He shook his head. "And even if you're right, would it work here? These are Old Earth people, the laggards of the laggards..."
He fell silent, his own mind answering him with the memory of how for this last year or so Ajela had been pointing out evidence that on the world below its peoples, too, had been changing, giving up - more and more of their millennia-old sectionalism. Ajela had talked of how for the first time they were beginning to think and act as a unit. Rukh had insisted, not once but many times repeating what was said by those who had come from Harmony and Association to help her speak out against the nihilism of those who preached support of Bleys' and the Others' attitudes. These Friendlies had said that, even among those who did not flock by the hundreds of thousands to see Rukh herself in person, some still showed an openness, a willingness to see that it was not really the Younger Worlds, like some horde of enemies, that threatened them, but a destructive attitude on the part of Bleys and the Others that was the core and heart of their opposition.
He had thought that by saying these things Rukh and Ajela were merely trying to lift his own dulled spirits. But perhaps they had been honestly reporting. Perhaps, even here on Old Earth, there was a new wind of thought, bringing together the established, self-centered, divided and often opposed-to-eachother peoples of a world which for some hundreds of years had trailed behind the rest of the race in its thinking.
If that was true... then it could suddenly be important what was happening on Kultis. If the Exotics were indeed, even in one small spot, anywhere near breaking through to a new and better form of their particular Splinter-culture type of social human. If that was the case, he badly wanted to see such a thing for himself. The problem was, however, he reminded himself, that even if this was true and meaningful, he could see no way now that it could help him, personally, with the problem that had stopped him dead in his tracks these last three years.
His spark of momentary excitement had gone out. And into that void Amanda once more spoke as if she had been thinking his thoughts with him. "Suppose," she said, "you put off telling Tam - say, for the two months it would take you to go to Kultis, see for yourself what I'm talking about - and return?" "Yes," he said slowly, as he thought about her suggestion. Even though his excitement had cooled, he found he could cling to the thought that, in any case it was two more months for Tam, Ajela and the rest to hope in. Even Amanda might hope. She had not asked for herself, but then she would not, although she and he were so close that he could not avoid knowing how it would cost her to lose him, just as it would cost him to be parted from her. "I'd like you to go with me," he said to her. "I'd planned on it," she said. "I'd have to guide you to the people I've been talking about, anyway. They're hidden as well as they can be from the Others' occupying military. Once there, though, I'd have to leave you with them and just drop back at intervals. It's my district and I've got responsibilities there. Also, in this case, I better not carry you to Kultis by myself. We'll need a driver." "So long as you get someone who can keep a secret." "About the fact you're gone from the Encyclopedia?" she said. "Did you think I wouldn't? Leave all that to me, and we'll get under way as soon as possible."
"All right then," he said, "but two months only, including travel time." "Including travel time. Yes," she said.
He nodded and smiled - for her sake. But it was no use, said the inner part of him. It was a false hope, only delaying the inevitable, while shortening vitally necessary time. Desperately, he wished he could find some way of estimating when the Younger Worlds would have enough properly crewed ships outside the phase-shield to try a breakthrough to Earth.
But it was no use hoping for that. Even Bleys could not know. It would depend on how much flesh and blood could stand on the Younger Worlds, how fast the people there could be driven to produce what the Others needed.
CHAPTER 8
"You're leaving immediately?" said Ajela the next morning. "Hal - it's bad enough you're going. Don't tell me you're planning to leave in the next minute!" "We'd better, I'm afraid," said Hal. "I said two months, which may make time short enough as it is, at the Kultis end. I don't want to waste any more going and coming than I have to.
He turned to Amanda. "You've got gear on board for me, Amanda?" he asked. "All you'll need," said Amanda. "Simon's been taking care of that, haven't you, Simon?"
She was speaking to Simon Graeme, the great-grandson of Ian, who had been Donal Graeme's uncle. It was a small double miracle that Amanda had been able to find him to be their driver. There had been none in her being able to find him on such short notice, even after three years of her being away from her own people. The Dorsai forces' location system, if greatly less sophisticated, was almost as swift as the system in the Final Encyclopedia.
But the first of the small miracles came from the fact that he had not gone out like Amanda to an undercover job on one of the Other-controlled worlds. Like her, he had had considerable contact with off-Dorsai people, which ideally suited him for such work.
The second had been the fact that the patrol duty slot he was in, here at Old Earth, was one he was willing and able to leave. "They've got a robe Exotics are required to wear," Simon told Hal, "something like a civilian uniform, all but required by the forces occupying them - you'll see. I duplicated the one Amanda's been wearing in a somewhat larger style. Footwear's the real problem, but a lot of the Exotics moved back and forth to other worlds, including Old Earth, and some of the earlier stuff's still worn, since everything's hard to get for the native population these days. "
His voice was a slightly deeper bass than Hal's. Otherwise, considering the distance in time and relationship between them, they were remarkably alike.
Simon, of course, could have no way of knowing that Hal had once been Donal. As far as ordinary information went, the Dorsai could only know what all the worlds knew: that Hal had been rescued as a baby from an antique courier-size spacecraft that had drifted into the near-vicinity of Old Earth, and that after being rescued, Hal had been raised on that world by tutors from the three Splinter Cultures. But Ian had lived long enough that Simon had been ten years old when Ian died. Simon could not fail to see Ian's likeness in Hal.
If nothing else, Simon must almost necessarily guess they had some kind of relationship. It was possible he took Hal for a descendant of a child on another world whom Ian had never acknowledged fathering. But Hal suspected that his somewhat distant and generations-younger cousin had actually guessed at something more than that.
But in any case, he had never said anything of what he might have concluded. In person, there were obvious differences between them. Simon was shorter than Hal, stockier, with a more wedge-shaped face and dark brown rather than black hair.
But for all that, the feeling of family was strong between them, as always among the Graemes of Foralie, and from their first moment of meeting three years earlier, Simon had shown that he felt it, as did Hal. As far as appearances went they might have been - not brothers perhaps, but cousins - though their similarity was most visible, oddly enough, when either or both were in motion. Simon's body movements were more fluid and balanced, as suited someone who had been born on the Dorsai and never out of training. Hal's were in some sense innate, and had - strange as the word might sound - something almost spiritual about them. But when the two men moved side by side, the attention of anyone watching was somehow drawn to the same heavy-boned leanness, and cragginess of feature, in them both.
Amanda had located Simon in two hours, Encyclopedia time, and he had been delivered to them within three hours after that. In the single hour since, he had got Amanda's ship ready to take them to Kultis. "Thanks, Simon," Hal said now. A thought struck him. "Would you answer a question for me, come to think of it. You've had three years here. What do you think of the Old Earth people? I mean, the ones you've had to deal with since you've been here?"