"He didn't die," said Hal. "It was simply assumed he'd died, when he didn't arrive where and when he was supposed to and no trace of his ship could be found. He hid in space for over eighty years, until it was time to let the ship be found, drifting into Old Earth orbit."
She said nothing for a long moment.
"With a baby aboard," she said. "A very young child - that was you?"
"Yes." Hal nodded. "It's something the mind can do with the body, if it has to. Even Cletus mended his crippled leg with his mind."
"I know that story," said Amanda. "But the Exotics helped him."
"No," said Hal. "They just provided the excuse for him to believe in his own ability to do it."
She said nothing, looking at him.
"We've had miracle cures reported all down the centuries," he said. "Long before the Exotics. They, themselves, have quite a library on such incidents, I understand. So, I hear, has the Final Encyclopedia. I believe I was dying in that cell from the pneumonia or whatever it was I had, until I realized I couldn't afford to die. Shortly after that realization, my fever broke. Of course, it could have been coincidence. But mothers have stayed untouched in the midst of epidemics as long as they were needed to care for their sick children."
"Yes," she said, slowly. "I do know what you mean."
"That, and taking over a dead body as life leaves it, are only two aspects of the same thing. But I don't want to get off on that business now. The main point is, Donal went back and became Paul Formain, so as to change the shape of things to come - and to change himself."
"Will you sit up?" Amanda said. "Then I can sit up, too. I can't lie propped on one elbow indefinitely."
They arranged themselves in seated position, side by side, with their backs protected by pillows from the metal bars of the bedstead behind them. The narrow width of the single bed left them still close, still touching.
"Now," said Amanda. "You said - 'and to change himself.' Change himself how?"
"Donal'd seen how he'd gone astray in his own time," Hal said. "He felt it was because he had failed to feel as he should for those around him - and he was right, as far as that went. At any rate, he went out to learn the ability to feel another's feelings, so that he could never again fall into the trap of thinking he had changed people when actually all he'd done was change the laws that controlled their actions."
"Empathy? That was what he wanted?"
"Yes," said Hal.
"And he found it?"
"He learned it. But it wasn't enough."
Amanda looked at him.
"What is it bothers you so about this time Donal - no, not Donal - when you were this animated dead man… what was his name?"
"Paul Formain," Hal said. "It's not easy to explain. You see as Formain, he - I - did it again. Donal'd played God. He hadn't done it just for the sake of playing God, but that's what the effect he'd had on the populations of fourteen worlds had amounted to. Then when he saw what he'd done it sickened him, and he decided whatever else he did, he wouldn't be guilty of doing it again. Then, as Paul Formain, he went and did just that."
"He did?" Amanda stared at him. "I don't see why you say that - unless you call it playing God to plant the possibilities of our present time…"
Her own voice ran down.
"No!" she said, suddenly and strongly. "Follow that sort of reasoning and you end up with the fact that to try to do anything for people, even for the best of reasons, is immoral."
"No," Hal said. "I don't mean that. What I mean is that once again, he realized he'd acted without sufficient understanding. As Donal he hadn't considered people at all, except as chess pieces on a board. As Paul Formain, he considered people - but only those with whom he learned to empathize. He was still trying to work with humanity from the outside - that was what hadn't changed in him."
He paused, then went on.
"He faced that, after he'd done what he'd gone back to the twenty-first century to do. He'd set in motion the very factors that are now bringing the internal struggle of the race animal out into the open and forcing everyone to take sides, with the Others or against, for the survival of us all. But he'd done it, in a sense, with a certain blindness; and it was because of that blindness that he couldn't foresee someone like Bleys and the growth of power behind him. After he returned Paul Formain's body to the ocean bed from which he had lifted it, he realized how he had gone wrong - although he couldn't yet foresee the consequences, that hold us in a vise right now. But he understood enough finally to see what his great fault had been."
"His great fault?" said Amanda, almost harshly. "And what was that great fault?"
"Just that he'd never had the courage to give up the one apart corner of himself, to abandon standing apart from everyone else." Hal turned his head to look directly at her. "He'd been the 'odd boy,' according to his teachers. He'd been the small and different ugly duckling among the Graemes. He'd been born with the same sort of mind that led Bleys Ahrens to put himself lightyears apart from the rest of the race. Donal, too, had been born an isolated individual, suffered from that isolation, and come to embrace it, as Bleys had embraced it. With his development of empathy, Paul Formain could begin to feel what someone else might be feeling, but he felt it as any human being might feel a frog's hunger for a passing fly. The soul of him still stood alone and apart from all those he had thought early had cast him out."
Again, he paused.
"I was afraid to be human, then," he said. He did not look at her, but he felt her arm go around his waist and her head come to rest on his shoulder.
"Not any more," she said.
"No.'' He heaved a very deep sigh. "But it was literally the hardest thing I ever had to do. Only there was no choice. There was the commitment. I had to go forward - and so I did."
"By coming back as a child," she said.
"As a child," he agreed. "Starting all over again without memory, without strength, without the skills of two lifetimes to protect myself with in an arena I'd built and didn't know I'd built. So I could finally learn, once and for all, to be like everybody else."
"Was it so absolutely necessary to do that?" he heard her asking from the region of his shoulder.
"It was critical," he said. "You can lead or drive from the outside, but you can only show the way from inside. It's not just enough to know how they feel - you have to feel it with them. That was the mistake I made being Formain and thinking empathy alone was going to give me what I needed to get the work done. And I was right - all the years of being Hal Mayne have proved how right I was, this last time. I was born Donal, and nothing I can do can ever leave him behind, but I can be a larger Donal. I can feel as if I belong to the community of all people - and I do."
He stopped and turned his head to look down into her face.
"And, of course," he said, "it brought me you."
"Who knows?" she said. "You might've come to it anyway by a different route, eventually. I still feel things - the historic forces, as you call them - would've brought us together in the long run, one way or another."
"I thought you'd thought it could go either way, and you'd just left it up to fate," he said.
"I did," she answered. "But looking back on it, I was certain you'd be back. I've learned to trust myself in things like that. I know when I'm right. Just as I know…"
She did not finish the sentence.
"Know what?" he asked.
"Nothing. Nothing worth talking about, right now, anyway. Nothing to worry about." He felt her shake her head, briefly. "In ancient times they would have called feeling like that second sight. But it's not giving me anything you ought to be concerned about. Tell me something else. When you talk about the race-animal, do you really mean some entity, actual and separate from us all?"