Hal looked at him closely for a second.
"Yes?" he said.
"I'm afraid we can't go along with you, blindly," Amid said. "I don't believe there's any reason not to tell you, though, that I argued for you as much as I could - as did Padma. And Chavis."
"That's three out of five," said Hal. "A majority in my favor?"
"Something more than a simple majority's needed in a situation like this," said Amid. "An element of doubt exists, and eventually we all had to face that."
"In short, you all ended by deciding against me?"
"Padma took himself out of the decision." Amid looked up at him; and there was no apology on the small man's face. "I'm sorry you have to be disappointed."
"I'm not," said Hal, wearily. "I think I expected it."
"It's still open to you if you want," said Amid, "to be our representative to the Dorsai. To go to them with our message to them as it was explained to you. Perhaps you should take the opportunity, even if you don't agree with it. At least you'll be doing something toward dealing with the Others."
"Oh, I'll do it," said Hal. "I'll go."
Amid looked at him a little strangely.
"I didn't expect you'd agree so easily," he said.
"As you say," Hal answered, "I'll be dealing with the problem of the Others, even if not the way I'd planned to."
He was suddenly aware that he was smiling tightly. With an effort, he stopped.
"I'm surprised," murmured Amid. His eyes had never left Hal's face. "Just like that?"
"Perhaps with one condition," said Hal. "After I'm gone, will you remind Nonne and the rest that it was their own assessment that the forces at work right now aren't something I could control, and that they themselves told me time is limited?"
"All right," said Amid. He seemed to be on the edge of saying something more, when he apparently changed his mind and turned about.
"Come along," he said. "I'll help get you prepared and started on your way."
Chapter Forty-one
A brisk chime commanded Hal's attention to the communications screen in one wall of his stateroom. The screen stayed blank, but an equally brisk feminine voice spoke from it.
"Give me your attention, please. Take your place in the fixed armchair by the bed and activate the restraining field. Control is the red stud on the right armrest of the chair."
He obeyed, a little surprised, aware that activating the field would register on a telltale in the control room, forward. But the order had caught him deep in his own thoughts and for the moment, automatically, he returned to them.
A corner, at least, of that dark shadow of defeat and depression, which had come to touch him in the garden below the balcony at Amid's home on Mara, had stayed with him through these five standard days of ship's time it had taken for his journey to the Dorsai. He had not met the woman who was evidently the pilot of this small courier-class vessel, on which he seemed to be the only passenger; and she had not come back from the restricted control area forward to make any sort of self-introduction. As a result, he had been free to think, uninterrupted, and there had been a great deal to think about.
Now, however, when they must be almost upon the Dorsai… he found those thoughts interrupted by the unusual demand that he put his body under control of a restraining field, something ordinarily requested of passengers only when their vessel was docking in space, as the jitney had been when it brought him to and into the Final Encyclopedia.
But this Dorsai light transport was no spaceliner, of course, and the commanders of Dorsai vessels had their own way of doing things, as all the fourteen worlds knew. He reached out and flicked on his room screen to see how close they actually were to going into a parking orbit.
What he saw made him sit up suddenly. They were indeed close enough to go into parking orbit. Blue and white, the orb of the Dorsai loomed large on his stateroom screen, the edge between night and day of the dawn terminator sharp below them. But, far from parking, the ship was still phase-shifting inward toward the surface of the world below. Even fifty years before, the psychic shock of a rapid series of shifts such as these would have required him to medicate himself in advance. But research at the Final Encyclopedia itself had found a way to shield from that shock. So there had been no warning.
It was a second before Hal recalled that the Dorsai - unlike pilots from other planets - had a habit of trusting themselves to shift safely right down into the atmosphere of any world on which they had good data; in fact, to within a few thousand meters of its surface. It was a skill developed in them as part of their normal training in ship-handling, as a practical matter of cutting jitney and shuttle costs on their far-from-wealthy world. The protective restraint was merely a routine precaution against some passenger panicking under such unusual approach maneuvers and getting hurt as a result. In fact, a moment later they came out of a series of very rapid, successive shifts with a jerk that would have thrown him from the chair, if the protective field had not held him anchored.
They were now no more than a thousand meters up, at most, and beginning to descend on atmosphere drive toward a spaceport misted with early morning rain under gray skies; a spaceport larger in area than the small city to which it was adjacent. Clearly, they were about to land at what Amid had earlier told Hal was the intended destination of the ship - the closest thing to a capital city that the Dorsai possessed. This was the city of Omalu, which housed the central administrative offices of the United Cantons, the districts into which the Dorsai had come to be organized for purposes of local self-government.
Actually, however, as Hal knew as well as the Exotics who had sent him here, these offices formed no more than a library and storage center for contractual records; and a contact point for discussion of matters that could not conveniently be discussed and settled locally in or between the cantons concerned. The Dorsai had even less than the Exotic Worlds in the way of a central government.
In theory, the cantonal officers had authority over the individuals and families living within the boundaries of the individual canton; but in actuality even this authority was more a matter of expressing local public opinion than otherwise.
Neighborliness - a word that held a special meaning on the Dorsai - was what made a social unit of this world. The cantons, even in theory, had only a courtesy relationship to the central administrative offices of each island on this world of islands, large and small. And the island offices did no more than communicate with the United Cantonal Offices here in Omalu. It was the only way a world could operate on which families, and individuals in those families, were constantly dealing on a direct and independent basis with off-planet governments and individuals scattered over all the other thirteen worlds.
Ironically, Hal had been sent out at Exotic expense to speak to representatives of a world which had no representatives, at least officially. It was ironic because the Exotics, who trusted nothing they could not test and identify, had in this case simply trusted the people of the Dorsai world to bring Hal somehow to those to whom he should speak.
But the spacecraft was now landing at the port, almost as precipitously and economically as it had phase-shifted to within a breath of ground level. As it settled down and became still, the sign winked out over the door. Hal shut off the restraining field. He got to his feet and collected a shoulder bag supplied and filled by Amid, and containing necessary personal clothes and equipment. Amid had reminded him - unnecessarily - that the Dorsai was one world where it was not always possible to buy suddenly needed clothes and other personal necessities conveniently close at hand.
Leaving his stateroom, he had to squeeze his way past crates of Exotic medical machines of various sizes and complexity, stacked even in the central corridor of the craft. A majority of these were new, replacements for worn-out units in Dorsai hospitals; but a fair number were older machines which had been taken back to their designers on Mara for repair or the additions of improvements beyond the training of the local Dorsai technicians doing ordinary maintenance on them. There were even more of these filling the vessel than Hal remembered encountering when he had come aboard. It had been remarkable that a craft this small could lift from the surface, packed with this much cargo.