His smile grew and became almost impish. He reached into a pocket of his trousers and brought out a small mirror, which he held up to Hal's eyes.
Hal stared at the image of his own face. There was a difference in what he saw that he could not pick out at first. Then he saw it - the pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to pinpricks of darkness, like the eyes of someone under drugs. For a fraction of a second the scintillation of the dewdrop seemed to leap out from those pinpricks and the mirror at him, making him feel light-headed, but happily so. "How could you tell ahead of time, in the dark?" he asked, as Old Man put the mirror back into the pocket.
Old Man passed his hand from left to right through the air at chest height before him, palm outward toward Hal. "I felt it," he said.
Hal stared at him, waiting for additional explanation, but Old Man, still smiling, merely turned and went away from him, back through the trees from among which he had emerged.
CHAPTER 32
He went back to their room and discovered that Amanda had already risen and left. He found her having breakfast by herself at a small table in the building's dining room and joined her.
Actually, he wanted nothing to eat, and she, after a single wise look at him, said nothing, not even "good morning." Instead, she merely smiled and continued her own meal, leaving him to sit and do what he wanted, which was merely to enjoy the early day with her, along with the other breakfasters. He let himself be immersed in the chatter in the dining room and the sounds from the kitchen. The sun, shining in through the windows of the room to brighten all around them, wrapped him in an unusual sense of happiness.
When she was done, she rose. He went with her. Taking her tray with its used utensils and dishes to the disposal slot, she pushed it through. Then, smiling again at him, she led him outside and parted company with him, going off herself in the direction of Amid's office.
He was left to his own devices, and found himself happy to be so. Kultis, around him, had never seemed more bright and fresh. Its colors stood out at him, as if just washed by a brief summer shower, from the sky overhead to the gravel of the paths underfoot.
He roamed about the ledge. There was a lightness to his body, and the sense of the illumination he had just received lingered in him. For once, he felt strangely free of purpose. It was as consciousness had been cut loose, like a towed dory from it behind a small longboat, to drift at the whim of soft winds and gentle waves under a bright sun.
He smiled. The image of the loose dory pleased him. The implications of what he had found were too massive and momentous for his mind to handle logically, and so that part of him had been set free temporarily by the more capacious mental machinery behind it, that moved in creative and other areas where the conscious, with its rigid patterns and logics, could not go.
The day, accordingly, passed like a pleasant dream. Either Amanda, or Amid, or someone among the others must have passed the word to leave him to his own devices. None of the Chantry Guild members approached him or tried to draw him into conversation, for which he was grateful.
His thoughts slid between wonderings at small things in his surroundings - from the quaint shape of a pebble among the gravel at his feet to the living design of a variform leaf or blade of grass, or their native equivalents that he came upon. Architecturally, they were all beautiful, and he was a little surprised he had failed so utterly to appreciate them before.
Interspersed with these were other things observed, or remembered - bits and flashes of scenes from his past. Images from his boyhood and manhood as Donal Graeme, from his brief life as Paul Formain and his present life as Hal, all these came and went in his head like bits of a serial recording.
Something within him guessed, but did not struggle to verify, at the possibility that these things he recalled were reflections of what his deeper mind was fitting into the matrix of his lifelong search, from what he had come to understand this morning. But he did not investigate this, did not question it, and it did not matter.
It was like being on a vacation. It occurred to him with a small shock of surprise that he had never really had a vacation, since he had been a schoolboy on the Dorsai. From the time he had left his home world he had never let go of his life's commitment for even a day. It was a strange feeling to be so cut loose now, even for a few hours like this, to be content with the distance he had come so far, when the end was still not yet reached. Though he could see it clearly, now.
As the morning grew into noon, he drifted toward Amid's office. When he stepped inside it at last, he was surprised to find it, for once, empty. Then it came to him that Amid, himself, might well have run short of sleep, these last forty-eight hours, and be in his own quarters, resting.
In any case, he had not come here to see Amid, but because of the memory of the recording of Jathed to which he had listened. He began to search both his memory and the office, and finally came across a filing cabinet with the name "Jathed" on it. There was a box of recording spindles in the second drawer from the top.
He took the box with him to Amid's desk and seated himself in a chair near it with the control pad Amid had searched for and found earlier. It was a standard desk unit and in a moment he had the first of the recording spindles in the control pad's magazine. Jathed's voice, apparently from several years earlier than the tape Hal had listened to before, sounded immediately in the room.
As he listened, he examined the other spindles. They were dated in order over a period of some twelve years. He started with the most recent ones and began playing them in reverse order to their dates of recording. Sitting in the empty office, he listened to the resonant, compelling voice of the founder of this reincarnation of the Chantry Guild.
He did not need to listen to more than half a dozen, however, before concluding that there would be little advantage to him in hearing them all. With the exception of two which were histories of Jathed's early life, dictated in an unfamiliar, elderly voice that might have belonged to Amid's brother, they were essentially repetitions of what were basically two or three customary lectures delivered by Jathed to audiences consisting of disciples, or others with an interest in what the cantankerous, but remarkable, man had to say.
In effect, the message of all of these was simple enough. Jathed believed that each person who had the necessary faith and self-discipline should be able to enter a personal, extra universe exactly like the physical one that surrounded him, except that in this other universe, the will of the person involved could accomplish anything wanted by merely determining it should be so. Furthermore, if that will was powerful enough, Jathed apparently believed that the effect produced in the extra universe could be duplicated in the universe of reality by convincing the minds of others that the alteration applied to the physical universe also.
In short, he believed in a personal, extra universe, and that the so-called real universe was no more than an agreement among the human minds existing in it.
It was in this latter view, about the real universe, that Hal found himself disagreeing with the other man.
It was true that when he had been Paul Formain, three hundred years before, he had experienced the night of madness brought upon a city by the original Chantry Guild of Earth, under its founder, Walter Blunt - that original Guild which had become the parent of Kultis and its sister world and the whole Exotic culture. It had been a night in which he had seen a monument melting down like wax, a stone lion decorating the balcony of a building lift its head and roar, and a hole of nothingness appear in the middle of a street. A nothingness of such utter blackness that his eyes refused to focus on it.