" 'You go see for yourself then,' said the rain. 'Anyway, I know it's there and I'm not going anywhere near it, ever again. The very thought of it chills me clear through - look how my drops are freezing at the thought of it!' " 'Poo!' said the wind. 'Where's it supposed to be - back the way you just came? I'll go see for myself, right now!' and off he went. "The sun went on his regular way, because it was important that a day always have the right number of minutes in it for the day it was, and he'd almost forgotten about the rain's fright and story, when the wind came up to him. And the wind was so shaken he was blowing in irregular gusts. " 'Calm down, now,' said the sun. 'What's wrong?' " 'What's wrong?' said the wind. 'I'll tell you what's wrong! I went to look for that Great Dark Place the rain talked about - and it was there! Just as rain said! The greatest, darkest place you ever - well, there's just no describing how terribly great and dark it was. I'll never get over the fright it gave me - never!' " 'Come, come,' said the sun, for he was a very large and comforting person, by nature, 'it just isn't possible for any place to be that frightening. How about this? I'll go have a look for myself, right now. There may have to be a few extra minutes in this day, but we can't go having the rain and wind all upset like that. The weather will turn crazy, if it's sleeting in the middle of summer and you're blowing a gusty gale when you ought to be cooling everybody's brow with gentle breezes. I'll be right back.' "Off he went. But he didn't come right back. In fact, he didn't come back for quite a while indeed, and when he did, he was exhausted. While the wind had been waiting the rain had come up to join him and they both watched the sun approaching. " 'Well?" called the rain, as the sun got close enough to hear. 'Now, you see? Isn't it the most terrible and greatest Dark Place you ever saw? " 'It certainly is not!' replied the sun as he reached them. He was hot and more than a little cross, for now the day would have at least an extra hour in it it never should have had - unless moon could be talked into shortening the night by that much. 'In fact I don't believe there ever was any such place. The two of you made it up to send me on a wild goose chase. I looked high and low. I looked into everything and under everything - and there's no dark place at all, anywhere! If there was, I couldn't have missed finding it. I don't think it ever existed in the first place, and that's the last time I go looking for something like that!" Hal had been lulled almost into drowsiness by the soft, regular voice of Amanda as she told the story. Besides being natural singers, the Morgans of Fal Morgan were gifted storytellers, and Amanda had all the family skills in that area. Now, the sudden stopping of her voice woke him suddenly, to the night and what he had himself been talking of before. "And this dark place," he said to her, "it has some particular application to me?" "You know why the sun couldn't find it, of course," said Amanda. "The dark place was there, but the sun saw only his own light when he looked. Tam has a dark place, even after all these years, but when you look at it, you see it so fully lighted by your own vision, you don't or won't see it as a dark place, because it echoes a dark place very like it, in you. The memory of your responsibility for how your brother Mor died."
Hal closed his eyes reflexively - because Amanda's last words had slapped him like a physical blow. Yet again his mind brought him the sight of William, the finally defeated and now fully insane Prince of the great planet Ceta, as he pressed the button that opened double doors to reveal the tortured body of what had once been Mor - the image was as fresh as if it had been yesterday, instead of a century past.
He made himself open his eyes again. "Tell me what you mean," he said. "No one you ever knew dies - for you," said Amanda, and the eerie near-echoing of what he had told himself, standing surrounded by the image of the library on the estate back down on Earth in the mountain rains, just a few days before, was part of what she always seemed able to do. "Similarly, for Tam, your uncle Kensie and Jamethon Black, and even David Hall his brother-in-law - will never have died. Tam's lived with his part in those deaths longer than you've lived with Mor's death. He's carried his guilt about them more than a century, and the only hope he's had was that your finding what you've been after would prove that there were other causes - that it was one of the necessary happenings that made possible your discovery of a way into the Creative Universe for all people."
She paused. "So, that's what you're going to be taking from him, when you tell him you're giving up: his last hope of some forgiveness from the darkness, before he dies. For Ajela, for the Encyclopedia, even for you in your own right, he's fought to live that long. But mostly for hope of pardon for what happened to David and Kensie and Jamethon. Nearly a hundred years of service here hasn't won that pardon for him. But you might have. This one thing of all things you couldn't see - because his darkness echoes yours too closely. When you got close to seeing it, it woke your own guilt over Mor, and so you didn't want to look deeply into him where his trouble lay."
Hal lay stiffly still in the bed. "You make leaving harder, only," he said. "No, I didn't realize that about Tam, but knowing it now makes no difference. What can I do that I haven't done already?" "Did it ever strike you," said Amanda softly, "that you've been going at the problem of entry to the Creative Universe in what amounts to a head-on attack-like an attempt by pure force on a fabric or situation, to break through it. Maybe you could back off for a moment, and try to find a way of approaching the problem obliquely, in a way that wouldn't provoke so much resistance."
He propped himself up on one elbow to stare at her. "By God!" he said. "Even in this you see more than anyone else can-" He broke off and slumped back. "But there is no other way. I've tried them all." "You've been too close to the problem even to see them all," she said. "You think so?" He was silent for a long moment. "No," he said, "I can't believe that. It's too easy an answer."
She let him think in silence for a while. "If you don't mind a suggestion..." she said at last. "I might have known!" He smiled grimly at her, aware that the moonlight showed his face to her clearly. "No - of course I want a suggestion!" "Then suppose I tell you that on Kultis, where I've been working underground, the people have found their own way of resisting the armed forces Bleys sent to occupy the Exotic worlds? A way that doesn't mean giving up their commitment to nonviolence? Would it make a difference if I could show you a small corner on that world where a new kind of Exotic is coming into being?"
He stared through the darkness at her, letting her words resound and re-echo in his mind, the implications of what she had just said flying out like sound waves from each stroke of a clapper against the metal side of some heavy bell. "New?" he said. "You mean a development-upward?" "Yes. Possibly upward. But new - I'm sure. Totally new, unmistakably different." "And better?" "I think so," said Amanda, "there's a group who've revived the old name of Chantry Guild for themselves, the name of the organization back in the twenty-first century, that you were once concerned with as Paul Formain. The organization from which the whole Exotic culture sprang, changed as it was from its beginnings." "It would mean. He rolled over once more on to his back, talking to the ceiling as much as to her, again. "It would mean one more sure indication the race as a whole is on the brink of a step forward. But the Exotics were a Splinter Culture, like the Friendlies and the Dorsai. More than the Friendlies and Dorsai, they were deliberately trying to improve all people. But to make that improvement now, under these conditions, when everything they have has been given away, or taken from them... it's incredible."