The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Spoken," he said. "Never mind the privacy code. It's to Ajela, Special Assistant to the Director. 'Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go.' "

  His own voice repeated itself back at him from the screen.

  "Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go."

  "That's all?" said the shipman.

  "Yes. Sign it—my name's Hal Mayne—" he checked himself. "Wait, add on… I'll see you both again, as soon as I can.' "

  "Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go. I'll see you both again, as soon as I can. Hal Mayne." The screen gave his words back to him once more.

  "All right? Or did you want that last sentence as a p.s.?" asked the shipman.

  "No, that's fine. Thank you."

  Hal broke the connection and got up from the seat. He pulled the bed down into position and stretched out on it. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling and bulkheads of his compartment, which showed the same flat brown color everywhere he looked. A faint vibration through the fabric of the ship around them was the only sign that they were under way; it would be the only sensation of movement to be felt—and not even that during phase shift—until they went into docking mode in New Earth orbit.

  There had never been any possible decision except that he should go on to Coby. But it had taken the Encyclopedia to help him see the inevitability of it; and even then the recognition had come in through the back door of his mind. It had been the poem that had told him, its images speaking from his unconscious, as surely as the images of Walter, Malachi and Obadiah had spoken from it on his first night in the great sphere. He was the knight and was summoned in one direction only.

  The poem had been no more than a codification of that oceanic feeling he had touched when he worked with the Encyclopedia. Blindly there, he had felt something, some great effort, that rang its particular call trumpet-like, reading back through him. For a little while, unknowing, he had touched what could be—and it was so large in promise that it dwarfed all other things. But the way to it did not lie through a dusty scholar's cell, or even by way of Tam's desk in the Encyclopedia. At least, not yet. There were things within him that would have to grow to match in size what he had felt in the Encyclopedia; and some deep-buried instinct had come to tell him clearly that these would not grow in a sterile, protected environment. It was out among the materials of which the race was made that he must find the particular strength he would need to use the mighty lever that was the Encyclopedia. And, once he had found it, he would be back—whether he was wanted or not.

  The faint vibration of the ship thrummed all through him as he lay. He felt caught, like someone apart, suspended between all worlds, waiting.

  Chapter Five

  As the spaceship to New Earth pulled away from Earth orbit preparatory to its first phase shift into interstellar space, the awareness of his utter loneliness moved in on Hal all at once. In the Final Encyclopedia, thanks to Tam and Ajela, he had not felt completely alone; and until he had gotten to the Final Encyclopedia the anesthesia of shock and his training had held the realities of his new orphan's status at a numb distance from his emotions. But now, unexpectedly a full appreciation of it flooded him.

  That first night on shipboard he dreamed a vivid, colorful dream in which it turned out that the events on the terrace and the deaths of Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had been nothing but a nightmare from which he had just awakened. He felt foolish, but inexpressibly relieved to discover that the three of them were still alive and all was well.

  Then he awoke to reality, and lay in the darkness, listening to the faint breathing of the ventilating system of the ship, echoing out through the grille on the near wall of his stateroom. Emptiness and desolation filled him. He pulled the bedcovers over his head like a very young child, and lay there, cold, in his misery, until, at some unknown, later time, he fell asleep again, to other dreams he did not remember on awakening.

  But from then on the awareness of his isolation and vulnerability was always with him. He was able to push it into a back corner of his mind, but there it settled, as if in some dark corner, where Bleys and the rest of the Others seemed also to crouch, waiting. He realized now that he had made a serious mistake in not asking that this passage from the Encyclopedia be booked for him under a false name.

  The situation was not completely irreparable, of course. Once he got to New Earth, he could cancel the reservations made under the name of Hal Mayne, and then make new reservations to Coby under an alias. At most, then, this ship's records would only show Hal Mayne as going no farther than New Earth. But the record of his having been outbound from Old Earth aboard this ship would remain, for the Others to find.

  A cooler part of his mind told him that even travelling under his real name as he was now, the passenger record would not be easy for Bleys to run down. It was not that ship's records were not kept and that the Others could not eventually get access to them all. It was simply that, given the mass of interstellar shipping and the complexity of individual records on fourteen worlds, it became a statistical nightmare to search through all of these in an attempt to trace or locate a single individual.

  Nonetheless, he made up his mind to be as inconspicuous as possible until he reached Coby and, once there, to lose himself under a completely false identity. Being inconspicuous would mean, of course, that he should restrict his contacts with other people aboard, as much as possible; but that was a small hardship. At this moment he felt no great desire to make the acquaintances of his fellow passengers, or those who staffed the ship.

  It was a prudent decision, but in making it he had not considered how much such solitary behavior would leave him to his own thoughts and feelings during the days that followed. At times he would find himself unexpectedly immersed in grief, an unbearable grief that would mutate gradually into an icy, compelling rage, that in its own strange way seemed familiar, although he could not recall having felt anything like it before. It made him shiver, thinking of Bleys and the Others, and all their kind. A desire to destroy them and everything connected with them would seize him so powerfully that he could think of nothing else.

  As ye have done to me and mine. …

  The words seemed to arise out of some ancient part of him like a stained and weathered carving on the stone of his soul. He would follow the advice of the ghosts of Malachi, Obadiah, and Walter to hide until he was strong enough to fight back against those who had done this; and then he would destroy them as they had destroyed all those he had ever loved. Just as Ajela had reminded him that Tam Olyn had once set out to destroy the entire Friendly culture. Tam had changed and turned back from what he had started to accomplish, but Hal would never do so.

  Walter's teaching had warned against letting destructive emotions grow and take charge of him; and he had been trained in ways to control them. But he found now that in the worst moments of his grief, the rage was the only thing that could push it from him—and at such times the grief seemed too great to be borne.

  Still, in all, the trip to New Earth was not that long in actual subjective, shipboard time. Most of the passengers on board were bound beyond that world, to Freiland, which was now the richer and more commercially active of the two worlds under the star of Sirius. But the ships stopped at New Earth first, because New Earth was the major transshipment point for that solar system; and, like Hal, all those who were going on to other destinations would be making their change to other vessels there, rather than at Freiland.

  Hal had hoped to find at least one other person aboard who was going to Coby, or who had known that planet first hand, so that he could ask what the life there was actually like for miners. But none of the other transshipping passengers were bound in his direction—he had asked the purser to check the ship's list to make sure. In the end, when he took the jitney down to New Earth City for the three days he must wait for his vessel to Coby, he was as much alone and knew as little as he had when he had come on board.

  But New Earth City itself caught his attention, even driving the memory of the events on th
e terrace and the Encyclopedia temporarily into the background of his thoughts. It was a space-base city, which meant it had its primary commercial activity in off-world shipping. The sky was busy with passenger and cargo jitneys going to and from parking orbit; the streets were equally full of a multitude of shipping agents. He had no trouble finding passage under a different name on a ship headed for Coby, after he had cancelled his original reservations.

  The city, itself, lay in the uplands of the north temperate zone of that world, in mid-continent, at the confluence of the two large rivers that together with their tributaries provided a watershed for nearly one-third of the continent's land mass. Hal remembered from his geography studies that the city was supposed to be very cold in winter. But now it was mid-summer, the air dusty and windy with the odor unique to vegetation of that latitude on the planet. He sat in sidewalk restaurants, drinking the local fruit and vegetable juices and watching the people who passed.

  In spite of his training, the romantic part of him had always clung to the thought that there would be markedly noticeable differences to be seen in the people on the younger inhabited planets. But New Earth was an unspecialized world and the majority of the people on it looked as much like full-spectrum humans as those of Earth. They looked the same; essentially, they talked the same; and, with slight variations in cut and style, they wore the same sort of clothes. Only occasionally did he see an individual who dressed and acted as if he or she clearly belonged to one of the true Splinter Cultures—Friendly, Exotic, or Dorsai—and these stood out sharply from those about them.

  Nonetheless, it was a strange and foreign place, New Earth City—the sunlight, the smells, the activity, all had differences about them that caught at his imagination and compelled it. He could see no signs of the decay Tam Olyn had spoken of, the approach of an Armageddon, an end to present civilization, or even to the human race itself. Dismissing the puzzle at last from his mind, he turned to a more immediate question. He tried telling those he met that he was a University-level student from Earth on a thesis-trip, testing his ability to pass for someone in his late teens or early twenties, and was gratified when no one questioned this.

  Part of him, he had found out long since, was a chameleon; an imaginative actor who could be seduced by an infinite number of roles. He had three days, local time, to pass before his new transport to Coby would be leaving orbit; and, even in three days, he came close to being strongly tempted to stay where he was for a month or two, learning to fit in with what he saw around him and experiencing New Earth living from within its society.

  But the thought that Bleys might already have set—no matter how idly—a search in progress for him, plus the pull of that same amorphous, oceanic purpose in him which had set him unthinkingly to packing as the time approached to board the jitney to the New Earth-bound ship; these sent him up to the ship to Coby in time; and a few hours later, he was once more between the stars, heading toward the first phase shift that would bring him eventually to work in the mines of that airless world.

  The ship he travelled on now was not a passenger liner, like the one on which he had left Earth orbit, but a cargo vessel that carried a small complement of passengers in accommodations comparable to those of the ship's officers. The only other passengers were three commercial representatives who spent all their time gambling with gravityless shotballs in the lounge. The officers and crew were indifferent to conversation with the passengers. They had their own professional clubbishness, and except at meals he never saw them; and so, at the end of five days, they came to Coby.

  —Not just to an orbit around Coby, however. At the mining world, it developed, spaceships did not park in orbit and wait for jitneys from the surface. They not only went down like military craft, directly to the surface, they went one step further. They descended below the world's surface. Everything built on Coby had been built underground, and as the ship Hal was on gingerly nudged its way close to the Moon-like landscape of the planet, that landscape developed a crack before them from which light shone upward. Barely hovering, it seemed, on its maneuvering powerways, the ship slid into an opening, as the jitney from Earth had slipped into the opening of the port of the Final Encyclopedia.

  The moment they were inside, the opening closed again behind them. With pressure barriers, there had been minimal loss of air; but for a world that needed to make all its air and water out of crustal chemicals, even small losses would be important, Hal thought. But then he forgot problems having to do with the crustal extraction of chemicals; for the place into which they had come was another matter entirely than the entry port of the Encyclopedia.

  This was like nothing so much as a full-sized surface military or commercial spaceport, hollowed out of the solid stuff of the world, with a spacepad of remarkable dimensions, its edges thick with fitting yards. In the viewing screen of his room, with which Hal was watching their landing, spaceships could be seen lying in the cradles of those yards and being fitted with the metal parts and fabrications that Coby could supply more cheaply than any of the other worlds.

  It had been ironic, Obadiah had said once, harshly, that the human race had been so slow to realize how favored was the planet of its birth. Not only in terms of air, water, climate and the wealth of its ecology—but in the availability of its metals. The first people settling on the younger worlds had been quick to discover that the metals they needed were neither so available in that quantity that Earth had accustomed them to, nor so cheaply easy to extract from the rocky mantle of their planets. On twelve of the fourteen worlds, the human race had metal-hungry societies; and on a few of those worlds, like both of the Friendly planets and on the Dorsai, that poverty was so great that they could not have existed in a modern interstellar community if they had not been able to buy much of what they needed for their technological life off-planet. The fourteen worlds could only remain one community if they could trade together; and the one currency they had in common was professional skills, packaged in the minds and bodies of their own people. So the worlds had specialized.

  Physicians and specialists in the soft sciences came from schools on the Exotics. Statisticians from the Friendlies. Professional military from the Dorsai. An individual working on a world other than his or her own earned not only a personal income in that planet's local currency, but interstellar credit for the world that had raised and trained her or him, And on the basis of that interstellar credit metal-poor worlds like New Earth bought what they needed from Coby…

  Their cargo spaceship was already settling onto the field below; and with the other passengers, Hal left the ship. He found immigration officials waiting at the foot of the landing stair; but the checks made were brief and simple.

  "Visa?" The heavy-bodied, gray-haired official who greeted him took the visa he had purchased on New Earth, under the name of Tad Thornhill, from Hal's hand. "Visiting or staying?"

  "Staying," Hal said. "I want to look for a job here."

  The woman ran the papers through the transverse slot of her desk and passed them back to Hal. Endless repetitions of the same words had worn her voice to a near-monotone.

  "Check the directory in the Terminal for the nearest Assignments Office outside of the port area," she said. "If you change your mind or for any reason stay in the port area, you must register and leave Coby again within eight days, or face deportation. If you leave the port area, you may only return on pass from your work superiors. Next!"

  Hal moved on and the commercial representatives behind him took his place.

  Inside the terminal building, the directory—when he queried its console—printed in its screen the words: Halla Station Assignment Office, Halla Station: Tube Line C: report for job interview at destination. It also extruded a small hard-copy card with the same information printed on it.

  Hal took the card and tucked it into his bag. The port area looked interesting, especially the fitting yards. He thought of trying to get a job there, rather than in the mines. But a little more though
t brought back to mind the fact that he was here to become invisible to the Others; and in a port area, pinned down by job-required identification and security observation, would not be the best place to hide.

  In fact, he thought, remembering the lessons that had been drilled into him, he would undoubtedly minimize the danger of being traced here by the Others if he got out of the port area as fast as possible. He went searching for, and found the subway-like station that was the terminal of Tube C, took passage in one of the long, silver cars that floated there in their magnetic rings, and an hour and a half later got out two thousand kilometers away, at Halla Station Terminal.

  The Assignment Office was in one corner of the Terminal, four desks in an open area. Three had no one at them. One had a man interviewing another man, who by his appearance and the travel bag on the floor beside his chair was a job applicant like Hal. Hal waited until the other applicant had finished and been sent out through a rear door in the Terminal. Then he came up to the desk, handed his papers to the interviewer and sat down without waiting to be asked.

  The man behind the desk did not seem to resent Hal's not waiting for an invitation. He scanned the papers, made out in the name of Tad Thornhill, ran them through the slot on his desk and then looked over at Hal. He was in his early thirties, a short, slim individual with a narrow, white face and a shock of red hair—the sort of face that might have been friendly, if it had not been for an expression of indifference that seemed to have worn lines in it.

  "You're sure you want to work in the mines?" he asked.

  "I wouldn't be here if I didn't," Hal said.

  The interviewer rattled busily away at the keys of his console and a hard copy document emerged from his desk top.

  "Sign here, and here. If you change your mind in less than a week, you will be charged for food and lodging and any other expenses incurred by you. Do you understand?"