They took up their way in somber silence. The streambed they had been following had been inclining more and more steeply with every step they took these last few minutes. Suddenly, they came through a small, thick cluster of trees and there was the face of the mountain itself, a near-vertical brown limestone wall of rock looking as if it had grown up suddenly through the ground before them, to tower on up and back, until it was out of sight.
The forest came almost to that wall. Amanda led Hal forward and he saw that the lower part of the near-vertical rock was pitted and indented with concavities. "This way," said Amanda, leading him to one dark opening, which they had to bend double to enter. Hal followed her in, thinking that they were moving into a cave, which made no sense - but suddenly their way turned under the rock and he saw light before him. They came out, into sunlight once more, somewhat higher up, into a sort of gouge in the steep rock face itself.
Hal noticed as they emerged that a large, semi-round boulder was perched to one side of their exit. It looked as if it were balanced so that it could be rolled to fall with its bulging side into the place where they had just come out, like a stopper into a bottle. Amanda led him into the gouge, and they continued upward, now climbing as much as walking, working their way around bosses of the naked brown limestone. They stopped to rest for a while on a small level area. "How much farther?" asked Hal, shading his eyes to look up the rock face they were climbing. "I can't see any sign of anything built up there, and" He switched his gaze to Procyon in the west. "The sun is going to be behind those peaks in a hurry - I'd guess no more than another fifteen minutes. " "You don't see anything because nothing's supposed to be seen," said Amanda. "But you're right about the fifteen minutes. We'll make it."
Hal looked up and for the first time saw, only a dozen meters or so higher up, that what he had assumed to be an unbroken, steep slope above them, actually ended in the lip of a ledge. The ledge ran off out of sight on either hand around the bulge of the mountainside. Its rock had blended in appearance very well with a slope behind it that he now realized must be at some distance from the edge he saw.
He had not noticed it before because the light of the descending sun had added to the illusion of a single, unbroken, upward face of rock. Now the sun was down enough that shadow lay on the rock face under an overhang of the upper slope beyond, as it lay on the two of them, here. The ledge itself must still be in sunlight, for what had caught his eye at last had been that its lip was now rimmed with light.
Seeing it, and aware of the waiting level just above them, the reality of the place that was their destination became suddenly solid and undeniable in his mind. His thoughts moved together into an undeniable conclusion, and he knew that finally he must have the answers he had wanted from Amanda earlier. "Wait!" he said.
He had stopped, and now, ahead of him, Amanda stopped and turned to face him. "What is it?" she asked. "This may be my last chance to talk to you alone for a while." The words seemed to sound stiff and awkward even as he said them - but they had to be said. "When Tam Olyn told you to have faith back at the Final Encyclopedia, what was he talking about? And what was it you turned back to say to Rukh and Ajela, just before we left?"
She gazed down at him for a long moment with an unusual intentness, as if she was trying to search for something deep within him. "Tell me," she said at last, "are you going on up? Or are you turning back, even at this point?" "Why should I turn back?" "Would you - now?"
He thought about it for a moment. "No," he said then, "I wanted to come here. I still do." "Good," she said, "because you had to come here of your own decision, your own free will. Because you wanted to come. " "I did. You know that." "I had to make sure," she said. She hesitated for a second. "You see," she said, "when I stopped to talk to Rukh and Ajela, it was to tell them it would be all right now, that there was hope you'd find the Creative Universe after all."
He stared at her. "How could you promise them something like that?" he said. "I've no guarantee there's hope - you knew that. And even if I did, no one can know certainly, one way or another!" "Oh, Hal!" She threw her arms around him suddenly, pressing her head against his chest. "Don't you understand? You've worn yourself thin trying to get through a wall at a point where there was no way in. Back at the Final Encyclopedia, you could see how everybody else had been worn thin, but you wouldn't face it in yourself! You've got to step back from the problem and wait for another way to come to you. That's why you had to come here! And as for the other question: I only know what Tam saw. He was seeing more than I ever had, because, just as he said, he was halfway through the door to death. But when he told me what he'd seen, I could see it, too - a time in which I'd need to believe in you, and why. Because you'd have won after all - but at a greater price than any of us had ever imagined. And the way to that's here, I can feel it! " "What price?" He was almost glaring at her, he knew, but he could not help himself. "I don't know!" she said, still holding him. "I said it was beyond imagination, for me - and I think even for Tam. He only knew the fact of it. But when he told me, I could feel it the way he did, and I understood something else - that I couldn't tell you, until you'd committed yourself by actually coming here."
She stopped, as if she had suddenly run out of breath. "What else?" he demanded. "Your next step on the road to what Tam made me see. You've committed yourself now by coming to the Chantry Guild here, of your own free will and choice. If I'd told you before this, it might have affected what you keep calling the Forces of History. "
She let go of him then, but kept a hand on his arm as if a living connection was necessary for the message she still had to reach him with. "Hal," she said, "listen to me! Tam has to die completed if you're ever to do what you first set out to do. You have to find the Creative Universe before he dies. Only that'll justify his life in his own eyes, and he must die justified. If he doesn't, you'll never find it!"
He stared at her. "Don't ask me why!" she said. "I don't know why! I only know what Tam believes, and - I know he's right."
Hal's mind clicked and slid, from premise, to odds, to conclusion. Now that his intuitive logic was given what it needed to work with, it was offering up answers where it could offer none before. What Amanda said made sense.
Until the Final Encyclopedia should be put to its final, practical use, the shape of that use would be undefined. It had been passed on, undefined, as no more than a dream, from Mark Torre to Tam and from Tam to him. The chain of cause and effect of this unreal and as-yet - unshaped, but powerful, cause could break at Tam's death, if he believed he had died without it reaching at last to its goal. It would mean to him that all his life, and everything effected by it, had been a wrong working of the developing historical fabric, a working to a dead end, that now would be abandoned.
Hal felt suddenly weak, with the weakness of shock. It had just been shown to him that he alone, of the three of them, had been in a position of choice. Neither Torre nor Tam could have turned from their work once they had taken it up. He could have - had to have been able to, before being given the chance to find the answer they all had sought - or else there was no free will. Otherwise, the fabric of future history was pre-determined.
And it was not. Not fixed. Only the past was that. So he alone had had the power of choice - and he had almost chosen wrongly.
No, never that. Succeed or fail, but to give up as he had thought himself ready to do was unthinkable after the torch had been carried this far. Fail, if he must, but the only decision he could live with was to stick with it to the end. Otherwise, all he had ever believed was false and useless.