“No!” I said harshly. And Mark Torre made a faint, rattling sound deep in his throat, like a dying echo of the wounded grunt he had given earlier.
“No. That’s right,” said Padma, nodding. “You see, as I said, you’ve got no empathy-no soul.”
“Soul?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Can I describe the color of gold to a man blind from birth?” His eyes were brilliant upon me. “You’ll know it if you find it-but you’ll find it only if you can fight your way through that valley I mentioned. If you come through that, finally, then maybe you’ll find your human soul. You’ll know it when you find it.”
“Valley,” I echoed, at last. “What valley?”
“You know, Tarn,” said Padma more quietly. “You know, better than I do. That valley of the mind and spirit where all the unique creativity in you is now turned-warped and twisted-toward destruction.”
‘OBSTRUCT!”
There it thundered, in the voice of my uncle, ringing in the ear of my memory, quoting, as Mathias always did, from the writings of Walter Blunt. Suddenly, as if printed in fiery letters on the inner surface of my skull, I saw the power and possibilities of that word to me, on the path I wanted to travel.
And without warning, in my mind’s eye, it was as if the valley of which Padma had been speaking became real around me. High black walls rose on either side of me. Straight ahead was my route and narrow-and downward. Abruptly, I was afraid, as of something at the deepest depth, unseen in the farther darkness beyond, some blacker-than-black stirring of amorphous life that lay in wait for me there.
But, even as I shuddered away from this, from somewhere inside me a great, shadowy, but terrible joy swelled up at the thought of meeting it. While, as if from a great distance above me, like a weary bell, came the voice of Mark Tone sadly and hoarsely tolling at Padma.
“No chance for us, then? There’s nothing at all we can do? What if he never comes back to us, and the Encyclopedia?”
“You can only wait-and hope he does,” Padma’s voice was answering. “If he can go on and down and through what he has created for himself, and survive, he may come back. But the choice has always been up to him, heaven or hell, as it is to all of us. Only his choices are greater than ours.”
The words pattered like nonsense against my ears, like the sound of a little gust of cold rain against some unfeeling surface like stone or concrete. I felt suddenly a great need to get away from them all, to get off by myself and think. I climbed heavily to my feet.
“How do I get out of here?” I asked thickly.
“Lisa,” said Mark Torre, sadly. I saw her get to her feet.
“This way,” she said to me. Her face was pale but expressionless, facing me for a moment. Then she turned and went before me.
So she led me out of that room and back the way we had come. Down through the light-maze and the rooms and corridors of the Final Encyclopedia Project and at last to the outer lobby of the Enclave, where our group had first met her. All the way she did not say a word; but when I left her at last, she stopped me unexpectedly, with a hand on my arm. I turned back to face down at her.
“I’m always here,” she said. And I saw to my astonishment that her brown eyes were brimming with tears. “Even if no one else is-I’m always here!”
Then she turned swiftly and almost ran off. I stared after her, unexpectedly shaken. But so much had happened to me in the past hour or so that I did not have the time or desire to try to discover why, or figure out what the girl could have meant by her strange words, echoing her strange words earlier.
I took the subway back into St. Louis and caught a shuttle flight back to Athens, thinking many things.
So wound up I was in my own thoughts that I entered my uncle’s house and walked clear into its library before I was aware of people already there.
Not merely my uncle, seated in his high wing chair, with an old leather-bound book spread open, face down and ignored on his knees, and not only my sister, who had evidently returned before me, standing to one side and racing him, from about ten feet away.
Also in the room was a thin, dark young man some inches shorter than myself. The marie of his Berber ancestry was plain to anyone who, like myself, had been required in college to study ethnic origins. He was dressed all in black, his black hair was cut short above his forehead, and he stood like the upright blade of an unsheathed sword.
He was the stranger I had seen Eileen talking to at the Enclave. And the dark joy of the promised meeting in the valley’s depths leaped up again in me. For here, waiting, without my need to summon it, was the first chance to put to use my newly discovered understanding and my strength.
CHAPTER 4
It was a square of conflict.
So much already of the discovery I had made in the place of lightning was already beginning to work in my conscious mind. But almost immediately, this new acuteness of perception in me was momentarily interrupted by recognition of my own personal involvement in the situation.
Eileen threw me one white-faced glance as she saw me, but then looked directly back at Mathias, who sat neither white-featured nor disturbed. His expressionless, spade-shaped face, with its thick eyebrows and thick hair, still uniformly black although he was in his late fifties, was as cold and detached as usual. He, also, looked over at me, but only casually, before turning to meet Eileen’s emotional gaze.
“I merely say,” he said to her, “that I don’t see why you should bother to ask me about it. I’ve never placed any restraints on you, or Tarn. Do what you want.” And his fingers closed on the book that was face down on his knees as if he would pick it up again and resume reading.
‘ ‘Tell me what to do!” cried Eileen. She was close to tears and her hands were clenched into fists at her sides.
“There’s no point in my telling you what to do,” said Mathias remotely. “Whatever you do will make no difference-to you or me, or even to this young man, over here-” he broke off and turned to me. “Oh, by the way, Tarn. Eileen’s forgotten to introduce you. This visitor of ours is Mr. Jamethon Black, from Harmony.”
“Force-Leader Black,” said the young man turning to me his thin, expressionless face. “I’m on attache duty here.”
At that, I identified his origin. He was from one of the worlds called, in sour humor by the people of the other worlds, the Friendlies. He would be one of the religious, spartan-minded zealots who made up the population of those worlds. It was strange, very strange it seemed to me then, that of all the hundreds of types and sorts of human societies which had taken seed on the younger planets, that a society of religious fanatics should turn out, along with the soldier type of the Dorsai World, the philosopher type of the Exotics, and the hard-science-minded people of Newton and Venus, to be one of the few distinct great Splinter Cultures to grow and flourish as human colonies between the stars.
And a distinct Splinter Culture they were. Not of soldiers, for all that the other fourteen worlds heard of them most often as that. The Dorsai were soldiers-men of war to the bone. The Friendlies were men of Devotion-if grim and hair-shirt devotion- who hired themselves out because their resource-poor worlds had little else to export for the human contractual balances that would allow them to hire needed professionals from other planets.
There was small market for evangelists-and this was the only crop that the Friendlies grew naturally on their thin, stony soil. But they could shoot and obey orders-to the death. And they were cheap. Eldest Bright, First on the Council of Churches ruling Harmony and Association, could underbid any other government in the supplying of mercenaries. Only- never mind the military skill of those mercenaries.
The Dorsai were true men of war. The weapons of battle came to their hands like tame dogs, and fitted their hands like gloves. The common Friendly soldier took up a gun as he might take up an axe or a hoe-as a tool needing to be wielded for his people and his church.
So that those who knew said it was the Dorsai who supplied soldiers to the sixteen worlds. The Friend-lies supplied cannon fodder.