"Now everything is different," he said.
He lay on his back; and she lay half-turned toward him, her head on the pillow, so that he could feel her eyes watching him even though he stared at the ceiling and the moonlight.
"Is it?" she said, softly. Her right arm lay above her head and the fingers of that hand wandered caressingly, through his own black, coarse hair. Her other arm lay across his chest, white against the darkness of the matted hair there. She moved closer to him, fitting her head into the hollow of his shoulder; and he turned toward her, laying his left arm over her. He saw his own thick wrist and massive hand lying relaxed upon the gentle rises of her breasts and felt a wonder that she should be here, like this; that out of all times and places they should find each other in this moment when the worlds were beginning to burn about them.
The wonder grew in him. How was it that at a time like this he could feel so close to someone else and happy; when only a handful of days past on Harmony -
He shuddered suddenly; and her arms tightened swiftly about him.
"What is it?" she said.
"Nothing…" he said. "Nothing. An old ghost walking over my grave."
"What old ghost?"
"A very old one," he said. "Hundreds of years old."
"It's not gone," she said, "it's still with you."
"Yes," he said, giving up. The core of him was still cold, even though she warmed him with her arms; and the words came from him almost in spite of himself.
"I've just come from the Friendlies," he said. "I'd gone there to get a Harmonyite named Rukh Tamani - did I tell you about her when I was here before? There's a work she's needed for on Earth, for all the worlds. But when I got there the Militia at Ahruma had her in prison."
He stopped, feeling the coldness grow within him.
"I know about the Militia on the Friendlies," Amanda said.
"I got the local resistance people to get her out. We went into the Militia Headquarters after her. When I found her, she'd been left in a cell…"
The memory grew back into a living thing, about him. He talked on. The coldness began once more to grow in him, as it had then, spreading out through his body. The bedroom and Amanda seemed to move away from him, to become remote and unimportant. He felt himself reentering the memory; and he grew ever more icy and remote…
"No!" It was Amanda's voice, sharply. "Hal! Come back! Now!"
For a moment he teetered, as on a sharp-crested rock, high above a dark depth. Then slowly, clinging to her presence, he began to retreat from the place into which he had almost gone a second time. He returned, farther and farther… until finally he was back and fully alive again. The coldness had melted from him. He lay on his back on the bed and Amanda had him in her arms.
He breathed out once, heavily; a sound too great to be called a sigh; and turned his head to look at her.
"You know about it?" he said. "How do you know?"
"It's not uncommon here," she said, grimly. "The Graemes had their share of it. It's called a cold rage."
"A cold rage…" He looked back up at the shadowy ceiling overhead. The phrase rang with familiarity in his ears. His mind took what she had just told him and ran far into the interior of his own thoughts, fitting it like a key to many things in himself he had not yet completely understood. He felt Amanda releasing the fierce grip she had maintained on him until now. She let go the tension of her arms and lay back a little from him. He felt her watching him.
"I'm sorry." The words came from him in a weary gust of air. He was still not looking at her. "I didn't mean to put it off on you, that way."
"I just told you," she answered - but her tone was more gentle than her words, "it's not uncommon here. I said the Graemes had their share of it. How many nights out of the past three hundred years, do you think, has one of them, man or woman, laid talking to whoever was close enough to tell, as you did now?"
He could think of nothing to say. He felt ashamed… but released. After a little while, she spoke again.
"Who are you?" she asked softly.
He closed his eyes. Her question struck heavily upon him at his recognition of a knowledge he had not expected her to have. There was nowhere he could turn to hide the rest of things from her - now that he had just tried to go as far as human mind could take him from her and she had brought him back in spite of himself.
"Donal." He heard his voice say it, out loud in the night silence. "I was Donal."
His eyes were still closed. He could not look at her. After a long moment he asked her: "How did you know?"
"Knowing runs in the Morgan line," she answered. "And the Amandas have always been gifted with it, even more than the others in the family. Also, I grew up with Ian around. How could I not know?"
He said nothing for a little while.
"It's Ian you look like," she said. "But you know that."
He smiled painfully, opening his eyes at last and gazing up at the ceiling. The relief in having it out in the open was so great that adjustment to it came hard.
"It was always Ian and Kensie I wanted to be like - when I was growing up - as Donal," he said; "and I never could."
"It wasn't Eachan Graeme? Your own father?"
He laughed a little at the thought.
"No one could be like Eachan Graeme, as I saw it then," he said. "That was too much to expect. But the twins - that seemed just barely possible."
"Why do you say you never were?" she said.
"Because I wasn't," he said. "As the Graemes go, I was a little man. Even my brother Mor was half a head taller than I was."
"Two lifetimes…" she said. "Two lifetimes bothering over the fact that you were shorter than the other men in your family?"
"Three lifetimes," he corrected her, "and if you're male, it sometimes matters."
"Three?"
He lay silent again for a moment, sorting out the words to say.
"I was also a dead man for a time," he said at last. "That is, I used the body and name of a man who'd died. I had to go back in time; and there was no other way to do it."
It was the last thing he had meant to do, but he heard the tone of his own voice putting up a wall against further questions from her about that second lifetime.
"How long have you known who you were… this last time?" she asked.
He had been speaking without looking at her. But now he opened his eyes and turned toward her; and, her own eyes, pure blue now in the moonlight, drew him down to her. He kissed her, as someone might reach out to hold a talisman.
"Not until these last two years - for certain," he said. "I grew up until I was nearly seventeen years old on Old Earth, not knowing. Then later, when I was in the mines on Coby, I began to feel the differences in me. Later, on Harmony, there began to be moments when I did things better than I should have known how to do. But it wasn't until I got here to Graemehouse on my first trip - when I was in the dining room there - "
He broke off, looking down into those eyes of hers.
"You must have known, then," he said, "or suspected, when you found me there when you came back, and saw how I was."
"No," she said. "It was the night before, that I felt it. I knew then, not who you were, but what you were."
He shook slightly, remembering.
"But I wasn't really sure then, myself. I didn't even understand how it could be," he said, "until this last year at the Final Encyclopedia. Then, when I began to use the Encyclopedia for the first time as a creative tool, the way Mark Torre had hoped and planned it would be used, I put it to work to hunt back and help me find out where I'd come from."
"And it showed you," she said, "that you'd come from the Dorsai?"
A coolness - different from the coldness she had rescued him from before, but equally awesome, blew through him.