"Not where," said Hal. "But in what. Like all journeys, it has to end in accomplishment - or I've gone nowhere."
"And if it should turn out you have?" asked Walter.
"If he has," Malachi broke in harshly, "he did well - he did his best while he could, at the trying of it. Do you always have to make things difficult for him?"
"That was our job here, Malachi," said Walter, "to make things difficult for him. You know that. He knows that - now. When he was Donal Graeme he saw himself growing away from the soul of humankind. He had to come back - and the only way was a hard way."
He smiled at his two fellow tutors.
"Otherwise why arrange with your intuitive logic that your trustees would choose three like us?"
"I'm sorry," said Hal. "I used you all. I've always used people."
"Maudlin self-pity!" snapped Obadiah. "What weakness is this, after all we taught you, and now that you're face to face at last with what you set out to do?"
Hal grinned, a little wanly.
"You sent me out to become human, after you were killed," he answered. "But you also put me on the road even before you sent me out. Can't you let me be a little human now, from time to time?"
"As long as you get your job done, boy," rumbled Malachi.
"Oh," Hal sobered. "I'll get it done, if it can be done. There's no changing or stopping the juggernaut of history, now. But, you know what the real miracle is? I wanted to start Donal over again, to get him right this time. But what I did worked even better than I could have dreamed. I'm not Donal, redone. I'm Hal; and even all of what Donal was, is only a part of me, now."
"Yes," said Malachi, slowly. "You've put away all armor. I suppose you had to."
"Yes," said Hal. "The passage ahead's too narrow for anyone wearing armor." He lost himself for a moment in thought, then went on, "And all those who come after me are going to have to come naked, likewise, or they won't get through."
He shivered.
"You're afraid," said Walter, quickly, leaning forward intently in his chair. "What are you afraid of, Hal?"
"Of what's coming," said Hal; and shivered again. "Of my own testing."
"Afraid," said a new voice in the room, "of me. Afraid I'll prove him wrong about this human race of ours, after all."
The tall figure of Bleys moved out of an angle in the bookcases and stepped forward to stand between Obadiah's chair and that of Malachi.
"Playing with your imagination, again?" he said to Hal. "Making up ghosts out of the images of your memory - even a ghost of me; and I'm still very much alive."
"You can go," said Hal. "I'll deal with you another time."
But Bleys continued to exist, standing between the chairs holding Malachi and Obadiah.
"Your unconscious doesn't want to dismiss me, it seems," he said.
Hal sighed and looked again into the fire. When he turned back to the room, Bleys was still there with the rest of them.
"No," Hal said. "I guess not."
None of the subjective images replied. They stayed; the three sitting, the one standing, looking at him, but without words.
"Yes," said Hal, after a time, looking back at the fire. "I'm afraid of you, Bleys. I never guessed there would be someone like you; and it shocked me to find you, in real life. If I've evoked your image now, it is to make me see something in myself I don't want to see. That's why you're here."
"My similarity to you," said Bleys. "That's what you don't want to see."
"No." Hal shook his head. "We're really not that similar. We only look that way to everyone else. But that doesn't make us alike. If all the people on all the worlds had in common what you and I have, we wouldn't look alike. Our differences would show, then; and we'd look as unalike - as we actually are."
He glanced briefly into the fire again.
"Unlike as two gladiators pushed into a ring to fight each other," he said.
"No one pushed either of us," said Bleys. "I chose my way. You chose to fight it. I offered you all I had to offer, not to fight me. But you decided to anyway. Who could push either of us, in any case?"
"People," said Hal.
"People!" There was a strange note of anger in Bleys' voice. "People are mayflies. It's no shame or sin in them; it's only fact. But will you die - and that magnificent, unique engine that's yourself be lost, for a swarm of mayflies? Leaving aside the other fact that the only one who can certainly kill you is myself; and you know I won't do that until it's plain you've lost."
"No," said Hal. "You know you'd lose, not gain, by killing me before that. As a dead martyr either one of us would make sure of victory for our side - and perhaps wrongly, by that means. No, it's the contest that's important, not ourselves. A chess Grand Master could shoot his opponent dead before the game between them was done. But the fact the other couldn't finish would prove nothing to the watchers, when it was vital to know whose game was best and who should have won. The watchers might even assume that the one who shot did because he knew he was going to lose - and that might not be true."
He paused. Bleys said nothing.
"I've understood you couldn't afford to kill me," Hal went on, more gently. "You admitted that when you didn't take advantage of my being your prisoner, back in the hands of the Militia on Harmony. You talk of mayflies; but I know - maybe I'm the only one who knows - that you care for the race as a race, in your own way, as much as I do."
"Perhaps," said Bleys, broodingly. "Perhaps you and I only need them to fill the void around us. In any case, the mayflies aren't us. Tomorrow there'll come another swarm of them, to replace what died today, and tomorrow after that, another. Give me one reason you want to sacrifice yourself for what lives only for a single day."
Hal looked at him, bleakly.
"They break my heart," he said.
There was silence in the room.
"I know you don't understand them," Hal said to Bleys. "That's the one great difference between us, the one reason I'm afraid. Because you represent only one part of the race; and if you win… if you win, the part I know is there can be lost forever, now that the race-animal's decided it can't live divided any longer. I can't let that happen."
He stopped speaking for a moment, looking at all four of his subjective images, then back at the shade of the tall Other.
"You don't see what I see," he said, "you can't see it, can you Bleys?"
"I find it," said Bleys slowly and quietly, "inconceivable. There's nothing in them - in us - to break any heart, even if hearts were breakable. We're painted savages, nothing more, in spite of what we like to think of as some thousands of years of civilization. Only our present paint's called clothing and our caves called buildings and spaceships. We're what we were yesterday, and the day before that, back to the point where we dropped on all fours and went like the animals we really are."
"No!" said Hal. "No. And that's the crux of it. That's why I can't let the juggernaut go the way you want. It's not true we're still animals; it's not true we're still savages. We've grown from the beginning. There was never a time we weren't growing; and we're growing now. Everything we face in this moment's only the final result of that growing, when it broke loose into consciousness, finally, a thousand years ago."
"Just a thousand?" Bleys' eyebrows lifted. "Not five hundred or fifteen hundred - or forty, or four thousand?"
"Pick the when and where you like," said Hal. "From any point in the past, the chain of events run inescapably forward to this moment. I've chosen the nexus in the fourteenth century of western Europe, to count from."
"And John Hawkwood," said Bleys, smiling thinly. "The last of the medieval captains, the first of the modern generals. First among the first of the condottieri, you'd say? Sir John, in northern Italy. You see, like these others here, I can read your mind."