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oriented toward violent effect upon the pattern."
I wet my lips.
What other individual?
"Ian Graeme."
I stood, staring at him.
"Ian found his brother's three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain,"
said Padma. "He killed them with his hands-and by so doing he calmed the
mercenaries and frustrated the plans of the Blue Front to salvage something
out of the situation. But then Ian resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He's
charged now with the same sense of loss and -bitterness you were charged with
when you came to St. Marie." Padma hesitated. "Now he has great causal
potential. How it will expend itself within the future pattern remains to be
seen."
He paused again, watching me with his inescapable yellow gaze.
"You see, Tam," he went on after a moment, "how no one like you can resign
from effect upon the fabric of events? I tell you you can only change. His
voice softened. "Do I have to remind you now that you're still charged-only
with a different force instead? You received the full impact and effect of
Jamethon's self-sacrifice to save his men."
His words were like a fist in the pit of my stomach-a blow as hard as the one
I had given Janol Marat when I escaped from Kensie's camp on St. Marie. In
spite of the new, watery sunlight filtering down to us, I began to shiver.
It was so. I could not deny it. Jamethon, in giving his life up for a belief,
where I had scorned all beliefs in my plan to twist things as I wanted them,
had melted and changed me as lightning melts and changes the uplifted
sword-blade that it strikes. I could not deny what had happened to me.
"It's no use," I said, still shivering. "It makes no difference. I'm not
strong enough to do anything. I tell you, I moved everything against Jamethon,
and he won.
"But Jamethon was wholehearted; and you were fighting against your true
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nature at the same time you fought him," said Padma. "Look at me, Tam!"
I looked at him. The hazel magnets of his eyes caught and anchored mine.
"The purpose for which on the Exotics it was calculated I should come to meet
you here is still waiting for us," he said. "You remember, Tam, how in Mark
Torre's office you accused me of hypnotizing you?" I nodded.
"It wasn't hypnosis-or not quite hypnosis," he said. "All I did was to help
you open a channel between your conscious and unconscious selves. Have you got
the courage, after seeing what Jamethon did, to let me help you open it once
again?"
His words hung on the air between us; and, balanced on the pinpoint of that
moment, I heard the strong, proud-textured voice praying inside the church. I
saw the sun trying to pierce through the thinning clouds overhead; and at the
same time, in my mind's eye, I saw the dark walls of my valley as Padma had
described them that day long ago back at the Encyclopedia. They were there
still, high and close about me, shutting out the sunlight. Only, like a narrow
doorway, still ahead of me, was there unshadowed light.
I thought of the place of lightning I had seen when Padma held up his finger
to me that time before; and-weak, and broken and defeated as I felt now- the
thought of entering that area of battle again filled me with a sick
hopelessness. I was not strong enough to face lightning anymore. Maybe I never
had been.
"For he hath been a soldier of his people, who are the People of the Lord,
and a soldier of the Lord," the distant, single voice praying from the church
came faintly to my ear, "and in no thing did he fail the Lord, who is our
Lord, and the Lord of all strength and righteousness. Therefore, let him be
taken up from us into the ranks of those who, having shed the mask of life,
are blessed and welcomed unto the Lord."
I heard this, and suddenly the taste of homecoming, the taste of an
undeniable return to an eternal home and unshakable certainty in the faith of
my forefathers, was strong in my mouth. The ranks of those who would never
falter closed comfortingly around me; and I, who also had not faltered, moved
into step and went forward with them. In that second, for a second, then, I
felt what Jamethon must have felt, faced with me and with the decision of life
and death for himself on St. Marie. Only for a moment I felt it, but that was
enough.
"Go ahead," I heard myself saying to Padma.
I saw his finger lifted toward me.
Into darkness, I went-into darkness and fury; a place of lightning, but not
of open lightning any Ionger, but roiling murk and cloud and storm and
thunder. Tossed and whirled, beaten downward by the rage and violence about
me, I battled to lift, to fight my way up into the light and open air above
the storm clouds. But my own efforts sent me tumbling, sent me whirling
wildly, pitching downward instead of up-and, at last, I understood.
For the storm was my own inner storm, the storm of my making. It was the
inner fury of violence and revenge and destruction that I had been building in
myself all these years; and as I had turned the strengths of others against
them, now it turned my own strength against me, pushing me down and down, ever
farther into its darkness, until all light should be lost to me.
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Down I went, for its power was greater than mine. Down I went, and down; but
when I was lost at last in total darkness, and when I would have given up, I
found I could not. Something other in mewould not . It kept fighting back and
fighting on. And then, I recognized this as well.
It was that which Mathias had never been able to kill in me as a boy. It was
all of Earth and upward-striving man. It was Leonidas and his three hundred at
Thermopylae. It was the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness and
their crossing of the Red Sea. It was the Parthenon on the Acropolis, white
above Athens, and the windowless darkness of my uncle's house.
It wasthis in me-the unyielding spirit of all men- which would not yield now.
Suddenly, in my battered, storm-beaten spirit, drowning in darkness, something
leaped for wild joy. Because abruptly I saw that it was there for me, too-that
high, stony land where the air was pure and the rags of pretense and trickery
were stripped away by the unrelenting wind of faith.
I had attacked Jamethon in the area of his strength-out of my own inner area
of weakness.That was what Padma had meant by saying I had been fighting
myself, even while I was fighting Jamethon. That was why I had lost the
conflict, pitting my unbelieving desire against his strong belief. But my
defeat did not mean I was without a land of inner strength. It was there, it
had been there, hidden in me all along!
Now I saw it clearly. And ringing like bells for a victory, then, I thought I
heard once more the hoarse voice of Mark Torre, tolling at me in triumph; and
the voice of Lisa, who, I saw now, had understood me better than I understood
myself and never abandoned me. Lisa. And as I thought of her again, I began to
hear them all.
All the millions, the billions of swarming voices- the voices of all human
people since man first stood upright and walked on his hind legs. They were
around me once more as they had been that day at the Transit Point of the
Index Room of the Final Encyclopedia; and they closed about me like wings,
bearing me up, up and unconquerable, through the roiling darkness, with the
lift of a courage that was cousin to the courage of Kensie, with a faith that
was father to the faith of Jamethon, with a search that was brother to the
search of Padma.
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