It was a strange feel. The locals had all the appearance and attitudes of a populace so downtrodden that it lived in fear and without hope or dignity. And still, there was something innately independent and stubbornly survivalistic about the controlled voices, the courtesy with which interactions went on from the apparently welcome, if brief conversations between encountering individuals who seemed to be friends, to the chance collisions of those hurrying so that they bumped into each other before they could stop.
Much was gone, but something yet remained. The words from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses, came back to him. The question in his mind now was whether what remained was something upon which an Exotic structure could still build-or was this once-powerful Splinter Culture finished forever?
He could not tell. It was tempting to hope, but... he saw it was getting close to eighteen hundred hours and he was still some distance from Marlo's residence. He had automatically mapped his wanderings in the back of his head so that he knew he had about eight blocks to go to get back to it.
He turned toward it. Amanda was sitting on the cushioned picnic bench in the front room when he got there. There was the smell of cooking in the air. She got up as he came in, shutting the front door behind him. "Where's Marlo?" he asked. "Asleep," said Amanda. "I waded into the supplies here and cooked food for the three of us. But I think she needs sleep more than she needs something to eat-though she needs that badly enough. I'll leave her food in dishes in her room, and she can eat it cold, or warm it if she likes, whenever she wakes during the night. She's bound to wake sometime. Meanwhile, you sit down and we'll have ours."
Hal sat. The meal Amanda dished up for them was nothing like the fare an Exotic house might have given a visitor once upon a time, but it was a solid dinner, with beans and local vegetables in a sort of curry, highly spiced, with local corn bread to go with it and water to drink. "The water's safe enough, I suppose?" said Hal, lifting his glass. "The water systems put in by the Exotics still take care of that," said Amanda. "Hal, they evidently caught Nier and the Groupman that was quartered here in some resistance action against the Occupation. Or at least, in something more than a breach of one of the smaller laws. They're undoubtedly both dead. All Marlo knows is that a squad of soldiers came to the house one day when the Groupman was here and took them both away. Marlo says Nier told her that the Groupman was being transferred to a job for which he'd have to live in the garrison from then on, and he'd found a good job for Nier there, too, so she wouldn't be at home anymore. Marlo knew she wasn't telling the truth - just trying to make Marlo feel better. The squad went off with them, and no one's seen either of them since. "
Hal shook his head. "So that's how it is," he said. "Yes, that's how it is," answered Amanda. Their eyes met. "Do you think the suggestions you gave Iban about being kinder to Marlo are going to last?" "Anything like that wears off in time," said Hal. "You know as well as I do how strong the powers of recovery are of both mind and body, and that's true even for characters like Iban. But maybe by the time it wears off, he'll have convinced himself 'it pays to be decent to Marlo. Or it may even have become a habit. He's going to have to excuse his better treatment of her to his fellow soldiers, and people like him tend to end up believing their own excuses, to avoid admitting they could be wrong about anything. But nothing lasts forever. He'll be moved out of this house, sooner or later, and someone else'll be quartered here." "Yes. Well, we can hope for the best. Who was the half-Exotic you said tried to hypnotize you?" "Bleys Ahrens," said Hal, "and he almost did, I was very young then, and he's very persuasive. But he was hypnotizing a good-sized group at the time and didn't know I was one of the people he was working on." "I see," she said. "Well, give me a hand cleaning up-- "I can do that by myself," said Hal. "Why don't you see if you can't find some clean sheets and blankets for that bed of Iban's" We'll need sleep ourselves if we want to be gone before he wakes up tomorrow, and there's no good reason for letting him have the bed. He can sleep on the floor, the way he is now, and never know the difference." "Where're you going to put him?" asked Amanda. "Out here, I think," said Hal, getting up and going back into Iban's bedroom. He lifted the slack body of the sleeping man, carried it out into the main room and dumped it on the cushioned picnic bench. Iban's body was a little large for the piece of furniture, but he did not seem in any immediate danger of rolling off. "You've got him programmed to believe he got up and answered the door in the night," said Amanda. "Won't he wonder in the morning when he wakes up in this room instead? And if you try to carry him back to his bed before we go, by that time he may be sober enough to wake up." "You're right, he probably would wake up. Not that I couldn't just put him back to sleep again if he did. But we don't need to bother with putting him back in his own bed. He'll just think he didn't make it any further back than the bench before folding up." Hal corrected himself. "No, you're right. Of course, he may wonder a bit. But I'm counting on his puffed-up ego over drinking a whole bottle and not having a hangover to knock everything else but that out of his mind. If he regularly drinks his way through his day off, he'll be expecting to wake feeling like a three-day corpse. The fact he doesn't ought to be enough by itself to keep him from any dangerous selfquestioning. Now, for those dishes and pots."
He had already turned away, when a question occurred to him. He turned back in time to catch her before she left the room for the bedroom. "Amanda," he said, "what's happened to them, inside, as a result of all this - the Exotics here, I mean?"
She smiled at him. "You tell me what you think," she answered. "And then I'll let you know if that agrees with my own ideas. Remember? I brought you here to see for yourself. If it'd simply been a matter of telling it, I could have told you back at the Encyclopedia. You tell me, and then I'll let you know how that agrees with what I think I've noticed." "The Exotics I've always known," said Hal, "were calm, intelligent, reasonable people, all of them. But nearly all of them also had a sort of philosophical arrogance underneath their gentle exteriors. It seems to me these people've had that arrogance planed off them, and they're almost a little surprised to find that the philosophy's still there. Like someone who's had a stand of large and valuable trees burned off land they own. Their first feeling is that they've lost everything. Then they realize that the earth they owned is still there and there isn't any reason the trees can't be regrown. Maybe even taller and stronger, because of the ashes enriching the soil."
Amanda smiled. "I'd agree with that," she said. "Did anything about the occupying soldiers strike you, by the way?" "I haven't seen enough of them to tell," said Hal. "They're sweepings - no good military commander would figure them worth having." "Sorry," said Amanda. "I put that badly. I should have said - does anything about the way the soldiers react to the Kultans strike you?" "I haven't really seen enough of that, either. But Marlo seems - they all seem to have made some sort of impression on the soldiers. I can't make out yet just what. Nothing specifically useful to the Exotics. Just a sort of moral ascendancy, which the troopers seem to be acknowledging whether they're consciously aware of it or not."
Amanda smiled again, and nodded. He smiled back at her and turned again to the kitchen as she went off to see about something clean and unused with which to make up Iban's bed.
When Hal came in there, after cleaning up in the kitchen, he found that she had covered the existing layers of bedding with extra blankets, and put down some more for cover, if needed. She was already asleep on the side of the bed against the wall when he got there. Now that he let himself feel it, a strong weariness was in him as well.