Tam's hand pulled away and slid out of Hal's grasp. It reached for Amanda and she took it in her own. "Lean close," Tam said to her. "Bastard doctors! They're so proud of giving me eyes like a twenty-year-old in perfect health, and I still can't see what I want unless I have people close. There, I see you now."
Their two faces, the dark, aged mask of Tam and the taut-skinned, perfect features of Amanda, were now only inches apart as she leaned down to him. "Yes," said Tam, looking into her eyes, "you'll do. I knew you were here. You see things, don't you?" "Yes," said Amanda softly. "So do I",- said Tam, with a hoarse, tiny bark of a laugh, "but that's because I'm halfway through the door to death. Do you believe me, Amanda Morgan?" "I believe you," she said. "Then believe in your seeing, always. Yes, I know you do that now, but I want to tell you to believe always, too, except for one time. You love him, of course." "Yes," said Amanda. "The time's going to come... one time, when what you'll see will be what is to be, but that one time you'll have to remember not to believe it. You'll know the time I'm talking about when you come to it. But, do you hear me? One time, only. You'll see him then, and your seeing will be right, but if you believe what you see, you'll, be wrong. So, don't believe, that one time. Have faith. Believe in what you believe, instead."
Amanda's face was very still. "What are you telling me?" she whispered. "When the time comes, and you see him in something that must not be, don't believe it. Promise me. At the hardest moment, the worst time, even though what you see is true, don't believe. Because he'll need to know you won't believe, then." "Not believe... " she echoed. "Promise me." "Yes," she said, and her hand tightened on his. "I don't understand, but I'll be ready. If it comes to that, I'll have faith beyond any seeing." "Good," said Tam on the exhale of one weary sigh. His hand slipped out of her grasp as it had slipped from Hal's, to lie again in his lap. He spoke without looking away from her. "Did you hear her, Hal?" "Yes," said Hal. "But I don't understand you, either." "For you, it doesn't matter." Tam turned his head away. "You've got to go," said Ajela, moving forward. "He's worn out. He's got to rest now."
They turned away from the old man, who was no longer looking at them, as if he had already forgotten their presence, and Ajela herded them out of the room.
CHAPTER 9
Amanda's ship, with Simon at the controls, hung in orbit above the night side of Kultis.
Only one of the planet's moons was in the sky with them. Once, when the Exotics had been the richest of the Younger Worlds, this, like its sister world of Mara, had owned a space-approach warning system that would have signaled the appearance of any craft within a hundred thousand kilometers of its surface. Now the men and women who had manned that system were dead or gone, and the very system itself had been cannibalized of its parts or left to grow dusty in uselessness.
Below, the planetary night side was a round shape of darkness occulting the stars and the smaller of the two moons beyond, but the instruments aboard the ship cut through the darkness and the cloud cover separating them from the surface and showed it as bright as if daylit. The screen showing that surface was already on close magnification that gave them a view of northern tropical uplands mounting to the foothills of successive ranges of sharply rising mountains, tall enough to have their peaks snow-capped even in this climate and season. As they continued their descent the viewer showed a road running upcountry past what had been homes and estates, scattered Exotic-fashion with plenty of land around them, through a small city and on into the mountains. Amanda was instructing Hal and Simon, particularly, at the moment, Simon.
"We'll be following the route of that road, approximately," she was saying to him. "The Chantry Guild is in the Zipaca Mountains, that range to our left there. The more lofty range to the right are the Grandfathers of Dawn, and the flat valley-floor in between them that widens as it comes toward us is the Mayahuel Valley. There's a more direct route to where we're going, but I want Hal to get the context for it all, first - I want him to see some of the rest of Kultis as it is now. So we'll make a couple days' walk out of it. You set us down, here... "
Her words were precise and clean-edged on Hal's ear, so that they stood out as if in italics. She had changed, he thought, listening, since that moment with Tam just before they left. She was more authoritative, more intense.
Without any specific alteration in her tone or her manner, her voice now seemed to carry the burden of a purpose that took precedence over everything else. As if she was now driven by something she had committed herself to carry through at any and all cost.
The difference in her had become apparent to him almost immediately they had left Tam's quarters for the ship. His first awareness of a difference in her had been when they were almost to the ship, when she had fallen back from walking at his side, turning and stopping Ajela and Rukh who were following them, so that his next few steps carried him beyond the point where he could hear what she said to them, briefly and in a low voice, before turning to catch up with him once more.
He had felt an unreasonable, but for a moment very real, flash of irritation. What was it she had to say to them that he could not be trusted to hear as well? As they had boarded the ship and all the way to where they were now above Kultis, he had waited for her to give him some explanation of what she had stopped to tell the others. But she had said nothing. In fact, she had acted as if that moment had never taken place, but since then he had noticed this driven quality in her, this difference.
It must, he thought, have something to do with Tam's vision about which he had warned her. Had some sort of private spark leaped between the two of them in that moment, without his seeing it? He told himself it was nothing, it was none of his business, in any case. But the memory and the difference in her now gnawed at him regardless.
She was reaching out now to touch the screen and a blue circle came to outline the place she had indicated, and then another, smaller screen suddenly showed a magnified view of the place she had touched. In that screen they saw things as if they hung only four or five meters above the ground, over a small patch of bushes just off the road, whose ruts were black, the higher surfaces between them palely contrasted in the cloud-filtered moonlight. The road was only some ten meters away from their point of view. "You see this?" Amanda said to Simon, holding up a white rag of a cloth, grayed from many launderings and slightly longer than it was wide, with ragged edges forming a roughly rectangular shape. "I've made a micrograph of this, so your viewer can identify even an edge of it, if that's all that's visible. You know our general route. Search along it each night, in the area of where a day's walk should have taken us. I'll try to display this somewhere every day or night we stop. I'll put it where the viewer can sight it - tangled in the branches or laid on top of one of those bushes down there, for example. One corner should always be folded under, and that corner will point in the direction we're headed, in case we have to vary from the original route. You should be able to find it displayed every night, except if we're overnighting in the city. It's too likely to be suspected as a signal there, so in the city I may not display it. If you can't find it for one night, don't worry. After three nights in a row without seeing it or any sign of us you can investigate-if you think it's reasonably safe for you to do so. Otherwise, don't try. "No otherwise," said Simon. "Simon," said Amanda. "You're our driver on this. You take orders." "Not where it comes to any chance that doing nothing might cost us Hal," said Simon. He held up a hand before she could speak. "It's what he means to our side, not just the personal connection between us - or the business of never leaving one of your own behind when you don't know what happened to them. "