The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Sixty

Riding the upcurrent above the brown granite slope of the mountainside in the late afternoon, high above the grounds of the Mayne Estate, the golden eagle turned his head sharply to focus his telescopic vision on the flat area surrounding the pool behind the building. There had been movement there - animal movement different from the movement of grass and twigs in the wind - where there had been no movement for a very long time.

His eyes fastened on a dark-clad, upright man-shape, tiny with the distance between them. There was no profit to be found in this, then, for a knight of the air like himself. The eagle cried harshly his disappointment and wheeled off, away from the estate and the mountainside, out over the thick green of the upland conifer forest.

Hal watched him go, standing on the far edge of the terrace overlooking the lake. A little, cold breeze rippled the gray surface of the water, and, above him, in the declining afternoon light, the blue of the sky was the blue of ice. Here, in this northern temperate zone of Old Earth, summer still held to the lowlands; but up in the mountains the first cutting blasts of winter's horn could be faintly heard. The cold, moving air chilled the exposed skin surfaces of his body and out of old days and memories came a piece of a poem to fit itself to the moment…

O what can ail thee, knight at arms

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing…

It was the first verse of the original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci - "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" - a poem by John Keats about a mortal ensorcelled by a fairy, but without the limiting term to that ensorcelment found in its poetic ancestor - True Thomas. The older poem had been written by Thomas of Erceldoune back in the thirteenth century, from even older versions of the legend passed down by word of mouth.

For that matter, he thought, the coming of the technological age five hundred years ago had brought the old tale to a newer version still; the concept of the Iron Mistress, that artifact of work that could capture a human soul and never let it loose again to live naturally among its own kind.

It was an update of an Iron Mistress, that historic purpose, which held him captive now; and had held him from his beginning.

He shook off the self-pitying notion. Ever since he had been last on the Dorsai, he had been missing Amanda, deeply and unyieldingly. The pain of not having her within sight and hearing and touch was a feeling of deep wrongness and loss, like the pain of an amputated limb that would not grow again. No, he corrected himself, it was as if the pain and sense of loss from an earlier amputation had finally made him aware of it. The feeling was something that could be buried temporarily under the emergencies of the moment, during most of his waking hours. But at times when exhaustion stripped him down to bones and soul, as aboard the courier ship leaving Freiland recently, or when he was alone, as now, it came back upon him.

What were the later six lines in Keats' poem - about the hillside and the pale kings and warriors, with their warning? Oh, yes…

… The latest dream I ever dreamed

On the cold hillside.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all

Who cried - "La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!"

"… The Iron Mistress hath thee in thrall! …"

Once more, he pushed the feeling of depression from him. There was no need for this. The time would not be too long before he and Amanda would be together, permanently. It was not like him to waste time on gloomy thoughts, fantasies of despair summoned up out of old writings. He made an effort to examine why he should be acting like this, now; but his mind shied away from the question.

It was only his coming back here and finding the estate so empty, he told himself. For that matter, when poetry could hurt, poetry could also heal. The heart of the same ancient story had been dealt with less than thirty-four years later by another poet, Robert Browning, in the first volume of his Men and Women. Browning had written Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, a poem similar in subject - but with all the difference in the universe, in theme. As an antidote to the earlier verse, Hal quoted the last verse of Browning's poem to himself aloud, softly, into the face of the chill river of air coming at him across the cooling water of the lake -

… There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

Browning had been a Childe all his life - an aspirant to a greater knighthood - although that part of him had passed, invisible before the conscious eyes of almost everyone, with the exception of his wife. As Hal was, himself, a Childe now, though in a different time and place and way, and never as a poet. It was no Iron Mistress that drove Browning, and perhaps even himself, after all, but the fire of a hope that would not let itself be put out.

At the same time, even with this small bit of understanding, the emptiness inside him that reached for Amanda echoed back the emptiness of this place he had known so well, but from which the three old men who had given it life and meaning were now departed. The estate had not become strange to him. He had become a stranger within it.

But an instinct had drawn him back to spend the night here; and spend it, he would. He turned back from the terrace and toward the French windows that would let him into the house, glancing through them, instinctively, down into the library where already the automatic lighting had gone on; and where, the last time he had looked in, he had seen Bleys and Danno standing toe to toe.

He opened one of the windows and stepped through, closing it behind him. The warmth of the atmosphere within, guarded by that same automatic machinery that had kept the place so well that all these years its caretaker had needed only to glance occasionally into the surveillance screens in his own home, five miles away, to make sure all was well, wrapped itself around him. He was enclosed by the still air, the smell of the leather bindings on the hundreds of old-fashioned books, dustless and waiting still on their long shelves of polished, honey-colored wood. He had read them all in those early years, devouring them one after the other, whenever he had the chance, like some starving creature fallen into a land of plenty.

Now that he was within doors, he was made aware of the darkening of the day beyond the windows. In just these last few moments the sun had gone behind the mountains. He walked to the fireplace at the end of the room. It, too, was waiting; laid ready for firing. He took the ancient sparker from its clip on the mantelpiece and with it touched the kindling under the logs alight.

Flames woke and raced among the shavings and the splinters beneath the kindling, reaching up to make the bark on the logs spark and glow. He seated himself in one of the large, overstuffed, wing-backed chairs flanking the hearth and fastened his eyes on the growing fire. The flames ran like small heralds among the dark structure of the wood, summoning its parts to holocaust. The heat of the burning reached out to warm him; but he could still feel the emptiness of the house at his back.

He had not been so conscious of being alone since he had run for the Encyclopedia, after the killing on the terrace beyond these windows. In all that time since, except for the moment in the Harmony prison when they would not come, he had never made the fully necessary effort to summon up self-hypnotically the images of his three dead tutors. But now, feeling the hollowness and darkness at his back, he reached within himself, keeping his eyes on the fire, and let the mental technique, in which Walter the InTeacher had coached him as a child, channel the force of his memories into subjective reality.

When I lift my eyes from the fire, he thought, they will be there.

He sat, gazing at the fire which was now sending flames halfway up inside the squared central pile of logs; and after a bit, he felt presences in the room behind him. He lifted his head, turned and saw them.

Malachi Nasuno. Obadiah Testator. Walter the InTeacher.

They sat in other chairs of the room, making a rough semi-circle facing him; and he turned the back of his own chair to the fire, in order to look directly at them.

"I've missed you," he told them.

"Not for a long time," said Malachi. The massive torso of the old Dorsai dwarfed the tall carved chair that held him; and his deep voice was as unyielding as ever. "And before that, only now and then, at times like this. If you'd done anything else, we'd have failed with you."

"And that we did not," said Obadiah. Scarecrow thin, looking taller than he was by virtue of his extreme uprightness as he sat in his chair. "Now you've met my own people, as well as others, and you understand more than I ever could have taught you."

"That's true," said Hal. He looked at Walter the InTeacher and saw the Exotic's old, blue eyes quiet upon him. "Walter? Aren't you going to say hello?"

"I was thinking, only." Walter smiled at him. "When I was alive, I would have asked you at a moment like this why you needed us in the first place. Being only a figment of your imagination and memory, I don't have to ask. I know. You needed us to help you do the kind of learning that was only possible to the open, fresh mind of someone discovering the universe for the first time. But do you even know now where the end of this journey of yours lies?"

"Not where," said Hal. "But in what. Like all journeys, it has to end in accomplishment - or I've gone nowhere."

"And if it should turn out you have?" asked Walter.

"If he has," Malachi broke in harshly, "he did well - he did his best while he could, at the trying of it. Do you always have to make things difficult for him?"

"That was our job here, Malachi," said Walter, "to make things difficult for him. You know that. He knows that - now. When he was Donal Graeme he saw himself growing away from the soul of humankind. He had to come back - and the only way was a hard way."

He smiled at his two fellow tutors.

"Otherwise why arrange with your intuitive logic that your trustees would choose three like us?"

"I'm sorry," said Hal. "I used you all. I've always used people."

"Maudlin self-pity!" snapped Obadiah. "What weakness is this, after all we taught you, and now that you're face to face at last with what you set out to do?"

Hal grinned, a little wanly.

"You sent me out to become human, after you were killed," he answered. "But you also put me on the road even before you sent me out. Can't you let me be a little human now, from time to time?"

"As long as you get your job done, boy," rumbled Malachi.

"Oh," Hal sobered. "I'll get it done, if it can be done. There's no changing or stopping the juggernaut of history, now. But, you know what the real miracle is? I wanted to start Donal over again, to get him right this time. But what I did worked even better than I could have dreamed. I'm not Donal, redone. I'm Hal; and even all of what Donal was, is only a part of me, now."

"Yes," said Malachi, slowly. "You've put away all armor. I suppose you had to."

"Yes," said Hal. "The passage ahead's too narrow for anyone wearing armor." He lost himself for a moment in thought, then went on, "And all those who come after me are going to have to come naked, likewise, or they won't get through."

He shivered.

"You're afraid," said Walter, quickly, leaning forward intently in his chair. "What are you afraid of, Hal?"

"Of what's coming," said Hal; and shivered again. "Of my own testing."

"Afraid," said a new voice in the room, "of me. Afraid I'll prove him wrong about this human race of ours, after all."

The tall figure of Bleys moved out of an angle in the bookcases and stepped forward to stand between Obadiah's chair and that of Malachi.

"Playing with your imagination, again?" he said to Hal. "Making up ghosts out of the images of your memory - even a ghost of me; and I'm still very much alive."

"You can go," said Hal. "I'll deal with you another time."

But Bleys continued to exist, standing between the chairs holding Malachi and Obadiah.

"Your unconscious doesn't want to dismiss me, it seems," he said.

Hal sighed and looked again into the fire. When he turned back to the room, Bleys was still there with the rest of them.

"No," Hal said. "I guess not."

None of the subjective images replied. They stayed; the three sitting, the one standing, looking at him, but without words.

"Yes," said Hal, after a time, looking back at the fire. "I'm afraid of you, Bleys. I never guessed there would be someone like you; and it shocked me to find you, in real life. If I've evoked your image now, it is to make me see something in myself I don't want to see. That's why you're here."

"My similarity to you," said Bleys. "That's what you don't want to see."

"No." Hal shook his head. "We're really not that similar. We only look that way to everyone else. But that doesn't make us alike. If all the people on all the worlds had in common what you and I have, we wouldn't look alike. Our differences would show, then; and we'd look as unalike - as we actually are."

He glanced briefly into the fire again.

"Unlike as two gladiators pushed into a ring to fight each other," he said.

"No one pushed either of us," said Bleys. "I chose my way. You chose to fight it. I offered you all I had to offer, not to fight me. But you decided to anyway. Who could push either of us, in any case?"

"People," said Hal.

"People!" There was a strange note of anger in Bleys' voice. "People are mayflies. It's no shame or sin in them; it's only fact. But will you die - and that magnificent, unique engine that's yourself be lost, for a swarm of mayflies? Leaving aside the other fact that the only one who can certainly kill you is myself; and you know I won't do that until it's plain you've lost."

"No," said Hal. "You know you'd lose, not gain, by killing me before that. As a dead martyr either one of us would make sure of victory for our side - and perhaps wrongly, by that means. No, it's the contest that's important, not ourselves. A chess Grand Master could shoot his opponent dead before the game between them was done. But the fact the other couldn't finish would prove nothing to the watchers, when it was vital to know whose game was best and who should have won. The watchers might even assume that the one who shot did because he knew he was going to lose - and that might not be true."

He paused. Bleys said nothing.

"I've understood you couldn't afford to kill me," Hal went on, more gently. "You admitted that when you didn't take advantage of my being your prisoner, back in the hands of the Militia on Harmony. You talk of mayflies; but I know - maybe I'm the only one who knows - that you care for the race as a race, in your own way, as much as I do."

"Perhaps," said Bleys, broodingly. "Perhaps you and I only need them to fill the void around us. In any case, the mayflies aren't us. Tomorrow there'll come another swarm of them, to replace what died today, and tomorrow after that, another. Give me one reason you want to sacrifice yourself for what lives only for a single day."

Hal looked at him, bleakly.

"They break my heart," he said.

There was silence in the room.

"I know you don't understand them," Hal said to Bleys. "That's the one great difference between us, the one reason I'm afraid. Because you represent only one part of the race; and if you win… if you win, the part I know is there can be lost forever, now that the race-animal's decided it can't live divided any longer. I can't let that happen."

He stopped speaking for a moment, looking at all four of his subjective images, then back at the shade of the tall Other.

"You don't see what I see," he said, "you can't see it, can you Bleys?"

"I find it," said Bleys slowly and quietly, "inconceivable. There's nothing in them - in us - to break any heart, even if hearts were breakable. We're painted savages, nothing more, in spite of what we like to think of as some thousands of years of civilization. Only our present paint's called clothing and our caves called buildings and spaceships. We're what we were yesterday, and the day before that, back to the point where we dropped on all fours and went like the animals we really are."

"No!" said Hal. "No. And that's the crux of it. That's why I can't let the juggernaut go the way you want. It's not true we're still animals; it's not true we're still savages. We've grown from the beginning. There was never a time we weren't growing; and we're growing now. Everything we face in this moment's only the final result of that growing, when it broke loose into consciousness, finally, a thousand years ago."

"Just a thousand?" Bleys' eyebrows lifted. "Not five hundred or fifteen hundred - or forty, or four thousand?"

"Pick the when and where you like," said Hal. "From any point in the past, the chain of events run inescapably forward to this moment. I've chosen the nexus in the fourteenth century of western Europe, to count from."

"And John Hawkwood," said Bleys, smiling thinly. "The last of the medieval captains, the first of the modern generals. First among the first of the condottieri, you'd say? Sir John, in northern Italy. You see, like these others here, I can read your mind."

"Only the shade of you I summon reads my mind," said Hal. "Otherwise, perhaps I could make you see some things you don't want to see. It was John Hawkwood who stopped Giangalleazo Visconti in 1387."

"And preserved the system of city-states that made the Renaissance possible? As I just said, I know your mind." Bleys shook his head. "But it's only your theory. Do you really think the Renaissance could have been stopped by one summer's military frustration of a Milanese Duke who was still in pursuit of the kingship of all Italy when he died, about a dozen years later?"

"Probably not," said Hal. "Giangalleazo's later tries didn't work. Nonetheless, the historic change was in the wind. But history's what happened. The causal chain I picked to work with links forward from Hawkwood. If you see that much, why can't you see people as I do?"

"And have them break my heart too?" Bleys watched him steadily. "I told you I found that inconceivable. And it's inconceivable to me that they can breaks yours - or that hearts can break, as I said, for any reason."

"It breaks mine, because I've seen them in actions you don't believe exist." Hal met the other man's gaze. "I've been among them and I've watched. I've seen the countless things they do for each other - the extraordinary kindnesses, the small efforts to help or comfort each other, the little things they deny themselves so that someone else can have what they might have had. And the large things - the lives risked and laid down, the lifetimes of unreturned effort, the silent heroisms, the quiet faithfulnesses - all without trumpet and flags, because life required it of them. These aren't the actions of mayflies, of animals - or even of savages. These are the actions of men and women reaching out for something greater than what they have now; and while I live I'll help them to it."

"There's that," said Bleys, remotely. "Sooner or later, you'll die. Do you think they'll build a statue to you, then?"

"No, because no statues are needed," Hal answered. "My reward never was supposed to be a recognition of anything I've done; but only my knowing I'd done it. And I get that reward every day, seeing the road extend, seeing my work on it and seeing that it's good. There's a poem by Rudyard Kipling, called The Palace - "

"Spare me your poems," said Bleys.

"I can spare you them, but life won't," said Hal. "Poems are the tool I've been hunting for all these years, the tool I needed to defeat those who think the way you do. Listen to this one. You might learn something. It's about a king who was also a master mason, who decided to build himself a palace like no one had ever seen before. But when his workmen dug down for the foundations they found the ruins of an earlier palace, with one phrase carved on every stone of it. The king ordered them to use the materials of the earlier palace and continued to build - until word came to him one day that it was ordained he should never finish. Then, at last, he understood the phrase the earlier builder had carved on each stone; and he told his workmen to stop building, but to carve the same phrase on each stone he had caused to be set in place. That phrase was - 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him I too have known!' "

Hal stopped talking. Bleys sat still, silent, watching him.

"Do you understand?" Hal said. "The message is that the knowing is enough. No more is needed. And I have that knowing."

"Shai Hal!" murmured Malachi.

But Hal barely heard the old Dorsai praise-word. His mind was suddenly caught up by what he had just said; and his mind wheeled outward like an eagle, seeing further and further distances lifting over the horizon as his wide wings carried him toward it.

The fire crackled and burned low behind him, unnoticed.

When he looked up, all four of the shades he had summoned from the depths of his mind were gone.