"I've got to go," he said. "I've things to do there. I've got to go about seeing whoever it is that represents the Dorsai."
"You want the Grey Captains."
He stared at her.
"Who?"
She smiled.
"It's an old term," she said. "Grey spelled with a 'e,' incidentally. I don't think anyone knows where it came from, originally. It was back in Cletus' day we stopped using the term Captain as a military rank anywhere but on spaceships. What the name's come to mean here is someone who's a leader, confirmed and accepted, a woman or man other people trust - and trust to make decisions. The first and second Amanda were Grey Captains."
"And the third?" He looked at her.
"Yes. The third, too," she said, unsmiling. "The point is, though, that it's the Grey Captains you want to talk to; and they aren't usually in Omalu. They're wherever they live on the Dorsai."
"Then I've got to go talk to them individually and get them to agree to get together so I can talk to them all at once."
She watched him for several seconds without speaking.
"If you were in shape," she said at last, slowly, "which you're not, that'd still be the wrong way to go about it. As it is, right now you're not up to talking to anyone. The first thing you do is get your feet back under you - and that means about a week."
He shook his head.
"Not that long," he said.
"That long."
"In any case," he put his arms on the arms of the chair, ready to get up, "this can't wait - "
"Yes, it can."
"You don't understand." His hands fell away from the arms of the chair. "To begin with, I've got an important message for the Dorsai people generally, from the Exotics. But, even more important, I've got to talk to these Captains, myself. There's something I've got to make them understands - that what we're headed into may destroy everything the Dorsai's stood for, and most of everything else… I don't know how to make you understand - "
"You already have," she said.
He stared at her with the uneasy feeling that matters were being rushed upon him.
"The first night you were here." She watched him, unwaveringly, and there was no end to the turquoise depths of her eyes. "You told me all about it."
"All about it?" he said. "All?"
"I think, all," she said. There was that several second pause, again, as her eyes watched him. "I know what you need done; and I know - which you don't - the way to do it. Before you can meet with the Grey Captains, they're all going to have to come together at some place. That place might as well be Foralie."
"Foralie?" He stared at her.
"Why not?" she said. "It's got the space to handle a meeting that size and it's not being used right now."
She stopped speaking and sat watching him. He did not say anything for a moment, himself. There was a cold feeling inside him at the thought of his speaking to these people in Graemehouse and for a moment he almost forgot she was there. Then his mind and his eyes came back to her, to find her still watching.
"I can call the Captains for you; and get some help from around the district, here," she said, "if it's needed to take care of the situation. It shouldn't take more than a day, unless some of them need to stay overnight before starting home."
He hesitated.
"You could suggest they come?" he said. "And you think they'd come?"
"Yes." It was a blunt statement. "They'll come."
"I can't - " words failed him.
"Can't what? Can't impose?" She smiled a little. "It's for our benefit, isn't it?"
"It is…" he said. "Of course. Still…"
"Then it's settled," she said. "I'll send the word out to the ones who should be here. Meanwhile, you can get rested up. You need a week."
"How long does it take to get them together?" he asked, still with the uneasy feeling that matters were being rushed upon him.
"Six hours in an emergency," she looked at him almost coldly. "In the case of something like this where there's no emergency, at the very least a week to find a time when most of them can get together. In a week you ought to be able to talk to at least two-thirds of them."
"Only two-thirds?" he said. "Is two-thirds enough?"
"If you can convince most of the two-thirds," she answered, "you'll have no trouble carrying most of the full number in the long run. Each one is going to make up his own mind; but they're all sensible people. If they hear sense most of them will listen to it and pass it on to their own people."
"Yes," he said. He was still unsure about all that she had said; but this talk, mild as it had been, had exhausted him.
"Then I'll take care of it." She looked keenly at him. "Can you fix yourself something to eat? I've got my hands full at the moment."
"Of course," he said.
She smiled for a second and her face transformed. Then she was level-mouthed, level-eyed, all business again.
"All right, then," she said, picking up her stylus again, and turning her attention back to the screen in her desk. "Don't hesitate to call if you need me."
He stood looking at her for a second more. There was something odd, here. When he had first come, she had been a friendly stranger, polite but open. Now, she was at once much closer and at the same time walled off from him - encased in some armor of her own. He turned and went off to the kitchen, conscious of the rubberiness of his legs and the labor of moving his body along the passageway with them.
He ate and immediately was avaricious for sleep again. He went back to his bedroom and fell on the bed, rousing later, briefly, to eat and sleep once more.
Amanda had been right. It was almost a full three days before he began to feel like himself again. It began to look as if the week until the Grey Captains could be gathered together would be welcome to him after all.
It was a different weakness that had gripped him, this time. Undoubtedly, the remnants of the physical attrition he had endured on Harmony were still with him. Nonetheless, the essential nature of his exhaustion right now did not seem merely physical, but something more - something he considered labelling with the word psychic, then drew back from the term.
What was undeniable was that what had done this to him was the purely non-physical experience in Graemehouse; and his mind, which could never leave anything alone, but was forever digging at things and taking them apart to find out how they worked, would not get off the subject of what had happened to him in the dining room.
There were all sorts of possible explanations.
One that stood up to examination was that he had found exactly what he had gone looking for - an understanding of the Graemes in general, and Donal in particular, so intense that for a moment he had been able, subjectively, at least, to relive an episode out of Donal's life. But there was another one that brought back the chill and the lifted hairs on the back of his neck. He shied away from it, turning back defensively to the first explanation.
Given his training in concentration, and the creative instinct that had led him into poetry, the moments in which he had become Donal, in the bedroom and in the dining room, were not impossible. But still… he found he could start comfortably down the route of a sensible explanation - adding together his mental techniques, his young desire to identify with Donal, his hangover of physical exhaustion from Harmony, and the emotional effect of his disappointment on Mara - but in the end he came to a gap, a quantum jump, in which something unknown, something not explainable, had to have happened in addition, to produce what he had experienced.
Something above and beyond knowledge - something almost like magic - had been at work there. And yet, was there not something very much like that sort of quantum jump, or magic, involved in the creation of any piece of art? You could follow down the line of craft and skill only so far - and then something would happen which not even the best craftsman could identify or explain; and the result was art.