When they got to Omalu, Amanda landed the jitney beside others in the parking lot of the Central Administrative Offices. Here, rain had moved in once more; and the skies above them were an unbroken, dull-colored mass. They went in the wide, double-doored main entrance and Hal, looking up, saw the two stanzas of A. E. Housman's poem Epitaph on Army of Dead Mercenaries cut into the stone of the wall just above the doors. The four somber lines of the first stanza caught in his mind, as always, as he passed underneath them.
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead …
The room in which the meeting was to be held turned out to be one of the general audience rooms, where matters of concern to large areas of the Dorsai, if not to the planet as a whole, were debated. It was a chamber that could hold at least several hundred people and it was needed for the number who had come this day.
"That many Grey Captains?" Hal said softly to Amanda, as she led him to the platform at the center of the semi-circular room; from which he looked out at the curved ranks of seats, each with a continuous table running in front of it, lifting to the back of the room.
"Active, reactivated, and also all those others who may not be Captains but have become responsible in what we're to do now," she answered, as quietly. "There's no one here who's not involved."
She stood with him on the platform at the lectern, until the conversation in the room died and all eyes came on them.
"I think you all recognize Hal Mayne," she said; her voice reaching clearly to the walls under the excellent acoustics of the chamber. "Rourke di Facino is Chairman of this meeting. I'll leave it to him, now."
She stepped down from the platform and went to sit in the only seat left empty in the first row. Hal recognized the pink, older face of Rourke di Facino in the center of the second row, directly opposite him. He also saw that the second row, and therefore Rourke himself, was directly level with him, leaving the first row, where Amanda sat, slightly below him and all rows from the third upwards, above.
For a moment a touch of impatience stirred in Hal. He could see so clearly now what must be done, without other choice, that meeting like this seemed redundant, a waste of valuable time. Then, surging up in him, came the understanding that this gathering was no less important a ritual than the service and the bagpipe music at the grave of James. He realized that he was listening to the deathsong of a people and his impatience was lost in shame.
He was still standing at the lectern. To his left was also a table and chair, the chair pulled back invitingly, the table empty. But he continued to stand. He put his copy of the contract, which he was still carrying, on the lectern's sloping face before him, and waited. Surprisingly, Rourke did not leave his seat in the audience area, but spoke from there.
"This meeting is now in session," said the small man; his tenor voice beat sharply upward upon the general silence of the room. "I'll announce the time for general discussion when that time comes. Until then, matters will proceed according to the schedule set up by your steering committee."
He stared at Hal.
"We're honored to have you with us again, Hal Mayne," he said.
"Thank you," said Hal.
"Is there anything in particular you want to say before we get into the planned business?"
Hal looked at him and around the room.
"Just… that I see you've anticipated me," he said.
There was a difference in attitude about those he now watched from the lectern, a difference from what he had seen and felt, facing the smaller number of Grey Captains he had talked to at Foralie. What he sensed now was part of the larger difference he had observed earlier in the unplanted fields and all the other changes he had noticed on the Dorsai since he had arrived.
The awareness of it struck him with a sharpness and a poignancy he had not expected to feel. It drew him to identify it and the source of its power upon him; and so, in that moment between his answer to Rourke and Rourke's response to it, he saw more clearly the details of what was before him.
It was as if the moment put itself on pause; as if time held its hand, briefly. But it was not really time holding or being held, but his own mental processes that had been enormously speeded up. Donal had known how to do that; and with the reawakening of Donal inside him, the ability came back to him.
So on that stretched-out second he noticed the clothes worn by those there, while still individual and casual for the most part, were, like Amanda's this morning, yet more formal than what he had seen the last time he had faced the Captains.
In a subtle way, although what they were dressed in varied from individual to individual, there was a preponderance of quiet earth colors, blues and grays, and a majority of open-throated upper garments with collars that laid down neatly, and a fresh cleanliness showed about everything they had on, that gave the impression that they were in a common uniform.
But then he saw that the impression had deeper roots than clothes alone. There was also an innate commonality in the way they sat and in the state of their bodies. All of them, even the older ones present, had the appearance of being healthy and in good physical condition. There was no excess fat to be seen, even on the more thick-boned and thick-chested of those present. They sat easily, upright and square-shouldered in their seats; and they sat still, with the relaxed stillness of those who have their selves under complete control.
… And there was also something even deeper in them than clothes and bodies that made them seem alike, for all their faces were the most varied, one from another, of the faces in any gathering he had seen on the Younger Worlds or Old Earth. No two, from the pink of Rourke's, to the hard black of Miriam Songhai's, to the lightly turned whiteness of Amanda's, were in any way the same. But still the likeness sat on them all; and he recognized its source finally in a similarity of attitude that gave them all a kinship.
For the first time, then, he saw something he had not caught earlier. A bleakness lived in them all, a bleakness that was so deep in each that it lay buried, below actions, below appearance, even below speech.
It was a bleakness hiding a silent and dry-eyed grief. A grief so intense and personal that they did not even speak of it to each other. A grief so fenced apart by custom and responsibility that it could be more easily seen in an unplowed field and unplanted flowers, than by anything said or done by these people. He felt it also in his own soul, recognizing it with that powerful empathy for which he, as Donal, had put off his flesh and returned to the body of a dead man in the twenty-first century, in order to acquire.
Feeling it, he suddenly understood why he had shrunk from talking even to Amanda about that second existence of his as Paul Formain. Each time he had needed to start life again, either as Paul or as Hal, the process of abandoning the life in him that had been, and the beginning again, had been traumatic.
The first time, when he had become Paul Formain, had been hardest of all. To strip the mind naked of knowledge and recollections, to throw the body into an unknown environment trusting it to survive without all that had been a familiar anchor in reality - to accept the very universe as a plastic and changeable thing - had taken more courage than even Donal had realized, until the actual moment of his changing. He had gone on, then, only because there had been no other choice.
Remembering that pain, he came abruptly to a full understanding of the pain in those he faced. It was not from what they would lose personally, or the destruction of their world and way, that they had labored to build for over three hundred years. It was from something even harder to bear; the knowledge that what they had lived with, and once thought of as secure for all foreseeable time, was now passing, would never come again, would in time be all but forgotten and buried forever.