The Final Encyclopedia

  She stared at him.

  "Where did he get the idea for something like that?" she said. "The sixteenth century…" Her voice trailed off, thoughtfully.

  "He was born about 1480," said Hal. "He had a professorship at Bologna, but he was always hard up for funds to build with—that's how he and the Theater came to be connected with Francis I. There was a strong desire in Renaissance times to unify all knowledge and that way see through it to the very essence of creativity. The idea of objects as mnemonic cues goes back into classical Greece, at least. The early churchmen and scholastics made it a moral practice, and later on Renaissance mysticism saw it as a framework for esoteric enlightenment. It produces Guido's Theater in the sixteenth century, in the thirteenth century it had already produced Ramon Lull's combination-of-wheels device; and that was nothing less than a sort of primitive computer. The same idea affected people from Bacon to Leibnitz, who in the seventeenth century actually did invent calculus. In effect, the Theater of Memory was one of the root causes of later technology and of this Encyclopedia, itself."

  "I see," she said.

  "I thought you would," he said. "The point is, the whole chain of effort from the Theater to the Final Encyclopedia represents a struggle, an effort by the race-animal to discover greater possibilities in itself. This is the important truth that underlies the struggle between the Others and everyone else—that's where the real battlefield is and is going to be for a while. So that's where I'll have to be for a time, yet."

  "I see," she said, again. "All right. I understand, then."

  She nodded slowly, her eyes abstracted.

  "Yes," she said. "Yes. I think, after all, the sooner you talk to Tam, the better. If you're through eating, I'll call him and we'll go now."

  "Even if I wasn't through," he smiled. "But as it happens, I am."

  They went.

  To Hal's eye, it was as if Tam Olyn had not altered in appearance or moved since he had seen the very old man last. Tam's suite, with its illusion of a forest and stream, and all its float furniture—chairs, desk, and everything else—seemed not to have been shifted a millimeter out of place, in the intervening years. Above all, the expression of Tam's face was the same.

  But his voice was different.

  "Hello, Hal Mayne," he said; and let Hal come to him to grip hands.

  The difference was not great; but Hal's ear registered the barely diminished volume, the slightly greater threadiness of breath behind the words and the infinitesimally increased length of the pauses between them as Tam spoke.

  "Sit down here, Hal," said Ajela, leading him to a cushioned float at no more than arm's length from the one in which Tam was sitting and pulling one up alongside his for herself.

  "You've come back," said Tam.

  "Yes," Hal said. "But I've come back with something I've got to do that involves not only the Encyclopedia but everything else, as well. What that's going to mean, though, is that I think the Encyclopedia is going to be put to use the way it ought to be, at last."

  "Is it?" said Tam. "Tell me about it."

  "You were right when you talked to me about Armageddon, when I was here before," Hal said. "I've taken nearly six years coming to understand what you meant. When I left here to go to the mines on Coby, I didn't know what I was doing; only that I was running, both because I had to find someplace safe for me and because there were things I had to do. What, I didn't know then. I do now."

  "Yes," said Tam. The deep hoarseness of age with which he spoke seemed to make his words walk under Hal's like those of a ghost speaking from a crypt at their feet. "You had to find yourself. I knew that, even then."

  "I didn't understand people," said Hal. "I'd been brought up under glass. That was why my tutors wanted me to go to Coby. On Coby I began to wake up…"

  He told Tam about Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, about Coby, Harmony, and his hours in the Militia cell; with all he had come to understand there and all that had followed from that until now. Tam sat and listened with the motionlessness of face and body that time had brought to him. When Hal finally stopped talking, he did not speak for a long moment.

  "And it ends with you back here," he said at last.

  "That much of it ends," said Hal.

  Tam sat looking at him. A younger individual would have frowned, questioningly. But Tam no longer needed gross facial movements to signal his reactions.

  "That much was only the beginning," he went on. "I can understand the situation, now, I can look beyond the Others and know that they're only a part of the real problem; a symptom, not a cause. The real problem's that we've all of us finally come to the point where there's no longer a choice. Now we've got to take charge—consciously—of what's going to happen to us; instead of going on blundering forward instinctively, the way we've always done ever since we first began to look beyond the next meal, or the next dry place to sleep. And the one tool that can let us do that is here. The Final Encyclopedia's the only thing we've managed to show for all those long centuries of savagery and the short centuries of civilization; that so far've only brought us to the point where a handful of us can kill off everyone else."

  "Yes," said Tam. For a moment he did not say anything more. His gaze went past Hal and Ajela alike; and when he spoke again, it was clearly to himself as well as them.

  "Do you know what it means to try to control history?" he said. He looked back to Hal. "Do you know the mass and momentum of those forces you're talking about laying your hands on? I tried something like that—and I had power. I raised a social tidal wave against a whole people. A tidal wave that ought to have drowned the Friendlies, forever. And all it took to stop me was Jamethon Black, one man of faith who wouldn't move out of my path. On him all that great force I'd built up broke; and it drained away, in a million little streams, in a million directions, doing nothing, harming no one."

  Ajela leaned forward and put one of her hands over one of his, where it laid on the padded arm of his float. Hal looked at the warm, white young hand over the dark, gnarled one of age.

  "For nearly ninety years you've been making up for that," she said, softly.

  "I? All I've done is watch the hearth, keep the candle lit…" His head shook on his shoulders, slightly, from side to side. "But I know the strength of history when it moves."

  He looked back at Hal.

  "And it's what you're talking about working with," he said. "Even if you're right about using the Encyclopedia, even if everything you hope for gathers behind what you know needs to be done, you'll still be an ant trying to direct a hurricane. You know that?"

  "I think so," said Hal, soberly.

  "God knows," said Tam, "I want to see you try. God knows it'd justify me, make me of some worth after all these years to the people I'd have destroyed if I could; and also it'd justify Mark Torre and everyone who's come to work here, after him. But think—you could just as easily close your eyes to where it's all going. You could use your mind and your strength to make a comfortable safe niche out of the storm for yourself and any you might love—for the few years your body still has to give you—just by closing your eyes to what's going to happen eventually to people who'll never really know who you were or what it costs you to try what you want to try. You can still turn back."

  "No," said Hal. "Not any more. Not for a longer time than you might think."

  Tam breathed in deeply and pushed himself more upright in his float.

  "All right, then," he said. "Then you ought to know that you've already got most of ten worlds set in motion against what you want. Bleys Ahrens has put in motion a plan for the mobilization of the credit and the force to take over everything the Others don't already control, by military means if necessary."

  There was a moment's silence among the three of them.

  "Bleys?" said Hal. "What about Danno?"

  "Danno died, unexpectedly and conveniently, four standard months ago," said Tam. "Bleys controls the Others now. In fact, he may have already for some time since; and p
lainly he's come to feel he can't risk waiting any longer to act."

  Hal watched the old man, fascinated.

  "How do you know that?" he asked. "How do you know about this plan, this mobilization?"

  "It's reflected in hundreds of thousands of ordinary news items," said Tam. "All I needed, to pick those out and read them right, was to see the implications of what I read in the neural pathways. What outside scholars come here to do, or what they ask us to tell them, mirrors the state of affairs on their worlds."

  "In the neural pathways?" Hal turned to stare at Ajela.

  "I haven't seen it there." Her face was pale. "But I told you no one could read the pathways like Tam."

  "Time teaches anyone," said Tam. "Believe me."

  The full strength of his grim and cantankerous spirit was in his voice; and Hal believed him. Looking at this man who had held the Final Encyclopedia true to Mark Torre's dream for so long, Hal understood for the first time that to Tam the task had not been just like that of standing sentinel at a vault. It had been like the guarding of a living being. Not simply the fierceness of a dragon crouching above a treasure had ridden in the other man, but an unthinking commitment like that of someone who defends and maintains a child of his or her body. It was not the machinery, but a soul, to which he had given the long years of his life.

  "Then time's short," said Hal.

  "Very short," said Tam. "What do you plan to do?"

  Now that the decision was plainly taken, the strength that Hal had felt in the older man a moment before had given way once more to the great weariness in him.

  "First," said Hal. "I've got to use the Encyclopedia to trace the roots leading to the emergence of the Others and the emergence of those who may successfully oppose them. It's the process by which knowledge gives birth to idea, and idea gives birth to art, that's the key to the way the Encyclopedia is finally going to be used. But knowledge has to come first. Until I've got a full picture of how the present situation came to be, I'll have no hope of identifying the human elements that are the real things going to war, here. So, while Bleys mobilizes, I'm going to be tracing people and their actions back into the dust of the past. There's no other path I can take to what we need."

  Chapter Fifty

  Nearly a standard year had gone by since Hal had come back to the Final Encyclopedia; and the knowledge he had dug out and forged in that time into new tools for his mind weighed far more heavily on his spirit than he could have imagined, twelve months before. It had enabled him to reach deeper into himself than he had thought possible in such a short time but it had also woken inner, sleeping gods and devils that he had not suspected himself of harboring. He understood now not only who he was, but also what he must do, and neither of those understandings were easy burdens to carry.

  He sat, his chair float seemingly adrift in space above the eastern hemisphere of the Dorsai. What he looked at was a simulation. No clouds were visible, but innumerable tiny white lights were scattered across the face of the numerous islands that made up the land mass of that sea-girt world; and it was these lights that Hal was considering.

  Each of the lights stood for a pad on which a full-sized spacecraft could land and take off—always assuming there was a man or woman of the Dorsai, or an equivalently skilled pilot, at the controls, to justify the risks in handling such a vehicle on and off surface. There were others besides Dorsai pilots who could bring deep space vessels safely to a planetary surface, of course; but it was an uncommon skill.

  The great number of pads he now looked at was therefore not surprising, considering the world they were on. Harmony, with its two fitting yards, of which one had been put out of action when he left, and with only two other pads where heavy spacecraft could be landed, was more typical of the other thirteen inhabited planets. Hal rotated the image of the Dorsai to show its western hemisphere; and the lights that signalled pads were as numerous there, as well.

  The only other worlds that approached Dorsai in their numbers of landing places were the two Exotic planets of Mara and Kultis; but both of these together did not have as many spacecraft pads as those he had just been observing. The large number on the Dorsai, of course, were attributable to the nearly three centuries in which Dorsai had been not merely a supplier of professional soldiers, but full of training areas for them. Expeditionary forces were normally not only assembled but worked into shape close to the home areas of the officers who had undertaken the contract that would employ all of them.

  Hal coded for a list of the pads he had been looking at, with their locations and their distances from nearby concentrations of the Dorsai populace; and as he did so, there was the sound of a single musical chime and a voice spoke to him from among the stars.

  "Hal? Jeamus Walters. I can drop in now, if you're ready for me."

  "Come ahead," said Hal.

  He touched the invisible console at his fingertips, staying the list and re-evoking his normal working surroundings. The image of the Dorsai vanished and the small carrel off his own room in the Final Encyclopedia came into existence around him—walls, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The carrel was a tiny place—hardly more than a cubbyhole; and his main room beyond was not much more—almost a single-room office, with bedroom furniture recessed in the walls, and perhaps enough space to gather at most five or six people on floats in close conversation. A moment later, the door chimed on a deeper note than the phone had used to announce Jeamus Walters' call.

  "Come on in," said Hal. The door opened to admit a short, broad man with thin blond hair on a round skull and a pleasant middle-aged face.

  "Sit down," said Hal. "How much time have you?"

  "As much as you want, now," said Jeamus. "We were just doing a periodic checkover when you called, earlier."

  Hal touched his console and one side of the room blanked out to show the Final Encyclopedia from the outside; the image was enough to fill the space that had been between ceiling and floor, its gray, misty protective screen looking close enough so that either man could reach out and touch it.

  "I haven't had time to learn much about it," said Hal, looking at the protective screen. "Periodic checkover, you said? I thought the screen was self-sustaining?"

  "It is, of course," said Jeamus. "Once created, it's independent of anything else in the universe. Just as the same thing in phase-shift form would have to be independent of the universe, or it couldn't move spacecraft around in it. But one of the things that that independence means, is that if we constructed a screen around the Encyclopedia and did nothing more, we'd immediately begin to move out from inside it, as we travelled along with the rest of the solar system, here. So we have to arrange to have it move with us; or we'd destroy ourselves trying to go through it, just like anything else would destroy itself trying to get through it at us. Consequently, we arrange for it to move with us; which takes a certain amount of controlling—as does making irises available, opening and closing them, and all the rest of that business—"

  He broke off, looking at Hal.

  "You didn't ask me in just to hear me lecture on the phase-screen, though, did you?"

  "As a matter of fact, yes," said Hal. "I've got some questions about it. How large can you make it? I mean, how large an area can you enclose and protect?"

  Jeamus shrugged.

  "Theoretically, there's no limit," he said. "Well, yes, of course there's the limit imposed by the size of the power source needed to create the protective sphere and keep adjusting it; and you have to keep adjusting, even if you're creating it to be set adrift in the universe; because sooner or later it'd begin to break down under the anomalies inherent in being a timeless system existing in a temporal universe."

  "What's the practical limit, then, approximately?" Hal asked. "Suppose we just wanted to expand the sphere around us now and keep expanding it as far as we could."

  Jeamus ruffled the thin hair on the back of his head, thoughtfully.

  "Well," he said, "theoretically, we could make it a numbe
r of times as large as the solar system, given the power of our available sun—but actually, as soon as we reached the size of Earth's orbit we'd have the sun inside it with us—" he broke off. "I'd have to figure that."

  "But," said Hal, "there'd be no problem in making it large enough to enclose a single world—practically speaking?"

  "Well, no… there shouldn't be," said Jeamus. "You'd run into some control problems. Something like that's never been considered. We've got some pretty interesting problems even now, just with the Encyclopedia here, as far as ingress and egress go. Also, we have to open irises toward the sun, for example, at regular intervals, to draw power… what I mean to say is, the controls for a sphere any larger would have to be very complex, not only for maintenance, but for making irises when and where you wanted them. I suppose you're assuming just about the same proportion of in and out traffic as we have here? Because any differences—"

  "No different, for now," said Hal. "Could you run me up some figures for a world, say, just a little larger than Earth?"

  "Of course," said Jeamus. He was staring at Hal. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what all this is about?"

  "If you don't mind."

  "Oh, I mind." Jeamus ruffled his back hair again. "I'm as curious as the next person. But… give me a week."

  "Thanks," said Hal.

  "Don't need to thank me. This is interesting. Anything else?"

  "No. And thanks for coming by," said Hal.

  "Honored." Jeamus got to his feet. "If you don't hear from me in a week, it'll be because I got sidetracked and bogged down on some maintenance problem. So if I don't get back to you in that time, give me a call; and I'll let you know how I'm coming with this. I suppose you realize, any time this stops being theoretical you're going to have to tell me exactly what you've got in mind if you want any really correct answers."

  "Of course. I understand. Thanks again," said Hal; and watched the other man leave.

  As the door shut, Hal dismissed the image of the Final Encyclopedia and called Ajela.