His last attempt had been the gathering of the best of what the Younger Worlds had gained - from the Exotics, the Friendlies, and his own world of the Dorsai - into safety behind the phase-shield he had caused to be set up, enclosing Earth and the Final Encyclopedia. He had been confident then, that at last, having done this, the next and last step to his goal would be obvious.
But it had not been. What he had achieved had only once more cleared the mists a little way, but left him with no understanding of what was to be done next. It had only shown yet a farther stretch of the road still to be covered.
He had not been wrong in anything he had done so far. Faith, courage, and the ability to think philosophically, all faculties of the human, developed from its animal forebears, and their extended forms, as embodied in the Friendlies, the Dorsai and these Exotics, had been part of the answer. He had not been wrong in that much, but now he saw what was needed was something still hidden by unknowns, still in shadow. He could only be sure now that it was somehow connected with the creativity in every living human.
In his disappointment and weariness, he had become blocked, and believed himself burnt out - a failure. So he had continued to think until Amanda had come to tell him he might find a new point of view here, on an Exotic world now wrecked and ground down by the forces of an enemy point of view that was trying to kill the growth element of the human spirit and destroy all that had been accomplished.
She had been right. He knew that now with a wholehearted, instinctive certainty, as he sat here, waiting for Procyon's rise over the mountaintops.
Somewhere, with her and among the Chantry Guild members and with his recent part in the rescue of Artur and little Cee, who was of an age with the boy he had been when he had made his original vow, he had once more found a way to go forward. And now, now here, waiting for the sunrise, he felt perhaps only one more large step toward what he sought, perhaps even close at last to the doorway itself, through which he now knew he must pass to find what he sought.
The paling of the night's black sky and the extinguishing of the stars had spread forward from above the distant mountains as he had been thinking, and the light had grown stronger. He felt the approaching dawn like a hand laid upon him, and although the breeze was merely cool, it seemed to blow through his clothing so that he felt as if he sat naked and waiting, his legs crossed, his hands not in prayer position but laid, palms down, one on top of the other in his lap, as he remembered his uncle Ian's massive hands used to lie.
He let his mind go out to his customary imaginings of this daily exercise of body and mind, conjuring up the time of the far future of this Chantry Guild, when the ledge had been filled by a massive structure of stone blocks quarried from the mountain, its flat surfaces paved and gardened and this pool before him enclosed by a rim of pink-veined, light gray rock, with the native plants replaced by imported water-lilies spreading their flat, broad petals on the liquid surface to uphold themselves and their night-closed and sleeping white flowers.
Those flowers of his imagination which would be opening with the coming light of day. As with some repeated meditation, the envisioned scene changed the reality around him. His ears heard the chanting replace ack of the present and future walkers in the behind him in circle....
The transient and the eternal are the same...
Now, the chant seemed to pick him up and possess him. So that he resonated to it as a tuning fork resonates to being struck, with a single pure note. In the pool, the white blossoms were beginning to open as the light flooded forward and the day brightened.
His eyes ignored the unvarying green sweep of the highaltitude forest below him and focused on the distant range of mountains, the Grandfathers of Dawn. Always the mountains. Always the mountains and the sunrise. These belonged as much to the future of his imagined scene as they did to the present second in which he sat here. To the mountains and the sunrise, the years or centuries in between were unimportant, the moment of a single drawn breath in a lifetime of breaths.
The sun was not yet in sight from behind the range, but the brightness of the sky showed that it was close now, very close.
His eyes were filled with light and he felt the cool air passing in and out of the lungs above his motionless body as he sat. He looked down at the pond and saw that the white flowers were now fully open, some of them showing the drops of the dew that had collected in their tightly closed petal tips earlier. He felt as if some essential but nonphysical part of himself was lifted out of the rest of him and rushed through the airy space between him and the distant mountain range to meet the dawn, seeing nothing else.
At the same time his physical eyes looked down at the pond and focused once more on a single flower, on one white petal of which a dewdrop sat like a blessing. The flower filled his gaze and like a wave through him came a great sweep of feeling, that anything should be so wonderful as the living leaf with the perfect transparency of the dewdrop upon it.
Feeling this, it was as if his flying, incorporeal self reached the upthrust giants of the land that waited, as they had always waited, for him in this moment, and, lifting, it and he saw the first blazing edge of Procyon, which was too bright to look at with the eyes of his body back on the ledge, appear in the bottom of a notch in the rock before him and send the first ray of direct light leaping across the space between range and ledge to touch the pond, to touch the flower.
It touched the dewdrop, and for one second too short for breath to draw or mind to do anything but hold in memory, the drop exploded, scintillating with light like a diamond, radiating off in all directions, including into him, where it shone unforgettable, from that moment on.
He sat, blinded by the vision. Behind him, the voices of the walkers chanted still....
The transient and the eternal are the same...
And, suddenly, moving in to replace the wonder within him came the understanding he had waited for. Now, the words of the walkers engulfed him. Suddenly, at last, he understood the truth of what they chanted, what he had so often chanted, that it was not a matter of faith but of actuality.
For the transient and the eternal were the same. He looked at the petal now and the dewdrop was already beginning to shrink, to disappear as the heat of the sun's ray drew it up. In a little it would be gone. The petal would be dry and it would be as if the dewdrop had never been there.
But the dewdrop was always there. Even as this one blazed for a second with incredible light and began to disappear, somewhere in this infinite universe there was another dewdrop just beginning to scintillate, and after that another, and another...
And another dawn and another, and another mountain range and another, when this one should be worn down to level dust, and without a pause, another world, which would make another range through which a ray of light would come to another dewdrop on another petal - forever and forever, until time should end.
The dewdrop was beyond destruction. The moment of its brilliance was eternal. It was transient here, but eternal everywhere. Just so, all things were eternal, only waiting to be found, even the doorway to something that had only been his dream all these years.
The physical light of the present day was everywhere about and the vision of the future was gone, but the moment of the explosion of illumination from the dewdrop still filled.
He got to his feet and went back, past visible circle of walkers toward the buildings beyond. He felt incredibly light-bodied. As if he could, with little effort, walk up into the thin air. A figure in the ordinary light workshirt and trousers, worn by the majority of the Chantry Guild members when they were otherwise occupied than walking in the circle, stepped out from behind some tree trunks to meet him. It was Old Man and he smiled up at Hal as they met and Hal stopped. "You weren't there this morning," said Hal. "I was there. I sat behind you," said Old Man. "Some things are best touched alone."