The Final Encyclopedia

  He was jolted. It was not the cost of a private ship to Earth that startled him. He could draw interstellar funds to handle that, from the Encyclopedia or probably even from the Exotics, if necessary. Very soon, such funds would have little use, in any case. It was the realization that other people had already begun to think of him in terms of someone whose work was now important enough not to be slowed down by the delays of commercial spaceship schedules. As he was still absorbing that idea, Amanda reached forward to the hand-luggage compartment in the firewall of the jitney; and, without looking down, brought out a sheaf of papers which she tossed into his lap.

  "What's this?" he asked, picking it up. The set of pages made a stack at least three centimeters thick.

  "A copy of the contract for you to read on the way to Omalu," she answered, with her eyes on the cloud layer ahead above which the jitney was now climbing.

  Contract… he smiled sadly to himself. Laying the paper on his knees, he started to read. Such documents would also soon have as little use and purpose as funds of interstellar credit. But at the same time it was touching and a little awesome to hold the commitment of a world of people in his hands, in so small a form as a handful of printed sheets.

  When they got to Omalu, Amanda landed the jitney beside others in the parking lot of the Central Administrative Offices. Here, rain had moved in once more; and the skies above them were an unbroken, dull-colored mass. They went in the wide, double-doored main entrance and Hal, looking up, saw the two stanzas of A. E. Housman's poem Epitaph on Army of Dead Mercenaries cut into the stone of the wall just above the doors. The four somber lines of the first stanza caught in his mind, as always, as he passed underneath them.

  These, in the day when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth's foundations fled,

  Followed their mercenary calling

  And took their wages and are dead …

  The room in which the meeting was to be held turned out to be one of the general audience rooms, where matters of concern to large areas of the Dorsai, if not to the planet as a whole, were debated. It was a chamber that could hold at least several hundred people and it was needed for the number who had come this day.

  "That many Grey Captains?" Hal said softly to Amanda, as she led him to the platform at the center of the semi-circular room; from which he looked out at the curved ranks of seats, each with a continuous table running in front of it, lifting to the back of the room.

  "Active, reactivated, and also all those others who may not be Captains but have become responsible in what we're to do now," she answered, as quietly. "There's no one here who's not involved."

  She stood with him on the platform at the lectern, until the conversation in the room died and all eyes came on them.

  "I think you all recognize Hal Mayne," she said; her voice reaching clearly to the walls under the excellent acoustics of the chamber. "Rourke di Facino is Chairman of this meeting. I'll leave it to him, now."

  She stepped down from the platform and went to sit in the only seat left empty in the first row. Hal recognized the pink, older face of Rourke di Facino in the center of the second row, directly opposite him. He also saw that the second row, and therefore Rourke himself, was directly level with him, leaving the first row, where Amanda sat, slightly below him and all rows from the third upwards, above.

  For a moment a touch of impatience stirred in Hal. He could see so clearly now what must be done, without other choice, that meeting like this seemed redundant, a waste of valuable time. Then, surging up in him, came the understanding that this gathering was no less important a ritual than the service and the bagpipe music at the grave of James. He realized that he was listening to the deathsong of a people and his impatience was lost in shame.

  He was still standing at the lectern. To his left was also a table and chair, the chair pulled back invitingly, the table empty. But he continued to stand. He put his copy of the contract, which he was still carrying, on the lectern's sloping face before him, and waited. Surprisingly, Rourke did not leave his seat in the audience area, but spoke from there.

  "This meeting is now in session," said the small man; his tenor voice beat sharply upward upon the general silence of the room. "I'll announce the time for general discussion when that time comes. Until then, matters will proceed according to the schedule set up by your steering committee."

  He stared at Hal.

  "We're honored to have you with us again, Hal Mayne," he said.

  "Thank you," said Hal.

  "Is there anything in particular you want to say before we get into the planned business?"

  Hal looked at him and around the room.

  "Just… that I see you've anticipated me," he said.

  There was a difference in attitude about those he now watched from the lectern, a difference from what he had seen and felt, facing the smaller number of Grey Captains he had talked to at Foralie. What he sensed now was part of the larger difference he had observed earlier in the unplanted fields and all the other changes he had noticed on the Dorsai since he had arrived.

  The awareness of it struck him with a sharpness and a poignancy he had not expected to feel. It drew him to identify it and the source of its power upon him; and so, in that moment between his answer to Rourke and Rourke's response to it, he saw more clearly the details of what was before him.

  It was as if the moment put itself on pause; as if time held its hand, briefly. But it was not really time holding or being held, but his own mental processes that had been enormously speeded up. Donal had known how to do that; and with the reawakening of Donal inside him, the ability came back to him.

  So on that stretched-out second he noticed the clothes worn by those there, while still individual and casual for the most part, were, like Amanda's this morning, yet more formal than what he had seen the last time he had faced the Captains.

  In a subtle way, although what they were dressed in varied from individual to individual, there was a preponderance of quiet earth colors, blues and grays, and a majority of open-throated upper garments with collars that laid down neatly, and a fresh cleanliness showed about everything they had on, that gave the impression that they were in a common uniform.

  But then he saw that the impression had deeper roots than clothes alone. There was also an innate commonality in the way they sat and in the state of their bodies. All of them, even the older ones present, had the appearance of being healthy and in good physical condition. There was no excess fat to be seen, even on the more thick-boned and thick-chested of those present. They sat easily, upright and square-shouldered in their seats; and they sat still, with the relaxed stillness of those who have their selves under complete control.

  … And there was also something even deeper in them than clothes and bodies that made them seem alike, for all their faces were the most varied, one from another, of the faces in any gathering he had seen on the Younger Worlds or Old Earth. No two, from the pink of Rourke's, to the hard black of Miriam Songhai's, to the lightly turned whiteness of Amanda's, were in any way the same. But still the likeness sat on them all; and he recognized its source finally in a similarity of attitude that gave them all a kinship.

  For the first time, then, he saw something he had not caught earlier. A bleakness lived in them all, a bleakness that was so deep in each that it lay buried, below actions, below appearance, even below speech.

  It was a bleakness hiding a silent and dry-eyed grief. A grief so intense and personal that they did not even speak of it to each other. A grief so fenced apart by custom and responsibility that it could be more easily seen in an unplowed field and unplanted flowers, than by anything said or done by these people. He felt it also in his own soul, recognizing it with that powerful empathy for which he, as Donal, had put off his flesh and returned to the body of a dead man in the twenty-first century, in order to acquire.

  Feeling it, he suddenly understood why he had shrunk from talking even to Amanda about that second existence of
his as Paul Formain. Each time he had needed to start life again, either as Paul or as Hal, the process of abandoning the life in him that had been, and the beginning again, had been traumatic.

  The first time, when he had become Paul Formain, had been hardest of all. To strip the mind naked of knowledge and recollections, to throw the body into an unknown environment trusting it to survive without all that had been a familiar anchor in reality—to accept the very universe as a plastic and changeable thing—had taken more courage than even Donal had realized, until the actual moment of his changing. He had gone on, then, only because there had been no other choice.

  Remembering that pain, he came abruptly to a full understanding of the pain in those he faced. It was not from what they would lose personally, or the destruction of their world and way, that they had labored to build for over three hundred years. It was from something even harder to bear; the knowledge that what they had lived with, and once thought of as secure for all foreseeable time, was now passing, would never come again, would in time be all but forgotten and buried forever.

  The pride and dream of the Dorsai, like the dream of the Round Table before it, was to pass; and they were witnesses to its passing.

  "We will proceed." The voice of Rourke was dry and emotionless in the room.

  He shuffled together the papers lying before him on his section of the long table.

  "We've lived by contracts for three centuries, here on the Dorsai," he said, briskly. "We'll die, if necessary, by proper contract. I take it you've had a chance to read the copy Amanda Morgan furnished you?"

  "Yes," said Hal. "I should say, to begin with—"

  The uplifted hand of Rourke stopped him.

  "We can discuss the actual contract in a moment," Rourke said. "As it happens, this isn't an ordinary coming to terms; but an agreement which goes in many ways beyond anything any of us have entered into before. So with your permission, we'll ask you a few questions first; and if the answers to those are satisfactory, we can move to direct discussion of the contract, itself."

  "By all means," said Hal.

  "Good," said Rourke.

  He glanced right and left, as if he would have paused to gather the eyes of all his fellow Dorsai there, if that had been possible without his standing up and turning around. Then his gaze came back to Hal's.

  "There are provisions in the contract," he said, "to require operating income for those engaged in the work of the contract, for the care of their dependents and for themselves in case of death or disabilities received in the course of work, as well as some further provision for everyone from this world who's to be engaged in that work. But in the ultimate sense, there's no currency or credit in which payment can be made for the kind of service that's being asked of us, here. I believe you can agree with me on that?"

  "Yes," said Hal. "It's true."

  "Then," said Rourke, "on behalf of all of us, let me ask you the soldier's question. Under that circumstance, why should we risk everything we've ever had, to fight and die for people who can't or won't fight for themselves?"

  "I don't think you'll find them unwilling to fight," said Hal slowly. "Some, right from the start, and more as time goes on, are going to come and join you. In fact, I'd be surprised if you hadn't already made provision for that."

  "We have, of course," said Rourke. "But my question still needs an answer."

  "I'll try to answer it…" said Hal. He stepped back mentally to let that in him which was Donal respond, and—as had happened involuntarily to him on his previous meeting with the Grey Captains—felt his earliest self take over.

  "It's an old question, isn't it?" he heard himself say. "Never answered once and for all. The Classical Greek who drank hemlock, the Roman who fell on his sword, had reasons for what they did. More to the point, the blind king, John of Bohemia, had his reasons nine hundred years ago when at fifty-four, he went to help King Philip of France against the English at the battle of Crecy; and had his squires lead him into the thick of battle, that August twenty-sixth in the year 1346, a battle in which he had to know he would be killed."

  He paused, searching the faces before him. But there was no puzzlement or uncertainty there, only a waiting.

  "In my own case…" he went on, "it's clear to me why I'm going to give everything that I've got—not just my life and all I've ever had, but any future there is for me—to what has to be done, now. I could give you my own reasons for doing that. Or I could make out a list of reasons for that ancient Greek I talked about, that old Roman, and the blind king of Bohemia. But in the end, each set of reasons would total up to the fact that what was done was done because the person doing it was who he or she was. I do now what I do because I am what I am. You, all of you, will do what you choose to do because as individuals and as a community you are what you are; and have been what you are, since the race began."

  He stopped speaking.

  "That's all the answer I've got for you," he said.

  "Yes," said Rourke unemotionally. "The other question is—where are you going to want us to fight?"

  Hal's eyes met his on the level.

  "You know I can't answer that," he said. "In the first place, that where is going to be decided by what happens between now and the moment in which we all commit ourselves to action. In the second place—you know that I don't doubt your security. But in a matter like this, with the life and future of people on a number of worlds concerned, that's one piece of information I can't share with anyone until the time is right. When the moment comes for your involvement, I'll tell you; and at that time, if you want, you can make your decision to go along with it or not, since there'll be no way in any case that I could make you agree to go along with my plans if you didn't want to."

  There was silence in the general audience room. Rourke had a stylus in hand and was making notes on the screen inset in the table surface before him. A strange feeling of having been through this before took Hal, followed by another, even stranger sensation. Abruptly, it seemed to him that he could feel the movement of this small world around its distant sun of Fomalhaut, the movement of Fomalhaut amongst its neighboring stars, the further movements of each of the human-inhabited worlds under their suns; and beyond even these he seemed to feel the great sidereal movement of the galaxy, wheeling them all inexorably onward to what awaited them further in time and space.

  "I've so noted that in the contract," Rourke said, looking up again at Hal; "and that ends the questions we had for you, at this moment. Do you have any to ask us?"

  "No," said Hal. "I'm sorry, but yes. You've made this a contract between all of you and me, with only the Final Encyclopedia to back me up. You'll have to understand that there's no way I'd ever be capable of ensuring the obligations this contract requires me to have toward you all. Even the Encyclopedia doesn't have the kind of resources that would allow it to guarantee what's set down there as due you in certain eventualities. Matters like rehabilitating this entire world, for example, if parts of it should be destroyed or damaged by enemy action in retaliation for your work under the contract; that's beyond the capabilities and wealth of several worlds, let alone something like the Encyclopedia—to say nothing of being beyond the resources of an individual like myself."

  "We understand that," said Rourke. "But this contract is made for the historical record, as well as for legal reasons. It's the whole human race we're serving in this instance; and there's no legal machinery that would be capable of binding the human race as a whole, to these obligations. But an opposite party to a contract is a necessary element in an agreement like this. We consider that what's set down here will bind both you and the Final Encyclopedia morally, to the extent of what resources you do have, to observe its provisions. More than that, we can't expect—and don't."

  "I see." Hal nodded. "On that basis, of course. Both Tam Olyn, for the Final Encyclopedia, and I will be more than willing to agree to it."

  "Then," said Rourke, "it only remains for this assembly to go through t
he contract itself with you, paragraph by paragraph, and make sure that the language of it means the same thing to you as it does to us."

  So they did. The procedure took over three hours, local time, and when Hal at last stepped down from the lectern, he found himself stiff-legged and light-headed. Amanda collected him from a number of the Captains who had come up to clasp hands with him; and led him toward the back of the room.

  "I've got someone to introduce you to," she said.

  She preceded him through the crowd of rising and departing people, many of whom also interrupted his passage to clasp his hand as he went up the levels toward the back of the chamber. As they got toward the back, the crowd thinned, and he saw a man standing by one of the entrances looking in their direction. For a moment Hal's gaze sharpened; for it was almost as if he was seeing one of the Graeme twins alive again, as his Donal memory recalled them.

  But when he got closer, he saw the differences. The man waiting for them was undeniably a Graeme—he had the straight, coarse black hair, the powerful frame and the dark eyes; but he was shorter than Ian or Kensie had been—shorter by several centimeters, in fact, than Hal himself. His shoulders sloped more than had Ian's or Kensie's and there was a more solid, less mobile, look about him. The impression he gave was of power and immovability, rather than of the rangy agility that had belonged to the twins, for all that this latter-day Graeme stood with all the balance and lightness of his lifetime's training. He was perhaps in his early thirties; and his eyes watched Hal with a controlled curiosity that Hal could understand, knowing how he, himself, must look to the other man.

  But whatever his curiosity, the other was clearly too polite in Dorsai terms to ask direct questions of Hal when Amanda halted the two of them before him.

  "Hal," said Amanda, "I want you to meet the driver of your courier ship. This is the current head of the Graeme household I told you about—Simon Khan Graeme. He just got in from New Earth, after all."