The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fifty-six

Amanda asked nothing more, for the moment. A temporary silence closed around them and by mutual consent they turned back to each other and into the universe and language that belonged only to the two of them. Later they lay companionably quiet together on their backs, side by side, watching the last of the moonlight illuminating a far corner of the room; and Amanda spoke.

"You didn't expect it at all, then, that I'd be waiting at the spaceport when you came back?"

He shook his head.

"I couldn't expect that," he said. "It would have been like expecting to grow up to be like Eachan Khan Graeme - too much to imagine. I just thought that when I came I'd look you up, wherever you were. I only hoped…"

He ran down into silence. Amanda said nothing for a moment.

"I've had more than a year to think about you," she said.

"Yes," he smiled, ruefully. "Has it been that long? I guess it has, hasn't it? So much has been going on…"

"You don't understand."

She raised herself up on one elbow and looked down into his face.

"You remember what I tried to tell you when you were here the last time?"

"That you were like the other two Amandas," he said, sobering. "I remember."

He looked up at her.

"I'm sorry I was so slow to realize what you meant," he went on. "I do now. You were telling me that, like them, you're committed to a great many people, too many to take on the possible conflict of an extra commitment to someone like myself. I understand. I've found out how little I can escape from my own commitments. I can hardly expect you to try to escape from yours."

"If you'll listen," she said, "I might be able to tell you what I'm trying to tell you."

"I'm listening," he answered.

"What I'm trying to say is that I had a chance to think about things after you were gone. You're right, I sent you off because I didn't think there was any room in my life for anyone like you - because I thought I had to be what the second Amanda had been; and she'd sent Ian away. But with time to think about it I started to realize there was a lot there I hadn't understood about both the earlier Amandas."

He lay waiting, listening. When she paused, he merely continued to look up at her.

"One of the largest shocks was realizing," she said, almost severely, "how little I'd understood about my own Amanda, the second one, in spite of being raised by her. I told you I grew up with Ian around the house so much of the time that as a young child I thought he was a Morgan. He and Amanda were both at a good age then, his children were grown and had children of their own; and his wife, Leah, was dead. He and Amanda, eventually in their old age, had come to be what life and their own senses of duty had never let them be until then - a love match. This was all right there, under my nose, but I was too young to appreciate it. Being that young and romantic-minded, all I could see was Amanda's great renunciation of Ian when she was younger, because of her obligation to the people of the Dorsai."

She paused.

"Say something," she demanded. "You are following me, aren't you?"

"I'm following you," he said.

"All right," she went on. "Actually, when I began to see Ian and Amanda as the human beings they really were, I was finally able to see how there'd been a progression at work down the Amanda line. The First had her obligation only to her family and the people of this local community. My Amanda had hers to the Dorsai people as a whole. The obligation I carry, I think, is the same as yours, to the human race as a whole - in fact, I think that's one of the forces that's brought us together now, and would have brought us together, sooner or later, in any case."

He frowned a little. What she had last said was an obvious truth that had never occurred to him.

"I realized finally," she was going on, "that, far from our personal commitments making us walk separate roads, they probably do just the opposite. They were probably going to require us to walk the same road together, whether we wanted to do so, or not; and if that was so, then there was no problem - for me, at least."

She stopped and looked down at him with an almost sly smile he had not expected and did not understand.

"Are you still following me?" she demanded.

"No," he answered. "No, to be honest, now you've lost me completely."

"My, my," she said, "the unexpected limits to genius. What I'm telling you is, I decided that if it was indeed inevitable that the factors involved were going to bring the two of us together, then it was just a matter of time before you came back here. If you never did, I could simply forget about the whole matter."

"But if I did come back? What then?" he asked.

She became serious.

"Then," she said, "I wouldn't make the mistake I'd made the first time. I'd be waiting for you when you got here."

They stared at each other for a long moment; and then she took her weight off her elbow, lay down and curled up against him, her head in the hollow of his shoulder. He put his other arm over and around her, holding her close. For a moment or two neither of them said anything.

"The last thing in the universe I expected," he commented, at last, to the ceiling. "It took me two tries at life to realize I had to develop the ability to love, then a third try from a standing start to actually develop it. And now, when I finally have, at a time when it ought to have been far too late to do me any good - here you are."

He stopped talking and ran the palm of his hand in one long sweep down her back from the nape of her neck to the inner crook of her knee.

"Amazing," he said thoughtfully, "how you can fit yourself so well to me, like that," he said.

"It's a knack," she answered, her lips against his chest. There was a second's pause. "Except all these hairs you have here tickle my nose."

"Sorry."

"Quite all right," she said, without moving. Another momentary pause. "I won't ask you to shave them off."

"Shave them off!"

She chuckled into his chest. They held each other close for a little while.

"I shouldn't do that sort of thing," she said in a different voice, after the time had passed. "I don't know what makes me want to tease you. It's just that it's like being able to ride a wild horse everyone is afraid to get close to. But I can feel something of what it must have been like for you, all those years and all those lives. It's so strange it doesn't show on you more, now that you know who you were and what you did."

"Each time was a fresh start," he said, earnestly. "It had to be. The slate had to be wiped clean each time so there'd be no danger of what had been learned before getting in the way of the new learning. I set myself up fresh each time. That way I could be sure I'd only remember what I'd known before after I'd progressed beyond needing it in my newer life. I've been learning - learning all the way."

"Yes, but hasn't it been strange, though?" she said. "Everybody else starts at the bottom and works up. Actually, what you've done is start at the top and work down. From Donal, controller of worlds, you've struggled your way down to being as much like an ordinary person as you can."

"It's because the solution's got to be for the ordinary person level - or it's no solution. Donal started out to mend the race by main force; and he learned it didn't work. Force never really changes the inner human. When Genghis Khan was alive, they said a virgin with a bag of gold could ride from one border of his empire to the other end and no one would molest her, or it. But once he was dead, the virgins and the gold started moving again under heavy armed guard, as they always had before. All anyone can ever do for even one other human being is break trail for him or her, and hope whoever it is follows. But how could I even break trail for people unless I could think like them, feel like them - know myself to be one of them?"

His voice sounded strange in the quiet nighttime room and his own ears.

"You couldn't, of course," Amanda said gently. "But how did Donal go wrong?"

"He didn't really," Hal said, to her and the shadowy ceiling. "He went right, but without enough understanding; and it may be I don't have enough understanding, even yet. But his start was in the right direction and what he dedicated me to as a child is still my path, my job."

"Dedicated you?" she said. "You mean, as Donal, as a child, you dedicated yourself to what you're doing now? How - so early?"

A remembered pain moved in him. A memory of the cell on Harmony closed around him once more.

"Do you remember James Graeme?" he asked her.

"Which James?" she asked. "There've been three by that name down the Graeme generations since Cletus."

"The James who was Donal's youngest uncle," he answered. "The James who was killed at Donneswort when I - when Donal was still a child."

He paused, looking at her calm face, resting now with the one cheek against his chest, looking back at him in the remains of the moonlight.

"Did I tell you the last time I was here about my dreaming about a graveyard and a burial, while I was in the cell on Harmony?" he asked.

"No," she said. "You told me a lot about the cell and what you thought your way through to, when you were there. But you didn't mention any dream of a burial."

"It was when I was just about to give up," he said. "I didn't realize it then, but I was just on the brink, finally, of finding what I'd sent myself out as Hal Mayne to find. What I'd come to understand began to crack through the barrier I'd set up to keep myself as Hal from knowing what had happened to me before, and what came through was a memory of the ceremony at Foralie held over James' grave, when I was a boy…"

His voice was lost in the pain of remembering for a moment, then he brought it back.

"That was the moment of Donal's decision, his commitment," Hal went on. "James had been closer to him than his own brother - it sometimes happens that way. Mor was between us in age, but Mor - "

His voice did not die this time, it stuck. Mor's name blocked his throat.

"What about Mor?" Amanda asked after a moment. Her hand moved gently to touch his, her fingertips resting on the skin at the back of his hand as it lay on the bed.

"Donal killed Mor," he said, from a long distance away.

He could feel her fingertips as if they touched the naked nerves below the skin and reached up along them to touch the innermost part of his identity.

"That's not the truth." He heard her voice a little way off. "You're making more of it than it is, somehow. It's right, but not that right. What is true?"

"Donal was responsible for Mor's death," he answered, as if she had commanded him.

The feeling of her reaching into him withdrew.

"Yes," she said. "That's all right, then, for now. You were telling me about James' death and how it brought about Donal's commitment to what's driven you all these lifetimes and all these years. What happened?"

"What happened?" His mind pulled itself back from the vision of Mor, as the finally-insane William of Ceta had left him, and came back to the vision of James' burial. "They just accepted it. Even Eachan - even my father - he just accepted James' being killed, reasonlessly, like that; and I… couldn't. I - he went into a cold rage - Donal did. The same sort of thing you brought me back from a little while ago."

"He did?" Amanda's voice broke on a note of incredulity. "He couldn't - he was far too young. How old was he?"

"Eleven."

"He couldn't at that age. It's impossible."

Hal laughed, and the laugh rang harshly in the quiet bedroom.

"He did. Kensie felt the same way you're feeling… when Kensie found him, in the stables where he'd gone after the ceremony, when all the rest had gone up to the house. But he could and did. He was Donal."

With the last word, as if the name had been a trigger, he felt within him a return, not only the coldness, but of a sweep of power that woke in him without warning, threatening to carry him off like a tidal bore sweeping up in its wall of water anything caught in its naked channel at high water time.

"I am Donal," he said; and the power took and lifted him, irresistible, towering -

"Not Bleys."

Amanda's quiet voice reached out and cut the power off at its source. Clear-mindedness came back to him, in a rush of utter relief. He lay for a few seconds, saying nothing.

"What have I told you about Bleys?" he asked her, then, turning to look through the gloom at her.

"A great deal," she answered, softly, "that first night you were at Fal Morgan, when you talked so much."

"I see." He sighed. "The sin of the Warrior, still with me. It's one of the things I still have to leave behind, as you saw… when I remembered Rukh's rescue. No, thank God, I'm not Bleys. But at eleven years old, I wasn't Bleys either. I only knew I couldn't endure that nothing be done about James' unnecessary death, about all such unnecessary evils in the universe - all the things people do to each other that should never be done."

"And you committed yourself then, to stop that?"

"Donal did. Yes," he said. "And he gave all his own life to trying. In a sense, it wasn't all his fault he went wrong. He was still young…"

"What did he do?" her voice gently drew him back onto the path of what he had been about to tell her, earlier.

"He went looking for a tool, a tool to make people not do the sort of things that had caused James' death," Hal said. "And he found one. I call it - he called it - intuitive logic. It's either logic working with the immediacy of intuition, or intuition that gets its answers according to the hard rules of a logic. Take your pick. Actually, he was far from the first to find it. Creative people - artists, writers, composers of music, musicians themselves, had used it for years. Researchers had used it. He only made a system for it and used it consciously, at his will and desire."

"But what it is?" Amanda's voice prodded him.

"It can't be explained - in the same sense a mathematics can't be explained - in words," he said. "You have to talk the language in which it exists to explain it - and even before that, your mind has to begin by making the quantum jump to a first understanding of that language, before you can really start learning what it is. I can give you a parallel example. You'll have seen, at one time or another, some great painting that reached out and captured you, heard a piece of music that was genius made audible, read a book that was beyond question one of the everlasting books?"

"Yes," she said.

"Then you know how all those things have one element in common, the fact you can come back and back to them. You can look, and look again, at the painting without ever exhausting what's to be found in it. You can listen to the music over and over, and each time find something new in it. You can read and reread the book without ever getting out of it all that's there for you to discover and enjoy."

"I know," she said.

"You see," he told her, "what makes all your returning to these things possible is their capability of triggering off in you an infinity of discoveries; and they can do that because there is an infinity of things to be discovered put into them by the creator. That infinity of possibilities could never be marshalled together consciously by one human mind and put to work in one piece of canvas, one succession of sounds, one succession of printed words. You know that. But still, there they are. They did not exist before, and now they do. There was no way they could have come into existence except by being put there by the human being who made each of them. And there was only one way he or she could have accomplished that - the maker had to have built not only with his conscious mind, which is precise but limited in how much it can conceive at any one time, but also with the unconscious, which knows no limits, and can bring all life's observations, all life's experience, to bear on a single rendered shape, sound, or word, placed just so among its fellow shapes, sounds or words."

He stopped speaking. For a second, she did not reply.

"And that," said Amanda then, "is what you call intuitive logic?"

"Not quite," said Hal. "What I was talking about there was creative logic, which is still operating under the control of the unconscious. If the unconscious is displeased with the task, it refuses to work, and no power of will can make it. What Donal did was move that control fully into the conscious area, that's all, and put it to work there manipulating the threads of cause and effect. Then, when he was still so young, he didn't realize how much he was drawing on what he had learned from reading the works on Strategy and Tactics by his great-grandfather."

"By Cletus Grahame, you mean?"

Hal nodded.

"Yes. You remember, don't you, that Cletus had actually started out with the idea of being an artist? It was only later on he became caught up in the physics of military action and reaction. He used creative logic to build his principles; and in fact, from what's there to be seen in his work, he may have crossed the line himself from time to time, into a conscious control of what he was making."

"I see," Amanda seemed to think for a moment. "But you don't know if he ever did? You seem to know that Donal did."

"I was never Cletus." Hal smiled, more to himself than to her. "But I was Donal."

"And you say creative logic was why Cletus was able to win the way he did, against Dow deCastries and an Earth so rich in everything all the Younger Worlds seemed to have no chance against it? And it was symbolic logic then that brought Donal to the title of Protector of the fourteen worlds, including Earth, before he was in his mid-thirties?"

"Yes," said Hal, somberly. "And having done it, Donal understood the lesson of the virgin with the bag of gold, after the death of Genghis Khan. He looked at the peace and law he had enforced on all the civilized planets and saw that he'd done nothing. He hadn't changed a single mind, a single attitude in the base structure of the human animal. It was the nadir of everything he had reached out for since that moment when he was eleven years old."

Her hand reached out and caressed his arm.

"It was all right," he smiled again, this time ruefully. "He lived through it. I lived through it. Being who I am, I can't give up. That's really what operated in that Militia cell. My conscious mind and body were ready to give up and lay back to do just that - but they weren't allowed to. That that's in me pushed me on, anyway. Just as it pushed Donal on, back then. As Donal, I saw I'd been wrong. The next step was to amend that wrongness - to correct, not an errant humanity, but the overall historic pattern that had made humanity errant."

"And how did he think he could do that?" her voice led him on to talk, and the talking was the slow unloading of an intolerable burden he had carried for so long he had forgotten that he had ever been without it.

"By turning his tool of intuitive logic not just upon the present, but on what made it, the causes behind the effects he saw around him and the causes behind those causes, until he came back to a point at which something could be done."

"And he found it."

"He found it." Hal nodded, "But he also found that what needed to be done was not something he could do as he had done things up until then. It wasn't something he was yet equipped to do. To operate upon what he needed to operate upon he himself had to change, to learn. To grow."

"So," Amanda said. "And your second life came from that. Can you tell me about that, now?"

He was conscious of all the burden he had already laid aside for the first time in his life, in talking to her here and now.

"Yes," he said. "Now I can."

He reached his free hand across to lay on the living incurve of her belly. He could feel her ribs rise and fall, slowly and fully with her breathing. He stared into the shadows above him.

"The problem had several sides," he said. "Humanity couldn't, as he thought he saw it then, be changed from where he stood at the moment, just like you couldn't do much about a tree that was already grown. But if you went back to the time of its planting and made changes that would be effective upon the environment in which it would grow to what it would be in the present…"

He stopped.

"Go on," Amanda said.

"I'm trying to work out the best way of telling you all this briefly," he answered. "And it takes a little thinking. You'll have to take my word for it that by using intuitional logic and working back from the then present effects to the causes he already knew for them, or could discover, he found he could trace back to the closest point in history where all the elements he hoped to alter were available at a single time and place for changing. He found that first point in the twenty-first century, just on the eve of the practical development of the phase drive, just before the diaspora to the Younger Worlds, in a time when all the root stocks of what would later become the Splinter Cultures were to be found together within a single environment - that of Old Earth."

Amanda rose on her elbow again to look down into his face.

"You're going to tell me he actually went back in time, to change the past?"

"Yes and no," Hal said. "He couldn't physically travel back in time, of course. He couldn't actually change the past. But what he found he could do was work his consciousness back along the chain of cause and effect to the time he wanted and there try to make the necessary changes, not in what actually happened then, but in the possible implications of what happened. He could open up to the minds living in that time possibilities that otherwise they might not have seen."

"How did he think he was going to communicate these possibilities - by stepping into people's dreams, then, or speaking to them, mind to mind?"

"No," he said, "by interacting - but as someone who actually did not exist at the time. To make the story as short as possible, he ended by reanimating a dead body, a mining engineer of the twenty-first century, who had drowned, named Paul Formain. As Paul Formain, he influenced people who were the forerunners of the Dorsai, the Friendlies and others - but most of all he influenced the people making up something that was then called the Chantry Guild."

"I remember that from history," said Amanda. "The Exotics came from the Chantry Guild."

"Yes," said Hal. "In the Chantry Guild and seed organizations of other Splinter Cultures, he introduced possibilities that were to have their effect, not in Donal's time, but in our present day. Now."

"But when did Donal manage to do this?" Amanda said. "He was in the public eye right up to the moment of his death - when he took that courier ship out alone and was caught by the one-in-a-million chance of not coming out of phase shift."

"He didn't die," said Hal. "It was simply assumed he'd died, when he didn't arrive where and when he was supposed to and no trace of his ship could be found. He hid in space for over eighty years, until it was time to let the ship be found, drifting into Old Earth orbit."

She said nothing for a long moment.

"With a baby aboard," she said. "A very young child - that was you?"

"Yes." Hal nodded. "It's something the mind can do with the body, if it has to. Even Cletus mended his crippled leg with his mind."

"I know that story," said Amanda. "But the Exotics helped him."

"No," said Hal. "They just provided the excuse for him to believe in his own ability to do it."

She said nothing, looking at him.

"We've had miracle cures reported all down the centuries," he said. "Long before the Exotics. They, themselves, have quite a library on such incidents, I understand. So, I hear, has the Final Encyclopedia. I believe I was dying in that cell from the pneumonia or whatever it was I had, until I realized I couldn't afford to die. Shortly after that realization, my fever broke. Of course, it could have been coincidence. But mothers have stayed untouched in the midst of epidemics as long as they were needed to care for their sick children."

"Yes," she said, slowly. "I do know what you mean."

"That, and taking over a dead body as life leaves it, are only two aspects of the same thing. But I don't want to get off on that business now. The main point is, Donal went back and became Paul Formain, so as to change the shape of things to come - and to change himself."

"Will you sit up?" Amanda said. "Then I can sit up, too. I can't lie propped on one elbow indefinitely."

They arranged themselves in seated position, side by side, with their backs protected by pillows from the metal bars of the bedstead behind them. The narrow width of the single bed left them still close, still touching.

"Now," said Amanda. "You said - 'and to change himself.' Change himself how?"

"Donal'd seen how he'd gone astray in his own time," Hal said. "He felt it was because he had failed to feel as he should for those around him - and he was right, as far as that went. At any rate, he went out to learn the ability to feel another's feelings, so that he could never again fall into the trap of thinking he had changed people when actually all he'd done was change the laws that controlled their actions."

"Empathy? That was what he wanted?"

"Yes," said Hal.

"And he found it?"

"He learned it. But it wasn't enough."

Amanda looked at him.

"What is it bothers you so about this time Donal - no, not Donal - when you were this animated dead man… what was his name?"

"Paul Formain," Hal said. "It's not easy to explain. You see as Formain, he - I - did it again. Donal'd played God. He hadn't done it just for the sake of playing God, but that's what the effect he'd had on the populations of fourteen worlds had amounted to. Then when he saw what he'd done it sickened him, and he decided whatever else he did, he wouldn't be guilty of doing it again. Then, as Paul Formain, he went and did just that."

"He did?" Amanda stared at him. "I don't see why you say that - unless you call it playing God to plant the possibilities of our present time…"

Her own voice ran down.

"No!" she said, suddenly and strongly. "Follow that sort of reasoning and you end up with the fact that to try to do anything for people, even for the best of reasons, is immoral."

"No," Hal said. "I don't mean that. What I mean is that once again, he realized he'd acted without sufficient understanding. As Donal he hadn't considered people at all, except as chess pieces on a board. As Paul Formain, he considered people - but only those with whom he learned to empathize. He was still trying to work with humanity from the outside - that was what hadn't changed in him."

He paused, then went on.

"He faced that, after he'd done what he'd gone back to the twenty-first century to do. He'd set in motion the very factors that are now bringing the internal struggle of the race animal out into the open and forcing everyone to take sides, with the Others or against, for the survival of us all. But he'd done it, in a sense, with a certain blindness; and it was because of that blindness that he couldn't foresee someone like Bleys and the growth of power behind him. After he returned Paul Formain's body to the ocean bed from which he had lifted it, he realized how he had gone wrong - although he couldn't yet foresee the consequences, that hold us in a vise right now. But he understood enough finally to see what his great fault had been."

"His great fault?" said Amanda, almost harshly. "And what was that great fault?"

"Just that he'd never had the courage to give up the one apart corner of himself, to abandon standing apart from everyone else." Hal turned his head to look directly at her. "He'd been the 'odd boy,' according to his teachers. He'd been the small and different ugly duckling among the Graemes. He'd been born with the same sort of mind that led Bleys Ahrens to put himself lightyears apart from the rest of the race. Donal, too, had been born an isolated individual, suffered from that isolation, and come to embrace it, as Bleys had embraced it. With his development of empathy, Paul Formain could begin to feel what someone else might be feeling, but he felt it as any human being might feel a frog's hunger for a passing fly. The soul of him still stood alone and apart from all those he had thought early had cast him out."

Again, he paused.

"I was afraid to be human, then," he said. He did not look at her, but he felt her arm go around his waist and her head come to rest on his shoulder.

"Not any more," she said.

"No.'' He heaved a very deep sigh. "But it was literally the hardest thing I ever had to do. Only there was no choice. There was the commitment. I had to go forward - and so I did."

"By coming back as a child," she said.

"As a child," he agreed. "Starting all over again without memory, without strength, without the skills of two lifetimes to protect myself with in an arena I'd built and didn't know I'd built. So I could finally learn, once and for all, to be like everybody else."

"Was it so absolutely necessary to do that?" he heard her asking from the region of his shoulder.

"It was critical," he said. "You can lead or drive from the outside, but you can only show the way from inside. It's not just enough to know how they feel - you have to feel it with them. That was the mistake I made being Formain and thinking empathy alone was going to give me what I needed to get the work done. And I was right - all the years of being Hal Mayne have proved how right I was, this last time. I was born Donal, and nothing I can do can ever leave him behind, but I can be a larger Donal. I can feel as if I belong to the community of all people - and I do."

He stopped and turned his head to look down into her face.

"And, of course," he said, "it brought me you."

"Who knows?" she said. "You might've come to it anyway by a different route, eventually. I still feel things - the historic forces, as you call them - would've brought us together in the long run, one way or another."

"I thought you'd thought it could go either way, and you'd just left it up to fate," he said.

"I did," she answered. "But looking back on it, I was certain you'd be back. I've learned to trust myself in things like that. I know when I'm right. Just as I know…"

She did not finish the sentence.

"Know what?" he asked.

"Nothing. Nothing worth talking about, right now, anyway. Nothing to worry about." He felt her shake her head, briefly. "In ancient times they would have called feeling like that second sight. But it's not giving me anything you ought to be concerned about. Tell me something else. When you talk about the race-animal, do you really mean some entity, actual and separate from us all?"

"Not separate," he said. "Oh, I suppose you could call it separate in that it might want something that you or I as part of it doesn't want. No, as I say, it's just the self-protective and other reflexes of the race as a whole, raised to the level of something approaching a personality because it's now the reflex-bundle of an intelligent, thinking race, as opposed to the same sort of thing in the case of the race, or genus or species of, say, lions or lemmings - or you name them."

"And that's all it is?" she said. "Then how do you justify talking about it as if it was a sort of wilful individual personality that had to be dealt with?"

"Well, again, that's the difference that's come into it because we, who make it up, while we're a race of intelligent individuals, are also a conglomeration of willful individuals. Because we think, it thinks - after our fashion. Try this for an explanation. It's a sort of collective unconscious, as if all our individual unconsciousnesses were wired together with something like telepathy - again, there's been evidence for that sort of wired-togetherness in the past."

"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "The empathy between twins. Or between parent and child, or any two adults in love, that allows them sometimes to feel at a distance what's happening to the other. I can agree with that. You know, we - you and I - have that, I think."

"All right, then," he said. "But there's one difference from us in the lower orders - particularly in the examples of the bee hive or the ant hill - in our case. It's that we can not only want something different from what the race-animal wants, we can actually try to change its mind and its course, by convincing the unconsciouses of our fellow-individuals. If we can get enough of them wanting what we want, the race-creature has to turn that way from whatever other route it's chosen."

"How do you convince the unconsciousness of others, though? There's nothing there to take hold of. The conscious mind of someone else you can talk to. All right, I know the Exotics do a beautiful job of mending sick minds by talking to the conscious and getting the corrections filtered down to the unconscious. And, for that matter, Bleys' charisma and that of the Others - that's working directly with the unconscious of others. So's hypnosis. But none of those thing have a lasting effect unless what's being put into the subject really agrees with what was there in the unconscious in the first place. There's no direct way to hold converse with other human's unconscious."

"Yes, there is," he said, "and it's a way that's been used at least since a prehistoric people lived in the caves of the Dordogne, back on Old Earth - you can talk to the unconscious of other people through the mediums of art."

"Art…" she said, thoughtfully.

"That's right," he said. "And you know why? Because art - real art - never tells anyone something. It only lays it out there for whoever comes to pick up."

"Perhaps. But it certainly makes whatever it has to say as attractive as possible to whoever comes along. You have to admit that."

"Yes, all right. If it's good. And if it isn't good, it doesn't offer anything to the unconscious of a viewer, reader, or listener. But the difference between that and conscious attempts to persuade is the difference between an order and a demonstration. The maker of the piece of art doesn't convince the person experiencing it - the person experiencing it convinces himself or herself, if they decided what's laid out in the art is worth picking up. That's why I worked my way back down the ladder from Donal, as you put it. All of Donal's strength couldn't move the race one millimeter from its already chosen path. But if I go first and leave footprints in the snow, some may follow, and others may follow them."

"Why?" she said. "I'm not against you, my love, but I want to see the reasons plainly. Why should anyone follow you?"

"Because of my dreams," he said. "Donal dreamed at James' death of a time when no more James' would be killed for stupid or selfish reasons. I've come to dream farther - I see the old dream of the race as a whole, now possible."

"And what does a race dream of?" she asked, so softly that anywhere but in this quiet and private room he would not have been able to hear her.

"It dreams," he said, "of being a race of gods. From the beginning, the individual part of the race, shivering in the wet as a stone-age savage, said, 'I wish I was a god who could turn the rain off,' and, finally, generations and millennia later, he was such a god - and his godlike power was called weather control. But long before that the urge to command wetness to cease had produced hats, and roofs and umbrellas - but always the push in the human heart went on toward the original dreams of being able to just say, 'rain, stop!' and the rain would stop."

He looked down through the dimness at her.

"And that's how it's been with everything else the individual, and therefore the race-animal, dreamed of - warmth when it was cold, coolness when it was too hot, the ability to fly bird-like, to cross great distances of water dry-shod, to hear and talk at as great or even greater distances, to block pain, defy disease and death. In the end, it's added up to one great desire. To be all-mighty. To be a god."

He paused, having heard his voice grow loud in the room and went on more quietly.

"And always the way to what was wanted's been found in a dozen small and practical ways before the single command, the wave of a godlike hand, was developed that could simply make it happen. But always the dream has run in advance. Hunters and cities, conquerors and kings, all succeeded in being and were superceded. The dream was always achieved first in art, time and again, and never forgotten until it was made real. Slowly, the human creature was changing, from a being that lived and died for what was material, to one who lived and died - and fought and died - for what was immaterial; for faith and obligation and love and power, power over the material first and then power over fellow-creatures, and finally, last and greatest, the power over self. And the dreams have gone always ahead, picturing what was wanted as something already possessed; until it became a truism to the race-animal that what could be conceived, could be had."

He stopped talking, finally.

"And you say these dreams were kept in the language of art?" she said.

"Yes," he answered, "and still are. The footprints I want to leave in the snow lead off toward the reality of what has only been barely dreamed of yet. The universe in which to understand a thing is to have it. Do you want a castle? You can have it merely by wanting it - but you have to know and own the materials it'd be built of, the architecture that'll ensure it'll stand, not fall, once it's built, and the very nature and extent of the ground on which it stands. If you know that much, you can have your castle right now, by means already known. But you want more than just the physical structure. Your castle must have those immaterial qualities that made you desire its castleness in the first place. These are not to be found in the physical universe, but in the other one that we all know and reach for, unconsciously. So, such a universe offers much more than the fulfillment of material dreams, it offers satisfaction of that original dream to be a god - the chance to cure all ills, to learn all mysteries, and finally to build what has never been dreamed of by any of us before now."

"You want everyone to dream your dream," Amanda said.

"Yes," he said. "But my dream is their dream, already - unless they shut it out as Bleys and his kind have done. I just articulate it."

"But maybe it never will be articulated, except in your own individual mind," she went on. "And when you're gone, it'll be gone."

"No," he said, strongly. "It's there in other minds as well, too strongly for that. It's there in the race-creature itself, along with the fear of trying for it. Haven't you felt it yourself - haven't you always felt it? It's too late now to hide it or kill it. Four hundred years ago, the race-animal was forced to face the fact that the safe, warm world it was born on was only an indistinguishable mote in a physical universe so big that anything conceivable not only could, but almost certainly must, exist in it. It could try to close its eyes to what it had been brought generally to know, or it could take the risk and step out into the alien territory beyond its atmosphere."

"It hadn't any choice," she said. "Overpopulation of Old Earth, for one thing, drove it out."

"Overpopulation was a devil it knew. The unlimited universe was one it didn't. But it went - in fear and trembling, talking of things 'man was not meant to know,' but going; and it scattered its bets as best it could by turning loose all the different cultural varieties of itself society has produced up until then, to see which, if any, would survive. Toward whatever survivors there were, it would adapt. Now that time of adaptation is on us; and the question is, which of two choices is it going to be? The type that'd stop and keep what we have - or the type that'd go on risking and experimenting? Because the human equation that's involved can stand for only one solution. If the dominant survivor is the Bleys type, with its philosophy of stasis, then, for the first time since we lifted our eyes above the hard realities of our daily lives, we stop where we are. If it's yours and mine, and that of those like us - we go on reaching for what may make us or destroy us. The race-creature waits to see which of us will win."

"But if the choices are either-or," she said, "then maybe the race-creature - you know, I've got trouble with that clumsy double word you thought up, you really should try to come up with something better - would be doing the right thing in going with Bleys and the Others if they win."

"No," said Hal, bleakly, "it wouldn't. Because it's a creature made up of its parts, and its parts aren't gods - yet. They and it can still be wrong. And they'll be wrong to choose the Others, because neither they nor it seem to realize that the only end to stasis is eventual death. Any end to growth is death. Never having stopped growing from the beginning, the race-creature's like a child who can't really believe he'll ever come to an end. But I know we can."

"You could still be the one who's wrong."

"No!" he said again. He stared down at her. "Let me tell you about this last year. You know I went back to the Final Encyclopedia; and with what I know now as Paul Formain and Hal Mayne this time I used it as Mark Torre dreamed of it being used - I made poetry into a key to unlock the implications of the records of our past - and the dream of godhood I've been talking about, personal godhood for every individual human, is there in the record. It explodes for the first time, plainly, in the constructs of the Renaissance. Not just in the art, but in all the artifacts of human creation from that period on."

He stopped and looked hard at her.

"You believe me?" he asked.

"Go on," said Amanda, quietly, "I'm still listening."

"Even today," he said, "there's a tendency to think of the Renaissance only in terms of its great art works. But it was a time of much more than that. It was a time of a multitude of breakings-out, in the forms of craft innovations and social and conceptual experimentation. I told you about the Theater of Memory which prefigures the Final Encyclopedia, itself. It wasn't just by chance that Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer. Actually, what we call the technological age had already begun in the pragmatic innovations of the later Middle Ages - now it flowed into a new consciousness of what might be possible to humans. From that, in only six centuries came the step into space… and everything since has followed. In each generation there were those who wanted to stop where they were, like Bleys, and consolidate. But did we? At any time along that uncertain and fearful upward way, did we stop?"

He himself stopped.

"No," said Amanda. "Of course, we didn't."

She turned and darted upwards slightly at him - and he jerked his head away from her. He stared grimly at her.

"You bit my ear!" he said.

"That's right." She looked at him wickedly. "Because that's enough of that for now. There'll be time yet to worry about the enemy before he starts beating at our gates. For now, I'm hungry and it's time for breakfast."

"Breakfast?"

Involuntarily, he glanced at the window and what she had just said was true. They - or rather he, he thought ruefully - had talked the moon down; and the darkness outside was beginning to pale toward day. He could see the grayish scree of the slope behind the house more clearly, looming like a slightly more solid ghost of the future.

"That's what I said." She was already out of bed, had seized his wrist and was hauling him also to his feet. "We've had a large night and we've got a large day ahead of us, starting not many hours off. We'll eat, clean up, and then if you can nap, you take a nap. Your meeting with the Grey Captains is set for noon."

"Meeting?" he echoed. He watched her begin to dress and mechanically reached for his shorts to follow her example. "I didn't even ask you yet about setting one up."

"A notice was sent out to all of the Captains as soon as the Commander of the ship that brought you in sent word you were aboard," she said. "That was what kept me in Omalu yesterday, putting the last minute finish to the paperwork for the meeting. I brought some meat up here with me, Hal Mayne. Not fish this time - meat! How about a rack of lamb for a combination breakfast and the proper dinner you probably didn't get around to having last night?"