"You don't do anything to people? Even to those like Danno?"
Bleys raised his eyebrows slightly, then shook his head.
"Even to those like Danno. Danno destroyed himself, as most people who love power. All I did was give the Others an alternative plan; and in refusing to consider it, Danno created the conditions that led to his destruction at other hands than mine. As I say, I work with larger matters than individual people."
"They why come see me?" The almost painfully brilliant, hard-edged clarity of mind that had come on Hal as he sat at the head of the long dining table at Foralie, talking to the Grey Captains, was back with him now.
"Because you're a potential problem," said Bleys. He smiled. "Because I hate the waste of a good mind - ask my fellow-Others if I don't - and because I feel an obligation to you."
"And because you have no one to talk to," said Hal.
Bleys' smile widened slowly. There was a short pause.
"That's very perceptive of you," he said, gently. "But you see, I've never had anyone to talk to; and so I'm afraid I wouldn't know what I was missing. As for what brings me here, I'd like to save you if I could. Unlike Danno, you can be of use to the race."
"I intend to," said Hal.
"No," said Bleys. "What you intend is your own destruction - very much like Danno. Are you aware the struggle you've chosen to involve yourself in is all over but the shouting? Your cause isn't only lost, it's already on its way to be forgotten."
"And you want to save me?" Hal said
"I can afford what I want," said Bleys. "But in this case, it's not a matter of my saving you but of you choosing to save yourself. In a few standard years an avalanche will have swallowed up all you now think you want to fight for. So, what difference will it make if you stop fighting now?"
"You seem to assume," said Hal, "that I'm going to stop eventually."
"Either stop, or - forgive me - be stopped," said Bleys. "The outcome of this battle you want to throw yourself into was determined before you were born."
"No," said Hal, slowly. "I don't think it was."
"I understand you originally had an interest in being a poet," said Bleys. "I had inclinations to art, too, once; before I found it wasn't for me. But poetry can be a personally rewarding life work. Be a poet, then. Put this other aside. Let what's going to happen, happen; without wasting yourself trying to change it."
Hal shook his head.
"I was committed to this, only this, long before you know," he said.
"I'm entirely serious in what I say," went on Bleys. "Stop and think. What good is it going to do to throw yourself away? Wouldn't it be better, for yourself and all the worlds of men and women, that you should live a long time and do whatever you want to do - whether it's poetry or anything else? It could even be something as immaterial as saying what you think to your fellow humans; so that something of yourself will have gone into the race and be carried on to enrich it after you're gone. Isn't that a far better thing than committing suicide because you can't have matters just as you want them?"
"I think," said Hal, "we're at cross purposes. What you see as inevitable, I don't see so at all. What you refuse to accept can happen, I know can happen."
Bleys shook his head.
"You're in love with a sort of poetic illusion about life," he said. "And it is an illusion, even in a poetic sense; because even poets - good poets - come to understand the hard limits of reality. Don't take my word for that. What does Shakespeare have Hamlet say at one point… 'how weary, flat, stale and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world?' "
Hal smiled suddenly.
"Do you know Lowell?" he asked.
"Lowell? I don't believe so," answered Bleys.
"James Russell Lowell," said Hal. "Nineteenth century American poet."
He quoted:
"When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp …"
He sat, matching his gaze with Bleys'.
"I believe you're better at quoting poetry than I am," said Bleys. He got to his feet and Hal rose with him. "Also, I believe I'll have to accept the fact I can't save you. So I'll go. What is it you've found here at the Encyclopedia - if anything, if I may ask?"
Hal met his eyes.
"As one of my tutors, Walter InTeacher would have said," he answered. "That's a foolish question."
"Ah," said Bleys.
He turned toward the door. He had almost reached it, when Hal spoke again behind him; his voice suddenly different, even in his own ears.
"How did it happen?"
Bleys stopped and turned back to face him.
"Of course," he said, gently, "you'd have had no way of knowing, would you? I should have seen to your being informed before. Well, I'll tell you now, then. The men we normally use to go before us in situations like that had found two of your tutors already on that terrace and the third was brought to join them a minute or two after I stepped out on to the terrace myself. It was the Friendly they brought. The Dorsai and your Walter InTeacher were already there. Like you, he seemed to be fond of poetry, and as I came out of the library window, he was quoting from that verse drama of Alfred Noyes, Sherwood. The lines he was repeating were those about how Robin Hood had saved one of the fairies from what Noyes called The Dark Old Mystery. I quoted him Blondin's song, from the same piece of writing, as a stronger piece of poetry. Then I asked him where you were; and he told me he didn't know - but of course he did. They all knew, didn't they?"
"Yes," said Hal. "They knew."
"It was that which first raised my interest in you above the ordinary," Bleys said. "It intrigued me. Why should they be so concerned to hide you? I'd told them no one would be hurt; and they would have known my reputation for keeping my word."
He paused for a second.
"They were quite right not to speak, of course," he added, softly.
Hal stood still, waiting.
"At any rate," said Bleys. "I tried to bring them to like me, but of course they were all of the old breed - and I failed. That intrigued me even more, that they should be so firmly recalcitrant; and I was just about to make further efforts, which might have worked, to find out from them about you, when your Walter InTeacher physically attacked me - a strange thing for an Exotic to do."
"Not," Hal heard his own voice saying, "under the circumstances."
"Of course, that triggered off the Dorsai and the Friendly. Together, they accounted for all but one of the men I had watching them; but of course, all three of them were killed in the process. Since there was no hope of questioning them, then, I went back into the house. Danno had just arrived; and I didn't have the leisure to order a search of the grounds for you, after all."
"I was in the lake," Hal said. "Walter and Malachi Nasuno - the Dorsai - signalled me when they guessed you were on the grounds. I had time to hide in some bushes at the water's edge. After… I came up to the terrace and saw you and Danno through the window of the library."
"Did you?" said Bleys.
The two of them stood, facing each other for a moment; and Bleys shook his head, slowly.
"So it had already begun between us, even then?" he said.
He opened the door and stepped through it, closing it quietly behind him. Hal turned back to the nearest float and touched the phone controls.
"Chuni," he said. "Bleys Ahrens is on his way out. See that he doesn't go astray."
Chapter Fifty-one
Cutting the connection to Chuni, Hal called Ajela.