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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.
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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 shipped 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
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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
whathe said at the airpad that they should do nothing against the soldiers.
One way oranother 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.
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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.
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