The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Forty-nine

"Tell them," said Hal, "that I don't have a pass. But ask them to contact Ajela and give her my name - Hal Mayne."

He stood in the debarkation lounge of the spaceship that had brought him from Freiland to Earth and which now lay holding its distance at ten kilometers from the Final Encyclopedia. He was talking to the debarkation officer, a slim, gray-haired man; and the two of them were alone in the lounge, now that most of the hundred and fifty-three other passengers had left for Earth's surface.

At the further ends of the long lounge, the lights had already automatically dimmed themselves to a level of standby illumination; and there was a coolness in the air, because for the few minutes yet the lounge would remain open it was not economical for the heating elements to remedy the drop in room temperature caused by the sudden absence of the large crowd of warm bodies who had abruptly and noisily left it for the landing jitney. The slight chill wrapped around Hal, bringing back to his mind once more the dream from which he had woken in the mountains on Harmony, to find himself trying to strangle Jason Rowe. The dream had come again, ten hours ago, his last night here on shipboard. Again, he had taken leave of those with him, had dismounted and started off alone across the rubbled plain toward the distant tower; only, this time, he had penetrated further into the plain than ever before, and discovered the deception of its appearance.

From its edge it had appeared level and smooth, all the way to the tower. But as he went, he found that the scant grass and hard, pebbled earth of the surface on which he had started had gradually begun to show a change. For one thing, the slope of the ground was deceptive. The fact emerged that the plain actually rose as it approached the tower; and only some trick of perspective had made it seem level, seen from far off.

But, more important, the farther he had penetrated across its bare openness, the more the apparent flatness and smoothness of it had revealed itself to be an illusion. The ground gradually became seamed with cracks enlarging to gullies, the pebbles were superseded by rocks, and the rocks by boulders; and what had been stony soil became only stone; so that his toilsome progress toward the tower had been hindered and slowed to the rate of a man climbing a cliff…

But now, as he stood chilled and separate from the officer who was talking on his behalf with the Final Encyclopedia, it was not his recollection of the struggle across the rocky land, his turnings and backtrackings between the great rocks barring his way, that had been brought back to mind. It was something remembered from very early in the dream and very simple. It had been the creak of his saddle leathers as he had swung down to the ground, the decisive abandonment of the warmth and strength of the horse-body between his knees, the overall feel of leave-taking from all who were familiar, in order to take up the unmarked path of a pilgrimage to some hidden but powerfully attractive goal. Something about this moment and this waiting for entrance this second time to the Final Encyclopedia had brought it back to him…

But the ship's officer had finally gotten into talk with someone at. the Encyclopedia who could undertake the conveying of the message Hal had asked sent to Ajela.

"Stand by," said the male voice of whoever was at the far end.

Silence fell on the speaker grilles by the phone.

"Who's this Ajela, then?" the officer asked.

"The personal assistant to Tam Olyn," said Hal.

"Oh." The officer looked down and became busy with a stylus on the desktop screen under his fingers. Hal waited. But in less than a minute, the voice came again.

"No need to pass that request on," it said. "I thought I'd seen the name before, so I just checked. Hal Mayne's on the permanent pass list."

"Thanks," said the officer in the phone. "All right. We'll have him straight over to you."

He cut connection and turned to Hal.

"You didn't know you had a permanent pass?"

Hal shook his head, smiling a little.

"No."

"All right," said the officer, into the phone. "Launch Deck - is the repair boat ready yet?"

"Already on its way."

"Thank you."

In fact, the officer had hardly cut connection for a second time before the warning chime from the airlock announced that a boat had docked at it and was unsealing. Hal turned and went to the lock, and the officer came along behind him.

They waited, listening to the sounds of the unsealing process, that carried through the closed inner airlock door. Finally, it swung open; and Hal could look through the matched airlocks to the repair boat's interior, cluttered with machine shop equipment.

"Have a good trip, sir," said the officer.

"Thanks," said Hal.

Carrying his small satchel of personal possessions, he ducked through the matched locks, feeling the brief but sudden deeper chill of heat radiated from his body to the cold metal of the lock interiors, and stepped into the repair boat.

"This way, sir," said a middle-aged, muscular shipwoman in white coveralls. "You'll have to thread your way through the equipment, I'm afraid."

"That's all right," Hal said, following her along a complicated route, around and between the hard-edged pieces of equipment, toward the control cabin in the bow of the boat.

"It's just that the regular ship-to-surface passenger jitney is too big for the entry lock at the Encyclopedia," she went on over her shoulder. "That jit is built to carry up to two hundred passengers and crew."

"They explained that," said Hal.

"Just so you don't feel snubbed." She laughed. "In here, now…"

They entered the cabin and Hal found himself in a room full of control consoles and screens, with three operations chairs up ahead, facing a segmented vision screen. The chair on the far left was already occupied by a shipman, sitting idle.

"Take the seat in the middle, if you don't mind," said the shipwoman.

Hal obeyed. She seated herself to his right and laid her hands on the console before her. Behind them, there was the sound of their airlock resealing and a brief jolt. Then all feeling of motion ceased

"That's it, up ahead," offered the shipman. He was a wiry man in his forties, smaller than his partner.

Hal looked into the large screen. Its segments at the moment were combined to show a single wide image that spread itself out before them. It was an image of starfilled space; and in the center of it, in full sunlight, floated the small, misty globe of their destination.

The Final Encyclopedia hung there - as they also seemed to hang still, facing it - like a ball small enough for the hand of a young child to hold comfortably. But as Hal watched, it began to enlarge. It swelled and grew before him until it had filled the screen and began to loom, smoke-gray and enormous, over their repair boat, shutting out their view of half the universe.

An opening of bright, yellow light appeared before them as an iris dilated; and they rode through into the same noisy metal cavern that Hal remembered from his first visit, five years before.

The shipwoman got up with him, and steered him back through the equipment in the main cabin of the repair boat and out through the airlock that was already standing open.

He walked down the sloping ramp, his ears assaulted by the clangor of machines moving about on bare metal decking. Ahead of him was the faintly hazy circle that was the entrance to the interior of the Final Encyclopedia; as he stepped through it, the sound behind him was cut off. He stood, and let the moving corridor onto which he had just stepped carry him forward toward a vision screen on the wall to his right, ahead. The screen had been blank, but just before he came level, it illuminated, and the face of Ajela looked out.

"Hal? Take the first door on your right," her voice told him.

He rode along for another ten meters, saw the door and went through it into another, shorter corridor without a moving walkway. At the end of this was a second door. He pushed it open when he reached it, and went in.

As it sucked shut softly behind him, he saw that he had come into a room half-office, half-lounge. The farthest wall, almost a copy of what he remembered seeing in Tam Olyn's suite, appeared to give on a stream winding through a summer forest; but here the light was like the sunlight of early morning. Ajela was already rising from behind a large desk. Her pink gown rippled as she ran to him, kissed him, then stood back to stare.

"Look at you!" she said.

He had, in fact, been looking at her. After Amanda, and other women he had met on the Dorsai, she gave an appearance of being tiny and fragile - not merely small in stature, by comparison, but more delicate in bone and feature. And yet, he knew that in comparison to the general run of humanity she would not be considered so.

"Look at me?" he answered, triggered by her warm smile to smiling back at her, for no other reason than that she was radiating such happiness. "Why?"

"You're a monster. A giant!" she told him. "Twice the size you were when I saw you last, and savage-looking enough to scare people."

He laughed at that.

"Savage-looking?" he said

"See for yourself." She turned him toward the wall at his left, and must have signalled some sensor; for the misty blueness of the wall changed to a mirror surface that gave him back his own image and that of the room around him.

He gazed, startled in spite of himself. He was used to seeing himself every morning as he wiped off the stubble of his beard; and from time to time otherwise, he had caught glimpses of himself in reflecting surfaces like this one. But he had not viewed himself as he now did, with Ajela beside him and in sudden empathy with how she must see him.

The sudden stranger he now saw in the mirror towered above the slim, blond-haired young woman at his elbow. The man's body was lean, broadening from a slender waist to a wide chest, and shoulders broad enough above the narrowness of waist and hips to make him look almost top-heavy. The face above the shoulders was strong-boned, the mouth level, the nose straight; and the eyes, dark gray with a slight difference in color between them, looked out under straight black brows and a wide forehead topped by straight, almost coarse, black hair. But even these features, in total, could not by themselves make for the overall impression that had caused Ajela to call him savage-looking. There was something else, an impression about the figure he stared at which might have been called one of controlled violence, if it had not been for a somber thoughtfulness of eyes, that seemed to overwhelm the general impression of face and body, alike.

He turned from the screen to Ajela.

"Well," she said. "You're back to stay? Or is it only a visit?"

He hesitated.

"Both," he said. "I'll have to explain what I mean by that - "

"Yes, you will," she said; and suddenly hugged him again. "Oh, Tam's going to be so happy!"

She took his hand, towed him toward her desk and pushed him into a padded float beside it.

"How are you?" she said. "Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?"

He laughed.

"I've still got a pretty good appetite," he said. "But let's just talk for the moment. You sit down."

She perched on the edge of her desk, facing him.

"Let me explain what I meant, just now," he said; and hesitated, again.

"Go on," said Ajela.

"I've been thinking about how to explain this to you," he said slowly. "I was going to ask you to believe me when I said there's nothing I could imagine myself wanting to do more, than take Tam up now on his offer to work here at the Encyclopedia…"

"And then you realized it wasn't true," said Ajela, quietly watching him. "Is that it?"

"Yes and no." He frowned at her. "The Encyclopedia pulls me like a moon pulls the tides. I've got things to do here. In the real meaning of the words, it's a tool I've wanted all my life. I know there're things I can do with it, if I had time, that haven't even been dreamed of by anyone else, yet. When I was here before, I really wanted to stay. But you remember I found out I couldn't. There were other things that had to be done. Well, I've still got most of them to do."

"That's the whole reason that's holding you back from staying with us?" She was watching him closely.

He smiled a bit ruefully.

"That's the immediate reason," he said. "But, you're right, to be honest, it isn't all of it. You see, these last few years I've been out among people - "

He hesitated, then went on.

"It's not that easy to explain," he said, "put it that I've found I've got things I have to do with people, too; and in any case, right now, there's something more immediate and important. I'd like to talk to you and Tam together, about it. Is that possible?"

"Of course," she said. "I haven't told him you're here yet; simply because I wanted a minute or two with you myself, first. The fact is, he's sleeping right now; but he'll be upset if I wait until he wakes up to tell him you're back. Just a second. I'll call him - "

She swung around and reached back over her desk.

"No. Wait," said Hal. "Let me give you a general idea of what I'm talking about, first. Let him sleep. There're things with me now, I want you to understand, and it'll take me a few hours just to bring you up to date."

"All right," Ajela drew her arm back and turned to face him, smiling again. "Now, are you sure you don't feel like having something to eat?"

Hal laughed.

"Well, maybe…" he said.

They went to eat at a table in one of the dining rooms; and Ajela, touching the table's sensor controls, enclosed them this time in something new to him, the privacy of four illusory stone walls.

"Could we have the stars, instead?" Hal asked. "All around us the way I can have them in a carrel?"

She smiled, moved her fingers over the control pad on the white cloth surface of the table, and abruptly they seemed to float in space, with the large, blue-white circle of Earth appearing to hang only a small distance off to their side, and Earth's moon just beginning to emerge from behind it.

In all other directions were the lights and distances of the universe. Hal looked about and overhead and down below his feet at them, picking out Earth's sister worlds of Mars and Venus; and gazing toward the other suns of the race - Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Procyon, Epsilon Eridani, Fomalhaut, Altair. In his mind's eye he saw beneath them what his physical eyes could not, humanity's other thirteen planetary homes - Freiland and New Earth, Newton and Cassida, Ceta, Coby, Ste. Marie, Mara and Kultis, Dorsai, Harmony and Association, Dunnin's World.

Imaginatively, he saw not only them but the people upon them; and for a second he breathed deeply, the emptiness he had felt earlier at the thought of their numbers returned.

"What is it?" Ajela asked, her voice suddenly more soft, her summer-green eyes deeply watching him now.

"Too much to tell at once, probably," he said, recovering. He smiled to reassure her. "Anyway, let's have that food, and I'll tell you what's been happening to me."

They sat among the stars, eating; and he talked. He told her of the mines on Coby and Sost, Tonina and John; and Jason, Rukh and James Child-of-God on Harmony; and of his own solitary breakthrough in the cell on that world, with everything that had happened since.

"But what is it you think you can find here, to deal with the Others?" she asked, when he was done.

"To deal with the problem of present history, you mean," he said. "I'm not sure. But the answer's either here or nowhere. It's not just that I've got to find a way to stop the Others. What I have to find is a way that'll be both obvious and convincing to the Exotics, the Dorsai and anyone else who's needed to fight them."

"And you really think what you're looking for is here?"

"It has to be here," he said. "Didn't Mark Torre originally say that the Final Encyclopedia eventually had to be something more than just a storehouse of knowledge? Hasn't Tam guarded it all these years so that a way might be finally found to do something larger with it than anyone's ever conceived of, yet? If it was my idea alone, I might doubt. But we all can't have been wrong. Three of us - all three - coming to the same conclusion about it, each on his own."

"But if it's really true that the ultimate use of the Encyclopedia has always been something more - " She broke off, suddenly thoughtful.

"That's right," he said. "If it's true, then a lot of things begin to make sense. The historical equation balances, then. Otherwise, the dice have been loaded too overwhelmingly by the race-animal in favor of the Others; and that makes no sense. Because the race-animal isn't out to choose one favorite out of the factions within it to win - it's out to get answers on how to survive. The root-causes behind the emergence of the Others go back and back in history; and so do the causes leading to the building of the Final Encyclopedia."

"How sure can you be of that, though?" she asked.

He gazed at her across the table.

"Did you ever hear of Guido Camillo Delminio, or the Theater of Memory?" he asked her.

"The Theater of Memory?" She frowned. "I think I have heard that mentioned, or read about it someplace…"

"Mark Torre mentions it in his Memoirs of Construction," Hal answered. "That's where I ran across it, myself, when I was young, in the library of my home. It was a great library; and back when I was young enough, anything I read about, that sounded interesting, I wanted. So when I read the Memoirs and saw the words 'Theater of Memory' the first thing I thought of was that I wanted to build one. I went to Walter InTeacher to show me the way to find out how, and he helped me research the actual, historical article."

Ajela frowned at him.

"There actually was something built that was called a Theater of Memory?"

"Partially built, at least, first in Bologna, and later in Paris with the help of funds from Francis I of France. The Guido Camillo I mentioned conceived of it and spent his life trying to turn it into a reality. That was in the sixteenth century, and his aim was to build a theater where anyone could stand on a stage and look out at art objects ranked on rising levels and put in a certain order, and give speeches calling on all the knowledge in the world, which would be cued by the sight of the art objects before him as he spoke."

She stared at him.

"Where did he get the idea for something like that?" she said. "The sixteenth century…" Her voice trailed off, thoughtfully.

"He was born about 1480," said Hal. "He had a professorship at Bologna, but he was always hard up for funds to build with - that's how he and the Theater came to be connected with Francis I. There was a strong desire in Renaissance times to unify all knowledge and that way see through it to the very essence of creativity. The idea of objects as mnemonic cues goes back into classical Greece, at least. The early churchmen and scholastics made it a moral practice, and later on Renaissance mysticism saw it as a framework for esoteric enlightenment. It produces Guido's Theater in the sixteenth century, in the thirteenth century it had already produced Ramon Lull's combination-of-wheels device; and that was nothing less than a sort of primitive computer. The same idea affected people from Bacon to Leibnitz, who in the seventeenth century actually did invent calculus. In effect, the Theater of Memory was one of the root causes of later technology and of this Encyclopedia, itself."

"I see," she said.

"I thought you would," he said. "The point is, the whole chain of effort from the Theater to the Final Encyclopedia represents a struggle, an effort by the race-animal to discover greater possibilities in itself. This is the important truth that underlies the struggle between the Others and everyone else - that's where the real battlefield is and is going to be for a while. So that's where I'll have to be for a time, yet."

"I see," she said, again. "All right. I understand, then."

She nodded slowly, her eyes abstracted.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. I think, after all, the sooner you talk to Tam, the better. If you're through eating, I'll call him and we'll go now."

"Even if I wasn't through," he smiled. "But as it happens, I am."

They went.

To Hal's eye, it was as if Tam Olyn had not altered in appearance or moved since he had seen the very old man last. Tam's suite, with its illusion of a forest and stream, and all its float furniture - chairs, desk, and everything else - seemed not to have been shifted a millimeter out of place, in the intervening years. Above all, the expression of Tam's face was the same.

But his voice was different.

"Hello, Hal Mayne," he said; and let Hal come to him to grip hands.

The difference was not great; but Hal's ear registered the barely diminished volume, the slightly greater threadiness of breath behind the words and the infinitesimally increased length of the pauses between them as Tam spoke.

"Sit down here, Hal," said Ajela, leading him to a cushioned float at no more than arm's length from the one in which Tam was sitting and pulling one up alongside his for herself.

"You've come back," said Tam.

"Yes," Hal said. "But I've come back with something I've got to do that involves not only the Encyclopedia but everything else, as well. What that's going to mean, though, is that I think the Encyclopedia is going to be put to use the way it ought to be, at last."

"Is it?" said Tam. "Tell me about it."

"You were right when you talked to me about Armageddon, when I was here before," Hal said. "I've taken nearly six years coming to understand what you meant. When I left here to go to the mines on Coby, I didn't know what I was doing; only that I was running, both because I had to find someplace safe for me and because there were things I had to do. What, I didn't know then. I do now."

"Yes," said Tam. The deep hoarseness of age with which he spoke seemed to make his words walk under Hal's like those of a ghost speaking from a crypt at their feet. "You had to find yourself. I knew that, even then."

"I didn't understand people," said Hal. "I'd been brought up under glass. That was why my tutors wanted me to go to Coby. On Coby I began to wake up…"

He told Tam about Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, about Coby, Harmony, and his hours in the Militia cell; with all he had come to understand there and all that had followed from that until now. Tam sat and listened with the motionlessness of face and body that time had brought to him. When Hal finally stopped talking, he did not speak for a long moment.

"And it ends with you back here," he said at last.

"That much of it ends," said Hal.

Tam sat looking at him. A younger individual would have frowned, questioningly. But Tam no longer needed gross facial movements to signal his reactions.

"That much was only the beginning," he went on. "I can understand the situation, now, I can look beyond the Others and know that they're only a part of the real problem; a symptom, not a cause. The real problem's that we've all of us finally come to the point where there's no longer a choice. Now we've got to take charge - consciously - of what's going to happen to us; instead of going on blundering forward instinctively, the way we've always done ever since we first began to look beyond the next meal, or the next dry place to sleep. And the one tool that can let us do that is here. The Final Encyclopedia's the only thing we've managed to show for all those long centuries of savagery and the short centuries of civilization; that so far've only brought us to the point where a handful of us can kill off everyone else."

"Yes," said Tam. For a moment he did not say anything more. His gaze went past Hal and Ajela alike; and when he spoke again, it was clearly to himself as well as them.

"Do you know what it means to try to control history?" he said. He looked back to Hal. "Do you know the mass and momentum of those forces you're talking about laying your hands on? I tried something like that - and I had power. I raised a social tidal wave against a whole people. A tidal wave that ought to have drowned the Friendlies, forever. And all it took to stop me was Jamethon Black, one man of faith who wouldn't move out of my path. On him all that great force I'd built up broke; and it drained away, in a million little streams, in a million directions, doing nothing, harming no one."

Ajela leaned forward and put one of her hands over one of his, where it laid on the padded arm of his float. Hal looked at the warm, white young hand over the dark, gnarled one of age.

"For nearly ninety years you've been making up for that," she said, softly.

"I? All I've done is watch the hearth, keep the candle lit…" His head shook on his shoulders, slightly, from side to side. "But I know the strength of history when it moves."

He looked back at Hal.

"And it's what you're talking about working with," he said. "Even if you're right about using the Encyclopedia, even if everything you hope for gathers behind what you know needs to be done, you'll still be an ant trying to direct a hurricane. You know that?"

"I think so," said Hal, soberly.

"God knows," said Tam, "I want to see you try. God knows it'd justify me, make me of some worth after all these years to the people I'd have destroyed if I could; and also it'd justify Mark Torre and everyone who's come to work here, after him. But think - you could just as easily close your eyes to where it's all going. You could use your mind and your strength to make a comfortable safe niche out of the storm for yourself and any you might love - for the few years your body still has to give you - just by closing your eyes to what's going to happen eventually to people who'll never really know who you were or what it costs you to try what you want to try. You can still turn back."

"No," said Hal. "Not any more. Not for a longer time than you might think."

Tam breathed in deeply and pushed himself more upright in his float.

"All right, then," he said. "Then you ought to know that you've already got most of ten worlds set in motion against what you want. Bleys Ahrens has put in motion a plan for the mobilization of the credit and the force to take over everything the Others don't already control, by military means if necessary."

There was a moment's silence among the three of them.

"Bleys?" said Hal. "What about Danno?"

"Danno died, unexpectedly and conveniently, four standard months ago," said Tam. "Bleys controls the Others now. In fact, he may have already for some time since; and plainly he's come to feel he can't risk waiting any longer to act."

Hal watched the old man, fascinated.

"How do you know that?" he asked. "How do you know about this plan, this mobilization?"

"It's reflected in hundreds of thousands of ordinary news items," said Tam. "All I needed, to pick those out and read them right, was to see the implications of what I read in the neural pathways. What outside scholars come here to do, or what they ask us to tell them, mirrors the state of affairs on their worlds."

"In the neural pathways?" Hal turned to stare at Ajela.

"I haven't seen it there." Her face was pale. "But I told you no one could read the pathways like Tam."

"Time teaches anyone," said Tam. "Believe me."

The full strength of his grim and cantankerous spirit was in his voice; and Hal believed him. Looking at this man who had held the Final Encyclopedia true to Mark Torre's dream for so long, Hal understood for the first time that to Tam the task had not been just like that of standing sentinel at a vault. It had been like the guarding of a living being. Not simply the fierceness of a dragon crouching above a treasure had ridden in the other man, but an unthinking commitment like that of someone who defends and maintains a child of his or her body. It was not the machinery, but a soul, to which he had given the long years of his life.

"Then time's short," said Hal.

"Very short," said Tam. "What do you plan to do?"

Now that the decision was plainly taken, the strength that Hal had felt in the older man a moment before had given way once more to the great weariness in him.

"First," said Hal. "I've got to use the Encyclopedia to trace the roots leading to the emergence of the Others and the emergence of those who may successfully oppose them. It's the process by which knowledge gives birth to idea, and idea gives birth to art, that's the key to the way the Encyclopedia is finally going to be used. But knowledge has to come first. Until I've got a full picture of how the present situation came to be, I'll have no hope of identifying the human elements that are the real things going to war, here. So, while Bleys mobilizes, I'm going to be tracing people and their actions back into the dust of the past. There's no other path I can take to what we need."