It had not been merely the fact that they had not listened. That had been only the final assault that had breached the inner fortress of his spirit. But the breach had been made only after a number of recent blows that had already cracked and weakened what he had always thought was unbreakable in him. Where he had once taken for granted that whatever he defended was unconquerable, he now could see defeat as a real possibility.
Granted, there were excuses. The emotional pain of having to trick and abandon his friends in the Command, his illness at the time, his driving of his body far beyond its physical limits and, finally, his rite-of-passage - as Amid had referred to it - alone in the Militia cell, had all had their effect. Even the arguments of Bleys, which, even denied, had weakened him in preparation for this final blow that was the Exotic refusal to hear what he had to say. Of all peoples, he had expected the men and women of Mara and Kultis to understand, to recognize something once it was pointed out to them.
But knowing these things did not help. The grayness, the feeling of defeat remained. He looked at his life and could not see that from the start he had achieved anything. His early dreams, put to the test out on the worlds, had vanished like pricked soap bubbles.
Who was he to think that he was anything but a minor annoyance to the Others - a mouse dodging about under the feet of giants who would sooner or later crush him? He was nothing; not Friendly, not Exotic, not Dorsai. He had no reason even to believe that he had any claim to belong to Earth. That ship in which he had been found could have been coming from anywhere; and been headed to anywhere. What was this present trip to Foralie, but a clutching at a straw floated to the surface of his mind by a dream? He had no real proof that he was not, indeed, a crossbreed, as Bleys had said. He had no identity, no home, no people. He was a stranger in every house, a foreigner on every world, his only known family three old men who had been no actual relations; and even they had only been with him for the first, early years of his life.
He had wanted to stay at the Final Encyclopedia, and his feeling that he must strike back at the Others had driven him from it. He had found a way of life as a miner; then, to save his life, had been forced to run and leave that way of life behind. He had found friends, almost a family, in Rukh's Command; and he had deliberately made the choice to abandon them. The Exotics had had no place or use for him except as a messenger; and there was no hearth waiting for him here on the Dorsai, where there were not even relatives of Malachi's to sit with for a moment and tell about Malachi's death. To have found even one other person who could have shared his grief over the loss of Malachi and the others, would have strengthened him to bear the dry emptiness of his solitary position in the universe.
He drew a deep, slow breath. Long ago, Walter InTeacher had told him how to deal with psychic pain like this; and he had remembered dutifully, if without great interest, seeing that the technique was for something that he could not imagine happening to him. Walter's instruction had been not to fight the depression and the self-condemnation, but to go with them and try to understand them. In the end, Walter had said, understanding could drain the destructive emotion from any situation.
He made an effort to do this now; and his mind slid off into a strange area, without symbols, where he seemed to feel himself tossed about by the vectors of powerful forces he could not see - like someone swept overboard from a ship in a hurricane. It went against his instincts not to fight these pressures; but Walter had emphasized the absence of resistance. Sitting in the thrumming near-silence of the jitney, hurling itself through the space where air and void meet, he forced himself into passivity, searching and feeling for some pattern to the situation that held him…
"Going down now," said the voice of the pilot, and Hal opened his eyes.
They were back into the atmosphere, descending fast over what seemed open ocean. Then a point of darkness near the horizon became apparent, enlarging as the jitney fell in a long curve toward it, until it was clearly visible as land. A few moments later they were low above mountain meadows and stony peaks; and shortly thereafter they dropped vertically to earth, on a concrete pad at the edge of what had seemed to be a small village beside a river.
"Here you are," said the driver. He punched a control on the panel before him and the entry to the jitney swung open, steps sliding down and out to the pad surface. "Just head up that road there. Center of Foralie Town's beyond the trees and the housetops, there."
"Thanks," said Hal. He reached for his case of credit papers, then remembered he had paid for this trip before leaving Omalu. He got up, taking his shoulder bag with him. "Is there a central office or - "
"Town Hall," said the driver. "It's always in the center of town. Just follow that road in. You can't miss it and it'll have a sign out front. If you do get lost, ask anyone."
"Thanks again," said Hal, and left the jitney, which took off before he had covered half the width of the pad to the road the driver had indicated.
They had flown forward into mid-afternoon. No breeze stirred. The trees that the jitney driver had mentioned were variform maples, and the color on them spoke of autumn. But it hardly needed that to tell Hal of the time of the year in this part of the Dorsai; for the clear, clean light of fall spoke of the season in every quarter. Under an almost cloudless sky, the still air was scentless, cool in the shadow but hot in the sun. The shadows of the trees and, after a bit, the shadows of the wooden buildings when he had passed through the trees and found himself in the streets of Foralie Town itself, seemed hard-edged, they lay so crisply where the brilliant sunlight was interrupted. The colors of the houses glowed, clean and bright, as if all structures there had just been freshly washed and painted against the oncoming winter.
But the town itself was still and quiet, and the relative silence of it touched Hal strangely. He felt an emotion toward its houses and its streets that was an unusual thing to feel to a place never seen before. No one was in the streets through which he walked, although occasionally he heard voices through the open windows he passed. He came after a few moments to a central square; and, facing him at the far end, was a white building of two stories, its lower level half-sunken into the ground. There were two doors visible; one at the top of a flight of six steps to the upper story, the other preceded by a shorter flight, down to the floor below.
The white building plainly showed its difference in design from the obvious homes that fronted on the other three sides of the square. Hal went to it; and as he got close, he saw the word Library above the door to the semi-basement entrance. He went up the stairs to the higher door and touched its latch panel. It swung open and he entered.
Inside was a space about ten meters square, divided by a room-wide counter with a gate that marked off the back half of the space into an area with three desks and some office equipment. A thin, handsome boy about ten or twelve years old got up from one of the desks and came to his side of the counter as Hal walked up to the front of it. He stared at Hal for a moment, then visibly pulled himself out of his first reaction.
"I'm sorry," he said, "my aunt's the Mayor and she's out in the hills at the moment. I'm Alaef Tormai - "