"I'll ask," said Mercy.
He stopped the truck, lowered the window at his shoulder and put his head out to speak to those in the crowd immediately outside. After a second, he brought his head back in, put up the window and restarted the truck.
"French Galley's right off John Knox Avenue, below the First Church," he said. "I know where that is. We'll be there in ten minutes."
But it took closer to twenty minutes than ten, before French Galley Place was found. It turned out to be a circle of very large, comfortable three-storey houses; and, seeing the flags displayed on various of the doorsteps, Hal realized that the Place itself was evidently a favorite location in Ahruma for off-world Consulates. So much for hiding the fact that he had been heading for a diplomatic destination. A somewhat puzzled Mercy dropped him off before a relatively smaller, brown establishment between what were obviously the Venus and New Earth Consulates.
"Thanks," said Hal, climbing out. "I can't thank you enough. No thanks, I can manage fine by myself. Let me see you safely on your way now - and say hello for me to your grandfather and the rest of your family when you get home."
"It's been my pleasure - and an honor, sir," said Mercy; and put the window up between them, before waving and driving off.
Hal waved back and watched the truck continue around the traffic circle on which the houses of the Place were built, and disappear between the trees on either side of the entrance into Knox Avenue. He breathed out, heavily. Merely being polite had drained his small supply of strength.
He turned, and walked slowly and unsteadily around the circle to sixty-seven French Galley Place, four doors away. The walk in from the gate was a short one, but the six steps leading up to the front door were like a small mountain to climb. He reached the top at last, however, and pressed the annunciator button. There was a wait that stretched out to several minutes. He was about to signal the annunciator again when its grille spoke to him.
"Yes?" said a voice from within.
"My name is Howard Immanuelson," he said, wearily leaning against the doorframe. "A few days ago I sent some papers - "
The door before him opened. A figure hardly shorter than his own, in a saffron-colored robe but with a full-fleshed, round and ageless face stood framed in the relative darkness of the interior.
"Of course, Hal Mayne," said a soft, baritone voice. "Amid asked us to do whatever we could for you; and said that you'd be along shortly. Come in, come in."
Chapter Thirty-eight
Hal lay, his long body clad in a forest-green Exotic robe, listening to the interweaving of the melody of birdsongs with the sound of a fountain beyond a screen of three-meter-tall, willow-like trees, to the left of the small, depressed sitting area, like a conversation pit, in which he was resting. The harmony that existed in all surroundings created by Exotic minds was soothing to the remnants of a tension that still lived deep inside him. Above, either blue sky or that same sky with a weather screen between himself and it, flooded everything about him with the distant, clear green-tinted light of Procyon A, which shared its energy not only with this world of Mara, but with its twin Exotic planet of Kultis, as well as with the smaller inhabited worlds of St. Marie, half again the distance of Mara out from that sun, and Coby.
He had been reading, but the capsule had dropped from his fingers into his lap, and the words printed on the air before him had vanished. He felt soaked through by that dreamy lethargy that continues to stain for days human bodies recovering from severe illness or great and prolonged physical effort; and his present surroundings, one of those Exotic homes in which it was often uncertain as to whether he was indoors or out, lent itself to a feeling that all eternity was available in which to do anything that needed to be done. At the same time, with the recovering of his strength, a note of urgency, that had kindled in him in the Militia cell, had been growing in insistence.
Something in him had sharpened. He had aged swiftly, these last few weeks. He was not likely now to imagine - as he might have, six months earlier - that the Exotics had smuggled him off Harmony to Mara, here, merely out of kindness or because of a private concern on Amid's part. In principle, the Exotics were kind; but, above all, they were practical. There would be further developments resulting from all this care and service; and, in fact, he welcomed them, for he, himself, had things to talk to his hosts about.
He had not seen Amid except for a few brief visits since he had arrived here, at Amid's home. Before that, from the moment in which he started off-Harmony, his contact had been almost solely with a woman named Nerallee, Outbond to Consulate Services on Harmony. She had been his companion and nurse on the voyage here. Lately now, as he had grown stronger, Nerallee had been less and less in evidence. He felt the sadness of a loss, realizing that she must, of course, soon be returning to her duties on that Friendly World; and that there was little likelihood that he or she would ever meet again.
He lay now, reconstructing the ways by which he had got here. When the door of the Exotic Consulate in Ahruma had opened for him, those within had simply led him to a room and let him sleep for a while. His memory recalled no drugs given to him; but then, while the Exotics had no objection in principle to using pharmacological substances, they preferred to do so only as a last resort. More to the point, he could remember no specific treatment or manipulation of mind or body. Only, the bed surface beneath him had been exactly of the proper texture and firmness, the temperature had been exactly as he would have wished, and the gently moving air about him had been infinitely warm, soft, and enfolding.
He had woken, feeling some return of strength. Staff members of the Consulate had given him quantities of different, pleasant liquids to drink, then padded and dressed him to resemble the tall, portly Exotic who had greeted him at the door.
Nerallee had been involved with him from the first moment; and it was Nerallee who had finally accompanied him out of the Consulate to a closed, official vehicle. This had then delivered them through special diplomatic channels past the usual customs and passport checks, directly to an Exotic-owned ship in the fitting yards, where Nerallee and the supposedly ill Consulate member she had in charge were ushered aboard.
Hal could not remember the ship lifting from Harmony's surface. He did recall the first few ship-days of the trip, but only as long periods of sleep, interrupted only briefly by moments in which Nerallee was always with him and encouraging him to eat. He recovered enough, finally, to realize that she had never left him, ship's-night and ship's-day, from the beginning; and that whenever he had woken he had found her in the bed beside him. So, simply and easily, without consciously thinking about it, he had fallen half-way in love with her.
It was a small, wistful, transitory love, which both understood could not last beyond the short time they would have together. Clearly Nerallee was a Healer, in the Exotic tradition, and making herself totally available to him was part of her work. Clearly, also, she had fallen in love with him in return, finding something in him beyond what she had discovered in any other of those before who had needed her ability to repair their bodies, minds and souls - he read this in her even before she told him that it was so.
But, even with her experience and training, she found herself incapable of telling him what it was about him that was different, although they talked in depth about this, as well as many other things. It was part of the requirements of what she did, to open herself to those she ministered to as fully as she attempted to bring them to open themselves to her. One of the things she did tell Hal was that, like all those in her work, she grew - and expected to grow - within herself, with each new person she helped; and that if ever she should become unable to do this, she would have to give up what she did.