The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 37

He was everywhere and nowhere.

His senses were no longer working. He could not feel, smell, hear or see. Instead he had an awareness of his surroundings that recognized certain patterns, some of which were in the form of objects and some of which were not, but which in any case were unimportant.

It was a place where time existed, but did not matter. A place where his now changed self had no desire to understand or act. In fact, his ability to do so was limited. He had memory, but no purpose, for he found he could not conceive of the future, and the present was forever. But he could remember, and, remembering, he recalled how he had been through something like this, once before. It had happened when he had been Donal going back in spirit to the twenty-first century, when he had worked by inhabiting the body that had belonged to the dead Paul Formain. Then, he now remembered, something had carried him through what he was presently experiencing... The memory part of him that was still working gave it back to him. Then he had expected to go beyond this to something else, to a twenty-first century Earth, and the momentum of that expectation had carried him through without realizing the concept of purpose he now lacked.

It was a remembrance of an impossibility that had yet happened. For the Creative Universe he now realized he had visioned both then and now could not, by definition, exist until he had created it. It did not exist now, and yet he had been any part of going aware of experiencing it before, as a necessary to alter the implications of the past.

"this Chaos - that was under the limitations of this place logic-limited conscious mind was not capable of it to be, his understanding the contradictions. Here he could only go on of which were blocked by its philosophy and courage, none the limits of his logical mind. With them he could accept the fact that he had been able to experience the Creative Universe once before and use it as a window to the past, because his unconscious had assumed a path back through time for his identity, and by that assumption, like the assumption that creates a poem never expressed before, had caused it to be.

His logical mind had afterwards rejected what, to it, could not be, and tucked the memory out of sight in his unconscious. There it had stayed until now, because the framework of understanding he needed to develop had not yet been there to understand how it could happen. Only now, spread out between time and space, did it all, at last, make sense.

As with the making of a poem, the explanation was that here all mechanisms must be developed in the unconscious, for the conscious mind could not operate without the arbitrary concepts it had gradually imposed over centuries on the physical universe, to give that universe a shape the conscious mind could work with.

He must now, therefore, not so much make what he wanted in the Creative Universe, as find it within himself, in this place where conscious logic and physics did not naturally apply. He must find it, as he had found poems and other discoveries of meaning and intent, in the past....

He let go, therefore, of his now useless and almost nonexistent upper mind. In effect he passed over into the realm of dreams and daydreams, and a jumble of memories and fancies tumbled through his imaginings, like the unchained thoughts that come in moments just before sleep sets the unconscious completely free.

So, letting go, he passed into what would have been a dream, if it had not been directed by some previous, deep-held sense of purpose that had directed him back to the twenty-first century. He could feel, in this universe-that-was-not, not only that earlier passage, but all the vast information of the Final Encyclopedia. The latter worked on the former....

"And, suddenly, he was where he wanted to be. It was a dream, made real after all. Real, it was, because not only all his senses now reported on the reality of it, but his logical upper mind, that must think in the language of symbols and identities, was once more awake and capable. But it was also a dream, because he remembered how he had first dreamed it, when he had been with the Resistance Group on Harmony, under a younger and strong-bodied Rukh. He had dreamed it then, and at other times since, and now, with the knowledge from the Encyclopedia, he had made it actual. It was at the dream's opening point now, that he, with the faith, belief and courage in him, had resolved the chaos around him into actuality.

Again, he was on horseback, with others also mounted. They were traveling in a group through a lightly forested area of some landscape in the temperate zone of an Earth-like world. They rode without talking, as he had earlier dreamed they had, but now, for the first time, he had a chance to look closely about him and identify those he rode with, and there were none of them he had not known, and all of them were now dead.

Obadiah the Friendly, Malachi the Dorsai and Walter the Exotic-the three who had been his tutors and raised him as Hal Mayne, rode not far behind him. Immediately beside and about him were those of his own - of Donal's-family. Eachan Khan Graeme, his father, now dead for nearly a hundred years, rode at his right side. Beside him on his left was Mary Kenwick Graeme, his mother, and beyond her was his brother Mor, who because of him had been tortured to death by the hands of the demented William of Ceta.

Mor leaned forward in his saddle to look around their mother at him, and Hal braced himself for the look that would be in the other's eyes. But when those eyes met him the look he had expected was not there. "Welcome back, Donny," said Mor - and he was smiling, a happy smile. With that, Hal realized that he had indeed become Donal again, in body as well as in memory.

All the other tall menfolk of the Graemes once more "Overtopped him, as they sat their saddles around him, and he was as he had been in his early life..."What's the matter, Brother?" Mor said. "Did you think I wouldn't understand?"

He reached out a hand across the neck of the horse Mary Graeme rode, and, with a moment's hesitation, Hal took it and found his brother's grasp comforting and as warm as his smile. "I didn't think it through far enough," he said. "I'd never have let him do that to you I if I had, for anything." "I know," said Mor, as their grips parted and they straightened up in their saddles, "but it brought us to this, and this is best. Isn't it?" "Yes," said Donal-Hal, "it's a new road, at last."

He looked around. In his dream he had not had time to identify faces. Now he saw how Ian and Kensie rode on the far side of Eachan, and how beyond Mor was his other uncle, James, whose death had set him on his life's path to this Moment.

He looked farther back and saw, also riding near him, the . Second Amanda Morgan, eerily like the Amanda he had left behind him beyond the phase-screen. A horde of other members of the family, long since gone, rode with them, including even Cletus Grahame, his great-great-grandfather.

But, farther back, there was also James Child-of-God, Rukh's second-in-command of the Resistance Group, who had died in the rain on Harmony, and the farther he looked, the more faces he recognized. Only now they were come to the edge of the forest, to the brink of a rubbed plain that stretched away toward the horizon, with nothing visible growing upon it and only one shape breaking the horizon line where rocky surface met the gray, unbroken ceiling of the clouds overhead.

That one shape stood darkly upright, so distant that it might have been on the horizon itself, and it was a single tower, black, featureless and solid, with the shape of one of the ancient keeps of the medieval centuries of Old Earth. About it, there was a terrible sense of waiting that held them all silent, as, following his example, they all checked their horses and sat looking at the tower. "I go on alone from here," he said to the others.

They answered nothing, but he felt their acceptance of what he had just said. He could also feel that they would wait for him, here, no matter how long it took.

He got down from his horse - as he had remembered dismounting before in his dream - and started out on foot across the endless distance of the plain, toward the tower.

In his dream it had been vitally necessary that he go alone to it, and he felt the same unexplained urgency now. At some time later, he looked back and saw those who had been with him, still sitting their horses, small under the trees, which were themselves shrunken with the distance he had put between himself and them. Then he had turned once more and continued on toward the tower, to which he seemed hardly to have progressed a step since he had left the edge of the wood.

Without warning, something he could not see touched him on the left shoulder. He whirled about, ready to defend himself, but there was nothing there. Only the waiting forms on horseback, now farther off than ever, though when he turned back toward the tower, still it seemed that he had moved hardly a step closer to it, in spite of all the distance covered.

The pebbles and rocks that made up the surface of the plane were now larger than those onto which he had first stepped. Looking down at them, the wealth of the Encyclopedia's knowledge flowed into him and he identified them as the detritus of an old lava flow, dark igneous rock that had over centuries been exposed to extremes of temperatures, until, cracking under the succeeding expansions and contradictions of their composite materials, the solid rock had decomposed and broken into many pieces-pieces which were later covered by a sea, and tumbled one against the other until their sharp edges and corners had become rounded.

His mind encompassed all this - or did it only create it as an explanation, out of the storehouse of the Encyclopedia? In any case he found himself understanding the geological ages that had made the surface he walked on, and without knowing how it could be possible, he realized that the tower toward which he was headed had been built on what had been an island during the period of the shallow sea that had rounded off the rocks. Inconceivably, it had been built before the waters rose to cover the lava plain of cracked and broken stones. Ancient it therefore was, as ancient as the human race itself, and what was within it, drawing him to it, was as ancient.

But it was still a long way off, and he was more concerned with the discovery of its creation. For in fact, it was his dream made real. He had created it only now, but as surely as he had ...

Chaos in which he had found himself. He had created his body and those of his companions and their horses. He had created the thick cloud layer overhead that hid a sun that he had chosen to be a duplicate of the star of Old Earth, illuminating this world that was itself a duplicate of Old Earth, more so than any of the terraformed planets of the Younger Worlds.

He had built it, here in the Creative Universe, that was only a Creative Universe because with the Encyclopedia's help, he had brought it finally into being. For without the ability of the Encyclopedia's knowledge available to his own creative unconsciousness, he could not have made any of this. A poem could not be written without a knowledge of what made poetry - the images, the shapes and the language. Without a knowledge of what was required to produce such works, no original painting could be painted, no cathedral built.

In the creation of the very tower toward which he now made his way, a knowledge of the forces of gravity upon its structure, and of the materials that made its walls, was needed.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the tiny figures waiting behind him now seemed to stand somewhat above him, and in fact the plain between them now had dipped downward, as if he had descended onto the old sea bottom that stretched level until it rose again in the far distance to the higher land of what had been an island when the tower was young. Looking ahead once more at it now, he saw that the sea floor approaching it, which had earlier seemed level to his eyes, actually rose and fell, gradually, in swells and hollows, before it reached the former island of the tower, and that he was now gradually ascending the slope of one of the nearer rises.

Sure enough, a little farther on, when he looked back again, the plain seemed to have descended toward the horizon behind him, and the group he had left there was indistinguishable now from the edge of forest behind them.

He turned his face forward and went on - and an unexpected shadow swept briefly over him, so that he looked up, startled, even as he heard what the Encyclopedia's knowledge now within him identified as the harsh cry of a raven.

Mixed with that cry was something he could not quite be sure he heard. It was as if a sound that was soundless had still somehow managed to signal itself upon his ear. It was like the resonance of a heavy bell, struck twice. Something that somehow echoed back to the time when he had been Paul Formain. Yet it did not belong to the memory of that time, but to the future still before him.

Like a warning note, it reminded him of the possible passage of real time. He did not know whether his time spent here was merely part of a moment of no-time back in the universe beyond the phase-screens, or whether a minute here might not be a day, or month, there.

He stopped suddenly. The rise in the ground he had been ascending had steepened gradually but steadily over the last fifty meters or so, and he was suddenly much closer to the tower. He had adjusted unthinkingly from what was a walking pace to a climbing one, so that he had come to the top of the rise without warning and now he checked, looking down its short, farther, descending side.

It dipped sharply for no more than ten paces before him. At that point it broke off abruptly in an edge as sharp as any cliff's. Beyond it was nothingness, with no sight of farther surface below. He saw only a relatively short distance horizontally to what looked like another cliff edge level with this one, that was visibly the edge of the one-time island with the tower upon it.

He went forward, cautiously. For the downslope was steep and he had to lean back to brace his weight and not slide forward over the edge before him. But even when he stood on the very lip of it, he could see nothing below him, only what appeared to be an endless fall to eternity. He looked at the distance of nothingness between him and the edge of the island, it was just far enough off that he could not quite make out the nature of the rocks that made up the distant land.

He stood, baffled. There was no reason for this space to be here, barring his way. He made an effort to visualize the gap filled in with the same sort of former sea bottom he stood upon. But nothing happened. It was as if here, alone, his creativity could not bring into being a land bridge where there was nothing. It was as if he had nothing to build with, as if what was needed to bridge the space was not in him.

For a long moment he stood, unbelieving. Then his mind began to work, and up out of the back of it came the answer that what he looked at was his own doing. He had created this gap, without ever realizing it, by his own act in going back to be Paul Formain and changing the implications of past history. He had set out to split up the Enemy that had struck at him during the old Chantry Guild's initiation ceremony, so that it became not a semi-living racial force, but a part of every human living.

It had been the only way he had known, then, of making humanity take sides, for either creativity or stasis, and so bring that hidden, inner conflict to an outer resolution.

And he had succeeded - with the Othem as an unexpected and unwelcome by-product. But he had succeeded. And here was another by-product.

The road to evolution of humankind led through the Creative Universe. But to enter it himself was not enough. It must be entered by at least one other human. The tower and what it stood on must be given relevance, as he had been required to find a relevance to feel the souls behind those creations of humankind and time stored in the Final Encyclopedia.

He could not cross the gap before him, because up to this point was no more than a place he had made himself. Beyond it, on the island and in the tower, he must share this universe with whoever or whatever in the race would oppose him there, for it was there the argument would come to a head and be settled. This place he had created was only an arena for decision, by his own choice he had willed it to be so.

There was only one other person so far alive, besides himself, with the background and experience to move through the phase-screen as he had and create a destination. After that one came here it would become progressively easier for those who would come after. But for now, and for that one person, the time was short. Perhaps, even now, too short.

He turned about quickly and stepped backward - with intent. So it was he stepped not back up the stony slope away from the edge of nothingness, but out through the farther phase-screen into the corridor of the Final Encyclopedia, where Jeamus and his men, with Rukh and Amanda, still waited for him....

"Thank the Lord" said Jeamus. "How long was I gone?" asked Hal. "No time at all," said Jeamus. "Perhaps a couple of minutes, then you came out of the other screen-" "Good," he interrupted. "Now I want this whole device moved and set us in Tam's main room, right now," "How fast?" "I-uh-" Jeamus floundered. "An hour-" "Five minutes," said Hal. "Five?" "Or as close to that as you can come," said Hal. "I want to get it there while Tam's still alive. Just the minimum of what you have here to make the doorway work." "But a minimum's all we ever had--

Jeamus's hands fluttered, half-lifted for a moment, helplessly. Then the meaning of Hal's words seemed to penetrate. He threw up his hands, and his voice hardened. "Maybe fifteen minutes... or ten? Maybe even... five? But Tam's quarters ? " "Yes." As Jeamus stood uncertain, he added harshly, "I'm speaking as the Director. Move it. As fast as you humanly can. Amanda? Rukh?"

He went out of the door. The two caught up with him just beyond it. "What is it?" said Amanda. He glanced at her as they went, for she had a right to ask. She saw deeper into him than Rukh. "Why the special hurry?" "I was in the Creative Universe," he answered briefly. "But someone else besides me has to go there, and only Tam's qualified, because he can read the Encyclopedia's knowledge core - not as well as I, but well enough." "There's a problem?" she asked. "Yes. What I mentioned - and there's something else. A gap where there shouldn't be one, a gap I can't reach across. I need a bridge. " "A bridge..."

Still striding swiftly down the corridor he turned to look at her. There was a look on her face he knew.

"What is it?" he said. "The cloak... I think," she said. Looking past him. "I don't know why, but the cloak will make a bridge."

But they were already at the entrance to Tam's quarters. "Yes," said Rukh, as they turned to go in, after him - he realized he was back in all the size of his Hal-body, "all thanks to God you came when you did. I have a feeling he's very close to the end... very close."