The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Thirty-four

Here, there was no change. But something in him was aware of having just achieved movement toward some as-yet-undefined goal. From the dreams just past he had progressed, had gained something that had not been available to him before. Once more aware of the cell about him, he felt for the first time an almost perfect separation of himself into two parts. One part, from which he was withdrawing, was the suffering body, which he now understood clearly but calmly to be losing its battle for life as its temperature mounted and its lungs gradually filled, bringing it closer and closer to the moment when it would cease to function. The other, to which he had drawn nearer, was the mind, now that the tether that normally held it to the demanding feelings and instincts of the body was becoming attenuated under the fierce fire of his struggle to survive. The mind itself burned now, with a brilliance that fed on the heat of that fire.

It was a new sort of brilliance that illuminated things formerly hidden from him. He was acutely aware of the two parts of the structure with which he thought. The but and the ben of it - the front chamber and the rear one. In the front, brightly illuminated, was the long and narrow room of his conscious thoughts, where logic kept order and worked in visible steps from question to answer. But at the back of that room was the doorless wall that separated it from the rear chamber - the vast unordered attic of his unconscious, piled and stored with all the rich lumber of his experience. In just the past few hours of talk and dreams that wall had been burned thin, as the connecting link between mind and body had been thinned by his struggle to survive, so that now it was less a wall than a semi-transparent membrane. Also, the normally blinding lamp of his instinct to survive had been turned down, until with vision adjusted to dimness he could see through that membrane into formerly obscure corners and dark places from which his conscious vision had been blocked before.

Now he saw by the light of that gentler lamp of understanding, which illuminated both chambers alike and shone through the thinned membrane that separated them, until from the dimmed front chamber he could now begin to make out new shapes of patterns and identities amongst all the clutter that the back chamber held.

In that seeking light he could no longer deny what he knew to be true. He had indeed, as Bleys had claimed he must sooner or later, taken matters finally into his own hands. He had lied to Rukh by omission because he knew she would not agree with what he wanted to suggest, the removal of the donkeys and the explosive so that the Command might disperse and survive, the explosives taken by one person to a safe hiding place. He had chosen to do this without consultation with anyone, making the decisions for all of the rest and taking charge by main force. But he had done it with a purpose. A purpose outside himself.

And in that fact lay all the difference in the universe from what Bleys had tried to imply to such an action. For Bleys had spoken of matters taken over by the more powerful individual, alone, for his own survival and comfort. Behind the tall man's words had been the implication that there was no other worthwhile goal but this. But he had been wrong. For there was in fact a massively greater goal - the eternal survival of the race so that it could continue to learn and grow. That purpose was toward life while Bleys' was only toward a brief moment of personal satisfaction, followed by an inevitable death that would leave behind no mark upon the fabric of the universe. The truer instinct to sacrifice a personal life that the race might survive was imaged in the Brown Man he had created as part of the poem he had made in the mountains, reaching out to give form to the understanding already growing within him.

It had been a form constructed by way of the pattern of words, as he had been making such constructs unconsciously with his poetry since he had been very young. Bleys' way had no form, no purpose, no value, only the building of a little comfort for a short while - before the coming of the endless dark.

The way of all those Hal had ever been close to had always been aware of the greater purpose. Malachi, Walter and Obadiah had died to ensure that Hal himself would live, and so perhaps come to this present moment of understanding. Those in Rukh's Command had fought and died for an end they felt too strongly to question, even if the exact shape of it was not visible to them. Tam Olyn had given the long years of his life to guardianship of that great lever for humanity that the Encyclopedia would one day be. And he, himself, had been driven from his earliest beginnings by a similar purpose; even if, as with those in the Command, its exact shape had continued to be hidden from him.

A powerful feeling of being close now to what he had always sought took hold of Hal. In the face of that feeling, the agonies and the approaching death of his body dwindled to unimportance. The fact of the cell about him dwindled. Pushing all things into the background now was the fact that through the near-transparent membrane, between the two compartments of his mind, comprehension was at last beginning to flow back and forth, revealing a possible solution to all problems, a victory the possibility of which had been wholly hidden from him, before.

Even now, he still could not see it clearly. But he felt its presence, unmistakably; and, knowing at last that it was there, he mined his way toward it with the twin tools of dreams and poetry, linking the two for the first time to explore, with the illumination of his reasoning front mind, the great store of human experience and unconscious understandings in the mind's darker, older twin beyond the membrane.

A sense of transport uplifted him. He foresaw these tools finally taking him to the distant tower of which he had dreamed, that was his goal and that of humanity since the beginning. The tools only waited for him to fashion them into conscious reality, out of the memories and vision that had been used unconsciously to that purpose since the race first lifted its eyes to dream beyond the prison of its present moment toward a greater and better future.

All that he needed was there in the cluttered attic of his experience. To isolate each necessary element of it he was only required to follow the two lamps that had lighted the way of every human from his beginning… the need, and the dream.

He let his mind take leave, therefore, of his body that was fighting and struggling for the scant breath available to it; and set his perceptions free to go on their search.

Again, he dreamed. But this time on the wings of purpose.

… A young man's face looked down at him, with Old Earth's summer sky blue and high behind it. It was an Exotic face, much more youthful than Walter's, the visage of a visitor to the estate. Its owner was a former pupil of Walter's, who had studied under the older man at a time when Walter had still been a teacher on his home of Mara. The pupil was grown, now, and himself a teacher of other Exotics. He wore a dark brown robe on his slim, erect body, and stood with Hal in the woods just beyond the artificial lake. Together, they were watching a sandy patch of ground at their feet and the busy scurrying there of tiny black bodies to and from the opening of an ant hill.

"… One way of thinking of them," the young Exotic was saying to Hal, "is to think of the whole community as a single creature, so that an ant-hill or a swarm of bees becomes the equivalent of a single animal. The individual ant or bee, then, is just one part of the whole creature. The way a fingernail might be to you, useful, but something that you can do without if necessary, or something for which you can grow a replacement."

"Ants and bees?" echoed Hal, fascinated. The single creature image woke something in him that was almost like a memory. "What about people?"

The Exotic teacher smiled down at him.

"People are individuals. You're an individual," he answered. "You don't have to do what the hive as a whole, or the swarm as a whole wants to do. These have no choice, as you do. You can make individual decisions and be free to act on them."

"Yes, but…" Hal's mind had been captured. The powerful idea that had risen in him was something he could not quite visualize and which his eight-year-old powers of expression were inadequate to describe. "A person doesn't have to do what other persons want unless he wants to - I know that. But there could be something like everyone knowing the same thing, then each person could make up his own mind about it. Wouldn't that be practically the same thing?"

The Exotic smiled at him.

"I think what you're suggesting is a sort of conversation of minds," he said. "It's been speculated about for hundreds of years and called a lot of different names - telepathy is one of them. But every test we've ever been able to make shows that at best telepathy's an occasional phenomenon of the unconscious mind, and there's no way to be sure you can use it when you want it. Most people never experience it at all."

"But it could be," said Hal. "Couldn't it?"

"If it could be, then perhaps you'd be right." A single, thoughtful crease formed for a second between the eyebrows of the young Exotic. Then it went away and he smiled again at Hal. "…Perhaps."

They turned from the ant hill and went on together to look at other things about the estate. Later, Hal overheard the younger Exotic speaking privately to Walter.

"He's very bright, isn't he?" the visitor was saying.

Walter's reply had been too low for Hal to catch. But he had been fascinated by the compliment implied in the young Exotic's final words - a compliment none of his three tutors had ever chosen to give him. But thinking about it, afterward, the feeling came even more strongly to him than it had at the time, that he had not so much suddenly stumbled then upon the question that had impressed the young Exotic, as found it already there in some part of him with which he was unfamiliar. Now, fascinated by it anew, after all these years, he let go of his dream about the visitor and came back to awareness of the cell.

That one idea was a piece of the whole that had brought him to this moment. It was also - he thought now, with his racing brain - a part of one of the tools of understanding he had just earlier imagined could be forged by a linking of the forward and back parts of his mind. He reached out to develop that idea, trying to touch with his consciousness other knowledges and awarenesses beyond the membrane, things that he could sense were there, but could still not see clearly. However, these still hid from him. It occurred to him once again that these hidden elements might be from a time farther back than his aware memory knew, that perhaps they lay shrouded partly by the darkness of that mystery about himself to which he had always hunted unsuccessfully for an answer, the mystery of who he was and where he had come from.

With that thought, it came to him that the unconscious might know what the conscious did not. Buried within it must be specific memories from before the time when he had been old enough to make conscious observations of what was around him. Memories, perhaps, of what it had been like aboard the old-fashioned courier spaceship on which he had been found as a child. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the cold wall of the cell, willing awareness of his body to depart from him again, reaching out for a vision of the past before the remembered times…

But the picture that he finally summoned up, half dream, half autohypnotic hallucination was limited in ways that disappointed him. He was able to see something that was clearly like a room, but most of it was shadowy or out of focus. Parts of it - a pilot's chair, some steadily glowing lights on a panel just above his reach - stood out in sharp focus as seen with the unmarred, fresh-born attention of the very young. But the rest was remote or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. Clearly, he thought, he was looking at the space that had combined the functions of main cabin and control room of the craft in which he had been found. However, he could deduce nothing beyond that fact to help him with the questions in his mind. There was no indication of a particular moment in which he might have been seeing this and no sign of other humans within the remembered range of his vision.

A sharp disappointment woke in him, kindling into near anger. All through the life he could remember, he had dreamed and longed to find out about his origins, imagining a thousand fanciful tales of who he might be and where he might have come from. Now it was almost as if he was deliberately being prevented from that discovery, when it lay at his fingertips. In frustration he turned his mind upon the inmost recesses of his unconscious with all the fury of someone running down empty corridors, pounding on door after unresponsive door. Until, at last, he burst his way through one such door to a point where he found himself brought up short, face to face against a barrier the existence of which he had not expected.

His imagination pictured it for him as a massive, round, metal door, like that on a vault. It was an unnatural barrier, that made no secret of the fact it had been put there by someone so much more capable than his present self, that there was no hope of his forcing it open. It stood, speaking a silent, unyielding message to him from the fact of its very existence.

I will stand open when you no longer need what I hide.

In itself, it represented a defeat. But at the same time it gave a confirmation of what he had often suspected; and that confirmation made it not a defeat but a victory. The barrier's very existence was proof at last that he was, and always had been, something more than his conscious self had realized. Also it meant that the way blocked off was no more than one tried by an earlier self and found to be a dead end. He was being directed by this to find some other path to the goal they had both tried to reach; and a newly possible means for that journey to that goal lay now in the understanding that had just come to him in this cell.

He let himself go back, therefore, to full consciousness of the cell, back to his laboring, suffering body. But with a new freedom now of will and thought, he began consciously to commence the forging of those special mental tools he had imagined earlier when it had come to him how the conscious mind might reach back and tap not only the knowledge but the abilities of the unconscious. He set himself, even as he struggled to breathe, to the building of a poem, sending his desire for that which he needed through the membrane to search among the relationships between the as-yet-unclear shapes and meanings stored back there.

And the search brought those relationships to him finally; in the sharply focused, creative images of the poem itself.

ARMAGEDDON

Yes, they are only deer.

Nervous instincts, fitted with hooves and horns,

That foolishly stamp among these Christian pines

Affixed like seals to the legal foolscap of winter;

And, illiterately facing the line of the snowplowed asphalt

Scrawled by a book-learned hand among these hills,

Cross to the redcapped men.

Armageddon.

Of course. The title and the words of the poem burned in his mind's-eye as the Final Encyclopedia had made his poem about the knight burn amongst the stars that appeared to surround his carrel there. Then, what he had found himself discovering in poetic form had been the irresistible inner force that was to drive him forth from the Encyclopedia, toward his years on Coby and this present moment of realization. Now, with this latter verse he had rendered a picture of the self-created cataclysm toward which the human race was now hurling itself, like a drunken man too intoxicated to realize the consequences of what he did.

Of course. Armageddon - Ragnarok - whatever you wanted to call it, was finally upon all of them. It had caught up all people like an avalanche, gaining speed as it plunged down a mountainside; and there was no one now who could fail to be aware of it on some level or another of his or her senses.

Tam Olyn had told him of it bluntly and plainly. But he also remembered Sost, in the tunneled corridors of Coby, referring to it. Hilary had talked about it to Jason as he had driven Jason and Hal to their meeting with Rukh's Command… and, just a few hours since, Barbage had once more used the term "Armageddon," here in this very cell.

Armageddon - the final battle. Its shadow lay with a weight that could be felt on all living humans, even those who had never heard of the word or the concept. Now it was obvious to Hal that each of them, alone, could feel its approach, just as birds and animals under a blue and cloudless sky could yet feel the coming of a thunderstorm. Not only with the thinking top of their minds, but all through their beings, they could sense the buildup of vast forces about to break into conflict above their heads.

And it was a conflict the roots of which stretched back into prehistoric times. Now that Hal had opened his own eyes to its existence, it became obvious how in the last few hundred years the developing historical situation had merely briefly held back the inevitable, coming hour of conflict, while at the same time setting the stage for its final fury.

All of this was there in the poem he had just made, in allegorical form. Now that he looked for it there, he saw each large division of the race represented. The hunters could only be the Others, involved solely with their personal concerns for the brief, secular moments of their individual lives. The deer were the great mass of people like Sost and Hilary, being driven now by pressures they did not understand at last across a dividing line from safety into the hands of the hunters. Finally, there were those who stood back and saw this situation for what it was, with a vantage point like that of a reader of the poem or a viewer of the picture described. Those who could see what was about to happen and who had already dedicated themselves to prevent its happening. People like Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, like Tam, Rukh and Child-of-God. Like -

Without warning, the lighting of the cell and the small section of corridor he could see dimmed almost to total darkness. A shiver ran for some seconds through all around him. At the same time, from nowhere in particular came a deep, rumbling sound that mounted in volume briefly, then died away - as if just beyond the walls enclosing him there had been the passage of that massive, swift-moving avalanche he had imagined as an image for Armageddon.

It was an inexplicable sound to reach his ears, here in the bowels of a Militia Headquarters as this must be, in the center of a city such as Ahruma. Then the lights came back on full, again.

He waited for an explanation to offer itself - for the sound of running feet approaching or the corridor-blurred echoes of raised voices. But nothing sounded. No one came.