The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He flung his mind wide. The Three Musketeers? D'Artagnan? What about Nigel Loring, the fictional hero of two of the historical novels by the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle—the novels Sir Nigel and The White Company.

  The idea of Sir Nigel, the small but indomitable hero of those two novels of the days of men in iron and leather welcomed his imagination like a haven. Nigel Loring was a character who had always glowed with an unusual light and color in his imagination. Perhaps Conan Doyle had even started a third novel about him, and never finished it? No, not likely. If that had been true he would almost undoubtedly have run across some word of it before now. He pressed the query key of the keypad on the arm of his chair and spoke aloud to the Encyclopedia.

  "List for me all that Conan Doyle ever wrote about the character Nigel Loring, who appears in the novels The White Company and Sir Nigel by Conan Doyle."

  A hard copy coiled up out of the void into existence and dropped in his lap. At the same time a soft bell note chimed and a voice replied to him in pleasant female tones.

  "Data from sources delivered in hard copy. Would you also like biographical details about the historical individual who is antecedent?"

  Hal frowned, puzzled.

  "I'm not asking for data on Conan Doyle," he said.

  "That's understood. The historical individual referred to was the actual Nigel Loring, knight, of the fourteenth century AD." Hal stared at the stars. The words he had just heard echoed in his head and a bubble of excitement formed within him. Almost fearful that it would turn out there had been some mistake, he spoke again.

  "You're telling me there actually was someone named Nigel Loring in England in the fourteenth century?"

  "Yes. Do you want biographical details on this person?"

  "Yes, please. All possible details—" he added hastily, "and will you list references to the real Nigel Loring in documents of the time and after. I want copies of these last, if you can give them to me."

  Another coil of hard copy emerged from the desktop, followed by a number of paper sections and pictures. Hal ignored the hard copy but picked up the second half of the delivery and went quickly through it. There was an amazing number of things, running from excerpts from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart; an account list of presents given by Edward, the Black Prince of England, to courtiers in his train; and ending with an image of a stall in a chapel. With the image of the chapel stall was a printed description identifying it, which Hal found the most fascinating of all the material.

  The stall, he read, still existed. Nigel Loring had been one of the charter members of the Order of the Garter. The chapel was St. George's Chapel, in the English palace of Windsor. The existing chapel now, he learned, was not, however, the original chapel. The original chapel had been built by Edward the Third and its rebuilding was begun by Edward IV and probably finished in the reign of Henry VIII. Work had gone on at night with many hundreds of candles burning at the time in order to get it ready at Henry's express order for one of his marriages.

  For a moment the terrace and its happenings were forgotten. The actual historical Nigel Loring and Doyle's fictional character slid together in Hal's mind. It seemed to him that he reached across time to touch the actual human being who had been Nigel Loring. For a moment it was possible to believe that all the people in the books he had read might have been as alive and touchable as any real person, if only he knew where and how to reach out for them. Fascinated, he pulled another character out of his mind almost at random, and spoke to the Encyclopedia.

  "Tell me," he asked, "was the character Bellarion, in the novel Bellarion by Raphael Sabatini also inspired by a real historical person of the same name?"

  "No," answered the Final Encyclopedia.

  Hal sighed, his imagination brought back to the practical Earth. It would have been too good to be true to have had Bellarion also an actual character in history.

  "… however," the Encyclopedia went on, "Sabatini's Bellarion draws strongly upon the military genius of the actual fourteenth century condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood, from whom Conan Doyle also drew to some extent in the writing of the books that contain the character of Sir Nigel. It is generally accepted that John Hawkwood was in part a model for both fictional characters. Would you like excerpts of the critical writings reaching this conclusion?"

  "Yes—NO!" Hal shouted aloud. He sat back, nearly quivering with excitement.

  John Hawkwood was someone about whom he knew. Hawkwood had caught his imagination early, not only from what Hal had read about him, but because Malachi Nasuno had spoken of him, referring to him as the first modern general. Cletus Graeme also had cited Hawkwood's campaigns a number of times in Cletus's multi-volumed work on strategy and tactics—that same Cletus Graeme who had been the great-grandfather of Donal Graeme of whom Ajela had spoken. Donal Graeme had ended up enforcing a peace on all the fourteen worlds. In Hal's mind, suddenly, a line led obviously from Donal to Cletus Graeme and back through the warrior elements of western history to Hawkwood.

  Hawkwood had come out from the village of Sible Hedingham in the rural England of the early fourteenth century, had fought his way up through the beginnings of the Hundred Years War in France and ended as Captain General of Florence, Italy. He had died at last in his bed at a probable age of over eighty, after a life of frequent hand-to-hand armed combat. He had been called "the first of the modern generals" by others before Malachi; and he had introduced longbowmen from England into the Italian warfare of the fourteenth century with remarkable results.

  Hal had been fascinated by him on first discovery. Not merely because of the clangor and color of Hawkwood's life, as seen from nearly a thousand years later, but because in the Englishman's lifetime, going from Sible Hedingham in his youth to Florence in his later years, he had effectively travelled from the society of the deep Middle Ages into the beginnings of the modern era. The flag that had been flying over Hal's terrace, and that Walter InTeacher had lowered to warn him, the flag of a hawk flying out of a wood, had been made by Hal himself with a device put of his imagination after a thorough search through the books in the library of the estate had failed to have any information on Hawkwood's coat of arms—on sudden impulse Hal spoke again to the Encyclopedia.

  "What was the coat of arms borne by Sir John Hawkwood?"

  There was a brief pause.

  "Sir John Hawkwood's arms were: argent, on a chevron sable three escallops of the field."

  The screen showed a shield with a silver background, crossed by a thick v-shaped black band, called a "chevron," point upwards in the middle of the ground, and with three silver cockle shells spaced out upon the black chevron.

  Why the cockles? Hal wondered. The only connection he could think of to cockle shells was St. James of Compostela, in Spain. Could Hawkwood at the time have been in Compostela? Or might the cockles in the arms mean something else? He queried the Final Encyclopedia.

  "The cockle shells are common to many coats of arms," answered the Encyclopedia, "I can furnish you with details if you like. They appear, for example, on some of the oldest arms, such as those of the Graemes, and on the arms borne by many of the septs of the Graeme family, such as the well known arms of Dundee and Dunbar. Do you wish details, a full report on cockles as a device on coats of arms during past centuries?"

  "No," said Hal.

  He sat back, thinking. Something in the deepest depths of his mind had been triggered by this discovery that the real Hawkwood lay in some manner behind the fictional characters of Doyle's Nigel Loring and Sabatini's Bellarion, something that continued backward to tie into this business of the cockle shells and Hawkwood. The cockle shells and Hawkwood somehow fitted together; they linked and evoked something. He could feel the mental chemistry of their interaction like a stirring in his unconscious, it was a sensation which he knew, it was the sort of deep excitement that came on just before he began to envision a poem. The chain of logic that ran from these things to whatever was now building in his crea
tive unconscious was not one his conscious mind could see or follow, but experience had taught him the futility of trying. He felt its workings there, now, as someone might feel conflicting winds blowing upon him in the absolute darkness of night. It was a pressure, a fever, an imperative. Something about this search and discovery had touched on a thing that was infinitely more compelling, was much larger, than what he had sat down here with the expectation of discovering, as an ocean is larger than a grain of sand on one of its shores. It reached out to touch him like a call, like a trumpet note reaching out, reaching all the way through him to summon him to a thing more important than anything he had felt in all his sixteen years before.

  The sensation was powerful. It was almost with relief that he found the lines of a poem beginning to stir in his head, forming out of the mists of his discovery, strange, archaic sounding lines… His fingers groped automatically for the keypad that was on the arm of his chair, not to summon the Encyclopedia back for another question or command but simply to resolve the poetic images forming inside him into words. Those words, as he pressed the keys, began to take visible shape, glowing like golden fire against the starscape before him.

  À OUTRANCE

  Within the ruined chapel, the full knight

  Woke from the coffin of his last-night's bed;

  And clashing mailed feet on the broken stones—

  His fingers paused on the keys. A chill, damp wind seemed suddenly to blow clear through him. He shook off the momentary paralysis and wrote on…

  Strode to the shattered lintel and looked out.

  A fog lay holding all the empty land

  A cloak of cloudy and uncertainness,

  That hid the earth; in that enfoliate mist

  Moved voices wandered from a dream of death.

  It was a wind of Time itself, the thought came to him unexpectedly, that he felt now blowing through him, blowing through flesh and bones alike. It was the sound of that wind he heard and was now rendering into verse. He wrote…

  A warhorse, cropping by the chapel wall,

  Raised maul-head, dripping thistles on the stones;

  And struck his hooves; and jingled all his gear.

  "Peace . . ." said the Knight. "Be still. Today, we rest.

  "The mist is hiding all the battlefield.

  "The wind whips on the wave-packs of the sea.

  "Our foe is bound by this no less than we.

  "Rest," said the Knight. "We do not fight today."

  The warhorse stamped again. And struck his hooves.

  Ringing on cobbled dampness of the stones.

  Crying—"Ride! Ride! Ride!" And the Knight mounted him,

  Slowly. And rode him slowly out to war.

  . . . The chime of the room phone catapulted him out of his thoughts. He had been sitting, he realized, for some time with the written poem before him, his thought ranging on journeys across great distances. He reached out reflexively to the control keys.

  "Who is it?"

  "It's Ajela." From behind the void and the glowing lines of his poem, her voice came clearly and warmly, bringing back with it all of the reality he had abandoned during his recent ranging. "It's lunch time—if you're interested."

  "Oh. Of course," he said, touching the keypad. The lines of verse vanished, to be replaced by the image of her face, occulting the imaged stars.

  "Well," she said, smiling at him, "did you have a useful session with the Encyclopedia?"

  "Yes," he said. "Very much."

  "And where would you like to eat?"

  "Any place," he said—and hastily amended himself. "Any place quiet."

  She laughed.

  "The quietest place is probably right where you are now."

  "—any quiet place except my room, then."

  "All right. We'll go back to the dining room I took you to the first time. But I'll arrange for a table away from other people where no one will be sent to sit near us," she said. "Meet you at the entrance there in five minutes."

  By the time he figured out the controls to move his room close to the dining room, and got to the dining room entrance, Ajela was already there and waiting for him. As he came down the short length of corridor that was now between his room's front door and the entrance to the dining room, he was aware suddenly that this was probably the last time he would see her before he left. The two days just past had done a good deal to shift her in his mind from the category of someone belonging to the Encyclopedia, and therefore beyond his understanding, into someone he knew—and for whom he felt.

  The result was that his perceptions were now sharpened. As far back as he could remember, his tutors had trained him to observe; as he met her now, spoke to her, and was led by her to a table in one deserted corner of the room, he saw her as perhaps he should have seen her from the start.

  It was as if his vision of her had focused. He noticed now how straight she stood and how she walked with something like an air of command—certainly with an air of firmness and decision that was almost alien in an Exotic—as she led the way to their table. She was dressed in green today, a light green tunic that came down to mid-thigh, hugging her body tightly, over an ankle-length skirt that was slit all the way up the sides, revealing tight trousers of a darker green with the parting of the slits at each stride.

  The tunic's green was that of young spring grass. There was a straightness to her shoulders, seen against the distant pearl-gray of the light-wall at the far end of the dining room. Her bright blonde hair was gathered into a pony-tail by a polished wooden barrette that showed the grain of the wood. The pony-tail danced against the shoulders of her tunic as she strode, echoing in its movements the undulations of her skirt. She reached their table, sat down, and he took the float opposite her.

  She asked him again about his morning with the Encyclopedia as they decided what to eat, and he answered briefly, not wanting to go into details of how what he had learned had struck so deep a chord of response within him. Watching her now, he saw in the faint narrowing of her eyes that she had noticed this self-restraint.

  "I don't mean to pry," she said. "If you'd rather not talk about it—"

  "No—no, it's not that," he answered quickly. "It's just that my mind's everywhere at once."

  She flashed her sudden smile at him.

  "No need to apologize," she said. "I was just mentioning it. As for the way you feel—the Encyclopedia affects a lot of scholars that way."

  He shook his head, slowly.

  "I'm no scholar," he answered.

  "Don't be so sure," she said gently. "Well, have you thought about whether you still want to go ahead and leave, the way you planned, in just a few hours?"

  He hesitated. He could not admit that he would prefer to stay, without seeming to invite her to argue for his staying. He understood himself, starkly and suddenly. His problem was a reluctance to tell her he must leave, that there was no choice for him but to leave. Caught between answers, neither of which he wanted to give, he was silent.

  "You've got reasons to go. I understand that," she said, after a moment. She sat watching him. "Would you like to tell me about them? Would you like to talk about it, at all?"

  He shook his head.

  "I see," she said. Her voice had gentled. "Do you mind, anyway, my telling you Tam's side of it?"

  "Of course not," he replied.

  Their plates, with the food they had ordered, were just rising to the surface of the table. She looked down at hers for a moment, and then looked back up at him levelly.

  "You've seen Tam," she said as they began to eat, and the gentleness in her voice gave way to a certainty that echoed the authority of her walk. "You see his age. One year, several years, might not seem so much to you; but he's old. He's very old. He has to think about what will happen to the Encyclopedia if there's no one to take charge of it after… he steps down as Director."

  He was watching her eyes, fascinated, as she spoke. They were a bluish green that seemed to have depths without end an
d reflected the color of her clothing.

  He said, after a second since she had paused as if waiting response from him, "Someone else would take over the Encyclopedia, wouldn't they?"

  She shook her head.

  "No one person. There's a Board of Directors who'll step in, and stay in. The Board was scheduled to take over after Mark Torre's death. Then Mark found Tam and changed that part of the plan. But now, if Tam dies without a successor, the Board's going to take over, and from then on the Encyclopedia will be run by committee."

  "And that's something you don't want to happen?"

  "Of course I don't!" Her voice tightened. "Tam's worked all his life to point the Encyclopedia toward what it really should do, rather than let it turn into a committee-run library! What would you think I'd want?"

  Her eyes were now full green, as green as the rare tinge that can color the wood flames of an open camp fire. He waited a second more to let her hear the echo of her words in her ears before he answered.

  "You should want whatever it is you want," he said, echoing what he had been taught and believed in. Her eyes met his for a second more, burningly, then dropped their gaze to her plate. When she spoke again, the volume of her voice had also dropped.

  "I… you don't understand," she said slowly. "This is very hard for me—"

  "But I do understand," he answered. "I told you, one of my tutors was an Exotic. Walter the InTeacher."

  What she had meant, he knew from Walter's teachings, was that it was difficult for her to plead with him to stay at the Encyclopedia, much as she plainly wanted to. As an Exotic, she would have been conditioned from childhood never to try to influence other people. This, because of the Exotic belief that participation in the historical process, even in the smallest degree, destroyed the clear-sightedness of a separate and dispassionate observer; and the Exotics' main reason for existence was to chart the movements of history, separately and dispassionately. They dreamed only of an end to which those movements could lead. But she was, he thought, as she had more or less admitted already, a strange Exotic.