"All right," said Hal.
She went out.
He was left alone in the crystalline stillness of the untenanted home. After a moment, he went into the living room.
It was a large, dark-panelled room, larger than its equivalent at Fal Morgan. The long shape of the house required it to be rectangular rather than square; and there was probably comfortable seating space in it for as many as thirty people. Up to fifty could probably be gathered here, if necessary. Its north wall was nothing but windows, the room-wide drapes upon them drawn back now to the daylight, giving a view of the steep slope behind the house. There would be sensors, he thought, to pull these drapes back each morning, part of the automatic machinery that would manage the purely physical establishment through daylight and dark, summer heat and winter cold, in the absence of its people.
The east wall, to his right, was pierced by a single entrance to what appeared to be a long hallway. The wall itself had only one object on its sober panelling. A full-length, life-size portrait of a man standing, dressed in an old-fashioned military uniform that could have been worn only on Earth, two hundred or more standard years ago. The man was very erect, tall, slim and middle aged. He wore a gray mustache, sharply waxed to points, which ruled out the possibility that it was a picture of Cletus Grahame. Of course, thought Hal, it would not be Cletus. It was a picture of Eachan Khan, the father of Melissa Khan, who had been the wife of Cletus; and from what he remembered about the family, Cletus himself had done the painting. The archaic uniform would be the one Eachan Khan had worn as a general officer in the Afghanistani forces, before he and Melissa had emigrated from Earth.
The south wall, straight ahead of Hal, showed nothing but its panelling, with the entrance from the entry hall in the center of it. The west wall, on his left, had entrances at each end of it. The nearest of these opened on stairs rising to the floor above, with beyond them a hallway which must lead to the kitchen Amanda had mentioned; and the further entrance, lit by the sunlight from the windows in the adjacent north wall, was obviously the entrance to the dining room. He could even see a corner of the dining table Amanda had spoken of, when he had commented on the size of the one at Fal Morgan.
The shortened wallspace between these two entrances was almost entirely occupied by a wide and deep fireplace built of a gray-black granite, including the long and heavy mantelpiece over it; carved into the thick edge of the mantelpiece where the verse had been cut at Fal Morgan was a shield shape, showing three scallop shells upon it. Above the mantelpiece hung a sword in a silver-metal scabbard, as antique as the uniform in the picture on the wall across from it, and plainly also an original possession of Eachan Khan.
Hal sat down in one of the large overstuffed armchairs. The silence of the house around him pressed in on him. He had come here, he had told himself, because he had felt himself unready to speak to the representatives of the Dorsai. Not unready to deliver the message the Exotics had sent with him, but unready to give the Dorsai people his own words, in terms that would make them listen and understand.
How much of this was simple lack of confidence after his failure on Mara, he did not know. He had gone into the meeting with Nonne, Padma and the rest, taking it for granted that they must understand him. He had never felt that sureness where the Dorsai were concerned; and Foralie had drawn him aside from his earlier planned destination like the magnetic North of Earth swinging about to itself the point of a compass needle. The decision to come here first had been born from the moment he had seen this blue and white, ocean-girt world mirrored in the vision screen of his stateroom aboard ship.
Sitting now in the silent living room, it seemed to him as if he could feel the house speaking to him. There was something here that picked him up, body, mind and soul, and held him in a way that was very nearly eerie. As he sat, he could feel the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting and an electric chill starting at the base of his skull and spreading downward, along his spine and across his shoulders. The house pulled at some ancient strings anchored deep within him. A soundless voice called him; and he rose slowly in answer from his chair, and turned to the corridor leading back to the kitchen.
He went down the corridor. It took six paces to traverse, and it was clear within him that he had known it would take that many and no more. It was a little more than twelve meters in length. There were no openings off it until he stepped from its further end into the kitchen. Like the kitchen at Fal Morgan, it was large, perhaps even larger than Amanda's. Like that one, also, another doorway in the wall to his right led into the dining room, giving a glimpse of its end, opposite the one he had seen from the living room.
The corridor he had just come down had paralleled the dining room's length.
In the kitchen here as well, the panelling was dark, unlike that at Fal Morgan, and the kitchen table was not round but octagonal. It was also larger than the one he and Amanda had sat at that morning. But in all important ways, it was a room like its counterpart at Fal Morgan.
He stood for a moment. There was nothing in particular to see, but the intense, high-altitude sunlight beat through the windows to his left and the dark wood of the walls drank up the illumination. There was nothing to hear; but to his imagination it seemed he could almost hear a hum of voices that had soaked, like time, into the panelling, and were now sounding just below his auditory threshold. The unheard sound brought back to him a feeling of the people, now dead and gone, who had sat here living and told each other of their doings and their thoughts.
He stood, feeling the minutes slip past him like stealthy sentinels returning to their posts, until with an effort he broke free and moved across the room to a door let into the north wall of the kitchen. The door opened at a touch and he stepped into the daylight of the morning and the backyard of Graemehouse. Around him and off to his left were the outbuildings that had been hidden by the bulk of the house on his approach, the stable, the stores buildings, the barn and - closest of all - that building that on the Dorsai he knew was customarily called the fieldhouse.
He walked across the short distance of stony and sunlit earth. The fieldhouse was unlocked and he let himself in. It was an unpartitioned building as wide as Graemehouse and almost as long. Its height was greater. Above its walls, the roof arched to a full two stories over the pounded earth of the floor. There were no windows in the walls, but skylights in the arched roof let sunlight down to fill the air of the interior with dancing motes of dust. It was a place for winter exercise; and as Hal knew, it could be heated, but barely to above the freezing point.
Now, it was not yet the season for artificial heat. The sunlight streaming down from the skylights warmed the interior air to a summer temperature; and Hal felt himself touched once more by the ghosts of sounds. To this building Donal Graeme would have come as soon as his infant legs could carry him, following the older members of the family. He would have tottered his unsteady way along the temporary winter passageways set up between the house and the outbuildings to give a weather-protected route. To the young child this building would at first have seemed enormous; and the activities of his elders here magical and frustrating, involving elements of balance, strength and speed that his very young body was not mature enough to imitate.
But he would have tried to imitate, regardless. He would have tried to turn in swift, flowing movement, as his elders turned, to run as they ran, and to struggle in the fashion they struggled with each other in their unarmed practice bouts; and he would have demanded also that they pretend to go through the motions of these activities with him, as they did with each other. By the time he had been five years old, his movements would have begun to resemble theirs, even if more slowly and clumsily.