear green eyes under thick black eyebrows and straight, coarse black hair, his large and sinewy hands dwarfing the control keys beside the screen inset in the top of the desk, on which he was composing some piece of writing.
But the look of startlement lasted only a second. An almost imperceptible tap of his finger erased whatever he had been working on and he was up and around the desk, coming toward her. They met in the middle of the room. "I had a report to make-," she began, but his arms were already around her and his mouth on hers was cutting off the rest of the words, with a fierce hunger she had never felt in him before. She responded for a long moment, then pulled her head back forcibly and laughed up at him. "You won't even give me a chance to tell you how I happen to be here" she said.
"It doesn't matter," he answered. He kissed her hungrily again, drowning himself in her. He had wanted her here for three years, as someone lost in a desert would want a drink of water, but there was now also something else. Something new in him this last year, that had feared her coming. For he knew now that he had been refusing to face the consequences as far as they two were concerned, of the decision he had just announced to Ajela and Rukh, his decision to give up.
There was no other way it could be. His leaving the battle while she was still in it, must part them for good, whether either of them might want it that way or not.
CHAPTER 7
Hal woke without opening his eyes, without moving. He felt the weight of Amanda's upper body and head come down again on the bed beside him. He would see her if he opened his eyes. This was no pressure field they slept upon, but, at his own choice, an antique form of spring and mattress such as was still used on most of the poorer Younger Worlds - which included the Dorsai. In a pressure bed he would not have been able to feel her movements a millimeter distant.
So - she had just now again lifted up to look at him as he slept, in the starlight and the light of the new moon shining through the illusion of a skylight in the room's ceiling. She had done that often, these last three nights. She was skillful enough to raise herself without waking him, but the return to a prone position was impossible without doing so. He wondered what she had seen in those dark moments, how much discovered?
For three days and nights he had avoided talking to her about what he knew he must talk to her about, eventually. It had been cowardice to have held off from it this long, the first deliberately cowardly act in all his lives. But the thought of making it final, by putting it into words that they must go away from each other - seemed to close off his throat and make him speechless every time he tried to make himself speak of it.
Or had she read it all in his face as he Jay sleeping? He did not underestimate her. She was capable of reading deeper into other humans, including him, than anyone else he had ever known. "Yes." He rolled over on his back and stared up at the stars in their true positions as seen from here, artificial illusion though the skylight was. "We should talk."
She rose on her elbow again and the darkness of her head and shoulder occulted part of the skylight. In the dimmer illumination of her own shadow, her features were just barely visible. Her hair, unloosed, fell over her shoulder and brushed with faint fingers at the left side of his face. For a moment she looked down at him. Then she lowered her head and kissed him gently on the lips. Then raised again and stayed looking down at him. "I should have told you the moment you got here," he said. "But..." "It's al I right, dear," she said. "I know. Rukh and Ajela told me. You think you have to stop searching for an answer."
Of course. They would have told her as soon as she got here, when he had just before that announced it to them. "Yes," he answered. "I've been here for three years, Amanda, and in all that time - not one step forward."
Her dark head nodded slowly against the stars. "I see." Her voice was thoughtful. "Up until a year ago," he said, "I still didn't doubt. I was still sure I'd find a way into the Creative Universe. I know it's there. I know if I could have found a way in, the advantages would have been overwhelming and obvious to anyone - to everyone on Old Earth, to begin with. If nothing else, it'd be a place to which the people could escape, if the force of the Younger Worlds does finally break through the phase-shield." "And at best?" "Why, at best - but haven't I told you all this before?" "You've told me very little. A bit about what you hoped to reach," said Amanda's voice softly. "A good deal about what made you start reaching, a lot about the past, but little about the future." "I guess - yes," said Hal. "You're right. I never did tell you much of what I hoped for. But that was because I didn't want to promise anything I couldn't..."