Underneath the wine-colored shift she wore, with its long sleeves and collarless neck, Hal knew she now weighed only slightly more than ten pounds over the weight she had been reduced to when he had carried her, more dead than alive, out of the Militia prison on Harmony. The skin was still stretched taut over her meager flesh and bones. And at that moment there was a glint from the narrow column of her neck, as the highly polished lines of a cross incised in a gray-white disk of Harmony granite, hung from a steel chain - the only thing resembling an ornament he had ever seen her wear - caught the overhead lighting of the room. It flashed momentarily with a light not unlike the light behind her dark eyes.
There were no circles under those eyes, no tightening of the skin over her cheekbones - if that were possible - to show the exhaustion that must be within her. But Hal knew she was tired, self-driven to the point of near-collapse, for she would not refuse the hosts of people down on all parts of the Earth who begged to see her in person. And she would not step back from the work she had taken to herself up here, too.
Nor could he blame Ajela for allowing her to take over the work at this desk. Ajela had not asked to be the ultimate authority over a clamoring, bickering Old Earth that was only now beginning to wake from its illusions. At last, now that it was possibly too late, Earth was beginning to realize that, if not for those who had come to its aid unasked, it would have been as vulnerable - or more - than any other of the human-inhabited planets.
Like Rukh, Ajela showed no obvious physical signs of the strain she was under, but the responsibility of her position, plus the gradual, inevitable slide toward death of the old man she loved more than anyone else on all the inhabited worlds, was gradually conquering her. In short, both of the people on which the Encyclopedia depended for control, were closer to reaching their limit, in Hal's opinion, than they realized - or were ready to admit.
It showed particularly in Ajela's case, in these last few months, that what she chose to wear had been different from the commonsensical clothes she had always worn and programmed the Final Encyclopedia to have ready for her at the beginning of each workday. Strangely, for someone Exotic-born, these last few months she had begun to dress flamboyantly-sexily, to be blunt about it - although Tam was almost the only person who saw her much...
His thoughts were wandering. He tried to pull them back to the statistics she was reciting, but they insisted on straying again... certainly, as she was costumed now, no one could appear in greater contrast to Rukh than Ajela, unless it might be Amanda. Hal hastily thrust the thought of Amanda from his mind.
Ajela still looked almost as young as the day he had first met her here in the Encyclopedia, when he had been running from the killing of his tutors, on his estate, eleven years ago. Her skin was still as fair, and her hair around her bright face as literally golden and long-in fact, perhaps lately she had worn it even longer. She wore a brown brocade tunic over silky gold blouse and pantaloons that all but hid the cinnamon-colored slippers on her feet. There was no necklace around her neck, but earrings of a honey-colored amber, and on the middle finger of her right hand shone a ring with a large, irregular chunk of the same color of amber, containing tiny seeds encased there, looking alive and ready to sprout, even after the hundreds of years since the amber had been gathered.
Her face was round, her skin fresh. But in her he thought he saw the tightness around the eyes that was not visible in Rukh. No single sign, but her whole self, to him who knew her so well, betrayed an inward-held but growing desperation, growing, he knew, from her inability to keep Tam from death.
She had come originally to the Encyclopedia from Mara, one of the two Exotic worlds, where part of the philosophy had been the hope that an evolved human race would outgrow any need of death except by choice. Thoughts of those same two Exotic worlds brought Kultis and Amanda to his mind again... almost savagely, he pushed her out of his thoughts.
Ajela had come here as a young girl of twelve, with her parents' permission, in love with the idea of the Encyclopedia, which Exotic funds had largely financed. She had stayed to rise to the position of Assistant Director, under Tam Olyn, and to also fall in love with Tam, himself, although already by that time he was old enough to be her great-grandfather.
Now she and Rukh sat together at this desk with its load of paper piled over all its surface except the small rectangles of the viewing screens inset there before each of the three of them. All these screens right now showed a view of space directly above and about the Encyclopedia.
The white opacity of the shield wall was directly overhead and it thinned off in every direction, as the screens' angle of vision began to slant, revealing both the inner and outer walls of the shield, until finally there were only the lights of the stars against the black of airless space. The sun, Hal thought inconsequentially, must be directly overhead, to be hidden by the greatest thickness of the mist-wall. It could not be they were nightside now, for it had been afternoon at the estate, almost directly below them.
He woke suddenly to the fact that Ajela had stopped talking and both Rukh and Ajela were looking at him. Like an echo half heard lingering on his ear, he realized that Ajela had laid down her paper and asked him something. "I'm sorry," he said, and his voice came out more harshly than he had intended, under the gaze of those waiting eyes, "I didn't catch the question. "
The faint indentation of a frown line, if that was what it was and not an expression of puzzlement, appeared between Ajela's hazel eyes, followed immediately by an expression of concern. "Hal," she said, "tell me - do you feel all right?"
Concern was showing on Rukh's face as well. Their reactions doubled the sense of guilt in him. "I'm fine," he said. "I just wasn't listening as I should have - that's all. What was it you asked me, just now?" "I said," said Ajela, "that we'd thought of checking with one of the Dorsai Sector Commanders. But since you said you were coming today, we thought we'd rather ask the question in-house. You just heard that remarkable list of how the Earth is finally realizing it has to help defend itself, and beginning to build some muscle. Do you think there's a chance, now, if we keep on improving this way, building ships and training crews for them, that we can put up a fleet as big as anything the Younger Worlds can throw at us? And, if so, how long would it take? Can we match them before they're ready to try a mass breakthrough of the shield?" "I can only guess," he said.
Ajela looked disappointed. Not so much, Rukh. "We thought..." Ajela said, "because you told us how you were really Donal Graeme to begin with..." "I'm sorry," Hal shook his head. "You two are the only people outside of Amanda who know about my past and my being first Donal, in the last century, then Paul Formain, two hundred years before that. But now Donal's only an old part of me and deeply buried. Much of what he was I've worked to get away from. But even Donal could only have guessed." "What would he have guessed, then?" asked Rukh.
Her voice came at him so unexpectedly, for some reason, that Hal almost started. He looked at her. "He'd guess - pretty strongly I'm afraid," he answered slowly, "that it wouldn't matter what the answer to your questions would be, because it wouldn't make any difference, even if you were able to match the Younger Worlds' ship power. "
He hesitated. It was hard to dash their hopes this way, too, when he had come to dash them as well in another. "Go on," said Ajela. "It wouldn't matter," Hal said, "because Bleys Ahrens doesn't want victory. He wants destruction. He's as determined to destroy the Younger Worlds as he is to reduce Earth's population to just those who'll follow him. In the case of the Younger Worlds, he plans to depopulate and impoverish them, so humanity will eventually die off there. Or be reduced at least to a handful of people who, lacking communication with other civilized worlds, will degenerate into savagery and eventually die. Die, because they'll be moving backwards from, not forward, toward civilization. At the same time he and his mere handful of Others can move in and take control of a depopulated Earth. - "He's said that, I know," said Ajela, "but he's not insane. He can't really mean-" "He does," said Hal. "He means exactly what he says. That's why he doesn't care how he bleeds the Younger Worlds to conquer Earth. All that matters is the conquest. So he'll throw his ships through the shield at you eventually, no matter what defensive position you're in. I think you'll find your Dorsai knew this and faced it from the start." "Thou art saying," said Rukh - and her rare use of the canting speech of her religious sect was evidence enough that she was deeply moved, "that there's no way Earth can win. "