He led the way through the doorway into the hall; and paused.
"Think about it," he said, and turned once more toward the door to the balcony. "The others are probably there by now. Come along."
Hal followed him. They went out of the room they had been in, crossed the hall and stepped onto the balcony, which now had two men and two women seated on it, in a semi-circle facing the entrance. One of the men, wearing a sky-blue robe, was obviously very old; the other was a reserved-looking, thin man in a gray robe; and, of the two women, one was small and black-haired, wearing green, the other was taller and ageless, with bronze skin, curly brown hair, and an umber-colored robe. Two floats had been left vacant with their backs to the door, completing the circle; and it was to these that Amid led Hal.
"Let me introduce you," said Amid, as they sat down. "From left to right, you're meeting Nonne, Recordist for Mara - "
Nonne was the small, black-haired woman in green. She looked to be about in her mid-thirties, her face a little sharpboned, and her eyes very steady on him.
"Honored," said Hal to her. She nodded.
"Alhonan of Kultis. Alhonan, Hal, is a specialist in cultural interfacing."
"Honored."
"Very glad to meet you, Hal," said Alhonan, a narrow man, with a voice as dry and reserved as his appearance.
"Padma, the Inbond."
"Honored," said Hal. He had not appreciated at first glance how old indeed the one called Padma was. The Exotic face he looked at now was still relatively unwrinkled, the hands holding the ends of the armrests of his float were not extravagantly shrunken of skin or swollen of vein; but the utter stillness of the body, the unchanging eyes, and other signals too subtle to be consciously catalogued, radiated an impression of almost unnatural age. Here now, indeed, was a man to rival Tam Olyn in antiquity. And the title he bore was a puzzle. Hal had never heard of an Inbond among the Exotics. Any one of them might be Outbond - assigned, that was - to some specific place or duty. But Inbond… and to what?
"Welcome," said Padma; and his voice, neither unusually hoarse nor deep nor faint, seemed somehow to come from a little distance off.
"And Chavis, whose speciality is a little hard to describe to you," Amid was saying at his shoulder. "Call her a specialist in historical crises."
Hal had to tear his eyes away from the gaze of Padma to look at the woman in the umber robe with black markings of random shapes.
"Honored," he said to Chavis.
"I take that as a compliment," she said, and smiled. Her age could be anything between late twenties and early sixties; but her voice was young. "Time may show that it's you who're honoring us."
"Sit down," said Amid.
"That'd take some doing," Hal answered Chavis, as he took his seat. "I don't think I'm likely to find four Exotics like yourselves brought together on my account, except under very unusual conditions."
"But it's unusual conditions we've met to talk about here, isn't it?" said the voice of Amid from the float to Hal's left. The two of them sat facing the half-circle of the others. Still, the feeling was plain in the atmosphere of the balcony that Amid was not with Hal, but with those who confronted him.
It was a feeling that triggered another touch of sadness in Hal. With the memory of Walter InTeacher still strong within him, of all the three cultures with which he had grown up believing he had a strong kinship, the Exotics had been those from whom he had expected the most in the way of sensitivity and understanding. But he sat now, intellectually almost at swords-points with those before him. He could feel their concern, first for the survival of their own way of life; and only secondarily with his own interest in the race as a whole. The thought came instinctively to him that it was a rarefied sort of selfishness they were displaying - a selfishness, not for their personal sakes, but for the sake of the principle to which they and their culture had always dedicated their people. It was a selfishness he would have to bring them to see beyond, if there was to be any hope of racial survival.
Looking at the faces around him, Hal's innate confidence in his cause sagged. It might be true, as Amid had said, that tests had shown him to have unusual qualities of maturity. But at the present moment he sat facing a total of several centuries of living and training in those facing him. To deal with all that, all he had to show were twenty years of life-experience, and perhaps sixty hours of intense thought under conditions of exhaustion and high fever.
"How much do you know about the history of the crossbreeds in general?" Nonne's voice roused him from his emotions. Her voice was a very clear contralto. "I'm speaking specifically, of course, of crossbreeds from the Dorsai, Friendly and Exotic cultures."
He turned to face her.
"I know they started to be noticed as appearing more frequently about sixty to seventy years ago - " he answered. "I know very little attention was paid to them as a group until about fifteen or twenty years ago, when they began to call themselves the Other People, show this charismatic skill of theirs, and put together their organization."
"Actually," said Nonne, "their organization began as a mutual-help agreement between two who were both Dorsai-Exotic crosses - a man named Daniel Spence and a woman named merely Deborah, after our own Exotic fashion - who were living together on Ceta, forty-two standard years ago."
"They were the first to call themselves 'Others,' " put in Alhonan.
Nonne glanced at him briefly. "Like most close partnerships among the crossbreeds," she went on, "the physical association didn't last; but the agreement did, and it grew rapidly over the next five years until there were over three thousand individuals involved - an estimated seventy-nine per cent of all crossbreeds from the three major Splinter Cultures who were in existence at that time. Both Spence and Deborah are now dead; and the current top leader of the organization for the past twelve years has been a man named Danno, who led the meeting of Other leaders at your home, the time your tutors were killed."
"I saw him then, through a window," said Hal. "A big, heavy-bodied man - not fat, but heavy-bodied - with black, curly hair."
"That's Danno," said Alhonan, in a precise, remote voice.
"He was the son of Daniel Spence and Deborah," said Nonne. "Those two also later took in a boy of about eleven, some six years younger than Danno; and the best evidence we can gather indicates that he was a nephew from some other world like Harmony, who had originally been left with some of Spence's relatives there to raise. There may be more to it than that. Bleys insists the former version is what happened. But it's doubtful if even he knows certainly whether it's true or not. In any case, he's a powerful leader; clearly more brilliant than Danno, although he seems to prefer that Danno wear the mantle of supreme leadership. You've met Bleys."
"Yes," said Hal. "Three times, now; and I talked to him this last time, when I was in that prison cell on Harmony. Danno, I saw only once, that first time; but my own feeling is that you're right. Bleys is more capable, and more intelligent - both."
"Yes," said Chavis, softly. "In fact, we've wondered exactly why he seemed content with second place. My own guess has been that he simply doesn't have any great desire to lead."
"Perhaps," said Hal. "Or he could be biding his time." Like the dark shadow of a cloud, sweeping briefly over his mind, the feverish memory returned of Bleys, seeming to tower enormously above him as he had lain on the cot in the Militia prison. "But if he's better than Danno, he'll have to lead, in the end. He won't have any choice."
There was a moment of silence from those around him that stretched out noticeably before Nonne broke it.
"So, you think," she said, "that it'll be Bleys we'll be dealing with in the long run?"