The Final Encyclopedia

  He stopped talking.

  "That's all," he said, abruptly.

  He turned and left the platform. There was no sound from the audience to signal his going. Amid had returned and was standing waiting for him with Padma.

  In silence they left the amphitheater through a doorway different from the one by which they had entered. Hal found himself walking down a long, stone-walled corridor, with an arched roof and a waist-high stretch of windows deeply inset in the full length of wall on his right. They were actual windows, not merely open space with weather control holding the cold and the wind at bay; and their glass was made up of diamond-shaped panes leaded together. The stone was gray and cold-looking; and beyond the leaden panes, he could see in the late-afternoon light that the white flakes were still falling thickly, so that the snow was already beginning to soften and obliterate the clear outlines of trees, paths and buildings.

  "How long, do you think, before the vote will be in, from both worlds?" Hal asked Amid.

  The small, old face looked sideways and up at him.

  "It was in before you landed."

  Hal walked a few steps without saying anything.

  "I see," he said, then. "And, when Bleys appeared, it was decided to hold up the results until everyone had heard what he had to say."

  "We're a practical people—in practical matters," said Amid. "It was that, of course. But also, everyone wanted to see and hear you speak, before a final announcement of the decision. Wouldn't you, yourself, want to meet the one person who would deal with the end of everything you'd ever lived for?"

  "All the same," said Hal, "the option was reopened for them to change their minds, if Bleys was able to bring them to it. Well, was he?"

  "Except for a statistically insignificant handful, no, I'm told." Amid's eyes rested on him as they walked. "I think that in this, Hal Mayne, you may fail to understand something. We knew there was nothing Bleys Ahrens could say that would change any of us. But it's always been our way to listen. Should we change now? And do you really think so badly of us that you could believe we'd fail to face up to what we have to do? We here have our faith, too—and our courage."

  Amid turned his gaze away from him, looking on ahead to the end of the corridor, to the double doors of heavy, bolted wood, standing ajar on a dimness that baffled the eye.

  "It'll take a day or two for our representatives to get together with you on details," the small man went on. "Meanwhile, you can be discussing with Rukh Tamani your plans for her crusade on Old Earth. In three days, at most, your work will be done here, and then you'll be free to go on to wherever you've planned to, next. Where is that, by the way?"

  "Earth…" said Hal.

  But his mind was elsewhere; and his conscience was reproaching him. He had felt a small chill on hearing that Bleys was here; and that chill had come close to triggering an actual fear in him when he saw the man standing before those assembled in the amphitheater, and heard him speak. It was no longer a fear that Bleys might have the talent and the arguments to out-talk him; but a fear that the Exotics, even recognizing the falsity of Bleys' purpose, would still seize on what the Other said as an excuse not to act, not to join the fight openly until it was too late for them and everyone else.

  He had been wrong. From the time he had been Donal, he thought now, one failing had clung to him. With all he knew, he could still find it in him to doubt his fellow humans; when, deeply, he knew that anything that was possible to him must be possible to them, as well. For a little while, there in the amphitheater, he had doubted that the Exotics had it in them to die for a cause, even for their own cause. He had let himself be prejudiced by the centuries in which they had seemed to want to buy peace at any price; and he had forgotten their dedication to the purpose for which they had bought that peace.

  Now he faced the unyielding truth. It was far easier for anyone simply to fight, and die fighting; than to calmly, cold-bloodedly, invite the enemy within doors and sit waiting for death so that others might live. But that was what the people of Mara and Kultis had just voted to do.

  Amid had been right in what he had just said.

  With this last act, all of them, including the unwarlike little man now walking beside him, had demonstrated a courage as great as any Dorsai's, and a faith in what they had lived for during these last three centuries, as great as that of any Friendly. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched Amid moving down the corridor; and in his mind he could see—not himself—but the ghosts of Ian and Child-of-God walking on either side of his ancient and fragile companion.

  "Yes," he said, breaking the silence once more as they came to the double doors. "Earth. There's a place there I've been trying to get back to for a long time now."

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  They went on together, passing from the light of day into the relative obscurity of the space lying beyond the double doors, which closed behind them.

  Within, warmly lit by an artificial illumination that in here was more than sufficient, but which had been unable to compete with the cloudy brightness of the late winter afternoon beyond the leaded windows, was a hexagonal room with a slightly domed ceiling, under which nine Exotics were seated about a large, round table. Their robes warmed the interior space with rich earth-colors in the soft light. Two floats at the table sat empty; and it was to these that Amid brought Hal and himself.

  Sitting down, Hal looked about at those there, four of whom he recognized. There were the old features of Padma, the small, dark ones of Nonne, the dry ones of Alhanon and the friendly expression of Chavis—all of those who had talked to him on his last visit here, sitting with him and Amid on a balcony of Amid's home. The others he saw were strangers to him; strangers with quiet, Exotic faces having little to make them stick in the mind at first glance.

  "Our two worlds are at your disposal now, Hal Mayne," said the age-hoarsened voice of Padma; and Hal looked over at the very old man. "Or has Amid already told you?"

  "Yes," said Hal, "I asked him, on the way here."

  Nonne started to say something, then stopped, looking at Padma.

  "I won't forget," said Padma, looking briefly at her. "Hal, we feel you ought to understand one thing about our future cooperation with you. We don't sign contracts like the Dorsai, but three hundred years of keeping our word speaks for itself."

  "It does," said Hal. "Of course."

  "Therefore," Padma put his hands flat on the smooth, dark surface of the table before him as if he would summon it to confirm his words, "you have to understand that we've chosen to go your way in this struggle, simply because there was no other way we could find to go. What's ironical is that the very calculations we'd been using to find out if you ought to be followed, now unmistakably show that you should be—primarily because of the effect of our own decision on the situation."

  The hoarseness in his voice had been getting worse as he talked. He stopped speaking and tapped the tabletop before him with a wrinkled forefinger. A glass of clear liquid rose into view; and he drank from it, then continued.

  "It's only right to tell you that there was a great feeling of reservation in many of us about following you," he said, "—not in me, personally, but in many of us—and that reservation was a reasonable one. But you should know us well enough to trust us, now that we've voted. Effectively, those reservations don't exist any longer. Irrevocably and unchangingly, we're now committed to follow wherever you lead, whatever the cost to us."

  "Thank you," said Hal. "I know what that voting has to have meant to you all. I appreciate what you've done."

  He leaned forward a little over the table, becoming suddenly conscious of how his greater height and width of shoulders made him seem to loom over the rest of them.

  "As I said out there, what I'll probably have to ask your two worlds to give me," he said to them all, "to put it simply, is everything you have—"

  "One more moment, if you don't mind," Padma broke in.

  Hal stopped speaking. He turned back to
Padma.

  "We know something of what you've got to tell us," Padma said. "But first, you ought to let us give you some information we can share with you now; we couldn't tell you, earlier, before we were committed to working with you."

  There was a small, tight silence about the table.

  "All right," said Hal. "Go on. I'm listening."

  "As I just said, what we have is yours, now," said Padma. "That includes some things you may know we have, but which are possibly a great deal more effective than you might have guessed."

  His old, dry-throated voice failed him again. He reached for the filled glass on the table before him and sipped once more from its contents. Putting the glass down, he went on more clearly.

  "I'm talking," he said, "of our ability to gather information—and our techniques for evaluating it. I think you'll be interested to hear, now, what we've concluded about both you and Bleys Ahrens."

  "You're right." Hal stared hard into the old eyes.

  "The result," Padma went on with no change in his tone, "of that gathering and evaluating gave us a pattern on each of you that could help you now to define the shape of the coming conflict."

  He paused.

  "The pattern on Bleys shows him aware of his strength and determined to use it in economical fashion—in other words, in such a way that he and the Others can't lose, since they'll simply operate by maintaining their present advantage and increasing it when they can, until there's no opposition to them left. This is a sort of dealing from strength that seems particularly congenial to Bleys' temperament. He seems to believe he and his people are fated to win; and, far from glorying in it, he seems to find a sad, almost melancholy pleasure in the inevitability of this that suits his own view of himself and reality. Apparently, he regards himself as being so isolated in the universe that nothing that happens in it can either much raise or lower his spirits."

  "Yes," murmured Hal.

  "This isolation of his bears an interesting resemblance to your own isolate character," said Padma, gazing at Hal. "In many ways, in fact, he's remarkably like you."

  Hal said nothing.

  "In fact," Padma went on, "to a large extent he's justified in his expectations. The ongoing factors of history—the forces that continue from generation to generation, sometimes building, sometimes waning—now seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of the Others. Our own discipline of ontogenetics, which we evolved to help us solve such problems as this, instead simply produces more and more proofs that Bleys is right in what he believes."

  Hal nodded, slowly; and Padma took a moment to drink once more.

  "If Bleys is the epitome of all that is orthodox aiming to win and moving to that end," Padma went on, "you, who should in any sane universe be the champion of what has been tried and established, are just the opposite. You are unorthodoxy personified. We have no real data on you before the time you were picked up as a mystery infant from a derelict ship in Earth orbit. You show no hard reason why you should emerge as the leader of an effort to turn back something like Bleys and the Others; but somehow all those opposed to Bleys have enlisted to follow you—even those of us on our two worlds, who've striven to think coolly and sensibly for three hundred years."

  He paused and drew a deep breath.

  "We," he said, "of all people, don't believe in mysteries. Therefore, we've had to conclude that there must be some mechanism at work here in your favor that we can't see and don't understand. All we can do is hope that it's equally invisible to, and equally beyond the understanding of, Bleys Ahrens."

  "Assuming you're right," said Hal, "I'll join you in that hope."

  "Which brings us to your pattern—what we know of it," said Padma. "What we have, in fact, concluded from the information we've processed—and we assume that someone like Bleys must have also come to the same conclusions—is that the only course open to you is to use the Dorsai as an expeditionary force against whatever military forces the Others may be able to gather and equip."

  He paused and looked at Hal.

  "Go on," said Hal, levelly. "What you've said so far's only an obvious conclusion in the light of the present situation. It doesn't call for any special access to information, or a Bleys-like mind, to read that as a possibility."

  "Perhaps not," said Padma. "However, it's equally obvious then that, either way, such a use on your part can't end in anything but failure. On the one hand, if you hold back your Dorsai until the forces that the Others are capable of gathering are ready to move, then not even the Dorsai will be able to handle that much opposition. Am I right?"

  "Perhaps," said Hal.

  "On the other hand," Padma went on, "if you spend this irreplaceable pool of trained military personnel in raids to destroy the Others' forces while those forces are forming and arming, the gradual attrition of even such experienced fighters as the Dorsai in such encounters will eventually reduce their numbers to the point where there won't be enough of them left to pose any real opposition to the Others' strength. Isn't that also an inescapable conclusion?"

  "It's a conclusion, certainly," Hal answered.

  "How, then," said Padma, "can you hope to win?"

  Hal smiled—and it was not until he saw the faint but unmistakable changes of expression on the other faces around the table that he realized how that smile must appear to them.

  "I can hope to win," he said slowly and clearly, "because I will not lose. I know those words mean nothing to you now. But if it was possible for you to understand what I mean by that, there'd be no war facing us; and the threat posed against us by the existence of the Others would've already been solved."

  Padma frowned.

  "That's no answer," he said.

  "Then let me offer you this one," said Hal. "The forces of history are only the internal struggles of a human race that's determined, above all, to survive. That much you ought to be able to understand yourselves, from your own work and studying to understand what is humanity. Apply that understanding equally to the large number of forces that seem to operate in favor of the Others and to the relatively small number that seem to operate in the favor of the survival of us—we who oppose them—and you'll see which forces must wax and which must wane if survival for the race as a whole is to be achieved."

  He stopped, and his words echoed in his own ears. I'm talking like an Exotic myself, he thought.

  "If what you're saying is the truth," Nonne broke out as if she could not hold herself silent any longer, "then the situation ought to cure itself. We don't need you."

  He turned his smile on her.

  "But I'm one of those forces of history I mentioned," he said, "—as Bleys is. We're effects, not causes, of the historical situation. If you got rid of either one of us you'd simply have a slightly different aspect of the same problem with someone else in replacement position. The truth is you can't get rid of what each of us represents, any more than you can get rid of any of the other forces at work. All you can do is choose your side; and I thought I'd just pointed out to you that you've already done that?"

  "Hal," said Amid softly at his side, "that was an unnecessary, if not somewhat discourteous, question."

  Hal sobered, turning to the small man.

  "Of course. You're right. I withdraw it—and apologize," he said to Nonne. He looked at Padma. "What else have you got to tell me from this body of information you've gathered and evaluated?"

  "We've got detailed data from all the sites on the worlds where the Others are gathering and training their soldiers," said Padma, "and from all the areas where work is going on to produce the spaceships and materiel to equip them. Hopefully, this will be sufficient for your needs, although of course there's information we can't get—"

  "It's not that so much," said Hal, almost unthinkingly, "as that there's other information I have to gather for myself."

  "I don't understand," said Padma.

  Around the table they were regarding him oddly.

  "I'm afraid," said Hal slowly, "I'd have tro
uble explaining it to your satisfaction. Basically, it's just that I'll have to see these places and the people working in them for myself. I'll be looking for things your people could never give me. You'll just have to take my word for it, that it's necessary I go and see for myself."

  The concept of the Final Encyclopedia had been forming like a palpable mass in his mind as he spoke and the sense of the immeasurably vast, inchoate problem with which he had been wrestling these last years crouched like a living thing before him. There was no way of explaining to Exotics that the battleground he now envisioned encroached literally upon that territory which encompassed the human soul.

  "You'll simply have to trust me," he repeated, "when I say it's necessary."

  "Well," said Padma heavily, "if you must… we still have courier ships making the trips back and forth between these two worlds of ours and our embassies on the other worlds. We can supply you with a ship."

  Hal breathed out evenly and lowered his gaze to the polished pool of darkness that was the tabletop.

  "A ship won't be necessary," he heard himself say, as if from some distance. "The Dorsai've already given me one—and a driver."

  He continued to stare into the darkness of the tabletop for a moment longer, then slowly raised his eyes and looked back once more at Amid. He smiled again, but this time the smile faded quickly.

  "It seems that trip of mine to Old Earth is going to have to wait a little longer, after all," he said.

  * * * *

  His perception was correct. Nearly four months later, standard time, he had still not stepped within the orbit of Earth; and he was running for his life through back alleys of Novenoe, a city on Freiland.

  The months of visiting most of the Younger Worlds, slipping in with his Dorsai courier ship and going secretly to make first-hand observations at the factories and installations in which the Others were putting together the soldiers and material they would use in their war effort, had worn him thin—almost as thin as he had been on Harmony when the Militia had caught him.