The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fifty

Nearly a standard year had gone by since Hal had come back to the Final Encyclopedia; and the knowledge he had dug out and forged in that time into new tools for his mind weighed far more heavily on his spirit than he could have imagined, twelve months before. It had enabled him to reach deeper into himself than he had thought possible in such a short time but it had also woken inner, sleeping gods and devils that he had not suspected himself of harboring. He understood now not only who he was, but also what he must do, and neither of those understandings were easy burdens to carry.

He sat, his chair float seemingly adrift in space above the eastern hemisphere of the Dorsai. What he looked at was a simulation. No clouds were visible, but innumerable tiny white lights were scattered across the face of the numerous islands that made up the land mass of that sea-girt world; and it was these lights that Hal was considering.

Each of the lights stood for a pad on which a full-sized spacecraft could land and take off - always assuming there was a man or woman of the Dorsai, or an equivalently skilled pilot, at the controls, to justify the risks in handling such a vehicle on and off surface. There were others besides Dorsai pilots who could bring deep space vessels safely to a planetary surface, of course; but it was an uncommon skill.

The great number of pads he now looked at was therefore not surprising, considering the world they were on. Harmony, with its two fitting yards, of which one had been put out of action when he left, and with only two other pads where heavy spacecraft could be landed, was more typical of the other thirteen inhabited planets. Hal rotated the image of the Dorsai to show its western hemisphere; and the lights that signalled pads were as numerous there, as well.

The only other worlds that approached Dorsai in their numbers of landing places were the two Exotic planets of Mara and Kultis; but both of these together did not have as many spacecraft pads as those he had just been observing. The large number on the Dorsai, of course, were attributable to the nearly three centuries in which Dorsai had been not merely a supplier of professional soldiers, but full of training areas for them. Expeditionary forces were normally not only assembled but worked into shape close to the home areas of the officers who had undertaken the contract that would employ all of them.

Hal coded for a list of the pads he had been looking at, with their locations and their distances from nearby concentrations of the Dorsai populace; and as he did so, there was the sound of a single musical chime and a voice spoke to him from among the stars.

"Hal? Jeamus Walters. I can drop in now, if you're ready for me."

"Come ahead," said Hal.

He touched the invisible console at his fingertips, staying the list and re-evoking his normal working surroundings. The image of the Dorsai vanished and the small carrel off his own room in the Final Encyclopedia came into existence around him - walls, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The carrel was a tiny place - hardly more than a cubbyhole; and his main room beyond was not much more - almost a single-room office, with bedroom furniture recessed in the walls, and perhaps enough space to gather at most five or six people on floats in close conversation. A moment later, the door chimed on a deeper note than the phone had used to announce Jeamus Walters' call.

"Come on in," said Hal. The door opened to admit a short, broad man with thin blond hair on a round skull and a pleasant middle-aged face.

"Sit down," said Hal. "How much time have you?"

"As much as you want, now," said Jeamus. "We were just doing a periodic checkover when you called, earlier."

Hal touched his console and one side of the room blanked out to show the Final Encyclopedia from the outside; the image was enough to fill the space that had been between ceiling and floor, its gray, misty protective screen looking close enough so that either man could reach out and touch it.

"I haven't had time to learn much about it," said Hal, looking at the protective screen. "Periodic checkover, you said? I thought the screen was self-sustaining?"

"It is, of course," said Jeamus. "Once created, it's independent of anything else in the universe. Just as the same thing in phase-shift form would have to be independent of the universe, or it couldn't move spacecraft around in it. But one of the things that that independence means, is that if we constructed a screen around the Encyclopedia and did nothing more, we'd immediately begin to move out from inside it, as we travelled along with the rest of the solar system, here. So we have to arrange to have it move with us; or we'd destroy ourselves trying to go through it, just like anything else would destroy itself trying to get through it at us. Consequently, we arrange for it to move with us; which takes a certain amount of controlling - as does making irises available, opening and closing them, and all the rest of that business - "

He broke off, looking at Hal.

"You didn't ask me in just to hear me lecture on the phase-screen, though, did you?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," said Hal. "I've got some questions about it. How large can you make it? I mean, how large an area can you enclose and protect?"

Jeamus shrugged.

"Theoretically, there's no limit," he said. "Well, yes, of course there's the limit imposed by the size of the power source needed to create the protective sphere and keep adjusting it; and you have to keep adjusting, even if you're creating it to be set adrift in the universe; because sooner or later it'd begin to break down under the anomalies inherent in being a timeless system existing in a temporal universe."

"What's the practical limit, then, approximately?" Hal asked. "Suppose we just wanted to expand the sphere around us now and keep expanding it as far as we could."

Jeamus ruffled the thin hair on the back of his head, thoughtfully.

"Well," he said, "theoretically, we could make it a number of times as large as the solar system, given the power of our available sun - but actually, as soon as we reached the size of Earth's orbit we'd have the sun inside it with us - " he broke off. "I'd have to figure that."

"But," said Hal, "there'd be no problem in making it large enough to enclose a single world - practically speaking?"

"Well, no… there shouldn't be," said Jeamus. "You'd run into some control problems. Something like that's never been considered. We've got some pretty interesting problems even now, just with the Encyclopedia here, as far as ingress and egress go. Also, we have to open irises toward the sun, for example, at regular intervals, to draw power… what I mean to say is, the controls for a sphere any larger would have to be very complex, not only for maintenance, but for making irises when and where you wanted them. I suppose you're assuming just about the same proportion of in and out traffic as we have here? Because any differences - "

"No different, for now," said Hal. "Could you run me up some figures for a world, say, just a little larger than Earth?"

"Of course," said Jeamus. He was staring at Hal. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what all this is about?"

"If you don't mind."

"Oh, I mind." Jeamus ruffled his back hair again. "I'm as curious as the next person. But… give me a week."

"Thanks," said Hal.

"Don't need to thank me. This is interesting. Anything else?"

"No. And thanks for coming by," said Hal.

"Honored." Jeamus got to his feet. "If you don't hear from me in a week, it'll be because I got sidetracked and bogged down on some maintenance problem. So if I don't get back to you in that time, give me a call; and I'll let you know how I'm coming with this. I suppose you realize, any time this stops being theoretical you're going to have to tell me exactly what you've got in mind if you want any really correct answers."

"Of course. I understand. Thanks again," said Hal; and watched the other man leave.

As the door shut, Hal dismissed the image of the Final Encyclopedia and called Ajela.

"How are things?" he asked, when she looked out of the phone screen at him. "Is now a good time for me to come up and give you both the whole story?"

"Just fine," she said. "You'll find us both in Tam's suite."

"I'll be right there."

When he stepped through the door into Tam's suite, he found her with Tam, seated in an obviously already prepared group of three chair floats facing each other. He came on in, took the empty float and smiled at Tam.

"How are things?"

"I'm fine," said Tam. "Don't waste time worrying about me. You've got the chain of consequences worked out?"

Hal nodded.

"At least as far back as the fourteenth century," he said. "Where, for practical purposes, this present historical phase begins with a pivotal figure named John Hawkwood."

"Ajela told me about him from the time you were here before and wanted to look up Conan Doyle's novelistic hero, Nigel Loring." Tam's gaze sharpened. "But Loring was different. He was one of the original Knights of the Garter under the Black Prince, wasn't he? Hawkwood's barely mentioned in Froissart - I know that much."

"After the Peace of Bretigny, when the Black Prince captured King Jean at Poitiers and England and France were at peace, Hawkwood was one of the leaders of the White Company that went over the mountains into Italy," Hal said. "He ended as Captain General of the forces of Florence, two decades later; and he was at least in his forties when he went into Italy."

"They call him 'the first of the modern generals,' Ajela tells me," Tam said. "Anyway, how'd you get to him? And why've you been so close-mouthed about your progress until now?"

"It was one of those situations where I had to have all the pieces before it fell together," Hal said. "Until a week ago I was still going largely on faith. That's why I didn't have anything solid to tell you."

"Faith in yourself," murmured Ajela.

Tam glanced at her.

"All right," he said to her. He looked back at Hal. "Tell us in your own way. I won't interrupt."

"As you know, I started working from the present backwards," Hal said. "The Others are crossbreeds between different Splinter Culture individuals. So they, too, are products of elements in the Splinter Cultures. The Splinter Cultures were a product of elements in the society of Old Earth just before and during the period when the phase-drive began to work and we had the explosion of emigration over less than a hundred years to the presently occupied worlds. The Exotics came from an organization that named itself the Chantry Guild in the twenty-first century. The Friendlies were originally colonies sponsored by the so-called marching societies - and so on and so forth. These, in turn, had their roots in the breakout century - the Chantry Guild of that time grew out of the twentieth century's apocalyptic upsurge of interest in Eastern religions, the occult, and paranormal abilities. The marching societies developed from the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism."

"An apocalyptic time, generally," Tam grunted. "In any time of social stress, you've got this sort of hysteria cropping up in biblically-rooted societies. It isn't just with western Christians - the same thing happens with Jews and Moslems, when conditions are right. Lots of historical instances before the twentieth century."

"But there's a special historical pivot point in the twentieth century," said Hal. "It was the time of the acknowledgment of space. The great mass of humanity up until then had ignored, even when they knew of it, the size of the universe outside Earth's air envelope and the insignificance of their little planet compared to it. Suddenly, they couldn't do that anymore, and the psychological shock was profound. Earth had suddenly ceased to be a safe, warm protective shell for the race. They were suddenly naked to the stars. The shock of that made their century unique in human history and pre-history, and they were forced to be aware of that uniqueness. I know - to those people who live in it, their own time is always the supremely important one; but the people in the twentieth really had some reason to think that way. The idea of space shook them up hard, down to the unconscious levels, and consequently, it shook up the then-existing forms of society - all over Old Earth. Those same forms had been shaped by five hundred years of technological development that really became explosive in the mid-nineteenth century… and so on. But I'm covering ground too fast, maybe - "

"Did I say you were?" growled Tam.

"No," Hal smiled at the old man. "Of course not. What I meant was, I was getting ahead of myself. What I did, working from the present backward, was to key on shifts in historical development, tied to unique individuals. For example, a necessary precursor to the development of the present social conditions that have provided a breeding ground for the rise to power of the Others was the achievement of Donal Graeme in pulling all the fourteen worlds together under one legal system; and putting an end to exploitative opportunities that gave rise to the interstellar barons like William of Ceta - "

"I saw Graeme only once," the antique way of referring to an individual by surname only rang oddly on Hal's ears, in the harsh old voice of Tam. "It was at a party for him on Newton. He wasn't particularly impressive to look at."

"But in any case," said Hal, "what Donal did wouldn't have been possible without the emergence of a unique group like the Dorsai; which in the beginning were nothing but a supply of cannon fodder for the inter-colony wars of the early centuries of interstellar expansion. And, in turn, what they became, and what Donal achieved would never have been possible without the unorthodox military science developed by Cletus Grahame."

"Runs in the family, doesn't it?" said Tam, smiling grimly.

"The Dorsai was a strongly hereditary culture," said Hal. "It's less surprising on a place like the Dorsai that Donal and Cletus should turn out to be related, than it might have been someplace else. But the interesting thing is that Cletus could not have done what he did without the financial backing of the Exotics, even at that early time, and the Exotics became the Exotics almost exclusively because of - "

"Walter Blunt," said Tam.

"I don't think so," said Hal, slowly. "Walter Blunt was apparently wholeheartedly sincere about his gospel of a cleansing destruction as his cure for whatever ailed the human race. I've got a lot more to learn about Walter Blunt and the Chantry Guild. On the face of it that theory of his is the very antithesis of the search for the evolved human, which the Exotics developed; and yet the Chantry Guild became the Exotics. No, there's another man who comes out of nowhere suddenly, in the late twenty-first century, a mining engineer with one arm who suddenly becomes involved with the Chantry Guild Walter Blunt had founded and rises to essentially challenge Blunt's leadership in a very short time - only to drown almost immediately after that challenge becomes successful, in a small sailboat he was sailing in the Pacific Ocean, offshore. But his brief interaction with the Chantry Guild changes everything about it. After this man - Paul Formain - had been involved, Blunt was left essentially as nothing more than a figurehead; and Jason - "

The chime announcing a phone call interrupted him.

"What's that?" said Tam. "Ajela, I thought you told them - "

"I said we weren't to be bothered, except for something of the gravest importance," she answered, reaching for the console on the arm of her float. "They wouldn't call us unless it was that… Chuni?"

"Ajela? - We've got a request from Bleys Ahrens to come for a talk with Hal Mayne."

Ajela's finger lifted from the phone connection. Her eyes, and Tam's as well, went to Hal.

"Yes," said Hal, after a moment. "I suppose it was bound to happen. I'll talk to him, of course."

"Tell Bleys Ahrens he can come on in," Ajela said over the phone circuit. "Hal will see him."

"All right," answered the voice at the far end. "And - Ajela?"

"What?"

"We've got another request that came in at almost the same moment, from a jitney that's just docking in B chamber now. An Exotic named Amid; doesn't have a pass, but he also wants to talk to Hal. Bleys Ahrens is holding distance in a private spacecraft. I don't think they know about each other."

Ajela looked again at Hal.

"Amid first," said Hal. "Then Bleys. Amid may have some information for me that'd be useful before I meet Bleys. I told you about Amid; he's the one I mailed my papers to when the Militia caught me finally on Harmony; and he passed the word to the local Exotic consulate to help me if I could get to them, then took care of me on Mara."

"Let them both in, Chuni," said Ajela. "Hal's going to see Amid first. Take him to Hal's room; and if you think they don't know about each other, better keep the two of them separate."

She glanced at Hal and Hal nodded. She closed off the phone circuit.

"Well," said Hal, "I think, under the circumstances, I'd better cut this short. There's too much to tell you to try to rush through it now. The essential point is, the chain leads back to a John Hawkwood, in the fourteenth century. Or rather, it leads back to the Renaissance; and if it hadn't been for John Hawkwood, we might not have had a Renaissance."

"That's rather a large statement, isn't it?" said Tam. "You aren't trying to tell us that history goes the way it does not simply because of a chain of social developments, but because of a chain of unusual individuals?"

"No," said Hal. "Pressures within the river of historical forces determine the bends and turns in that river; and the unusual individuals are thrown up by those same pressures at the turning points. A different turn or bend would have thrown up a different individual. At least, that's the way it always was in the past. But, beginning about a thousand years ago, the race started to move into an area where certain individuals began to develop a consciousness of the river; and, depending upon how great that consciousness is, each one since has been consciously able to make some at least partially successful attempt to bend the river to his or her will. That's why someone like Bleys with his great awareness of what's now happening can be many times more effective than he could have been in any past period of history."

He stood up.

"I should go," he said. "I want time to talk to Amid without Bleys knowing that I've kept him waiting."

"What difference would it make if he knew?" Ajela said.

"I don't know. With anyone else I wouldn't be so concerned," said Hal. "But I'm cautious about exposing even the corner of any potentially useful data to that mind of Bleys'. I'll talk to you again as soon as I've seen these two."

Amid, looking almost toylike in a silver-gray robe, was waiting for him when Hal stepped back into his own room. The small Exotic was standing by Hal's desk.

"Sit down," said Hal, taking a seat himself, away from the desk. "It's good to see you."

Amid smiled wryly, and settled himself in a float.

"It's good of you to say so," he said. "Are you sure you're that pleased to see me?"

"Of course," said Hal. "How long will you stay?"

Amid's face sobered.

"Forever," he said, quietly. For a moment the lines of his face were sad and older than Hal had ever seen them. "Or, in practical terms, as long as I can be of any use to you."

Hal considered him thoughtfully for a moment.

"Should I take it opinions about me have changed on the Exotics?"

"In a sense," said Amid. "I'm afraid we've given up. That's why I'm free to come to you."

"Given up?" Hal sat looking at him. "That's a little like saying an elephant has given up being an elephant - it makes no sense at all. You don't mean it literally?"

"Literally? Of course not," said Amid. "No more than any healthy-minded person means it when he says he's going to give up living. Death is unthinkable; and since the Others mean to kill us off, to acquiesce in that is impossible. No, it's only that our best calculations show us no way out. Effectively, the contest is over. The Others have already won."

"You can't mean that either," said Hal.

"No other answer's possible. How much do you know, about what they've been doing lately?"

"Not much," said Hal. "We interpret the factors that reach us, particularly with Tam Olyn's understanding of the Encyclopedia to help us; and we get a general picture of the fact that they're mobilizing rapidly under Bleys Ahrens. But it's all inference - even if it's very high level inference. Specific information's what we don't get much of."

"That's why I'm here. I can help you with that." Amid sat with Exotic stillness in his chair, but Hal felt a tenseness in him. "For example, the situation isn't just that the Others are mobilizing against you; it's that they've already achieved mobilization - past the point where it looks as if they can be stopped. But, about me. With no visible way to go, we're all left free to do what we choose. So, I decided to humor my natural inclinations, and offer you my services, while the Others can still be fought. That's what I meant when I said I could stay forever, if you want. I can stay with you until the end."

Hal sat back in his float, thoughtfully.

"Oh," said Amid. "And, incidentally, we admit now that you and the Dorsai were right. The attempt to assassinate the Others, individually, wouldn't have worked. Each one of them's now got a large partisan population around them, on all the nine worlds they control. Even if they all could be killed, their deaths would only make those populations determined to destroy us in revenge."

"This is interesting," said Hal, slowly. "When I got here, some twelve standard months ago, all I could learn, through Tam Olyn, was that Danno was dead, and that Bleys had taken over, and started to mobilize."

"When you got away from Bleys on Coby," said Amid, "I think you signed Danno's death warrant. We'd known for years that he and Bleys had very different ideas of what the destiny of the Others should be. Danno wanted peace and plenty in his time; and nothing much more. Bleys had a somewhat longer view."

Hal looked more closely at him.

"You sound as if you're giving me more credit for alarming Bleys than I'd suspected you would."

"I'm free now to say and do what I want," said Amid.

"How could Bleys move so fast with this mobilization that all of you on the Exotics would be sure he'd already won?"

"Not - already won," Amid answered, "but certain to win. Because of that tremendous leverage on other people that the Others seem to be able to bring to bear. What he's done, in effect, is start a popular movement against all of us who might oppose him."

"How? On what basis?" Hal said.

Amid smiled, almost wistfully.

"The man's a genius," he said. "He simply turned everything inside out. He made the Others' enemies the villains who'd destroy civilization. The popular opinion now becomes that there's a plot on the part of those same people on Earth who always wanted to control the Younger Worlds and their populations. The plot is supposed to be masterminded by those like yourself on the Final Encyclopedia; who, as everyone knows, for two hundred years have been busy developing scientific black magic of great power - the variant of the phase drive that gives you your protective envelope here is visible proof of that. The story goes that the main business of the Encyclopedia has been the development of awesome weaponry all these two centuries, and with these they can sweep all human life from the other worlds, unless those worlds surrender to them. The only hope of the Younger Worlds is that the Encyclopedia isn't quite ready to act; and if they move fast, they can kill the dragon before it gets out of its cave."

Hal sat for a moment.

"I see," he said at last.

"The Others have advertized themselves as leaders and organizers of the effort to save the Younger Worlds. According to them, all the historical henchmen of the Encyclopedia, such as the Dorsai, Exotics, and the wrong kind of Friendly, are known to be in with the Encyclopedia in this, helping to soften up the Younger Worlds for Earth's final attack; and so they must also be rooted out at the same time, once and for all."

Amid paused.

"You'll notice," he said, "how neatly this line is set up to be developed later into one that says that, if all people are to have lasting safety, all knowledge, science and related demons must be done away with or strictly controlled; so that they can never rise again in the future, to threaten the ordinary human."

"How large a proportion of the formerly uncommitted on those nine worlds seem to have been recruited by this, at the present time?" Hal asked.

"Perhaps twenty per cent," said Amid, "and that's why we've calculated that there's no hope for us. Effectively, twenty per cent is more than enough to commit an overwhelming supply of cannon fodder for the Others to throw against us. For all practical purposes, twenty per cent might as well be a hundred per cent. It represents so many individuals that they could march upon us, twenty abreast, forever. They'd be self-renewing down the generations, if the war against us could last that long."

"The Others may have the people," said Hal. "But it's something else to mount an attack between worlds with a force that massive, logistically."

"True," said Amid. "So we do have some time. But on the Exotics, our best calculations see the attack eventually, and our destruction, as inevitable."

His eyes were steady on Hal's.

"So you see," he went on, after a second. "Oh, I know. Ten years ago, anything like such a military attempt of worlds upon worlds would have sounded as wild as a fairy tale come to life. But what everyone took for granted was that no people would consider such a tremendous wastage of life and material as would be necessary to gain such an end. But to the Others, the costs don't matter as long as they get the results they want."

Hal nodded.

"Since that's the case," he said, "and since I assume you don't find any flaws in the Exotic calculations - "

"No," said Amid.

"Why bother coming to me?" finished Hal. "According to what you say, what you and I can do isn't going to make any difference. Under those circumstances I'd expect a mature Exotic to give up philosophically."

"Possibly then I'm not a mature Exotic," said Amid. "In spite of my wrinkles. As I say, I'm free now to do what I want; and, being free, I'm allowing myself to indulge an irrational, unprovable hope that, just as the Others with this charismatic talent of theirs pulled a rabbit out of their hat which nobody'd ever suspected, you just might be able to pull out an equally unsuspected counter-rabbit. Consciously, of course, I have to realize that such a hope is nonsense. But I believe I'll feel better if I go down resisting, so to speak, until the bitter end. So, I'd like to stay as long as I can and be of as much use to you as possible."

"I see," said Hal. "You don't happen to have some Dorsai blood in your ancestry, by any chance?"

Amid laughed.

"I just think I can be useful to you," he went on. "You've got your inferences; but I can give you access to specific, hard information, much of it through a network of communication the Exotics have developed and improved over the centuries. If I could set up a communication center for you, here, I think you'd find what I could bring in would be very useful to you."

"I'm sure I would," said Hal. "All right, thanks; and welcome."

He stood up. Amid in response got to his own feet.

"I'm sorry to cut this short," said Hal. "But we'll have time to talk later. I've got someone else to see, now."

"Perfectly all right," said Amid.

Hal reached down to the console on the arm of the float he had just left and touched for Ajela.

"Hal?" Her voice came clearly into the room, but without picture on the phone screen.

"I'd like Amid to stay with us," Hal said. "Can we arrange quarters for him?"

"If one of the regular rooms for visiting scholars will do, certainly," said Ajela. "Tell him to turn right when he steps out of your room and he'll find me through the first door he comes to."

"Thank you, both of you," said Amid.

He left. Hal sat down again and touched the phone. This time the face of Chuni, the reception leader who had spoken to them in Tam's office, came on the phone screen.

"Hal?" said Chuni.

"Where's Bleys now, Chuni?"

"He's waiting in the private lounge here by the dock."

"He's alone?"

"Yes," said Chuni.

"Send him - no, bring him up yourself, would you please?"

"All right. Is that all?" Chuni looked tensely out of the phone at Hal.

"That's all," Hal said.

He sat down again. After only a few minutes, the door opened and he got to his feet again.

"Here you are, Bleys Ahrens…" the voice of Chuni was saying; and the two of them came through the door, with Bleys in the lead. Chuni stopped just inside the threshold, nodded past Bleys at Hal and went out again, closing the door behind him.

Bleys stopped, three steps inside the room. He stood, lean and tall in a short black jacket and narrow gray trousers tapering into his boots. His straight-boned, angular face with its penetrating brown eyes under straight black brows studied Hal.

"Well," he said, "you've grown up."

"It happens," said Hal.

They stood, facing, little more than a meter of distance between them; and, strangely, the sight of the Other brought back the memory of Amyth Barbage, standing facing the other Militia captain who had not wanted to keep pursuing Rukh's Command. The feeling struck Hal that the room seemed suddenly to have grown small around them; and he realized that for the first time he was looking at Bleys without the stark emotion of his memory of the day on the terrace, standing like a drawn sword between them. It surprised Hal now - but not as much as he would have been surprised before he had discovered that his head had touched the same top of the doorway as had Ian Graeme's - to discover that he now stood eye to eye, on a level with Bleys. From nowhere, a strange poignancy took him. This individual before him was, in a reverse sense, all he had left of what he had once known; the only one to whom he had any connection from before the moment of his tutors' deaths.

Bleys turned and stepped to Hal's float desk, sitting down on the edge of it, almost as if Hal was the visitor, rather than he.

"A big change to take place in a year," Bleys said.

Hal sat down in his chair. Perched on the desk, Bleys sat a little above him; but that advantage in position no longer mattered between them.

"The biggest change took place in that Militia cell in Ahruma, in the day or two after you left me," said Hal. "I had a chance to sort things out in my mind."

"Under an unusual set of conditions," Bleys said. "That captain deliberately misinterpreted what I told him."

"Amyth Barbage," said Hal. "Have you forgotten his name? What did you do to him, afterwards?"

"Nothing." Bleys sat still, watching him. "It was his nature to do what he did. Any blame there was, was mine, for not understanding that nature as I should have. I don't do things to people, in any case. My work is with events."

"You don't do anything to people? Even to those like Danno?"

Bleys raised his eyebrows slightly, then shook his head.

"Even to those like Danno. Danno destroyed himself, as most people who love power. All I did was give the Others an alternative plan; and in refusing to consider it, Danno created the conditions that led to his destruction at other hands than mine. As I say, I work with larger matters than individual people."

"They why come see me?" The almost painfully brilliant, hard-edged clarity of mind that had come on Hal as he sat at the head of the long dining table at Foralie, talking to the Grey Captains, was back with him now.

"Because you're a potential problem," said Bleys. He smiled. "Because I hate the waste of a good mind - ask my fellow-Others if I don't - and because I feel an obligation to you."

"And because you have no one to talk to," said Hal.

Bleys' smile widened slowly. There was a short pause.

"That's very perceptive of you," he said, gently. "But you see, I've never had anyone to talk to; and so I'm afraid I wouldn't know what I was missing. As for what brings me here, I'd like to save you if I could. Unlike Danno, you can be of use to the race."

"I intend to," said Hal.

"No," said Bleys. "What you intend is your own destruction - very much like Danno. Are you aware the struggle you've chosen to involve yourself in is all over but the shouting? Your cause isn't only lost, it's already on its way to be forgotten."

"And you want to save me?" Hal said

"I can afford what I want," said Bleys. "But in this case, it's not a matter of my saving you but of you choosing to save yourself. In a few standard years an avalanche will have swallowed up all you now think you want to fight for. So, what difference will it make if you stop fighting now?"

"You seem to assume," said Hal, "that I'm going to stop eventually."

"Either stop, or - forgive me - be stopped," said Bleys. "The outcome of this battle you want to throw yourself into was determined before you were born."

"No," said Hal, slowly. "I don't think it was."

"I understand you originally had an interest in being a poet," said Bleys. "I had inclinations to art, too, once; before I found it wasn't for me. But poetry can be a personally rewarding life work. Be a poet, then. Put this other aside. Let what's going to happen, happen; without wasting yourself trying to change it."

Hal shook his head.

"I was committed to this, only this, long before you know," he said.

"I'm entirely serious in what I say," went on Bleys. "Stop and think. What good is it going to do to throw yourself away? Wouldn't it be better, for yourself and all the worlds of men and women, that you should live a long time and do whatever you want to do - whether it's poetry or anything else? It could even be something as immaterial as saying what you think to your fellow humans; so that something of yourself will have gone into the race and be carried on to enrich it after you're gone. Isn't that a far better thing than committing suicide because you can't have matters just as you want them?"

"I think," said Hal, "we're at cross purposes. What you see as inevitable, I don't see so at all. What you refuse to accept can happen, I know can happen."

Bleys shook his head.

"You're in love with a sort of poetic illusion about life," he said. "And it is an illusion, even in a poetic sense; because even poets - good poets - come to understand the hard limits of reality. Don't take my word for that. What does Shakespeare have Hamlet say at one point… 'how weary, flat, stale and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world?' "

Hal smiled suddenly.

"Do you know Lowell?" he asked.

"Lowell? I don't believe so," answered Bleys.

"James Russell Lowell," said Hal. "Nineteenth century American poet."

He quoted:

"When I was a beggarly boy,

And lived in a cellar damp,

I had not a friend nor a toy,

But I had Aladdin's lamp …"

He sat, matching his gaze with Bleys'.

"I believe you're better at quoting poetry than I am," said Bleys. He got to his feet and Hal rose with him. "Also, I believe I'll have to accept the fact I can't save you. So I'll go. What is it you've found here at the Encyclopedia - if anything, if I may ask?"

Hal met his eyes.

"As one of my tutors, Walter InTeacher would have said," he answered. "That's a foolish question."

"Ah," said Bleys.

He turned toward the door. He had almost reached it, when Hal spoke again behind him; his voice suddenly different, even in his own ears.

"How did it happen?"

Bleys stopped and turned back to face him.

"Of course," he said, gently, "you'd have had no way of knowing, would you? I should have seen to your being informed before. Well, I'll tell you now, then. The men we normally use to go before us in situations like that had found two of your tutors already on that terrace and the third was brought to join them a minute or two after I stepped out on to the terrace myself. It was the Friendly they brought. The Dorsai and your Walter InTeacher were already there. Like you, he seemed to be fond of poetry, and as I came out of the library window, he was quoting from that verse drama of Alfred Noyes, Sherwood. The lines he was repeating were those about how Robin Hood had saved one of the fairies from what Noyes called The Dark Old Mystery. I quoted him Blondin's song, from the same piece of writing, as a stronger piece of poetry. Then I asked him where you were; and he told me he didn't know - but of course he did. They all knew, didn't they?"

"Yes," said Hal. "They knew."

"It was that which first raised my interest in you above the ordinary," Bleys said. "It intrigued me. Why should they be so concerned to hide you? I'd told them no one would be hurt; and they would have known my reputation for keeping my word."

He paused for a second.

"They were quite right not to speak, of course," he added, softly.

Hal stood still, waiting.

"At any rate," said Bleys. "I tried to bring them to like me, but of course they were all of the old breed - and I failed. That intrigued me even more, that they should be so firmly recalcitrant; and I was just about to make further efforts, which might have worked, to find out from them about you, when your Walter InTeacher physically attacked me - a strange thing for an Exotic to do."

"Not," Hal heard his own voice saying, "under the circumstances."

"Of course, that triggered off the Dorsai and the Friendly. Together, they accounted for all but one of the men I had watching them; but of course, all three of them were killed in the process. Since there was no hope of questioning them, then, I went back into the house. Danno had just arrived; and I didn't have the leisure to order a search of the grounds for you, after all."

"I was in the lake," Hal said. "Walter and Malachi Nasuno - the Dorsai - signalled me when they guessed you were on the grounds. I had time to hide in some bushes at the water's edge. After… I came up to the terrace and saw you and Danno through the window of the library."

"Did you?" said Bleys.

The two of them stood, facing each other for a moment; and Bleys shook his head, slowly.

"So it had already begun between us, even then?" he said.

He opened the door and stepped through it, closing it quietly behind him. Hal turned back to the nearest float and touched the phone controls.

"Chuni," he said. "Bleys Ahrens is on his way out. See that he doesn't go astray."