The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Three

Hal did not know at what point the shades of his tutors left him. Simply, after a while, the floats were empty and he was alone once more. His mind had wandered from his need for them, and they had gone, back into the land of his memories, like the flames of blown-out candles.

But he felt better. Even with the dreary prospect of Coby facing him, he felt better now. Purpose had come back to life in him; and the evocation of the attitudes and certainties of his dead tutors had given him a certain amount of strength. Also, though he was not consciously aware of this, the basic vitality of his youth was lifting his spirits whether he wanted them lifted or not. He had too much sheer physical energy to do nothing but sit and mourn, in spite of the severity of the emotional wound their deaths had dealt him.

He dressed, examined the controls of his room and ordered in some food. He was eating this when his annunciator chimed.

He keyed the screen on his bedside table-surface; and the bright and cheerful face of the young woman from the Transit Point took shape in it.

"Hal Mayne?" she said. "I'm Ajela, Special Assistant to Tam Olyn."

There was a split-second before the second name she had mentioned registered on him. Tam Olyn was the Director of the Encyclopedia - had been its Director for eighty-odd years. He had originally been a top-level interplanetary newsman; but he had abandoned that as suddenly as a man might turn from the world into the seclusion of a monastery to step in, almost at the moment of his entrance there, to being the supreme authority of the Encyclopedia. Hal had learned all about the man in his studies; but he had never thought that he might someday be talking directly to one of the Director's close assistants.

"I'm honored to meet you," he said automatically to the screen.

"Can I drop in on you?" Ajela asked. "There's something we should talk about."

Caution laid its hand on him.

"I'm just here temporarily," he said. "I'll be going out to one of the younger worlds as soon as I can get passage."

"Of course," she said. "But meanwhile, if you wouldn't mind talking to me…"

"Oh, no. No, of course not." He was aware that he fumbled, and he felt embarrassment kindle in him. "Come along right now, if you want."

"Thank you."

The screen lost its image, returning to a uniform pearl gray without depth. Hastily, he finished his meal and pushed his emptied utensils down the disposal slot. They had hardly disappeared when the annunciator chimed again.

"Can I come in?" asked the voice of Ajela, from the blank screen.

"Certainly. Come along - " he went to the door but it opened before he could reach it, and she stepped through it.

She was wearing a loose saffron robe that tied at the waist and reached to her knees. In spite of her youth, she was clearly an Exotic; and she seemed to have the Exotic ability to make everything about her seem as if it could never have been otherwise. So the saffron robe seemed to him, in that first moment in which he really looked at her, as if it was the only thing she should ever wear. Her impact on him was so profound that he almost drew back defensively. He might, indeed, have been even more wary of her than he was; but the open, smiling face and disregard of pretense reassured his prickly young male fear of making the wrong move, suddenly finding himself face to face with a startlingly beautiful woman - he, who had had so little normal acquaintance with women of any age until now.

"You're all right now?" she asked him.

"Fine," he said. "I - thank you."

"I'm sorry," she said. "If we could have warned you, we would have. But the way it is with the Transit Point, if we warn people, we'd never know… it's all right if I sit down?"

"Oh, of course!" He backed away and they sat down in facing floats.

"What wouldn't you know?" he asked, his unquenchable curiosity rising even above his feelings of social awkwardness.

"We'd never be sure that they weren't imagining what they said they heard."

Hal shook his head.

"There wasn't any imagination in what I heard," he said.

"No." She was looking closely at him. "I don't believe there was. What exactly did you hear?"

He looked at her closely, cautiously.

His mind was now almost completely recovered from the unsureness he had felt on first talking to her.

"I'd like to know more of what this is all about," he said.

"Of course you would," she said warmly. "All right, I'll tell you. The fact is, early in the building of the Final Encyclopedia they discovered by accident that someone stepping into the Transit Point for the first time might hear voices. Not voices speaking to them - " She stopped to gaze closely at him. "Just voices, as if they were overhearing them. Mark Torre, in his old age, was the first to hear them. But only Tam Olyn, the first time he stepped into the Encyclopedia, heard them so plainly that he collapsed - the way you did."

Hal stared at her. All his training had ingrained in him the principle of going cautiously, the more unknown or strange the territory. What Ajela had just said was so full of unknown possibilities that he felt a danger in showing any reaction at all before he had had time to understand the matter. He waited, hoping she would simply talk on. But she did not. She only waited in her turn.

"Tam Olyn," he said at last.

"Yes."

"Just Tam Olyn and me? In all these years?"

"In all these years," she said. Her voice had a note in it he could not interpret, a note that was almost sad, for no reason that he could understand. She watched him, he thought, with an odd sympathy.

"I think," he said carefully, "you ought to tell me all about this; and then give me a chance to think about it."

She nodded.

"All right," she said. "Mark Torre conceived of the Encyclopedia - you know that. He was Earth-born, no Exotic, but the Exotics found his conception so in agreement with ontogenetics and our other theories of human and historical evolution that we ended by financing the building of this - " she gestured at the structure around them.

Hal nodded, waited.

"As I said, it was in his late years Mark Torre first heard the voices at the Transit Point." She looked at him with a seriousness that was almost severity. "He theorized then that what he'd heard was just the first evidence of the first small use by any individual of the potential of the Encyclopedia. It was as if someone who'd had no knowledge of what to listen for had suddenly tuned in to all the radio noise of the universe. Sorting out the useful information from that roar of noise, Torre said, would take experience."

Again she paused, almost frowning at him. Hal nodded again, to show his appreciation of the importance of what she was saying.

"I see," he said.

"This idea," she went on, "is what meshed with some of our theories on the Exotics, because it seemed to say that using the Encyclopedia the way Mark Torre dreamed of it being used - as a new sort of tool for the human mind - called for some special ability, an ability not yet to be found in all of the human race. Torre died without making any sense out of what he heard. But he was convinced someone would eventually. After him, Tam took charge here; but Tam's lived in the Encyclopedia all these years without learning how to handle or use what he hears."

"Not at all?" Hal could not help interrupting.

"Not at all," Ajela said, firmly.

"But, like Mark Torre, he's been certain that sooner or later someone would come along who could; and when that finally happens the Encyclopedia is at last going to be put to use as what it was built to be, a tool to unravel the inner universe of the race - that inner universe that's been a dark and fearful mystery since people first started to be conscious of the fact they could think."

Hal sat looking at her.

"And now," he said, "you - and Tam Olyn - you think I might be the one to use it?"

She frowned at him.

"Why are you so cautious… so fearful?" she asked.

He could not tell her. The implication he thought he heard in her voice was one of cowardice. He bristled instinctively.

"I'm not fearful," he said, sharply. "Just careful. I was always taught to be like that."

She reacted instantly.

"I'm sorry," she said with unexpected softness; and her eyes made him feel as if he had made a most unjustified inference from what she had said. "Believe me, neither Tam nor I are trying to push you into anything. If you stop and think, you'll realize that what Mark Torre and Tam were thinking was something that never could be forced on anyone in any case. It'd be as impossible to force that as it'd be impossible to force someone to produce great art. A thing that'd be as great and new as that couldn't ever be forced into existence. It can only come out of some person willing to give her or his life to it."

These last words of hers echoed with a particular power in his mind. In his heart he had never yet been able to delude himself that he was adult, in any ordinary social sense. Even though he was taller than most men already and had already packed into his sixteen years more learning than a normal person would have pushed upon him by twice that time, secretly, and inwardly, he had never been able to convince himself that he was grown up yet. Because of this he had been very conscious of the fact that she was probably a year or two older than he was, and had suspected her of being contemptuous of him, of looking down on him because of it. In a way, the capability of his three tutors had so overshadowed him that they had kept him feeling like a child beyond his years.

But now, for the first time in talking to her, he began to be conscious also of an independence and a strength that he had never felt before. He found himself looking on her and thinking of her, and all the rest of them in this Encyclopedia, with possibly the exception of Tam Olyn, as potential equals, rather than superiors; and, thinking this, he found himself - although the thought did not surface as such in his conscious mind - beginning to fall in love with Ajela.

"I told you, though," he said to her, suddenly conscious of the silence between them, "I'm on my way out. So it doesn't matter whether I heard anything or not."

She sat looking at him penetratingly for a long, silent moment.

"At least," she said at last, "you can take the time to come and talk to Tam Olyn. You and he have something very rare in common."

The point she made was not only effective, but flattering. He was aware she had intended it to be that, but he could not help responding. Tam Olyn was a fabulous name. For his own to be matched with it was ego-building. For just that moment his private grief and loss were forgotten and he thought only that he was being invited to meet Tam Olyn face to face.

"Of course. I'll be honored to talk to him," he said.

"Good!" Ajela got to her feet.

He stared up at her.

"You mean - right now?"

"Why not?"

"No reason not - of course." He got up, in his turn.

"He wants very much to talk to you," she said. She turned, but not toward the door. Instead, she stepped to the bedside tablefloat and the panel of controls there. Her fingers tapped out some code or other.

"We'll go right over," she said.

He was not aware of any feeling of the room's movement; but after a moment's wait she turned toward the door, walked across and opened it, and instead of the corridor he had expected to see, he found himself looking into another, much larger room. Another space, in fact, was a better word for it; it seemed to be not so much a room as a forest glade with comfortable, heavily padded chairfloats scattered up and down its grassy floor along the banks of a small stream that murmured away out of sight between the trunks of a pine forest at the near end of the room and flowed from the base of a small waterfall at the other. A summer midday sky seemed to be overhead.

Behind a desk by the stream, down a little distance from the waterfall, sat the room's single occupant. He looked up as Hal and Ajela approached, pushing aside some time-yellowed and brittle-looking papers that he had been examining on his desk. To Hal's private surprise, he was not the frail-looking centenarian Hal had expected. He was aged - no doubt about it - but he looked more like an eighty-year-old in remarkably good physical condition than someone of his actual years. It was only when they came forward, and Hal met the eyes of the Director of the Final Encyclopedia for the first time, that he felt the full impact of the man's age. The dark gray eyes sunken in wrinkles chilled him with a sense of experience that went beyond any length of the years that Hal could imagine living.

"Sit down," Tam said. His voice was hoarse and old and deep.

Hal walked forward and took a float directly in front of Tam Olyn. Ajela, however, did not sit down. She continued walking forward, and turned to stand beside and partly behind the back of the padded float in which he sat. With one arm she leaned on the top of the float back, the other dropped so that the tips of her fingers rested lightly on Tam's shoulder, as lightly as the lighting of a butterfly. She looked out over Tam's head at Hal, but spoke to the older man.

"Tam," she said, "this is Hal Mayne."

Her voice had a different tone in it that touched Hal for a moment almost with jealousy and with a certain longing.

"Yes," said Tam.

His voice was indeed old. It was hoarse and dry. All his hundred and twenty-plus years echoed in it. His eyes continued to hold Hal's.

"When I first met Mark Torre, after hearing the voices," Tam said slowly, "he wanted to touch my hand. Let me have your hand, Hal Mayne."

Hal got up and extended his hand over the desk. The light, dry fingers of the old man, like twigs covered in thin leather, took it and held it for a second - then let it go.

"Sit down," said Tam, sinking back into his seat.

Hal sat.

"Mark Torre felt nothing when he touched me," Tam said, half to himself, "and I felt nothing now. It doesn't transfer… only, now I know why Mark hoped to feel something when he touched me. I've come to want it, too."

He drew a slow breath through his nostrils.

"Well," he said, "that's it. There's nothing to feel. But you did hear the voices?"

"Yes," said Hal.

He found himself awed. It was not just the ancientness of Tam Olyn that touched him so strongly. There was something beyond that, something that must have been there all of Tam Olyn's life - an elemental force for either good or evil, directed these last eighty-odd years to one purpose only. That time, that distance, that fixity of purpose towered over everything Hal had ever experienced like a mountain over someone standing at the foot of it.

"Yes. I didn't doubt you," Tam was saying, now. "I just wanted the pleasure of hearing you tell me. Did Ajela tell you how rare you are?"

"She mentioned that you and Mark Torre were the only ones who'd heard the voices," Hal answered.

"That's right," Tam Olyn said. "You're one of three. Mark, myself… and now you."

"I…" Hal fumbled as he had fumbled earlier with Ajela, "I'm honored."

"Honored?" There was a dark, angry flash in the eyes set so deeply beneath the age-heavy brow. "The word 'honored' doesn't begin to describe it. Believe me, who used to make my living from words."

Ajela's fingertips pressed down a little, lightly upon the shoulder they touched. The dark flash passed and was gone.

"But you don't understand, of course," Tam said, less harshly. "You think you understand, but you don't. Think of my lifetime and Mark Torre's. Think of the more than a century it took to build this, all around us. Then think deeper than that. Think of all the lifetime of the human race, from the time it began to walk on two legs and dream of things it wanted. Then, you might start to understand what it means to the human race for you to hear the voices at the Transit Point the way you did."

A strange echo came to Hal's mind as he sat under the attack of these words - and it was a curiously comforting echo, Abruptly, it seemed to him he heard in Tam Olyn's voice the trace of an element of another, loved harshness of expression - which had been Obadiah's. He stared at Tam. His studies had always told him that the other was pure Earthman - full-spectrum Earth stock; but what Hal had thought he had heard just now was the hard ring of Friendly thinking - of pure faith, unselfsparing and uncompromising. How could the Director of the Final Encyclopedia have come to acquire some of the thought-ways of a Faith-holder?

"I suppose I can't appreciate it as much as you do," Hal said. "But I can believe it's a greater thing than I can imagine - to have done it."

"Yes. Good," said Tam, nodding. "Good."

He leaned forward over his desk.

"Ajela tells me your clearance request states that you're simply passing through," he said. "We'd like you to stay."

"I can't," answered Hal, automatically. "I've got to go on, as soon as I can find a ship."

"To where?" The commanding old voice, the ancient eyes held him pinned. Hal hesitated. But if it was not safe to speak to Tam Olyn, who could he speak to?

"To Coby."

"Coby? And you're going to do what, on Coby?"

"I'm going to work there," Hal said, "in the mines - for a while."

"Awhile?"

"A few years."

Tam sat looking at him.

"Do you understand you could be here instead, with all it means to have heard the voices, and following to whatever great discovery they might lead you to?" he demanded. "You realize that?"

"Yes."

"But you're going to go to Coby to do mining, anyway?"

"Yes," said Hal, miserably.

"Will you tell me why?"

"No," said Hal, feeling the hand of trained caution on him again, "I… can't."

There was another long moment in which Tam merely sat watching him.

"I assume," Tam said at the end of that time, "you've understood all I've told you. You know the importance of what hearing the voices implies. Ajela and I, here and now, probably know more about you - thanks to the records of the Encyclopedia - than anyone alive, except your three tutors. I assume they agreed to this business of your going to Coby?"

"Yes. They - "Hal hesitated. "It was their idea, their decision."

"I see." Another long pause. "I also assume there're reasons, for your own good, to make you go; and it's these you aren't free to tell me."

"I'm sorry," said Hal. "That's right. I can't."

There rose once again in his mind the remembered image of his three tutors and the still semi-obscured memory of what he had watched on the terrace only the day before. A pressure grew in his chest until it threatened to choke him. It was rage, a rage against the people who had killed those whom he loved. There would be no peace for him, anywhere, until he had found the tall man, and everyone connected with him who had brought Walter, Malachi, and Obadiah to their deaths. Something hard and old and cold had been waked in him by their slaying. He was going to Coby only to grow strong, so that in the end he could bring retribution to that tall man and the others. There was no way he could stay here at the Final Encyclopedia or anywhere else. If he were to be held prisoner here, he knew, he would find some way to break loose and go to Coby.

He became aware that Tam was talking again.

"Well then," said Tam, "I'll respect the privacy of your reasons. But I'll ask you one thing in return - remember. Remember our need of you here. This - "

He gestured at everything around him.

" - this is the most precious thing ever produced by the human race. But it needs someone to direct it. It had Mark Torre in the beginning. It's had me since. But now I'm old, too old. Understand - I'm not offering you the Directorship. You'd only qualify for that later on, if you showed you could do the job, and after a great deal of time and work. But there isn't any other prospect but you; and past indications are there aren't likely to be, in the time I've got left."

He stopped. Hal did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

"Have you any conception of what it's like to have a tool like the Encyclopedia at your fingertips?" Tam said suddenly. "You know scholars use it as a reference work; and the overwhelming majority of people think it's nothing more than that - a large library, nothing else. But that use is like using a human being for a beast of burden when he or she could be a doctor, a scientist, or an artist! The Encyclopedia's not here just to make available what's already known. It's been built at all this great cost and labor for something more, something far more important."

He paused and stared at Hal, the deep lines of his face deeper with emotion that could either be of anger or anguish.

"Its real purpose - its only true purpose - " he went on, "is to explore the unknown. For that it needs a Director who understands what that means, who won't lose sight of that purpose. You can be that person; and without you, all the potential value of the Encyclopedia to the human race can be lost."

Hal had not planned to argue; but his instincts and training led him to question instinctively.

"If it's that important," he said, "what's wrong with waiting however long it takes? Inside the force panels nothing can touch the Encyclopedia. So why not just keep on waiting until someone else who can hear the voices comes along, someone who's free?"

"There're no denotations in reality, only connotations," said Tam harshly. The command in his dark eyes held Hal almost physically in his seat. "Since time began people have given words arbitrary definitions. They created logical structures from those same definitions, and thought that they'd proved something, in terms of the real universe. Safe physically doesn't mean totally safe. There're non-material ways in which the Encyclopedia is vulnerable to destruction; and one of them's an attack on the minds directing it. Marvelous as it is, it's still only a tool, needing the human intellect to put it to work. Take that human intellect from it and it's useless."

"But that's not going to happen," said Hal.

"It's not?" Tam's voice grew even harsher. "Look around you at the fourteen worlds. Do you know the old Norse legends, the term 'Ragnarok'? It means the end of the world. The doom of Gods and Men."

"I know," said Hal. "First came the Frost Giants and Fimbulwinter, then Ragnarok - the last great battle between Gods and Giants."

"Yes," said Tam. "But you don't know that Ragnarok - or Armageddon, the real Armageddon, if you like that word better - is on us now?"

"No," said Hal; but the words in the old, hoarse voice jarred him deeply, and he felt his heart pumping strongly in his chest.

"Then take my word for it. It is. Hundreds of thousands - millions of years it's taken us to build our way up from the animal level to where we could spread out among the stars. Unlimited space. Space for everyone. Space for each individual to emigrate to, to settle down on and raise those of the same mind as himself or herself. And we did it. We paid the cost and some survived. Some even matured and flowered, until we had a few special Splinter Cultures, like the Exotic, the Dorsai, and the Friendly. Some didn't. But so far we've never been tested as a whole race, a whole race inhabiting more than one world. The only enemies we met were natural forces and each other, so we've built up worlds; and we've built this Encyclopedia."

A sudden coughing interrupted him. For a little while his voice had strengthened and cleared as he spoke until it nearly lost its hoarseness and sounded young again. But then it had hoarsened rapidly once more, and now the coughing took him. Ajela massaged his neck with the fingertips of both her hands until the fit stopped and he lay back in the float breathing deeply.

"And now," he went on, slowly and throatily after a long moment, "the work of all our centuries has borne its fruit - just before the frost. The peak of the harvest season is on us and the unpicked fruit will rot on the trees. We've found out the Splinter Cultures can't survive on their own. Only full-spectrum humans survive. Now, the most specialized of our Splinter Cultures are dying; and there's a general social breakdown preparing us for the end. Where the physical laws of the universe have tried and failed to defeat us, we've done it to ourselves. The pattern of life's become fouled and sterile; and there's a new virus spreading among us. The crossbreeds among the Splinter Cultures are a sickness to our whole race as they try to turn it into a mechanism for their own personal survival. Everywhere, everywhere - the season of our times is going downhill into a winter-death."

He stopped and stared fiercely at Hal for a moment.

"Well? Do you believe me?" he demanded.

"I suppose so," said Hal.

The fierceness that had come into Tam's face relaxed.

"You," he went on, looking at Hal, "of all people, have to understand this. We're dying. The race is dying. Look, and you have to see it! The people on all the fourteen worlds don't realize it yet because it's coming too slowly, and because they're blinded by the limited focus of their attitudes toward time and history. They only look as far as their own lifetime. No, they don't even look that far. They only look at how things are for their own generation. But to us, up here, looking down at the original Earth and all the long pattern of the centuries, the beginnings of decay and death are plain to see. The Others are going to win. You realize that? They'll end up owning the rest of the race, as if all other humans were cattle - and from that day on there'll be no one left to fight them. The race as a whole will start to die, because it'll have stopped growing - stopped going forward."

Tam paused again.

"There's only one hope. One faint hope. Because even if we could kill off all the Others now, this moment, it wouldn't stop what's coming. The race'd only find some other disease to die of. The cure has to be a cure of the spirit - a breaking out into some new, vaster area for all of us to explore and grow in. Only the Encyclopedia can make that possible. And maybe only you can make it possible for the Encyclopedia, and push back the shadows that are falling, falling in now over all of us."

His voice had run down in strength toward the end of his words until it was almost inaudible to Hal. He stopped talking; and this time he did not start again. He sat still behind his desk, looking down at the top of it. Ajela stood silently behind him, soothingly massaging his neck; and Hal sat still. It seemed to Hal, although the little stream ran unchanged beside them, the pseudo-sky overhead was still as blue and the appearance of the pine forest around them was still as green and lovely, that a coldness had crept into the room they occupied, and that all the colors and softnesses in it had become dulled and hardened and old.

"In any case," Ajela said, into the new silence, "I can show Hal around the Encyclopedia during the time he's got before he has to go."

"Yes." Tam lifted his eyes to look at the two of them once more. "Show him around. Give him a chance to see as much as he can, while he can."