"Actually," he told her, "you argue better for my staying here when you don't argue, than you could if you used words."
He smiled, to invite her to smile back, and was relieved when she did. What he said had been said clumsily; but all the same, it was a truth she was too intelligent not to see. If she had argued, he would have had someone besides himself to marshal his own arguments against. This way, he was left to debate with his own desires; which, she might have guessed, could make an opponent far harder for him to conquer than she was.
But his conscience sank its teeth into him, now. He was, he knew, leading her on to hope—which was an unfair thing to do. He must not give in and stay here. But, because she was an Exotic and because he knew what that meant as far as her beliefs were concerned, he could think of no way to explain this to her that would not either wound or baffle her. He did not, he thought almost desperately, know enough about her—enough about her as the unique individual she was—to talk to her. And there was no time to learn that much about her.
"You're from—where? Mara? Kultis?" he asked, striking out at random. "How did you happen to end up here?"
She smiled, unexpectedly.
"Oh, I was a freak," she said.
"A freak?" Privately he had sometimes called himself that. But he could not imagine applying it to someone like her.
"Well, say I was one of the freaks, then," she answered. "We called ourselves that. Did you ever hear of a Maran Exotic called Padma?"
"Padma…"He frowned.
The name had a strange echo of familiarity, as if he had indeed heard Walter or one of his other tutors mention it, but nothing more. His memory, like the rest of him, had been trained to a fine point. If he had been told of such a man, he should be able to remember it. But nowhere, searching his memory now, could he find any clear reference to someone called Padma.
"He's very old now," she said. "But he's been an Outbond, from either Mara or Kultis, at one time or another, to every important culture on the fourteen worlds. He goes clear back to the time of Donal Graeme. In fact—that's why I'm here."
"He's that old?" Hal stared at her. "He must be older than Tam."
She sobered, suddenly. The smile left her face and went out of her voice as well.
"No. He's younger—but just by a few years." She shook her head. "Even when he was a very young man, he had an ageless look, they say. And he was brilliant, even then—even among his own generation on the Exotics. But you're almost right. When I got here, I found out even Tam had thought Padma was older than he was. But it's not true. There's been no one Tam's age; and no one like him—ever. Even Padma."
He looked at her half-skeptically.
"There are fourteen worlds," he said.
"I know," she said. "But the Final Encyclopedia's got no record of anyone else much more than a hundred and eighteen years old just now. Tam's a hundred and twenty-four. It's his will that keeps him going."
He could hear in her voice an appeal to him to understand Tam. He wanted to tell her that he would try, but once more he did not trust himself to put the assurance into words he could trust her to believe.
"But you were telling me how you got here," he said, instead. "You were saying you were one of the freaks. What did you mean? And what's Padma got to do with it?"
"It was his conscience created us—me, and the others—" she said. "It all goes back long ago to something that happened between him and Donal Graeme, back when Donal was alive and Padma was still young. Later, what passed between them brought Padma to feel that he'd been too young and sure of himself, to notice something important—that Donal had something Padma should have been aware of and made use of; something critical, he said, to the search we've been engaged in on the Exotics for three centuries now. Those are Padma's own words, to an Assembly of both the Exotic worlds forty years ago. Padma came finally to think that Donal might have been a prototype of the very thing we'd been searching for, the evolved form of human being we've always believed the race will finally produce."
He frowned at her, reaching out to understand. Donal he knew of through general history and the tales of Malachi. But he had never been too impressed with Donal, in spite of Donal's triumphs. Ian and Kensie, Donal's uncles; and Eachan Khan, Donal's grim, war-crippled father, had caught more at his imagination, among the Graemes of Foralie on the Dorsai. But the uneasy feeling that he should recognize the name continued to nag at him on a low level of consciousness.
"Padma," Ajela was going on, "felt we Exotics had to look for what he might have missed seeing in Donal; and because Padma was enormously respected—if you had an Exotic teacher, you know what the word respected means on Mara and Kultis—and because he suggested a way that had never been tried, it was agreed he could make an experiment. I—and some others like me—were the elements of the experiment. He chose fifty of the brightest Exotic children he could find and arranged to have us brought up under special conditions."
Hal frowned again at her.
"Special conditions?"
"Padma's theory was that something in our own Exotic society was inhibiting the kind of personal development that had made someone like Donal Graeme possible. Whatever else was true about him, no one could deny Donal had abilities no Exotic had ever achieved. That pointed to a blindness somewhere in our picture of ourselves, Padma said."
She was carried away now on the flood of what she was telling him. Her eyes were blue-green and depthless once more.
"So," she went on, "he got a general agreement to let him experiment with the fifty of us—Padma's Children, they called us, then—and he saw to it we were exposed, from as soon as we were able to understand, not only to the elements of our own culture, but to those in the Dorsai and the Friendly cultures which our Exotic thinking had always automatically rejected. You know how our family structure on Mara and Kultis is much looser than on the Dorsai or the Friendlies. As children, we treat all adults almost equally as parents or near relatives. No one forced the fifty of us in any particular direction, but we were given more freedom to bond emotionally to individuals, to indulge in romantic, rather than logical thinking. You see—a romantic attitude was the one common element permitted Dorsai and Friendly children, which we on the Exotics had always been steered away from."
He sat, studying her as she talked. He did not yet see where her words were headed, but he could feel strongly across the short physical distance separating them that what she was saying was not only something of intense importance to her, but something that it was difficult for her to say to him. He nodded now, to encourage her to go on; and she did.
"To make the story short," she said, "we were set free to fall in love with things we ordinarily would've been told were unproductive subjects for such attention; and in my case what I fell in love with, when I was barely old enough to learn about it, was the story of Tam Olyn—the brilliant, grim, interstellar newsman who tried and almost succeeded in a personal vendetta to destroy the Friendly culture, only to change his mind suddenly and completely, to come back to Earth and take on all the responsibility of the Final Encyclopedia, where he'd been the only person except Mark Torre to hear the voices at the Center point."
Her face was animated now. The feeling in her reached and caught up Hal as music might have caught him up.
"This man, who still controls the Final Encyclopedia," she went on animatedly, "holding it in trust all these years for the race, and refusing to let any other person or power control it. By the time I was nine I knew I had to come here; and by the time I was eleven, they let me come—on Tam's personal responsibility."
She smiled suddenly.
"It seemed," she said, "Tam was intrigued by someone only my age who could be so set on getting here; and I found out later, partly he hoped I might hear the voices, as you and he did. But I didn't."
She stopped speaking, suddenly, with her last three words. The smile went. She had hardly touched the small salad she had ordered; but Hal recognized with surprise that his
own plate was utterly empty—and yet he could not remember eating as he listened to her.
"So it's because of Tam you're still here?" he said, finally, when it seemed she would not go on. She had started to poke at her salad, but when he spoke she put her fork down and looked levelly across the table at him.
"I came because of him, yes," she said. "But since then I've come to see what he sees in the Encyclopedia—what you should see in it. Now, even if there weren't any Tam Olyn, I'd still be here."
She glanced down at her salad and pushed the transparent bowl that held it away from her. Then she looked back at him, again.
"It's the hope of the race," she said to him. "Their one hope. I don't believe any longer that the answer can lie with our Exotics, or anyone else. It's here—here! No place else. And only Tam's been able to keep it alive. He needs you."
The tone of her voice on her last words tore at him. He looked at her and knew finally that he could not give her a flat no, not here, not now. He took a deep, unhappy breath.
"Let me think about it—a little longer," he said. Suddenly, he felt a desperate need to get away from her before he made her some promise that was neither true nor possible to keep. He pushed his float back from the table, still unable to keep his eyes off her face. He would tell her later, he told himself, call her from his room, and tell her that eventually he would be back. Even with their phone screens on, there would be a psychic distance between them that would lessen the terrible power of persuasion he felt coming at him from her now, and make it possible for him to reassure her he would someday return.
"I'll go back to my room and think about it, now," he said.
"All right," she said without moving. "But remember, you heard the voices. You have to understand; because there's only the three of us who do. You, Tam and I. Remember what you risk if you leave, now. If you go, and while you're gone Tam reaches the point where he can't go on being Director any longer, by the time you come back the Board will be in charge; and they won't want to give up control. If you go now, you may lose your chance here, forever!"
He nodded and stood up. Slowly, she stood up on the other side of the table and together, not saying anything more to each other, they went out of the dining room. At its entrance, Ajela touched a control pad set in the wall, and the same short corridor formed with a door at the end that would be the entrance to his own quarters.
"Thank you," he said, hardly looking at her. "I'll call you—as soon as I've got something to tell you."
After a moment more he met her eyes with his own. Her naked gaze seemed to go through him effortlessly.
"I'll wait for you to call," she said.
He went down the corridor, still feeling her standing watching him from behind, as he had felt the piercing strength of her gaze. Not until the door of his room closed behind him did he feel free of her. He dropped into a float opposite his bed.
There was an empty loneliness and a longing in him. What he needed desperately, he told himself, was some point outside the situation that now held him, where he could stand and look at it—and at her expectations and Tam's. Of course, she would see no sense in his going. From her standpoint, the Encyclopedia was so much beyond Coby in what it had to offer him that any comparison of the two was ridiculous. All Coby had to offer was someplace to hide.
The Encyclopedia offered him not only that, but the shield of the force panels, the protection of those who belonged to the single institution that the Others probably would never be able to control, and quite possibly would have no interest in controlling. In fact, as long as he stayed and worked with the Final Encyclopedia, here, what sort of threat did he pose to the Others? It would be only out in their territory, on the younger worlds, that he posed a possible threat to them. Even if they discovered him here, it might well be that they would simply decide to leave him alone.
Meanwhile, there was all that the Encyclopedia had to offer him. Walter the InTeacher had been fond of saying that the pursuit of knowledge was the greatest adventure ever discovered by the human race. The degree to which Ajela had touched Hal just now had almost swept him away beyond the power of any personal choice. To be able to work with the Encyclopedia as he had done for a short while was like having the Universe handed to him for a plaything. It was more than that—
It was, thought Hal suddenly, like being able to play God.
On Coby he would be a stranger among strangers—and probably among strangers who were the sweepings of the fourteen worlds, for who would go and work in the mines of Coby if he could be someplace else? Here, he already knew Ajela… and Tam.
And her last words had struck him forcefully. She was right in the fact that if he went now and Tam died or stopped being Director, Hal's own chances at that post with the Encyclopedia could be lost forever. His mind shied from the responsibility of the prospect. But it was a great and almost unheard-of thing, to be someone who could be considered as a successor to the Director of the Encyclopedia. Tam seemed a crusty sort of individual—age might have something to do with that, or it might be his natural pattern—but Ajela obviously found him to be someone she could love; and, in fact, Hal had found himself warming to the old man, also, even during their brief meeting.
It might also be his resemblance to Obadiah. Perhaps Hal was deliberately making himself see Obadiah in the Director, and this was giving him a greater feeling of closeness to Tam than the situation actually justified. But it really did not matter whether Tam and he were close or not. The overwhelmingly important thing was the Encyclopedia itself and that it have a continuity of Directors; and if Hal was indeed a serious possibility to take control from Tam's hands eventually, then…
Hal's mind drifted into a dark, but comfortable dream of the Encyclopedia, as it might be after he had been here some years and was finally in control as Director. Ajela could probably be brought to agree to stay on with him, in something like the relationship that she had with Tam—of course she could, for the Encyclopedia's sake, if nothing else. And, if they should really agree well together…
He looked at the chronometer on his wrist. The ring that was set to local time showed a little less than an hour and a half before his ship was scheduled to lift from its docking, just under the metal and force-panel skin of the Encyclopedia. His mind still caught in his dark dream, he got up and went across the room, to find the travel bag with which he had come to the Encyclopedia. He was holding it in his hands before he realized what he was doing.
He laughed.
He was on his way to Coby.
The recognition came like a dull, but expected, shock. Abruptly, then, he realized; it was not the dead hands of Walter, Malachi and Obadiah reaching out to control him against his will. It was not even the calculation of his training that had implemented its decision by some sort of conditioned lever upon his will. It was simply that he, for reasons he could not clearly enunciate, knew that he had to go; and, far from weakening that certainty, what he had heard from Ajela and experienced in his earlier work with the Encyclopedia that morning had confirmed it.
Heavily, he began to do what little gathering of papers and possessions was necessary. He had been deluding not only Ajela, but himself, by pretending that the question of his staying was still open.
He had not been able to face Ajela with that truth over the lunch table. She would not have pressed him for reasons, he knew, being an Exotic; but she would have—and still did—deserve some. Only, he would not be able to give her any. So he would simply sneak out of the Encyclopedia, after all, as he had, in effect, sneaked in; and he would send both her and Tam a message afterwards, once he was irrevocably on his way among the stars.
He finished up, coded the number of his exit port into the room control, and stepped out the dilated entrance into a short corridor that took him down and through another entrance, past another screen from which an elderly woman perfunctorily scanned his papers, and into the port chamber.
There was a forty minute wait before he could b
oard the ship. But five minutes later he was in his compartment, and forty minutes after that, the ship sealed and lifted. An annunciator woke over his head.
"First phase shift in two hours," it said. "First phase shift in two hours. There will be a meal service immediately after the shift. All portside compartments, first seating; all starboardside compartments, second seating."
He was in a portside compartment; but he was not hungry—although in two hours, knowing himself, he would probably be starving, as usual. He sat down on that one of the two fixed seats in the compartment that was below the bed folded up against the bulkhead.
Once they had phase-shifted, there would be no direct communication possible with the Encyclopedia. At once, they would be light-years distant; and a message physically carried by a ship inbound to Earth would be the quickest way of getting in touch. He did not feel up to talking face to face with Ajela, in any case; but something in him rebelled at waiting to tell her until he was well away. She would be looking at the time and thinking that he had decided against going, and was working with the Encyclopedia—and she would hear from him about dinner time.
He roused himself, stepped across to the tiny desk against the wall of his compartment opposite the bed, sat down on the other seat, and coded a call to the ship's communications center. The screen lit up with a heavy man in ship's whites.
"I'd like to send a message back to the Encyclopedia," he said.
"Certainly. Want the message privacy coded? And written of spoken?"