"I know," she said.
"You see," he told her, "what makes all your returning to these things possible is their capability of triggering off in you an infinity of discoveries; and they can do that because there is an infinity of things to be discovered put into them by the creator. That infinity of possibilities could never be marshalled together consciously by one human mind and put to work in one piece of canvas, one succession of sounds, one succession of printed words. You know that. But still, there they are. They did not exist before, and now they do. There was no way they could have come into existence except by being put there by the human being who made each of them. And there was only one way he or she could have accomplished that - the maker had to have built not only with his conscious mind, which is precise but limited in how much it can conceive at any one time, but also with the unconscious, which knows no limits, and can bring all life's observations, all life's experience, to bear on a single rendered shape, sound, or word, placed just so among its fellow shapes, sounds or words."
He stopped speaking. For a second, she did not reply.
"And that," said Amanda then, "is what you call intuitive logic?"
"Not quite," said Hal. "What I was talking about there was creative logic, which is still operating under the control of the unconscious. If the unconscious is displeased with the task, it refuses to work, and no power of will can make it. What Donal did was move that control fully into the conscious area, that's all, and put it to work there manipulating the threads of cause and effect. Then, when he was still so young, he didn't realize how much he was drawing on what he had learned from reading the works on Strategy and Tactics by his great-grandfather."
"By Cletus Grahame, you mean?"
Hal nodded.
"Yes. You remember, don't you, that Cletus had actually started out with the idea of being an artist? It was only later on he became caught up in the physics of military action and reaction. He used creative logic to build his principles; and in fact, from what's there to be seen in his work, he may have crossed the line himself from time to time, into a conscious control of what he was making."
"I see," Amanda seemed to think for a moment. "But you don't know if he ever did? You seem to know that Donal did."
"I was never Cletus." Hal smiled, more to himself than to her. "But I was Donal."
"And you say creative logic was why Cletus was able to win the way he did, against Dow deCastries and an Earth so rich in everything all the Younger Worlds seemed to have no chance against it? And it was symbolic logic then that brought Donal to the title of Protector of the fourteen worlds, including Earth, before he was in his mid-thirties?"
"Yes," said Hal, somberly. "And having done it, Donal understood the lesson of the virgin with the bag of gold, after the death of Genghis Khan. He looked at the peace and law he had enforced on all the civilized planets and saw that he'd done nothing. He hadn't changed a single mind, a single attitude in the base structure of the human animal. It was the nadir of everything he had reached out for since that moment when he was eleven years old."
Her hand reached out and caressed his arm.
"It was all right," he smiled again, this time ruefully. "He lived through it. I lived through it. Being who I am, I can't give up. That's really what operated in that Militia cell. My conscious mind and body were ready to give up and lay back to do just that - but they weren't allowed to. That that's in me pushed me on, anyway. Just as it pushed Donal on, back then. As Donal, I saw I'd been wrong. The next step was to amend that wrongness - to correct, not an errant humanity, but the overall historic pattern that had made humanity errant."
"And how did he think he could do that?" her voice led him on to talk, and the talking was the slow unloading of an intolerable burden he had carried for so long he had forgotten that he had ever been without it.
"By turning his tool of intuitive logic not just upon the present, but on what made it, the causes behind the effects he saw around him and the causes behind those causes, until he came back to a point at which something could be done."
"And he found it."
"He found it." Hal nodded, "But he also found that what needed to be done was not something he could do as he had done things up until then. It wasn't something he was yet equipped to do. To operate upon what he needed to operate upon he himself had to change, to learn. To grow."
"So," Amanda said. "And your second life came from that. Can you tell me about that, now?"
He was conscious of all the burden he had already laid aside for the first time in his life, in talking to her here and now.
"Yes," he said. "Now I can."
He reached his free hand across to lay on the living incurve of her belly. He could feel her ribs rise and fall, slowly and fully with her breathing. He stared into the shadows above him.
"The problem had several sides," he said. "Humanity couldn't, as he thought he saw it then, be changed from where he stood at the moment, just like you couldn't do much about a tree that was already grown. But if you went back to the time of its planting and made changes that would be effective upon the environment in which it would grow to what it would be in the present…"
He stopped.
"Go on," Amanda said.
"I'm trying to work out the best way of telling you all this briefly," he answered. "And it takes a little thinking. You'll have to take my word for it that by using intuitional logic and working back from the then present effects to the causes he already knew for them, or could discover, he found he could trace back to the closest point in history where all the elements he hoped to alter were available at a single time and place for changing. He found that first point in the twenty-first century, just on the eve of the practical development of the phase drive, just before the diaspora to the Younger Worlds, in a time when all the root stocks of what would later become the Splinter Cultures were to be found together within a single environment - that of Old Earth."
Amanda rose on her elbow again to look down into his face.
"You're going to tell me he actually went back in time, to change the past?"
"Yes and no," Hal said. "He couldn't physically travel back in time, of course. He couldn't actually change the past. But what he found he could do was work his consciousness back along the chain of cause and effect to the time he wanted and there try to make the necessary changes, not in what actually happened then, but in the possible implications of what happened. He could open up to the minds living in that time possibilities that otherwise they might not have seen."
"How did he think he was going to communicate these possibilities - by stepping into people's dreams, then, or speaking to them, mind to mind?"
"No," he said, "by interacting - but as someone who actually did not exist at the time. To make the story as short as possible, he ended by reanimating a dead body, a mining engineer of the twenty-first century, who had drowned, named Paul Formain. As Paul Formain, he influenced people who were the forerunners of the Dorsai, the Friendlies and others - but most of all he influenced the people making up something that was then called the Chantry Guild."
"I remember that from history," said Amanda. "The Exotics came from the Chantry Guild."
"Yes," said Hal. "In the Chantry Guild and seed organizations of other Splinter Cultures, he introduced possibilities that were to have their effect, not in Donal's time, but in our present day. Now."
"But when did Donal manage to do this?" Amanda said. "He was in the public eye right up to the moment of his death - when he took that courier ship out alone and was caught by the one-in-a-million chance of not coming out of phase shift."