The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fifty-nine

They went on together, passing from the light of day into the relative obscurity of the space lying beyond the double doors, which closed behind them.

Within, warmly lit by an artificial illumination that in here was more than sufficient, but which had been unable to compete with the cloudy brightness of the late winter afternoon beyond the leaded windows, was a hexagonal room with a slightly domed ceiling, under which nine Exotics were seated about a large, round table. Their robes warmed the interior space with rich earth-colors in the soft light. Two floats at the table sat empty; and it was to these that Amid brought Hal and himself.

Sitting down, Hal looked about at those there, four of whom he recognized. There were the old features of Padma, the small, dark ones of Nonne, the dry ones of Alhanon and the friendly expression of Chavis - all of those who had talked to him on his last visit here, sitting with him and Amid on a balcony of Amid's home. The others he saw were strangers to him; strangers with quiet, Exotic faces having little to make them stick in the mind at first glance.

"Our two worlds are at your disposal now, Hal Mayne," said the age-hoarsened voice of Padma; and Hal looked over at the very old man. "Or has Amid already told you?"

"Yes," said Hal, "I asked him, on the way here."

Nonne started to say something, then stopped, looking at Padma.

"I won't forget," said Padma, looking briefly at her. "Hal, we feel you ought to understand one thing about our future cooperation with you. We don't sign contracts like the Dorsai, but three hundred years of keeping our word speaks for itself."

"It does," said Hal. "Of course."

"Therefore," Padma put his hands flat on the smooth, dark surface of the table before him as if he would summon it to confirm his words, "you have to understand that we've chosen to go your way in this struggle, simply because there was no other way we could find to go. What's ironical is that the very calculations we'd been using to find out if you ought to be followed, now unmistakably show that you should be - primarily because of the effect of our own decision on the situation."

The hoarseness in his voice had been getting worse as he talked. He stopped speaking and tapped the tabletop before him with a wrinkled forefinger. A glass of clear liquid rose into view; and he drank from it, then continued.

"It's only right to tell you that there was a great feeling of reservation in many of us about following you," he said, " - not in me, personally, but in many of us - and that reservation was a reasonable one. But you should know us well enough to trust us, now that we've voted. Effectively, those reservations don't exist any longer. Irrevocably and unchangingly, we're now committed to follow wherever you lead, whatever the cost to us."

"Thank you," said Hal. "I know what that voting has to have meant to you all. I appreciate what you've done."

He leaned forward a little over the table, becoming suddenly conscious of how his greater height and width of shoulders made him seem to loom over the rest of them.

"As I said out there, what I'll probably have to ask your two worlds to give me," he said to them all, "to put it simply, is everything you have - "

"One more moment, if you don't mind," Padma broke in.

Hal stopped speaking. He turned back to Padma.

"We know something of what you've got to tell us," Padma said. "But first, you ought to let us give you some information we can share with you now; we couldn't tell you, earlier, before we were committed to working with you."

There was a small, tight silence about the table.

"All right," said Hal. "Go on. I'm listening."

"As I just said, what we have is yours, now," said Padma. "That includes some things you may know we have, but which are possibly a great deal more effective than you might have guessed."

His old, dry-throated voice failed him again. He reached for the filled glass on the table before him and sipped once more from its contents. Putting the glass down, he went on more clearly.

"I'm talking," he said, "of our ability to gather information - and our techniques for evaluating it. I think you'll be interested to hear, now, what we've concluded about both you and Bleys Ahrens."

"You're right." Hal stared hard into the old eyes.

"The result," Padma went on with no change in his tone, "of that gathering and evaluating gave us a pattern on each of you that could help you now to define the shape of the coming conflict."

He paused.

"The pattern on Bleys shows him aware of his strength and determined to use it in economical fashion - in other words, in such a way that he and the Others can't lose, since they'll simply operate by maintaining their present advantage and increasing it when they can, until there's no opposition to them left. This is a sort of dealing from strength that seems particularly congenial to Bleys' temperament. He seems to believe he and his people are fated to win; and, far from glorying in it, he seems to find a sad, almost melancholy pleasure in the inevitability of this that suits his own view of himself and reality. Apparently, he regards himself as being so isolated in the universe that nothing that happens in it can either much raise or lower his spirits."

"Yes," murmured Hal.

"This isolation of his bears an interesting resemblance to your own isolate character," said Padma, gazing at Hal. "In many ways, in fact, he's remarkably like you."

Hal said nothing.

"In fact," Padma went on, "to a large extent he's justified in his expectations. The ongoing factors of history - the forces that continue from generation to generation, sometimes building, sometimes waning - now seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of the Others. Our own discipline of ontogenetics, which we evolved to help us solve such problems as this, instead simply produces more and more proofs that Bleys is right in what he believes."

Hal nodded, slowly; and Padma took a moment to drink once more.

"If Bleys is the epitome of all that is orthodox aiming to win and moving to that end," Padma went on, "you, who should in any sane universe be the champion of what has been tried and established, are just the opposite. You are unorthodoxy personified. We have no real data on you before the time you were picked up as a mystery infant from a derelict ship in Earth orbit. You show no hard reason why you should emerge as the leader of an effort to turn back something like Bleys and the Others; but somehow all those opposed to Bleys have enlisted to follow you - even those of us on our two worlds, who've striven to think coolly and sensibly for three hundred years."

He paused and drew a deep breath.

"We," he said, "of all people, don't believe in mysteries. Therefore, we've had to conclude that there must be some mechanism at work here in your favor that we can't see and don't understand. All we can do is hope that it's equally invisible to, and equally beyond the understanding of, Bleys Ahrens."

"Assuming you're right," said Hal, "I'll join you in that hope."

"Which brings us to your pattern - what we know of it," said Padma. "What we have, in fact, concluded from the information we've processed - and we assume that someone like Bleys must have also come to the same conclusions - is that the only course open to you is to use the Dorsai as an expeditionary force against whatever military forces the Others may be able to gather and equip."

He paused and looked at Hal.

"Go on," said Hal, levelly. "What you've said so far's only an obvious conclusion in the light of the present situation. It doesn't call for any special access to information, or a Bleys-like mind, to read that as a possibility."

"Perhaps not," said Padma. "However, it's equally obvious then that, either way, such a use on your part can't end in anything but failure. On the one hand, if you hold back your Dorsai until the forces that the Others are capable of gathering are ready to move, then not even the Dorsai will be able to handle that much opposition. Am I right?"

"Perhaps," said Hal.

"On the other hand," Padma went on, "if you spend this irreplaceable pool of trained military personnel in raids to destroy the Others' forces while those forces are forming and arming, the gradual attrition of even such experienced fighters as the Dorsai in such encounters will eventually reduce their numbers to the point where there won't be enough of them left to pose any real opposition to the Others' strength. Isn't that also an inescapable conclusion?"

"It's a conclusion, certainly," Hal answered.

"How, then," said Padma, "can you hope to win?"

Hal smiled - and it was not until he saw the faint but unmistakable changes of expression on the other faces around the table that he realized how that smile must appear to them.

"I can hope to win," he said slowly and clearly, "because I will not lose. I know those words mean nothing to you now. But if it was possible for you to understand what I mean by that, there'd be no war facing us; and the threat posed against us by the existence of the Others would've already been solved."

Padma frowned.

"That's no answer," he said.

"Then let me offer you this one," said Hal. "The forces of history are only the internal struggles of a human race that's determined, above all, to survive. That much you ought to be able to understand yourselves, from your own work and studying to understand what is humanity. Apply that understanding equally to the large number of forces that seem to operate in favor of the Others and to the relatively small number that seem to operate in the favor of the survival of us - we who oppose them - and you'll see which forces must wax and which must wane if survival for the race as a whole is to be achieved."

He stopped, and his words echoed in his own ears. I'm talking like an Exotic myself, he thought.

"If what you're saying is the truth," Nonne broke out as if she could not hold herself silent any longer, "then the situation ought to cure itself. We don't need you."

He turned his smile on her.

"But I'm one of those forces of history I mentioned," he said, " - as Bleys is. We're effects, not causes, of the historical situation. If you got rid of either one of us you'd simply have a slightly different aspect of the same problem with someone else in replacement position. The truth is you can't get rid of what each of us represents, any more than you can get rid of any of the other forces at work. All you can do is choose your side; and I thought I'd just pointed out to you that you've already done that?"

"Hal," said Amid softly at his side, "that was an unnecessary, if not somewhat discourteous, question."

Hal sobered, turning to the small man.

"Of course. You're right. I withdraw it - and apologize," he said to Nonne. He looked at Padma. "What else have you got to tell me from this body of information you've gathered and evaluated?"

"We've got detailed data from all the sites on the worlds where the Others are gathering and training their soldiers," said Padma, "and from all the areas where work is going on to produce the spaceships and materiel to equip them. Hopefully, this will be sufficient for your needs, although of course there's information we can't get - "

"It's not that so much," said Hal, almost unthinkingly, "as that there's other information I have to gather for myself."

"I don't understand," said Padma.

Around the table they were regarding him oddly.

"I'm afraid," said Hal slowly, "I'd have trouble explaining it to your satisfaction. Basically, it's just that I'll have to see these places and the people working in them for myself. I'll be looking for things your people could never give me. You'll just have to take my word for it, that it's necessary I go and see for myself."

The concept of the Final Encyclopedia had been forming like a palpable mass in his mind as he spoke and the sense of the immeasurably vast, inchoate problem with which he had been wrestling these last years crouched like a living thing before him. There was no way of explaining to Exotics that the battleground he now envisioned encroached literally upon that territory which encompassed the human soul.

"You'll simply have to trust me," he repeated, "when I say it's necessary."

"Well," said Padma heavily, "if you must… we still have courier ships making the trips back and forth between these two worlds of ours and our embassies on the other worlds. We can supply you with a ship."

Hal breathed out evenly and lowered his gaze to the polished pool of darkness that was the tabletop.

"A ship won't be necessary," he heard himself say, as if from some distance. "The Dorsai've already given me one - and a driver."

He continued to stare into the darkness of the tabletop for a moment longer, then slowly raised his eyes and looked back once more at Amid. He smiled again, but this time the smile faded quickly.

"It seems that trip of mine to Old Earth is going to have to wait a little longer, after all," he said.

His perception was correct. Nearly four months later, standard time, he had still not stepped within the orbit of Earth; and he was running for his life through back alleys of Novenoe, a city on Freiland.

The months of visiting most of the Younger Worlds, slipping in with his Dorsai courier ship and going secretly to make first-hand observations at the factories and installations in which the Others were putting together the soldiers and material they would use in their war effort, had worn him thin - almost as thin as he had been on Harmony when the Militia had caught him.

But this was a different thinness. With his admission at last to Amanda of his first identity as Donal Graeme - that identity that had been withheld from him deliberately by his Donal-self until he should pass through the learning process of growing up as Hal Mayne - he had finally come very close to replicating Donal's old physical abilities and strengths, though he still necessarily fell short of the strength and skill of an adult Dorsai who had maintained his training daily since birth. Still, what he had accomplished flew in the face of all physiological experience among the Dorsai. That after twenty-odd years of living untrained by Dorsai standards (even giving him credit for what Malachi Nasuno had taught him up into his sixteenth year) it was simply beyond reason that in only a few months he had been able to achieve reflexes and responses that came at all close to being as effective as Simon Graeme's, for example.

Simon himself had commented on it. It had been impossible to hide the development in Hal from the other man, under the conditions of the close-knit existence they shared aboard the courier vessel with Amid. The old Exotic had been riding with them as a necessary living passport for Hal to the Exotic embassies from which they drew information and assistance. That development was, as Simon hinted, at once impossible and an obvious fact, and Simon had compared the achievement with that of some of the martial artists down through history who had become legendary in their own times. Beyond that comment, the current titular head of the Graeme family seemed content to leave the matter for later explanation. Hal had no choice but to do the same; although to him, too, it was a cause for wonder and a puzzle not as easy to accept as it seemed to be for Simon.

His own temporary conclusion was that it could be some sort of psychic force at work upon him in response to Donal's emergent identity; a psychic force that could shape even bone and muscle, if necessary. Cletus Grahame, nearly two hundred years before, had been supposed to have rebuilt a damaged knee of his by some such means. At the same time, something in Hal strongly insisted that there was more to it than the simple term "psychic force" implied; and the unknown element nagged at him.

But there had been no time to ponder this currently; and there was certainly none at this present moment. Running easily but steadily, like a hunger-gaunted wolf dodging through the dark and odiferous passages that hardly deserved the names of streets and alleys in this quarter of ruined buildings, Hal felt the intuition that had been Donal's numbering and placing in position about him the pursuers that were now closing in.

He had gotten inside the spaceship yards he had gone to Freiland to see; and identified the vessels being built there as military transports. But after these many months the forces controlled by the Others on all their worlds were alerted and on watch for him; and he had been both identified and pursued by the so-called "executive" arm of the Novenoe police. His only hope of escape from them lay in the courier ship waiting for him in the yard of a decayed warehouse. He was leading his pursuers toward it now, simply because he had no other choice. The invisible calculations of intuitive logic that had woken in him from the Donal part of himself told him there was no way he could reach the vessel before those hunting him would close in on him.

His estimate was that there were between thirty and forty of the "executives" - and they would know this part of Novenoe better than he did.

He ran on - steadily, still at three-quarter speed, saving his strength for the moment in which he would need it. The last leg of his journey led over broken, but still high, security fences; and across forgotten yards full of abandoned equipment rusting in the darkness. As, still running, he reached the last fence but two, flung up a hand to catch its top edge and vaulted over, he heard ahead of him the small, impatient sounds of at least two police in wait for him in the darkness of the littered yard.

He crouched down and went like a ghost, feeling his way ahead and around the debris, large and small, that littered his way. His aim was to bypass those in wait for him if he could; but one of them - evidently cramped and weary with waiting - rose and blundered directly into his way as Hal tried to pass.

Hal felt the heat of the body approaching and both smelled and heard the other's breath. There was no time to go around, so he rose from the ground and struck out, swiftly.

The "executive" dropped, but grunted as he fell; and immediately a thin, rapier-like guide-beam of visible light, of the sort used to direct the night-firing of a power weapon, began playing about the yard like a child's toy searchlight. Hal snapped a shot with the silent, but low-powered, void pistol that was the only weapon he carried, at the source-point of the light and the beam vanished. But the damage was done. The darkness now would be alive with the electronic screaming of alarms and communications, pinpointing his position to his pursuers.

He went to full speed. Even then, clearing the fence before him into the yard next to the one where the courier ship waited, his senses of hearing and smell counted five of those who sought him, on hand to block his way. They were too many to slip by. He could hear each now, plainly, while they would not be able to hear him; but they would have heat-sensing equipment and with it could see him as a glow amidst the scattered junk filling the yard; a glow imprecise in outline and occulted by the shapes of the junked vehicles and trash filling the yard, establishing his general position, nonetheless.

The choice was no choice. If he wanted to reach the ship, there was no way to do it unobserved. He must fight his way through those who were here to take him. He dropped to the gritty earth underfoot to catch his breath for a second.

It needed little enough thought to see how he had to do it. His position was hardly different from that of a man in a river, and about to be swept over a waterfall, who calls to a friend safe on the bank to jump in and help him. But the hard facts of the matter were, he knew he was more important to the large work yet to be done than was Simon Graeme. Nor would Simon - or any other Dorsai - thank him for not calling for help when it was needed, under such circumstances.

Savagely, he pressed the button at his waist that would send out a single gravity pulse to the ship's sensors and summon Simon to his aid.

Having called, he gave himself wholly over to survival, dropping flat in the dirt of the yard and squirming his way forward toward the further fence. He could hear the five men closing in upon him; and knew that they would shortly be reinforced. He stopped, suddenly, finding himself boxed. To move in any direction from the ruins of a tractor behind which he was presently sheltering was to put himself into the open field of fire from one of the "executives." Now, he must make gaps in their circle about him, if he wanted to pass through.

He did not need a visible guide-beam for the weapon he carried. He could aim accurately by ear; and the silentness of the void pistol in use would help to hide the point of origin of its killing pulse. He shot one man, and shifted quickly into the gap this made, only to find himself boxed again. And, so it began…

It was an ugly little battle, fought in the dark, at point-blank range, with his opponents' numbers being reinforced faster than his accurate fire could clear them out of his way. A bitterness stirred inside him; the bitterness of someone who has had to fight for his life for too many years, on too many occasions, and who is weary of the unceasing attacks that give him no rest. Crouching and moving through the dark, he felt for the first time in his experience the burden he carried - not the physical but the emotional weight of his three lifetimes.

He had fought his way now for half the remaining distance between him and the last fence. He was less than five or six meters from it; and the number of his enemies in the yard had grown to more than fifteen. He stopped in passing over the body of one of those he had just taken out of the action and picked up the heavy shape of the power rifle the man had been using. And at that moment, Simon came over the wall from the ship.

Hal heard him come; and knew who he was. The "executives," hearing nothing, suspecting nothing, were caught by void pistol fire from a new angle and assumed that Hal had reached the fence. They changed direction to move in on the position Simon now held.

Hal gave them a slow count of five. Then, standing up in the darkness and holstering his nearly depleted void pistol, he triggered the power rifle he had picked up onto continuous fire; and swept it like a hose of destruction across the front of those making the sounds of movement through the yard.

There was sudden, appalled inactivity among the weapons of those still left unhurt among the attackers. In that moment, Hal threw the power rifle from him, far across the yard, to where the clatter of its fall would draw any fire well away from Simon and himself - and ran for Simon's position, hurdling the barely-seen obstacles in his path.

They were suddenly together, two patches of darker dark in the gloom.

"Go!" grunted Simon.

Hal went up and over the fence, without pausing, checked on the far side, and swung about, void pistol held high over the fence to cover Simon as the other followed, landing beside him. They ran together for the courier ship. The outer airlock door yawned before them, with Amid ducking hastily back out of their way, then closed behind them. Simon hurled himself at the controls; and the courier ship bucked explosively into motion - upward into the night sky.

There were police craft holding station overhead, in positions up to four kilometers of altitude. But barely above the rooftops, Simon went into phase shift; and suddenly the silence of orbital space was around them. Hal, who had been standing, holding to the back of the co-pilot's seat against the savage acceleration off the ground, let go and sagged limply backward into one of the backup seats of the control compartment.

He felt a touch on his elbow, turned his head to look into the face of Amid, standing beside him.

"You need sleep," said Amid.

Hal glanced again at Simon, but Simon had already finished his plot for a second shift, and the stars jumped as they watched, to a new configuration in the screens about them. Ignoring them, Simon reached to the plotting board for the next shift and Hal stood up.

"Yes…" he said.

He let Amid lead him back into his own compartment and stretched out in the bunk, unprotestingly letting Amid pull off his boots and his heavy outer jacket. Exhaustion was like a deep aching, all through his body and mind. He lay, staring at the gray metal of the compartment ceiling, a meter and a half above his bunk; and Amid's head moved into his field of vision, between him and it, looking down.

"Let me help you sleep," said Amid; and his eyes seemed to begin to grow enormously as Hal watched.

"No." Hal shook his head, fractionally. It was a great effort even to speak. "You can't. I have to do it for myself. But I will. Just leave me."

Amid went, turning out the compartment lighting, closing the door behind him. Hal stared up into sudden lightlessness; feeling again the weight of his lifetimes, which had come upon him in the darkness of the yard. He turned his mind like a hand holding up the stone of consciousness, letting that stone fall from the grasp that held it, fall into darkness… and fall… and fall… and fall…

It took them five days, ship's-time, to make Earth orbit. Most of that time Hal slept and thought. The other two left him alone. When they parked at last in Earth orbit, Hal called up a jitney to take him down to the planet's surface.

"And Amid and me?" asked Simon. "What do you want us to do? Wait here?"

"No. Go and wait for me at the Final Encyclopedia," answered Hal. "I'll be a day - at most two. No more."