He turned away from the desk, reeling as he lost the support of it, and being caught and held upright by the strong grasp of Amanda. "Sleep for you," she said, "this way."
CHAPTER 31
Hal woke to almost complete darkness relieved only by the faint line of light under the door to the bathroom. This alone told him that he was not in his own bed in Dormitory Two, but back in Amid's second office, in which he and Amanda had slept on his arrival at the Chantry Guild. There was someone beside him in the bed, and he turned his head to make out that it was Amanda, deeply sleeping, her hair spread out on the pillow.
It must be deep into the night. He lay there, trying to remember. He had no recollection of getting here. He remembered nothing beyond Amanda catching him, holding him up, and telling him he must sleep. He had no memory of being brought to this bed. But now that he tried to recall anything at all after that there came to him a few flashes from momentary wakings, as seeing a sliver of the rich daylight illumination of Procyon, that had managed to make its way here and there through the blanket she had once more hung over a rod to provide a near-perfect blackout curtain.
In each case he had awakened long enough only to recognize the fact that he was safe and comfortable, then fallen immediately and heavily back to sleep again. He had no memory of Amanda joining him. She would have been quiet so as not to disturb him, of course, as only she could be quiet. But how long had it been since she had come? How long since night replaced day outside his curtained window?
Some internal clock deep inside him told him that it had been a long time - that he had slept most of the night through, as well as the day, and dawn was near.
It had been no ordinary sleep. He had put in forty-eight hours of wakefulness under active conditions before this, without falling into such a pit of unconsciousness, and while he might be a few years older since then, and softer, in spite of his daily exercise in the Final Encyclopedia, neither time nor inaction could account for such a heavy, prolonged slumber.
There had to he another reason for it, and even as he formed the question the answer came. His unconscious mind had once more wanted his consciousness out of the way so it could work with perfect freedom, putting together all the things he had learned, one by one - those parts that now almost, but not quite, came together like the parts of a puzzle of many pieces, to give him a complete picture of his goal.
He felt a yearning to stay here, where he was, and put an arm gently over Amanda, coaxing her gently back into wakefulness and the joining that they had always had so few chances for. But at the same time, there was a powerful feeling within him that now and only now the answer he sought, or at least another step toward it, was calling him outside this room. It was waiting for him with the dawn that would be coming, as it had waited all this time he had been here, but he had not yet learned enough to see it.
Quietly, as Amanda must have come to bed quietly, he left it, found his clothes, dressed and let himself out of the room. The corridor was bright-lit and silent, but outside, when he closed the main door of the building behind him, the ledge was in complete darkness. The night was empty except for the chanting of those who walked the circle, invisible to him. Both moons were down and the light of the stars was not enough to let him see his hand at arm's length before him.
But like the Guild members, he now knew the ledge well enough to find his way about it blindfolded. In addition, in this season of summer, even at this altitude, the wind blew toward the ledge across the land below.
Accordingly, he turned his face into the wind and, feeling the familiar slopes and pitches of the ground under his bare feet, went toward the edge.
As he went, his eyes readjusted to the darkness from the bright glare of the hall lights. He was able to see the treetops overhead occulting the stars, the trees that had been deliberately left uncut in patches and clumps so that part of one of them always hid any walkway below it. Almost unthinkingly, he oriented himself by those shapes of the treetops against the pinpoints of light in the sky, and as he got close to the edge he could see it as a line of demarcation where darkness gave way suddenly to deeper darkness.
He was out here earlier than usual and he did not expect to find Old Man here yet, and in fact, when he got to the place by the pool where he usually sat, the spot the Old Man usually occupied was empty. After all, Hal reminded himself, his fellow watcher was no longer young, and also had just finished putting in much the same hours, at the same activity as had Hal. It would hardly be surprising if he did not show up at all.
Hal sat, therefore, waiting for the paling of the sky that would signal the approaching day and the sunrise. There was a strange blend of expectation and excitement in him.
In patches, where the native vegetation of the pond did not obscure its reflecting surface, the image of the stars overhead looked back up at him - as they also looked down on him through the clear, high-altitude air. He felt enclosed by them as an individual feels warmly enclosed by family or close friends at a gathering of those who were close. The sky about them was beginning to pale, but only beyond the line of the Grandfathers of Dawn in the far distance - that place from which the sunrise would come. Overhead, it was still dark enough for their lights to be clear and sharp against the deep dark.
As far as he could tell, none of those that he could see up there were stars that were suns over the other Younger Worlds, or art itself. Those solar bodies were at present in the wrong position to be seen from Kultis - or more accurately, this part of the planet was pointed in the wrong direction. But those he did see stood in for those he knew, in his imagination, so that it was as if they had come here at this important moment to watch him now from both above and below at once, waiting for him to take up his journey once more along the path he had chosen for himself that day of his uncle James's death.
It had been a ridiculously ambitious decision at the time on the part of a half-grown boy, to find and destroy whatever element it was in people that made them selfish and uncaring to the point of brutality and cruelty to each other. The shape of the answer he sought had emerged, little by little from the mists of things undiscovered as he worked his way toward it, trying one route after another, finding his way blocked but learning a little more each time, so that with each fresh start he chose his next route with more wisdom.
So, slowly, he had progressed. Slowly, his certainty had grown that there was a path to humanity's becoming a race of people who would voluntarily refrain from all harming of their fellows, by all actions, from literal killing, to the exercise of the little cruelties of words and sheer thoughtlessness that were so common in human society that they went almost without remark. But now, he was surer than he had ever been, that only a few thin veils - perhaps only one - hid it from him.
As Donal he had found that power and law alone could not force the change he wanted. But the discovery pointed to the road he himself must travel, and, after him, the race. As Paul Formain, back in the twenty-first century, he had found that part of the answer lay outside the known universe and its laws, but that this further universe - the one he had come to call the Creative Universe - was again, only part of the answer.