The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 38

They went as swiftly as the Final Encyclopedia could align their blind corridor with the one leading to Tam Olyn's quarters, and Rukh led them in through the door there without waiting to ask for entrance.

Inside, things had hardly changed. Ajela was dressed now in a Japanese kimono, which Hal noted was perfectly arranged, in contrast to the disheveled sari she had worn earlier. She was sitting upright now, but still held one of Tam's hands, and Tam still gazed off at something beyond their sight, he was now holding his interstellar newsman's cloak, that he had not worn since he had returned to the Final Encyclopedia, over ninety years before. It was still set as it had been since the death of his sister's young husband, on the white and red he had worn the day of David's end.

Hal reached the side of Tam's armchair opposite Ajela in six long strides and knelt beside it, putting his hand on Tam's arm which lay strengthlessly along the top of the padded armrest. "Tam!" he said in a low voice, but urgently. "We've done it! I've been in the Creative Universe. Now, to make the Encyclopedia the tool for everyone, the way we always dreamed, and Mark Torre dreamed, we only need one more thing - one final effort from you. Can you make it?" "What're you saying?" Ajela's voice rang through the forest glade that was actually a room. "You aren't going to ask anything of him now?"

Hal ignored her. Amanda and Rukh moved in to draw her aside from the chair and speak to her, in low, imperative voices. "But he can't do anything now! He can't-"

The low-pitched but steady voices of the other two women interrupted her. Hal ignored her. All his attention was focused on Tam, his eyes staring into the faded old eyes only centimeters from his own. "Can you do it, Tam?" Hal asked again. "I've got Jeamus and his people on the way here with the equipment to make it possible. You can go into the Creative Universe and I'll go with you. Now, in the beginning, it has to be done by someone besides me, it has to be used by more than one mind, otherwise, it's just something I've created for myself. But if I can share it with you, we can go on to share it with everyone else, on all the worlds. Do you understand, Tam?"

The ancient eyes stared into his. The head moved minimally forward and back again in what could have been a nod. "But he can't-he can't do anything!" From the sound of her voice, Ajela was crying now as she talked. "He hasn't any strength left! You can't ask anything more of him now. It's too late. He ought to be left to die in peace." "That's what I'm offering him," Hal answered her without taking his eyes off Tam. "That's what it is, Tam. A chance for you to see the end at last, a chance to see it completed." "I tell you he can't do anything - he couldn't if he wanted to!" Ajela protested behind Hal. "I think he can," said Hal. "This one last thing. This final effort, Tam. Can't you?"

There was a change in Tam's face, so small as to be unreadable by anyone who did not know him like the four now with him. Again, his head moved - in a motion more clearly of agreement now. "Good. You remember," Hal said, "how the knowledge here in the Final Encyclopedia had to be a requirement. Nothing less would do. Whoever intended to be a creator in the Creative Universe would need a memory bank at least that large. "

He paused. "Can you hear me, Tam?" he asked. "Do you understand?"

Tam gave another minuscule nod. His eyes seemed to see nothing but Hal's face. "I thought there had to be the way in. I thought I'd find it here," Hal went on. "But for three years, these last three years, I couldn't find it here. "Then Amanda came to suggest I take a fresh look at the problem from outside the Final Encyclopedia, and she was right. I went to a place called the Chantry Guild, on Kultis - a new I in the Creative Universe without giving up the rules and laws of the real universe we already know. And those rules, by definition, were the last to apply in the Creative Universe, where the first principle of creativity had to apply - that anything and everything conceivable could be made."

He paused, and this time Tam nodded without being asked. "There were no rules," said Hal, "but there were necessities. First, it was necessary for those who entered the Creative Universe to believe in it. Next, whoever tried to enter it had to believe humans could do so. Last, it could only be entered by a mind willing to put aside the laws and rules of the real universe."

Hal paused, but only to take breath. "That was the hardest of all, that last," he said. "From the first moment of life, instinct tells us the only laws are the laws of the place where we're born. I don't think I'd have been able to keep going if I hadn't already had my own private proof of a place somewhere with different laws. I had it with my poetry. I had it when I went back, in mind only, to the twenty-first century to alter a future not yet made, the future of the time I'd known as Donal."

He held Tam's eyes with his own and his voice held them both. "I was ready to give up when Amanda came. And you know she feels what's right. She was right this time. At the new @@ila", she was on Kultis, a Chantry Guild, I found it - the belief of another man who'd been as close to the Creative Universe as I'd been. He'd come up with one insight. Only one, but it was enough to point me to where I could finally understand how, just as the physical laws of our universe can be, they can also not-be... and that they're subject to us, not us to them!"

He paused once more. Where were Jeamus and the doorways? "Tam, his name was Jathed, and his particular battlecry was 'the transient and the Eternal are the same.' At first it meant nothing to me, logically - only a contradiction in terms. And then I saw the truth of it. I broke through, finally, to that truth - and the whole Creative Universe opened out before me like a flower to the morning sun. For if the Transient and the Eternal could be the same, then all things could. All things were possible. It was only our point of view that had learned to encompass the possibility it wanted, using the knowledge the race already had, to make it real, and that knowledge was there, waiting for us, in the Final Encyclopedia! "Jeamus and his people are going to be here in just minutes, with the equipment we need to make the trip," Hal said. He dared not take his eyes from Tam's eyes, and the strength he could see in them that the old man was trying to gather, the ancient fighting spirit of a lifetime trying to rouse for one more effort. But he could feel time slipping away from them, like the running water of the stream beside Tam's armchair. "Amanda, Rukh-" he called, his gaze still locked with Tam's. "Isn't there some way you can call that corridor where we were? Find out how they're coming. Tell them we have to have it - now!"

He concentrated on Tam once more. "We had the means of going there, all the time," he went on to the still face, behind which the great struggle was going on to rouse a dying spirit. "It was in phase-technology. The same thing that gave us the phase-shift and the phase-shield. But maybe even that's not necessary. Maybe it's just an excuse for the mind to go into the Creative Universe. I don't know. But we don't have time to experiment now, and I used it when I went this first time. So..."

He was talking without a pause, desperately, as if his words were the lifeline up which Tam was pulling himself to safety. There was a fear within him that if he stopped speaking, even for a moment, Tam would lose his hold, - would fall back, and be lost. "You see," he said, "you go through a phase-doorway to no set destination, which should end you spread out to infinity-"

But at last now, behind him, there was a sound of the door from the corridor banging open with unusual noise and violence, and a moment later Jeamus struggled, sweating, into his field of vision, helping one other man move the framework of one of the phase-doorways. The framework had obviously been made weightless, but they still had to contend with its mass and the awkwardness of its size and rectangular shape. "There's a chance-" Jeamus panted, as the two of them stopped behind Tam's chair. "there may be a chance you can go - and come through the same doorway - so to save time we came - with just that. You want to try it? if so, where - where do we put it. "Yes!" snapped Hat. "Put it right here, in front of Tam's chair! "

He turned back to Tam, seeing them obey out of the comer of his eye. "Now we go," he said gently to Tam. "We go together. I know you can't get up and walk through the doorway - that's what I did. But when I went back to the time of the first Chantry Guild, I only sent my mind back. Trust me. You can send your mind through that doorway the way I went then."

He looked and saw that Jeamus and the man helping him had just set up the doorway, less than a meter from Tam's feet, and other men he recognized as being from Jeamus's crew were connecting it to some kind of heavy cable that snaked out of sight to disappear among the illusion of trees to their right. "All right," he said to Tam, and closed his hand around the wide but bony, cold hand of Tam, "come with me, now. Look through that doorway as if it was an opening on wherever you want to go to. In your mind, stand up and step through the frame to that place, and I'll go with you, by your side, holding to you as I am now."

He broke off, and stared then, for the doorway before him had suddenly become not merely a plate of silver blankness, as it had been in the blind corridor for him. Instead it now seemed to open on a green hillside, lifting beyond the doorway for only a few meters, before it reached a crest, beyond which was only the cloudless light blue of a spring sky. It was the sky of one of the Younger Worlds Hal had never been on, but he had seen images of it. It was a spring sky over the northern hemisphere of the small, lush world of Sainte Marie, the world on which both Jamethon and Kensie had died.

Hal rose to his feet, letting the dead weight of Tam's hand slip from his own. But - unless it was his imagination - it seemed he still felt it there, though Tam had not stirred and no one stood visibly beside Hal.

Still, he felt that Tam was beside him, that their hands were linked. "Here we go," he said, without looking to his left, where the spirit of Tam should now be, and he stepped forward, through the phase-doorway.

At once he stood on the sloping surface of the hillside under the warmth of the different sunlight. He felt the hand withdrawn from his grasp and, turning, now saw Tam standing with him.

But it was a younger Tam, a Tam in no more than his thirties, wearing green field clothing, except for the newsman's cloak. Tam took a step forward by himself and stood, looking at the hilltop.

His face showed an expression that was a strange mixture of grimness and a hope so painfully deep it barely escaped being a fear. He had let go of Hal. Now he moved away from him. Hat stood where he was and watched.

After a moment, some little distance to their right, a head appeared above the brow of the hill, and lifted as the man bearing it approached. It was Kensie, as Hal had last seen him, riding in the place Hal had created in his different universe.

Only here Kensie was wearing a Field Commander's uniform in the dark blue of the Exotic Mercenary Forces. But aside from that he was no different than ever, and the warmth of his smile, directed at Tam, went like a wave before him down the slope.

Tam breathed out, a soft, deep breath, and at that same moment another man mounted over the crest of the hill to the left, wearing the black uniform of a Friendly Commandant out of the last century. He was thin and tall, but nowhere near the height of Kensie, and he also smiled. It was a grave, small smile in his narrow face, but it was there, and it, too, was directed at Tam.

Tam stared at Jamethon as he, too, came onward down the slope. But at that moment two more figures came over the hilltop, this time from directly ahead. One was a young woman, looking hardly out of her teens, with black hair and the same sharp features as Tam himself, holding hands with a man who looked no older than she did, but wore the historic battle gray of the Cassidan Field forces. His uniform was without insignia or mark of rank. These two, also, broke into smiles, coming down toward Tam, so that he suddenly ran forward toward them, the woman who had been his sister and the man who had been her husband, David Hall.

So they all came together, all five of them, halfway up the slope from Hal, in the sun, and clustered together there like a family reunited. Tam was all but hidden by the others surrounding him, but Hal, remembering Mor reaching out his hand across the crupper of his mother's horse as they had ridden together in another place of this Creative Universe, could feel what was in the man who had been Director of the Encyclopedia so long.

He turned back and stepped through where his instinct told him the phase-doorway must be, and was suddenly again in the room with the old man, beside the running stream and with the three women, all surrounded by the illusion of the trees.

Below on the Earth's surface, a cloud must have slipped before the face of the sun, for shadow fell about them as Hal stepped forth. Amanda in her long formal dress of that wintry blue that was the color of the Dorsai northern seas, Rukh, all in black, one hand at her throat holding the circle of grafite on its chain, with the simple cross in its gray-white rock, and Ajela in the green, formal Japanese kimono of fleshy silk, embroidered with a design of pine branches with snow on them - these three in their colors seemed to glow somberly in the little dimming of the light like three queens at a state burial.

Hal turned just in time to see those he had left on the hillside, Tam among them, moving close together over the crest of ground and disappearing beyond. - The hill vanished then, and the face of the phase-door was once more silver and blank.

Hal turned to Ajela and the others. "Did you see?" he said. "Did you see how they met him, smiling, and took him away with them?" "No," whispered Ajela. Slowly the other two shook their heads. "I did" The faint words were barely breathed by Tam, but they all heard. Slowly, Tam's eyelids dropped. But a new, faint smile on his lips remained. Ajela ran to him and hugged him, but it was not the desperate embrace Hal had seen her give the dying man in recent times before. It was an enfolding of warmth and joy.

Tam's eyes closed finally, and, as they watched, the tiny lift 'and fall of his chest stopped its movement altogether. The faint smile still remained on Tam's lips, but he had at last stopped breathing. "Lord," said Rukh, "now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

And in that same moment the cloak, like a creature released, changed back from the white and red it had held for so long, and shone on its basic setting, with all the colors of the rainbow on Old Earth.

Hal stared at it. Amanda had been right. It was the bridge.