The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  And the search brought those relationships to him finally; in the sharply focused, creative images of the poem itself.

  ARMAGEDDON

  Yes, they are only deer.

  Nervous instincts, fitted with hooves and horns,

  That foolishly stamp among these Christian pines

  Affixed like seals to the legal foolscap of winter;

  And, illiterately facing the line of the snowplowed asphalt

  Scrawled by a book-learned hand among these hills,

  Cross to the redcapped men.

  Armageddon.

  Of course. The title and the words of the poem burned in his mind's-eye as the Final Encyclopedia had made his poem about the knight burn amongst the stars that appeared to surround his carrel there. Then, what he had found himself discovering in poetic form had been the irresistible inner force that was to drive him forth from the Encyclopedia, toward his years on Coby and this present moment of realization. Now, with this latter verse he had rendered a picture of the self-created cataclysm toward which the human race was now hurling itself, like a drunken man too intoxicated to realize the consequences of what he did.

  Of course. Armageddon—Ragnarok—whatever you wanted to call it, was finally upon all of them. It had caught up all people like an avalanche, gaining speed as it plunged down a mountainside; and there was no one now who could fail to be aware of it on some level or another of his or her senses.

  Tam Olyn had told him of it bluntly and plainly. But he also remembered Sost, in the tunneled corridors of Coby, referring to it. Hilary had talked about it to Jason as he had driven Jason and Hal to their meeting with Rukh's Command… and, just a few hours since, Barbage had once more used the term "Armageddon," here in this very cell.

  Armageddon—the final battle. Its shadow lay with a weight that could be felt on all living humans, even those who had never heard of the word or the concept. Now it was obvious to Hal that each of them, alone, could feel its approach, just as birds and animals under a blue and cloudless sky could yet feel the coming of a thunderstorm. Not only with the thinking top of their minds, but all through their beings, they could sense the buildup of vast forces about to break into conflict above their heads.

  And it was a conflict the roots of which stretched back into prehistoric times. Now that Hal had opened his own eyes to its existence, it became obvious how in the last few hundred years the developing historical situation had merely briefly held back the inevitable, coming hour of conflict, while at the same time setting the stage for its final fury.

  All of this was there in the poem he had just made, in allegorical form. Now that he looked for it there, he saw each large division of the race represented. The hunters could only be the Others, involved solely with their personal concerns for the brief, secular moments of their individual lives. The deer were the great mass of people like Sost and Hilary, being driven now by pressures they did not understand at last across a dividing line from safety into the hands of the hunters. Finally, there were those who stood back and saw this situation for what it was, with a vantage point like that of a reader of the poem or a viewer of the picture described. Those who could see what was about to happen and who had already dedicated themselves to prevent its happening. People like Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, like Tam, Rukh and Child-of-God. Like—

  Without warning, the lighting of the cell and the small section of corridor he could see dimmed almost to total darkness. A shiver ran for some seconds through all around him. At the same time, from nowhere in particular came a deep, rumbling sound that mounted in volume briefly, then died away—as if just beyond the walls enclosing him there had been the passage of that massive, swift-moving avalanche he had imagined as an image for Armageddon.

  It was an inexplicable sound to reach his ears, here in the bowels of a Militia Headquarters as this must be, in the center of a city such as Ahruma. Then the lights came back on full, again.

  He waited for an explanation to offer itself—for the sound of running feet approaching or the corridor-blurred echoes of raised voices. But nothing sounded. No one came.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Gradually, he ceased to wait. The hope that someone might come or some sort of explanation appear left him; and his mind, like a compass needle, swung back to the magnetic element of his earlier thoughts. He had been listing in his mind those he had known who were committed to fight the bringers of Armageddon and he had been about to add one more name—his own.

  Because he now realized that he also was committed. But there was a difference between him and the others he had thought of. Unlike them, he had been enlisted at some point farther back than his conscious memory could reach. Even before he had been found in the spacecraft, plans must have been laid to make him part of a war that he did not then even know existed.

  Once more, he came back to the fact that there were things beyond the membrane, in the shadowy warehouse of his unconscious, that belonged to a past beyond the life his present consciousness knew. He could feel back there answers that had been blocked from him, as the image of the vault door had blocked his earlier searching. But it was no dead end he followed now. A certainty lived in him that the reason he had been committed to this struggle had been with him all this time in his unconscious.

  The same tools that had brought him answers so far should continue to work for him now. He closed his eyes and his mind once more to the cell about him and reached out for the materials of another poem that would give him further answers.

  But no poem came. Instead, came something so powerful that he lived it beyond the definition of the words dream or vision. It was a memory of a sound once heard. It spoke in his mind with such keen clarity that there was no difference between that and his hearing it with his physical ears, here in the cell, all over again. It was the sound of bagpipe music. And he found himself weeping.

  It was not for the music alone he wept, but for what it had meant, for the pain and the grief of that meaning. He followed sound and pain together as if they were a braided thread of gold and scarlet leading him first into darkness and then out once more into a cloud-thick, chilly autumn day, with tall people standing around a newly-dug grave, below willows already stripped of their leaves, and the high, cold peaks of mountains.

  The people about seemed so tall, he realized, because he, who was there with them, was still only a child. They were his people and the grave had been filled in though the coffin it held was empty—but the music was now filling it, for the body that should have been there. The man playing the pipes and standing across from him, up near the head of the grave, was his uncle. His father and mother stood behind the gravestone, and his great-uncle stood opposite his uncle. His only other uncle, the twin of the one playing the pipes, was not there. He had been unable to return, even for this. Of the rest of the family present, there was only his one brother, who was six years older than himself, sixteen now and due to leave home himself in two years.

  At the foot of the grave were a handful of neighbors and friends. Like the family, they wore black, except for five of them with oriental faces, whose white mourning robes stood out starkly amongst the dark clothing around them.

  Then the music ended and his father took a limping half-step forward, so that he could close one big hand over the curved top of the gravestone, and speak the words that were always spoken by the head of the family at the burial of one of its members.

  "He is home." His father's voice was hoarse. "Sleep with those who loved you—James, my brother."

  His father turned away. The burial was over. Family, neighbors and friends went back to the big house. But he, himself, lagged behind and drifted aside, unnoticed, to slip away into the stable.

  There, in the familiar dimness warmed by the heavy bodies of the horses, he went slowly down the center aisle between the stalls. The horses put their soft noses over the doors that locked them in and blew at him as he passed, but he ignored them. At the barn's far end he sank down into a sit
ting position on a bale of new hay from the summer just past, feeling the round logs of the wall hard against his back. He sat, looking at nothing, thinking of James whom he would never see again.

  After a while a coldness began to grow in him; but it came, not from the chill of the day outside but from inside him. It spread from a point deep within, outward through his body and limbs. He sat, remembering what he had listened to the day before, with all of the family gathered in the living room to hear from the man who had been his dead uncle's commanding officer, to tell them how James had died.

  There had come a point in the talking when the officer, a tall, lean man of his father's age, named Brodsky, had paused in what he was saying and glanced over at him.

  "Maybe the boy… ?" Brodsky said. Small among all the rest, he had tensed.

  "No," answered his father harshly, "he'll need to know how such things happen soon enough. Let him stay."

  He had relaxed. He would have fought, even in the face of his father's command, being sent away from what the officer had to tell.

  Brodsky nodded, and went on with what he had been telling them.

  "There were two things that caused it," he said slowly, "neither of which should have happened. One of them was that the Director of the Board at Donneswort had been secretly planning to pay us with the help of some pretty heavy funding promised from William of Ceta."

  Donneswort was one of the principalities on the planet called Freiland; and the small war there in which James had died had been one of the disputes between communities on that populous world which had escalated into military conflict.

  "He'd kept that from us, of course," the officer went on, "or we'd have required a covering deposit in advance. Apparently no one at Donneswort, even the other members of his Board, knew. William, of course, had interests in controlling either Donneswort or its opponent, or both. At any rate, the contract was signed, our troops made good progress from the first into opposition territory and it looked like we were ready to sweep up, when—again, without our knowing it—William reneged on his promise to the Board Director, as he'd probably planned to do from the beginning."

  Brodsky stopped and looked steadily at his father.

  "And that left Donneswort without funds to pay you off, of course," his father said. His father's dark gaze glanced at his uncle and brother. "That's happened before, too, to our people."

  "Yes," said Brodsky, emotionlessly. "At any rate, the Board Director decided to try and hide the news of this from us until we'd got a surrender from our opposition—it looked as if we were only a few days from it, at that time. He did keep it from us, but he didn't manage to keep it from spies belonging to the opposition. As soon as the other side heard, they stuck their necks out, borrowed militia from adjoining states they wouldn't be able to pay for unless they won, and we suddenly found a force three times the size we'd contracted to deal with thrown at us."

  Brodsky paused and he saw the officer's dark eyes glance briefly once more, over at his own small self.

  "Go on," said his father, harshly. "You're going to tell us how all this affected my brother."

  "Yes," said the officer. "We'd had James on duty as a Force-Leader, with a unit of local Donneswort militia. But of course, since he was one of ours, his orders came only down our own chain of command. Because he was new in command and because his militia weren't worth much, we'd held his Force in reserve. But when the Board Director heard of the increase in opposition forces, he panicked and tried to throw all of us, all available troops, into an all-out attack—which would have been suicidal, the way we were positioned at the time."

  "So you refused," said his uncle, speaking for the first time.

  "We did, of course," said Brodsky, looking over at the uncle. "Our Battle Op rejected the Director's order, for cause, which he was free to do under the contract, and as he would've in any case. But those companies of militia not under our own officers received the order and followed it. They moved up."

  "But the boy got no order," said his mother.

  "Unfortunately," Brodsky sighed softly, "he did. That was the second thing that shouldn't have happened. James' Force was part of a unit positioned off on the left flank of our general position, in touch with the overall Command HQ through a central communications net that was staffed almost totally by local militia. One of these was the man who received the message for the troops in James' area. There, all the units except James' were commanded by militia officers. The militiaman on net communications to their sector made up move orders for all units before someone pointed out to him that the one to your brother could only be sent if it was authorized by one of our own commanders. Because the militiaman was ignorant of the overall situation, and apparently also because it was simply easier for him than checking with our command, he put the name of James' Commander on the order to James without authority, and sent it out over the net to your brother."

  Brodsky sighed softly again.

  "James moved his Force up with the rest of the militia around him," he went on. "There was a road they'd been ordered to hold; and they made contact with opposition forces almost immediately. James must have seen from the beginning that he and his men were caught up in a fight with numbers and equipment too great for his men to hold. The militia under their own officers on either side of him pulled out—ran, I should say. He checked back with the communications net, but the same militiaman who'd issued the order panicked, just as the Board Director had, and simply told James no orders had come in from the Dorsai command for him to pull back."

  The officer stopped speaking. The silence in the living room was uninterrupted.

  "So," said the officer, "that's the last contact that was had with his Force. We believe he must have assumed our own people had some reason for wanting him to hold. He could still have pulled back on his own initiative under the Mercenaries Code, of course, but he didn't. He did his best to hold until his position was overrun and he and his men were killed."

  The eyes of all the rest of them in the room were dry and steady upon Brodsky.

  "That particular militiaman was killed an hour or so later when the net position was overrun," the officer said softly. "We would have dealt with him otherwise, naturally, and also there would at least have been reparations for you as a family. But Donneswort was bankrupt, so not even that much was possible. The rest of us who were there got the funds to return home from the opposition. We threatened to hold the Donneswort capital city on our own, against them, if they didn't pay us what we needed to evacuate. It was a lot cheaper for them to bear the expense of sending us home than to pay the cost of taking the city from us. And if they hadn't taken the city within a week, they'd have been bankrupt themselves, unable to keep the borrowed militia they needed to control Donneswort."

  He stopped speaking. There was a long silence.

  "Nothing more than that's required, then," said his father, harshly. "We all thank you for bringing us word."

  "So." It was his uncle speaking, and for once his open, friendly face was no longer so. In this dark moment he was the mirror image of that grim man, his twin brother. "William of Ceta, the Board Director, and the dead net communicator. We've all three to hold to account for this."

  "The Director was tried and executed by Donneswort, itself," said Brodsky. "He got a lot of his own people killed, too."

  "That still leaves—" his uncle was beginning, when his father interrupted.

  "It does no good to fix blame now," his father said. "It's our life, and this sort of thing happens."

  A deep shock went through him at the words; but he said nothing then, watching as his uncle fell silent and the rest of the family got to their feet. His father offered a hand to the officer, who took it. They stood, hands clasped together for a moment.

  "Thank you," said his father, again. "Will you be able to stay for the funeral?"

  "I wish I could," Brodsky answered. "I'm sorry. We've still got wounded coming back."

  "We understand�
�" his father had said…

  —The stable door creaked open now and the scene from the previous day evaporated, leaving him only with the perfect coldness that held him as if he had been frozen into a block of ice. Remotely, he was aware of his uncle coming toward him with long strides down the aisles between the horsestalls.

  "Lad, what are you doing here?" his uncle said, in a concerned voice. "Your mother's worried about you. Come back in the house."

  Hal did not answer. His uncle reached him, abruptly frowned and knelt so that their faces were on a level. His uncle's eyes peered into his own, and his uncle's face suddenly altered into a look of pain and deep shock.

  "Oh, boy, boy," his uncle whispered. He felt the big arms gently enclosing his own stiff body, holding him. "You're too young for this, yet. It's too soon for you to go this way. Don't, lad, don't! Come back!"

  But the words came remotely to his ears, as if they had been addressed to someone other than himself. Out of the coldness in him, he looked steadily into his uncle's eyes.

  "No more," he heard his own voice saying. "Never any more. I'll stop it. I'll find them and stop them. All of them."

  "Boy…" His uncle held him close as if he would warm the smaller body with the living heat of his own. "Come back. Come back…"

  For a long moment it was as still as if his uncle was speaking to someone else. But then, in a moment no longer than that of a sigh, the iciness drained out of him. Half-unconscious in the reaction from what he had just been feeling, he fell forward against his uncle's shoulder, and as if in a dream he felt himself lifted up like a tired child in the powerful arms and carried out of the stable…

  He woke once more to the cell. For a brief moment, still anesthetized by unconsciousness, he had thought that he was well again; and then an uncontrollable coughing seized him and for a moment he found his breathing completely stopped. Panic, like the shadow of some descending vulture, closed its wings about him and for a long minute he struggled vainly for breath. Then he managed to rid himself of the phlegm he had coughed loose, and momentarily the illusion of being able to breathe more deeply came to him, then was lost in a new awareness of his fever, his violently aching head and his choked lungs.