Finding his way out of the entry port at last, Hal stepped into the cloudy morning and the gusting rain above the landing pad. Descending the ramp to the pad, Hal found at the foot of it a tall, lean, middle-aged woman in gray coveralls, in brisk conversation with a lean-faced, older man riding a small hovertruck.
" - You'll need bodies!" she was saying. "The way that equipment's packed in there, you're not going to get it out alone, even with handlifters. Even the two of us can't do it. We're going to have to lift three things to get one clear enough for you to carry it off."
"All right," said the man. "Back in five minutes."
He turned his truck and slid off swiftly across the pad toward a blurred line of gray buildings in the distance. The woman turned and saw Hal. Saw him, and stared at him for a long moment.
"Are you Dorsai?" she said, at last.
"No," said Hal.
"I was about twenty meters away from you, over by the truck, unloading, when they took you on board," she said. "You moved like a Dorsai. I thought you were."
Hal shook his head.
"One of the people who raised me was Dorsai," he said.
"Yes." She stared at him for a moment more. "So, then, you've never had ship-handling. There ought to have been two of us on a trip like this, and I wondered why you didn't come up front and offer to give me a hand. But I had my own hands full; and when you didn't, I took it there was some reason you wanted privacy."
"In a way," said Hal, "I did."
"Good enough. If you couldn't help, you did just what you should have by staying out of my way. All right, no harm done. I made it here well enough by myself, and you're where you wanted to go."
"Not exactly," said Hal. "Foralie's where I wanted to go."
"Foralie? On Caerlon Island?" She frowned. "Those Exotics told me Omalu."
"They were assuming something," said Hal. "I'll be coming back to Omalu here, eventually. But for now, I want to go to Foralie."
"Hmm." The pilot glanced over at the buildings. "Babrak'll be back in a moment. He can give you a ride to the terminal and they can tell you there how you might get to Foralie. You'll probably have to change boats several times - "
"I was hoping to fly straight there," said Hal. "I've got the interstellar credit to pay for it."
"Oh." She smiled a little grimly. "Interstellar credit's one thing we can always use these days. I should have guessed you'd have some, since you came aboard on one of the Exotics. Well, as I say, Babrak'll be back shortly. Let's get in out of this weather; and meanwhile, how about giving me a hand clearing enough space just inside the entry port for him to get started?"
Less than two hours later, Hal was airborne in the smallest jitney-type space and atmosphere craft in which he had ever ridden. He sat side by side with the driver before the control panel; there were two more empty seats behind them, and beyond that only a small cargo space.
"It's about a third of a circumference," said the pilot, a thin, brisk, black-haired man of about thirty in a fur-collared jacket and slacks. "Take us something over an hour. You're not Dorsai, are you?"
"No," said Hal.
"Thought for a moment you were. Hold on." The jitney went straight up toward the upper edge of the atmosphere. The pilot checked his controls and looked over at Hal, again.
"Foralie Town, isn't it?" he said. "You know someone there?"
"No," answered Hal. "I've just always wanted to see Foralie. I mean, Foralie, itself. Graemehouse."
"Foralie's the property. Graemehouse's the name of the house on it. Which is it, the property or the house you want to see?"
"All of it," said Hal.
"Ah."
The driver watched him briefly for a moment longer before returning his gaze to the stars visible above the far, curved horizon of the daylit surface below, visible beyond the vehicle's windshield. They were headed in the same direction as the rotation of the planet. The brilliant white pinpoint of the local sun, Fomalhaut, which had been behind them on liftoff, began now to catch up. "You didn't happen to have a relative who was a Graeme?"
"Not as far as I know," said Hal.
The dry tone in which he had unthinkingly answered had its effect. The driver asked no more questions and Hal was left in the dimness of the jitney's interior to his own thoughts once more. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. When he had been very young one of his fanciful dreams had indeed been that his parents might have been related to the Foralie Graemes. But that sort of wishful thinking was long past now. The pilot's question had still managed to touch an old sensitivity.
However, now that he was actually headed toward Foralie, he found himself strangely uneasy with his decision to go there first, before doing anything else on the Dorsai. He had no sensible reason for making this trip now - only his early fascination with the history of the Graemes and the stories Malachi had told him of Ian and Kensie, Donal, and the others.
No, it had simply been that, darkened by the shadow which had come over him in the garden on Mara, he had felt a reluctance to move too swiftly here on the Dorsai - in his execution of the commission that Nonne and the other Exotics had asked him to undertake, or anything else; and in the face of that feeling, on the trip here, he had decided to do what he had always wanted to do since he had been a child, and that was see the Foralie which Malachi had so many times mentioned to him.
The deeper reason was less clear, but more powerful. It was that of all his dreams and fever-visions during the period in the cell, the one that still clung in his mind and moved him most strongly was the dream of the burial. Its events were solid and real in his mind even now - the tearing sorrow and the commitment. He did not need to hunt out points of evidence within that dream to know that it had been about some place and people on the Dorsai. To someone raised as he had been, the fact was self-evident - the very color and feel of what he had dreamed was Dorsai. So powerful had been its effect on him that he felt it like an omen - to be disregarded at his peril; and since Malachi had been the last of his own family, there was no place on that world to which Hal could relate strongly but the household of the legendary Graemes of which he had heard so much in his young years.
It was true, he had always wanted to see the birthplace of Donal Graeme. But something more than that was at work in him, now - something beyond his present understanding of that vision of death and commitment - that was still hidden from his conscious mind and which drew him instinctively toward some place or time strongly Dorsai, for a fuller understanding.
Besides, it was curiously apt that he should go there now. Malachi, or the shade of Malachi which he had conjured up with those of Walter and Obadiah four years past at the Final Encyclopedia, had told him that there would be no reason for him to go to the Dorsai until he was ready to fight the Others. Well, he was at last ready to fight them; and it had been from the starting point of Foralie that Donal Graeme had gone in his time to gain leadership of the whole fourteen worlds. An almost mystic sense of purpose seemed to beckon Hal to the same place of beginning.
Also, he was in a mood that needed support, even mystic support. He had failed dismally to get the Exotics to listen to him or help him. There was no reason to expect the Dorsai to do more. In fact, considering the independence of its people on that harsh world, there was less reason. What had happened to him in Amid's garden as he had waited for their decision had been something outside his experience until that moment. A certain belief in himself with which he had emerged from the Militia cell on Harmony, and which he had then thought impregnable, had been struck and weakened by the blindness of the Exotic attitude.