"What's strange?" he heard her ask, when he did not go on.
He was staring into the dark, firelit pool of whiskey in his glass, kneading it between his hands again. He looked up from the glass at her.
"Those who ought to see what's happening - the people who could do something - refusing to see. While everyone who can't do anything about it seems to know it's there. They seem to feel it, the way animals feel a thunderstorm coming."
"You feel it yourself, do you?" she asked. Her eyes, darker now in the firelight, still watched him, and drew him. He talked on.
"Of course. But I'm of those caught up in it," he said. "I've had to face up to what's happening, and will happen."
"Tell me, then," said Amanda's voice softly. "What is it that's happening? And what is it that's going to happen?"
He pressed the hard shape of the whiskey glass between his hands, staring now into the flames of the fireplace.
"We're headed toward the last battle," he said. "That's what's happening. No, call it a last conflict, because most of it won't be a battle in the dictionary sense. But, depending on how it comes out, the race is either going to have to die or grow. I know - that sounds like something too large to believe. But we've made it that big ourselves, over the centuries. Only those in the best position to understand how it could happen, wouldn't ever look squarely at the situation. I couldn't see it myself until my nose was rubbed in it. But if you look back at what's been happening in just the last twenty or thirty standard years, you see the evidence all over the place. The Others appearing…"
He talked on, almost in spite of himself. The words ran from him like dogs unleashed, and he found himself telling her about everything that he had come to understand in the cell on Harmony.
She sat quietly, asking a brief question now and then, watching him. He felt a tremendous relief in being able to uncap the pressure of that explosion of understanding. It was a pressure that had been growing steadily in him lately, as his mind developed and extended its first discoveries. His original impulse had been to do no more than sketch the situation for her; but he found himself being drawn, by the way she listened, from that to the people and things that had led him to understanding. He felt captured by her attention; and he heard his own voice going on and on as if it had developed an independent life of its own.
Once, it crossed his mind again to wonder if the Dorsai whiskey had something to do with it. But once more he rejected the idea. It had been in his first year on Coby that he had found that alcohol did not affect him in the same measure as it seemed to affect the other miners. When they had finally drunk themselves into silence and even slumber, he would be still awake and restless, so restless he had been driven to those long, solitary walks of his down the endless stone corridors. It had been as if a part of his mind had withdrawn a little farther with each step his body took toward intoxication; until he had existed apart from the moment, wrapped in a sadness and a sense of isolation that would drive him eventually out, away from the unconscious others to walk those lonely distances.
But what he was feeling now, with her, was if anything the opposite of that sense of isolation; and, in any case, there was a reasonable limit to the strength of alcoholic liquors made for the pleasure of drinking. Beyond a certain proof they were uncomfortable to the palate and throat; and that point the Dorsai whiskey, though strong, had not exceeded. Nor was the amount he had drunk at all great, measured by the meterstick of his experience…
He found himself telling the third Amanda about Child-of-God, and the effect of Child's death upon his own understanding.
"… When I first met him," he was saying, "I thought he was another Obadiah - I told you about my other two tutors, didn't I? Then, as I got to know him, I began to have less and less use for him. He seemed to be a fanatic and nothing more - not able to care or feel, not interested in anything but the rules of that religion of his. But then, he was the one who spoke up when the local people wanted the Command to send me away; and for the first time I began to see a pattern to what he was; and it was larger - much larger - than I'd thought."
"You were still young," said Amanda.
"Yes," he said. "I was young. We're always young, no matter how old we are. And then, when he insisted on staying behind to slow down the Militia; and I couldn't stay with him - knew that it wasn't for me to stay with him - and that he understood that, this man I'd thought had no sensitivity, no understanding beyond the church rules he lived by, then it all opened up for me. I knew the difference between someone like him, then, and someone like Barbage, who was my jailer in that Militia cell, the man whose life I'd saved in the mountain pass…"
The lights of the living room blinked once.
"Curfew," murmured Amanda. "We save power, nowadays, for those who most need it."
She got to her feet. The hard fabric of her riding pants whispered lightly, leg against leg, as she stepped to the fireplace once more; and the firelight, reflecting from the polished apron of black stone before it, sent glitters of light into the small wave of her bright hair, where it clung close against the tanned skin of her neck. She lit the stubs of two large candles that stood on supports on either side of it. They looked from their thickness to have been as long as her forearm to begin with; and the stands they rested on were tall, lifting the candle flames even now above Hal's eye level as he sat in his armchair. The candles themselves seemed to be made of grayish-green, waxy-looking seeds, pressed together into sticks. As the generous flamens rose from their wicks, the built-in lighting of the room dimmed itself gradually into extinction. Shadow moved in from the corners of the room, until Hal and Amanda were in a little illuminated space constructed by candlelight and firelight alone. A faint, piny odor reached Hal's nostrils.
Amanda sat down again. Even as close as she was to him, the darkness of her outdoor clothing lost itself against the shadows of her chair, so that the whiteness of her face seemed to float in a friendly gloom, watching him.
"You were telling me about someone whose life you saved in a mountain pass," she said.
"Yes," he said. "Barbage's life. I didn't understand then the sort of things the Militia did to anyone from the Commands that they got their hands on; and what Barbage himself must have done to prisoners from the Commands, while he was working his way up through the ranks to Captain. And still, there wasn't anything false about him, either. He was - he is wrong. I think I know why now - but he was what he was. That's why the other Militia officers were afraid of him. I saw him face down another Militia Captain, the one time I managed to get close to their camp…"
He talked on. The candles burned lower; and, imperceptibly, he found he had drifted from telling her about those he had met to telling her about himself. Something within him, some small alarm sensor, was trying to catch his attention, but the force pushing him to talk was too great to be denied. Amanda hardly needed to ask questions, now; and in the end he found himself telling her about what it had been like for him when he was very young.
"… But what was it, specifically," she asked, finally, "that made you identify so with the Graemes?"
"Oh, well," he said, staring into the fire, his mind adrift in the flame-lit darkness and carried on by the force within him, "you've got to remember I'm an orphan. I've always been… isolated. I suppose I identified with Donal's isolation. You remember how when he was at the Academy, they used to speak of him as an odd boy, different from anyone else - "
- Something happened in the room. He looked up swiftly.
"I'm sorry - " he gazed at Amanda but she was exactly as she had been a moment before. The small alarm sensor was now obvious within him. Deliberately, he forced it from his consciousness. "Did you say something?"