Gradually the history of the Morgans, which was also in a sense the history of the Dorsai itself, began to take shape for Hal. The Morgans and the Graemes had lived side by side for generations, had been born together, grew up together, and fought together, with the special effectiveness that such special closeness made possible. They were separate families, but a common people; and, as he touched the life of the Morgans from their beginnings now, in this particularly living way through the voice of Amanda, he found himself brought closer than he had ever been before to the life of Donal, to the lives of Donal's uncles, Kensie and Ian Grahame, to that of Eachan Khan Graeme - Donal's father - even to the life of Cletus Grahame, the ancestor of all of them, who had written the great multi-volume military work on strategy and tactics which had made the effectiveness of the specially-trained Dorsai soldier possible.
" - Now, is there anything else I can offer you?" The voice of Amanda, interrupting herself, brought Hal's mind back from the place into which it had wandered and almost gotten lost.
"I beg your pardon?" said Hal, then realized she was speaking about food. "How could I eat any more?"
"Well, that's a question, of course," said Amanda.
He stared at her, then saw the smile quirking the corners of her mouth, and woke to the fact that every serving dish on the table was empty.
"Did I eat all that?" he said.
"You did," Amanda told him. "How about coffee and after dinner drinks, if you want them, in the living room?"
"I… thank you." He got to his feet and looked uncertainly at the empty dishes on the table.
"Don't worry about that now," said Amanda. "I'll clean up later."
She got up, herself, put coffee, cups, glasses and whiskey once more on the tray she had carried back from the living room earlier. They went out of the kitchen and down the hall.
The lights in the kitchen went out, and those in the living room went on, softly, as sensors picked up the traces of bodies leaving and entering. Amanda put the tray on a low table before the fireplace and picked up a torch-staff that was leaning against the stonework there. She held it to the kindling and logs already placed. A little flame reached out from the tip of the staff and licked against the shavings under the kindling. The shavings caught. Fire ran among the kindling and along the underside of the laid logs, then blossomed up between them. Amanda leaned the staff back against the stonework.
The new light of the flames had picked out four lines of words carved into the polished edge of the thick slab of the granite mantelpiece. Hal leaned forward to read them. They were cut so deeply into the stone that shadow hid from him the actual depth of their incision.
"The Song of the House of Fal Morgan," said Amanda, looking over his shoulder. "The first verse. It's a tribute to the first Amanda. Jimmy, her son, wrote it, when he was a good-aged man."
"It's part of a song?" Hal looked at her.
"It is," she said.
Unexpectedly, softly, she sang the words cut in the stone. Her voice was lower-pitched than he would have thought, but it was a fine, true voice which loved singing, with strength behind the music of it.
"Stone are my walls, and my roof is of timber,
But the hands of my builder are stronger by far.
My roof may be burnt and my stones may be scattered,
Never her light be defeated in war."
The words, sung as she had chosen to sing them, triggered off a sudden emotion in Hal so powerful that it approached pain. To cover his reaction, he turned back abruptly to the tray on the table and made a little ceremony of pouring some of the whiskey into a glass and sitting down in an armchair at one side of the fire. Amanda gave herself coffee and sat down in an identical chair facing him on the fire's other side.
"Is that all of the song?" Hal asked.
"No," said Amanda. Self-consciously, he was aware of her watching him again, closely - and he thought - strangely. "There're more verses."
"Sometime," he said quickly, suddenly afraid that she might sing more, and wake again whatever had momentarily touched him so deeply, "I've got to hear those, too. But tell me - where are all the Morgans and Graemes, now? Graemehouse is empty and you're - "
"And I'm alone here," Amanda finished the sentence for him. "Times have changed. For the Dorsai people, life's not easy now."
"I know," Hal said. "I know the Others are working to keep you from getting contracts."
"They can't keep us from all of them," said Amanda. "There aren't enough of them to interfere with all the contracts we sign. But they can stop most of the big ones, the top ten per cent that brings in nearly sixty per cent of our interstellar credit. So, since times are difficult, most of us of working age are either out on the fisheries or at some other job on the Dorsai that ties in with surviving on our own resources. Others have gone off-world. A number of individuals, and even families, have emigrated."
"Left the Dorsai?"
"Some think they don't have any choice. Others of us, of course, would never leave. But this world's always been one where any adult's free to make his own decisions, without advice or comment unless she or he asks for it."
"Of course…" said Hal, hardly knowing what he was saying.
He was caught up entirely in what he had just heard. Since the hours in the cell on Harmony he had known that the time of the Splinter Cultures was over. But for the first time, with what Amanda had just told him, the knowledge hit deeply within him. The Dorsai world without the Dorsai people was somehow more unthinkable than the same thing on any of the other Younger Worlds. All at once, his mind's eye saw it deserted; its homes empty and decaying, its level lands, oceans and high mountains without the sound of human voices. His whole being tried to push the image from him; and still, in the back of his mind, the certainty of it sat like a certainty of the end of the universe. This, too, had to end; and the concept that had been built here with such labor must finally vanish with it, not to come again.
He roused himself from the feeling that had suddenly crushed him like the grip of some giant's icy hand, into a perfect silence. Across the table with the tray holding glasses, cups, coffee dispenser and whiskey decanter, Amanda still sat watching him almost oddly, as she had watched him in that first moment of their meeting.
He was conscious of something, some current of feeling that seemed to wash back and forth between them, virtually unknown to each other as they were.
"Are you all right?" he heard her ask, calmly.
"I'd kill time if I could!" he heard the words break from him without warning, shocking him with their intensity. "I'd kill death. I'd kill anything that killed anything!"
"But you can't," she answered, softly.
"No." He pulled himself back to something like normal self-possession. The whiskey, he told himself - but he had drunk very little, and alcohol had always had only small power to touch him. Something else had driven him - was still driving him to speak as he just had. "You're right. Everyone's got a right to his own decisions; and that's what creates history - decisions. The decisions are changing and the times are changing. What we were all used to is going to be put aside; and something new is going to be taking its place. I tried to tell that to some Exotics before I came here; and I thought if anyone would listen, they would."
"But they didn't?"
"No," he said, harshly. "It's the one thing they can't face, time running out. It sets a limit to their search - it means that now they'll never find what they've been looking for, all this time since they called themselves the Chantry Guild, back on Earth. Strange…"