The face of Mara came up toward them. Then they were suddenly through a high cloud layer, over blue ocean and slanting in toward a coastline. They were over land and dropping, and without warning, there was snow in the air about them. Below, dusted with snowcover, were rolling woodlands from horizon to horizon, with only the occasional white patch of a meadow-clearing to interrupt them; and their ship fell at last toward the still, ice-held ribbon of a minor river, and to what looked like an interconnected clump of graceful, pastel-colored buildings sitting back a small distance from its bank.
They sat down at last on a small weather-controlled pad, showing the bare concrete of its surface to the clouded sky. Hal stepped out, followed by Simon, and found Amid, in a light gray robe, waiting for them.
"Amid, this is Simon Khan Graeme," Hal said, stepping aside to let Simon come forward. "He's driving me around these days, courtesy of the Dorsai."
"Honored to meet you, Simon Khan Graeme," said Amid.
"And I, you," said Simon.
In the Exotic fashion, Amid did not offer his hand; and Simon did not seem to expect it. Hal had forgotten how tiny the older man was. Seeing him now, as he stood looking up at Simon's face, Hal registered their difference in size with a mild emotional shock. It was almost as if Amid had aged and dwindled since Hal had last seen him. Standing together on the pad, there was only still dry, warm air surrounding them; but, beyond, about the house, over the river and above the trees, the snow was quietly sifting down in large, soft flakes.
It was strange to see it. Somehow, Hal had always thought of the two Exotic worlds as caught in an endless summer of blue skies and green fields. With Simon, now, he followed Amid off the pad and into the house - if that was really the right word for such a wandering and connected collection of structures - and almost immediately found himself, as usual, without any way of telling whether he was indoors or outdoors, except for an occasional glimpse of snowy surface beyond a weather shield.
Simon was left behind in a suite of rooms that would be his until he left; and Amid took Hal on to find Rukh.
They located her after a little while, wrapped in what looked more like a colorful, antique quilt than anything else, seated by the side of a free-form pool surrounded by tall green plants that arched long, spade-shaped leaves over the lounging float upon which she was stretched out.
She threw off the quilt and sat up when she caught sight of them, her float adjusting to her new posture. She was wearing an ankle-length Exotic robe of maroon and white, the ample folds of which helped to hide how she had lost weight. Her olive skin looked sallow but her face, in its gauntness, was more beautiful than ever. They came up to her and Hal reached down to kiss her. It was still a wire-strong young body that his arms enclosed; but thin, thin…
He let go of her as Amid brought up floats for the two of them; and they sat down together.
"Thank you, Hal," she said.
"For what?" he asked.
"For being God's instrument to set me free."
"I had reasons of my own for doing it." His voice sounded roughly over the quiet pool - but hid, and effectively reburied, the chill of fury momentarily reawakened in him by the sight of how frail she was. "I needed you - I have plans for you."
"Not you, only." She looked at him closely. "You're a lot older, now."
"Yes." A soberness in him had replaced the first stirrings of remembered emotion. "I still need to explain to you, though, why it was I did something different than I told you I was going to do - back when the Militia was after us all, there outside Ahruma."
"You don't have to explain." She smiled. "I understood it, later. How you'd taken the only way there was to protect the rest of us and get the explosives safely into Ahruma, out of the Militia's reach. Once I understood, we scattered, and lost them. We stayed scattered until it was time to gather together again to destroy the Core Tap. But by doing what you did for us, you delivered yourself up to the Militia."
And she put one narrow hand softly on his arm.
"They carried me around on a silver platter in that jail - " he said, suddenly and bitterly, "compared to what they did to you!"
"But I was enguarded of God," her voice reproved him, gently. "You were not. There was no way they could touch me with anything they might do; any more than anything you might have done could have touched Amyth Barbage in the courtyard there, afterwards."
An uncomfortableness moved in him - something as yet not understood, as the scene she spoke of came back to him. But she smiled at him again, gently and tolerantly, the way a mother might smile at a child who did not yet understand some completely ordinary matter, and the uncomfortableness was forgotten.
"You say you had reasons for doing what you did?" Her brown eyes watched him gravely. "What reasons were these?"
"I've still got them," he said. "Rukh - there's a place that needs you more than Harmony does."
He had expected her to object to that, and he paused, waiting. But she merely continued to look at him, patiently.
"Go on," she said.
"I'm talking about Old Earth," he told her. "The Others have been holding back from an all-out effort at getting control of the people there, because so many show that strong, apparently innate resistance to their charismatic talent. You know about that. So Bleys and the rest have been marking time, hoping they could figure out a way around the problem, before trying to move in. But time's getting short for them, as well as us. They'll have to start pushing onto Old Earth, any time now."
"But they've already got people there, haven't they?" Rukh asked. "We were told on Harmony that a secret group of unknown but influential Earth locals are afraid of them; and that these've been running a campaign to prejudice the general mass of Earth's people against them?" She looked at him closely. "Or was that report just a divide and conquer technique, on Bleys' part?"
Hal nodded.
"But if they're not going to be able to convert any important percentage of the populace there, in any case," she went on, "why worry about them? Even if they put on what you call a push, it wouldn't look as if they'd have much luck."
"I'll tell you why." Hal sat back on his float. "When they had me in that Militia cell, I was running a high fever and I hit a decision point in my life. The result was, I went into what you might want to call a sort of mental overdrive; and I realized a number of things I hadn't been able to see earlier."
She reached out to put her hand on his, softly, for a moment.
"You don't need to feel for me," he told her gently in return. "I told you they carried me around on a silver platter there, compared to what they did to you."
"No one seems to understand you - how you fight in a battle larger than any of ours," she murmured. "But I know."
"Some of us have some idea, I think," murmured Amid.
Hal curled his fingers around hers.
"One of the things I suddenly understood, then," he went on, "was that the charismatic talent, instead of being some special gift of genetic accident, given only to those who were Others, was really just a developed form of an ability that had been already sharpened to a fine edge on your own worlds, Harmony and Association. It was the ability to proselyte and convert - worked over, refined, and raised to a slightly higher power. The only ones among the Others who really have it are those like Bleys Ahrens who are at least partial products of the Friendly Worlds."
"Friendly? The records say Bleys is a mixture of Dorsai and Exotic," Amid put in.
"I know he's claimed that; and that that's what the records say, as far as they say anything about him," answered Hal; "and I've got no hard evidence to the contrary. But I've met him; and in some ways I think I know him better than anyone else alive. He's all three Splinter Cultures - "