The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Thirty-six

… He woke.

It was not a sudden wakening. He came gradually out of deep slumber to the knowledge that he had been sleeping heavily for some little time. With consciousness the awareness of his fever, his weakness and his struggle to breathe came back to him… but now there was a difference.

He broke into another heavy fit of coughing, almost strangling, as he had strangled before when the matter in his lungs choked and closed completely the airway that brought him the oxygen of life. But this time the panic that had hovered on dark wings above him as he fought to clear his airways did not materialize. Some new fierceness within him, burning more hotly than the fever itself, more inextinguishably than the attack of whatever microscopic entity was working to destroy him, fought back and routed it.

Gasping, he leaned back limply against the wall. It was strange. Nothing was changed, nothing about his physical condition had improved, but internally he felt as if the universe had swung half a cosmic turn about him and settled in some new order that gave strength and the certainty of hope. Triumph lifted its head in him. Death had been pushed back now, and for some reason, he no longer gave it credit for the power to overcome him.

Why? Or rather, if this was so, why had he ever had a fear of it in the first place? He sat, propped up against the wall of the cell in sitting position, with the thin blanket pulled up over him; and the realization came slowly to him that the difference he now recognized was one of mind and will, rather than of body.

When Barbage had named him a hound of Armageddon, and left him to die, a small part of him had acknowledged a rightness in the Militiaman's attitude. Barbage was what he was. His faith, though twisted, was real. He listened to and was used by Bleys, but only because he believed Bleys spoke with the words of Barbage's own personal God; not, like Bleys' other followers, because he either feared or worshipped the man himself.

Unnaturally turned as it was, still the quality of that faith had had the power to touch and weaken Hal. Because of the strength of it, for the first time in his life he had acknowledged the possibility of his own personal death; and in doing that he had, in effect, accepted the possibility of dying. But now, that acceptance was gone from him. In these last hours of fever-vision and dream-memories he had found and confirmed instead a reason why he could not afford death. There were things to be done first, the most urgent of these being the necessity to translate into clear, conscious terms the unconscious reasonings that had given him the necessity to survive. He cast his mind back.

At first, after Barbage, his journey into understanding had not been toward survival, but away from it. His first dream had been of himself, manacled on the mountainside, slowly being destroyed by the pitiless and invincible rain of Bleys' logic. The words Bleys had spoken had carried the argument Milton had put into the mouth of his Satan in Paradise Lost - "I am greater than either the concept of Heaven or that of Hell."

And it was true. Only, it was true in that sense not just of Bleys or the Others, but of any human being who was not afraid to face that greaterness. It was in his avoidance of that universality of possibility that all of Bleys' arguments had betrayed their weakness. The isolation Bleys had spoken of and Hal had remembered feeling on Coby was also true enough, but it was a self-made thing. Nor was it necessary to understand this fact logically in order to put that feeling aside. Anyone with sufficient faith could put it aside without understanding, as James Child-of-God had put aside any consideration of personal cost in the matter of his death on Harmony.

Bleys' arguments, like Bleys' chosen way, were personal and selfish - they closed their eyes to the proven rewards, equally personal but greater, of working not for the self but for humanity as it was personified in one's fellow humans. And it was humanity, the race itself, that was the key to all puzzles. No, not just the race, but the understanding of it as a single creature, concerned with its own survival and apportioning its parts among partisan groups that struggled with each other, so that strengths might be revealed which would point the best direction for future actions and growths by the race as a whole. A race-creature regarded its parts as expendable and unimportant, setting up a web of historic forces that built always forward, containing and controlling the great mass of humanity - that great mass that since time began had been driven like the deer by forces they did not understand, to the waiting, redcapped hunters. Sost and John Heikkila, Hilary and Godlun Amjak, the farmer who had sought reassurance for the future from Child, and had not gotten it - all driven and trapped by the warring factions that had now dwindled to two, the Others and those who opposed them.

And he was one of the opposed. Hal realized suddenly that it was from his understanding of that, that his new strength had just come. He knew himself now. Once, at some graveside, he had made a commitment; and this present moment in which he found himself was simply an extension of that commitment. He had been barred until now, from knowing his own past, for a reason he could not see. But now he saw.

Until now, the time of this present moment, he who had made the commitment had not known how to get to where he wanted to go. It had taken this present life he could remember, up until this moment in the cell, to uncover that way and make it plain. He had seen it now, in allegory in his dream of his path to the Tower - which, that still lost and hidden past of his now whispered, might yet be not dream, but reality. Reality of a different order only, than the here and now.

But it was in the here and now that he presently existed; and so what he must do immediately was translate that unconscious and allegorical understanding of a path into hard and logical understandings of the real forces that must be worked upon to produce the end toward which he had worked all this time. He let the effort of that translation take him and the overriding excitement in his new capacity for understanding flowed purposefully over all that he had mined from his unconscious. The image of the human race as a group entity, an amoeba-like race-animal with an identity and a purpose apart from the individual identities of its component human parts, now stood as a valid model of what he must deal with. The race, pictured as a single creature, a sort of primitive individual with its own instincts and desires - chief among these the instinct to survive as an entity, and a willingness to sacrifice its parts in continuous experimentation to satisfy that instinct - explained all that followed.

Such experimentation would have been a steady process from the time the race-animal became conscious of itself. The drives to develop, through its human components, first intelligence, and later, technology, would have been expressions of that instinct at work. So, too, would have been the twentieth century's probing off the planet of its birth into space, in unconscious search for more living room, the rise of the Splinter Cultures - each an experiment in the viability of human varieties in off-Earth environments - and now, finally, the emergence of the Others.

What made the Others a racial experiment, he understood now, was their need to take over and control all the rest of the race. In that need lay the way to an answer to why the racial animal should have birthed them in the first place. Bleys had answered it himself, in this cell. Whatever else was true about the Others, two things were undeniable. They were human, with all ordinary hungers and wants, including that of always wanting more than they had; and they were very much aware that they were too few to risk the rest of humanity realizing how their sheer lack of numbers made them vulnerable. It was a vulnerability that nothing less than total control of the rest of the race could ever remove; and such control could only be achieved by the establishment of a single unvarying uniform culture. Only such a culture in which all things were permanently fixed and unchanging could release them from the need to stand on guard against those they dominated and turn them loose at last to enjoy their advantage of a natural superiority over the majority of humanity.

And the only way for them to obtain both ends was to first achieve a situation of complete stasis, an end to the long, instinctive upward development of civilization. History must be brought to a halt. To do that they must remove or render harmless to them those other humans who could never accept an end to that development, those who would have no choice but to oppose the Others' building of that stasis.

The strengths of the Others would be first, in their charismatic skills, and secondly, in the fact that individually they were the equals in minds and bodies of the best that could be brought against them. Finally, those strengths would total in that they would be able to marshal most of the total populations of ten worlds to act on their orders. On the other side of their ledger lay their lack of ability to value the future. Other weaknesses…

… But so far they seemed to have no other weaknesses. In a strict sense, one thing that could be labeled as a weakness was the smallness of their actual numbers; while the numbers of their opponents included for all practical purposes the total populations of the Dorsai, and the two Exotic worlds; plus, on Harmony and Association, the minority of true faith-holders such as Child-of-God and Rukh. There would also be added, in the long run, a large share of the population of Earth - but any more than that, any hope of getting all the diverse inhabitants of the Home World to voluntarily join together in any kind of effective response to the danger the Others posed, would be wishful thinking.

While the possible numbers of those opposed in the long run, putting Old Earth aside, would equal only a fraction of the fighting strength and resources the Others could raise from the ten planets they effectively controlled even now; if it came down to worlds fighting worlds as in the old days of Donal Graeme. Therefore, from the start, the Others' best tactic had been to work for an Armageddon, a final battle under the cover of which all those they could neither dominate nor persuade could be destroyed or neutralized.

It was easy now for his mind to see how they might aim at this; but hard to see any way by which they could be stopped or turned back. In any case, the war that was beginning even now would not be one fought so much with material weapons for physical territories, but one waged by opposing minds for the support of the driven deer, the mass of uncommitted individuals making up the human race; and, in such a war, the charismatic abilities of the Others ought to make their victory a foregone conclusion.

Hal sat, struggling for breath in the silent cell, his body burning like a live coal, his mind thrusting and dissecting like a surgeon's tool of ice.

What those who opposed the cross-breeds must have, as soon as possible, was first, a long-range plan that promised at least the hope of victory - and, second, a weapon to match the charismatic abilities of the Others. It would have to be a weapon that the Others either did not have, or could not use; any more than those opposing them could probably expect to use charismatic skills successfully against them.

That there must be at least the potential of a counter-weapon was sure, since the Others themselves were an experiment in survival by the racial-animal. It was necessary to look at the racial-animal itself for an understanding of the real forces at work, those historic forces of which the Others, like the Dorsai, the Exotics and the true faith-holders, and like himself, were merely manifestations.

It had been as if the racial-animal - thought Hal - on becoming aware in the twentieth century that space was physically reachable, had been both attracted and frightened by what lay outside the warm, reliable place that was the planet of its birth. History showed at that time two attitudes among people, one that shrank from space, speaking of "things Men were not meant to know"; and another that was fascinated by it, dreaming of exploration and discoveries, just as dreams of the Indies had moved minds four hundred years earlier, while others foresaw ships sailing off the ocean-edge of the world. When at last it became possible to go into space, and particularly to go beyond the home solar system, both the fears and dreams had spawned thousands of smaller groups, looking for a place to build a society in the pattern of their own desires.

What the racial-animal had wanted, Hal thought now, was proven survivor types, both in the way of individuals and societies; and so it had given free rein to the experimentation of its parts. Out of the diversity of that diaspora had emerged the most successful survivors of the so-called Splinter Cultures; the three greatest, which had been the Dorsai, the Friendlies and the Exotics. These three had flowered for two hundred years during which they performed functions that made the off-Earth, interplanetary society of their time stable, by making war, trade and conflicts safely controllable within the fabric of that society.

Then, with the necessary development of the pattern of that society as its diverse elements were brought under one system of control by Donal Graeme, the need for the Splinter Cultures' special elements dwindled and the cultures themselves had begun to die. Meanwhile, the racial animal, thriftily cross-breeding the new human strains that these Splinter Cultures had developed, so that what had been gained should not be lost, had begun at last to produce the unopposable dominants for which part of its nature had always yearned. So had been rounded out the growth that had gone from development of intelligence - to technology - to the overpopulation of Earth - to space - to the Splinter Cultures who were experiments with survival types of humans off-Earth - to the recombination of these Splinter types, into the new dominants who called themselves the Others.

Only, these dominants now looked to be unremovable as the new leaders of the race; and the millennia-proven growth of historical progress that had always come from the new human talent of each generation deposing the old from authority was in danger of being ended for all time - unless the Others could be shown, after all, to have a weakness.

So much, then, thought Hal, for the position of the Others. Their opponents' position was simply that, since the coming of the Others to power meant an end to all human change and growth, it was a situation not to be endured. To that part of the racial animal the Others' opponents represented, to cease growing meant a death to all hopes for the future; and to avert that universal death, personal death was a small price to pay.

Something clicked in Hal's mind.

Of course. The reason Earth alone had shown such a resistance to the influence of the Others would be that Earth was still the original gene pool of the race; and its people were full-spectrum human - unspecialized in any of the myriad ways that had resulted from the racial animal's experimentation with the breeding and adaptation of its individual parts for their life on other worlds. Within all of those who were native Earth-born, as opposed to just some of those on the younger worlds, lived not merely a portion, but all of the possibilities of the human spirit, good and bad; and one of those possibilities was a portion with the faith of the Friendlies, the independence of the Dorsai and the vision of the Exotics that could not endure an end to change and growth.

Sudden hope kindled in Hal. Earth, then, was at least part of a weapon the Others could not use.

At least part… Hal's leaping mind fastened on a new point. What the Earth's population of native-born, full-spectrum individuals represented to the Others, as to the race as a whole, was genetic insurance, in case their dominance should result in patterns of human specialization that would lack the ability to survive. Some of the variforms of plants and animals had already shown themselves unable to flourish on certain of the Younger Worlds. No one could be sure what several hundred generations from now would produce in human adaptations to the newer planets. Earth was the one world the Others dared not decimate; and also the one they absolutely must control, in order to ensure the survival of their interstellar kingdom once they had established it.

Others, then, equalled stasis. Others-opponents should therefore equal… evolution?

Evolution … the word rang, like a massive gong hammered once, in Hal's mind. Evolution had been the great dream of the Exotics - their great, unfulfilled dream, that mankind was indeed in process of evolving; and that the Exotic students of mankind would eventually identify the direction of the evolution, foster it, and eventually produce an improved form of human.

But the Exotics were dying now, their dream unfulfilled, if their purpose was still in existence, as was that of the Dorsai and the Friendlies. But meanwhile their place was being usurped, along with that of everyone else, by the Others. The Exotics, like the rest of the Others' opponents, had no solution of their own to the situation. If there had been a way within the reach of the Exotics that would stop the Others, they would have found and used it by now.

But, even though the Exotics were dying off, evolution as a concept still existed - for the moment at least. It was not just the private property of the Exotics and never had been, but a property of mankind in general. In short, all these years that the Exotics had sought it, perhaps evolution and the means for it had been in operation under their noses, unrecognized. Perhaps mankind could have been building toward the future of the race without knowing it, just as for centuries humanity had built toward a home on other worlds without knowing it -

Hal chilled. So profound was the shock of discovery, that even with the candle of his life guttering within him, for a moment he forgot the cell around him, his fever, even his struggle to breathe.

The Final Encyclopedia.

The Encyclopedia was the one weapon the Others did not have, and could not use, even if they had it.

Because it had been designed as a tool for learning that which was not known; and, by definition of the stasis toward which the Others worked, there would be a positive danger for them in a tool that promised the addition of new knowledge, in a culture where they wanted no increase and neither growth nor change.

And that, of course, explained the division and the upcoming conflict.

Because the racial animal was purely concerned with survival, at root it would have no partiality for either side. It was allowing its parts to fight each other only to find out which would win. Therefore, both sides must have been allowed by it to unconsciously develop means and weapons toward the inevitable moment of conflict - not just the side that had spawned the Others. The Final Encyclopedia could be the weapon that balanced the scale for the adherents of evolution against the Others' weapon of charisma.

Hal wiped his forehead with the back of an unsteady hand and it came away damp. With a shock he realized that, in this last burst of mental struggle with the problem obsessing him, something had changed in his physical condition. Strangely, now, the chill he had felt at the first shock of discovery was still with him. His fever no longer seemed to burn so fiercely inside him; and even his breathing appeared easier. He coughed; and it was not the dry, struggling cough that it had been before. This cough brought up phlegm more easily and seemed to clear a little extra breathing space in his overstuffed lungs. His head had almost stopped aching. He put a hand to his forehead, again, wonderingly, and again brought away a palm wet with sweat.

His fever had broken. But so great was the turmoil of discovery in him that he could not yet rejoice.

Within his mind, now, he could feel massive shapes and patterns of understanding beginning to take form, like the underwater ghosts of great icebergs in a murky, polar sea, as known facts fell together with conclusions that suddenly were obvious - all shaping so rapidly that consciously he was not able to read the full meaning of what he was just now beginning to understand. It was as if one block, pulled from a towering and meaningless jumble of other such blocks, had caused an earthquake-like tumbling and rearrangement through the entire pile; so that when the motion at last ceased, as in his last dream of the Tower, the jumble stood as a recognizable structure - complete to the smallest detail; while he stood, with the one removed block still in his hand, and marvelled. Even the charisma must have come from some element buried in the full spectrum of human capabilities. Somewhere perhaps they who would fight the Others could find it and use it equally.

Now that he had found this knowledge - now that he held, safe within him, the understanding that the Final Encyclopedia was indeed the tool he had blindly reached for, the weapon unconsciously prepared over time to be used against the Others - he could hardly believe it. He sat with it in mind, dazed by the fact of his understanding, as Arthur Pendragon who was to be king might have felt dazed at finding the great sword come smoothly from the stone into his hand, deaf to the cheers of the watching multitude in his realization at what he had done.

Now that Hal understood, he realized that this understanding was more precious than anything in the ownership of the race. Now that he had it, he must live to escape from here and get himself and his knowledge to safety.

As this other had been solvable, so that, too, must be.