Amanda frowned. "I don't see any connection, myself, between any of those, people and what you're after," she said. "But now we're in your work area, not mine. Anyway..."
She stopped, turned to him and reached up to put her arms around his neck and kiss him. "I've got to get moving," she said. "It's a good two days' walk to the little town I want to go to first, and part of today has already been used up." "Does it make all that much difference" said Hal wistfully. "You, of all people, to say that!" replied Amanda, starting to lead them back to where Amid and Simon waited for them. "How would you like it if you got to a town just one hour too late to save someone's life'' "Yes," said Hal. "Of course. You're right. But that can't be something that happens often - never mind. You're quite right. If it only happens once, that's reason enough for not wasting time. "
He smiled at her. "But there's a human limit to the amount of help anyone can give," he said.
"You say that" She linked arms with him and they went back in a shared silence that, though warm, was both deep and thoughtful and still in it, returned to the small building that was the Guildmaster's main office.
CHAPTER 20
Over the weeks that he had now been at the Chantry Guild, Hal's sitting by the pond to watch the sun rise when he was not walking in the circle at that time had become a ritual. Seated, he unchained his mind to its own ways of abstracting his thoughts, ways that produced inner thoughts and visions also. Although those evoked as he sat by the pond tended to be of a different character than those he produced for himself in the circle.
One morning he had just seated himself while the world beyond the ledge was still lost in the grayout of predawn, when a figure materialized from the dimness at his back and also settled by the pond, not far from him and also facing the mountains over which the sun would rise.
It was Old Man. He and Hal looked at each other companionably. Hal, however, found himself vaguely disturbed. Not by the other's presence, but by something about it that felt not quite right. He puzzled over this feeling for several moments and then understanding came to him.
Old Man was sitting on his heels, quite comfortably but undeniably squatting, rather than seating himself cross-leg as Hal had, and if there was anyone on the ledge whom Hal would have expected to sit naturally in a cross-legged position it would be the white-bearded older man now beside him. Moreover, Old Man had obviously Joined Hal and the natural thing would have been for him to signal the fact by taking the same posture.
But years had gone by since Hal's early training by the Exotics among the three tutors he had had as a boy, and the occasions on which a lotus position might have seemed appropriate for him to assume had become fewer and fewer. He had become careless. His legs were almost in the half-lotus position, but his toes were not tucked in behind the calves of the opposing legs the way they should have been. With an old-fashioned sort of politeness, Old Man had evidently taken the position he had to avoid seeming to go Hal one better by sitting down in a proper half-lotus himself.
Hal was out of practice, but not so much that the half-lotus was impossible to him. He tucked his toes in. Old Man dropped immediately into the same position with one fluid motion. Hal bowed gravely from the waist to him. Old Man bowed as gravely back. They both turned their attention to the mountains over which would come the sunrise.
Hal's gaze went away beyond the cliff edge. For him, the Chantry Guild and the place it occupied had now effectively ceased to exist. He knew the names of the area that surrounded him as anyone would know his own, familiar neighborhood.
He sat on the eastern face of the range of the Zipaca mountains. Behind him, the thickness of that range ran eastward until it was out of sight. But Hal now knew it descended at last to high, nearly perpendicular cliffs overhanging the coastal forest, which was too steamy and hot to be more than sparsely inhabited. That forest was called the Tlalocan - the "land of sea and mist'' in the ancient Mayan language of Old Earth. It reached to the shores of' the Zephry Ocean, which stretched some thousands of miles onward to the next large continental mass of Kultis. At his feet lay the Mayahuel Valley, up which Amanda had led him to this place, and beyond where he sat now, the Zipacas continued, angling in so that they, and the Grandfathers of Dawn, opposite, became one range to the north after the upland forest below had given way to high altitude desert. It was the Grandfathers over which the star Procyon Would rise to bring daylight to the Chantry Guild and the people in the valley below.
Watching the far dark bulk of the distant mountains, as their details began gradually to emerge from the mist under the steadily brightening overhead, he let his mind flow in whatever direction might attract it, as water seeks its own way down a slope. This was not his way in the circle, where he deliberately turned his mind over to understanding the Law he repeated as he walked. Here and now, he only set it free like a hawk to soar with the waking day.
It had come to him some morning since, seated in this place, that for the first time since he had been a young boy and dedicated himself to ending that which had killed his uncle James, he had a chance to step back and add up the gains and losses of his own lives.
They were part-lives, really, for Donal Graeme had ceased to be before middle age, so that he could become Paul Formain. And Formain had existed only a few years as a shell for him who had once been Donal, before he had been abandoned, along with the rest of the already-dead twenty-first century. From there, what was essentially both Donal and now Hal had returned to the courier ship of the twenty-second century: and to the timeless wait of eighty years that had passed before he became the two-year-old child who had grown into what he was now.
But all those lives had been aimed and controlled by a single mind and a single purpose, and they had achieved some things and failed to achieve some others - so far, at least. It was ironic that at the Final Encyclopedia for three years, where he had had nothing to do but concentrate on his goal, that he had never found time to do this sort of self-survey. And now, immersed in walking in the circle, watching the sunrise. serving food, fixing, cleaning - he had been set free to do just that.
He had grown smaller in the eyes of his race and larger in dimensions, where the vision of other people did not penetrate. It was as if to grow as a human being he had needed to give up more and more of what other humans had desired and admired. On all the worlds only a handful now knew him, in any real sense of that word, and nearly all on the Younger Worlds had known Donal, in Donal's later years.