But at the same time, he got a feeling from them now as if part of the warmth that had always characterized the Exotics was now withdrawn. Not gone, pulled back away inside them, coiled like a spring under tension - but, somehow, not gone. "We'll be at the gate in a few minutes," Amanda said, interrupting his thoughts, and he looked ahead to see a tall wooden wall, evidently recently built, surrounding what was plainly their destination. It reached to the side and back as far as Hal could see in either direction, and their road led to a wide gate as tall as the wall itself. "Let me do the talking to the guards," Amanda said. "You're my idiot big brother, I mean, you're literally a little slow-witted. The cliches that work best are the old cliches. Look stupid. "
Hal obediently slumped his shoulders, let his face go slack and his mouth hang slightly open. There was a jam-up of people at the gates, of course, but those coming in gathered close together and waited with little talk, and without raising their voices when they did speak, any more than they had on the road. It was reasonable, Hal thought, that they should be those he watched would have been brought up as children to never abandon a conversational tone and volume, and in spite of their present condition, that training would persist in them.
And yet, thought Hal again, watching them behind the mask of his loose jaw and expressionless face, there was something more going on here than just childhood training. There was something quietly in opposition to the uniformed men who were checking them. It was not a quietness of fear in any sense, but one of strength that the uniformed men did not have, or even understand. It was curious.
At the same time, he was aware of something that was going on for him, personally, him alone. It had nothing to do with what he believed he had just seen in the people around him. It was totally unrelated to it - or was it?
It was a curious sensation of having been part of just such a scene as this, once before. He could not say why, but he felt an element that was medieval about the wooden walls, the wooden gates, the swarm of people in their rough and unlovely clothing, waiting their turn to be passed inside by the guards. It triggered off a conviction that somehow, somewhere, he had lived through this before. Not him, but someone very like him as he now was, had stood almost as he was now standing, seen much what he was now seeing, and waited with such a crowd in such a place as this....
The guards, thought Hal, concentrating on them to get his mind back on ordinary channels - if these were typical of the garrison troops here, they were poor stuff indeed. They were neatly enough uniformed, in black, with power pistols bolstered on their hip and swagger sticks at their belt or under their arms, but they were not really soldiers.
Hal Mayne had never seen actual soldiers on duty. Soldiers who were purely that, instead of half-police, like the Militia that Rukh's Command had fought against on Harmony. But Donal Graeme had been brought up to work with troops, and to anticipate that his life might depend on his ability to read their value at a glance.
It was Donal's eye, therefore, that now told Hal that the eight men he saw on duty at this gate were not only useless, but for practical purposes untrainable to be anything better than the bullies of unarmed civilians they presently were. Ian, Donal's uncle, who had trained troops for Donal after the assassination of Kensie, Ian's twin, would have stripped all eight of their uniforms on sight.
If the rest of the soldiers in garrison here were like these, it was likely that, weapons and all, they would break and run in the face of any serious riot, even a riot of Exotics, who, had they been any other people, would have risen against any such flimsy oppressors, long since.
But he and Amanda had now reached the gate, at the head of the crowd of waiting people. He concentrated on looking as harmless as possible for one of his size and appearance. "Open up," said the uniformed man confronting them, he was obviously from one of the Friendly worlds. Hal had learned to recognize such in any guise, after his experience on Harmony - though this one's appearance on his surface was completely at odds both with the people Hal had met around Rukh, and his present uniform. He was oriental, young, round-faced and innocent-looking. Nonetheless, he went through the contents of their two sacks with reasonable efficiency. "All right. Go on in. Home address?" "Sixteen, thirty-six, seven, Happiness Lane," answered Amanda. "Downstairs apartment."
The gate guard repeated the address into his wrist recorder and turned away from them to the two bag-carrying women behind him. Hal and Amanda were free to go. "What about that address?" Hal asked as soon as they were far enough down the road within the gates that they were no longer too closely surrounded by others to speak without being overheated. "It's the home of three brothers, none of which look at all like you," she answered. "I mean, why did he ask for it?" "They do an automatic check to see that people who've left for the day are back in their homes that night by curfew." "But what'll happen when they find they don't even know of us at that address?" "The one checking is going to figure the guard at the gate transposed a couple of numbers, or otherwise got the address wrong. Then he'll forget about it. They don't worry that much about people getting in, they worry about them getting out." "I see," said Hal. "Where are we headed, then?" "There're a few serious resistance people in every town," said Amanda. "We're going to one named Nier. She lives alone with her mother and a soldier who's quartered on them. He's a sub-officer who likes night duty, so he's not there after sundown, ordinarily. The result is, they've got room to put us up overnight, and, in addition, Nier's made something of a friend of the sub-officer, which gives them a few advantages including freedom from a housecheck under normal conditions. I want you to talk to Nier."
"Does she live anywhere near Happiness Lane?" asked Hal dryly.
Amanda laughed. "The other side of the town," she said. "Come on." The streets within the walls had not been rutted and were in good shape. They had entered at what was evidently an older part of it, for the buildings were large and faced with white stone. Their fellow travelers went off in different directions among the streets of this section and there were few sackcloth robes to be seen after several blocks. There were, however, a number of uniformed soldiers who seemed to be off duty, either moving about the streets or going in and out of buildings that Hal thought might be either restaurants or drinking places. Amanda noticed Hal watching one clearly inebriated soldier entering one of the latter. "Alcohol's the only intoxicant allowed - even to the troops," she said. "Probably because of the difficulty of enforcement. You can ferment almost any vegetable into a beverage with at least some alcohol in it. Adding a sugar of some kind helps, of course. So since they can't stop the making of illegal liqueurs by their own people, they let their soldiers drink the best the planet can produce. The civilians, of course, are officially Exotics who don't drink, though that's changed for a few of them in the last two years." "There was a joke among the troops on Ceta, a cousin who'd been on a contract there told the rest of us in the family once," Hal said absently, dropping back into Donal's memories. "That you could even make an alcoholic drink by fermenting dead rats. Impossible, of course, but the idea was to talk new recruits into drinking a home-brew, then tell them a story that'd make them sick..."