What had lulled the suspicions of the invaders until too late had been that there were inhabitants of Foralie Town also getting sick and dying, just as the soldiers were. Even when at last they understood, it had been unbelievable to Dow's military that townspeople could choose to stay where they were and die, just to make sure that the invaders died with them.
At the last, there had been a situation in which Dow had held Cletus as a captive at Foralie, with healthy troops on guard. An assortment of the older children, armed, plus the eight professionals Cletus had left to organize defenses, and Amanda, had reversed the situation. Amanda, in her ninety-third year, had finally captured the soldiers guarding Foralie by threatening to blow them and herself up together.
Compelling as the story was, it was not so much that which caught at Hal's attention. It was Amanda's way of telling it, as if she herself had been there. More strongly than ever came the impression that there was something she was trying to tell him under the screen of words which he was failing to understand. An anger stirred in him that he should be so unperceptive. But there was nothing to be done but wait and hope for some word that would wake him suddenly to her meaning.
So, he sat with her in the bright sunlight, hearing not merely the story of the defense of Foralie District, but of Kensie's death on Ste. Marie; and about how the second Amanda, who had loved both Kensie and Ian (but Ian more) had decided at last to marry no one. But even when they remounted their horses, he still did not know what it was she wanted him to understand. The afternoon had moved in upon them as she had talked; and Fomalhaut was halfway down the sky by the time they rode once more into the yard of Fal Morgan.
"… And I," she said again at the end of the story, "am the first and second Amandas over again."
They did not get the chance to talk again at any length until after the meeting. The next day, Monday, Amanda was gone on a business trip; and on Tuesday she was busy away from Fal Morgan, directing and helping with the preparing of Graemehouse for the meeting. Hal stayed where he was at Fal Morgan, puzzling over her as much as over what he would say to convince the Grey Captains. There was something in him like a superstition - which, strangely, Amanda seemed to understand - that made him unwilling to return to Foralie until the actual meeting time should arrive.
The Captains from furthest away began to arrive late Tuesday; and were welcomed at Graemehouse by Amanda and the neighbors who were helping. She did not get back to Fal Morgan until late evening; and after a quick meal she sat with Hal over a drink in the living room for only a few minutes before going to bed.
"What was it you said - that I'd need to convince most of those that come?" he asked her as they sat before the fire. "What percentage is 'most'?"
She raised her gaze from the flames, which she had been watching; and smiled a little. "If you can get through to seventy per cent of those who come, you'll be a success," she said. "Those who don't get here will eventually react in pretty much the same proportions, after talking to those who did."
"Seventy per cent," he echoed, turning the short, heavy glass slowly in his hands and looking at the firelight through the brown liquid he had barely tasted.
"Don't expect miracles," her voice said; and he looked up to see her watching him. "No one, except Cletus, or maybe Donal, in his lifetime, could carry them all. Seventy per cent will give you what you want. Be very happy with that. As I told you - everyone makes up his own mind here, and the Grey Captains more than most."
He nodded.
"Do you know what you're going to say?" she asked after a moment.
"Part of it. The part that's the Exotic message," he answered, nursing the whiskey glass between his palms. "For the rest - it doesn't seem to plan."
"If you tell them what you told me, your first night here," she said, "you'll be all right."
He looked at her, startled.
"You think so?"
"I know so," she said.
He continued to look at her, searchingly, trying to remember all of what he had said that first night.
"I'm not sure I remember exactly what that was," he said, slowly.
"It'll come to you," she told him. The words lingered on his ears. She got to her feet, carrying her half-empty glass.
"Well, I need sleep," she said; and watched him for a second. "Possibly you do, too."
"Yes," he said. "But I think I'll sit here just a little while longer, though. I'll take care of the fire."
"Just be sure the screen's in place…"
She went off. He sat alone for another twenty minutes before he sighed, reached out to wave his hand over the screen sensor, and stood up. The screen slid tightly across the front of the fireplace, and the last of the flames, cut off from fresh oxygen, began almost immediately to dwindle and die. He drained his glass, took it to the kitchen, and went to bed.
The meeting was not to be held until an hour after lunch time at Foralie. Half an hour before then, Hal and Amanda saddled up and rode from Fal Morgan.
He did not feel like talking, and Amanda seemed content to leave him in his silence. He had expected his mind to be buzzing with possible arguments he could use. Instead, it had retreated into a calmness, utterly remote from the situation into which he was heading.
He was wise enough to let it be. He sat back in the saddle and let his senses be occupied by the sound, scent and vision of the ride.
When they reached the mounded level of the area on which Graemehouse was built, they found a couple of dozen air-space jitneys parked before the main building; and as they dismounted at the corral by the stable, the sound of internal activity reached out to them, through an opened kitchen window. They removed saddles and bridles from their horses, turned them loose in the corral, and went in through the front entrance.
In the living room, they found only two people, seated talking in an adjoining pair of the overstuffed chairs. One was a square, black woman with a hooked nose in a stern face, and the other a pink-faced, small man, both at least in their sixties.
"Miriam Songhai," said Amanda, "this is Hal Mayne. Rourke di Facino, Hal Mayne."
"Honored," they all murmured to each other.
"I'll go round up people," added di Facino, getting to his feet, and went off toward the office and bedroom end of the house. Amanda stayed with Hal.
"So you're the lad," said Miriam, in a voice that had a tendency to boom.
"Yes," said Hal.
"Sit down," she said. "It'll be a while before they're all together. Where do you spring from originally?"
"Earth - Old Earth," said Hal, taking the chair di Facino had vacated.
"When did you leave? Tell me about yourself," she said; and Hal began to give her something of his personal history.
But they were interrupted by others entering the room in ones and twos, and the necessity of introductions. Shortly, the conversation with Miriam Songhai was lost completely and Hal found himself standing in a room full almost to overcrowding.
"Everybody's here, aren't they?" said a tall, cadaverous man in at least his eighties. He had a bass voice that was remarkable. "Why don't we move in and get settled?"
There was a general movement toward the dining room and Hal found himself carried along by it. At the entrance to the dining room, for a second only, a small hesitation took him; and then it was gone. The long room before him was no longer dim and filled with amber light in which ghosts might walk. The drapes had at last been drawn and the fierce white illumination of Fomalhaut reflected off the gray-white surface of the steep slope behind the house and sent hard light through the windows, to carve everything animate and inanimate within to an unsparing three-dimensional solidity. Hal went on, saw Amanda standing beside the single chair at the table's head beckoning to him, and walked forward.