“Whatever works,” I said. “I’ll go and see what else Ian can find for me to do.”
I turned and went to the door that would let me back into the interior of Gebel Nahar.
“Thank you again,” he called after me. There was a note of relief in his voice that moved me more strongly than I had expected, so that instead of telling him that what I had done in listening to him was nothing at all, I simply waved at him and went inside.
I found my way back to Ian’s office, but he was not there. It occurred to me, suddenly, that Kensie, Pad-ma or Amanda might know where he had gone—and they should all be at work in other offices of that same suite.
I went looking, and found Kensie with his desk covered with large scale printouts of terrain maps.
“Ian?” he said. “No, I don’t know. But he ought to be back in his office soon. I’ll have some work for you tonight, by the way. I want to mine the approach slope. Michael’s bandsmen can do the actual work, after they’ve had some rest from the day; but you and I are going to need to go out first and make a sweep to pick up any observers they’ve sent from the regiments to camp outside our walls. Then, later, before dawn
I’d like some of us to do a scout of that camp of theirs on the plains and get some hard ideas as to how many of them there are, what they have to attack with, and so on. . .”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m all slept up now, myself. Call on me when you want me.”
“You could try asking Amanda or Padma if they know where Ian is.”
“I was just going to.”
Amanda and Padma were in a conference room two doors down from Kensie’s office, seated at one end of a long table covered with text printouts and with an activated display screen flat in its top. Amanda was studying the screen and they both looked up as I put my head in the door. But while Padma’s eyes were sharp and questioning, Amanda’s were abstract, like the eyes of someone refusing to be drawn all the way back from whatever was engrossing her.
“Just a question. . .” I said.
“I’ll come,” Padma said to me. He turned to Amanda. “You go on.”
She went back to her contemplation of the screen without a word. Padma got up and came to me, stepping into the outside room and shutting the door behind him.
“I’m trying to find Ian.”
“I don’t know where he’d be just now,” said Padma. “Around Gebel Nahar somewhere—but saying that’s not much help.”
“Not at the size of this establishment,” I nodded toward the door he had just shut.
“It’s getting rather late, isn’t it,” I asked, “for Amanda to hope to turn up some sort of legal solution?”
“Not necessarily.” The outer office we were standing in had its own window wall, and next to that window wall were several of the heavily overstuffed armchairs that were a common article of furniture in the place. “Why don’t we sit down there? If he comes in from the corridor, he’s got to go through this office, and if he comes out on the terrace of this level, we can see him through the window.”
We went over and took chairs.
“It’s not exact, actually, to say that there’s a legal way of handling this situation that Amanda’s looking for. I thought you understood that?”
“Her work is something I don’t know a thing about,” I told him. “It’s a specialty that grew up as we got more and more aware that the people we were making contracts with might have different meanings for the same words, and different notions of implied obligations, than we had. So we’ve developed people like Amanda, who steep themselves in the differences of attitude and idea we might run into, in the splinter cultures we deal with.”
“I know,” he said.
“Yes, of course you would, wouldn’t you?”
“Not inevitably,” he said. “It happens that as an Outbond, I wrestle with pretty much the same sort of problems that Amanda does. My work is with people who aren’t Exotics, and my responsibility most of the time is to make sure we understand them—and they us. That’s why I say what we have here goes for beyond legal matters.”
“For example?” I found myself suddenly curious.
“You might get a better word picture if you said what Amanda is searching for is a social solution to the situation.”
“I see,” I said. “This morning Ian talked about Amanda saying that there always was a solution, but the problem here was to find it in so short a time. Did I hear that correctly—that there’s always a solution to a tangle like this?”
“There’s always any number of solutions,” Padma said. “The problem is to find the one you’d prefer—or
maybe just the one you’d accept. Human situations, being human-made, are always mutable at human hands, if you can get to them with the proper pressures before they happen. Once they happen, of course, they become history—“
He smiled at me.
“—And history, so far at least, is something we aren’t able to change. But changing what’s about to happen simply requires getting to the base of the forces involved in time, with the right sort of pressures exerted in the right directions. What takes time is identifying the forces, finding what pressures are possible and where to apply them.”
“And we don’t have time.”
His smile went.
“No. In fact, you don’t.”
I looked squarely at him.
“In that case, shouldn’t you be thinking of leaving, yourself?” I said. “According to what I gather about these Naharese, once they overrun this place, they’re liable to kill anyone they come across here. Aren’t you too valuable to Mara to get your throat cut by some battle-drunk soldier?”
“I’d like to think so,” he said. “But you see, from our point of view, what’s happening here has importances that go entirely beyond the local, or even the planetary situation. Ontogenetics identifies certain individuals as possibly being particularly influential on the history of their time. Ontogenetics, of course, can be wrong—it’s been wrong before this. But we think the value of studying such people as closely as possible at certain times is important enough to take priority over everything else.”
“Historically influential? Do you mean William?” I said. “Who else—not the Conde? Someone in the revolutionary camp?”
Padma shook his head.
“If we tagged certain individuals publicly as being influential men and women of their historic time, we would only prejudice their actions and the actions of the people who knew them and muddle our own conclusions about them—even if we could be sure that ontogenetics had read their importance rightly; and we can’t be sure.”
“You don’t get out of it that easily,” I said. “The fact you’re physically here probably means that the individuals you’re watching are right here in Gebel
Nahar. I can’t believe it’s the Conde. His day is over, no matter how things go. That leaves the rest of us. Michael’s a possibility, but he’s deliberately chosen to bury himself. I know I’m not someone to shape history. Amanda? Kensie and Ian?”
He looked at me a little sadly.
“All of you, one way or another, have a hand in shaping history. But who shapes it largely, and who only a little is something I can’t tell you. As I say, ontogenetics isn’t that sure. As to whom I may be watching, I watch everyone.”
It was a gentle, but impenetrable, shield he opposed me with. I let the matter go. I glanced out the window, but there was no sign of Ian.
“Maybe you can explain how Amanda, or you go about looking for a solution,” I said.
“As I said, it’s a matter of looking for the base of the existing forces at work—“
“The ranchers—and William?”
He nodded.
“Particularly William—since he’s the prime mover. To get the results he wants, William or anyone else has to set up a structure of cause and effect, operating through individuals. So, for anyone else to control the forces already set to work, and bend them to different results, it’s necessary to find where William’s structure is vulnerable to cross-pressures and arrange for those to operate—again through individuals.”
“And Amanda hasn’t found a weak point yet?”
“Of course she has. Several.” He frowned at me, but with a touch of humor. “I don’t have any objection to telling you all this. You don’t need to draw me with leading questions.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right. As I say, she’s already found several. But none that can be implemented between now and sometime tomorrow, if the regiments attack Gebel Nahar then.”
I had a strange sensation. As if a gate was slowly but inexorably being closed in my face.