"Don't need to thank me. This is interesting. Anything else?"
"No. And thanks for coming by," said Hal.
"Honored." Jeamus got to his feet. "If you don't hear from me in a week, it'll be because I got sidetracked and bogged down on some maintenance problem. So if I don't get back to you in that time, give me a call; and I'll let you know how I'm coming with this. I suppose you realize, any time this stops being theoretical you're going to have to tell me exactly what you've got in mind if you want any really correct answers."
"Of course. I understand. Thanks again," said Hal; and watched the other man leave.
As the door shut, Hal dismissed the image of the Final Encyclopedia and called Ajela.
"How are things?" he asked, when she looked out of the phone screen at him. "Is now a good time for me to come up and give you both the whole story?"
"Just fine," she said. "You'll find us both in Tam's suite."
"I'll be right there."
When he stepped through the door into Tam's suite, he found her with Tam, seated in an obviously already prepared group of three chair floats facing each other. He came on in, took the empty float and smiled at Tam.
"How are things?"
"I'm fine," said Tam. "Don't waste time worrying about me. You've got the chain of consequences worked out?"
Hal nodded.
"At least as far back as the fourteenth century," he said. "Where, for practical purposes, this present historical phase begins with a pivotal figure named John Hawkwood."
"Ajela told me about him from the time you were here before and wanted to look up Conan Doyle's novelistic hero, Nigel Loring." Tam's gaze sharpened. "But Loring was different. He was one of the original Knights of the Garter under the Black Prince, wasn't he? Hawkwood's barely mentioned in Froissart - I know that much."
"After the Peace of Bretigny, when the Black Prince captured King Jean at Poitiers and England and France were at peace, Hawkwood was one of the leaders of the White Company that went over the mountains into Italy," Hal said. "He ended as Captain General of the forces of Florence, two decades later; and he was at least in his forties when he went into Italy."
"They call him 'the first of the modern generals,' Ajela tells me," Tam said. "Anyway, how'd you get to him? And why've you been so close-mouthed about your progress until now?"
"It was one of those situations where I had to have all the pieces before it fell together," Hal said. "Until a week ago I was still going largely on faith. That's why I didn't have anything solid to tell you."
"Faith in yourself," murmured Ajela.
Tam glanced at her.
"All right," he said to her. He looked back at Hal. "Tell us in your own way. I won't interrupt."
"As you know, I started working from the present backwards," Hal said. "The Others are crossbreeds between different Splinter Culture individuals. So they, too, are products of elements in the Splinter Cultures. The Splinter Cultures were a product of elements in the society of Old Earth just before and during the period when the phase-drive began to work and we had the explosion of emigration over less than a hundred years to the presently occupied worlds. The Exotics came from an organization that named itself the Chantry Guild in the twenty-first century. The Friendlies were originally colonies sponsored by the so-called marching societies - and so on and so forth. These, in turn, had their roots in the breakout century - the Chantry Guild of that time grew out of the twentieth century's apocalyptic upsurge of interest in Eastern religions, the occult, and paranormal abilities. The marching societies developed from the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism."
"An apocalyptic time, generally," Tam grunted. "In any time of social stress, you've got this sort of hysteria cropping up in biblically-rooted societies. It isn't just with western Christians - the same thing happens with Jews and Moslems, when conditions are right. Lots of historical instances before the twentieth century."
"But there's a special historical pivot point in the twentieth century," said Hal. "It was the time of the acknowledgment of space. The great mass of humanity up until then had ignored, even when they knew of it, the size of the universe outside Earth's air envelope and the insignificance of their little planet compared to it. Suddenly, they couldn't do that anymore, and the psychological shock was profound. Earth had suddenly ceased to be a safe, warm protective shell for the race. They were suddenly naked to the stars. The shock of that made their century unique in human history and pre-history, and they were forced to be aware of that uniqueness. I know - to those people who live in it, their own time is always the supremely important one; but the people in the twentieth really had some reason to think that way. The idea of space shook them up hard, down to the unconscious levels, and consequently, it shook up the then-existing forms of society - all over Old Earth. Those same forms had been shaped by five hundred years of technological development that really became explosive in the mid-nineteenth century… and so on. But I'm covering ground too fast, maybe - "
"Did I say you were?" growled Tam.
"No," Hal smiled at the old man. "Of course not. What I meant was, I was getting ahead of myself. What I did, working from the present backward, was to key on shifts in historical development, tied to unique individuals. For example, a necessary precursor to the development of the present social conditions that have provided a breeding ground for the rise to power of the Others was the achievement of Donal Graeme in pulling all the fourteen worlds together under one legal system; and putting an end to exploitative opportunities that gave rise to the interstellar barons like William of Ceta - "
"I saw Graeme only once," the antique way of referring to an individual by surname only rang oddly on Hal's ears, in the harsh old voice of Tam. "It was at a party for him on Newton. He wasn't particularly impressive to look at."
"But in any case," said Hal, "what Donal did wouldn't have been possible without the emergence of a unique group like the Dorsai; which in the beginning were nothing but a supply of cannon fodder for the inter-colony wars of the early centuries of interstellar expansion. And, in turn, what they became, and what Donal achieved would never have been possible without the unorthodox military science developed by Cletus Grahame."
"Runs in the family, doesn't it?" said Tam, smiling grimly.
"The Dorsai was a strongly hereditary culture," said Hal. "It's less surprising on a place like the Dorsai that Donal and Cletus should turn out to be related, than it might have been someplace else. But the interesting thing is that Cletus could not have done what he did without the financial backing of the Exotics, even at that early time, and the Exotics became the Exotics almost exclusively because of - "
"Walter Blunt," said Tam.
"I don't think so," said Hal, slowly. "Walter Blunt was apparently wholeheartedly sincere about his gospel of a cleansing destruction as his cure for whatever ailed the human race. I've got a lot more to learn about Walter Blunt and the Chantry Guild. On the face of it that theory of his is the very antithesis of the search for the evolved human, which the Exotics developed; and yet the Chantry Guild became the Exotics. No, there's another man who comes out of nowhere suddenly, in the late twenty-first century, a mining engineer with one arm who suddenly becomes involved with the Chantry Guild Walter Blunt had founded and rises to essentially challenge Blunt's leadership in a very short time - only to drown almost immediately after that challenge becomes successful, in a small sailboat he was sailing in the Pacific Ocean, offshore. But his brief interaction with the Chantry Guild changes everything about it. After this man - Paul Formain - had been involved, Blunt was left essentially as nothing more than a figurehead; and Jason - "
The chime announcing a phone call interrupted him.