The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "And there's more than love," said Malachi, suddenly. "You'll find that out. In the end you may have to do without love to get done what you have to do."

  "That will come," said Obadiah, "if God wills. But there's no reason the child should have to face that test, yet. Leave it to the future, Malachi."

  "The future is here," growled Malachi. "He won't survive the forces against him by sitting on a bed and crying. Boy, straighten up—" The command was harsh, but the tone in which it was uttered was not. "Try to take hold. You have to plan what to do. The dead are dead. The living owe their concern to the living, even if the living are themselves."

  "Hal," said Walter, still gently, but insistently. "Malachi is right. Obadiah is right. By clinging to your grief, now, you only put off the moment when you have to think of more important things."

  "No," said Hal, shaking his head. "No."

  He shut his mind against them. It was unthinkable that he should let go any of the grief inside him. To do so, even in the smallest way, threw the earth of certainty upon the doubtless unmarked graves of these three he had loved and still loved. But they continued to talk, saying the things he had heard them say so many times, in the ways he remembered them saying such things; and gradually he began, in spite of himself, to listen.

  The shock of what had happened had driven him nearly back into being a very young child again, with all the terrible helplessness of the young. But now, as the familiar voices spoke back and forth around him, he began to come back up to the relative maturity of his sixteen years.

  "…he must hide somewhere," Walter was saying.

  "Where?" said Malachi.

  "I'll go to the Exotics," Hal surprised himself by saying. "I could pass for a Maran—couldn't I, Walter?"

  "What about that?" Malachi demanded of the InTeacher, "Would your people give him up to the Others?"

  "Not willingly," said Walter. "But you're right. If the Others located him there and put pressure on, they couldn't keep him. The Exotics are free of Other control on their own worlds, but their interplanetary connections are vulnerable—and two worlds have to take precedence in importance over one boy."

  "He could hide on Harmony or Association," Obadiah said. "The Other People control our cities, but outside those cities there are those who will never work with the Belial-spawn. Such people of mine would not give him up."

  "He'd have to live like an outlaw," Walter said. "He's too young to fight yet."

  "I can fight!" said Hal. "Others, or anyone else!"

  "Be quiet, boy!" growled Malachi. "They'd have you on toast for breakfast without getting up off their chairs. You're right, Walter. The Friendly Worlds aren't safe for him."

  "Then, the Dorsai," said Hal. Malachi's gray thickets of eyebrows frowned at him.

  "When you're ready and able to fight, then go to the Dorsai," the old man said. "Until that day, there's nothing they can do for you there."

  "Where, then?" said Obadiah. "All other worlds but Earth are already under Other control. They'd only have to sniff him there, and he'd be gone with no one to aid him."

  "Still," said Walter. "It has to be one of the other worlds. Earth, here, is also no good. They'll be looking for him as soon as they unravel the full story of his life and our teaching. There're Exotic mixed breeds among them, like that tall man who was there at our death; and they, like me—like all of us trained on Mara or Kultis—know ontogenetics. They're a historic force, the Other People, and they'll know that for any such force there must be a counter-force. They'll have been watching for its appearance among the rest of the race, from the beginning. They'll take no chances of leaving Hal alive once they have his full story."

  "Newton, then," said Obadiah. "Let him hide among the laboratories and the ivory towers."

  "No," said Malachi. "They're all turtles, there, all clams. They pull back into their shell and pull the shell in after them. He'd stick out like a sore thumb among such people."

  "What about Ceta?" said Obadiah.

  "That's where the Others are thickest—where the banking and the threads of interstellar trade are pulled," said Malachi, irritably. "Are you mad, Obadiah? Anyway, all of these unspecialized worlds, as well as old Venus and Mars, are places where none of the machinery of society is under any control but that of the Others. One slip and it'd be over for our boy."

  "Yes," said Walter slowly. "But Obadiah, you said all worlds but the Dorsai, the Exotics, the Friendlies and Earth were already under Others' control. There's one exception. The world they can't be bothered with because there's no real society there for them to want to control. Coby."

  "The mining world?" Hal stared at Walter. "But there's nothing there for me to do but work in the mines."

  "Yes," said Walter.

  Hal continued to stare at the InTeacher.

  "But…" words failed him. Mara, Kultis, the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, and the Dorsai were all places to which he had longed to go. Any beyond these, any of the Younger Worlds were unknown, interesting places. But Coby…

  "It's like sending me to prison!" he said.

  "Walter," Malachi was looking at the InTeacher, "I think you're right."

  He swung to face Hal.

  "How old are you now, boy? You're due to turn seventeen in a month or so, aren't you?"

  "In two weeks," said Hal, his voice thinning at the sudden surge of old memories, of early birthday parties and all the years of his growing up.

  "Seventeen—" said Malachi, looking again at Walter and at Obadiah. "Three years in the mines and he'd be almost twenty—"

  "Three years!" The cry broke from Hal.

  "Yes, three years," said Walter softly. "Among the nameless and lost people there, you can do a better job of becoming nameless and lost, yourself, than you can do on any other world. Three years will bury you completely."

  "And he'll come out different," said Obadiah.

  "But I don't want to be different!"

  "You must be," said Malachi to him. "That is, at least, if you're to survive."

  "But, three years!" said Hal again. "That's nearly a fifth of my life so far. It's an eternity."

  "Yes," said Walter; and Hal looked at him hopelessly. Walter, the gentlest of his three tutors, was the least likely to be moved once he had come to a decision. "And it's because it'll be an eternity for you, Hal, that it'll be so useful. With all we tried to do for you, we've still raised you off in a corner, away from ordinary people. There was no choice for us, but still you're crippled by that. You're like a hothouse plant that can wither if it's suddenly set out in the weather."

  "Hothouse plant?" Hal appealed to Malachi, to Obadiah. "Is that all I am? Malachi, you said I was as good as an average Dorsai my age, in my training. Obadiah, you said—"

  "God help you, child," said Obadiah, harshly. "In what you are and in what we tried to make of you, you're a credit to us all. But the ways of the worlds are some of the things you do not know; and it's with those ways that you'll have to live and struggle before God brings you at last to your accomplishment and your rest. Your way cannot be in corners and byways any more—and I should have realized that when I suggested Newton as a place for you to go. You have to go out among your fellow men and women from now on and begin to learn from them."

  "They won't want to teach me," said Hal. "Why should they?"

  "It's not for them to teach, but for you to learn," said Obadiah.

  "Learn!" said Hal. "That's all you ever said to me, all of you—learn this! Learn that! Isn't it time I was doing something more than learning?"

  "There is nothing more than learning," said Walter; and in the InTeacher's voice Hal heard the absolute commitment of the three facing him that he should go to Coby. It was not something that he could argue against successfully. He was not being faced with an opinion by three other people, but by the calculation that was part of the pattern trained in him. That calculation had surveyed the options open to him and decided that his most secure future for the upc
oming years lay on Coby.

  Still, he was crushed by that decision. He was young and the thirteen other inhabited worlds of mankind glittered with promise like tempting jewels. As he had said, going into the mines would be like going to prison, and the three years—to him—would indeed be an eternity.

  Chapter Three

  Hal did not know at what point the shades of his tutors left him. Simply, after a while, the floats were empty and he was alone once more. His mind had wandered from his need for them, and they had gone, back into the land of his memories, like the flames of blown-out candles.

  But he felt better. Even with the dreary prospect of Coby facing him, he felt better now. Purpose had come back to life in him; and the evocation of the attitudes and certainties of his dead tutors had given him a certain amount of strength. Also, though he was not consciously aware of this, the basic vitality of his youth was lifting his spirits whether he wanted them lifted or not. He had too much sheer physical energy to do nothing but sit and mourn, in spite of the severity of the emotional wound their deaths had dealt him.

  He dressed, examined the controls of his room and ordered in some food. He was eating this when his annunciator chimed.

  He keyed the screen on his bedside table-surface; and the bright and cheerful face of the young woman from the Transit Point took shape in it.

  "Hal Mayne?" she said. "I'm Ajela, Special Assistant to Tam Olyn."

  There was a split-second before the second name she had mentioned registered on him. Tam Olyn was the Director of the Encyclopedia—had been its Director for eighty-odd years. He had originally been a top-level interplanetary newsman; but he had abandoned that as suddenly as a man might turn from the world into the seclusion of a monastery to step in, almost at the moment of his entrance there, to being the supreme authority of the Encyclopedia. Hal had learned all about the man in his studies; but he had never thought that he might someday be talking directly to one of the Director's close assistants.

  "I'm honored to meet you," he said automatically to the screen.

  "Can I drop in on you?" Ajela asked. "There's something we should talk about."

  Caution laid its hand on him.

  "I'm just here temporarily," he said. "I'll be going out to one of the younger worlds as soon as I can get passage."

  "Of course," she said. "But meanwhile, if you wouldn't mind talking to me…"

  "Oh, no. No, of course not." He was aware that he fumbled, and he felt embarrassment kindle in him. "Come along right now, if you want."

  "Thank you."

  The screen lost its image, returning to a uniform pearl gray without depth. Hastily, he finished his meal and pushed his emptied utensils down the disposal slot. They had hardly disappeared when the annunciator chimed again.

  "Can I come in?" asked the voice of Ajela, from the blank screen.

  "Certainly. Come along—" he went to the door but it opened before he could reach it, and she stepped through it.

  She was wearing a loose saffron robe that tied at the waist and reached to her knees. In spite of her youth, she was clearly an Exotic; and she seemed to have the Exotic ability to make everything about her seem as if it could never have been otherwise. So the saffron robe seemed to him, in that first moment in which he really looked at her, as if it was the only thing she should ever wear. Her impact on him was so profound that he almost drew back defensively. He might, indeed, have been even more wary of her than he was; but the open, smiling face and disregard of pretense reassured his prickly young male fear of making the wrong move, suddenly finding himself face to face with a startlingly beautiful woman—he, who had had so little normal acquaintance with women of any age until now.

  "You're all right now?" she asked him.

  "Fine," he said. "I—thank you."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "If we could have warned you, we would have. But the way it is with the Transit Point, if we warn people, we'd never know… it's all right if I sit down?"

  "Oh, of course!" He backed away and they sat down in facing floats.

  "What wouldn't you know?" he asked, his unquenchable curiosity rising even above his feelings of social awkwardness.

  "We'd never be sure that they weren't imagining what they said they heard."

  Hal shook his head.

  "There wasn't any imagination in what I heard," he said.

  "No." She was looking closely at him. "I don't believe there was. What exactly did you hear?"

  He looked at her closely, cautiously.

  His mind was now almost completely recovered from the unsureness he had felt on first talking to her.

  "I'd like to know more of what this is all about," he said.

  "Of course you would," she said warmly. "All right, I'll tell you. The fact is, early in the building of the Final Encyclopedia they discovered by accident that someone stepping into the Transit Point for the first time might hear voices. Not voices speaking to them—" She stopped to gaze closely at him. "Just voices, as if they were overhearing them. Mark Torre, in his old age, was the first to hear them. But only Tam Olyn, the first time he stepped into the Encyclopedia, heard them so plainly that he collapsed—the way you did."

  Hal stared at her. All his training had ingrained in him the principle of going cautiously, the more unknown or strange the territory. What Ajela had just said was so full of unknown possibilities that he felt a danger in showing any reaction at all before he had had time to understand the matter. He waited, hoping she would simply talk on. But she did not. She only waited in her turn.

  "Tam Olyn," he said at last.

  "Yes."

  "Just Tam Olyn and me? In all these years?"

  "In all these years," she said. Her voice had a note in it he could not interpret, a note that was almost sad, for no reason that he could understand. She watched him, he thought, with an odd sympathy.

  "I think," he said carefully, "you ought to tell me all about this; and then give me a chance to think about it."

  She nodded.

  "All right," she said. "Mark Torre conceived of the Encyclopedia—you know that. He was Earth-born, no Exotic, but the Exotics found his conception so in agreement with ontogenetics and our other theories of human and historical evolution that we ended by financing the building of this—" she gestured at the structure around them.

  Hal nodded, waited.

  "As I said, it was in his late years Mark Torre first heard the voices at the Transit Point." She looked at him with a seriousness that was almost severity. "He theorized then that what he'd heard was just the first evidence of the first small use by any individual of the potential of the Encyclopedia. It was as if someone who'd had no knowledge of what to listen for had suddenly tuned in to all the radio noise of the universe. Sorting out the useful information from that roar of noise, Torre said, would take experience."

  Again she paused, almost frowning at him. Hal nodded again, to show his appreciation of the importance of what she was saying.

  "I see," he said.

  "This idea," she went on, "is what meshed with some of our theories on the Exotics, because it seemed to say that using the Encyclopedia the way Mark Torre dreamed of it being used—as a new sort of tool for the human mind—called for some special ability, an ability not yet to be found in all of the human race. Torre died without making any sense out of what he heard. But he was convinced someone would eventually. After him, Tam took charge here; but Tam's lived in the Encyclopedia all these years without learning how to handle or use what he hears."

  "Not at all?" Hal could not help interrupting.

  "Not at all," Ajela said, firmly.

  "But, like Mark Torre, he's been certain that sooner or later someone would come along who could; and when that finally happens the Encyclopedia is at last going to be put to use as what it was built to be, a tool to unravel the inner universe of the race—that inner universe that's been a dark and fearful mystery since people first started to be conscious of the fact they could think."

&nb
sp; Hal sat looking at her.

  "And now," he said, "you—and Tam Olyn—you think I might be the one to use it?"

  She frowned at him.

  "Why are you so cautious… so fearful?" she asked.

  He could not tell her. The implication he thought he heard in her voice was one of cowardice. He bristled instinctively.

  "I'm not fearful," he said, sharply. "Just careful. I was always taught to be like that."

  She reacted instantly.

  "I'm sorry," she said with unexpected softness; and her eyes made him feel as if he had made a most unjustified inference from what she had said. "Believe me, neither Tam nor I are trying to push you into anything. If you stop and think, you'll realize that what Mark Torre and Tam were thinking was something that never could be forced on anyone in any case. It'd be as impossible to force that as it'd be impossible to force someone to produce great art. A thing that'd be as great and new as that couldn't ever be forced into existence. It can only come out of some person willing to give her or his life to it."

  These last words of hers echoed with a particular power in his mind. In his heart he had never yet been able to delude himself that he was adult, in any ordinary social sense. Even though he was taller than most men already and had already packed into his sixteen years more learning than a normal person would have pushed upon him by twice that time, secretly, and inwardly, he had never been able to convince himself that he was grown up yet. Because of this he had been very conscious of the fact that she was probably a year or two older than he was, and had suspected her of being contemptuous of him, of looking down on him because of it. In a way, the capability of his three tutors had so overshadowed him that they had kept him feeling like a child beyond his years.

  But now, for the first time in talking to her, he began to be conscious also of an independence and a strength that he had never felt before. He found himself looking on her and thinking of her, and all the rest of them in this Encyclopedia, with possibly the exception of Tam Olyn, as potential equals, rather than superiors; and, thinking this, he found himself—although the thought did not surface as such in his conscious mind—beginning to fall in love with Ajela.