"I am sorry to have caused you grief," she said softly. "I have been told that many of you believed me dead or at least badly hurt in recent days; and because you believed this, you grieved. But you should not grieve for me, ever.
"Grieve instead for those things more important under Heaven. For any who may have shared their lives with you and now suffer or lack. For your angers which wound, your indifference which hurts or kills, more than any outright anger or cruelty does.
"Grieve that you live in yourself, walled and apart from your fellow women and men. Grieve for your failures in courage, in faith, in kindness to all.
"But, grieving, know that it is not necessary to grieve, for you need not have done or been that which causes you to grieve.
". . . For there is a great meaning to life, which each of you controls utterly for yourself; and which no one else can bar you from without your consent. . .."
She spoke on; and within moments Bleys, stunned, found himself listening as she read to the people of Old Earth his own letter, that he had so recently sent out to be released to the people of the Younger Worlds.
"How can she have that letter?" Toni asked, voicing Bleys' own thoughts from behind him. "It can't possibly have gotten to New Earth, been released, and been reported back here!"
"But it has been," he said. He shook his head. "We developed our own method of sending messages faster than everybody thought possible," he went on. "It shouldn't surprise us that Hal Mayne tried to arrange faster communications, too."
"But even if he's set up a chain of ships—" she began.
"It got here too fast for that," he said. "He's got something else."
"Instructions are coming in from Jeamus Walters," she said. She listened in on the circuit from the communications room for a moment.
"This is going to be dangerous," she said. "They say they'll open a tunnel in the shield-wall, that you can enter from outside the wall; and that Hal Mayne will meet you inside it."
"You're right, that does sound dangerous," he said. "Get the details, and we'll go right away." He smiled, and saw that although her face retained its expression of concern, her eyes smiled back at him.
CHAPTER 45
As the atmosphere bled out of the airlock, Bleys could feel slight pressures and movements at odd places around his body. He knew it was the air inside his vacuum suit pushing the suit away from his body in response to the increase in the pressure differential. He had never been in a vacuum before, but he had read about it.
He was excited about being outside the ship, with nothing but the transparent suit, and light-years of nothingness, separating him from the stars. The reaction pleased him, because he knew he had been depressed since the shield-wall around Old Earth went up, and he had been a little uneasy about how objective his decisions would be.
Beside him, Captain Broadus touched another control, and the panel at the end of the lock seemed to pop outward a little, soundlessly, to slide to the side and out of sight, while a ramp telescoped out of the airlock floor, creating a ten-meter-long bridge that had no anchor for its other end. The hatchway now framed a field of stars as bright as he had ever seen them.
"Are you all right, Great Teacher?" the captain asked. Her voice was solicitous, even beyond her normal deference toward her employer; she was aware he had no free-fall experience, and she had insisted on seeing him safely to the iris in the shield-wall that would take him to his meeting with Hal Mayne.
Taking no chances, the captain had also insisted on tethering herself to him even before the lock was voided; and now she followed him along the gravity-augmented ramp, until at last they stood at its end, looking across an expanse of crystal-clear nothing at a translucent grayness so large it could not be thought of as a wall.
Bleys wondered if the light in this vacuum played tricks with human eyes. Everything—the ramp, the captain, even his hands— seemed sharply focused as he looked at them, but at the same time he felt unsure about his perceptions of distance; he could not depend on his eyes to tell him how far they were from the shield-wall, although it had been determined that Favored of God would keep station a good two hundred meters out.
The captain had been listening as the Final Encyclopedia's Chief Engineer, Jeamus Walters, described the dangers of coming into contact with that wall. Like the walls that shielded the Encyclopedia itself, it was an application of the same phase physics that made interstellar travel feasible—but this wall, once it scattered a physical object's component particles across the Universe, would not bring them back together.
Knowing that, the captain had made no bones about the fact that she intended to personally convey Bleys to the iris, which from here could be seen as a glowing dot on the grayness. But Bleys had insisted that the captain was not to enter the tunnel itself.
The captain was still unhappy; in her opinion, it was all too possible for Bleys, inexperienced as he was, to make any of a number of fatal mistakes.
Now she insisted on briefing him once more on the entire procedure; but before long Bleys found himself falling through space toward the gray wall. Although he had read about the experience of free-fall before, he still found it unsettling to face the actual decision to step off the ramp into nothingness.
The captain was strapped directly behind him, where she could best control their combined center of gravity by means of her suit's power belt—Bleys was under the strictest orders to leave his own belt alone.
When the glowing dot that was their target had resolved itself into a coin-size disk, Bleys' body suddenly realized it was falling into that disk, that it was a hole and he was dropping to it much too quickly—
He closed his eyes, going into breath-control exercises; and the panic reaction cased off, to lodge somewhere behind his breastbone. After a couple of minutes he felt relaxed enough to be able to open his eyes once more—and found they were unexpectedly close!
He checked an instinctive protest, as he felt a braking force slowing his fall. The iris, that he had seen as a disk, now appeared to his brain—trying to put into meaningful terms the signals sent by his eyes—like a sidelit landing area on a gray spaceport pad. For the first time he noticed that a dark bar cut across the iris, well away from its center, which must be the end of the floor that had been floated into the tunnel; its presence gave him a reference point that told him he was now rotating slightly.... The captain, expert spacer that she was, was orienting him properly, so that when he pushed his way through the pressure seal at the end of the tunnel he would be able to simply step onto that floor.
The floor, when he got there, turned out to be obscured by a glowing mist that made him feel as if he were stepping into a cloud. He had been told the air in the tunnel would be supersaturated with water vapor, to cut down the risk of a deadly static-link to the phase-field that made up the tunnel wall, but he had not expected the surreal vision created as the lights at the sides of the floor reflected off the myriad of tiny droplets in the air.
He unsealed his helmet and tilted it back. The air was heavy, and cool on his skin, like a light rain; around him the mist, apparently subject to faint air currents, seemed to be billowing slowly. He could not see his feet, or the floor; and for a moment he was disoriented.
He froze in place for a moment, until his searching eyes recognized that the billows of mist seemed slightly thinner in one direction— which matched what he had been told to expect. He started walking in that direction, moving cautiously.
After a minute, or perhaps a little more, he became aware that a darker shape was appearing out of the mist before him; and in moments he could see it was Hal Mayne, also wearing a vacuum suit with the helmet thrown back.
Bleys felt as if the hairs on the back of his neck were trying to stand on end. This man coming toward him at a fast walk once more looked very different than he had the last time Bleys had seen him—he was coming on toward Bleys as if he didn't intend to stop, as if he were some war machine that could not be prevented from rumbling righ
t over Bleys. .. . Bleys told himself it was the vacuum suit, giving Mayne extra bulk.
And yet, once more Bleys felt the old sense of kinship with the younger man now coming to a halt before him—the sort of tug at his attention, his mind, his heart, that he would perhaps have expected if he had an identical twin.
Hal Mayne was just standing there, looking at him; and Bleys recalled that he himself was the one who had requested this meeting—that, in fact, all of their meetings had been initiated by Bleys ... he suppressed a twinge of hurt, and opened the dialogue as a good host should.
"Well," he said, "you've got your Dorsai and everything you want from the Exotics locked up, here. I take it, then, you're determined to go through with this?"
"I told you there was never any other way," Hal said. His voice was neutral, distant. It was as if they had simply stepped right into their last conversation. Bleys wondered if he wasn't wasting his time here, after all.
"So now the gloves come off," he said. Belatedly, he realized the words could be taken as a threat.
"Yes," Hal Mayne said. "Sooner or later they had to, I being what I am and you being what you are."
"And what are you?"
"You don't know, of course," Hal said, nodding slightly, as if he were in a conversation with himself.
"No," Bleys said, feeling now as if he were trying to bridge a chasm with his words. "I've known for some time you're not just a boy whose tutors I watched die on a certain occasion. How much more, I still don't know. But it'd be petty-minded of me to hide the fact that I've been astonished by the quality of your opposition to me. You're too intelligent to move worlds like this just for revenge on me because of your tutors' deaths. What you've done and are doing is too big for any personal cause. Tell me—what drives you to oppose me like this?"
"What drives me?" Hal Mayne's tone was almost perfunctory, although his face wore a kind of smile; but his body spoke too, conveying a message of profound weariness that resonated with something inside Bleys himself.
"A million years of history and prehistory drive me," Mayne continued, "as they drive you. To be more specific, the last thousand years of history drive me. There's no other way for you and I to be, but opponents. But if it's any consolation to you, I've also been surprised by the quality of your opposition."
"You?" Bleys found himself startled, as if the Universe had turned itself over. "Why should you be surprised?"
"Because I'm more than you could imagine," Hal said, "just as you've turned out to be something I couldn't imagine. But then when I was imagining this present time we live in I had no real appreciation of the true value of faith. It's something that goes far beyond blind worship. It's a type of understanding in those who've paid the price to win it. As you, yourself, know."
Bleys was at a loss. He was sure Hal was telling him something important—was even letting his guard down—but Bleys could not tell what his words meant, or what they were leading to.
"As I know?" he said, temporizing.
"Yes. As you, of all people, know."
Bleys shook his head, more in puzzlement than in denial.
"I should have dealt with you when you were much younger," he said. Once again, he was only making conversation, trying to cover himself with words while he thought, furiously.
"You tried. You couldn't," Hal said. His voice was soft, and his face serious, with no hint of a threat or boast.
"I did?" said Bleys. "I see. You're using faith, again, to reach that conclusion?" He was probing, trying to find something for his mind to draw understanding from.
"Not for that," Hal said. "No, only observation and fact." Hal's eyes, Bleys thought, were watching him, as if he were a laboratory subject. "Primarily," Hal went on, "the fact that I'm who I am, and know what I can do."
"You're mistaken if you think I couldn't have eliminated a sixteen-year-old boy if I'd wanted to." Bleys was repelled by this line of conversation, but he felt compelled to go where the thoughts led, to see where Hal might be going.
"No, I'm not mistaken," Hal said. "As I say, you tried. But I wasn't a boy, even then when I thought I was. I was an experienced adult, who had reasons for staying alive. I told you I've learned faith, even if it took me three lives to do the learning. That's why I know
I'm going to win, now. Just as I know my winning means your destruction, because you won't have it any other way." Three lives? What is he saying?
"You seem to think you know a great deal about me," Bleys said, forcing a smile that he hoped would cover his confusion.
"I do," Hal said. "I came to understand you better by learning to understand myself—though understanding myself was a job I started long before you came along." He paused, as if gathering himself for some effort, and Bleys found himself tensing up.
"If you'd been only what I thought you were the first time I saw you," Hal said, "the contest between us would already be over. More than that, I'd have found some way by this time to bring you to the side of things as they must be for the race to survive."
Bleys was unable to believe what he was hearing. Never before had he heard this boy—man, he reminded himself—speaking in terms that, in a lesser person, could be construed as braggadocio.
"But since that day at the estate," Hal was going on, "I've learned about myself, as well as more about you, and I know I'll never be able to bring you to see what I see until you, yourself, choose to make the effort to do so. And without that effort, we're matched too evenly, you and I, by the forces of history, for any compromise to work."
"I'm not sure I understand you," Bleys responded, hoping for a clarification of some kind, "and that's unusual enough to be interesting."
"You don't understand me because I'm talking of things outside your experience," Hal said. "I came to talk to you here—as I'll always be willing to come to talk to you—because I've got to hang on to the hope you might be brought to consider things beyond the scope of what you look at now; and change your mind."
"You talk like a grandfather talking to a grandson," Bleys said. He told himself he should show anger at the condescension he had perceived, but he was not angry.
"I didn't mean to," Hal said. He showed no contrition. "But the hard fact is," he went on, "you've had only one lifetime from which to draw your conclusions. I've had three. It took me that long to become human; and because I've finally made it, I can see how you, yourself, fall short of being the full human being the race has to produce to survive the dangers it can't even imagine yet. Like it or not, that experience is there, and a difference between us."
And that quickly, the floor fell out from beneath Bleys' mental feet—Hal was back into that strangeness of moments earlier, and Bleys was lost. Searching for something to use, he fastened on Hal's words about becoming a "full human being."
"I told you you were an Other," he said.
"Not exactly," said Hal. "If you remember, you left me to infer it. But I'm splitting hairs. In a sense you were right. In one sense I am an Other, being a blend of all that's new as well as all that's old in the race. But I'm not the kind of Other who's Everyman. Your kind, if it survives, are at best going to be a transient form of human. Mine, if it does, will be immortal."
A threat?
"I'm sorry," Bleys said. "I don't have a kind. I'm my own unique mixture."
"As are we all," Hal said, nodding. "But what matters is that on top of your own talents, you were raised on Association by a family that was pure Friendly, and it's that which dominates in you."
The shift in the conversation, from Hal to Bleys himself, was startling.
Why did he bring that up? And what does he mean by it?
"Where did you find records that told you that?" Bleys asked.
"I know," Hal said, his tone weary again, "that the official records of your birth and movements all show what your brother fixed them to say."
"Then what makes you say something like this?"
"The correct knowledge. An absolute knowledge that comes from j
oining together bits and pieces of general records that hadn't been tampered with—because there was no reason to tamper with them—at the Final Encyclopedia. I put them together only a year ago, and then made deductions from them using something I taught myself during my first trial of life. It's called intuitive logic."
"First trial of life"? Bleys found himself frowning, and wiped it away as giving away too much of himself.
"Ah," he said; and found himself suddenly making a mental connection to Hal's words about his method of thinking. "I believe what you're talking about may be what I've been calling interval thinking."
"The name hardly matters."
"Of course not," Bleys said, almost shrugging. "So there's more to learn about you than I'd imagined. But tell me, why place so much emphasis on the fact that part of what I am by inheritance and upbringing may be Friendly?"
"For one reason," Hal said, with a slight air of being patient, "because it explains your ability of charisma, as well as that of those Others who have it to some extent or another. But I'd rather you called yourself Faith-Holder than Friendly. Because, more than anyone on all the worlds suspects, it's a form of Faith-Holding that rules you. You never were the bored crossbreed whose only concern was being comfortable during his own brief years of life. That was a facade, a false exterior set up in the first place to protect you from your older half-brother, Dahno—who would have been deathly afraid of you if he'd suspected you had a purpose of your own."
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 44