The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "You also," said Alhonan, "feel to all of us like an Exotic. And to the extent of my specialty, you also feel to me like a Dorsai."

  Hal shook his head.

  "No," he said. "I'm none of these, none of you. The fact is, I don't belong anywhere."

  "Do you remember," said Amid, against his ear, "a moment ago, when you first understood what Nonne was suggesting the Dorsai do about the Others? You answered right away that the Dorsai wouldn't do it. Where did you get the certainty you felt in telling us that? Unless you, yourself, trust yourself to think like a Dorsai?"

  The words rang with uncomfortable persistence in Hal's mind. They also, without warning, touched off a sudden, inexplicable, deep sadness inside him; so that it was a moment before he got control of his feelings enough to go on. He made an effort to think calmly.

  "It doesn't matter," he said, finally. "The idea of Dorsai individuals assassinating the Others, one by one, aside from anything moral or ethical about it, is too simplistic a solution. I can't believe I'm listening to Exotics—"

  "Yes, you can," interrupted Amid. "Check the Exotic part of yourself."

  Hal went on talking, refusing to look at the small man.

  "—Whatever else the Others are, they've emerged as a result of natural forces within the human race," he went on. "Attempted genocide's no answer to them, any more than it ever was for any situation like this, as long as historic records've run. Besides, it ignores what's really going on. Those same forces that produced them have been building to this moment of confrontation for hundreds of years.''

  He paused, looking at them all, wondering how much of what he now felt and realized could be made clear to them.

  "When I was in that cell on Harmony," he went on, "I had a chance to think intensively under some unusual conditions; and I'm convinced I ended up with a clearer picture of what's going on historically, right now, than a great many people have. The Others pose a question, a question we've got to answer. It's not going to work just to try to erase that question and pretend it was never asked. It's our own race that produced the crossbreeds—and their Other organization. Why? That's what we've got to find out—"

  "There's no time left for that sort of general investigation, now," said Nonne. "You, of all people, ought to know that."

  "What I know," said Hal, "is that there has to be time. Not time to burn, perhaps, but time enough if it's used right. If we can just find out why the Others came to be what they are, then we'll be able to see what the answer is to them; and there's got to be an answer, because they're as human as we are and the instincts of a race don't lead it to produce a species that could destroy it—without some strong reason or purpose. I tell you, the Others were developed to test something, to resolve something; and that means there has to be an answer to them, a solution, a resolution that'll end up doing much more than just taking off our backs what looks now like a threat to our survival. If we can only find that answer, I'm sure it'll turn out to mean more to the whole race than we, here, can begin to imagine."

  He felt his words dying out against the silence that answered him, as calls for help might die against a wall too thick for sound to penetrate. He stopped talking.

  "As Amid's pointed out," said Nonne after a moment, "you react in part like an Exotic. Ask the Exotic part of yourself, then, which of two answers is most likely to be right—the conclusions you've come to on your own? Or the unanimous conclusion of the best minds of our two worlds, on which the best minds have been sought out and encouraged for nearly four hundred years?"

  Hal sat, silent.

  "We could, however, ask Hal what alternative he sees," said Padma.

  For the first time Nonne turned directly to face the very old man.

  "Is there any real point to it?" she asked.

  "I think so," said Padma; and in the pause following those three words of his the silence seemed to gather in on itself and acquire an intensity it had not had until this moment. "You talked about being one of those who were seduced and blinded by the hope that the crossbreeds were what we had looked for, these hundreds of years. Your fault in that was much less than mine, who'd watched them for more years than any of you, and was in even a better position than anyone else to see the truth. I, for one, can't risk being seduced a second time, and blinded by our own desire for a quick and certain solution—a solution which Hal has properly called simplistic."

  "I think—" began Nonne, and then fell quiet again as Padma raised his hand briefly from his lap.

  "Not only did I make the mistake of assuming the crossbreeds were something they weren't," he said, "unlike the rest of you, I made another mistake, one that still haunts me. Of all Exotics I had the chance, and closed my eyes to it, to find out if Donal Graeme was a real example of evolutionary development. Now, too late, I'm convinced he was. But he was never checked; and I could have had that done at any time in the last five years of his life. If I had only done that much, we'd have been able to read him positively, one way or another. But I failed; and the result was that the chance he might have offered us, eighty standard years ago, was lost forever when he was. I don't want to make another mistake like that."

  The other Exotics looked at each other.

  "Padma," said Chavis, "what's your personal opinion of Hal's potential, then?"

  The intensity that had come into the room a moment before when Padma had spoken was still there.

  "I think he may be another like Donal Graeme," he said. "If he is—we can't afford to lose him; and in any case, the least we can do is listen to him, now."

  The eyes of the other four robed individuals consulted once more.

  "We should, of course, then," said Nonne.

  "Then—?" Chavis glanced around at the others, all of whom nodded. "Go ahead, Hal. That is, if you've got something specifically to suggest that's a workable alternative to our ideas."

  Hal shook his head.

  "I don't have any answers," he said. "I just believe they can be found. No, I know they can be found."

  "We haven't found any," said Alhonan. "But you think you can?"

  "Yes."

  "Then," said Alhonan, "isn't what you're asking just this—that our two worlds should trust you blindly; and blindly take on all the risks a trust like that implies?"

  Hal took a deep breath.

  "If you want to put it in those terms," he said.

  "I don't know what other terms to put it in," replied Alhonan. "But you do think you, alone, can solve this; and we should simply follow you wherever you want to take us?"

  "I've got nothing else to think." Hal looked at him squarely. "Yes."

  "All right," said Chavis, "then tell us—what would you do?"

  "What I decided to do in that cell on Harmony," said Hal, "learn what's involved for the race in this situation, decide what's to be done, then try to do it."

  "Calling on us for whatever help you need," said Alhonan.

  "If necessary—and I'd say it will be," Hal said. "You, and any others who also want a solution."

  The four before him looked at each other.

  "You'll have to give us a specific reason," said Chavis, gently. "You must have a basis for this belief of yours, that, even if there's something there for you to find, a reason why you should be the one to find it where we haven't been able to."

  He gazed at her, then at Padma, and finally at Nonne and Alhonan.

  "The fact is," he said, slowly at first but gaining speed and emphasis as he spoke, "I don't understand why you, with your ontogenetic calculations, don't see it for yourselves. How is it you can't recognize what's under your noses? All that's needed is to look—to stand back for a moment and look at the last five hundred years, the last thousand years, as a whole. It's people building forward—always forward—that makes history. The interaction of their individual forces—conflicting, opposing, mingling and finding compromise vectors for their impinging forces; like an orchestra with millions of instruments, each trying to play a part and each
trying to be heard in its own part. If the brass section sounded as if it was dominating the rest of your orchestra, would your solution be no more than eliminating the brass section?"

  He paused, but none of them answered.

  "That's exactly what you're suggesting, with your idea of setting the Dorsai to destroy the Others," he said. "And it's wrong! The orchestra as a whole's got a purpose. What has to be done is find why the brass section's too prominent; and from that knowledge learn to use the whole orchestra better. Because it's not happening by accident—what you hear. It's a result, an end product of things done earlier, things done with a purpose that you haven't yet understood, that the individual players even in the brass section don't themselves understand. It's happening for a reason that has to be found; and it won't be found by anyone looking for it who doesn't believe it's there. So I suppose that's why it has to be me who goes looking for it—not you; and that's why you'll have to trust me until I do find it, then listen when I tell you what needs to be done."

  He stopped at last. The three other faces before him turned to Padma. But Padma sat without saying anything, with no expression on his calm face that would indicate his opinion.

  "I think," Chavis said, carefully, "that at this point we might do better to talk this over by ourselves, if Hal doesn't mind leaving us."

  Beside Hal, Amid was getting to his feet. Hal also rose, and Amid led him from the balcony. They went left along the hall to a down-sloping ramp, that let them out into a garden which plainly lay below the balcony where the others still sat. A tall hedge enclosed a small pool and fountain, surrounded by deeply-hollowed blocks of stone, obviously designed as seats.

  "If you don't mind waiting alone," Amid said, "I'm one of them, and I ought to be up there with them. I'll be back, shortly."

  "That's fine," said Hal, seating himself in one of the stone chairs with its back to the balcony. Amid left him.

  The gentle sound of splashing water amid the otherwise silence of the garden enclosed him gently. Looking back over his shoulder and up, he could see the balustrade of the balcony: but the angle of his view was too steep for him to see even the tops of the heads of those still there. By some no-doubt-intentional trick of acoustics, he could hear nothing of their voices.

  He looked away from it, back to the leaping water, a jet rising from the center of the pool some fifteen feet in the air before curving over and breaking into feathery spray. Curiously, a feeling of defeat and depression lay like a special darkness upon him.

  His thoughts went back to the moment in his cell when he had suddenly broken through to an understanding of all things racial, enclosing him in that moment of his comprehension. The complete picture had been too immense for him to grasp all at once, then; and he still could not do it. During the past weeks he had explored the entity of that understanding section by section, as he might have explored some enormous picture inlaid upon a horizontal area too large to be seen from any one point on it. As he had explored, he had grown taller in knowledge; so that he could see more and more of it from a single point. But, even now, he could not begin to grasp the shape of it as a whole.

  However, he could feel it as a whole. He was aware of its totality, the living moment of the great human creation he was now carefully examining, bit by bit.

  Already, it had become almost incredible to him that the existence of what he could be so aware of, in its immensity, should not equally, overwhelmingly, be apparent to everyone else; above all, to seekers after understanding like Amid and the other four upstairs. How was it that the Exotics, all through the three centuries of their existence, had never developed a special study of this great, massive forward progress of the race, that was the result of the interaction of every human individual with its fellows, along the endless road of time?

  But they had, of course, he told himself. That was what ontogenetics had been intended to become. Only, apparently it had failed in its purpose. Why?

  Because—the answer grew in him slowly out of his new awareness of what he now searched, and tried to understand—ontogenetics had been crippled from the start by an assumption that its final answer would be what the Exotics desired as an ultimate goal.

  A feeling of depression, a sensation and an emotion such as he had encountered before, was born in him and grew, slowly, undramatically but undeniably. The one people he had counted on had been the Exotics, clothed in the colors of perceptivity and understanding he had found in Walter the InTeacher. Now, at last, he had been brought to doubt those qualities in them; and, doubting them for the first time, he came at last to doubt himself. Who was he to think that worlds of men and women should listen to him? The task on which he had so confidently launched himself from the cell loomed too great for any single human, even with all things made easy for him. He had little more than twenty years of life's experience to draw on. He was alone—even Amid stood on the other side of the barrier that separated him from all others.

  The depression he felt spread to fill him and settle itself in the place of the certainty that had been so much a part of his nature until now. At its base was the dark logic of Bleys, now reinforced by the deaf ears to which he had just been speaking. He lost himself in wrestling with this new enemy and the fountain played. Time passed; and it was with a small shock that he was aware of Amid, once more at his elbow.

  Hal got to his feet.

  "No," said Amid, "no need to go back up. I can tell you what's been decided."

  Hal looked at him closely for a second.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "I'm afraid we can't go along with you, blindly," Amid said. "I don't believe there's any reason not to tell you, though, that I argued for you as much as I could—as did Padma. And Chavis."

  "That's three out of five," said Hal. "A majority in my favor?"

  "Something more than a simple majority's needed in a situation like this," said Amid. "An element of doubt exists, and eventually we all had to face that."

  "In short, you all ended by deciding against me?"

  "Padma took himself out of the decision." Amid looked up at him; and there was no apology on the small man's face. "I'm sorry you have to be disappointed."

  "I'm not," said Hal, wearily. "I think I expected it."

  "It's still open to you if you want," said Amid, "to be our representative to the Dorsai. To go to them with our message to them as it was explained to you. Perhaps you should take the opportunity, even if you don't agree with it. At least you'll be doing something toward dealing with the Others."

  "Oh, I'll do it," said Hal. "I'll go."

  Amid looked at him a little strangely.

  "I didn't expect you'd agree so easily," he said.

  "As you say," Hal answered, "I'll be dealing with the problem of the Others, even if not the way I'd planned to."

  He was suddenly aware that he was smiling tightly. With an effort, he stopped.

  "I'm surprised," murmured Amid. His eyes had never left Hal's face. "Just like that?"

  "Perhaps with one condition," said Hal. "After I'm gone, will you remind Nonne and the rest that it was their own assessment that the forces at work right now aren't something I could control, and that they themselves told me time is limited?"

  "All right," said Amid. He seemed to be on the edge of saying something more, when he apparently changed his mind and turned about.

  "Come along," he said. "I'll help get you prepared and started on your way."

  Chapter Forty-one

  A brisk chime commanded Hal's attention to the communications screen in one wall of his stateroom. The screen stayed blank, but an equally brisk feminine voice spoke from it.

  "Give me your attention, please. Take your place in the fixed armchair by the bed and activate the restraining field. Control is the red stud on the right armrest of the chair."

  He obeyed, a little surprised, aware that activating the field would register on a telltale in the control room, forward. But the order had caught him deep in his own thoughts a
nd for the moment, automatically, he returned to them.

  A corner, at least, of that dark shadow of defeat and depression, which had come to touch him in the garden below the balcony at Amid's home on Mara, had stayed with him through these five standard days of ship's time it had taken for his journey to the Dorsai. He had not met the woman who was evidently the pilot of this small courier-class vessel, on which he seemed to be the only passenger; and she had not come back from the restricted control area forward to make any sort of self-introduction. As a result, he had been free to think, uninterrupted, and there had been a great deal to think about.

  Now, however, when they must be almost upon the Dorsai… he found those thoughts interrupted by the unusual demand that he put his body under control of a restraining field, something ordinarily requested of passengers only when their vessel was docking in space, as the jitney had been when it brought him to and into the Final Encyclopedia.

  But this Dorsai light transport was no spaceliner, of course, and the commanders of Dorsai vessels had their own way of doing things, as all the fourteen worlds knew. He reached out and flicked on his room screen to see how close they actually were to going into a parking orbit.

  What he saw made him sit up suddenly. They were indeed close enough to go into parking orbit. Blue and white, the orb of the Dorsai loomed large on his stateroom screen, the edge between night and day of the dawn terminator sharp below them. But, far from parking, the ship was still phase-shifting inward toward the surface of the world below. Even fifty years before, the psychic shock of a rapid series of shifts such as these would have required him to medicate himself in advance. But research at the Final Encyclopedia itself had found a way to shield from that shock. So there had been no warning.

  It was a second before Hal recalled that the Dorsai—unlike pilots from other planets—had a habit of trusting themselves to shift safely right down into the atmosphere of any world on which they had good data; in fact, to within a few thousand meters of its surface. It was a skill developed in them as part of their normal training in ship-handling, as a practical matter of cutting jitney and shuttle costs on their far-from-wealthy world. The protective restraint was merely a routine precaution against some passenger panicking under such unusual approach maneuvers and getting hurt as a result. In fact, a moment later they came out of a series of very rapid, successive shifts with a jerk that would have thrown him from the chair, if the protective field had not held him anchored.