The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 36

Sixteen hours had passed.

Ajela, Rukh and Amanda had taken shifts staying with Tam, as he fought to live a little while longer. Hal had returned to his quarters to study the knowledge stored in the core of the Final Encyclopedia and now open to him. He had studied it awhile, then slept, then rose to seat himself again with the mental image of the core before him. His eyes saw it, but his mind was far distant, wandering the reaches of what had been stored in it over the centuries.

It was like wandering through the corridors of an endless museum. Here were the artifacts of creativity. But they were strangely lacking in some invisible element he could not put a mental finger on. Then, it came to him, Where were the souls that had created each of these things? It was strange. You could follow the creation of a piece of art or discovery down through the levels of the craft that made it actual and real. But only up to a certain point. Then you came suddenly to a gap, a quantum jump, beyond which the work became wholly the product of the individual who did it - no one else could have done it just that way - and there was no more craft bridge there to explain the uniqueness of what you saw, heard, or felt. Beyond was simply incomparable, irreplaceable individual talent made manifest, the essence of creativity itself at work, as if it were magic.

There was this gap, this vital element missing, yet. For his purposes in the Creative Universe, it must be touched, even if it could not be grasped. As one mind could never wholly grasp the tent of another mind, but could touch and understand enough the other's intent to work with that. For some hours now, Hal had turned his unconscious loose to research for a way to so touch what was needed, while his conscious still wandered the corridors of the Encyclopedia's storehouse, just as his conscious mind had been left to wander about, that day on the ledge - and at last the answer came to him as something he had almost forgotten.

Three years before, when he had asked Tam about how he, Hal, could learn to do what Tam did, in reading the knowledge core, he found that Tam could not describe how he did it in logical, verbal terms. He referred Hal to an old twentieth century novel, which had ended up by becoming a classic after being nearly forgotten, then rediscovered in the twenty-first century. The Sand Pebbles, written by an author named Richard McKenna, had for its lead character a non-commissioned officer assigned as engineer on a United States of America Navy river patrol boat in China, during a time of great upheaval.

All the other enlisted crewmen aboard had yielded to the custom of hiring unofficial Chinese understudies for their jobs. As a result, the actual work in the engine room was done by Chinese. The lead character, who loved engines and was adamant about handling his duties himself, could not bring himself to do this. He was determined to do his job with his own hands. This earned him the enmity of the Chinese workers, since his decision kept one of their own people out of a job they had come to regard as theirs.

There was a scene in the novel, Tam told Hal - and Hal later looked it up with the help of the Encyclopedia's memory - in which the lead character, pacing around the engine room while the ship was under way, suddenly found himself stopped and standing over a small trap door that gave access to the steam piping underneath the engine room floor. He had lifted the trap and found that a valve that should have been open was turned down tightly, shutting off the steam through that pipe. An act of deliberate sabotage by one of the workers.

He had opened the valve, and only much later discovered that by doing so he had earned a reputation as a magician among the Chinese workers, since apparently he had gone directly to the deliberately closed valve and opened it, although there was no way he could have known about it.

In a reminiscence by another author of the same period, the other author had told of asking McKenna directly whether, in all the noise of a steamship's engine room, someone could actually hear the difference made by shutting off one small valve. McKenna, who had worked with the engines of navy ships in just that same sort of job, had said someone could. He had noticed such changes and corrected them, himself, while on duty, in almost unthinking reaction, so used he had become to the proper sound of the engine.

As the engine sound had been to the man in the engine room, so the stored knowledge of the Encyclopedia had come to be to Hal. What he needed to do was to be able to think with the full knowledge stored in the Encyclopedia available to his mind from his mental image of the lines, and, now, he had found the only missing note in their silent symphony.

The individual notes of creativity, which he would need to reach out to build with, in the Creative Universe, were all around him here, then, and his ear was not yet tuned to them. So far, he had built what his own mind had already created, or a few sounds of creativity from the verse or making of others which had touched his own soul in the past. But that universe would not be truly open until it could hold and he could hear the sounds of others.

But that had been enough to let him create the potentiality of a split in the human race - animal, so that it might - and had - grown into two separately developing entities, one of which embodied the desire to grow and evolve, and one which tried to hold back and stay as it was.

A chime sounded suddenly on the air of his room and a voice spoke aloud in it, summoning him back to the real universe. It did not speak privately, as Rukh's voice had spoken in his ear to summon him to the conference just past. It was the voice of Jeamus. "We're ready, Hal Mayne," Jeamus said. "You'll find the entrance to the special. corridor through the door at the left end of the one presently outside your quarters." "Coming," answered Hal to the empty air above him. He rose and went out.

He stepped into the blind corridor, what he saw brought sudden stop. The two phase-shift constructions Jeamus promised him were there. The nearer one extending most of the way across the corridor, leaving just room to the second one, which, as far as the first allowed him to see, blocked the farther corridor. Come waiting for him there were not only Jeamus and a men in Research dust smocks, but also Rukh and Rukh wore her usual long, high-collared dress, black this time. But Amanda was also wearing a floor-length dress she just have ordered the Encyclopedia to fashion for her - one he had never seen her in before - of a dark, sea blue. The general effect was vaguely formal, as if they had dressed themselves in authority to come here. "I thought," said Hal to Jeamus, "I asked you not to say anything to anyone else about this?" "I'm sorry," said Jeamus. "It turned out there was a danger we hadn't expected. In the moment of powering up these two-screens, there's a danger of one or both of them trying to interface with the protective screen around the Encyclopedia itself. Once up, there'd be no danger. But in turning them on, there was, and none of us could estimate what might happen. No one had ever set up a phase-window completely within another window before-" "What about the Encyclopedia's screen inside the one enclosing Earth?" interrupted Hal. "But they're both double screens, loops, closed circuits within themselves. What you've got here isn't and can't be a closed circuit. Not if you want it to do what you asked for. So I had to turn the Encyclopedia's shield off for just a few seconds while we turned on these, and I didn't feel I could do that without warning Ajela or Rukh. Rukh wanted to know more about what was going on that made me ask for something like that. "I suggested she ask," said Amanda. "Don't jump on anyone else, Hal. Something unusual like that had your fingerprints all over it, and when we found out what it was, Rukh and I both wanted to be here. And we've got a right to be." "I couldn't lie to Rukh Tamani when it was a direct question," said Jeamus.

"Of course not. I don't blame you, Jeamus. " Hal took a deep breath. "And you're right, Amanda. You and Rukh should be here if that's what you want." "How could we not want to, Hal?" said Rukh.

Hal shook his head. "Of course. All right. I was wrong not to tell you from the start what I wanted to do. It was just I didn't - I still don't know - if it's going to work. It could be an utter failure."

Jeamus had been looking slightly bewildered. "I don't understand," he said. "Just what is it you're planning to put through this first screen?"

"Myself," said Hal. Jeamus stared. "My God!" he said. "Do you know what you're talking about doing? Committing suicide! You'll end up spread out through the universe, with no way back." "There's that chance, of course," said Hal, "but I've got reason to think, in this case, it's not going to happen that way." "All the same," said Jeamus, "if that's what you've had in mind all along, I'm going to pray that nothing more goes on when you step through the back screen there - that you immediately step back out, facing us, through this near one!" "Thanks, but I hope not, myself," said Hal.

He turned to Rukh and Amanda. "But I might be able to do what I hope to do in what amounts to no-time, like any phase-shift, so that I still come back here right away," he said. "On the other hand, it could be that time spent between the screens is the same as time spent here and it'll be awhile before I'll come back. But there's no real doubt in me I'll be back sooner or later."

Rukh came to him, put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips. "I should have done that long ago," she said. "We'll wait for you, Hal."

He held her for a moment, feeling his heart moved once again, as it had been when he carried her out of the prison cell on Harmony four years before, by the frailness of her body, even now. Then he let her go and turned to Amanda, who also held him and kissed him. "I love you," she said.

"And I love you," he answered. "This could be the answer, last, what I'm going to do." "I know," said Amanda, and let him go.

from them, around the nearer screen the second, and stepped through it.