Learning how to love and be loved is Hal's particular triumph—he yields to overcome. As Donal he tries to push and pull persons around like building blocks, arranging his subordinates below him like the supporting pillars of an arch. But Hal instead persuades his comrades to form an encircling wall of linked arms around him. The lonely godling has become human so that other humans can become godlike.
The kinds of associates Hal draws to him make interesting contrasts to Donal's contemporaries. Because the Splinter Cultures are eroding, the men are lower peaks in the same mountain ranges their predecessors dominated: Jason is a lesser Jamethon, Amid a lesser Padma, Simon a lesser Ian. But women like Athalia (Friendly/Exotic), Nonne (Exotic/Dorsai), and Miriam (Dorsai/Friendly) are subliminally crosscultural for the tectonic plates that uphold established mountains are shifting.
The company is shaped by the struggle it agrees to undertake at Hal's side. His apocalyptic message poses cruel choices that divide single homes and whole societies. Yet once made, these decisions also open unexpected avenues to reconciliation between cultures sundered from birth. The process affects both groups and individuals. Hostile sects on Harmony join hands against the common foe. Ajela, Rukh, and Amanda each resolve previous conflicts between their public roles and private selves. Above all, it touches the racial animal. What Paul divides into conscious and unconscious halves, Hal labors to rejoin. Only prior separation makes reunion possible.
But before the peace, the war. Hal and his companions form a whole constellation of light to confront a prince of darkness. This tension between Light and Darkness is a recurring thematic marker to characterize persons or situation—or even both at once. Rukh and Child radiate like glowing coals; Bleys bedims like a gloomy cloud. Hal's will to live is a blinding lamp but the shades of his tutors are burnt-out candles. Coby's lighting is cruelly steady and the Encyclopedia's responsively fluid just as Bleys is a Tyrant Holdfast and Hal a champion of change.
But light is not automatically equated with Good nor darkness with Evil. Either condition can express either quality. In their first trial of will, Hal draws strength to resist the storm of darkness that is Bleys by envisioning both an eternal flame and a dark stone altar. Brunette Rukh with her dusky Mediterranean complexion is faery-fair Amanda's match in loveliness and heroism. Mystic shadows matter as much as the luminous reason that dispels them. Cool darkness conceals Hal's flight from home but hot brightness signals danger during his brawl with a fellow miner. Turning his eyes from the light lets Hal lead the Command through the night-shrouded forest to safety.
The alteration of bright and dark shapes days and seasons to signal shifting moods. Though autumn evening dies on Earth and winter falls on Mara which once had seemed a summer country of the mind, one last defiant Dorsai springtime promises rebirth. But until that destiny is fulfilled, light and darkness wait "in order serviceable" for the climax of Hal's creative struggle. Within the Encyclopedia he strives alone, enveloped by silent, starry space no Lucifer could endure.
Passages between Darkness and Light delimit human life. Three pairs of transits made by one persona bring forth Donal, Paul, and Hal in turn. But their lives do not simply retrace the same round. Since each of these avatars undergoes a whole series of initiations, their collective experiences form a winding gyre of many small turns between the three great ones. This unique spiral ascent opens a path the whole race will follow. Then nothing that once comes into light will thereafter go into darkness forever.
Day and night have measured enough lifetimes. A long evolutionary gestation stretching back to the first germ of sentient awareness draws near its term. A new and more perfect human condition is about to emerge. Soon, ethically mature mankind will be able to believe, think, and act responsibly, with conscious and unconscious impulses permanently reconciled. While "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together" awaiting this consummation, recurring images of conception, pregnancy, and birth convey Hal's role in bringing it forth.
From the time Donal recreates himself as an infant inside his personal spacecraft until the full-grown man takes his place in the Encyclopedia, Hal passes through a bewildering variety of wombs. The circumstances of his escape from Earth immediately set the tone. Note the Freudian femininity of the "eggshell" canoe, lake, shed, house, bus, and space ferry. Thereafter, a sequence of real or visionary chambers are places where transforming lessons are learned and prodigious growth achieved. Sessions in a healer's cozily uterine bed restore him so he can proclaim the enlightenment he won in prison. (He then plays midwife in Rukh's delivery from the same confinement.) These enclosures may be as grand as the Dorsai assembly hall or trivial as the mail kiosk that receives his identity papers with a soft, orgiastic sigh. In his end is his beginning and in his beginning, his end: only a return to the ancestral womb of Graemehouse establishes his true nature and bonds him to the partner best suited to appreciate it.
But the two most significant incubators are so utterly unlike as to be mystically the same. Coby and the Final Encyclopedia are Night and Day faces of Motherhood—Devourer versus Nourisher—but Mothers nonetheless. The moonlet and the planetoid are both hollow, inhabited bodies that spacecraft actually penetrate to service. Their mazy inner recesses hold vital resources everywhere in demand. However, Coby grudgingly yields ore to sweaty, competitive miners while the Encyclopedia freely offers knowledge to cooperative scholars. The one society is oppressed, deprived, and brutal; the other is liberated, affluent, and kindly. The infernal Mother kills her children but the celestial one preserves them.
Hal enters the mines with the utmost reluctance. His alias "Tad Thornhill" sounds a boy's phallic defiance in the midst of a fearsome rocky womb. Yet even in the belly of the beast he finds gold and friendship for there is no darkness wholly barren of light. Refined raw materials from Coby may be incorporated into the subtle fabric of the Encyclopedia; unpromising people may be converted by compassion. The lowest is potentially the highest nor can the highest stand without it.
Thus Coby is a necessary stage in Hal's pilgrimage to the Encyclopedia, not a detour away from it. The long way round is really the shortest route—a spiritual great circle. On Coby Hal begins learning that progress comes paradoxically. Neither force nor reason suffices for making the difficult passage. One leaps through the clashing rocks by faith or not at all. Only by embracing the Hag does Hal win the Queen for both are the same woman in different guise.
The same underlying principle can resolve Hal's impasse with Bleys. They are two rival futures struggling like Jacob and Esau in the womb of Time—their final meeting-place at the Encyclopedia's boundary is a kind of birth-canal—and Necessity is closing around them like uterine contractions. Vast causal chains of choice have brought them to this crisis. Liberty-loving Dorsai that he is, Donal assumes his actions are completely free. But after contemplating his past lives, Hal gradually realizes that historic forces have determined his decisions. Held fast by his dilemma, he has yet to discover how opposites like Freedom and Necessity or Self and Other can be identical. Until the path through paradox opens, Time will labor in vain without hope of living issue.
It is only fitting that the age-old conflict be concluded in and around the Final Encyclopedia, the ultimate man-made womb. Here is the matrix of transcendence for Hal and for all humanity through him.
First, the Encyclopedia is a marvelous artifact, begun on Earth and completed in orbit. This evolutionary instrument is designed to shine light into the dark corners of the racial mind just as a woman might "show a man the back of his head." On the personal scale, its womanly vitality reverses the negative feminine symbols that haunt Tam in Soldier, Ask Not. In place of a cryptlike house, the ruined Parthenon, and his victims' graves, it gives him a loving home, a temple of learning, and a font of life.
Moreover, the Encyclopedia is the heavenly computer, antithesis of Necromancer's hellish Super Complex. That sentient subterranean device is a Terrible Mother who castrates, crushes, and controls her
children to keep them infantile forever. Super Complex threatens mankind until Paul defangs it; the Encyclopedia cannot save mankind unless Hal joins it.
Furthermore, the Encyclopedia is both an "elementary" and a "transformative" Mother figure as defined by mythologist Erich Neumann. On the one hand, it is a container for implanted knowledge. Its mission to guard the sum of recorded experience later expands to encompass the physical defense of Earth. (Thus did the medieval Virgin of Mercy spread her sheltering cloak over people of every class and condition.) On the other hand, the Encyclopedia also shapes what it holds, knotting strands of data into new webs of understanding. (Likewise the Biblical Holy Wisdom, Yahweh's docile agent, "covered the earth like a mist" and "encircled the vault of the sky" tirelessly "ordering all things for the good.") Taken together, the Encyclopedia's twin functions of keeping and transmuting link it back to its Renaissance prototype the Theater of Memory. There, encoded knowledge was catalogued to spark mystic enlightenment. (Paleolithic cave art may have served a similar purpose.) But what the past failed to produce, the Encyclopedia will deliver.
As the promise of that wondrous future made flesh, Hal is self-conceived in his fruitful virgin mother's metal womb and is coupled to his creative work within her. But Bleys, the solitary autarch, enjoys no such parent or partner's care. Tomorrow's gates are locked against his keyless hand.
Meanwhile, Hal has literally found his "final encyclopedia." His third lap around life's circuit of instruction is to be his last. The long initiation hastens to its close. The child is nearly a man; the childe is almost a knight. "Darkness within darkness," says the Tao Te Ching: "the gate to all mystery." But the pilgrim bold enough to brave rebirth finds the Door into Darkness a passageway to boundless Light.
Gordon R. Dickson, The Final Encyclopedia
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