"Actually," he told her, "you argue better for my staying here when you don't argue, than you could if you used words."
He smiled, to invite her to smile back, and was relieved when she did. What he said had been said clumsily; but all the same, it was a truth she was too intelligent not to see. If she had argued, he would have had someone besides himself to marshal his own arguments against. This way, he was left to debate with his own desires; which, she might have guessed, could make an opponent far harder for him to conquer than she was.
But his conscience sank its teeth into him, now. He was, he knew, leading her on to hope - which was an unfair thing to do. He must not give in and stay here. But, because she was an Exotic and because he knew what that meant as far as her beliefs were concerned, he could think of no way to explain this to her that would not either wound or baffle her. He did not, he thought almost desperately, know enough about her - enough about her as the unique individual she was - to talk to her. And there was no time to learn that much about her.
"You're from - where? Mara? Kultis?" he asked, striking out at random. "How did you happen to end up here?"
She smiled, unexpectedly.
"Oh, I was a freak," she said.
"A freak?" Privately he had sometimes called himself that. But he could not imagine applying it to someone like her.
"Well, say I was one of the freaks, then," she answered. "We called ourselves that. Did you ever hear of a Maran Exotic called Padma?"
"Padma…"He frowned.
The name had a strange echo of familiarity, as if he had indeed heard Walter or one of his other tutors mention it, but nothing more. His memory, like the rest of him, had been trained to a fine point. If he had been told of such a man, he should be able to remember it. But nowhere, searching his memory now, could he find any clear reference to someone called Padma.
"He's very old now," she said. "But he's been an Outbond, from either Mara or Kultis, at one time or another, to every important culture on the fourteen worlds. He goes clear back to the time of Donal Graeme. In fact - that's why I'm here."
"He's that old?" Hal stared at her. "He must be older than Tam."
She sobered, suddenly. The smile left her face and went out of her voice as well.
"No. He's younger - but just by a few years." She shook her head. "Even when he was a very young man, he had an ageless look, they say. And he was brilliant, even then - even among his own generation on the Exotics. But you're almost right. When I got here, I found out even Tam had thought Padma was older than he was. But it's not true. There's been no one Tam's age; and no one like him - ever. Even Padma."
He looked at her half-skeptically.
"There are fourteen worlds," he said.
"I know," she said. "But the Final Encyclopedia's got no record of anyone else much more than a hundred and eighteen years old just now. Tam's a hundred and twenty-four. It's his will that keeps him going."
He could hear in her voice an appeal to him to understand Tam. He wanted to tell her that he would try, but once more he did not trust himself to put the assurance into words he could trust her to believe.
"But you were telling me how you got here," he said, instead. "You were saying you were one of the freaks. What did you mean? And what's Padma got to do with it?"
"It was his conscience created us - me, and the others - " she said. "It all goes back long ago to something that happened between him and Donal Graeme, back when Donal was alive and Padma was still young. Later, what passed between them brought Padma to feel that he'd been too young and sure of himself, to notice something important - that Donal had something Padma should have been aware of and made use of; something critical, he said, to the search we've been engaged in on the Exotics for three centuries now. Those are Padma's own words, to an Assembly of both the Exotic worlds forty years ago. Padma came finally to think that Donal might have been a prototype of the very thing we'd been searching for, the evolved form of human being we've always believed the race will finally produce."
He frowned at her, reaching out to understand. Donal he knew of through general history and the tales of Malachi. But he had never been too impressed with Donal, in spite of Donal's triumphs. Ian and Kensie, Donal's uncles; and Eachan Khan, Donal's grim, war-crippled father, had caught more at his imagination, among the Graemes of Foralie on the Dorsai. But the uneasy feeling that he should recognize the name continued to nag at him on a low level of consciousness.
"Padma," Ajela was going on, "felt we Exotics had to look for what he might have missed seeing in Donal; and because Padma was enormously respected - if you had an Exotic teacher, you know what the word respected means on Mara and Kultis - and because he suggested a way that had never been tried, it was agreed he could make an experiment. I - and some others like me - were the elements of the experiment. He chose fifty of the brightest Exotic children he could find and arranged to have us brought up under special conditions."
Hal frowned again at her.
"Special conditions?"
"Padma's theory was that something in our own Exotic society was inhibiting the kind of personal development that had made someone like Donal Graeme possible. Whatever else was true about him, no one could deny Donal had abilities no Exotic had ever achieved. That pointed to a blindness somewhere in our picture of ourselves, Padma said."
She was carried away now on the flood of what she was telling him. Her eyes were blue-green and depthless once more.
"So," she went on, "he got a general agreement to let him experiment with the fifty of us - Padma's Children, they called us, then - and he saw to it we were exposed, from as soon as we were able to understand, not only to the elements of our own culture, but to those in the Dorsai and the Friendly cultures which our Exotic thinking had always automatically rejected. You know how our family structure on Mara and Kultis is much looser than on the Dorsai or the Friendlies. As children, we treat all adults almost equally as parents or near relatives. No one forced the fifty of us in any particular direction, but we were given more freedom to bond emotionally to individuals, to indulge in romantic, rather than logical thinking. You see - a romantic attitude was the one common element permitted Dorsai and Friendly children, which we on the Exotics had always been steered away from."
He sat, studying her as she talked. He did not yet see where her words were headed, but he could feel strongly across the short physical distance separating them that what she was saying was not only something of intense importance to her, but something that it was difficult for her to say to him. He nodded now, to encourage her to go on; and she did.
"To make the story short," she said, "we were set free to fall in love with things we ordinarily would've been told were unproductive subjects for such attention; and in my case what I fell in love with, when I was barely old enough to learn about it, was the story of Tam Olyn - the brilliant, grim, interstellar newsman who tried and almost succeeded in a personal vendetta to destroy the Friendly culture, only to change his mind suddenly and completely, to come back to Earth and take on all the responsibility of the Final Encyclopedia, where he'd been the only person except Mark Torre to hear the voices at the Center point."
Her face was animated now. The feeling in her reached and caught up Hal as music might have caught him up.
"This man, who still controls the Final Encyclopedia," she went on animatedly, "holding it in trust all these years for the race, and refusing to let any other person or power control it. By the time I was nine I knew I had to come here; and by the time I was eleven, they let me come - on Tam's personal responsibility."