Hal shook his head. "Of course. All right. I was wrong not to tell you from the start what I wanted to do. It was just I didn't - I still don't know - if it's going to work. It could be an utter failure."
Jeamus had been looking slightly bewildered. "I don't understand," he said. "Just what is it you're planning to put through this first screen?"
"Myself," said Hal. Jeamus stared. "My God!" he said. "Do you know what you're talking about doing? Committing suicide! You'll end up spread out through the universe, with no way back." "There's that chance, of course," said Hal, "but I've got reason to think, in this case, it's not going to happen that way." "All the same," said Jeamus, "if that's what you've had in mind all along, I'm going to pray that nothing more goes on when you step through the back screen there - that you immediately step back out, facing us, through this near one!" "Thanks, but I hope not, myself," said Hal.
He turned to Rukh and Amanda. "But I might be able to do what I hope to do in what amounts to no-time, like any phase-shift, so that I still come back here right away," he said. "On the other hand, it could be that time spent between the screens is the same as time spent here and it'll be awhile before I'll come back. But there's no real doubt in me I'll be back sooner or later."
Rukh came to him, put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips. "I should have done that long ago," she said. "We'll wait for you, Hal."
He held her for a moment, feeling his heart moved once again, as it had been when he carried her out of the prison cell on Harmony four years before, by the frailness of her body, even now. Then he let her go and turned to Amanda, who also held him and kissed him. "I love you," she said.
"And I love you," he answered. "This could be the answer, last, what I'm going to do." "I know," said Amanda, and let him go.
from them, around the nearer screen the second, and stepped through it.
CHAPTER 37
He was everywhere and nowhere.
His senses were no longer working. He could not feel, smell, hear or see. Instead he had an awareness of his surroundings that recognized certain patterns, some of which were in the form of objects and some of which were not, but which in any case were unimportant.
It was a place where time existed, but did not matter. A place where his now changed self had no desire to understand or act. In fact, his ability to do so was limited. He had memory, but no purpose, for he found he could not conceive of the future, and the present was forever. But he could remember, and, remembering, he recalled how he had been through something like this, once before. It had happened when he had been Donal going back in spirit to the twenty-first century, when he had worked by inhabiting the body that had belonged to the dead Paul Formain. Then, he now remembered, something had carried him through what he was presently experiencing... The memory part of him that was still working gave it back to him. Then he had expected to go beyond this to something else, to a twenty-first century Earth, and the momentum of that expectation had carried him through without realizing the concept of purpose he now lacked.
It was a remembrance of an impossibility that had yet happened. For the Creative Universe he now realized he had visioned both then and now could not, by definition, exist until he had created it. It did not exist now, and yet he had been any part of going aware of experiencing it before, as a necessary to alter the implications of the past.
"this Chaos - that was under the limitations of this place logic-limited conscious mind was not capable of it to be, his understanding the contradictions. Here he could only go on of which were blocked by its philosophy and courage, none the limits of his logical mind. With them he could accept the fact that he had been able to experience the Creative Universe once before and use it as a window to the past, because his unconscious had assumed a path back through time for his identity, and by that assumption, like the assumption that creates a poem never expressed before, had caused it to be.
His logical mind had afterwards rejected what, to it, could not be, and tucked the memory out of sight in his unconscious. There it had stayed until now, because the framework of understanding he needed to develop had not yet been there to understand how it could happen. Only now, spread out between time and space, did it all, at last, make sense.
As with the making of a poem, the explanation was that here all mechanisms must be developed in the unconscious, for the conscious mind could not operate without the arbitrary concepts it had gradually imposed over centuries on the physical universe, to give that universe a shape the conscious mind could work with.
He must now, therefore, not so much make what he wanted in the Creative Universe, as find it within himself, in this place where conscious logic and physics did not naturally apply. He must find it, as he had found poems and other discoveries of meaning and intent, in the past....
He let go, therefore, of his now useless and almost nonexistent upper mind. In effect he passed over into the realm of dreams and daydreams, and a jumble of memories and fancies tumbled through his imaginings, like the unchained thoughts that come in moments just before sleep sets the unconscious completely free.
So, letting go, he passed into what would have been a dream, if it had not been directed by some previous, deep-held sense of purpose that had directed him back to the twenty-first century. He could feel, in this universe-that-was-not, not only that earlier passage, but all the vast information of the Final Encyclopedia. The latter worked on the former....
"And, suddenly, he was where he wanted to be. It was a dream, made real after all. Real, it was, because not only all his senses now reported on the reality of it, but his logical upper mind, that must think in the language of symbols and identities, was once more awake and capable. But it was also a dream, because he remembered how he had first dreamed it, when he had been with the Resistance Group on Harmony, under a younger and strong-bodied Rukh. He had dreamed it then, and at other times since, and now, with the knowledge from the Encyclopedia, he had made it actual. It was at the dream's opening point now, that he, with the faith, belief and courage in him, had resolved the chaos around him into actuality.
Again, he was on horseback, with others also mounted. They were traveling in a group through a lightly forested area of some landscape in the temperate zone of an Earth-like world. They rode without talking, as he had earlier dreamed they had, but now, for the first time, he had a chance to look closely about him and identify those he rode with, and there were none of them he had not known, and all of them were now dead.
Obadiah the Friendly, Malachi the Dorsai and Walter the Exotic-the three who had been his tutors and raised him as Hal Mayne, rode not far behind him. Immediately beside and about him were those of his own - of Donal's-family. Eachan Khan Graeme, his father, now dead for nearly a hundred years, rode at his right side. Beside him on his left was Mary Kenwick Graeme, his mother, and beyond her was his brother Mor, who because of him had been tortured to death by the hands of the demented William of Ceta.
Mor leaned forward in his saddle to look around their mother at him, and Hal braced himself for the look that would be in the other's eyes. But when those eyes met him the look he had expected was not there. "Welcome back, Donny," said Mor - and he was smiling, a happy smile. With that, Hal realized that he had indeed become Donal again, in body as well as in memory.
All the other tall menfolk of the Graemes once more "Overtopped him, as they sat their saddles around him, and he was as he had been in his early life..."What's the matter, Brother?" Mor said. "Did you think I wouldn't understand?"