Childe Cycle - The Spirit of Dorsai Part 11

What was that? That ridiculous phrase that the children had made up only a few years back, and which was now beginning to be picked up by their elders as a high compliment?

It was supposed to mean "real, actual Dorsai." Nonsense.

It occurred to her, as some minor statistic might, that she was dying; and she was vaguely annoyed with herself for not having realized this earlier. There were things she should think about, if that was the case. If Betta had been in labor before the attack began, she might well have her child by now.

If so, it was important she tell Betta what she had decided just before they moved in on the troops, that the use of the Amanda name was her responsibility now, and the responsibility of succeeding generations...

"Well," said a voice just above her, and she looked up into the face of Ekram. He stank of sweat and anesthetic. "Coming out of it, are you?"

"How long..." it was incredibly hard to speak "Oh, about two days," he answered with abominable cheerfulness.

She thought of her need to tell Betta of her decision.

"Betta..." she said. It was becoming a little easier to talk; but the effort was still ma.s.sive.

She had intended to ask specifically for news of Betta and the child.

"Betta's fine. She's got a baby boy, all parts in good working order. Three point seven three kilograms."

Boy! A shock went through her.

Of course. But why shouldn't the child be a boy? No reason-except that, deluded by her own aging desires, she had fallen into the comfortable thought that it would not be anything but a girl.

A boy. That made the matter of names beside the point entirely.

For a moment, however, she teetered on the edge of self-pity. After all she had known, after all these years, why couldn't it have been a girl-under happier circ.u.mstances when she could have lived to know it, and find that it was a child who could safely take up her name?

She hauled herself back to common sense. What was all this foolishness about names, anyway? The Dorsai had won, had kept itself independent. That was her reward, as well as the reward to all of them -not just the sentimental business of pa.s.sing her name on to a descendent. But she should still tell Bet-ta of her earlier decision, if Ekram would only let them bring the girl to her. It would be just like the physician to decide that her dying might be hurried by such an effort, and refuse to let Betta come. She would have to make sure he understood this was not a decision for him to make. A deathbed wish was sacred and he must understand that was what this was...

"Ekram," she managed to say faintly. "I'm dying..."

"Not unless you want to," said Ekram.

She stared at him aghast. This was outrageous. This was too much. After all she had been through... then the import of his words trickled through the sense of unreality wrapping her.

"Bring Betta here! At once!" she said; and her voice was almost strong.

"Later," said Ekram.

"Then I'll have to go to her," she said, grimly.

She was only able to move one of her arms feebly sideways on top of the covers, in token of starting to get up from the bed. But it was enough.

"All right. All right!" said Ekram. "In just a minute."

She relaxed, feeling strangely luxurious. It was all right. The name of the game was survival, not how you did it. A boy! Almost she laughed. Well, that sort of thing happened, from time to time. In a few more years it could also happen that this boy could have a sister. It was worth waiting around to see. She would still have to die someday, of course-but in her own good time.

INTERLUDE.

The voice of the third Amanda ceased. In the still mountain afternoon there were no other sounds but *the hum of some nearby insects. A little breeze sprang up, and was gone again.

With her words still echoing in his mind, Hal thought of the struggle she had been speaking of, that early Dorsai fight to stay free of Dow deCastries; and its likeness to the present fight on all the worlds, to resist the loss of human freedom to the Other Men and Women-those cross-breeds from human splinter cultures such as that on the Dorsai itself. This present fight in which he and the third Amanda were both caught up.

"What happened inside Foralie?" he asked. "Inside the house, I mean, after Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer with their men went inside? What happened with Cletus and Dow-or were they just able to take over with no trouble?"

"Something more than no trouble," she said. "Swahili was there, remember, and Swahili had been a Dorsai. But Eachan Khan killed Swahili when Swahili let himself be distracted for a second and Arvid and Bill were able to control the situation. Dow had a sleeve gun of his own, it turned out. He hurt Cletus, but didn't manage to kill him. In the end it was Dow who was s.h.i.+pped back to Earth as a prisoner."

"I see," said Hal. But his first question had immediately raised another one in his mind.

"How was that other business worked?" he asked. "That Coalition trick of having a contingent of well soldiers up there at Foralie after they'd seemed to have been rotated down into the area of town? Where did they come from, the soldiers Amanda found wait- ing, and ready to fight, in the vehicle park?"

"You remember the military physician had phoned Dow deCastries the night before,"

Hal's Amanda said. "He was a political appointee himself and he knew General Amorine was another. Besides Amorine was sick himself from the nickel carbonyl vapors. The military physician knew that taking his suspicions to Amorine would simply have meant Amorine arresting Ekram and trying to force some kind of answer out of him-and the military doctor was only too aware of what it would be like for him to face alone a situation where everybody was dying. So, he went directly to Dow, instead."

"I don't understand what that would have to do with it ..." Hal frowned.

"Dow had been getting the reports from other areas. A thousand different things were going wrong in a thousand different places with his occupation forces; and, next to Cletus, he had the best mind on the planet." She paused to look at him. "Don't underestimate what Dow was."

"I didn't intend to."

"What he saw," Amanda said, "was that, for all practical purposes, his occupation of the Dorsai had failed. But he could still, with some luck, grab Cletus and take him off-planet as a prisoner-or at the worst, get away himself. This, if he had military control in this one district alone."

"And he figured out that as soon as Cletus reached Foralie, Foralie would be attacked by the local people in a try to rescue him?"

"Of course." Amanda shrugged. "It was obvious -as the first Amanda essentially said, to Ramon, when Ramon wondered if Cletus hadn't really meant what he said at the airpad-that they should do nothing against the soldiers. One way or another the district had to attack, then. So he sent up the patrol that morning with only sick soldiers; and it brought back well soldiers, all right; but those same well soldiers- only now pretending to be sick-went back up as the troops in the convoy that escorted Cletus to Foralie."

"Ah," said Hal, nodding. "How long did the first Amanda actually live?"

"She lived to be a hundred and eight."

"And saw a second Amanda?"

Hal's Amanda shook her head.

"No. It was nearly a hundred years before there was a second Amanda," she said.

Hal smiled.

"Who had the wisdom to name the second one Amanda?"

"No one," Amanda said. "She was named Elaine; but by the time she was sir years old everyone was already calling her the second Amanda. You might say, she named herself."

Once more, in the back of his mind, Hal felt an obscure alerting to attention of that part of him which recognized the existence of The Purpose.

"Tell me something about the second Amanda," he said.

The third Amanda hesitated for a brief moment.

"For one thing," she said, "the second Amanda was the one both Kensie and Ian Graeme were in love with."

"Kensie and Ian?" Hal felt a strange coldness move through him. "But Kensie never married and Ian..."

"That's right," Amanda said. "Ion's wife, the mother of his children, was named Leah. But it was the second Amanda who both the twins fell in love with in the first place."

"How did it happen?"

The third Amanda looked down toward Fal Morgan.

"The second Amanda grew up with Kensie and Ian," she said. "How could it be any other way when the two households were practically side by side, here? She grew up with them; and by the time they were nearly grown, if she loved either of them, it was probably Kensie, with that brightness and warmth that was such a natural part of him."

"She loved Kensie?"

v "I said-if she loved either of them... then. She was young, they were young. She had had them around all her life. What was there about them to make her suddenly fall seriously in love with either one of them? But then they graduated from the Academy and went off to the wars; and when they came back, it was all different."

She paused.

"Different? How?" Hal said gently, to get her going again.

She sighed once more.

"It's not easy to describe," she said. "It's something that happens often, with the situation we have here on the Dorsai. You grow up, knowing the boys of your district, and those from a lot of others. And when they finally sign contracts and go off-planet, that's all they are, still-just tall boys. But then, perhaps it's a year, or several, before they come home; and when they do you find they're... different."

"You mean, they've become men."

"Not only men," she said, "but men you never thought might come from the boys you knew. Some things you hardly noticed about them have moved forward in them and taken over. Other things you thought were the most important part of what made them, have gone way back in them, or been lost forever. They've grown up in ways you didn't expect.

Suddenly, it's as if you never had known them. They can be anybody... strangers."

Her voice had sunk so low that she seemed to be speaking more to herself than him; and her gaze was on nothing.

"You sit and talk with them, after they come home," she went on, "and you realize you're talking to someone who's gone away from what was common to both of you and now has something that has nothing to do with you, that you've never known and maybe never will know ..."

She looked at him. Her eyes were brilliant.

"And then you discover that the same thing that happened to them has happened to you.

You were a girl they grew up with when they left; but that girl is gone, gone forever. With you, too, some things have come forward, other things have gone back or been lost forever. Now they sit talking to a woman they don't know, that now they maybe never will know. And so, everything changes."

"I see," he said. "And it changed that much far the second Amanda and for Kensie and Ian?"

"Yes," she said, soberly. "They came back, two strangers, and fell in love with a stranger they had once grown up with. With any other three people that would have been problem enough-but those twins were half and half of each other, and Amanda knew it."

"What happened?"

The third Amanda, Hal's Amanda, did not answer. She had drawn her knees up to her chin, and hugged them. Now she rested her chin upon her knees, staring down into the valley.

"What happened?" Hal asked again.

"Everybody had simply a.s.sumed that Kensie and Amanda would end up together," she said, at last, "including Ian. When Ian found he was in love with Amanda himself, it was unthinkable to him that he should interfere in any way with his twin brother. So he married Leah, who had wanted him for a long time. Married her simply and quickly."

"And took himself out of the picture."

"No, "Amanda shook her head. "Because he had made a mistake. After the two of them had come home, different, it wasn't Kensie, but Ian, that the second Amanda had fallen in love with. Ian. Only with Ian being the kind of person he was, there was no chance that, having once married Leah, that situation could ever be changed."

"But you say ..." began Hal puzzled, then checked himself. "But, if she had any love for Kensie at all, what was to keep her from ending up with him? Certainly that would have been better than the two of them-"

"The way they were." Amanda turned her head to look at Hal. "Kensie and Ian were too close not to know each other's feelings; and Kensie loved Amanda as completely as Amanda loved Ian. Knowing how she loved Ian, Kensie could not take the place he would have filled in her life if things had been otherwise. He went back to the wars as if... he was too much a Dorsai to deliberately put himself in the way of getting killed. But for all his brightness, he lived in the shadow of death for years after that; and it seemed as if death was perversely avoiding him."

She looked away from him, down to the valley again.

"The Exotics say," she went on, "that there are ontogenetic laws which explain why someone like Kensie could lead a charmed life under such conditions."

"Yes," said Hal. He had not realized how strangely he had said the word until he looked up and saw her gazing at him.

"You know something about ontogenetics?" she asked. "Something that applies to the second Amanda, and Ian and Kensie?"

"To Ian and Kensie, maybe," he said. The part of him that concerned itself with what he called The Purpose-that half-seen thing he must do with his life -was working powerfully, now; and he heard his own words almost as if someone else was speaking them. "Ontogenetics merely says nothing happens by chance or accident. Everything is interrelated. Stop and think. When Donal Graeme was moving toward his goal of bringing all the inhabited worlds under one order, his enemy was William of Ceta, just as Dow deCastries was the special opponent of Cletus Grahame."

"Yes," Amanda frowned. "But what of it?"

"To defeat William, who had unlimited power and wealth, Donal needed to defeat all possible military opponents. To do that he needed a military force larger than had ever been seen on the inhabited worlds. Only one other man could train that force as Donal needed it trained-and the rule in the Graeme household was that no two of their men served in the same place at the same time; far the same reason that a father and mother of young children may travel by different s.p.a.cecraft, so that in case a phase s.h.i.+ft accident should take one of them, the other would still be there to take care of the children."

"But it was different with Ian and Kensie," Amanda said. "They were allowed to serve in the same farce, together."

"Until Kensie's death. Then the rule was broken once more by Eachan Khan Graeme, who you'll remember was the family head, Donal's father and Jan's older brother." The Purpose-oriented part of Hal's mind was in complete control of him, now. He went on, not noticing the sudden intensity with which she was regarding him. "He asked Donal to find work with him for Ian, as the only means of rousing Ian after his twin's death."

She was watching him closely.

"You know a good deal about the Graemes," she said.

Suddenly aware of her attention, he grew fl.u.s.tered.

"I... don't," he said. "I only know something about ontogenetics."

"What you're saying adds up to the fact that Donal had Kensie killed to free Ian far his own use."

"No, no..." he protested. "Only Donal's need far Ian, acting on the network of cause and effect-"

"No!" she said. "Do you think any such farces could combine to kill Kensie, and Ian wouldn't be aware of it? They were one person, those twins!"

"But you said yourself that Kensie had been searching far death, ever since he had lost Amanda," he protested. "Maybe Ian simply, at last, let him go. You remember Kensie was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Dorsai aren't easy to a.s.sa.s.sinate, unless they don't care any "No!" the third Amanda said, again, almost violently. "That wasn't the way it was, at all.