So now he must face it. He was no longer a Dorsai. He realized now that he had not been one for a long time, but for that same long time he had refused to face the fact. Now, it was inescapable. There were the Dorsai, and there was Hal Mayne, who had been Donal. But Donal was gone, and Hal Mayne had never been one of them, for all that he had believed himself to be so. He was separated from them as surely as Bleys had been locked away, once in a dream of Hal's, behind a gate of iron bars.
He half closed his eyes at the agony of realization. But it mounted still inside him, until he suddenly found his elbow caught, and the forward motion of his walking body stopped in its tracks. He was turned, and looked down into the face of Amanda. "What is it?" she said.
He opened his mouth to tell her, but he could not answer. His throat was so tight that no words were able to force their way out.
Amanda flung her arms around him and pressed herself against him, pressing her face into his shoulder. "My dearest dear," she said. "What is it? Tell me?"
Instinctively, his own arms went around her. He held to her, this one living link with humanity that he had, as if to let go would be to lose not only that life, itself, but all eternity before and after it. His voice came, brokenly and hoarsely, out of him.
"I've lost my people..."
It was all he could manage to say. But somehow she read through them to what was in him. She led him away from the road, out of sight of it. There, she made him sit down with his back to a tree and fitted herself to him, as if he was dangerously chilled and she would warm him with her body. He held her, and they lay together wordlessly.
He felt a tremendous comfort in her presence and her closeness to him. But it brought peace only to the top level of his mind. Below that was an ever-widening wound, as if he was a figure cut out of cardboard in which a hole had been made with a pinprick, which was now being enlarged and torn apart into a long rip by a pressure too great for him to resist.
But his gratitude for her comfort at this time was immeasurable. After a little while, still unable to speak, he lifted one hand and began to slowly stroke the shining curve of her hair. It seemed so wonderful to him that she should be this beautiful and this near to him, and so quickly understanding of what was breaking him apart inside.
After a long silence, she spoke. "Now, listen to me," she said. "You've lost nothing." Her voice was low and soft, but very certain. "I have." His voice was ragged with tears he did not know how to shed. "First I sold my people into a death contract, then I lost them." "You did neither." she said. in the same soft, even tones.
"Do you remember when you came to the Dorsai to talk about our folk coming - as many as could - to help defend Old Earth?" "And I met you," he said. "You met the Grey Captains, and I was one of them." "You arranged for the rest to meet me," he said, "and I sold them a contract with the Encyclopedia, to die, defending Earth. " "You sold nothing," she said, her voice unhurried, unchanged. "Have you already forgotten that the chance of death was always a part of any Dorsai military contract? Of those who met with you, only two others besides myself had never actually been in the field. Do you think, even not counting those three, that the men and women you talked to had not realized, long before, that one day they would have to face the Others? It was only a question of where or how."
She paused, as if to let her words sink in. "You showed them those things, as you had to others, when the part of you that was Donal broke through to your surface," she went on, "and made it plain to all of us, as he had always made things plain to people. Has your opinion of the Dorsai mind fallen so low that you think they - the Grey Captains - thought they could forever put off an eventual conflict with the Others? When it was the Others who wanted everything humanly owned, including the Dorsai itself? Our people couldn't become the assassins that the Exotics asked them to be, to kill the Others one by one, because life isn't worth certain costs, particularly if that cost is the abandonment of what you believe in. But you showed them a way to fight in the way they knew how to fight, and they took that way. How could it have been otherwise?"
He could not answer. What she said went through and through him, and, if it did not heal the great rent in him, it at least stopped its growing. "And you've lost no one," she went on after a while, still quietly. "You've only gone on ahead of everyone else a little way, so that you've passed over a hill which blocks your view of the rest of us when you looked back. You've stared at that hill so long now, you've come to believe it's all space and time. But it's not. You've lost no one. Instead, you've joined in the whole human race, of which the Dorsai were always a part - but only a part. You've gone on from where Donal stood, alone and solitary."
They continued to sit for some while after that, neither of them speaking. Slowly, what she had just said soaked into him, as sea water slowly soaks into a floating length of timber, until at last it can hold no more, and so, water-logged, it begins to sink slowly and quietly to the far bottom.
So, in time, what she had told him brought relief. He could not believe her, much as he would have liked to do so. Because, much as she was Amanda and understood, he thought he recognized his own life, and his own failure, in a way no one else could. But the very fact that she had tried to warm the chill of despair from him like this, as she might have warmed him back from a death-chill, helped him. So that in time he came back again to her and all other things. The pain that had come from the great torn place inside him was still with him, but it had at last become bearable, as bearable as his headache from the blow had become, when he had pushed it away from the center of his attention, out to the fringes of his consciousness. "We'd better go on," he said at last.
They got up and went back to the edge of the road, and continued along it under the pale brilliant star of Procyon toward the destination she had in mind for him.
CHAPTER 11
Procyon had started to lower in the sky, but the Kultan evening was still quite distant when they came out of a belt of trees to see the edge of the village of Porphyry before them. The last half mile or so, traffic on the road had increased heavily in comparison to what it had been earlier, but those they passed, or who passed them, moved at some little distance from each other. Enough so that any of the travelers who were moving together could talk privately merely by lowering their voices.
Hal had been roused from the oppression of his own inner feelings by his interest in those sharing the road - and apparently their destination - with them. They had seen no one headed away from Porphyry. And these people were all Exotics. They showed it in many little ways - their calmness of feature and economy of movements, for instance. But Hal noticed that none of those they caught up with, or were passed by, seemed to be indulging in conversation simply for conversation's sake. In fact, none they passed seemed to feel it necessary to greet Hal. Amanda, or each other. At most they only acknowledged the presence of others with a gentle smile or nod.
But versions of these elements had been part of the Exotic character as long as Hal, or Donal, had known members of this Splinter Culture. What he noticed now, and a startling difference it seemed to him, was that there was something extraordinarily self-contained about these sharing the road with them. It was hard to say whether it was a change in the direction of growth or not. It was as if each had drawn inside himself or herself, and now lived a private life behind the drawn curtains of their calm faces. There was an individualism that was new in them, an individualism noticeably different from the communal feeling that had always appeared to be an integral part of the Exotics he had known, from Padma the Outbond, when he had been Donal, to Walter the InTeacher, Hal Mayne's tutor. In no way did those about him seem a beaten or conquered people, in spite of their circumstances.