"Ekram," she managed to say faintly. "I'm dying…"
"Not unless you want to," said Ekram.
She stared at him aghast. This was outrageous. This was too much. After all she had been through… then the import of his words trickled through the sense of unreality wrapping her.
"Bring Betta here! At once!" she said; and her voice was almost strong.
"Later," said Ekram.
"Then I'll have to go to her," she said, grimly.
She was only able to move one of her arms feebly sideways on top of the covers, in token of starting to get up from the bed. But it was enough.
"All right. All right!" said Ekram. "In just a minute."
She relaxed, feeling strangely luxurious. It was all right. The name of the game was survival, not how you did it. A boy! Almost she laughed. Well, that sort of thing happened, from time to time. In a few more years it could also happen that this boy could have a sister. It was worth waiting around to see. She would still have to die someday, of course - but in her own good time.
Interlude
The voice of the third Amanda ceased. In the still mountain afternoon there were no other sounds but •the hum of some nearby insects. A little breeze sprang up, and was gone again.
With her words still echoing in his mind, Hal thought of the struggle she had been speaking of, that early Dorsai fight to stay free of Dow deCastries; and its likeness to the present fight on all the worlds, to resist the loss of human freedom to the Other Men and Women - those cross-breeds from human splinter cultures such as that on the Dorsai itself. This present fight in which he and the third Amanda were both caught up.
"What happened inside Foralie?" he asked. "Inside the house, I mean, after Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer with their men went inside? What happened with Cletus and Dow - or were they just able to take over with no trouble?"
"Something more than no trouble," she said. "Swahili was there, remember, and Swahili had been a Dorsai. But Eachan Khan killed Swahili when Swahili let himself be distracted for a second and Arvid and Bill were able to control the situation. Dow had a sleeve gun of his own, it turned out. He hurt Cletus, but didn't manage to kill him. In the end it was Dow who was shipped back to Earth as a prisoner."
"I see," said Hal. But his first question had immediately raised another one in his mind.
"How was that other business worked?" he asked. "That Coalition trick of having a contingent of well soldiers up there at Foralie after they'd seemed to have been rotated down into the area of town? Where did they come from, the soldiers Amanda found waiting , and ready to fight, in the vehicle park?"
"You remember the military physician had phoned Dow deCastries the night before," Hal's Amanda said. "He was a political appointee himself and he knew General Amorine was another. Besides Amorine was sick himself from the nickel carbonyl vapors. The military physician knew that taking his suspicions to Amorine would simply have meant Amorine arresting Ekram and trying to force some kind of answer out of him - and the military doctor was only too aware of what it would be like for him to face alone a situation where everybody was dying. So, he went directly to Dow, instead."
"I don't understand what that would have to do with it …" Hal frowned.
"Dow had been getting the reports from other areas. A thousand different things were going wrong in a thousand different places with his occupation forces; and, next to Cletus, he had the best mind on the planet." She paused to look at him. "Don't underestimate what Dow was."
"I didn't intend to."
"What he saw," Amanda said, "was that, for all practical purposes, his occupation of the Dorsai had failed. But he could still, with some luck, grab Cletus and take him off-planet as a prisoner - or at the worst, get away himself. This, if he had military control in this one district alone."
"And he figured out that as soon as Cletus reached Foralie, Foralie would be attacked by the local people in a try to rescue him?"
"Of course." Amanda shrugged. "It was obvious - as the first Amanda essentially said, to Ramon, when Ramon wondered if Cletus hadn't really meant
what he said at the airpad - that they should do nothing against the soldiers. One way or another the district had to attack, then. So he sent up the patrol that morning with only sick soldiers; and it brought back well soldiers, all right; but those same well soldiers - only now pretending to be sick - went back up as the troops in the convoy that escorted Cletus to Foralie."
"Ah," said Hal, nodding. "How long did the first Amanda actually live?"
"She lived to be a hundred and eight."
"And saw a second Amanda?"
Hal's Amanda shook her head.
"No. It was nearly a hundred years before there was a second Amanda," she said.
Hal smiled.
"Who had the wisdom to name the second one Amanda?"
"No one," Amanda said. "She was named Elaine; but by the time she was sir years old everyone was already calling her the second Amanda. You might say, she named herself."
Once more, in the back of his mind, Hal felt an obscure alerting to attention of that part of him which recognized the existence of The Purpose.
"Tell me something about the second Amanda," he said.
The third Amanda hesitated for a brief moment.
"For one thing," she said, "the second Amanda was the one both Kensie and Ian Graeme were in love with."
"Kensie and Ian?" Hal felt a strange coldness move through him. "But Kensie never married and Ian…"
"That's right," Amanda said. "Ion's wife, the mother of his children, was named Leah. But it was the second Amanda who both the twins fell in love with in the first place."
"How did it happen?"
The third Amanda looked down toward Fal Morgan.
"The second Amanda grew up with Kensie and Ian," she said. "How could it be any other way when the two households were practically side by side, here? She grew up with them; and by the time they were nearly grown, if she loved either of them, it was probably Kensie, with that brightness and warmth that was such a natural part of him."
"She loved Kensie?" v
"I said - if she loved either of them… then. She was young, they were young. She had had them around all her life. What was there about them to make her suddenly fall seriously in love with either one of them? But then they graduated from the Academy and went off to the wars; and when they came back, it was all different."
She paused.
"Different? How?" Hal said gently, to get her going again.
She sighed once more.
"It's not easy to describe," she said. "It's something that happens often, with the situation we have here on the Dorsai. You grow up, knowing the boys of your district, and those from a lot of others. And when they finally sign contracts and go off-planet, that's all they are, still - just tall boys. But then, perhaps it's a year, or several, before they come home; and when they do you find they're… different."
"You mean, they've become men."
"Not only men," she said, "but men you never thought might come from the boys you knew. Some things you hardly noticed about them have moved forward in them and taken over. Other things you thought were the most important part of what made them, have gone way back in them, or been lost forever. They've grown up in ways you didn't expect. Suddenly, it's as if you never had known them. They can be anybody… strangers."