He turned his face again to the ledge above them and felt Amanda's hand slip down his arm to take his hand. Together, they went up into sunlight.
CHAPTER 14
The sunset exploded in their eyes as they came up over the rim onto the ledge, for a moment all but blinding Hal as his eyes struggled after the dimness of the shadowed slope below. His legs felt strange and weak to be once more on level ground. Gradually, visual adjustment came and he began to make out what was around them.
They had stepped up onto a level space that ran back a hundred meters or so before the mountain face resumed its upward thrust. The ledge was at least five times as wide as it was deep and it was a crowded, busy place.
For a moment, still dazzled by the rays of the setting sun, Hal could not make out the details. Then his vision made a sharper adjustment, and all that was there seemed to stand out with a particular depth and clarity, as if he was seeing it in more than three dimensions.
There were several openings in the mountain face at the back of the level space, whether to caves, or interior continuations of the ledge, it was impossible to tell from where he stood. He and Amanda stood only a little way to the right of a small pond, fed by a stream which angled across the flat rock of the ledge floor from a near waterfall spilling down the farther face of the mountain. The pond must drain from its bottom, he thought, since there was no other obvious exit, and the water probably emerged elsewhere on the mountainside or as a spring in the forest below.
Directly ahead, on the right of the tiny stream as Hal looked toward the back of the ledge, were three large buildings. The one farthest in was slightly larger than the one next to it, and the one closest was a structure so small that it seemed hardly more than a cabin by comparison with the other two.
All three buildings had been built of logs. The face of the mountain behind was in the process of being quarried for blocks of brown limestone, and some of these blocks had already been set up on the other side of the stream, marking the outline of what promised to be a greater structure that would eventually fill and use all the space at the back of the ledge. Away from the stream on both sides, and otherwise in lines about the ledge as well as against the upslanting rock walls of the mountain - so steep their upper branches touched the stone - were numerous variform pine, with a scattering of native evergreens. Pine needles were scattered everywhere, and made a carpet over all the ledge itself.
People in robes were moving purposefully everywhere, along paths under the lines of trees. The only exception to this, in the sharp sunset light, was a ring of individuals walking in a circle, a little beyond and behind the pond. They walked, one behind the other, chanting, a chant that Hal now realized, some acoustical trick of the rock below the level of the ledge had kept him from hearing until this moment. But now it came clearly to his ears.
They intoned it as they walked, but it carried no clear message to him in this first moment. But for a reason he could not identify, something about it rang a deep note of certainty in him. It was right.
The last of the sunset was disappearing with the swiftness that was to be expected on a world under such a tiny seeming circle of light. The star was, in fact, far from Kultis and Mara, Procyon was a much larger, as well as brighter, star than Earth's Sun. At the distance from it that Earth was from its Sun, a world like this would have been uninhabitable.
The evening shadow seemed to fall across all the world at once, and as it did so, Hal's mind finally registered the sense of what the walkers were repeating. That what they repeated had taken this long to become intelligible to him had not been because the words had not been spoken in Basic - Basic was what everyone on all the human worlds normally used nowadays. Nor was it because they had run the words together, or in any way sounded them differently.
It had only been because of their method of chanting. They intoned the phrase they used, not in chorus, but as if each one was repeating it solely to himself or herself. Sometimes the voices blended on the same sound at the same moment, and sometimes they did not. But at any rate, now he clearly heard and understood them. There were only eight words to what they repeated.
"The transient and the eternal are the same... The transient and the eternal are the same..."
So suddenly did they become understandable to him, that it was as if they had abruptly been translated from some language he did not know into one he had spoken from his earliest years.
It was not so much the words in themselves that registered so strongly on him, but the burden of their meaning, which he could not identify clearly, but which stirred him strangely. As unfamiliar music might move him unexpectedly and strongly even at the first hearing.
It was like a sound heard around a corner and out of sight, striking some powerful meaning in him, but exactly what and why was not immediately clear. Still, for the present it did not matter. The knowing would come, at its own pace, but in time to be useful. All that mattered now was realizing that it rang a deep chime of truth in him.
It continued...
"The transient and the eternal are the same... The transient and the eternal..."
...and so it went, on and on, echoing in him as if his mind was one great unlighted cavern and it was speaking to him with the voice of all the universe at once. Echoing and speaking, echoing and speaking....
His body tensed to make an instinctive step toward the circle, then checked. He held back, his eyes focusing for some reason on one walker with a long, white beard, silky on a thin, bony face beneath oriental eyes. The man he watched had just completed the turn of the circle, after having been facing away from Hal, but now came back toward him. For a moment his features were clear in spite of the steadily deepening shadow that seemed to wash the colors from the walker's patterned robe of thin, smooth cloth, unlike the rough garments the other walkers wore. Hal turned to Amanda. He saw her face looking up at him, concerned. He looked back down and smiled to reassure her. "You were right," he said. "I needed to come here." "Good," she said, the concern relaxing from her eyes. "Come along then." "Where?" he asked.
The face of the ledge was busy with people moving to and fro between its buildings. Some of these smiled at Amanda, but none seemed surprised to see her. They extended their smile in a welcome to Hal himself in a manner so like that of the Exotics as Hal remembered, that he felt a sudden, small pang of sadness. Amanda was leading the two of them toward the smallest of the buildings. "First you've got to meet the one in charge here," she said, "an old friend of yours." "Old friend?" He tried to think of Exotics who might fit that description. "Nonne?"
Nonne had been the Exotic representative - theoretically to the Final Encyclopedia, but actually, as both the Exotics and Hal had clearly understood, to Hal himself, since he had been the one who had won their allegiance to the cause of Old Earth in a debate against Bleys, broadcast to both Exotic worlds.
That had been at the time of the movement of the Dorsai people to Earth's defense, and it had resulted in the donation of Exotic wealth and knowledge to the same end. The time of the activation of the phase-shield. It was also the fact that Nonne had been sent with him to voice any objections the Exotics might have to Hal's later arrangements, as a kind of single last voice of the Exotic Splinter Culture.
Nonne had stayed the first year with him at the Final Encyclopedia. But it had become more and more obvious that Hal was concerned, not with the management of Earth's defense, but only with the work he pursued alone in the carrel of his suite. So she had gone home, leaving the actual uses of Exotic funds and skill to Ajela, and the actual execution of that defense to the Dorsai.