“Has he renounced the quest of lawfulness?” Thrax asked, seized with bewilderment as he listened.
“Aye,” the Seer answered. “And he accepts his fate with fortitude and humility. The will of the gods and the way of life does indeed work through the whims of chaos. You have the ability, Thrax. Use it to learn the true wisdom.”
“What would he have me do?”
“Begin again. Take thyself hence from the city and the plain. Find
thee a Master who teaches, and learn from him the true way. Seek beyond for Hyperia; it can never be built in Waroth.”
Thrax gasped. “He would have me become a Master?”
“Thus speaks the mind of Dalgren.”
Seized by remorse and a new resolve, Thrax turned his back upon the city, and there and then, taking only the clothes that he stood in, he set off toward the wilderness. And it was as well for him that he did. For even as he fixed his gaze upon the distant mountains, the sheriff of the city was arriving at Dalgren’s house with a troop of guards and a warrant from the Assembly to arrest him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Before joining UNSA, Hunt had been a theoretical physicist employed by the Metadyne Nucleonic Instrument Company, a British subsidiary of the Intercontinental Data & Control Corporation based in Portland, Oregon. IDCC’s senior physicist at that time was a man called Erwin Reutheneger, of Hungarian extraction, well into his eighties, but with a mind still sharper and more agile than most a quarter of his age.
Hunt remembered him talking once about the regrets that he felt, looking back over life. The biggest, it turned out, wasn’t that he had not won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to nucleonic science, or had a lecture series named after him at a major institution of learning, or otherwise made his mark in halls of fame or rolls of honor in a way that would be recorded by posterity. It was a missed opportunity with a petite, French philosophy graduate from the Sorbonne whom he had met in the course of a stay in Paris in 1968, which he was sure would have turned out differently if he’d had a better idea at the time of what was going on. “Don’t become a sad old man who missed his chances” had been his advice. “Have plenty of memories to chuckle about—even the ones that didn’t work out the way you hoped.”
Partly because of Hunt’s nature, and partly because of the hardly orthodox life that he always seemed to find himself leading—as he had told his neighbor, Jerry, a settled domestic existence didn’t go with things like year-long jaunts to Jupiter—it accorded well with his own philosophic disposition toward life. And since his work left little time for any creative precipitation of opportunity, the serendipitous incursions of good fortune that chose occasionally to infuse themselves into life’s pattern were all the less to be sneered at.
Intelligence, he had always found, was the most potent aphrodisiac, and since inhibition did not seem to be one of Gina’s problems, he had not bothered overly to disguise the fact. He had found himself intrigued by her questioning ways and curious to learn what else her peripatetic interests had led her to explore. She, for her part, had done nothing to hide her fascination for somebody who had crossed the Solar System and who took calls at home from aliens at other stars. What happened next would develop in its own time, if it wanted to. Rushing the situation would be the worst thing to do, as well as not being in the best of taste. But a small helping hand while it was making its mind up wasn’t the same thing at all, Hunt told himself.
Caldwell had stressed that Gina’s involvement with the Jevien mission had to be, as far as outward appearances went, a private matter, unconnected with UNSA. Therefore, Hunt reasoned, he could hardly invite’ her to Goddard to brief her on it. Accordingly, he called her at the Maddox later in the evening after his talk with Caldwell and told her that he had some news. Could they get together later somewhere and talk about it?