The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Four

Back in Hal's room, Ajela played with the controls bank; and a lean-faced man with grizzled hair appeared on the screen.

"Ajela!" he said.

"Jerry," she told him, "this is Hal Mayne, who just came in yesterday. He wants to go out to Coby as soon as he can. What have you got as possibilities?"

"I'll look." The screen went blank.

"A friend of yours?" Hal asked.

She smiled.

"There're less than fifteen hundred of us on permanent staff, here," she said. "Everybody knows everybody."

The screen lit up again with the face of Jerry.

"There's a liner outbound to New Earth, due to hit orbit here in thirty-two hours, eighteen minutes," he said, "Hal Mayne?"

"Yes?" Hal moved up to where he could be seen on Jerry's screen.

"From New Earth in two days you can transship by cargo ship to Coby itself. That should put you on Coby in about nine days, subjective time. Will that do you?"

"That's fine," said Hal.

"You've got your credit papers on file, here?"

"Yes."

"All right," said Jerry. "I can just go ahead and book it for you, if you want."

Hal felt a touch of embarrassment.

"I don't want any special favors - " he was beginning.

"What favors?" Jerry grinned. "This is my job, handling traffic for our visiting scholars."

"Oh, I see. Thanks," said Hal.

"You're welcome." Jerry broke the connection.

Hal turned back to Ajela.

"Thank you for doing the calling, though," he said. "I don't know your command codes here at all."

"Neither does anyone who's non-permanent personnel. You could have found out from the Assistance Operator, but this saves time. You do think you'd like to have me show you around the Encyclopedia?"

"Yes. Absolutely - " Hal hesitated. "Could I actually work with the Encyclopedia?"

"Certainly. But why don't you leave that until last? After you've seen something of it, working with it will make more sense to you. We could go back to the Transit Point and start from there."

"No." He did not want to hear the voices again - at least, not for a while. "Can we get some lunch first?"

"Then suppose I take you first to the Academic control center - I mean after the dining room, of course."

They left their table, walked out of the dining room, down what seemed like a short corridor, and entered through a dilated aperture into a room perhaps half the size of the dining room. Its walls were banked with control consoles; and in mid-air in the center of the room floated what looked like a mass of red, glowing cords, making a tangle that was perhaps a meter thick, from top to bottom, and two meters wide by three long. Ajela led him up to it. The cords, he saw from close-up, were unreal - visual projections.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The neural pathways of the Encyclopedia currently being activated as people work with them." She smiled sympathetically at him. "It doesn't seem to make much sense, does it?"

He shook his head.

"It takes a great deal of time to learn to recognize patterns in it," she said. "The technicians that work with it get very good. But, actually only Tam can look at it and tell you at a glance everything that's being done with it."

"How about you?" he asked.

"I can recognize the gross patterns - that's about all," she said. "I'll need ten more years to begin to qualify myself for even the beginning technician level."

He looked at her with a touch of suspicion.

"You're exaggerating," he said. "It won't take you that long."

She laughed, and he felt gratified.

"Well, maybe not."

"I'd guess you must be pretty close to being level with a beginning technician right now," he said. "You're pulling that Exotic trick of talking yourself down. You wouldn't have gone from nowhere to becoming Tam's special assistant in six years, if you weren't unusual."

She looked at him, suddenly sober.

"Plainly," she said, "you're a little unusual yourself. But, of course, you'd have to be."

"I would? Why?"

"To hear the voices at the Transit Point."

"Oh," he said. "That."

She took him up close to the glowing, air-borne mass of red lines, and began to trace individual ones, explaining how one was clearly a tap from the Encyclopedia's memory-area of history over to the area of art, which meant that a certain scholar from Indonesia had found a connection to a new sidelight on the work he was doing; and how another line showed that the Encyclopedia itself was projecting related points to the research another person was doing - in effect suggesting avenues of exploration.

"Is this all just what Tam called 'library' use of the Encyclopedia?" Hal asked.

"Yes." Ajela nodded.

"Can you show me what the other kind would look like in these neural pathways?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"No. The Encyclopedia's still waiting for someone who can do that."

"What makes Tam so sure it's possible?"

She looked gravely at him.

"He's Tam Olyn. And he's sure."

Hal reserved judgment on the question. She took him next to the mechanical heart of the Encyclopedia, the room containing the controls for the solar power it stored and used, to run the sphere and to drive the force-panels that protected it. The panels actually used little of the power. Like the phase-shift from which they were derived, they were almost non-physical. Where the phase-shift drive did not actually move a spaceship as much as it changed the description of its location, the protective panels in effect set up an indescribably thin barrier of no-space. Just as a spaceship under phase drive at the moment of shift was theoretically spread out evenly throughout the universe and immediately reassembled at some other designated spot than that from which it started, so any solid object attempting to pass the curtain of no-space in the panels became theoretically spread out throughout the universe, without hope of reassembling.

"You know about this?" Ajela asked Hal as they stood in the mechanicals control room.

"A little," he said. "I learned, the way everybody does, how the shift was developed from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle."

"Not everybody," she said. He frowned at her.

"Oh?"

She smiled. "You'd be surprised what percentage of the total race has no idea of how space vessels move."

"I suppose," he said, a little wistfully. "But anyway, the force-panels don't seem that hard to understand. Essentially, all they do is what a spaceship does, if a one-in-a-million chance goes wrong. It's just that after things are spread out they're never reassembled."

"Yes," she said, slowly. "People talk about phase-shift errors as if they were something romantic - a universe of lost ships. But it's not romantic."

He gazed closely at her.

"Why does that make you so sad?" he asked, deeply moved to see her cheerfulness gone.

She stared at him for a second.

"You're sensitive," she said.

Before he could react to that statement, however, she had gone on.

"But shouldn't I be sad?" she asked. "People have died. To them there was nothing romantic about it. People have been destroyed or lost forever, who might have changed the course of the race if they'd lived. How about Donal Graeme, who brought the fourteen worlds to the closest thing to a unified political whole that they'd ever known - just a hundred years or so ago? He was only in his thirties when he left the Dorsai for Mara, and never got there."

Hal shrugged. He knew the bit of history she referred to. But in spite of the sensitivity she had just accused him of having, he could not work up much sympathy for Donal Graeme, who after all had had nearly a third of a normal lifetime before he was lost. He became aware that Ajela was staring at him.

"Oh, I forgot!" she said. "You were almost lost that way. It was just luck you were found. I'm sorry. I didn't think when I brought the subject up."

It was like her, he thought - already he was thinking of ways in which she was like, although he had only known her a matter of hours - to put the kindest possible interpretation on his indifference to what moved her deeply.

"I don't remember any of it," he said. "I was under two years old when they found me. As far as I'm concerned, it could just as well have happened to someone else."

"Haven't you ever been tempted to try and establish who your parents were?"

Internally, he winced. He had been tempted, hundreds of times. He had woven a thousand fantasies in which by chance he discovered them, still alive somewhere.

He shrugged again.

"How'd you like to go down to the Archives?" she asked. "I can show you the facsimiles of all the art of the race from the Paleolithic cave paintings of the Dordogne, up until now; and every weapon and artifact and machine that was ever made."

"All right," he said; and with an effort hauled himself off thoughts of his unknown parents. "Thanks."

They went to the Archives, which were in another room-area just under the actual metal skin of the Encyclopedia. All the permanent rooms made a layer of ten to twenty meters thick just inside that skin. With the force-panels outside it, that location was as safe as anywhere within the sphere itself; and this arrangement left the great hollow interior free for the movable rooms to shift about it.

As Ajela explained, the rooms were in reality always in motion, being shuttled about to make way for the purposeful movement of other rooms as they were directed into proximity with one another. In the gravityless center of the sphere, with each room having its own interior gravity, this motion was all but unnoticeable, said Ajela; though in fact Hal had already come to be conscious of it - not the movement itself, but the changes in direction. He supposed that long familiarity with the process had made permanent personnel like Ajela so used to it that they did not notice it any more.

He let her talk on, although the facts she was now telling him were some, he had learned years ago from Walter the InTeacher. He was aware that she was talking to put him at his ease, as much as to inform him.

The Archives, when they came to them, inhabited a very large room made to seem enormous, by illusion. It had to be large to appear to hold the lifesize and apparently solid, three-dimensional images of objects as large as Earth's Roman Colosseum, or the Symphonie des Flambeaux which Newton had built.

He had not expected to be deeply moved by what he would see there, most of which he assumed he had seen in image form before. But as it turned out, he was to betray himself into emotion, after all.

"What would you like to see first?" she asked him.

Unthinkingly, his head still full of the idea of testing the usefulness of the Encyclopedia, he mentioned the first thing he could think of that legitimately could be here, but almost certainly would not.

"How about the headstone on Robert Louis Stevenson's grave?" he asked.

She touched the studs on her bank of controls, and almost within arm's length of him the transparent air resolved itself into an upright block of gray granite with words cut upon it.

His breath caught. It was an image copy only, his eyes told him, but so true to actuality it startled him. He reached out to the edge of the imaged stone and his fingers reported a cold smoothness, the very feel of the stone itself. He, with all the response to poetry that had always been in him, had always echoed internally to this before all other epitaphs, the one that Stevenson had written for himself when he should be laid in a churchyard. He tried to read the lines of letters cut in the stone, but they blurred in his vision. It did not matter. He knew them without seeing them:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

The untouchable words woke again in him the memory of the three who had died on the terrace, and kindled a pain inside him so keen that he thought for a second or two he would not be able to bear it. He turned away from the stone and Ajela; and stood, looking at nothing, until he felt her hand on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But you asked…"

Her voice was soft, and her touch on his shoulder so light he could barely sense it; but together they made a rope by which he was able to haul himself once more back up from the bitter ache of the personal loss.

"Look," she said, "I've got something else for you. Look!"

Reluctantly, he turned and found himself looking at a bronze sculpture no more than seven inches in height. It was the sculpture of a unicorn standing on a little patch of ground with tight-petalled roses growing near his feet. His neck was arched, his tail in an elegant circle, his mane flying and his head uptilted roguishly. There was a look in his eye and a twist to his mouth that chortled at the universe.

It was The Laughing Unicorn, by Darlene Coltrain. He was unconquerable, sly, a dandy - and he was beautiful. Life and joy bubbled up and fountained in every direction from him.

It was impossible for pain and such joy to occupy the same place; and after a moment the pain began to recede from Hal. He smiled at the unicorn in spite of himself; and could almost convince himself that the unicorn smiled back.

"Do you have the originals of any of these facsimiles?" he asked Ajela.

"Some," she said. "There's the problem of available storage space - let alone that you can't buy things like this with credit. What we do have are those that have been donated to us."

"That one?" he asked, pointing at The Laughing Unicorn.

"I think… yes, I think that's one we do," she said.

"Could I see it? I'd like to actually handle it."

She hesitated, then slowly but plainly shook her head.

"I'm sorry," she said. "No one touches the originals but the archivists - and Tam."

She smiled at him.

"If you ever get to be Director, you can keep him on your desk, if you want."

Ridiculously, inexpressibly, he longed to own the small statuette; to take it with him for comfort when he went out alone between the stars and into the mines on Coby. But of course that was impossible. Even if he did own the original himself, it was too valuable to be carried in an ordinary traveller's luggage. Its loss or theft would be a tragedy to a great many people besides himself.

He lost himself after that in looking at a number of other facsimiles of art, all sorts of works, books and other artifacts that Ajela summoned up with her control bank. In an odd way, a barrier had gone down between the two of them with the emotions that had just been evoked in him, first by the Robert Louis Stevenson gravestone and then by the Laughing Unicorn. By the time they were done, it was time for another meal. This time they ate in another dining room - this one imaged and decorated to give the appearance of a beer hall, full of music, loud talk, and the younger inhabitants of the Encyclopedia - although few of these were as young as Ajela, and none as young as Hal. But he had learned that when he remembered to act soberly and trade on his height he could occasionally be taken for two or three years older than he actually was. No one, at least, among those that stopped by the booth where they sat, showed any awareness that he was two years younger than she.

But the food and drink hit him like a powerful drug, after the large events of the last two days. An hour or so in the dining room, and he could barely keep his eyes open. Ajela showed him how to code for his own room on the booth's control bank, and led him down another short corridor outside the dining room to a dilating aperture that proved, indeed, to be the door to his own quarters.

"You think there'll be time for me to work with the Encyclopedia tomorrow?" he said as she left.

"Easily," she said.

He slept heavily, woke feeling happy, then remembered the deaths on the terrace - and grief rushed in on him again. Again he watched through the screen of the bush at the edge of the pond and saw what happened. The pain was unendurable. It was all too close. He felt he had to escape, the way a drowning man might feel, who had to escape from underwater up to where there was air and light. He clutched frantically for something other to cling to, and fastened on the recollection that today he would have a chance to work with the Encyclopedia itself. He clung to this prospect, filling his mind with it and with what he had done the day before when Ajela had taken him around.

Still thinking of these things he got up, ordered breakfast, and an hour later Ajela called to see if he was awake yet. Finding him up, she came to his room.

"Most people work with the Encyclopedia in their rooms," she told him. "But if you like I can add a carrel to this room, or set one up for you elsewhere."

"Carrel," he echoed. He had assumed for some years now that there were no words worth knowing he did not know, but this was new to him.

"A study-room."

She touched the controls on his desk and a three dimensional image formed in the open center of his quarters. It showed something not much larger than a closet holding a single chair float and a fixed desk surface with a pad of control keys. The walls were colorless and flat; but as she touched the controls in Hal's room again, they dissolved into star filled space, so that float and desk seemed now to be adrift between the stars. Hal's breath caught in his throat.

"I can have the carrel attached to my room here?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Then I think that's what I'd like."

"All right." She touched the control. The light shimmer of the wall opposite the door that was the entrance to his room moved back to reveal another door. As he watched it opened and he saw beyond it the small room she had described as a carrel. He went to and into it, like a bee drawn to a flower blossom. Ajela followed him and spent some twenty minutes teaching him how to call up from the Encyclopedia whatever information he might want. At last she turned to leave him.

"You'll make better use of the resources of the Encyclopedia," she said, "if you've got a specific line of inquiry or investigation to follow. You'll find it'll pay you to think a bit before you start and be sure you're after information that needs to be developed from the sources it'll give you, rather than just a question that can be simply answered."

"I understand," he said, excitement moving in him.

But once she had gone and he was alone again, the excitement hesitated and the grief in him, together with the cold ancient fury toward Bleys Ahrens he had felt earlier, threatened to wake in him once more. Resolutely he shoved it back down inside him. He pressed the control set in the arm of his chair that sealed the room about him and set its walls to an apparent transparency that left him seemingly afloat in space between the stars. His mind hunted almost desperately, knowing that he must find something to occupy it or else it would go back to the estate again, to the lake and the terrace. The words of Malachi's evoked image came back to him.

"… the concerns of the living, must be with the living, even if the living are themselves …"

He made a powerful effort to think only of the here and now. What would he want if he was simply here at the Final Encyclopedia in this moment and nothing at all had happened back at his home? Reaching out, his mind snatched again at the dreams built up from his reading. He had asked to see the gravestone of Robert Louis Stevenson yesterday. Perhaps he should simply ask for whatever else the Encyclopedia had to tell him about Stevenson that he had never known before? But his mind shied away from that idea. The image of Stevenson was now tied in his mind to the image of a gravestone, and he did not want to think of gravestones.

He flung his mind wide. The Three Musketeers? D'Artagnan? What about Nigel Loring, the fictional hero of two of the historical novels by the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle - the novels Sir Nigel and The White Company.

The idea of Sir Nigel, the small but indomitable hero of those two novels of the days of men in iron and leather welcomed his imagination like a haven. Nigel Loring was a character who had always glowed with an unusual light and color in his imagination. Perhaps Conan Doyle had even started a third novel about him, and never finished it? No, not likely. If that had been true he would almost undoubtedly have run across some word of it before now. He pressed the query key of the keypad on the arm of his chair and spoke aloud to the Encyclopedia.

"List for me all that Conan Doyle ever wrote about the character Nigel Loring, who appears in the novels The White Company and Sir Nigel by Conan Doyle."

A hard copy coiled up out of the void into existence and dropped in his lap. At the same time a soft bell note chimed and a voice replied to him in pleasant female tones.

"Data from sources delivered in hard copy. Would you also like biographical details about the historical individual who is antecedent?"

Hal frowned, puzzled.

"I'm not asking for data on Conan Doyle," he said.

"That's understood. The historical individual referred to was the actual Nigel Loring, knight, of the fourteenth century AD." Hal stared at the stars. The words he had just heard echoed in his head and a bubble of excitement formed within him. Almost fearful that it would turn out there had been some mistake, he spoke again.

"You're telling me there actually was someone named Nigel Loring in England in the fourteenth century?"

"Yes. Do you want biographical details on this person?"

"Yes, please. All possible details - " he added hastily, "and will you list references to the real Nigel Loring in documents of the time and after. I want copies of these last, if you can give them to me."

Another coil of hard copy emerged from the desktop, followed by a number of paper sections and pictures. Hal ignored the hard copy but picked up the second half of the delivery and went quickly through it. There was an amazing number of things, running from excerpts from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart; an account list of presents given by Edward, the Black Prince of England, to courtiers in his train; and ending with an image of a stall in a chapel. With the image of the chapel stall was a printed description identifying it, which Hal found the most fascinating of all the material.

The stall, he read, still existed. Nigel Loring had been one of the charter members of the Order of the Garter. The chapel was St. George's Chapel, in the English palace of Windsor. The existing chapel now, he learned, was not, however, the original chapel. The original chapel had been built by Edward the Third and its rebuilding was begun by Edward IV and probably finished in the reign of Henry VIII. Work had gone on at night with many hundreds of candles burning at the time in order to get it ready at Henry's express order for one of his marriages.

For a moment the terrace and its happenings were forgotten. The actual historical Nigel Loring and Doyle's fictional character slid together in Hal's mind. It seemed to him that he reached across time to touch the actual human being who had been Nigel Loring. For a moment it was possible to believe that all the people in the books he had read might have been as alive and touchable as any real person, if only he knew where and how to reach out for them. Fascinated, he pulled another character out of his mind almost at random, and spoke to the Encyclopedia.

"Tell me," he asked, "was the character Bellarion, in the novel Bellarion by Raphael Sabatini also inspired by a real historical person of the same name?"

"No," answered the Final Encyclopedia.

Hal sighed, his imagination brought back to the practical Earth. It would have been too good to be true to have had Bellarion also an actual character in history.

"… however," the Encyclopedia went on, "Sabatini's Bellarion draws strongly upon the military genius of the actual fourteenth century condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood, from whom Conan Doyle also drew to some extent in the writing of the books that contain the character of Sir Nigel. It is generally accepted that John Hawkwood was in part a model for both fictional characters. Would you like excerpts of the critical writings reaching this conclusion?"

"Yes - NO!" Hal shouted aloud. He sat back, nearly quivering with excitement.

John Hawkwood was someone about whom he knew. Hawkwood had caught his imagination early, not only from what Hal had read about him, but because Malachi Nasuno had spoken of him, referring to him as the first modern general. Cletus Graeme also had cited Hawkwood's campaigns a number of times in Cletus's multi-volumed work on strategy and tactics - that same Cletus Graeme who had been the great-grandfather of Donal Graeme of whom Ajela had spoken. Donal Graeme had ended up enforcing a peace on all the fourteen worlds. In Hal's mind, suddenly, a line led obviously from Donal to Cletus Graeme and back through the warrior elements of western history to Hawkwood.

Hawkwood had come out from the village of Sible Hedingham in the rural England of the early fourteenth century, had fought his way up through the beginnings of the Hundred Years War in France and ended as Captain General of Florence, Italy. He had died at last in his bed at a probable age of over eighty, after a life of frequent hand-to-hand armed combat. He had been called "the first of the modern generals" by others before Malachi; and he had introduced longbowmen from England into the Italian warfare of the fourteenth century with remarkable results.

Hal had been fascinated by him on first discovery. Not merely because of the clangor and color of Hawkwood's life, as seen from nearly a thousand years later, but because in the Englishman's lifetime, going from Sible Hedingham in his youth to Florence in his later years, he had effectively travelled from the society of the deep Middle Ages into the beginnings of the modern era. The flag that had been flying over Hal's terrace, and that Walter InTeacher had lowered to warn him, the flag of a hawk flying out of a wood, had been made by Hal himself with a device put of his imagination after a thorough search through the books in the library of the estate had failed to have any information on Hawkwood's coat of arms - on sudden impulse Hal spoke again to the Encyclopedia.

"What was the coat of arms borne by Sir John Hawkwood?"

There was a brief pause.

"Sir John Hawkwood's arms were: argent, on a chevron sable three escallops of the field."

The screen showed a shield with a silver background, crossed by a thick v-shaped black band, called a "chevron," point upwards in the middle of the ground, and with three silver cockle shells spaced out upon the black chevron.

Why the cockles? Hal wondered. The only connection he could think of to cockle shells was St. James of Compostela, in Spain. Could Hawkwood at the time have been in Compostela? Or might the cockles in the arms mean something else? He queried the Final Encyclopedia.

"The cockle shells are common to many coats of arms," answered the Encyclopedia, "I can furnish you with details if you like. They appear, for example, on some of the oldest arms, such as those of the Graemes, and on the arms borne by many of the septs of the Graeme family, such as the well known arms of Dundee and Dunbar. Do you wish details, a full report on cockles as a device on coats of arms during past centuries?"

"No," said Hal.

He sat back, thinking. Something in the deepest depths of his mind had been triggered by this discovery that the real Hawkwood lay in some manner behind the fictional characters of Doyle's Nigel Loring and Sabatini's Bellarion, something that continued backward to tie into this business of the cockle shells and Hawkwood. The cockle shells and Hawkwood somehow fitted together; they linked and evoked something. He could feel the mental chemistry of their interaction like a stirring in his unconscious, it was a sensation which he knew, it was the sort of deep excitement that came on just before he began to envision a poem. The chain of logic that ran from these things to whatever was now building in his creative unconscious was not one his conscious mind could see or follow, but experience had taught him the futility of trying. He felt its workings there, now, as someone might feel conflicting winds blowing upon him in the absolute darkness of night. It was a pressure, a fever, an imperative. Something about this search and discovery had touched on a thing that was infinitely more compelling, was much larger, than what he had sat down here with the expectation of discovering, as an ocean is larger than a grain of sand on one of its shores. It reached out to touch him like a call, like a trumpet note reaching out, reaching all the way through him to summon him to a thing more important than anything he had felt in all his sixteen years before.

The sensation was powerful. It was almost with relief that he found the lines of a poem beginning to stir in his head, forming out of the mists of his discovery, strange, archaic sounding lines… His fingers groped automatically for the keypad that was on the arm of his chair, not to summon the Encyclopedia back for another question or command but simply to resolve the poetic images forming inside him into words. Those words, as he pressed the keys, began to take visible shape, glowing like golden fire against the starscape before him.

À OUTRANCE

Within the ruined chapel, the full knight

Woke from the coffin of his last-night's bed;

And clashing mailed feet on the broken stones -

His fingers paused on the keys. A chill, damp wind seemed suddenly to blow clear through him. He shook off the momentary paralysis and wrote on…

Strode to the shattered lintel and looked out.

A fog lay holding all the empty land

A cloak of cloudy and uncertainness,

That hid the earth; in that enfoliate mist

Moved voices wandered from a dream of death.

It was a wind of Time itself, the thought came to him unexpectedly, that he felt now blowing through him, blowing through flesh and bones alike. It was the sound of that wind he heard and was now rendering into verse. He wrote…

A warhorse, cropping by the chapel wall,

Raised maul-head, dripping thistles on the stones;

And struck his hooves; and jingled all his gear.

"Peace . . ." said the Knight. "Be still. Today, we rest.

"The mist is hiding all the battlefield.

"The wind whips on the wave-packs of the sea.

"Our foe is bound by this no less than we.

"Rest," said the Knight. "We do not fight today."

The warhorse stamped again. And struck his hooves.

Ringing on cobbled dampness of the stones.

Crying - "Ride! Ride! Ride!" And the Knight mounted him,

Slowly. And rode him slowly out to war.

. . . The chime of the room phone catapulted him out of his thoughts. He had been sitting, he realized, for some time with the written poem before him, his thought ranging on journeys across great distances. He reached out reflexively to the control keys.

"Who is it?"

"It's Ajela." From behind the void and the glowing lines of his poem, her voice came clearly and warmly, bringing back with it all of the reality he had abandoned during his recent ranging. "It's lunch time - if you're interested."

"Oh. Of course," he said, touching the keypad. The lines of verse vanished, to be replaced by the image of her face, occulting the imaged stars.

"Well," she said, smiling at him, "did you have a useful session with the Encyclopedia?"

"Yes," he said. "Very much."

"And where would you like to eat?"

"Any place," he said - and hastily amended himself. "Any place quiet."

She laughed.

"The quietest place is probably right where you are now."

" - any quiet place except my room, then."

"All right. We'll go back to the dining room I took you to the first time. But I'll arrange for a table away from other people where no one will be sent to sit near us," she said. "Meet you at the entrance there in five minutes."

By the time he figured out the controls to move his room close to the dining room, and got to the dining room entrance, Ajela was already there and waiting for him. As he came down the short length of corridor that was now between his room's front door and the entrance to the dining room, he was aware suddenly that this was probably the last time he would see her before he left. The two days just past had done a good deal to shift her in his mind from the category of someone belonging to the Encyclopedia, and therefore beyond his understanding, into someone he knew - and for whom he felt.

The result was that his perceptions were now sharpened. As far back as he could remember, his tutors had trained him to observe; as he met her now, spoke to her, and was led by her to a table in one deserted corner of the room, he saw her as perhaps he should have seen her from the start.

It was as if his vision of her had focused. He noticed now how straight she stood and how she walked with something like an air of command - certainly with an air of firmness and decision that was almost alien in an Exotic - as she led the way to their table. She was dressed in green today, a light green tunic that came down to mid-thigh, hugging her body tightly, over an ankle-length skirt that was slit all the way up the sides, revealing tight trousers of a darker green with the parting of the slits at each stride.

The tunic's green was that of young spring grass. There was a straightness to her shoulders, seen against the distant pearl-gray of the light-wall at the far end of the dining room. Her bright blonde hair was gathered into a pony-tail by a polished wooden barrette that showed the grain of the wood. The pony-tail danced against the shoulders of her tunic as she strode, echoing in its movements the undulations of her skirt. She reached their table, sat down, and he took the float opposite her.

She asked him again about his morning with the Encyclopedia as they decided what to eat, and he answered briefly, not wanting to go into details of how what he had learned had struck so deep a chord of response within him. Watching her now, he saw in the faint narrowing of her eyes that she had noticed this self-restraint.

"I don't mean to pry," she said. "If you'd rather not talk about it - "

"No - no, it's not that," he answered quickly. "It's just that my mind's everywhere at once."

She flashed her sudden smile at him.

"No need to apologize," she said. "I was just mentioning it. As for the way you feel - the Encyclopedia affects a lot of scholars that way."

He shook his head, slowly.

"I'm no scholar," he answered.

"Don't be so sure," she said gently. "Well, have you thought about whether you still want to go ahead and leave, the way you planned, in just a few hours?"

He hesitated. He could not admit that he would prefer to stay, without seeming to invite her to argue for his staying. He understood himself, starkly and suddenly. His problem was a reluctance to tell her he must leave, that there was no choice for him but to leave. Caught between answers, neither of which he wanted to give, he was silent.

"You've got reasons to go. I understand that," she said, after a moment. She sat watching him. "Would you like to tell me about them? Would you like to talk about it, at all?"

He shook his head.

"I see," she said. Her voice had gentled. "Do you mind, anyway, my telling you Tam's side of it?"

"Of course not," he replied.

Their plates, with the food they had ordered, were just rising to the surface of the table. She looked down at hers for a moment, and then looked back up at him levelly.

"You've seen Tam," she said as they began to eat, and the gentleness in her voice gave way to a certainty that echoed the authority of her walk. "You see his age. One year, several years, might not seem so much to you; but he's old. He's very old. He has to think about what will happen to the Encyclopedia if there's no one to take charge of it after… he steps down as Director."

He was watching her eyes, fascinated, as she spoke. They were a bluish green that seemed to have depths without end and reflected the color of her clothing.

He said, after a second since she had paused as if waiting response from him, "Someone else would take over the Encyclopedia, wouldn't they?"

She shook her head.

"No one person. There's a Board of Directors who'll step in, and stay in. The Board was scheduled to take over after Mark Torre's death. Then Mark found Tam and changed that part of the plan. But now, if Tam dies without a successor, the Board's going to take over, and from then on the Encyclopedia will be run by committee."

"And that's something you don't want to happen?"

"Of course I don't!" Her voice tightened. "Tam's worked all his life to point the Encyclopedia toward what it really should do, rather than let it turn into a committee-run library! What would you think I'd want?"

Her eyes were now full green, as green as the rare tinge that can color the wood flames of an open camp fire. He waited a second more to let her hear the echo of her words in her ears before he answered.

"You should want whatever it is you want," he said, echoing what he had been taught and believed in. Her eyes met his for a second more, burningly, then dropped their gaze to her plate. When she spoke again, the volume of her voice had also dropped.

"I… you don't understand," she said slowly. "This is very hard for me - "

"But I do understand," he answered. "I told you, one of my tutors was an Exotic. Walter the InTeacher."

What she had meant, he knew from Walter's teachings, was that it was difficult for her to plead with him to stay at the Encyclopedia, much as she plainly wanted to. As an Exotic, she would have been conditioned from childhood never to try to influence other people. This, because of the Exotic belief that participation in the historical process, even in the smallest degree, destroyed the clear-sightedness of a separate and dispassionate observer; and the Exotics' main reason for existence was to chart the movements of history, separately and dispassionately. They dreamed only of an end to which those movements could lead. But she was, he thought, as she had more or less admitted already, a strange Exotic.

"Actually," he told her, "you argue better for my staying here when you don't argue, than you could if you used words."

He smiled, to invite her to smile back, and was relieved when she did. What he said had been said clumsily; but all the same, it was a truth she was too intelligent not to see. If she had argued, he would have had someone besides himself to marshal his own arguments against. This way, he was left to debate with his own desires; which, she might have guessed, could make an opponent far harder for him to conquer than she was.

But his conscience sank its teeth into him, now. He was, he knew, leading her on to hope - which was an unfair thing to do. He must not give in and stay here. But, because she was an Exotic and because he knew what that meant as far as her beliefs were concerned, he could think of no way to explain this to her that would not either wound or baffle her. He did not, he thought almost desperately, know enough about her - enough about her as the unique individual she was - to talk to her. And there was no time to learn that much about her.

"You're from - where? Mara? Kultis?" he asked, striking out at random. "How did you happen to end up here?"

She smiled, unexpectedly.

"Oh, I was a freak," she said.

"A freak?" Privately he had sometimes called himself that. But he could not imagine applying it to someone like her.

"Well, say I was one of the freaks, then," she answered. "We called ourselves that. Did you ever hear of a Maran Exotic called Padma?"

"Padma…"He frowned.

The name had a strange echo of familiarity, as if he had indeed heard Walter or one of his other tutors mention it, but nothing more. His memory, like the rest of him, had been trained to a fine point. If he had been told of such a man, he should be able to remember it. But nowhere, searching his memory now, could he find any clear reference to someone called Padma.

"He's very old now," she said. "But he's been an Outbond, from either Mara or Kultis, at one time or another, to every important culture on the fourteen worlds. He goes clear back to the time of Donal Graeme. In fact - that's why I'm here."

"He's that old?" Hal stared at her. "He must be older than Tam."

She sobered, suddenly. The smile left her face and went out of her voice as well.

"No. He's younger - but just by a few years." She shook her head. "Even when he was a very young man, he had an ageless look, they say. And he was brilliant, even then - even among his own generation on the Exotics. But you're almost right. When I got here, I found out even Tam had thought Padma was older than he was. But it's not true. There's been no one Tam's age; and no one like him - ever. Even Padma."

He looked at her half-skeptically.

"There are fourteen worlds," he said.

"I know," she said. "But the Final Encyclopedia's got no record of anyone else much more than a hundred and eighteen years old just now. Tam's a hundred and twenty-four. It's his will that keeps him going."

He could hear in her voice an appeal to him to understand Tam. He wanted to tell her that he would try, but once more he did not trust himself to put the assurance into words he could trust her to believe.

"But you were telling me how you got here," he said, instead. "You were saying you were one of the freaks. What did you mean? And what's Padma got to do with it?"

"It was his conscience created us - me, and the others - " she said. "It all goes back long ago to something that happened between him and Donal Graeme, back when Donal was alive and Padma was still young. Later, what passed between them brought Padma to feel that he'd been too young and sure of himself, to notice something important - that Donal had something Padma should have been aware of and made use of; something critical, he said, to the search we've been engaged in on the Exotics for three centuries now. Those are Padma's own words, to an Assembly of both the Exotic worlds forty years ago. Padma came finally to think that Donal might have been a prototype of the very thing we'd been searching for, the evolved form of human being we've always believed the race will finally produce."

He frowned at her, reaching out to understand. Donal he knew of through general history and the tales of Malachi. But he had never been too impressed with Donal, in spite of Donal's triumphs. Ian and Kensie, Donal's uncles; and Eachan Khan, Donal's grim, war-crippled father, had caught more at his imagination, among the Graemes of Foralie on the Dorsai. But the uneasy feeling that he should recognize the name continued to nag at him on a low level of consciousness.

"Padma," Ajela was going on, "felt we Exotics had to look for what he might have missed seeing in Donal; and because Padma was enormously respected - if you had an Exotic teacher, you know what the word respected means on Mara and Kultis - and because he suggested a way that had never been tried, it was agreed he could make an experiment. I - and some others like me - were the elements of the experiment. He chose fifty of the brightest Exotic children he could find and arranged to have us brought up under special conditions."

Hal frowned again at her.

"Special conditions?"

"Padma's theory was that something in our own Exotic society was inhibiting the kind of personal development that had made someone like Donal Graeme possible. Whatever else was true about him, no one could deny Donal had abilities no Exotic had ever achieved. That pointed to a blindness somewhere in our picture of ourselves, Padma said."

She was carried away now on the flood of what she was telling him. Her eyes were blue-green and depthless once more.

"So," she went on, "he got a general agreement to let him experiment with the fifty of us - Padma's Children, they called us, then - and he saw to it we were exposed, from as soon as we were able to understand, not only to the elements of our own culture, but to those in the Dorsai and the Friendly cultures which our Exotic thinking had always automatically rejected. You know how our family structure on Mara and Kultis is much looser than on the Dorsai or the Friendlies. As children, we treat all adults almost equally as parents or near relatives. No one forced the fifty of us in any particular direction, but we were given more freedom to bond emotionally to individuals, to indulge in romantic, rather than logical thinking. You see - a romantic attitude was the one common element permitted Dorsai and Friendly children, which we on the Exotics had always been steered away from."

He sat, studying her as she talked. He did not yet see where her words were headed, but he could feel strongly across the short physical distance separating them that what she was saying was not only something of intense importance to her, but something that it was difficult for her to say to him. He nodded now, to encourage her to go on; and she did.

"To make the story short," she said, "we were set free to fall in love with things we ordinarily would've been told were unproductive subjects for such attention; and in my case what I fell in love with, when I was barely old enough to learn about it, was the story of Tam Olyn - the brilliant, grim, interstellar newsman who tried and almost succeeded in a personal vendetta to destroy the Friendly culture, only to change his mind suddenly and completely, to come back to Earth and take on all the responsibility of the Final Encyclopedia, where he'd been the only person except Mark Torre to hear the voices at the Center point."

Her face was animated now. The feeling in her reached and caught up Hal as music might have caught him up.

"This man, who still controls the Final Encyclopedia," she went on animatedly, "holding it in trust all these years for the race, and refusing to let any other person or power control it. By the time I was nine I knew I had to come here; and by the time I was eleven, they let me come - on Tam's personal responsibility."

She smiled suddenly.

"It seemed," she said, "Tam was intrigued by someone only my age who could be so set on getting here; and I found out later, partly he hoped I might hear the voices, as you and he did. But I didn't."

She stopped speaking, suddenly, with her last three words. The smile went. She had hardly touched the small salad she had ordered; but Hal recognized with surprise that his own plate was utterly empty - and yet he could not remember eating as he listened to her.

"So it's because of Tam you're still here?" he said, finally, when it seemed she would not go on. She had started to poke at her salad, but when he spoke she put her fork down and looked levelly across the table at him.

"I came because of him, yes," she said. "But since then I've come to see what he sees in the Encyclopedia - what you should see in it. Now, even if there weren't any Tam Olyn, I'd still be here."

She glanced down at her salad and pushed the transparent bowl that held it away from her. Then she looked back at him, again.

"It's the hope of the race," she said to him. "Their one hope. I don't believe any longer that the answer can lie with our Exotics, or anyone else. It's here - here! No place else. And only Tam's been able to keep it alive. He needs you."

The tone of her voice on her last words tore at him. He looked at her and knew finally that he could not give her a flat no, not here, not now. He took a deep, unhappy breath.

"Let me think about it - a little longer," he said. Suddenly, he felt a desperate need to get away from her before he made her some promise that was neither true nor possible to keep. He pushed his float back from the table, still unable to keep his eyes off her face. He would tell her later, he told himself, call her from his room, and tell her that eventually he would be back. Even with their phone screens on, there would be a psychic distance between them that would lessen the terrible power of persuasion he felt coming at him from her now, and make it possible for him to reassure her he would someday return.

"I'll go back to my room and think about it, now," he said.

"All right," she said without moving. "But remember, you heard the voices. You have to understand; because there's only the three of us who do. You, Tam and I. Remember what you risk if you leave, now. If you go, and while you're gone Tam reaches the point where he can't go on being Director any longer, by the time you come back the Board will be in charge; and they won't want to give up control. If you go now, you may lose your chance here, forever!"

He nodded and stood up. Slowly, she stood up on the other side of the table and together, not saying anything more to each other, they went out of the dining room. At its entrance, Ajela touched a control pad set in the wall, and the same short corridor formed with a door at the end that would be the entrance to his own quarters.

"Thank you," he said, hardly looking at her. "I'll call you - as soon as I've got something to tell you."

After a moment more he met her eyes with his own. Her naked gaze seemed to go through him effortlessly.

"I'll wait for you to call," she said.

He went down the corridor, still feeling her standing watching him from behind, as he had felt the piercing strength of her gaze. Not until the door of his room closed behind him did he feel free of her. He dropped into a float opposite his bed.

There was an empty loneliness and a longing in him. What he needed desperately, he told himself, was some point outside the situation that now held him, where he could stand and look at it - and at her expectations and Tam's. Of course, she would see no sense in his going. From her standpoint, the Encyclopedia was so much beyond Coby in what it had to offer him that any comparison of the two was ridiculous. All Coby had to offer was someplace to hide.

The Encyclopedia offered him not only that, but the shield of the force panels, the protection of those who belonged to the single institution that the Others probably would never be able to control, and quite possibly would have no interest in controlling. In fact, as long as he stayed and worked with the Final Encyclopedia, here, what sort of threat did he pose to the Others? It would be only out in their territory, on the younger worlds, that he posed a possible threat to them. Even if they discovered him here, it might well be that they would simply decide to leave him alone.

Meanwhile, there was all that the Encyclopedia had to offer him. Walter the InTeacher had been fond of saying that the pursuit of knowledge was the greatest adventure ever discovered by the human race. The degree to which Ajela had touched Hal just now had almost swept him away beyond the power of any personal choice. To be able to work with the Encyclopedia as he had done for a short while was like having the Universe handed to him for a plaything. It was more than that -

It was, thought Hal suddenly, like being able to play God.

On Coby he would be a stranger among strangers - and probably among strangers who were the sweepings of the fourteen worlds, for who would go and work in the mines of Coby if he could be someplace else? Here, he already knew Ajela… and Tam.

And her last words had struck him forcefully. She was right in the fact that if he went now and Tam died or stopped being Director, Hal's own chances at that post with the Encyclopedia could be lost forever. His mind shied from the responsibility of the prospect. But it was a great and almost unheard-of thing, to be someone who could be considered as a successor to the Director of the Encyclopedia. Tam seemed a crusty sort of individual - age might have something to do with that, or it might be his natural pattern - but Ajela obviously found him to be someone she could love; and, in fact, Hal had found himself warming to the old man, also, even during their brief meeting.

It might also be his resemblance to Obadiah. Perhaps Hal was deliberately making himself see Obadiah in the Director, and this was giving him a greater feeling of closeness to Tam than the situation actually justified. But it really did not matter whether Tam and he were close or not. The overwhelmingly important thing was the Encyclopedia itself and that it have a continuity of Directors; and if Hal was indeed a serious possibility to take control from Tam's hands eventually, then…

Hal's mind drifted into a dark, but comfortable dream of the Encyclopedia, as it might be after he had been here some years and was finally in control as Director. Ajela could probably be brought to agree to stay on with him, in something like the relationship that she had with Tam - of course she could, for the Encyclopedia's sake, if nothing else. And, if they should really agree well together…

He looked at the chronometer on his wrist. The ring that was set to local time showed a little less than an hour and a half before his ship was scheduled to lift from its docking, just under the metal and force-panel skin of the Encyclopedia. His mind still caught in his dark dream, he got up and went across the room, to find the travel bag with which he had come to the Encyclopedia. He was holding it in his hands before he realized what he was doing.

He laughed.

He was on his way to Coby.

The recognition came like a dull, but expected, shock. Abruptly, then, he realized; it was not the dead hands of Walter, Malachi and Obadiah reaching out to control him against his will. It was not even the calculation of his training that had implemented its decision by some sort of conditioned lever upon his will. It was simply that he, for reasons he could not clearly enunciate, knew that he had to go; and, far from weakening that certainty, what he had heard from Ajela and experienced in his earlier work with the Encyclopedia that morning had confirmed it.

Heavily, he began to do what little gathering of papers and possessions was necessary. He had been deluding not only Ajela, but himself, by pretending that the question of his staying was still open.

He had not been able to face Ajela with that truth over the lunch table. She would not have pressed him for reasons, he knew, being an Exotic; but she would have - and still did - deserve some. Only, he would not be able to give her any. So he would simply sneak out of the Encyclopedia, after all, as he had, in effect, sneaked in; and he would send both her and Tam a message afterwards, once he was irrevocably on his way among the stars.

He finished up, coded the number of his exit port into the room control, and stepped out the dilated entrance into a short corridor that took him down and through another entrance, past another screen from which an elderly woman perfunctorily scanned his papers, and into the port chamber.

There was a forty minute wait before he could board the ship. But five minutes later he was in his compartment, and forty minutes after that, the ship sealed and lifted. An annunciator woke over his head.

"First phase shift in two hours," it said. "First phase shift in two hours. There will be a meal service immediately after the shift. All portside compartments, first seating; all starboardside compartments, second seating."

He was in a portside compartment; but he was not hungry - although in two hours, knowing himself, he would probably be starving, as usual. He sat down on that one of the two fixed seats in the compartment that was below the bed folded up against the bulkhead.

Once they had phase-shifted, there would be no direct communication possible with the Encyclopedia. At once, they would be light-years distant; and a message physically carried by a ship inbound to Earth would be the quickest way of getting in touch. He did not feel up to talking face to face with Ajela, in any case; but something in him rebelled at waiting to tell her until he was well away. She would be looking at the time and thinking that he had decided against going, and was working with the Encyclopedia - and she would hear from him about dinner time.

He roused himself, stepped across to the tiny desk against the wall of his compartment opposite the bed, sat down on the other seat, and coded a call to the ship's communications center. The screen lit up with a heavy man in ship's whites.

"I'd like to send a message back to the Encyclopedia," he said.

"Certainly. Want the message privacy coded? And written of spoken?"

"Spoken," he said. "Never mind the privacy code. It's to Ajela, Special Assistant to the Director. 'Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go.' "

His own voice repeated itself back at him from the screen.

"Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go."

"That's all?" said the shipman.

"Yes. Sign it - my name's Hal Mayne - " he checked himself. "Wait, add on… I'll see you both again, as soon as I can.' "

"Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go. I'll see you both again, as soon as I can. Hal Mayne." The screen gave his words back to him once more.

"All right? Or did you want that last sentence as a p.s.?" asked the shipman.

"No, that's fine. Thank you."

Hal broke the connection and got up from the seat. He pulled the bed down into position and stretched out on it. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling and bulkheads of his compartment, which showed the same flat brown color everywhere he looked. A faint vibration through the fabric of the ship around them was the only sign that they were under way; it would be the only sensation of movement to be felt - and not even that during phase shift - until they went into docking mode in New Earth orbit.

There had never been any possible decision except that he should go on to Coby. But it had taken the Encyclopedia to help him see the inevitability of it; and even then the recognition had come in through the back door of his mind. It had been the poem that had told him, its images speaking from his unconscious, as surely as the images of Walter, Malachi and Obadiah had spoken from it on his first night in the great sphere. He was the knight and was summoned in one direction only.

The poem had been no more than a codification of that oceanic feeling he had touched when he worked with the Encyclopedia. Blindly there, he had felt something, some great effort, that rang its particular call trumpet-like, reading back through him. For a little while, unknowing, he had touched what could be - and it was so large in promise that it dwarfed all other things. But the way to it did not lie through a dusty scholar's cell, or even by way of Tam's desk in the Encyclopedia. At least, not yet. There were things within him that would have to grow to match in size what he had felt in the Encyclopedia; and some deep-buried instinct had come to tell him clearly that these would not grow in a sterile, protected environment. It was out among the materials of which the race was made that he must find the particular strength he would need to use the mighty lever that was the Encyclopedia. And, once he had found it, he would be back - whether he was wanted or not.

The faint vibration of the ship thrummed all through him as he lay. He felt caught, like someone apart, suspended between all worlds, waiting.