The scent of the air in his nostrils, the colors, the shapes, the sounds and echoes of the house as he had moved about it - the light from the windows and the interior lights of the long corridor past the offices and bedrooms - all these had finally built a connection between him and those who also once moved about here; and he finally now felt that, like them, he belonged to the house.
There was no miracle to it. He knew that all he had achieved here so far was humanly quite possible. His recreation of Donal and the others to the point where he literally felt their presence about him was within what he knew of the capability of the human mind and imagination. But nonetheless it felt as if he teetered on the border of something far more awesome; a step beyond the possible into some area where no one had gone before.
He shivered. With the heightened sensitivity had come a clarity of mind that also was close to painful; and with that clarity in him he now identified the one part of the house he had been unconsciously avoiding all this time. The dining room, Amanda had told him, was the area of a Dorsai house where decisions were made, not merely business decisions, but family ones as well. Remembering this, his mind turned him at last toward the dining room, knowing that, if anywhere, he would find there the greatest locus of Donal's being and purpose.
He took a step toward it. But a fear stopped him. He checked himself and sat down in one of the living room's chairs. Sitting, he gazed at the entrance before, trying to understand the faceless, but very real, terror that had flared at the instant of his decision to go in.
He reached out to grapple with it, as Walter had taught him. Consciously, he made the almost physical effort needed to put emotion apart from him. In his mind he made himself visualize what he feared, as a formless shape standing a little distance from him. Having given it form, he considered it. In itself, it was not important. It was only its effect on him that was important. But to understand that effect, he must understand what it was; and what was it?
It was not the room, itself, nor the thought of what he might find there. It was that irrevocable thing that the finding of it might do to him, that he feared. To enter the dining room in his present state of sensitivity could be finally to discover what part of him was himself and what was Donal. And if he should come to know what he feared to know…
… He might find himself committed to something from which there would be no drawing back. Perhaps, before him was that boundary of which all men and women were instinctively afraid - the boundary between the possible and the impossible; and if so, once into the impossible he might belong to it forever.
It was an old fear, he understood suddenly; one not merely old to him, but old in humankind. It was the fear of leaving the safeness of the known to cross into the darkness of the unknown, with all the unimaginable dangers that might wait there. And there was, he realized now, only one counter to it - equally old. The great urge to continue, no matter what, to grow and adventure, to discover and learn.
Understanding this at last, he understood for the first time that the commitment he had feared just now was one that he had already made for himself, long since. Faced with the choice of entering the unknown, he was one who would always go forward. Like a messenger, a few lines from a poem by Robert Browning returned to him, out of the depths of memory:
… they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'
The path he had chosen for himself had led him to the cell on Harmony. And the path he had chosen for himself there had led to this house, this room and this moment. He got to his feet and walked across the living room and into it.
Within, the long, silent chamber was in dimness. Here, unlike in those other rooms he had entered, automatic sensors had not pulled the drapes back from the windows. Nor did the drapes pull back as he entered now. They were of heavy but soft cloth, a light brown in color, and the white daylight of Fomalhaut did not so much shine through them as make them glow softly, so that the room seemed caught in a luminous, amber twilight.
In that twilight the long, empty slab of the table and the upright, carved chairs ranked on both sides, with one only at the top end by the kitchen entrance, gleamed in a wood so dark a brown as to be almost black. The ceiling was lower than that of the living room, and beamed, so that the very air of the place, enclosed and populated by stillness, seemed even more hushed and timeless than that in the rest of the house.
On the long wall opposite the windows was the only active color in the dining room. Spaced along it at regular intervals were six small, archaic two-dimensional pictures in narrow frames, showing outdoor scenes; and, offset behind the single chair at the head of the table, to Hal's left as he looked at them, was the entrance from the kitchen.
The light and stillness of the place seemed to flow about Hal, enclosing him from the rest of the house. All else may alter, the dining room seemed to say, I have not changed in two hundred years. He stepped forward and walked slowly down the wall side of the table, pausing to look at the small framed pictures as he passed.
They were scenes variously showing mountain, lake, glen and seashore, in reproductions which must be as old as Eachan Khan's memory of such places. And they were of Earth. The colors of land and sky, the relationships of slope and level were of the kind that was to be found nowhere else. A thousand tiny, subtle details authenticated the origin of what each represented. For a moment they recalled memories of Hal's that had not come to his mind for a long time; and he felt a sudden, intense homesickness for the Rocky Mountains he remembered from his own youth.
But then the feeling was gone, washed away by the power of the emotion that came from all that surrounded him. It was an emotion stained into walls and floor, chairs and table, and most of all into those pictures on the wall - the emotion of a family that had lived and died according to its own private code for more than two hundred years. There had been a saying that Malachi had quoted to Hal once when he had been very young - that the Dorsai, more than any other world, was its people. Not its wealth, or its power, or its reputation - but its people. Here, in this long, silent room, that saying stood forward from his memory to confront him.
As those of this family would have stood. Hal walked slowly to the head of the table and stood a little back from the corner of it, there, looking down its length. They had all sat here, at one time or another, since these walls had first been raised. Those whose names he had seen on the gravestones - Eachan Khan, Melissa and Cletus Grahame, Kamal Graeme; Eachan, who had been the father of Donal, Mor - Donal's brother; James, Kensie and Ian - his uncles; Leah - Ian's wife; Simon, Kamal and James - Ian's sons… and others.
Including Donal.
Donal would have sat here often before the night of his graduation from the Academy, the night before he was to leave under his first contract. But that one night, after dinner, for the first time, he would have joined those others in the family who had already made their outgoing; those who had left the planet of their birth under contract to fight for other people they did not know. For the first time, then, he would have felt himself one with these older relatives who had already achieved what he had privately feared was beyond any strength and skill he would ever manage. That evening, for the first time, the door to the fourteen worlds would have seemed to stand open to him; and he would have looked through it, and on those beside him, with new eyes.