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committed yourself now by coming to the Chantry Guild here, of your own free
will and choice. If I'd told you before this, it might have affected what you
keep calling the Forces of History. "
She let go of him then, but kept a hand on his arm as if a living connection
was necessary for the message she still had to reach him with. "Hal," she
said, "listen to me! Tam has to die completed if you're ever to do what you
first set out to do. You have to find the Creative Universe before he dies.
Only that'll justify his life in his own eyes; and he must die justified. If
he doesn't, you'll never find it!"
He stared at her. "Don't ask me why!" she said. "I don't know why! I only know
what Tam believes; and-I know he's right."
Hal's mind clicked and slid, from premise, to odds, to conclusion. Now that
his intuitive logic was given what it needed to work with, it was offering up
answers where it could offer none before. What Amanda said made sense.
Until the Final Encyclopedia should be put to its final, practical use, the
shape of that use would be undefined. It had been passed on, undefined, as no
more than a dream, from Mark Torre to Tam and from Tam to him. The chain of
cause and effect of this unreal and as-yet- unshaped, but powerful, cause
could break at Tam's death, if he believed he had died without it reaching at
last to its goal. It would mean to him that all his life, and everything
effected by it, had been a wrong
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131
working of the developing historical fabric; a working to a dead end, that now
would be abandoned.
Hal felt suddenly weak, with the weakness of shock. It had just been shown to
him that he alone, of the three of them, had been in a position of choice.
Neither Torre nor Tam could have turned from their work once they had taken it
up. He could have-had to have been able to, before being given the chance to
find the answer they all had sought-or else there was no free will. Otherwise,
the fabric of future history was pre-determined.
And it was not. Not fixed. Only the past was that. So he alone had had the
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power of choice-and he had almost chosen wrongly.
No, never that.' Succeed or fail; but to give up as he had thought himself
ready to do was unthinkable after the torch had been carried this far. Fail,
if he must, but the only decision he could live with was to stick with it to
the end. Otherwise, all he had ever believed was false and useless.
He turned his face again to the ledge above them and felt Amanda's hand slip
down his arm to take his hand. Together, they went up into sunlight.
CHAPTER
14
The sunset exploded in their eyes as they came up over the rim onto the ledge,
for a moment all but blinding Hal as his eyes struggled after the dirnness of
the shadowed slope below. His legs felt strange and weak to be once more on
level ground. Gradually, visual adjustment came and he began to make out what
was around them.
They had stepped up onto a level space that ran back a hundred meters or so
before the mountain face resumed its upward thrust. The ledge was at least
five times as wide as it was deep and it was a crowded, busy place.
For a moment, still dazzled by the rays of the setting sun, Hal could not make
out the details. Then his vision made a sharper adjustment, and all that was
there seemed to stand out with a particular depth and clarity, as if he was
seeing it in more than three dimensions.
There were several openings in the mountain face at the back of the level
space; whether to caves, or interior continuations of the ledge, it was
impossible to tell from where he stood. He and Amanda stood only a little way
to the right of a small pond, fed by a stream which angled across the flat
rock of the ledge floor from a near waterfall spilling down the farther face
of the mountain. The pond must drain from its bottom, he thought, since there
was no other obvious exit, and the water probably
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133
emerged elsewhere on the mountainside or as a spring in the forest below.
Directly ahead, on the right of the tiny stream as Hal looked toward the back
of the ledge, were three large buildings. The one farthest in was slightly
larger than the one next to it; and the one closest was a structure so small
that it seemed hardly more
than a cabin by comparison with the other two.
All three buildings had been built of logs. The face of the mountain behind
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