Chapter Forty-nine
"Tell them," said Hal, "that I don't have a pass. But ask them to contact Ajela and give her my name—Hal Mayne."
He stood in the debarkation lounge of the spaceship that had brought him from Freiland to Earth and which now lay holding its distance at ten kilometers from the Final Encyclopedia. He was talking to the debarkation officer, a slim, gray-haired man; and the two of them were alone in the lounge, now that most of the hundred and fifty-three other passengers had left for Earth's surface.
At the further ends of the long lounge, the lights had already automatically dimmed themselves to a level of standby illumination; and there was a coolness in the air, because for the few minutes yet the lounge would remain open it was not economical for the heating elements to remedy the drop in room temperature caused by the sudden absence of the large crowd of warm bodies who had abruptly and noisily left it for the landing jitney. The slight chill wrapped around Hal, bringing back to his mind once more the dream from which he had woken in the mountains on Harmony, to find himself trying to strangle Jason Rowe. The dream had come again, ten hours ago, his last night here on shipboard. Again, he had taken leave of those with him, had dismounted and started off alone across the rubbled plain toward the distant tower; only, this time, he had penetrated further into the plain than ever before, and discovered the deception of its appearance.
From its edge it had appeared level and smooth, all the way to the tower. But as he went, he found that the scant grass and hard, pebbled earth of the surface on which he had started had gradually begun to show a change. For one thing, the slope of the ground was deceptive. The fact emerged that the plain actually rose as it approached the tower; and only some trick of perspective had made it seem level, seen from far off.
But, more important, the farther he had penetrated across its bare openness, the more the apparent flatness and smoothness of it had revealed itself to be an illusion. The ground gradually became seamed with cracks enlarging to gullies, the pebbles were superseded by rocks, and the rocks by boulders; and what had been stony soil became only stone; so that his toilsome progress toward the tower had been hindered and slowed to the rate of a man climbing a cliff…
But now, as he stood chilled and separate from the officer who was talking on his behalf with the Final Encyclopedia, it was not his recollection of the struggle across the rocky land, his turnings and backtrackings between the great rocks barring his way, that had been brought back to mind. It was something remembered from very early in the dream and very simple. It had been the creak of his saddle leathers as he had swung down to the ground, the decisive abandonment of the warmth and strength of the horse-body between his knees, the overall feel of leave-taking from all who were familiar, in order to take up the unmarked path of a pilgrimage to some hidden but powerfully attractive goal. Something about this moment and this waiting for entrance this second time to the Final Encyclopedia had brought it back to him…
But the ship's officer had finally gotten into talk with someone at. the Encyclopedia who could undertake the conveying of the message Hal had asked sent to Ajela.
"Stand by," said the male voice of whoever was at the far end.
Silence fell on the speaker grilles by the phone.
"Who's this Ajela, then?" the officer asked.
"The personal assistant to Tam Olyn," said Hal.
"Oh." The officer looked down and became busy with a stylus on the desktop screen under his fingers. Hal waited. But in less than a minute, the voice came again.
"No need to pass that request on," it said. "I thought I'd seen the name before, so I just checked. Hal Mayne's on the permanent pass list."
"Thanks," said the officer in the phone. "All right. We'll have him straight over to you."
He cut connection and turned to Hal.
"You didn't know you had a permanent pass?"
Hal shook his head, smiling a little.
"No."
"All right," said the officer, into the phone. "Launch Deck—is the repair boat ready yet?"
"Already on its way."
"Thank you."
In fact, the officer had hardly cut connection for a second time before the warning chime from the airlock announced that a boat had docked at it and was unsealing. Hal turned and went to the lock, and the officer came along behind him.
They waited, listening to the sounds of the unsealing process, that carried through the closed inner airlock door. Finally, it swung open; and Hal could look through the matched airlocks to the repair boat's interior, cluttered with machine shop equipment.
"Have a good trip, sir," said the officer.
"Thanks," said Hal.
Carrying his small satchel of personal possessions, he ducked through the matched locks, feeling the brief but sudden deeper chill of heat radiated from his body to the cold metal of the lock interiors, and stepped into the repair boat.
"This way, sir," said a middle-aged, muscular shipwoman in white coveralls. "You'll have to thread your way through the equipment, I'm afraid."
"That's all right," Hal said, following her along a complicated route, around and between the hard-edged pieces of equipment, toward the control cabin in the bow of the boat.
"It's just that the regular ship-to-surface passenger jitney is too big for the entry lock at the Encyclopedia," she went on over her shoulder. "That jit is built to carry up to two hundred passengers and crew."
"They explained that," said Hal.
"Just so you don't feel snubbed." She laughed. "In here, now…"
They entered the cabin and Hal found himself in a room full of control consoles and screens, with three operations chairs up ahead, facing a segmented vision screen. The chair on the far left was already occupied by a shipman, sitting idle.
"Take the seat in the middle, if you don't mind," said the shipwoman.
Hal obeyed. She seated herself to his right and laid her hands on the console before her. Behind them, there was the sound of their airlock resealing and a brief jolt. Then all feeling of motion ceased
"That's it, up ahead," offered the shipman. He was a wiry man in his forties, smaller than his partner.
Hal looked into the large screen. Its segments at the moment were combined to show a single wide image that spread itself out before them. It was an image of starfilled space; and in the center of it, in full sunlight, floated the small, misty globe of their destination.
The Final Encyclopedia hung there—as they also seemed to hang still, facing it—like a ball small enough for the hand of a young child to hold comfortably. But as Hal watched, it began to enlarge. It swelled and grew before him until it had filled the screen and began to loom, smoke-gray and enormous, over their repair boat, shutting out their view of half the universe.
An opening of bright, yellow light appeared before them as an iris dilated; and they rode through into the same noisy metal cavern that Hal remembered from his first visit, five years before.
The shipwoman got up with him, and steered him back through the equipment in the main cabin of the repair boat and out through the airlock that was already standing open.
He walked down the sloping ramp, his ears assaulted by the clangor of machines moving about on bare metal decking. Ahead of him was the faintly hazy circle that was the entrance to the interior of the Final Encyclopedia; as he stepped through it, the sound behind him was cut off. He stood, and let the moving corridor onto which he had just stepped carry him forward toward a vision screen on the wall to his right, ahead. The screen had been blank, but just before he came level, it illuminated, and the face of Ajela looked out.
"Hal? Take the first door on your right," her voice told him.
He rode along for another ten meters, saw the door and went through it into another, shorter corridor without a moving walkway. At the end of this was a second door. He pushed it open when he reached it, and went in.
As it sucked shut softly behind him, he saw that he had come into a room half-office
, half-lounge. The farthest wall, almost a copy of what he remembered seeing in Tam Olyn's suite, appeared to give on a stream winding through a summer forest; but here the light was like the sunlight of early morning. Ajela was already rising from behind a large desk. Her pink gown rippled as she ran to him, kissed him, then stood back to stare.
"Look at you!" she said.
He had, in fact, been looking at her. After Amanda, and other women he had met on the Dorsai, she gave an appearance of being tiny and fragile—not merely small in stature, by comparison, but more delicate in bone and feature. And yet, he knew that in comparison to the general run of humanity she would not be considered so.
"Look at me?" he answered, triggered by her warm smile to smiling back at her, for no other reason than that she was radiating such happiness. "Why?"
"You're a monster. A giant!" she told him. "Twice the size you were when I saw you last, and savage-looking enough to scare people."
He laughed at that.
"Savage-looking?" he said
"See for yourself." She turned him toward the wall at his left, and must have signalled some sensor; for the misty blueness of the wall changed to a mirror surface that gave him back his own image and that of the room around him.
He gazed, startled in spite of himself. He was used to seeing himself every morning as he wiped off the stubble of his beard; and from time to time otherwise, he had caught glimpses of himself in reflecting surfaces like this one. But he had not viewed himself as he now did, with Ajela beside him and in sudden empathy with how she must see him.
The sudden stranger he now saw in the mirror towered above the slim, blond-haired young woman at his elbow. The man's body was lean, broadening from a slender waist to a wide chest, and shoulders broad enough above the narrowness of waist and hips to make him look almost top-heavy. The face above the shoulders was strong-boned, the mouth level, the nose straight; and the eyes, dark gray with a slight difference in color between them, looked out under straight black brows and a wide forehead topped by straight, almost coarse, black hair. But even these features, in total, could not by themselves make for the overall impression that had caused Ajela to call him savage-looking. There was something else, an impression about the figure he stared at which might have been called one of controlled violence, if it had not been for a somber thoughtfulness of eyes, that seemed to overwhelm the general impression of face and body, alike.
He turned from the screen to Ajela.
"Well," she said. "You're back to stay? Or is it only a visit?"
He hesitated.
"Both," he said. "I'll have to explain what I mean by that—"
"Yes, you will," she said; and suddenly hugged him again. "Oh, Tam's going to be so happy!"
She took his hand, towed him toward her desk and pushed him into a padded float beside it.
"How are you?" she said. "Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?"
He laughed.
"I've still got a pretty good appetite," he said. "But let's just talk for the moment. You sit down."
She perched on the edge of her desk, facing him.
"Let me explain what I meant, just now," he said; and hesitated, again.
"Go on," said Ajela.
"I've been thinking about how to explain this to you," he said slowly. "I was going to ask you to believe me when I said there's nothing I could imagine myself wanting to do more, than take Tam up now on his offer to work here at the Encyclopedia…"
"And then you realized it wasn't true," said Ajela, quietly watching him. "Is that it?"
"Yes and no." He frowned at her. "The Encyclopedia pulls me like a moon pulls the tides. I've got things to do here. In the real meaning of the words, it's a tool I've wanted all my life. I know there're things I can do with it, if I had time, that haven't even been dreamed of by anyone else, yet. When I was here before, I really wanted to stay. But you remember I found out I couldn't. There were other things that had to be done. Well, I've still got most of them to do."
"That's the whole reason that's holding you back from staying with us?" She was watching him closely.
He smiled a bit ruefully.
"That's the immediate reason," he said. "But, you're right, to be honest, it isn't all of it. You see, these last few years I've been out among people—"
He hesitated, then went on.
"It's not that easy to explain," he said, "put it that I've found I've got things I have to do with people, too; and in any case, right now, there's something more immediate and important. I'd like to talk to you and Tam together, about it. Is that possible?"
"Of course," she said. "I haven't told him you're here yet; simply because I wanted a minute or two with you myself, first. The fact is, he's sleeping right now; but he'll be upset if I wait until he wakes up to tell him you're back. Just a second. I'll call him—"
She swung around and reached back over her desk.
"No. Wait," said Hal. "Let me give you a general idea of what I'm talking about, first. Let him sleep. There're things with me now, I want you to understand, and it'll take me a few hours just to bring you up to date."
"All right," Ajela drew her arm back and turned to face him, smiling again. "Now, are you sure you don't feel like having something to eat?"
Hal laughed.
"Well, maybe…" he said.
They went to eat at a table in one of the dining rooms; and Ajela, touching the table's sensor controls, enclosed them this time in something new to him, the privacy of four illusory stone walls.
"Could we have the stars, instead?" Hal asked. "All around us the way I can have them in a carrel?"
She smiled, moved her fingers over the control pad on the white cloth surface of the table, and abruptly they seemed to float in space, with the large, blue-white circle of Earth appearing to hang only a small distance off to their side, and Earth's moon just beginning to emerge from behind it.
In all other directions were the lights and distances of the universe. Hal looked about and overhead and down below his feet at them, picking out Earth's sister worlds of Mars and Venus; and gazing toward the other suns of the race—Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Procyon, Epsilon Eridani, Fomalhaut, Altair. In his mind's eye he saw beneath them what his physical eyes could not, humanity's other thirteen planetary homes—Freiland and New Earth, Newton and Cassida, Ceta, Coby, Ste. Marie, Mara and Kultis, Dorsai, Harmony and Association, Dunnin's World.
Imaginatively, he saw not only them but the people upon them; and for a second he breathed deeply, the emptiness he had felt earlier at the thought of their numbers returned.
"What is it?" Ajela asked, her voice suddenly more soft, her summer-green eyes deeply watching him now.
"Too much to tell at once, probably," he said, recovering. He smiled to reassure her. "Anyway, let's have that food, and I'll tell you what's been happening to me."
They sat among the stars, eating; and he talked. He told her of the mines on Coby and Sost, Tonina and John; and Jason, Rukh and James Child-of-God on Harmony; and of his own solitary breakthrough in the cell on that world, with everything that had happened since.
"But what is it you think you can find here, to deal with the Others?" she asked, when he was done.
"To deal with the problem of present history, you mean," he said. "I'm not sure. But the answer's either here or nowhere. It's not just that I've got to find a way to stop the Others. What I have to find is a way that'll be both obvious and convincing to the Exotics, the Dorsai and anyone else who's needed to fight them."
"And you really think what you're looking for is here?"
"It has to be here," he said. "Didn't Mark Torre originally say that the Final Encyclopedia eventually had to be something more than just a storehouse of knowledge? Hasn't Tam guarded it all these years so that a way might be finally found to do something larger with it than anyone's ever conceived of, yet? If it was my idea alone, I might doubt. But we all can't have been wrong. Three of us—all three—coming to the same conc
lusion about it, each on his own."
"But if it's really true that the ultimate use of the Encyclopedia has always been something more—" She broke off, suddenly thoughtful.
"That's right," he said. "If it's true, then a lot of things begin to make sense. The historical equation balances, then. Otherwise, the dice have been loaded too overwhelmingly by the race-animal in favor of the Others; and that makes no sense. Because the race-animal isn't out to choose one favorite out of the factions within it to win—it's out to get answers on how to survive. The root-causes behind the emergence of the Others go back and back in history; and so do the causes leading to the building of the Final Encyclopedia."
"How sure can you be of that, though?" she asked.
He gazed at her across the table.
"Did you ever hear of Guido Camillo Delminio, or the Theater of Memory?" he asked her.
"The Theater of Memory?" She frowned. "I think I have heard that mentioned, or read about it someplace…"
"Mark Torre mentions it in his Memoirs of Construction," Hal answered. "That's where I ran across it, myself, when I was young, in the library of my home. It was a great library; and back when I was young enough, anything I read about, that sounded interesting, I wanted. So when I read the Memoirs and saw the words 'Theater of Memory' the first thing I thought of was that I wanted to build one. I went to Walter InTeacher to show me the way to find out how, and he helped me research the actual, historical article."
Ajela frowned at him.
"There actually was something built that was called a Theater of Memory?"
"Partially built, at least, first in Bologna, and later in Paris with the help of funds from Francis I of France. The Guido Camillo I mentioned conceived of it and spent his life trying to turn it into a reality. That was in the sixteenth century, and his aim was to build a theater where anyone could stand on a stage and look out at art objects ranked on rising levels and put in a certain order, and give speeches calling on all the knowledge in the world, which would be cued by the sight of the art objects before him as he spoke."