The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fourteen

The other occupant of the room, a man stretched out on one of the benches with his back to the room, was apparently trying to sleep; although this was something of an endeavor in the face of the fact that the room was brightly illuminated by a lighting panel let into the center of its ceiling. Hal recognized the man by the color of his hair and his general shape as the dark-skinned young man who had been in front of him through most of the procedure that had taken place since they had all disembarked from the jitney.

Now, as the door to the cell clanged shut and locked behind Hal, the other came to life, rolled over off the bench on to his feet and walked lightly to the cell door to look out through the small window set in its upper panel. He nodded to himself and, turning back into the room, came soft-footedly to Hal, cupping one hand behind his right ear and pointing at the ceiling warningly.

"These Accursed of the Lord," he said, clearly, taking Hal's arm and leading him toward the corner containing the latrine, "they make these places so, deliberately, to rob us of all decency. Might I ask you, out of kindness, to stand where you are over there and turn your back for a moment… thank you, brother. I'll do as much for you, whenever you wish…"

He had drawn Hal by this time right into the corner where the latrine stood. He turned on the water taps of the washstand, triggered the cleansing unit of the stool, and drew Hal's head down with his next to the spouting taps. He wiggled the fingers of both of his hands before Hal's face. Covered by the sound of the running water, he whispered directly into Hal's right ear.

"Can you talk with your fingers?"

Hal shook his head and turned to whisper in the ear of the other.

"No. But I read lips and I can learn very quickly. If you'll mouth the words and show me enough finger-motions to start with, we can talk."

The dark-skinned young man nodded. He straightened up; and while they still stood covered by the sound of the water coming from the taps, he formed words with his lips.

"My name is Jason Rowe. What is yours, brother?"

Hal leaned close again to whisper in Jason Rowe's ear.

"Howard Immanuelson." Jason stared at him. Hal went on. "And you don't need to make the words slowly and exaggeratedly. Just move your lips as if you're speaking normally, and I can follow you easily. Just don't forget to look at me when you speak."

Jason nodded in turn. He lifted his right hand with thumb and forefinger spread slightly and the other fingers curled into the palm.

"Yes," he mouthed at Hal.

Hal nodded, imitating the sign with his own thumb and forefinger.

A few minutes later, when Jason shut off the water coming from the taps and they moved off to take flanking benches in another corner of the room, Hal had already learned the signs for yes, no, I, you, go, stay, sleep, guard and half the letters of the alphabet. They moved to that corner of the room that was to the right of the door, so that anyone looking through the window of the door would not be able to see what they were doing.

Seated as they were, on the benches at right angles to each other, they came as close as possible to facing each other. They began to talk, at first slowly, as Hal was put to the problem of spelling out most of the words he needed to use. But he gained speed as Jason would guess the word he was after before it was completely spelled and give him the sign for it. Hal's signing vocabulary grew rapidly, to what he could see was the profound, if silent, surprise of Jason. Hal made no attempt to explain. It would hardly help here to air the fact that his mnemonic and communicative skills owed a debt to the skills of the Exotics. Their conversation seemed headed at first in a strange direction and Hal was grateful that he could hide his ignorance of what the other was talking about behind his ignorance of the sign language.

"Brother," Jason asked, as soon as they were seated facing each other, "are you of the faith?"

Hal hesitated only a fraction of a second. On the surface there was no reason why any Friendly should not answer such a question in the affirmative; although what the other might mean specifically could be something very much to be determined.

"Yes," he signed, and waited for enlightenment from Jason.

"I, also," said Jason. "But be of good cheer, brother. I do not think that those holding us here have any idea that we're the very kind they're seeking. This witch-hunt they've swept us up in is just part of a city-wide attempt to make themselves look good, in the eyes of one of the Belial-spawn who's come visiting here."

"Visiting?" Hal spelled out.

He had gone tense at the last words of the other; and now, for the first time there was a touch of cold sickness in the pit of his stomach. The words "Belial-spawn" were words he had heard Obadiah use to describe the Others. It was too far-fetched a supposition to imagine that the Other or Others looking for him on Coby had traced the route of his escape and beaten him here to Citadel. But, assuming that they had indeed traced him, a spaceship piloted by someone more inclined to take risks on his phase shifts than the paid master of a freighter could indeed have reached the city here a day or two before him.

"So they say," Jason answered him with silently-moving lips.

"When did he get here?"

Jason's eyes watched Hal curiously.

"Then you had heard - and knew that it was a man, rather than a woman?"

"I…" Hal took advantage of his ignorance of the sign language to cover up his slip, "assumed they'd probably send a man to a New Tradition city like this."

"Perhaps that was the reason. Anyway, it seems he's been here in Citadel less than twenty standard hours." Jason smiled startlingly and suddenly. "I'm good at getting interrogators to tell me things when they're questioning me. I found out quite a bit. They call him Great Teacher - as the lickspittle way of their kind is; and they'll be planning to fawn on him, offering up some examples of those of the faith as sacrifices to his coming."

"Why should I be of good cheer if that's the situation?" asked Hal. "It doesn't sound good to me."

"Why, because they can't be sure, of course," said Jason. "In the end, unless they're certain, they'll delay showing us to him, because they're all like whipped dogs. They cringe at the very thought of his scorn if they're wrong. So, we'll have time; and with that time we'll escape - "

He looked almost merrily at Hal.

"You don't believe me?" he mouthed. "You can't believe that I'd trust you with the knowledge I was going to escape, just like that? Why do you think I open myself to you like this, brother?"

"I don't know," said Hal.

"Because it happens I knew the Howard Immanuelson whose papers you carry. Oh, not well; but we were advanced students in the same class in Summercity, before he left for Kultis to qualify himself for off-planet work. I also know when it was he went to Coby, and that he died there. But he was of the faith; and all his moving away from Harmony was to launder himself, so that he could come back and be useful to us here. You got aboard at Coby with his papers. Also, you've picked up the finger speech far too swiftly to be other than someone who has used it all his life - you must watch that, brother, while you're here. Be careful of seeming to know too much, too quickly. Even some of the Traitors to God have the wit to put two and two together. Now, tell me. What's your real name, and your purpose in being here?"

Hal's brain galloped.

"I can't," he signalled. "I'm sorry."

Jason looked at him sadly for a long moment.

"Unless you can trust me," he said, "I can't trust you. Unless you can tell me, I can't take you with me when I leave here."

"I'm sorry," signed Hal again. "I don't have the right to tell you."

Jason sighed.

"So be it," he said. He got up and went across the cell, lay down with his back to the room in the position he had been in when Hal had entered. Hal sat watching him for a few minutes, then tried to imitate the other man and stretch out himself. But his success was limited. The width of his shoulders was too great for the narrow bench; and the best he could do, lying down, was balance himself so precariously that a second's relaxation would send him tumbling to the floor.

He gave in, finally, and sat upright on the bench, drawing in his legs until he perched in lotus position with his back to the wall. His knees and a good part of his legs projected outward into thin air; but in this position the center of his mass was closer to the edge of the bench that touched the wall behind him and he could relax without falling off. He dropped his hands on his thighs carelessly and hunched his shoulders a little to make it appear to any observer that his position was unthinking and habitual rather than practised. Then he turned his mind loose to drift. Within seconds, the cell faded about him; and, for all physical intents and purposes, he slept…

The cell door clashed open abruptly, waking them. Hal was on his feet by the time the guard came through the open door and he saw out of the corner of his eye that Jason was also.

"All right," said the man who had entered. He was thin and tall - though not as tall as Hal - with a coldly harsh face, and captain's lozenges on his black Militia uniform. "Outside!"

They obeyed. Hal's body was still numb from sleep, but his mind, triggered into immediate overdrive, was whirring. He avoided looking at Jason in the interests of keeping up the pretense that they had not talked and still did not know each other; and he noticed that Jason avoided looking at him. Once in the corridor they were herded back the way Hal remembered being brought in.

"Where are we going?" Jason asked.

"Silence!" said the captain softly, without looking at him and without changing expression, "or I will hang thee by thy wrists for an hour or so after this is over, apostate whelp."

Jason said no more. They were moved along down several corridors, and taken up a freight lift shaft, to what was again very obviously the office section of this establishment. Their guardian brought them to join a gathering of what seemed to be twenty or more prisoners like themselves, waiting outside the open doors of a room with a raised platform at one end, a desk upon it and an open space before it. The flag of the United Sects, a white cross on a black field, hung limply from a flagpole set upright on the stage.

The captain left them with the other prisoners and stepped a few steps aside to speak to the five other enlisted Militiamen acting as guards. They stood, officer, guards and prisoners alike, and time went by.

Finally, there was the sound of footwear on polished corridor floor, echoing around the bend in the further corridor, and three figures turned the corner and came into sight. Hal's breath hesitated for a second. Two were men in ordinary business suits - almost certainly local officials. But the man between them, tall above them, was Bleys Ahrens.

Bleys ran his glance over all the prisoners as he approached, and his eye paused for a second on Hal, but not for longer than might have been expected from the fact that Hal was noticeably the tallest of the group. Bleys came on and turned into the doorway, shaking his head at the two men accompanying him as he did so.

"Foolish," he was saying to them as he passed within arm's length of Hal. "Foolish, foolish! Did you think I was the sort to be impressed by what you could sweep off the streets, that I was to be amused like some primitive ruler by state executions or public torture-spectacles? This sort of thing only wastes energy. I'll show you how to do things. Bring them in here."

The guards were already moving in response before one of the men with Bleys turned and gestured to the Militia officer. Hal and the others were herded into the room and lined up in three ranks facing the platform on which the two men now stood behind the desk and Bleys himself half-sat, half-lounged, with his weight on the further edge of that piece of furniture. To even this casual pose he lent an impression of elegant authority.

A coldness had developed in the pit of Hal's stomach with Bleys' appearance; and now that feeling was growing, spreading all through him. Sheltered and protected as he had been all his life, he had grown up without ever knowing the kind of fear that compresses the chest and takes strength from the limbs. Then, all at once, he had encountered death and that kind of fear for the first time; and now the reflex set up by that moment had been triggered by a second encounter with the tall, commanding figure on the platform before him.

He was not afraid of the Friendly authorities who were holding him captive. His mind recognized the fact that they were only human; and he had been deeply instructed in the principle that for any problem involving human interaction there was a practical solution to be found by anyone who would search for it. But the sight of Bleys faced him with a being who had destroyed the very pillars of his personal universe. He felt the paralysis of his fear spreading all through him; and the rational part of him recognized that once it had taken him over completely he would throw himself upon the fate that would follow Bleys' identification of him - just to get it over with.

He reached for help; and the ghosts of three old men came out of his memory in response.

"He is no more than a weed that flourishes for a single summer's day, this man you face," said the harsh voice of Obadiah in his mind. "No more than the rain on the mountainside, blowing for a moment past the rock. God is that rock, and eternal. The rain passes and is as if it never was. Hold to the rock and ignore the rain."

"He can do nothing," said the soft voice of Walter the InTeacher, "that I've not already shown you at one time or another. He's no more than a user of skills developed by other men and women, many of whom could use them far better than he can. Remember that no one's mind and body are ever more than human. Forget the fact he's older and more experienced than you; and concentrate only on a true image of what he is, and what his limits are."

"Fear is just one more weapon," said Malachi, "no more dangerous in itself than a sharpened blade is. Treat it as you would any weapon. When it approaches, turn yourself to let it pass you by, then take and control the hand that guides it at you. The weapon without the hand is only one more thing - in a universe full of things."

Up on the platform Bleys looked down at them all.

"Pay attention to me, my friends," he said softly to the prisoners. "Look at me."

They looked, Hal with the rest of them. He saw Bleys' lean, aristocratic face and pleasant brown eyes. Then, as he looked at them, those eyes began to expand until they would entirely fill his field of vision.

Reflexively, out of his training under Walter the InTeacher, he took a step back within his own mind, putting what he saw at arm's length - and all at once it was as if he was aware of things on two levels. There was the level on which he stood with the other prisoners, held by Ahrens like animals transfixed by a bright light in darkness; and there was the level in which he was aware of the assault that was being made on his free will by what was hidden behind that bright light, and on which he struggled to resist it.

He thought of rock. In his mind he formed the image of a mountainside, cut and carved into an altar on which an eternal light burned. Rock and light… untouchable, eternal.

"I must apologize to you, my friends and brothers," Bleys was saying gently to all of them. "Mistakenly, you've been made to suffer; and that shouldn't be. But it was a natural mistake and small mistakes of your own have contributed to it. Examine your conscience. Is there one of you here who isn't aware of things you know you shouldn't have done…"

Like mist, the beginnings of rain blew upon the light and the altar. But the light continued to burn, and the rock was unchanged. Bleys' voice continued; and the rain thickened, blowing more fiercely upon the rock and the light. On the mountainside the day darkened, but the light burned on through the darkness, showing the rock still there, still unmarked and unmoved…

Bleys was softly showing all of them the way to a worthier and happier life, a way that trusted in what he was telling them. All that they needed to do was to acknowledge the errors of their past and let themselves be guided in the proper path for their future. His words made a warm and friendly shelter away from all storm, its door open and waiting for all of them. But, sadly, Hal must remain behind; alone, out on the mountainside in the icy and violent rain, clinging to the rock so that the wind could not blow him away; and with only the pure but heatless light burning in the darkness to comfort him.

Gradually, he became aware that the wind had ceased growing stronger, that the rain which had been falling ever heavier was now only steady, that the darkness could grow no darker - and that he, the rock and the light were still there, still together. A warmth of a new sort kindled itself inside him and grew until it shouted in triumph. He felt a strength within him that he had never felt before, and with that strength, he stepped back, merging once more the two levels, so that he looked out nakedly through his own eyes again at Bleys Ahrens.

Bleys had finished talking and was stepping down from the platform, headed out of the room. All the prisoners turned to watch him go as if he walked out of the room holding one string to which all of them were attached.

"If you'll come this way, brothers," said one of the guards.

They were led, by this single guard only, down more corridors and into a room with desks, where they were handed back their papers.