The Final Encyclopedia

  It followed therefore that, as Immanuelson, Hal could be expected by fellow-Friendlies to be one of a younger, newer breed, infected with off-world habits and ideas, and not necessarily aware of recent events on Harmony—which could help cover any inconsistencies in his masquerade as the other man. "Off-world," as currently used on the two Friendly planets, meant any world but those of Harmony and Association.

  Some work, he now saw, had already been done to adjust the papers to him. Each of the spaces for his identifying thumbprint were blank. He proceeded to press down on each of these sensitized squares in turn and watch the whorls of his thumbprints leap into visible existence on the papers as he took his hand away. He was now officially Howard Immanuelson. There was a strange little emotion involved in acknowledging the change. It was a feeling as if some part of him had been lost. Not the Hal Mayne part that was basic to him; but that part of him that had come into existence on Coby, and was now officially being removed from existence.

  He put the papers into an inside pocket.

  "Here's your credit," Sost said, passing over another set of papers, "reassigned to your Harmony name. There's still a lot left."

  "Can you trust Jennison?" Hal asked, taking the credit papers.

  "Wouldn't have dealt with him, otherwise," Sost said. "Don't worry. Freight Handlers has a lock on him."

  "Can Freight Handlers be trusted?" Hal said; and stared a little as the other two laughed.

  "Sost was Freight Handlers before Freight Handlers was invented," Tonina said. "He may not have the office and the title, but you don't need to worry about Freight Handlers as long as he's here."

  "I just kept my hand in," said Sost, "and over the years you get to know people. Now, give me your own papers."

  "We'd better destroy them," said Hal, passing them over.

  "That's the idea. Now," said Sost, as he tucked the Tad Thornhill papers away. "We'll leave here, you and me. You've got passage on a ship to Harmony, and a ticket to Citadel, there. You know anything about Citadel?"

  "I studied about it, once," said Hal. "It's a fair-sized city on the continent they call South Promise, in the low latitudes of the temperate zone."

  "That's right; and it's the one city-sized place on Harmony this Immanuelson's work record doesn't show him as having been in. Once there you're on your own." Sost stood up, and Hal and Tonina followed suit. "We'll get you on board with the freight and slip the whole business of outgoing customs. Come on."

  Hal turned toward Tonina. She had made him uncertain about trying to touch her; but now he would never see her again. He put his arms around her awkwardly and kissed her; and she held him strongly for a moment.

  "Get going," she said, pushing him away.

  He went out with Sost. Looking back he saw her still standing upright and motionless by the table, watching them go.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hal sat in the jitney taking him down from orbit around Harmony to the city of Citadel. Curiously, in this moment of stepping into a totally new world, it was not his three years on Coby that were beginning to lose reality in his mind, it was the four days of interstellar space travel, with the frequent psychic shocks of the phase shifts that had brought him here. The trip had had the feel of unreality to it; and now he found it also difficult to think of the Friendly World to which he was rapidly descending as real; although he knew it would be so, for him, soon enough.

  Something else was filling his mind and driving out anything else but the years just passed on Coby. For the first time in his life, on the trip from there to here, he had come to a stark understanding of why his three tutors had insisted that he go to the mines and work, instead of hiding on one of the Younger Worlds. Their reason had not been merely a matter of shielding him from the eyes of the Others until he was old enough to protect himself. No, the important factor in their decision had lain in what they had said about his need to grow up, to learn about people before he ventured forth to face his enemies.

  Only now, after three years on the mining world, he could realize that he had been—up until the moment of the deaths of Obadiah, Malachi and Walter the InTeacher—a hothouse plant. He had been raised as an unusual boy, by unusual people. He had had no real, day-to-day experience or understanding of ordinary men and women; those who were the root stock of the race itself—those from among whom the unusual people like himself were occasionally produced, simply to be taken and used by the historic pressures of their time. Until Coby, such ordinary people had been as unknown to him as if they had been creatures from the furthest stars. Their goals had never been his goals, their sorrows his sorrows, their natures his nature. His lack of understanding of these differences had been an unacceptable defect; because now it came home to him, unsparingly, that it was these, not the gifted ones like himself and those who had brought him up, whom he would be fighting for in the years ahead.

  It had been necessary that he begin by realizing his place among such ordinary people, that he learn to understand and feel with and for them, before he could be of any use to the race as a whole. For they were the race. In the mines he had come face to face with this. He had discovered it in Tonina, in John Heikkila, in Sost—in all of them. He had found unremarkable people there he could care about, and who cared about him—regardless of his abilities. People who, in the end, had made his escape possible when alone, with all his special talents, he would have failed.

  The remembrance of that escape now made his eyes burn with regret that he had never told Sost, at least, how much the old man had come to mean to him. The manner of their leave taking had been almost casual. They had driven Sost's truck out to the ship he was now in, ostensibly to deliver a large but lightly sealed package, with Hal seated beside Sost and dressed in the gray coveralls of a freight handler. Together, they had carried the package in through the ship's loading entrance to the number one hold and been met there by the Chief Purser, who had evidently been expecting them.

  At his direction Hal had taken off the coveralls, dropped them in a refuse container, and taken leave of Sost. He had followed the Chief to a portside cabin, been ushered in, and left with directions not to leave the cabin until after the first phase shift. He had obeyed; and, in fact, had stayed close to his cabin through the first third of the trip. The solitary hours had offered an opportunity for him to practice casting himself mentally into the persona of a tithe-payer of the Revealed Church Reborn.

  He had the role model of Obadiah to draw on. Growing up with his three tutors, he had come, instinctively, to imitate each of them. To be like Obadiah, he had only to imagine himself as Obadiah—but the trick down on the surface of Harmony would be to carry that bit of imagination in his mind so constantly that even under moments of stress he would not slip out of character.

  He also practiced on the one fellow-passenger who seemed to have any inclination to talk with him beyond the barest exchange of civilities; and this passenger proceeded to open his eyes to an unsuspected danger. The other was an Exotic named Amid, a small, erect old man with—for an Exotic—a remarkably wrinkled face. Amid was returning from Ceta where he had been as an Outbond, teaching the history of the Splinter Cultures at the University of Ceta, in the city of the same name as that of the planet and the University.

  Like most Exotics, he was as at ease with everyone as the other Friendlies and Harmony-bound passengers were stiff and suspicious. He was also, like many teachers, in love with his subject; and Hal found him full of fascinating historical anecdotes out of the history of Harmony and Association that he would not have thought anyone but one of the native-born Friendlies could have known, and then only if they were from the area or district of the world with which the anecdote dealt.

  "Faith," said Amid to him, the third day out of Coby, "in its large sense, is more than just the capacity to believe. What it is, is the concept of a personal identity with a specific, incontrovertible version of reality. True faith is untouchable. By definition anything that attacks it is not only false
but doomed to be exposed as such. Which is why we have martyrs. The ultimate that can be offered against any true faith-holder to force him to change his beliefs is a threat to destroy him utterly, to cancel out his universe, leaving only nothingness. But for the true faith-holder, even this threat fails, since he, and that in which he has faith, are one; and, by definition, that in which he has faith is indestructible."

  "But why can't someone who merely believes be just as immune to having his personal universe destroyed?" Hal had asked.

  "Because merely believing—if you want to define the word separately—implies something to believe in—that is, something apart from the believer. In other words, we have two things in partnership, the believer and his belief. A partnership can be dissolved. Partners can be divorced. But, as I just pointed out, the faith-holder is his faith. He and it make, not two, but a single thing. Since he and it are one, there's no way to take it from him. That makes him a very powerful opponent. In fact, it makes him an unconquerable opponent; since even death can't touch him in his most important part."

  "Yes," said Hal, remembering Obadiah.

  "That difference," said Amid, "between the mere believer and the true faith-holder, is the one thing that has to bet grasped, if the peoples of this Culture are to be understood. Paradoxically, it's the hardest distinction for the non-Friendly to grasp—just as the intimate parallel commitments of the Exotic and the Dorsai are also the hardest things for people not of those cultures to understand. In the case of each culture, it's a case of an ordinary human capability—for faith, for courage, or for insight—raised to a near-instinctive level of response."

  Remembering that conversation, now, as the jitney approached the landing area, Hal made an effort to apply the distinction Amid had been talking about to what he knew of the Friendly character. It was not easy, because all he really knew about what made a Friendly a Friendly had been absorbed directly into his unconscious by observing Obadiah as he had been growing up. In short he knew, without having to think, what Obadiah would do in almost any situation, once he had been confronted with it, but he had little conscious understanding of why Obadiah would do just that. Hal was, in fact, in a position very like that of someone who could operate a piece of machinery but had no idea of why or how it worked.

  As the jitney touched down, he made a mental note to at least not let himself be lulled into complacency by the fact that the people here might seem at first to take him easily for one of themselves. He would have to make a conscious effort to observe and study those around him, in spite of whatever ability he already had to play the role he had adopted. Otherwise, he could end up making a wrong move without ever knowing he had made it; and the results from that wrong move might result in tripping him up without warning.

  The passengers left the jitney and found themselves in a closed tunnel that led for some distance before delivering them into a series of rooms where they were sorted out according to the type of personal papers they were carrying. As someone with Harmony papers Hal was channeled with a couple of dozen other Friendlies into the last room to be reached. Within were a number of desks with Immigration Service officials seated at them.

  Hal was a little out of position to be first at the table nearest him. Just ahead of him was a slight, slim, dark-skinned young man. There was a hush-zone around each desk, and Hal stood at such an angle to both his fellow traveller and the official that lip-reading was difficult, so there was no way for him to find out in advance any of the questions he might be asked.

  Finally, the man ahead of him was directed onward to a fenced enclosure made of two-meter-high wire mesh and containing physical, straight-backed chairs, watched over by a stocky, middle-aged enlisted man in a black Militia uniform. The dark young man took a chair there, and Hal was beckoned forward to the desk with the official.

  "Papers?" said the official, as Hal sat down.

  Hal produced them and the official read through them.

  "How long has it been since you were on Harmony?" he asked.

  Hal took it as a good sign that the other had not addressed him in the canting speech of the ultra-fanatics among the Friendlies. It might indicate that the official was one of the more reasonable sort. In any case, he had his answer ready, having studied the papers he was carrying.

  "Four and a half standard years, more or less."

  The official shuffled the papers together and handed them back to him.

  "Wait over there," he said, nodding to the enclosure.

  Hal took the papers, slowly. No one else of the native Friendlies except the dark-skinned young man had been sent to wait. The rest, from other desks, were all being directed ahead, through a further doorway and out of the room.

  "May I ask why?" he said, standing up.

  "Anyone off-planet more than three years is checked."

  Hal felt grimness as he walked over toward the enclosure. He should have thought of this. Sost should have thought of this. No, it was unfair to blame Sost, who would have had no way of knowing that a special effort should have been made to get Friendly papers that were less than three years off the individual's home world. Naturally, the chances of the papers Jennison dealt in being out of date were likely to be greater rather than lesser.

  He took a seat across the enclosure from the dark-skinned man, under the watchful eye of the policeman. It seemed to him that the glance of the dark-skinned man met his own eyes strangely for a fraction of a second; then they were watching nothing, again. It would have been easy to believe that the other man had never glanced at him at all, but one of Hal's earliest teachings by Malachi had been in the art of observation. Now, in his mind Hal replayed the last few minutes of what he had just seen, and his memory produced, beyond argument, the brief moment in which the other's eyes had met his.

  It was something that could mean nothing—or a great deal. Hal sat back on the stiff, upright chair and let his body relax. Time went by—more than a standard hour. At the end of that period the room was empty of his fellow travellers, except for those in the enclosure; and there were now five of these, including himself. The other three were unremarkable-looking individuals, obviously Friendlies, all of them at least twenty years older than Hal and the dark-skinned man.

  "All of you now," said the policeman, nasally. "Come. This way."

  They were taken out of the enclosure and the room they had been in, down another short corridor to an underground garage and a waiting bus. The bus hissed up on its fans and they slid out through the garage, emerging into the nighttime streets of Citadel. It was raining, and the rain streaked the windows of the bus, blurring the gray shapes of the building fronts they passed under the sparse yellow glow of the street lighting. They drove for a little under half an hour, then entered another interior garage, down below the street level.

  From the bus in the garage, they were taken upstairs into what seemed at first sight to be an office building. Their papers were taken from them; and there was another long wait on straight chairs in an outer office, with trips to the water tap in one wall and to the rest room, under the eye of their police guard, as the only distractions. Then, one by one, they were called into interior offices that had only a single desk and a single interviewer behind it. Once more, Hal saw the dark-skinned young man called before him.

  When Hal's turn came, he found himself sitting down at the side of a desk, facing a small, balding man with an egg-shaped face, unblinking eyes and an almost lipless mouth. The gray man picked up papers that Hal recognized as his from the desk, and read through them with a speed that made Hal suspect the other of being already familiar with their contents. He laid the papers back down and looked at Hal from a bureaucratic distance.

  "Your name?"

  "Howard Beloved Immanuelson

  "You're a communicant of the Revealed Church Reborn, born into that Church twenty-three point four standard years ago, in the hamlet of Enterprise?"

  "Yes," said Hal.

  "Your father and mother were both
communicants of that Church?"

  "Yes."

  "You remain a communicant in good standing of that Church?"

  "I am," said Hal, "by the grace of the Lord."

  "You have just returned from four years of work off-planet as a semantic interpreter, having been employed by various of the unchurched…"

  The questioning continued, covering the facts of Howard Immanuelson's life as set forth in the papers Hal had been carrying. Once these had been exhausted, the interviewer pushed the papers from him and stared at Hal with his unchanging eyes.

  "Do you keep regular times of prayer?" he asked.

  Hal had been expecting this sort of question.

  "As far as I can," he said. "Travelling about as I do among those who do lack the Word, it isn't always easy to keep regular hours of prayer."

  "Ease," said the interviewer, "is not the way of the Lord."

  "I know," said Hal. "I know as you do that the fact that regular hours of prayer are difficult to keep is no excuse for laxity. So I've become used to inward communication at my usual times of literal prayer."

  The gray man's upper lip seemed to curl a little, but it was so thin Hal could not be sure.

  "How many daily are your times of prayer—when it's convenient for you to pray, that is?"

  Hal thought swiftly. He did not know the sectarian rules of the Revealed Church Reborn. But if it was a church in the North Oldcontinent region where Enterprise was located, then it was probably in the so-called "Old" Tradition, rather than the New. In any case, as the saying went, each Friendly was a sect on his own.

  "Seven."

  "Seven?" The interviewer kept his tone level and his face expressionless, but Hal suddenly suspected he was talking to one of those who held to the New Tradition, and believed that more than four times of formal prayer a day were arrogant and ostentatious.