The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Thirty-five

Gradually, he ceased to wait. The hope that someone might come or some sort of explanation appear left him; and his mind, like a compass needle, swung back to the magnetic element of his earlier thoughts. He had been listing in his mind those he had known who were committed to fight the bringers of Armageddon and he had been about to add one more name - his own.

Because he now realized that he also was committed. But there was a difference between him and the others he had thought of. Unlike them, he had been enlisted at some point farther back than his conscious memory could reach. Even before he had been found in the spacecraft, plans must have been laid to make him part of a war that he did not then even know existed.

Once more, he came back to the fact that there were things beyond the membrane, in the shadowy warehouse of his unconscious, that belonged to a past beyond the life his present consciousness knew. He could feel back there answers that had been blocked from him, as the image of the vault door had blocked his earlier searching. But it was no dead end he followed now. A certainty lived in him that the reason he had been committed to this struggle had been with him all this time in his unconscious.

The same tools that had brought him answers so far should continue to work for him now. He closed his eyes and his mind once more to the cell about him and reached out for the materials of another poem that would give him further answers.

But no poem came. Instead, came something so powerful that he lived it beyond the definition of the words dream or vision. It was a memory of a sound once heard. It spoke in his mind with such keen clarity that there was no difference between that and his hearing it with his physical ears, here in the cell, all over again. It was the sound of bagpipe music. And he found himself weeping.

It was not for the music alone he wept, but for what it had meant, for the pain and the grief of that meaning. He followed sound and pain together as if they were a braided thread of gold and scarlet leading him first into darkness and then out once more into a cloud-thick, chilly autumn day, with tall people standing around a newly-dug grave, below willows already stripped of their leaves, and the high, cold peaks of mountains.

The people about seemed so tall, he realized, because he, who was there with them, was still only a child. They were his people and the grave had been filled in though the coffin it held was empty - but the music was now filling it, for the body that should have been there. The man playing the pipes and standing across from him, up near the head of the grave, was his uncle. His father and mother stood behind the gravestone, and his great-uncle stood opposite his uncle. His only other uncle, the twin of the one playing the pipes, was not there. He had been unable to return, even for this. Of the rest of the family present, there was only his one brother, who was six years older than himself, sixteen now and due to leave home himself in two years.

At the foot of the grave were a handful of neighbors and friends. Like the family, they wore black, except for five of them with oriental faces, whose white mourning robes stood out starkly amongst the dark clothing around them.

Then the music ended and his father took a limping half-step forward, so that he could close one big hand over the curved top of the gravestone, and speak the words that were always spoken by the head of the family at the burial of one of its members.

"He is home." His father's voice was hoarse. "Sleep with those who loved you - James, my brother."

His father turned away. The burial was over. Family, neighbors and friends went back to the big house. But he, himself, lagged behind and drifted aside, unnoticed, to slip away into the stable.

There, in the familiar dimness warmed by the heavy bodies of the horses, he went slowly down the center aisle between the stalls. The horses put their soft noses over the doors that locked them in and blew at him as he passed, but he ignored them. At the barn's far end he sank down into a sitting position on a bale of new hay from the summer just past, feeling the round logs of the wall hard against his back. He sat, looking at nothing, thinking of James whom he would never see again.

After a while a coldness began to grow in him; but it came, not from the chill of the day outside but from inside him. It spread from a point deep within, outward through his body and limbs. He sat, remembering what he had listened to the day before, with all of the family gathered in the living room to hear from the man who had been his dead uncle's commanding officer, to tell them how James had died.

There had come a point in the talking when the officer, a tall, lean man of his father's age, named Brodsky, had paused in what he was saying and glanced over at him.

"Maybe the boy… ?" Brodsky said. Small among all the rest, he had tensed.

"No," answered his father harshly, "he'll need to know how such things happen soon enough. Let him stay."

He had relaxed. He would have fought, even in the face of his father's command, being sent away from what the officer had to tell.

Brodsky nodded, and went on with what he had been telling them.

"There were two things that caused it," he said slowly, "neither of which should have happened. One of them was that the Director of the Board at Donneswort had been secretly planning to pay us with the help of some pretty heavy funding promised from William of Ceta."

Donneswort was one of the principalities on the planet called Freiland; and the small war there in which James had died had been one of the disputes between communities on that populous world which had escalated into military conflict.

"He'd kept that from us, of course," the officer went on, "or we'd have required a covering deposit in advance. Apparently no one at Donneswort, even the other members of his Board, knew. William, of course, had interests in controlling either Donneswort or its opponent, or both. At any rate, the contract was signed, our troops made good progress from the first into opposition territory and it looked like we were ready to sweep up, when - again, without our knowing it - William reneged on his promise to the Board Director, as he'd probably planned to do from the beginning."

Brodsky stopped and looked steadily at his father.

"And that left Donneswort without funds to pay you off, of course," his father said. His father's dark gaze glanced at his uncle and brother. "That's happened before, too, to our people."

"Yes," said Brodsky, emotionlessly. "At any rate, the Board Director decided to try and hide the news of this from us until we'd got a surrender from our opposition - it looked as if we were only a few days from it, at that time. He did keep it from us, but he didn't manage to keep it from spies belonging to the opposition. As soon as the other side heard, they stuck their necks out, borrowed militia from adjoining states they wouldn't be able to pay for unless they won, and we suddenly found a force three times the size we'd contracted to deal with thrown at us."

Brodsky paused and he saw the officer's dark eyes glance briefly once more, over at his own small self.

"Go on," said his father, harshly. "You're going to tell us how all this affected my brother."

"Yes," said the officer. "We'd had James on duty as a Force-Leader, with a unit of local Donneswort militia. But of course, since he was one of ours, his orders came only down our own chain of command. Because he was new in command and because his militia weren't worth much, we'd held his Force in reserve. But when the Board Director heard of the increase in opposition forces, he panicked and tried to throw all of us, all available troops, into an all-out attack - which would have been suicidal, the way we were positioned at the time."

"So you refused," said his uncle, speaking for the first time.

"We did, of course," said Brodsky, looking over at the uncle. "Our Battle Op rejected the Director's order, for cause, which he was free to do under the contract, and as he would've in any case. But those companies of militia not under our own officers received the order and followed it. They moved up."

"But the boy got no order," said his mother.

"Unfortunately," Brodsky sighed softly, "he did. That was the second thing that shouldn't have happened. James' Force was part of a unit positioned off on the left flank of our general position, in touch with the overall Command HQ through a central communications net that was staffed almost totally by local militia. One of these was the man who received the message for the troops in James' area. There, all the units except James' were commanded by militia officers. The militiaman on net communications to their sector made up move orders for all units before someone pointed out to him that the one to your brother could only be sent if it was authorized by one of our own commanders. Because the militiaman was ignorant of the overall situation, and apparently also because it was simply easier for him than checking with our command, he put the name of James' Commander on the order to James without authority, and sent it out over the net to your brother."

Brodsky sighed softly again.

"James moved his Force up with the rest of the militia around him," he went on. "There was a road they'd been ordered to hold; and they made contact with opposition forces almost immediately. James must have seen from the beginning that he and his men were caught up in a fight with numbers and equipment too great for his men to hold. The militia under their own officers on either side of him pulled out - ran, I should say. He checked back with the communications net, but the same militiaman who'd issued the order panicked, just as the Board Director had, and simply told James no orders had come in from the Dorsai command for him to pull back."

The officer stopped speaking. The silence in the living room was uninterrupted.

"So," said the officer, "that's the last contact that was had with his Force. We believe he must have assumed our own people had some reason for wanting him to hold. He could still have pulled back on his own initiative under the Mercenaries Code, of course, but he didn't. He did his best to hold until his position was overrun and he and his men were killed."

The eyes of all the rest of them in the room were dry and steady upon Brodsky.

"That particular militiaman was killed an hour or so later when the net position was overrun," the officer said softly. "We would have dealt with him otherwise, naturally, and also there would at least have been reparations for you as a family. But Donneswort was bankrupt, so not even that much was possible. The rest of us who were there got the funds to return home from the opposition. We threatened to hold the Donneswort capital city on our own, against them, if they didn't pay us what we needed to evacuate. It was a lot cheaper for them to bear the expense of sending us home than to pay the cost of taking the city from us. And if they hadn't taken the city within a week, they'd have been bankrupt themselves, unable to keep the borrowed militia they needed to control Donneswort."

He stopped speaking. There was a long silence.

"Nothing more than that's required, then," said his father, harshly. "We all thank you for bringing us word."

"So." It was his uncle speaking, and for once his open, friendly face was no longer so. In this dark moment he was the mirror image of that grim man, his twin brother. "William of Ceta, the Board Director, and the dead net communicator. We've all three to hold to account for this."

"The Director was tried and executed by Donneswort, itself," said Brodsky. "He got a lot of his own people killed, too."

"That still leaves - " his uncle was beginning, when his father interrupted.

"It does no good to fix blame now," his father said. "It's our life, and this sort of thing happens."

A deep shock went through him at the words; but he said nothing then, watching as his uncle fell silent and the rest of the family got to their feet. His father offered a hand to the officer, who took it. They stood, hands clasped together for a moment.

"Thank you," said his father, again. "Will you be able to stay for the funeral?"

"I wish I could," Brodsky answered. "I'm sorry. We've still got wounded coming back."

"We understand - " his father had said…

- The stable door creaked open now and the scene from the previous day evaporated, leaving him only with the perfect coldness that held him as if he had been frozen into a block of ice. Remotely, he was aware of his uncle coming toward him with long strides down the aisles between the horsestalls.

"Lad, what are you doing here?" his uncle said, in a concerned voice. "Your mother's worried about you. Come back in the house."

Hal did not answer. His uncle reached him, abruptly frowned and knelt so that their faces were on a level. His uncle's eyes peered into his own, and his uncle's face suddenly altered into a look of pain and deep shock.

"Oh, boy, boy," his uncle whispered. He felt the big arms gently enclosing his own stiff body, holding him. "You're too young for this, yet. It's too soon for you to go this way. Don't, lad, don't! Come back!"

But the words came remotely to his ears, as if they had been addressed to someone other than himself. Out of the coldness in him, he looked steadily into his uncle's eyes.

"No more," he heard his own voice saying. "Never any more. I'll stop it. I'll find them and stop them. All of them."

"Boy…" His uncle held him close as if he would warm the smaller body with the living heat of his own. "Come back. Come back…"

For a long moment it was as still as if his uncle was speaking to someone else. But then, in a moment no longer than that of a sigh, the iciness drained out of him. Half-unconscious in the reaction from what he had just been feeling, he fell forward against his uncle's shoulder, and as if in a dream he felt himself lifted up like a tired child in the powerful arms and carried out of the stable…

He woke once more to the cell. For a brief moment, still anesthetized by unconsciousness, he had thought that he was well again; and then an uncontrollable coughing seized him and for a moment he found his breathing completely stopped. Panic, like the shadow of some descending vulture, closed its wings about him and for a long minute he struggled vainly for breath. Then he managed to rid himself of the phlegm he had coughed loose, and momentarily the illusion of being able to breathe more deeply came to him, then was lost in a new awareness of his fever, his violently aching head and his choked lungs.

His sickness had not lessened. But for all that, he felt a difference. A small increase of strength seemed to have been restored to him by the sleep; and he felt a clearheadedness in the midst of the pain and the struggle to breathe that he had not known before. Where he had thought of himself until now as thinking with a fever-fueled overpressure of brilliance and insight such as he had never touched before, he now, like someone recovering from a massive dose of some stimulant drug, discovered a different and stronger order of perception, an awareness of subtle elements in all of what he had so far perceived and remembered - and the connections between them, that he had been blocked off from previously.

Moreover, with this awareness he found himself caught up for the first time in a tremendous sense of excitement - the excitement of a searcher who has at last stepped over the crest that has been blocking his view and for the first time sees his goal undeniably and clearly. He felt himself on the edge of something enormous, that thing he had been in pursuit of all his life - in fact, for longer than his life, an incalculable amount of time.

Sitting upright once more with his back against the cell wall, he probed the difference this new feeling implied. It was as if all the universe beyond his limited view of the cell and the corridor had suddenly taken a gigantic step toward him. He no longer guessed at the vague shapes of possible understandings just beyond his reach; he knew they were there and that his road to them could not be barred.

So thinking, he let himself go, following the inner compass needle of his will; and passed almost without effort into a condition he had never experienced before. Awake - he dreamed, and was conscious that he dreamed. He could see the cell around him; but at the same time, with as much or more clarity, he could see the landscape of his dream.

He was back in his vision of the rubbled plain and the Tower toward which he had been journeying so long and so painfully on foot; while the Tower itself had seemed to move back from him as each footstep brought him closer to it.

For the first time now, all this was changed. He had taken one great step that brought him close in to the Tower. Now he looked at it from relatively close at hand. Only a short distance separated them. But at the same time he saw that he had covered only the easy half of his journey to it. What remained ahead was less in distance, but so much greater in difficulty that he realized only his training and toughening by the long, arduous travel to this point made it possible for him to hope he could cross the final stretch of forbidding ground that lay between them.

Looking back over his shoulder, he discovered now that his journey to this moment had been subtly upslope, so that only now did he stand on a high point from which he could see what lay before him. Slowly the massive rubble before him began to reveal a form. He stood on the broken and crumbled stones of what had once been the outer ramparts of some great defensive structure, so enormous in extent that the historic Krak des Chevaliers of Old Earth could have been dropped into it and lost, among the very shadows of the massive building stones that had formed its inner structures. It was a castle old beyond memory, and time had all but destroyed it. Only the Tower, which had been its keep, its innermost defense, still stood and waited for him.

It would be among that maze of ruined inner walls and outer walls, of fallen baileys and rubble-choked courtyards, chambers and passageways that he must climb and crawl, to make his way at last to the entrance of the Tower. And it was a journey that would have been inconceivable to him, even now, if it had not been for the changes in mind and body that had come upon him over the years, the counterpart of the hardening absorbed in his dream of the long, solitary trek across the rubbled plain. Now older, more skilled and firm of mind, there had grown in him a relentlessness that he had not recognized until now and that not even what lay before him could halt. As someone might enter hell for some strong purpose, he stepped forward and down off the broken ramparts into the rocky and treacherous wilderness before him; and with that step forward his mind was at last committed and at peace.

Going, he left behind that part of him that had carried him through the long earlier parts of his journey and which he no longer needed. Grown and different, he returned to his self that was still in the cell, where he could now begin to see the work that lay before him and the path he must take to its doing.