The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 2

Through the library window, the cold mountain rain of early winter in the north temperate zone of Old Earth could be seen slanting down on the leafless oaks and the pines around the little lake before the estate building that was the earliest home he could remember, as Hal Mayne. Overhead, obscuring the peaks of the surrounding mountains, the sky was an unbroken, heavy, gray ceiling of clouds, and the gusts from time to time slanted the rain at a greater angle, and made the treetops bow momentarily. The darkness of the day and the lowering clouds made the window slightly reflective, so that he saw what was barely recognizable as an image of his face, looking back at him like the face of a ghost.

An unusually early winter had commenced upon the Rocky Mountains of the North American continent. An early winter, in fact, was upon the whole northern hemisphere of the planet. Outside, the day was chill and dismal, sending forest creatures to their dens and holes. Within the library a fire burned brightly in the fireplace, with the good smell of birch wood, started by the automatic machinery of the house on a signal from a satellite overhead. The ceiling lighting was bright on the spines of the antique books that solidly filled the shelves of the bookcases covering all the walls of the room.

This was the home where the orphan Hal had been raised by his tutors, the three old men he had loved - and the place where he had watched those three killed when he had been sixteen eleven years ago. It was an empty house now, as it had been ever since, but usually he could find comfort here.

They're not dead, he reminded himself. No one you love ever dies - for you. They go on in you as long as you live. But the thought did not help.

On this cold, dark day he felt the emptiness of the house inescapably around him. His mind reached out for consolation, as it had on so many such occasions, to remembered poetry. But the only lines of verse that came to him now did not comfort. They were no more than an echo of the dying year outside. They were the lines of a poem he had himself once written, here in this house, on just such a day of oncoming winter, when he had just turned thirteen.

Now, autumn's birch, white-armed, disrobed for sorrow,

In wounded days, as that weak sun slips down

From failing year and sodden forest mold,

Pray for old memories like tarnished bronze.

And when night sky and mist, like sisters, creeping,

Bring on the horned owl, hooting at no moon

Mourn like a lute beneath the wotfskin winds,

That on the hollow log sound hollow horn.

A chime rang its silvery note on his ear. A woman's voice spoke.

"Hal," said the voice of Ajela, "conference in twenty minutes."

"I'll be there," he said.

He sighed. "Clear!" he added, to the invisible technological magic that surrounded him. The library, the estate and the rain winked out. He was back in his quarters at the Final Encyclopedia, in orbit far above the surface of the world he had just been experiencing. The rain and the wind and the library, all as they would actually be at the estate in this moment, were left now far below him.

He was surrounded by silence - silence, four paneled walls and three doors, one door leading to the corridor outside, one to his bedroom, and one to the carrel that was his ordinary workroom. About him in the main room where he stood were the usual padded armchair floats and a desk, above a soft red carpeting.

He was once again where he had spent most of the past three years, in that technological marvel that was an artificial satellite of the planet Earth, the Final Encyclopedia. Permanently in orbit about Earth. Earth, which in this twenty-fourth century its emigrated children now called Old Earth, to distinguish it from the world of New Earth, away off under the star of Sirius and settled three hundred years since.

Around him again was only the silence - of his room, and of the satellite itself. The Final Encyclopedia floated far above the surface of Earth and just below the misty white phase-shield that englobed and protected both world and Encyclopedia. Too far off to be heard, even if there had been atmosphere outside to carry the sound, were the warships which patrolled beneath that shield, guarding both the satellite and Earth against any intrusion by the warships of ten of the thirteen Younger Worlds, beyond the shield.

Hal stood for a moment longer. He had twenty minutes, he reminded himself'. So, for one last time, he sank into a cross-legged, seated position on the carpeting and let his mind relax into that state that was a form of concentration, although its physical and mental mechanisms were not the usual ones for that mental state.

They were, in fact, a combination of the techniques taught him as a boy by Walter the InTeacher - one of those three who had died eleven years ago - and his own self-evolved creative methods for writing the poetry he had used to make. He had developed the synthesis while he was still young, and Walter the InTeacher, the Exotic among his tutors, had still been alive. Hal remembered how deeply and childishly disappointed he had been then, when he had not been able to show off the picture his mind had just generated, of the birch tree in the wet autumn wood. The raw image of the poem he had just written.

But Walter, usually so mild and comforting in all things, had told him sternly then that instead of being unhappy he should feel lucky that he had been able to do it at all. The ability Walter had said, was not unknown, but rare, and few people had ever been able to conceptualize on that level. He had explained that the difference between what most could manage and what Hal had evidently been able to do was the difference in the creation of what Walter gave the name of "vision, " as opposed to an "image" - quoting an ancient artist of the twentieth century who also had the capability. "Most people can, with concentration, evoke an image," Walter had told him, "and, having evoked it, they can draw it, paint it, or build it. But an image is never the complete thing, imagined. Parts of it are missing because the person evoking it takes for granted that they're there. While a vision is complete enough to be the thing, itself, if it only had solidity or life. The difference is like that between a historic episode, thoroughly researched and in the mind of a historian, ready to be written down, and the same episode in the memory of one who lived through it. Now, is it an actual vision you're talking about?" "Yes. Yes!" Hal had said eagerly. "It's all there - so much you can almost touch it, as if it was solid. You could even get up and walk around it and see it from the back! Why can't you try harder and see it?" "Because I'm not you," Walter had answered.

So, now, under the pressure of his concentration, but for the last time, there seemed to take shape in the air before Hal a reproduction of the core image of the Final Encyclopedia's stored knowledge.

Its shape resembled a very thick section of cable made of red-hot, glowing wires - but a cable in which the strands had loosened, so that now its thickness was double that it might have had originally - it appeared about a meter in cross section and perhaps three meters in length.

In this mass, each individual strand was there to be seen. Not only that, but each strand, if anyone looked closely enough, was visibly and constantly in movement, stretching or turning to touch the strands about it, sometimes only briefly, sometimes apparently welding itself to another strand in what seemed a permanent connection.

Originally it had appeared before him like this thanks to the same technological magic of the Encyclopedia that had seemed to place him in his old home, below. With the broadcast image he had formed this continually updated vision in his room so that he could study it. But over the years, as he had come to learn each strand of it, he had begun to be able to envision it by concentration alone.

He had begun this study after seeing Tam Olyn, then Director of the Encyclopedia, standing in the data control room and examining the same image perpetually broadcast there. For all Hal knew, at the moment that room and image could be next door to him now. There was no permanent location within the Encyclopedia to any of its parts, because it moved them around at the convenience of its occupants.

Tam Olyn had been Director of the Encyclopedia for nearly a hundred years. Before that he had been an interstellar newsman, who had tried for his own personal revenge to turn the hatred of all the occupied worlds upon the peoples of Harmony and Association, the two self-named Friendly Worlds colonized by the Splinter Culture of both true faith-holders and religious fanatics.

Tam had blamed them, then, for the death of his younger sister's husband - to avoid facing his own guilt for that death. When he had failed to make the Friendlies anathema to the rest of the human race, he had at last seen himself for what he had become. Then he had come back here, to the Encyclopedia, at which he had once shown a rare talent. Here, he had risen to the Directorship, and he alone had learned to identify the knowledge behind each apparently glowing strand, merely by gazing at it, without the help of the instruments used by the technicians who were always on duty in the core room.

So it had been Tam's example that fired the imagination of Hal. For a moment even the vision before Hal now dimmed, overlaid in his mind by the gray shadow of the old man. Tam would be sitting alone, now, in those quarters of his, that had been transformed by the Encyclopedia into an illusion of a woodland glade with a stream running through it, its day and night always as the surface of Earth directly below him saw the sun or not.

Tam would be alone now because Ajela, the Assistant Director, had left him to hold the conference. Alone, and waiting for death, as someone weary at the end of too long a day might wait for steep. Waiting, but holding death, like sleep, at bay, because he still hoped for a word from Hal. A word of success Hal had not been able to bring him.

Three years before, Hal had had no doubt he would bring that word, eventually. Now, after those slow years with no progress, the time had come when he must face the fact he never would. He must announce it at the conference of which Ajela had reminded him. He could not be late, after his unusual offer to attend, when for so long he had avoided such administrative discussions between Ajela and Rukh Tamani, the faith-holder and kindler of Old Earth's awakening.

Now, Hal tried once more to concentrate on his vision of the knowledge store. He had gone beyond Tam in the reading of it. Like Tam he could know from a particular part of a glowing wire which specific bit of knowledge it represented. But, more than Tam, he had been able to reach through to that knowledge directly, though he had failed at becoming able to read it.

It would not have been a conscious reading in any case. What the knowledge was, would have simply, suddenly been available there in the back of his memory. A dead and buried bit of memory, but one which, with an effort, he would have been able to bring alive to his conscious mind. It was not that he lacked mental space to hold so much information. He had tried, and found that that same back of the human mind - though not the consciousness up front - could contain all the knowledge the Encyclopedia itself held, which was all the knowledge remembered and known on the world below.

But so far it was still, to him, an untouchable knowledge. To bring it back to life required its being put to use consciously, and this final step his conscious mind had proved incapable of. The human conscious could only tap stored wisdom along the straight-line, simple route of concrete thought - one piece at a time.

For the last year and a half he had struggled to find ways to put to conscious use the whole of the stored knowledge. But he had found none, and in consequence the doorway to the Creative Universe he believed in had remained closed to him. Yet he knew it was there. All the art and inventions of recorded history attested to that fact, each piece of art and each invention was an existing proof that a purely Creative Universe, where anything was possible, could be reached and used. He had made use of it himself to create poems - good or bad, made no difference, as long as they had had no existence in the known universe until he made them. And they had not. But still they came only from his unconscious.

So, the doorway was there. But he could not enter it. What he wanted was to physically put himself inside it, as he might put himself inside another physical universe. The bitter part was to know it could be entered, but not know how. Since he had been born as Donal Graeme, the Dorsai, he had several times entered it, but always without knowing how he did so. Once, had been his return to consciousness among the historically fixed events of the twenty-first century. In that instance he had made use of a dead man's body to move about, had heard a carved stone lion roar like the living animal, and he had come back from that past time to a moment eighty years later than he had left, physically changed from an adult man to a two-year-old boy.

The doorway had been there for him to pass through then, seemingly simply because he had believed then he could do it. Why could he not find that belief again, now? Unless he could, and unless he could enter it at will, knowing how he had done it, all he had accomplished and experienced in three different personas had been wasted.

He told himself grimly, now, that the goal he had set himself a hundred years in the past as Donal Graeme could only have been a false one. All he had achieved had been to prod the historic forces of humanity into giving birth to the Others, and the eventual certainty of Old Earth's conquest and destruction.

He could not go on this way, possibly only making matters worse. But, even thinking this, he had weakened. Now, even with Ajela and Rukh waiting, he was going to try to find the doorway one more time before giving up forever. He sat, filling his mind with the storehouse of knowledge represented by the image before him, until it was all within him.

He tried, once more, to use it, to enter the place where he could use it.

And... Nothing. He sat unchanged, unenlightened. The knowledge lay like a dead thing within him, useless as books forgotten as soon as they had been read, cloaked in an eternal darkness. "Hal," said the voice of Ajela, "Rukh and I are already here in my office. Are you coming?" "Coming," he answered, and put the image of the knowledge core, together with all the hopes of his lifetime, away for good.