He found himself facing that prospect at last as an actuality. He could no longer deny that it could happen. All his life until this moment, it had been easier to imagine the death of the universe than his own. But now, at last, his personal mortality had become as real to him as the walls enclosing him. His end could be only a handful of hours away, unless something - some miracle - could prevent it.
His racing mind revolted against that realization, like an animal galloping wildly around and around the circular wall of an abattoir in search of some opening to freedom and life. Deep and far off in him, like the barely-heard trumpet call of an approaching enemy, he felt for the first time in his life the pale, cold touch of pure panic. He made an effort to reach out with the semi-autohypnotic technique he had used when he had passed through the Final Encyclopedia and evoked the images of his three former tutors to help him; but his mind could not be freed sufficiently from the adrenalin released by the instinctive struggles of his body, so that he might be able to find the mental control that would make the evocative technique work.
For a second, realizing this, his panic doubled. Then, coldly, strengtheningly into him came the realization that there was no one to help him now in any case but himself. The years that had passed since the deaths of the three who had raised him had given him experience and information beyond what Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had known in him, while they were alive, and these things he must find how to use for himself.
But the brief moment of logical understanding had steadied him. He had slumped down during the past hours. Now he pushed himself further upright with the wall at his back and set himself to consciously deal with the situation. But the fever still held him like an intoxication and with his best efforts his mind wandered and drifted off from its purpose, in a state of blurred discomfort that left him floating halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Without warning he found himself dreaming with a knife-edged clarity to all his senses, discovering himself on the same mountainside to which his mind had retreated back when he had been newly landed on Harmony and in the Militia's hands before; and Bleys, not recognizing him among prisoners in the room before him, had tried to make them all captive to the Others' charisma.
But this time he dreamed that he was spread-eagled on his back, wrists and ankles manacled tightly to the rough granite upon which he lay and the icy rain, falling steadily upon him, chilled him to his bones…
He forced himself awake to find himself shuddering once again with the great chills that shook his whole body. The thin blanket had fallen from him. He pulled it hastily up around him and huddled down on the mattress, to lie panting with the effort of movement. For what seemed to be a long time he fought for breath and against the shivering fit that shook him, until his fever started to swing upward once more; and - once more without warning - dreams returned him to the moment earlier, in which Bleys had stood towering over him, here in the cell.
"… You're right, of course," he heard the Other saying again. "But still I'd like you to try and understand my point of view…"
As before, Bleys loomed enormous over Hal. But from somewhere else, out of the far past, the soft voice of Walter the InTeacher rose, reading, as he had once read aloud to Hal, the lines spoken by the fallen Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost:
"… The mind is its own place, and in itself,
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I still be the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? …"
But Walter's voice dwindled again and was lost while Bleys was still speaking. The Other's deep tones echoed in the fevered vastness of Hal's dream.
"… None of us chose this, to be what each of us is," Bleys was saying once more to him, " - but what we are, we are; and like everyone else we have an innate human right to make the best of our situation."
"At the expense of those millions of people you talk about." Hal heard his own answer as if from someone else, speaking far off, at a distance.
"And what sort of expense is that?" Bleys' voice deepened until the whole universe seemed to resonate with it. "The expense of one Other borne by a million ordinary humans is a light load on each ordinary human. But turn that about. What of the cost to the Other; who, trying only to fit in with the human mass around him, accepts a life of isolation, loneliness, and the endurance daily of prejudice and misunderstanding? While, at the same time, his unique strengths and talents allow those same individuals who draw away from him to reap the benefits of his labors. Is there justice in that?…"
The deeply musical voice rolled on, echoing and reechoing until it muttered like distant thunder in the mountains, until in its multi-layered echoes all sense of the individual words was lost. Suddenly, the mountains of his younger years were once more around Hal and he found himself standing again in the water at the edge of the artificial lake on the estate, looking up through the limbs of the bush that hid him at the terrace of the house, seeing the three figures there that he knew so well move suddenly, together… and fall.
It seemed he fled from that scene, fled as he had actually fled - to Coby. Once more he lay in his small room in the miner's barracks, that first night at the Yow Dee Mine, feeling that same feeling Bleys had spoken of only hours since, that difference and isolation from everyone else sleeping and awake around him within the plain walls of the building. That isolation, that he seemed to remember knowing also at some earlier time, long, long before Bleys or any Other…
Suddenly, he was back on Harmony, in his dream of rubbled plain; and the tower, far off, toward which he made his slow way on foot. He had known that plain, too, from before, somewhere. He forged on now toward the tower, but his efforts seemed to bring him no nearer to it. Only the conviction held him, like the conviction of life, itself, that it was what he must reach eventually, no matter how far it might be, or how difficult the way to it.
He woke from that dream to another - of Harmony and the weeping woods, to the stumbling figures of an exhausted Command fleeing from the relentless Militia pursuit of Barbage. He left the others and by himself carried James Child-of-God up to a little rise; settling him there with his weapons and his slight barricade, leaving him there to die in delaying their pursuers.
"What is thy true name… ?" James asked again, looking up at him.
Hal stared at him.
"Hal Mayne."
"… Bless thee in God's name, Hal Mayne," said James. "Convey to the others that in God's name also I bless the Command, Rukh Tamani, and all who shall fight under the banner of the Lord. Now go. Care for those whose care hath been set into thy hands."
James turned from Hal to fix his eyes once more on the forest as seen through the firing slot in his barricade. Hal turned away also, but in a different direction, leaving James Child-of-God upon the small rise…
… And woke at last to his silent cell, which took shape around him once more.
Chapter Thirty-four
Here, there was no change. But something in him was aware of having just achieved movement toward some as-yet-undefined goal. From the dreams just past he had progressed, had gained something that had not been available to him before. Once more aware of the cell about him, he felt for the first time an almost perfect separation of himself into two parts. One part, from which he was withdrawing, was the suffering body, which he now understood clearly but calmly to be losing its battle for life as its temperature mounted and its lungs gradually filled, bringing it closer and closer to the moment when it would cease to function. The other, to which he had drawn nearer, was the mind, now that the tether that normally held it to the demanding feelings and instincts of the body was becoming attenuated under the fierce fire of his struggle to survive. The mind itself burned now, with a brilliance that fed on the heat of that fire.