The Final Encyclopedia

"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 act
ual 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 thr
ee 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.