This was the first time he had ever awakened in a force bed. He knew what it was, of course, but he was totally unprepared for the comfort of it. To the eye, he seemed to lie half-immersed in a white cloud perhaps twenty centimeters thick, which floated in the air with its underside an equal distance above the floor of the room. The white cloud-stuff wrapped him in warmth against the cooler air, and that portion of it which was underneath him became firm enough to support him in whatever position he took. Right now the elbow on which he leaned was upheld as if by a warm cupped hand, although to his eye it was merely buried to the depth of half his forearm in the thick mist.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed - and with that movement, memory came back completely, like a silent body blow. He saw the terrace and what had happened there in the eye of his mind, as he had watched it all through the screen of lakeside branches. Overcome, he huddled on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands; and for a moment the universe rocked around him and his mind ran screaming from what it now saw.
But there was no longer any wall to hold it back from him, and after a while he came to some sort of terms with it. He lifted his face from his hands again. The color had gone out of the walls of the room. The sensors in them had read the changes in the temperature and humidity of his skin, as well as half a hundred other tiny signals of his body, and accurately reflected his change in emotion. Now the color of the room was a dull, utilitarian gray, as bleak as a chamber carved from rock.
A terrible feeling of rebellion erupted in him, a fury that such a thing as had happened should have been allowed to take place; and riding the energy wave of that fury as the wall glowed into the redness of heated iron around him, his training was triggered again, and pushed him to a further action.
Under the force of his will his consciousness gathered itself, focused on the glint of a single point of light from one corner of a float and closed in on that point until it was the only thing he saw. Through that point, as through a doorway, his mind moved with its Exotic training into a discipline that was partly self-hypnosis, partly a freeing of a direct channel from his awareness into his own unconsciousness. His vision moved back and out, away once more from the point of light, and he saw all the room again. Only now, there seemed to be three figures sitting in the available floats; and they were Walter, Malachi and Obadiah.
The men who had raised and tutored him were not really there, of course. He knew that. Even as he spoke to them now, he knew that it was not actually they who answered, but constructs of them, created by his imagination from his countless memories of the attitudes and reactions he had observed in them during their lives together. It was, in fact, his own knowledge of them that was answering him, with their voices, uttering the words that he knew they would say if they could be here with him now. The technique was a discipline that had been instilled against a moment just like this one, a moment in which he would need their help and they would no longer be around to give it. But in that first second as he looked at them, it was not a cry for help he threw at them, but an accusation.
"You didn't have to!" He was half-sobbing. "You let them kill you and leave me alone; and you didn't have to!"
"Oh, Hal!" Pain was strong in Walter's voice. "We had to protect you."
"I didn't ask you to protect me! I don't want to be protected. I wanted you alive! And you let them shoot you!"
"Boy," said Malachi, gruffly, "you were prepared for this day. We taught you that something like what happened could happen, and what you must do if it did."
Hal did not answer. Now that he had opened the door to his grief it took possession of him utterly. He huddled on the edge of the bed, facing them, weeping.
"I didn't know…" he sobbed.
"Child," said Obadiah, "you've been taught how to handle pain. Don't fight it. Accept it. Pain alters nothing for him who is beyond such things."
"But I'm not beyond it." Hal was rocking in his misery, rhythmically rocking on the edge of the bed, backward and forward.
"Obadiah is right, Hal," said Walter, softly. "You were taught; and you know how to handle this moment."
"You don't care, none of you… you don't understand!" Hal rocked back and forth.
"Of course we understand." Walter's voice sounded the note of the suffering in him, evoked by the suffering in Hal. "We were the only family you had; and now it seems to you you've got no one. You feel as if everything's been taken away. But it's not like that. You still have a family - an enormous family, made up of everyone else in the human race."
Hal shook his head - back and forth, back and forth - as he rocked.
"But you do," said Walter. "Yes, I know. Right now you think there's no one on the fourteen worlds could take the place of those you've lost. But there will be. You'll find all things in people. You'll find those who hate you and those who love you - and those you'll love. I know you can't believe that, now; but it will be."
"And there's more than love," said Malachi, suddenly. "You'll find that out. In the end you may have to do without love to get done what you have to do."
"That will come," said Obadiah, "if God wills. But there's no reason the child should have to face that test, yet. Leave it to the future, Malachi."
"The future is here," growled Malachi. "He won't survive the forces against him by sitting on a bed and crying. Boy, straighten up - " The command was harsh, but the tone in which it was uttered was not. "Try to take hold. You have to plan what to do. The dead are dead. The living owe their concern to the living, even if the living are themselves."
"Hal," said Walter, still gently, but insistently. "Malachi is right. Obadiah is right. By clinging to your grief, now, you only put off the moment when you have to think of more important things."
"No," said Hal, shaking his head. "No."
He shut his mind against them. It was unthinkable that he should let go any of the grief inside him. To do so, even in the smallest way, threw the earth of certainty upon the doubtless unmarked graves of these three he had loved and still loved. But they continued to talk, saying the things he had heard them say so many times, in the ways he remembered them saying such things; and gradually he began, in spite of himself, to listen.
The shock of what had happened had driven him nearly back into being a very young child again, with all the terrible helplessness of the young. But now, as the familiar voices spoke back and forth around him, he began to come back up to the relative maturity of his sixteen years.
"…he must hide somewhere," Walter was saying.
"Where?" said Malachi.
"I'll go to the Exotics," Hal surprised himself by saying. "I could pass for a Maran - couldn't I, Walter?"
"What about that?" Malachi demanded of the InTeacher, "Would your people give him up to the Others?"
"Not willingly," said Walter. "But you're right. If the Others located him there and put pressure on, they couldn't keep him. The Exotics are free of Other control on their own worlds, but their interplanetary connections are vulnerable - and two worlds have to take precedence in importance over one boy."
"He could hide on Harmony or Association," Obadiah said. "The Other People control our cities, but outside those cities there are those who will never work with the Belial-spawn. Such people of mine would not give him up."
"He'd have to live like an outlaw," Walter said. "He's too young to fight yet."
"I can fight!" said Hal. "Others, or anyone else!"
"Be quiet, boy!" growled Malachi. "They'd have you on toast for breakfast without getting up off their chairs. You're right, Walter. The Friendly Worlds aren't safe for him."