She nodded.
"So," he said, "Bleys knows he's got people with the talent to do that; and his assumption will be we've got no one to stop them. But we do - we've got you Rukh; and those like you. I escaped from the Militia by getting out of an ambulance that was taking me to the hospital; and the reason I could escape was because the ambulance was caught in the crowd listening to you speak in that square at Ahruma. I heard you that day, Rukh - and there's nothing permanent in the way of changing minds Bleys or any others of his people can do, talking to an audience, that you can't match. In addition, you know other true holders of the Faith who could join you in opposing the crowd-leaders Bleys will be sending to Earth. Those others like you are there - on Harmony and Association. They'd never listen to me, if I tried to convince them to come. But you could - by coming yourself first and sending your words back to those who're left behind you as well as those you'll be speaking to on Earth."
He stopped speaking.
"Will you?" he asked.
She sat, looking at and through him for a little while. When she did begin to speak, it was so softly that if he had not been straining to hear her answer, he would have had difficulty understanding her.
"When I was in my cell alone, there, near the end of the time I was prisoner of the Militia," she said, talking almost as if to herself, "I spoke to my God and thanked Him for giving me this chance to testify for Him, I resigned myself once more to His will; and asked Him to show me how I might best serve Him in the little time I thought I had left."
Her eyes came back and focused penetratingly only on him.
"And His answer came - that I should know better than to ask. That, as one of the Faith, I already knew that the way I must travel at any time would always become plain and clear to me, once it was time for me to take it up. When I accepted this, a happiness came over me, of a kind I hadn't felt since James Child-of-God left the Command to die alone, so the rest of us might survive. You remember that, Hal, because you were the last to speak to him. I understood, then, that all I had to do was wait for my path to appear; for I knew now that it would do so, in its own good time. And I've been waiting, in peace and happiness, since then - "
She reached out to take Hal's hand.
"And it's a special joy to me, Hal, that you should be the one to point it out to me."
He held her hand; wasted, weak and fragile within his own powerful fingers and wide palm; and he could feel the strength that flowed between them - not from him to her, but the other way around. He leaned forward and kissed her again, then got to his feet.
"We'll talk some more as soon as I've done what I came here for," he said. "Rest and get strong."
"As fast as I can." She smiled; and smiling, she watched them go.
The amphitheater into which Amid brought Hal was deceptive to the eye. Hal's first impression was that it was a small place, holding at most thirty or forty people in the seats of the semicircle of rising tiers. Then he caught a slight blurring at the edges of his vision and realized that in any direction in which he looked, the faces of those in the audience directly in focus were clear and sharp; but that beyond that area of sharpness and clarity, there was a faint ring of fuzzily visible faces. He seemed to be looking across an enormous distance at mere dots of people. With that he realized that the smallness of amphitheater and audience was a deception; and that a telescopic effect was bringing close any area he looked at directly to give the impression of smallness to an area that must hold an uncountable number of individuals - who each undoubtedly saw him at short distance.
Padma, the very aged Exotic he had met before, was standing on the low platform facing up at the seats of the amphitheater, dwarfed by the slim, erect, wide-shouldered shape of Bleys, now dressed in a loose, light gray jacket, over dark, narrow-legged trousers, and towering over the aged Exotic. The illusion Hal had encountered so frequently - of Bleys standing taller than human - was here again; but as Hal himself approached the two men, it was as if Bleys dwindled toward normal limits of size. Until at last when they were finally face to face, as it had also happened the last time they had met, he and the leader of the Others stood level, eye to eye, the same size.
It registered in Hal's mind that Bleys had changed since that last meeting, in some subtle way. There were no new lines of age in his features, no obvious alteration in any part of his features. But nonetheless there was an impression about him of having become worn to a finer point, the skin of his face drawn more taut over its bones. He looked at Hal quietly, remotely, even a little wistfully.
"Hal Mayne," said Amid at Hal's elbow, as the two of them reached Padma and Bleys, "would prefer that Bleys Ahrens speaks first."
"Of course," Bleys murmured. His eyes rested for a moment longer in contact with Hal's. It seemed to Hal that in Bleys' expression, there was something that was not quite an appeal, but came close to being one. Then the Other's gaze moved away, to sweep out over the amphitheater.
"I'll leave you to it, then," said Hal.
He turned and led the two Exotics back off the platform to some chair floats that were ranked on the floor beside it. They sat down, the back of their floats against the wall that backed the platform. They sat, looking out at the amphitheater and the side and back of Bleys.
Standing alone on the stage, he seemed once more to tower, taller than any ordinary human might stand, above audience and amphitheater, alike.
Unexpectedly he spread his long arms wide, at shoulder height, to their fullest extent.
"Will you listen to me?" he said to the Exotic audience. "For a few moments only, will you listen to me - without preconceptions, without already existing opinions, as if I was a petitioner at your gates whom you'd never heard before?"
There was a long moment of silence. Slowly, he dropped his arms to his side.
"It's painful, I know," he went on, speaking the words slowly and separately, "always, it is painful when times change; when everything we've come to take for granted has to be reexamined. All at once, our firmest and our most cherished beliefs have to be pulled out by the roots, out of those very places where we'd always expected them to stand forever, and subjected to the same sort of remorseless scrutiny we'd give to the newest and wildest of our theories or thoughts."
He paused and looked deliberately from one side of the amphitheater to the other.
"Yes, it's painful," he went on, "but we all know it happens. We all have to face that sort of self-reexamination, sooner or later. But of all peoples, those I'd have expected to face this task the best would have been the peoples of Mara and Kultis."
He paused again. His voice lifted.
"Haven't you given your lives, and the lives of all your generations to that principle, ever since you ceased to call yourselves the Chantry Guild and come here to these Exotic Worlds, searching for the future of humankind? Not just searching toward that future by ways you found pleasant and palatable, but by all the ways to it you could find, agreeable or not? Isn't that so?"
Once more he looked the audience over from side to side, as if waiting for objection or argument; and after a moment he went on.
"You've grown into the two worlds of peoples who dominated the economies of all the inhabited worlds - so that you wouldn't have to spare time from your search to struggle for a living. You've bought and sold armies so that you'd be free of fighting, and of all the emotional commitment that's involved in it - all so you'd have the best possible conditions to continue your work, your search. Now, after all those many years of putting that search first, you seem ready to put it in second place to a taking of sides, in a transient, present-day dispute. I tell you frankly, because by inheritance I'm one of you, as I think you know, that even if it should be the side I find myself on that you wish to join, at the expense of your long struggle to bring about humanity's future, I'd still stand here as I do now, and ask you to think again of what you have to lose by doing so."