"Who'd have thought it'd be like this?" Ajela said exhaustedly to Hal at mid-morning of that fourth day. Like everyone else, she had been operating on little food and less sleep since Tam's speech. "Ninety per cent of this is unnecessary. If some of those people in control down there would only face reality - but I suppose there's no hope of that."
"They actually are facing reality; and, in fact, it actually is necessary," said Hal.
They were in Ajela's office suite, and Ajela had just been talking to the Director of the planet's Northwest Agricultural Sector, who had been only the latest of a large number of officials needing to be reassured that the interposition of the shield-wall between the particular area of his responsibilities and the sun would not somehow have an adverse effect on the ripening grain of that year's upcoming harvest. It was clear he had no idea what kind of adverse effect this could be, but rather, hoped Ajela could tell him of one.
She frowned at Hal; suddenly he was emphatically conscious of how exhausted she was. In anyone but a born Exotic that frown would have been an emotional explosion. He hurried to explain.
"A man like that one you just heard from," Hal said, "is struggling to make an adjustment to the concept of the Encyclopedia as not only a politically potent, but a superior entity. This is a situation that even a week ago was so far-fetched it was inconceivable. But now we've become the main power center, up here. So it's necessary for each member of the power network below to make contact with us and make sure we know they, personally, are also on the political map."
"But we haven't got the staff to play those kinds of games!" said Ajela. "That isn't what's important, anyway. What's important is handling four million Dorsai as they get here and seeing to their resettlement; and even if that was all we were trying to do, we don't have staff enough for it, now that the ships have started arriving; even if we do have all that wealth from the Exotics and can use the Encyclopedia as if it was an automated bureaucracy!"
"All right," said Hal. "Then let's have a communications breakdown."
She stared at him.
"I mean a breakdown as far as conversations with the surface is concerned," Hal said.
Ajela was still staring. She was, Hal realized, more tired than he had thought.
"We can simply simulate an overload, or a power failure - Jeamus'll know what to do," he said. "Either respond to all calls from below as if our phones were tied up, or simply not answer at all with anything but static. We can have the difficulty clear up just as soon as I've made my speech and Rukh begins hers; and that leaves you free to fold up from now until I start talking. That ought to be good for at least four hours sleep for you."
"Four hours," she echoed, as if the words were sounds in some peculiar, unknown tongue. Then her gaze sharpened and she frowned at him again.
"And are you going to fold up too?"
"No," he said. "I don't need to. You've been running things, not me. All I am is ordinarily tired. In fact, it'll give me the chance I haven't had to work on my speech - which is my main concern."
She swayed a little as she sat at her desk, puzzling over what he had said, instinctively feeling the deception in it; but too dulled by fatigue to pinpoint the lie.
"You really think…" she began at last - and ran down.
"I do," he said. He rose and went to her; and over her protests literally lifted her from her float by her elbows. Setting her on her feet, he steered her into her adjoining personal suite and made her lie down on her bed. He sat down in a float beside her.
"What are you doing there?" she demanded, drunk with the exhaustion that was taking her over completely, now that she had let herself admit to it.
"Waiting to make sure you fall asleep."
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "I'm wound up like a spring. I'm not going to fall asleep just like that…"
She stared at him fiercely for all of twenty seconds before her eyes fluttered, closed, and she slept. He set the temperature control above her bed and left.
He went directly to his own quarters, now enlarged into a suite to provide space for the kind of conferences his new obligations as Director required; and sat down to put in a call to Rukh, Nonne, Rourke, Amid and Jason.
"Conference in two hours," he told them. "Here."
Having passed that message he went to the same bay into which he, Rukh and Jason had arrived less than a week before. The same bay commander was on duty.
"Chui," he said to her, "I need a skidder to go visit the Dorsai transports parked in orbit."
A shuttle was unloading; and a man in a pilot's uniform had just stepped out of the airlock among the passengers. She broke off to shout at him.
"No, you don't! Back in there! Passengers only. No crew allowed off the transport at this end!"
Her voice was considerable. He would not have thought it of her. She turned back, saw him watching her and looked, for a second, a little flustered.
"We've all changed, I guess," she said. "You want a driver?"
"No."
"If you want to go up to the front of the bay, out of the passenger area, I'll have one unracked and brought up to you right away."
Five minutes later Hal drove out of the Encyclopedia in his mosquito of a one-man craft and headed toward the parking area of the spaceships from the Dorsai. The gray orb of the Encyclopedia dwindled swiftly behind him at steady acceleration until his instruments warned him he was at midpoint from the nearest of the still-invisible ships. Then he flipped the power segment beneath his seat and rode in toward his destination on metered deceleration; as, with his viewscreen ranging ahead on normal telescopic setting, the first of the spacecraft which had just crossed twenty-three light-years of interstellar emptiness began to come into view.
These, lying ahead of him at protectively spaced intervals, were some of the largest vessels, troops transports of the Dorsai and luxury spaceships that had followed regular schedules between the stars under Exotic ownership. The hundreds of smaller craft that would also be making the trip would lift later from the outlying, smaller community centers like Foralie; and even from personal spacepads built by Dorsai families such as the Graemes who had mustered and trained soldiers on their own land for specific off-Dorsai contracts. But first had come the big ships, loading up from the few cities and larger populations centers.
They were fully visible now in his screen on a scan that compensated for the distance they covered, their parked ranks stretching away from him in a long curve that was part the illusion of distance and space, part actuality. They lay in sunlight translated through the screen, next to the great, apparently vertical wall of it on his right, that stretched upwards and downwards from his viewpoint until all view of it was lost in the blackness of space.
To his left, also in bright sunlight, floated the white-swatched blue orb of the Earth, looking close enough in the compensated view of the screen so that he could reach out at arm's length and touch it. Unimportant in the space that went also between them, and seeming only to crawl along, his tiny skidder crept up on the nearest of the huge vessels. Far ahead, and far behind, where the gray of the shield-wall seemed to vanish, the blackness of space showed the lights of stars, which from that angle and distance were perceptible through it.
A stillness took him. He felt the presence of the universe that dwarfed not only men and women but ships, planets and stars - even galaxies that were no more than scatterings of dust across its inconceivable face. The universe that knew nothing and cared less for the microscopic organism called the human race, that in its many parts tried so hard for survival. It was all around him, and its remoteness and vastness confirmed the isolation of his own spirit. Not on Earth, nor in sky nor space, he floated apart, even from his own kind. A crushing loneliness closed around him; but the call of what he had seen, what Donal had seen, gazing out at the unknown stars in that moment when Padma had at last had a chance and failed to recognize him for what he was, drew him on. With the failure of Padma he had set aside all hope of being touched again by human understanding as one touched one in the race of his birth; and he had left it set aside through two lives since… until this one. Until now…