The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Eighteen

"Are you all right?" said Hal numbly. "What happened?"

Jason's lips worked without a sound. He lifted a hand and felt his throat. At last his voice came, huskily.

"I woke and heard you breathing," he said. "Then, suddenly, your breathing stopped. I called to you to wake you up, but you didn't answer. I crawled over to see if you were still there, and you were - but you weren't breathing at all. I tried to shake your shoulder to wake you…"

His voice ran down.

"And I woke up and grabbed your throat," said Hal.

Jason nodded, still staring up at him.

"I'm sorry," said Hal. "I don't know why I did that. I wasn't even awake. I'm sorry."

Jason got slowly to his feet. They looked at each other with their faces only a few hands-width's apart in the yellow light of the glowtube.

"You're dangerous, Howard," said Jason, in an expressionless voice.

"I know," said Hal, unhappily. "I'm sorry."

"No," said Jason, "it's good for this Command to have dangerousness like that on our side, against our enemies. But what made you attack me?"

"I don't know."

"It was because I woke you suddenly, wasn't it?"

"I suppose," said Hal. "But even then… I don't usually go around attacking anyone who wakes me suddenly."

"Were you dreaming?"

"I don't remember…" Hal made an effort to remember. "Yes."

"A bad dream?"

"In a way…" said Hal.

"A bad dream. It's not surprising," said Jason. "Many of us know what it's like to have that sort of dream. It's all right. As long as we're both awake now, let's have some coffee."

Hal shivered.

"Yes," he said. "That's a good idea."

Jason turned to a corner of the tent and came up with a temperature-sealed plastic container that looked as if it might hold about a liter of liquid.

"I filled it after dinner - I meant to tell you it was here," he said, almost shyly. He pressed the thumb-stop to jet a stream of dark liquid, steaming in the chill air of the nighttime tent, into a couple of plastic cups. He handed one filled cup to Hal and got back into the warmth of his own bedsack, sitting up with it around him.

Hal imitated him. They looked at each other across the width of the tent.

"Would you want to tell me what the dream was?" Jason said.

"I don't know if I can," said Hal. "It wasn't very clear…"

"Yes. I know that kind, too," said Jason. He nodded. "Don't try to talk about it, then. Drink the coffee and lie down again. The thread gets broken that way, and the same nightmare doesn't come back. Tomorrow's another day. Think about tomorrow while you're falling asleep."

"All right," said Hal.

Jason finished his cup quickly and lay down again, pulling the hood of his bedsack up close around his head.

"Leave the light on or turn it off, whichever you like," he said. "It won't bother me."

"I'll put it out," said Hal.

He got up, extinguished the glowtube and crawled back into his bedsack in darkness. He had set his cup to one side of the bedsack and it was still half full. Sitting up, he drank it off, then laid back down himself. The feeling of the dream he had admitted having came back to him. There was nothing he could have told Jason about it that would have made sense out of his murderous response at being wakened, or his earlier unaccountable ceasing to breathe.

… He had been riding, armed and armored, on horseback with others. They had ridden out of some trees onto the edge of a vast plain, and halted their horses. Distant in the middle of the otherwise stark emptiness of the plain was a dark, solitary, medieval-looking structure - like a peel tower, narrowing as it reached upward to its crenelated top. There were no other buildings around it, only the tower itself - and it was far off. There was a terrible sense about the tower of waiting, that held them all silent.

"I'll go alone," he had said to the others.

He had gotten down from his horse, passed the reins to the man next to him and started out on foot across the endless distance of the plain, toward the tower. At some time later, he had looked back and seen 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 again 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; and without warning something he could not see had come up out of the wasteland behind him and touched him on the shoulder.

And that had been all. The next thing he had known was that he was awake with his hands around Jason's throat. Still holding in his mind the dream-memory of the tower as he had last seen it in his dream, he fell asleep again.

He woke to the feel of his foot being moved. He opened his eyes and saw that it was Jason who had hold of it, through the bedsack. Jason squatted at arm's length from the bottom end of the bedsack, at maximum distance from him; and his gaze was anxious.

"Wasn't I breathing again?" Hal said, and grinned at him.

Jason let go of his foot and grinned back.

"You were breathing, all right. But we're due to help with breakfast. You'll have to hurry."

Hal rolled over, fumbled for and found the bath kit with which Hilary had supplied him, and pulled himself out of the warmth of the bedsack into the chill morning air. He stumbled from the tent toward the nearby stream.

Fifteen minutes later they were walking through the dawn woods toward the cook tent. The light was grayish white and mist was everywhere in wisps between the trees. Sounds came very clearly through the mist, sounds of wood being chopped, people calling back and forth, metal objects clanking against each other. The cold, damp air laved Hal's freshly depilated cheeks and touched deep into his lungs when he drew it in. From dead sleepiness, he was waking powerfully to a sense of being very alive, warm and alive within the protection of his heavy outdoor clothing. He was hollow with hunger.

When they got to the cook shack, however, he and Jason had time only for a hastily-gulped cup of coffee before going to work. But eventually the rest of the Command was fed and they got a chance at their own breakfasts.

"We'll look over the packsaddles, first," Jason said as they sat eating, perched on some boxes in the cooktent, "along with the other gear. Then we'll check out the animals and decide which to load first and which to lead unloaded for rotation. I haven't had a chance to look in the load tent, yet; but Rukh said we've already picked up about three-quarters of as much raw makings as we can carry; and we'll get the rest on our way."

"Our way to where?"

Jason stopped eating for a moment and looked at him.

"No one's said anything?" he said. "Rukh didn't say?"

"No."

"Why don't you go ask her what you're supposed to know, then come back and tell me?" Jason looked uncomfortable. "I don't know what to say and what not."

"I remember you talking in the van to Hilary about the Coretap - "

"I didn't know you were awake." Jason's face was stricken.

"I'd just woke."

"Yes. Well," said Jason, "why don't you talk to Rukh? That way we'll all know what we can talk about."

"All right," said Hal. "I will."

They finished their breakfast and went back to the donkeys and the load tent. All that day they worked over the packsaddles and other carrying gear and practiced loading and unloading. Ten of the donkeys were required to carry the community equipment of the Command, and whatever personal gear a member of the Command was temporarily unable to carry. That left sixteen others to carry what Jason continued to refer to as "the makings," and act as replacement animals for any of the other donkeys who fell lame or otherwise needed to be rested from their loads. It was ordinary practice, Hal learned, to rotate the loads on the animals, so that each one of them periodically was led unburdened; and this went beyond keeping the animals in the best possible condition. It had its roots in the idea that it was sinful not to allow the beasts, like humans, periodic rest.

The next day the Command packed up and started out; and with that began some weeks of daily travel through the mountains. They made fifteen to eighteen kilometers a day; and each night when they camped, they would be visited by people living in the vicinity, bringing in donations of food or supplies, or more of the raw materials for the potassium nitrate.

The physical demands of this life were entirely different from those the mines had made on Hal, but he adapted quickly. He was still as lean as a stripped sapling and he suspected he was still adding height; but to a great extent he had begun to develop the strength of maturity, while still having the elasticity of youth. Before they were a week on their way, he was completely acclimated to this new life. Even the local coffee was beginning to taste good to him.

Their weeks were all very much alike; high altitude days full of bright sunshine and wind, with a few small white clouds, the air very clean and light, the water icy cold from the mountain streams and their sleep sudden and sound after days that grew steadily longer as they moved south to meet the advancing summer.

Hal and Jason were up at dawn. They ate, harnessed and packed the donkeys for the day's trek. Two hours later, the Command was on the move, its human members lined out ahead with backpacks containing their immediate personal equipment and followed by Jason at the head of the donkeys carrying the general gear of the Command. At the tail end of the donkey contingent were those animals carrying the makings and the unloaded animals. Last of all came Hal as rearguard on the pack train. It was his job to make sure none of the beasts or people fell behind and got left, meanwhile keeping a wary eye on the donkeys ahead of him to make sure no load had slipped and no animal had gone lame.

It was a duty that called for vigilance rather than activity; and Hal's mind was free. It was the first time he had been able to stop to think since he had run from his home in the Rockies. On Coby the weekday life of the mines and the weekend life in Port had not given him the kind of mental privacy in which he could stand back and take stock. Now, it was amply available. In the solitude of his position at the end of the donkey line, with the long day's walk and the solidity of the mountains all around him, peace flowed into him and he had the chance to think long thoughts.

Now that he could hold it off at arm's length, he recognized that the Coby life had been an artificial one. He had spent the last three years indoors. It had been necessary as a place to hide while he grew up physically; and it had taught him to live, if not be completely comfortable, with strangers. But in a deeper sense, it had been, as planned, only a marking of time while he had grown up. Now, he was like a convict released from prison. He was back out in the universe where things could begin to happen; and he saw matters more in their proper dimensions.

One of the things that he saw most clearly was that it would be easy to underestimate most of the people he was now with. Not Rukh, and not Child-of-God - each of whom radiated power like hot coals inches from the palm of a hand. But most of the rest were so limited in their view of the universe, so steeped in their religious beliefs, and in many ways so unquestioning as to be hardly suspected even of shrewdness.

But there was more to each one of them than those limitations implied. They were, in fact, very like these mountains through which they now trudged, committed to a conflict they did not really understand but which they would pursue while any flicker of life was still in them, in the name of what they believed to be right.

Deep down, there was a great strength in each of them; an innate strength and a search toward something of more meaning than mere survival. This difference in them from the miners of Coby had reawakened Hal to the reasons and purpose his own life should have. He found himself thinking of where he would need to go from this present moment, to what end he should be looking, and planning to meet.

Somewhere in the last few weeks, he had hardened into the resolve to meet the Others head-on as soon as he should be strong enough. Among the complex bundle of attitudes that made him what he was, was one reflex that looked back always to the moment in which Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had died on the terrace; and a feeling, hard and ancient and unsparing, looked also toward Bleys and Dahno and all their kind. But beyond that he felt, without the understanding that would enable him to define it, that oceanic purpose that had always been there behind everything else in him, now developing into something like a powerful commitment only waiting for the hour in which it would be called to action.

Because he could not define it, because it evaded his grasp when he tried to get his mind around it, he drifted off into the area of poetic images which had always acted as translator for him of those things which his conscious mind could not grasp. As he had used his memories of Walter, Obadiah and Malachi in the Final Encyclopedia to give form to his problem of escape from the Others, so he found himself coming to use the making of poetry to reach the formless images and conclusions in the back of his mind.

As he tramped along, he cut the creative part of himself loose to the great winds of awareness that blew invisibly behind all thoughts; and, line by line as he walked behind the donkeys through the bright-cold of the high mountains, he found himself beginning to reach out and build a poem that put a form and a language to that awareness. Line by line it grew; and just before one of the midday halts, it was done.

No one is so plastic-fine

That he lacks a brown man.

Twisted core of the old-wood roots,

In blind earth moving.

Clever folk with hands of steel

Have built us to a high tower,

Pitched far up from the lonely grass

And the mute stone's crying.

Only, when some more wily fist

Shatters that tower uplifted,

We may yet last in the stone and grass

By a brown man's holding.

The poem sang itself in his head like a repeated melody. It was a song, he thought reasonlessly, to eat up the distance between him and the dark tower of his dream.

With that thought, a vagrant idea came to him of another possible poem waiting to be born about the dark tower of his dream - a poem that charted the path into a new and larger arena of possibilities that was waiting in the back of his mind, somewhere. But it slipped away as he reached for it now. Like his song about the brown man, it bore a relationship to himself and his circumstances in ways he could feel but not yet define. Only, the poem about the tower was massive and touched great forces waiting to be. He forced himself to put aside thinking of it and came back to the brown man song to see what it had to tell him.

Clearly, it was saying that a stage was now past for him, a step was achieved - before he could think any farther into it, he saw Jason standing by the side of the route, holding the halter of one of the donkeys. Hal shooed his own beasts ahead and drew level with Jason and his.

"What's up?" he called.

"A thrown shoe," said Jason. "It must have happened right after we started. We'll have to switch the load to another animal."