That, and history was full of miracles witnessed by crowds, as well as smaller, so-called "magics" seen by small groups of people gathered in confined spaces for just that purpose.
And, finally, there was the sound of the breaking light on the first recording of Jathed Hal had ever heard.
Nonetheless, Hal held to his own view of a single, separate, creative universe that would be a tool, not just a box of conjuring tricks, for humankind.
The only strong point he shared with Jathed was that the other must also have experienced a moment of revelation in which the absolute truth of the transient and the eternal being the same became undeniable. But from that point they had each built different ways, if with much of the same material.
In any case, his mind would not work with the problem right now. It was a refusal, but a different sort of refusal than he had experienced at the Final Encyclopedia before coming here.
That had been a blockage, a painful situation in which he went over the same answers time and again, on each occasion finding them unworkable. This day was a pleasant moment of rest along a route that he now knew to be correct and to run straight to his goal.
But his mind would not wrestle with that problem - or any problem, just now. He put the spindles in their box back where he had found them, the control pad back on Amid's desk, and went out.
Later he was never able to remember, without a great deal of effort, how the rest of that day went for him. In part he did not really want to investigate the memory, only recall it fondly as a sort of pleasant blur. At any rate, by the time night had fallen and he had at last taken something to eat and drink, he was back, seated in Amid's office in one of its few armless chairs, with a musical instrument in his hands.
The fire was alight in the fireplace and the instrument was someone's reconstruction of a six-string classical Spanish guitar. It was enough like the instrument he had played and sung with on his trips to Port, during the period when he had been a miner on Coby, to suit him.
The guitar had been offered to him, rather shyly, by one of the Guild members, who had said Amanda had suggested he might enjoy having it for a while. Indeed, he did. He wondered what part of the almost occult understanding in Amanda had prompted her to make such a suggestion. In any case, he had ended up here with it, seated beside the fire in the evening.
The lights were turned down, so that almost the only illumination was from the fireplace itself. He was letting his mind and his fingers wander together, in whatever direction his memory took him, which for the last half hour had been to the ancient ballads and songs out of the past centuries of Old Earth. Songs he had learned there, as a boy, from books and recordings in the library of the estate where he had been brought up.
Amid and Amanda were seated in chairs before him, listening, and so, too, surprisingly, were a number of the members of the Guild, who had slipped in quietly over the past hour or so, taking more distant chairs - so that they were all but lost in the moving shadows cast on the wall by the flames of the fire.
Most surprisingly, among those there was Cee. He had not noticed her entering. He had only become gradually aware of her sitting with Onete in a couple of chairs against a far wall.
Since that first moment when he had discovered her, she had moved closer and closer to him, until now she was seated on the floor, almost at his feet. He had not caught her in movement once. She had made each tiny shift toward him at a time when his eyes were briefly off her, inching toward him, until she was where she was now.
He was careful not to look directly at her. But now it was not necessary. She was near enough so that he could examine her face out of the corner of his eyes. There was no more friendliness showing in it than there had been during the hard trek up the mountainside with Artur on the stretcher - but a great deal of wonder and fascination.
He had drifted off into the singing of old English and Scottish ballads, learned long ago out of the collection made by Childe in the nineteenth century.
How much such songs could mean to Cee, he had no way of imagining. The Basic tongue universally spoken nowadays on all the worlds was a descendant of the English language as it had been spoken during the latter part of the Technological Age, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its archaic word forms would be a little strange to the young girl, but most of it would still be understandable. Only, what she would make of the medieval Scottish and English accents with which he was pronouncing the words, and with those words which were in dialects now dead and forgotten, he could not guess.
He slid into Sir Walter Scott's Scottish version of The Battle of Otterburn, which was a little less loaded with unfamiliar words...
It fell about the Lammas time,
When the muir-men won their hay,
That the doughty Earl Douglas went
Into England to catch a prey.
He chose the Gordons and the Graemes,
With them the Lindsays, light and gay,
But the Jardines wanna with him ride,
And they rued it to this day.
And he has burnt the dales of Tine
And part of Almonshire,
And three good towers on Roxburgh fells
He has left them all on fire...
This time Hal saw her move. It was a small shift, to only slightly closer to him, but the fact that she had allowed herself to be seen moving was enough to show that she had ceased to care about whether or not he would catch her at it. A new light of interest had come into her eyes. Clearly, this one was to be a song about fighting and destruction. Somehow, by chance - or was it by chance, entirely? - he had picked a ballad that particularly woke her interest.
She was motionless now, watching and listening. He continued to study her upturned features. It was a grim little face, in some ways. Again, he was reminded of the similarity between her protective reaction toward Artur, and his own reaction years before in that moment when, as Donal, he had heard of his uncle James's death. Perhaps his development since was an indication of the development to come in her. It was warming to think so.
He wished that there was some way that he could reach her with words, to tell her that the road she had been forced to follow so far need no longer be the way she must go. That he had followed one like it, himself, and, even though he had accomplished all he had set out to do in that direction, it had not brought him to the end he wanted.
But he knew that, even now, though she might listen to and enjoy his singing, she would probably not listen if he tried to talk to her - she would probably not even stay close to him if he tried talking to her. If he could stay here at the Guild for a long enough time for her to grow into the ways of the Guild members, the day might come when she would listen. But he could not stay here, just for that, just for her, no matter how strongly in this moment he might want to reach her with the truth. There were larger tasks calling him away. But his progress with them might in some way be a pledge for hers, into the new human future.
From covert glances around him, he read puzzlement and some little consternation on the faces of some of the older Guild members there, listening to this story of iron and blood in this place where both by their heritage as Exotics and by their own choosing, they were committed to an attitude of nonviolence.