He laid himself down softly beside her and closed his eyes. He was ready to sleep, but once his body became inactive, a tribe of unanswered questions that had erupted into his mind at various times of the day came back at him like a mob, clamoring for attention. Ruthlessly, he pushed them from his mind, but they crowded in again.
The difference in the Exotics he had seen here must be on the part of what was obviously in process of change about this whole world. Perhaps he should have gone down to Earth from the Final Encyclopedia, this last year, to see for himself how the people there were really changing, as Ajela and Rukh had seemed convinced they were. The coming of the Others appeared to have had a much wider effect on humanity than even he had given it credit for....
He smiled to himself, harshly. Almost he had forgotten that he had given up trying to reach an understanding that would give him the key to the Creative Universe. With an effort he blanked his mind to all these questions and possibilities and, in the dark void that remained, the sleep that his body reached for came easily.
CHAPTER 12
A touch woke Hal. He looked up at Amanda. "Time to leave?" he asked. ."Yes," she said. "The gates'll be open in about twenty minutes. There'll be a crowd waiting to make the most of the day outside the city by getting out as soon as possible. We're safest leaving with them."
The day before had been cloudless. This one had scattered tufts of white moisture afloat, it seemed, just beyond arm's reach, with the mountains toward which they headed looming over all. The day warmed with the sun, but the road climbed steeply almost from the time they lost sight of the city gates in the vegetation behind them, and the air was thinner and drier than it had been on the previous day's walk. "Not many people are headed this way," commented Hal, after they had been on their route for about an hour. "Soil's not much worth farming as we get higher," said Amanda. "Look, you can notice the change in forestation."
Indeed, Hal had. And over that day and into the next, he watched the changes in their surroundings. From the scattered stands of taller timber and the plenteous bush and scrub trees of the uplands, they moved into more open woods of variform evergreens whose ancestral seeds had been imported from Earth, mixed, still, with some native varieties. "By the way, I left Marlo some money so she could replace the food we ate without Iban being any the wiser, and also so she'd have a little extra for her own use." "Money?" said Hal. He had had so little use for money, beyond the letters of interstellar credit he had carried in his younger years, when he was trying to stay one jump ahead of Bleys Ahrens and the Others, that he simply had not thought of money in connection with this trip to Kultis. "What sort of money do they have here?" "Scrip issued by the occupying authorities, now," said Amanda. "Arranged to further put the squeeze on the native Exotics. Theoretically, anything else - even interstellar credits in any form - isn't legal tender anymore on this planet and on Mara. " "Where'd you get scrip? I didn't see any when the guard at the gate dumped your bag to see what was in it." "I'd picked some up on my earlier trips, and brought it out with me," she said. "At the Encyclopedia your friend, Jeamus Walters, copied me a large stock of it. Most of it's still in the ship, but I'm carrying a young fortune sewn into the hem of my robe. "
She paused. "Your friend Jeamus seems to be able to do anything." "With the help of the Encyclopedia," Hal said. "Also, before I went to steep," Amanda went on, "I stole a small, but useful, amount from Iban. Not so much that he'll notice the loss, but enough to help out what I gave Marlo. A man who stuffs scrip into any pocket that's handy doesn't usually keep an account book in his head." "That's true enough," said Hal. "I could have given Marlo a lot more, of course," she continued, "but the Authority strictly limits the amount of scrip in circulation, to tighten up the shortages being forced on the people. If Marlo had a lot to spend, she'd stick out like a sore thumb. I can do a lot more good by giving small amounts to a large number of people, spread across a wide area."
Hal nodded. "How far is it to this Chantry Guild?" "An easy day's walk from here to the Zipacas. Though this isn't a route I've taken lately," said Amanda. "From there, a short climb to the Guild itself-"
She broke off in midsentence. They had both halted reflexively at a faint sound that it was impossible to identify.
Amanda gestured with a hand toward her ear, in a signal to continue listening. Hal nodded. He had lost the noise and at first heard only the sound of the insects and the breeze in the trees around them. Then he became aware of an undertone that was a human voice talking steadily in a low, unvarying pitch. The voice was too far off for them to distinguish words, but it was undeniably the sound of someone speaking, steadily and without pause or change in emphasis. "It's up ahead," said Amanda. "Yes," said Hal.
They went on up the road, which here curved to its left through a stand of the local evergreens. Mounting a small rise, they looked down a short, relatively open, slope into a clearing that held the ruins of one of the former Exotic villas.
Vegetation had not yet encroached upon those ruins, but there was little enough left of the home that had been. Back some short distance from the road were the low remains of firedestroyed walls, partly shrouded with vines and weeds. Most such places, and this one was no exception, had owned white walls, and the fire-blackening had oddly and arbitrarily seemed to paint what was left standing of these, so that the impression was of an end to the home that had come about by age rather than by flame.
Hal remembered that he had felt something medieval about the moment in which they had waited at the gates of Porphyry. Today, the ruins of the houses they had passed had struck him with a feeling from an even earlier period in history. They had made him think, for some strange reason, of how the ruins of Roman villas must have looked in ancient Britain, after the military power of that mighty but decaying Empire was withdrawn, and the barbarians flooded in to loot, slay and destroy what had been.
There was no obvious reason for such a thought to arise now. Nonetheless, it was strong in him as the two of them started down toward what was left of the home in the clearing, and the man they saw there.
He wore the ordinary penitential robe and had let his graying hair and beard grow. These were clotted into locks from lack of washing, and his robe, even from a distance, showed that it had not been cleaned for a very long time. He was a thin man, whose hollowed cheeks looked sucked in above the beard that mounted his face toward the cheekbones, and his arms and legs, protruding from the robe, were skin and bone.
He stood before what had once perhaps been a decorative fishpond in the forecourt of the villa. It was a round body of water with a red-tiled edging, some four meters across in size and undoubtedly quite shallow, since mounds of something peeked here and there above the surface. The breeze blowing across it up the slope toward Hal and Amanda brought a smell sick with the stink of organic decay.
The area around the pool itself, a circular terrace of gray stone with white stone benches and a stone pedestal about chest high to the man-before which he stood-had been meticulously restored, cleaned and cared for. Everything sparkled in the clear upland light, with two exceptions, besides the appearance of the man himself.
One, was the dark opaque waters of the pool, which seemed to swallow all light falling on it, and the other was a row of decorative flowerpots all around its edge. Those in the flowerpots to the man's right held many-branched plants of some sort, that had been stripped down to bare branches and twigs, as if in the depths of winter.