The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Her curiously intent gaze held him. Once more, he felt the strange wash of feeling between them.

  "I think the house'll be safe enough," she said; and turned toward the door. "I'll be back in a few hours."

  "All right," said Hal.

  She went out.

  He was left alone in the crystalline stillness of the untenanted home. After a moment, he went into the living room.

  It was a large, dark-panelled room, larger than its equivalent at Fal Morgan. The long shape of the house required it to be rectangular rather than square; and there was probably comfortable seating space in it for as many as thirty people. Up to fifty could probably be gathered here, if necessary. Its north wall was nothing but windows, the room-wide drapes upon them drawn back now to the daylight, giving a view of the steep slope behind the house. There would be sensors, he thought, to pull these drapes back each morning, part of the automatic machinery that would manage the purely physical establishment through daylight and dark, summer heat and winter cold, in the absence of its people.

  The east wall, to his right, was pierced by a single entrance to what appeared to be a long hallway. The wall itself had only one object on its sober panelling. A full-length, life-size portrait of a man standing, dressed in an old-fashioned military uniform that could have been worn only on Earth, two hundred or more standard years ago. The man was very erect, tall, slim and middle aged. He wore a gray mustache, sharply waxed to points, which ruled out the possibility that it was a picture of Cletus Grahame. Of course, thought Hal, it would not be Cletus. It was a picture of Eachan Khan, the father of Melissa Khan, who had been the wife of Cletus; and from what he remembered about the family, Cletus himself had done the painting. The archaic uniform would be the one Eachan Khan had worn as a general officer in the Afghanistani forces, before he and Melissa had emigrated from Earth.

  The south wall, straight ahead of Hal, showed nothing but its panelling, with the entrance from the entry hall in the center of it. The west wall, on his left, had entrances at each end of it. The nearest of these opened on stairs rising to the floor above, with beyond them a hallway which must lead to the kitchen Amanda had mentioned; and the further entrance, lit by the sunlight from the windows in the adjacent north wall, was obviously the entrance to the dining room. He could even see a corner of the dining table Amanda had spoken of, when he had commented on the size of the one at Fal Morgan.

  The shortened wallspace between these two entrances was almost entirely occupied by a wide and deep fireplace built of a gray-black granite, including the long and heavy mantelpiece over it; carved into the thick edge of the mantelpiece where the verse had been cut at Fal Morgan was a shield shape, showing three scallop shells upon it. Above the mantelpiece hung a sword in a silver-metal scabbard, as antique as the uniform in the picture on the wall across from it, and plainly also an original possession of Eachan Khan.

  Hal sat down in one of the large overstuffed armchairs. The silence of the house around him pressed in on him. He had come here, he had told himself, because he had felt himself unready to speak to the representatives of the Dorsai. Not unready to deliver the message the Exotics had sent with him, but unready to give the Dorsai people his own words, in terms that would make them listen and understand.

  How much of this was simple lack of confidence after his failure on Mara, he did not know. He had gone into the meeting with Nonne, Padma and the rest, taking it for granted that they must understand him. He had never felt that sureness where the Dorsai were concerned; and Foralie had drawn him aside from his earlier planned destination like the magnetic North of Earth swinging about to itself the point of a compass needle. The decision to come here first had been born from the moment he had seen this blue and white, ocean-girt world mirrored in the vision screen of his stateroom aboard ship.

  Sitting now in the silent living room, it seemed to him as if he could feel the house speaking to him. There was something here that picked him up, body, mind and soul, and held him in a way that was very nearly eerie. As he sat, he could feel the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting and an electric chill starting at the base of his skull and spreading downward, along his spine and across his shoulders. The house pulled at some ancient strings anchored deep within him. A soundless voice called him; and he rose slowly in answer from his chair, and turned to the corridor leading back to the kitchen.

  He went down the corridor. It took six paces to traverse, and it was clear within him that he had known it would take that many and no more. It was a little more than twelve meters in length. There were no openings off it until he stepped from its further end into the kitchen. Like the kitchen at Fal Morgan, it was large, perhaps even larger than Amanda's. Like that one, also, another doorway in the wall to his right led into the dining room, giving a glimpse of its end, opposite the one he had seen from the living room.

  The corridor he had just come down had paralleled the dining room's length.

  In the kitchen here as well, the panelling was dark, unlike that at Fal Morgan, and the kitchen table was not round but octagonal. It was also larger than the one he and Amanda had sat at that morning. But in all important ways, it was a room like its counterpart at Fal Morgan.

  He stood for a moment. There was nothing in particular to see, but the intense, high-altitude sunlight beat through the windows to his left and the dark wood of the walls drank up the illumination. There was nothing to hear; but to his imagination it seemed he could almost hear a hum of voices that had soaked, like time, into the panelling, and were now sounding just below his auditory threshold. The unheard sound brought back to him a feeling of the people, now dead and gone, who had sat here living and told each other of their doings and their thoughts.

  He stood, feeling the minutes slip past him like stealthy sentinels returning to their posts, until with an effort he broke free and moved across the room to a door let into the north wall of the kitchen. The door opened at a touch and he stepped into the daylight of the morning and the backyard of Graemehouse. Around him and off to his left were the outbuildings that had been hidden by the bulk of the house on his approach, the stable, the stores buildings, the barn and—closest of all—that building that on the Dorsai he knew was customarily called the fieldhouse.

  He walked across the short distance of stony and sunlit earth. The fieldhouse was unlocked and he let himself in. It was an unpartitioned building as wide as Graemehouse and almost as long. Its height was greater. Above its walls, the roof arched to a full two stories over the pounded earth of the floor. There were no windows in the walls, but skylights in the arched roof let sunlight down to fill the air of the interior with dancing motes of dust. It was a place for winter exercise; and as Hal knew, it could be heated, but barely to above the freezing point.

  Now, it was not yet the season for artificial heat. The sunlight streaming down from the skylights warmed the interior air to a summer temperature; and Hal felt himself touched once more by the ghosts of sounds. To this building Donal Graeme would have come as soon as his infant legs could carry him, following the older members of the family. He would have tottered his unsteady way along the temporary winter passageways set up between the house and the outbuildings to give a weather-protected route. To the young child this building would at first have seemed enormous; and the activities of his elders here magical and frustrating, involving elements of balance, strength and speed that his very young body was not mature enough to imitate.

  But he would have tried to imitate, regardless. He would have tried to turn in swift, flowing movement, as his elders turned, to run as they ran, and to struggle in the fashion they struggled with each other in their unarmed practice bouts; and he would have demanded also that they pretend to go through the motions of these activities with him, as they did with each other. By the time he had been five years old, his movements would have begun to resemble theirs, even if more slowly and clumsily.

  The memory of that young bright time, in which he had been an in
stinctive part of his people and thought of himself as no different from them, would have been something Donal would have looked back on often from the standpoint of his later years… Hal turned suddenly, and walked on through the fieldhouse, to let himself out by a further door.

  Outside, he paused for a second, then turned to go through the other outbuildings, which were also not locked. The interiors of these revealed themselves as clean, neat, and in most cases still stored and fitted with what they would have contained if the house was occupied; but while there was an echo from them of lives lived down the generations, they did not produce the strong effect on him that the house and the fieldhouse had. He was of half a mind to turn back again to the house itself, when he saw a final building that was the stables, with a stand of willows beyond, all but hidden by the stables' bulk. He went forward, stepped through the door into the half-gloom within, and all that he had felt before came back.

  Once again, something closed about him and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The stalls on either side of the central aisle before him were empty. He looked down to bales of hay, neatly stacked at the far end, and that which he had come here to meet stood at last face to face with him.

  For a long moment he stood, breathing the dusty, clean-stable odor of the structure; and then he turned and went once more out the door. He turned right and went down along the further length of the stables' outside wall, turned the corner at the end and saw, under the long, gently-downreaching limbs of the willows, the white-painted picket fence that enclosed the private graves of those who had lived here.

  For a moment he stopped, only looking at it; and then he went forward to it.

  There was a small gate in the fence. He opened it, went through and closed it softly behind him. Each grave had an upright headstone of gray rock the color of the mountains looking down on him. On and between the grave plots the grass was neatly cut. There was space to walk between the graves and the headstones all faced to his left, six across in orderly ranks. He turned to his right and went to the head of the graveyard, where the older plots were.

  There he paused, looking down at the names cut in the upright stones. Eachan Murad Khan… Melissa Gray Khan Grahame… Cletus James Grahame… he moved down the ranks… Kamal Simon Graeme… Anna Outbond Graeme. On his right, Mary Kenwick Graeme and Eachan Khan Graeme, with a single headstone for their graves that lay side by side with no space separating them.

  His step faltered. Then he took one more stride forward and looked down. On his right again, Ian Ten Graeme… Leah Sary Graeme… and Kensie Alan Graeme. Furthest from him, Kensie's grave lay against the far line of the picket fence, so close to the willows there that the branches had grown down until they lightly swept the grassy surface of his grave with their tips, like fingers gently stroking in the little air that stirred about Hal as he stood watching. And in the next rank beyond the graves of Ian and Leah and Kensie were three more identically cut gravestones. His step hesitated again.

  Then he stepped forward, turned and looked down. Under the willows beyond Kensie's grave, but untouched by them as his uncle's grave had been touched, was a plot with the name of Donal Evan Graeme upon it. Next to it was the grave of Mor Kamal Graeme, and next to Hal, himself, so close that the toes of his boots almost touched the edge of it, was a stone with the name upon it of James William Graeme…

  He could not weep. In the cell, pared thin by fever, exhaustion and the struggle to breathe, he had wept. But here, nearly a century later and in a grown body, he could not. Only his throat clenched painfully and a coldness began to grow in him—not the electric coldness now of the back of the neck and shoulders, but the different, indestructible, unyielding coldness deep in the center of him, spreading out to stain his whole body within. In his mind he felt the powerful arms of his uncle around him once more, heard the voice of Kensie calling on him to come back, come back…

  He came back. The coldness went and he turned away from the graves. He went out by the little gate in the picket fence, closing it quietly behind him, and started back up to the house.

  He reentered the kitchen door through which he had emerged. It latched softly and he looked at his chronometer. Time had passed. The figures on it now showed less than an hour to noon, the time at which Amanda was due to return.

  He went back down the corridor from the kitchen to the living room. Now that he had entered the house for the second time, he felt a difference in his response to it. It was no longer a place in which he was a stranger; and every part of it seemed to have a latent power to kindle emotions in him. The sights and echoes of it were familiar, and the living room, when he came to it, enclosed him like a place well remembered.

  He turned his attention to the rest of the building. The stairs off the living room led to bedrooms upstairs, but the bedroom toward which he now felt impelled was down on this level. The corridor opposite the one to the kitchen and leading toward the east end of the house went only a short distance before making a forty-five degree turn to the left for an even shorter distance, then turned back again to its original direction, to run approximately down the center line of the house.

  In the left hand wall of the small cross-corridor there was a doorway into a room which was adjacent to the living room he had just left. Hal stepped through the doorway into a library, almost as long and wide as the living room itself. A large writing table of very dark, polished wood stood in one corner near the far windows. As with the living room, the north wall was almost all glass, and the outside daylight lit the shelves of reading cubes and old-fashioned volumes. Low on one shelf near the windows was a long row of tall books, bound in a dark brown leather. Hal walked across to them and saw that they were bound manuscript copies of the volumes of Cletus Grahame's work on Strategy and Tactics. He ran his finger along their spines, but did not disturb them from their quiet order.

  He turned and left the room.

  Interior lighting went on, down the long leg of the corridor beyond, as he moved through the remaining downstairs part of the house. This section was nearly half of the total building; and the first doors he passed opened on bedrooms to his left, and workrooms like offices to his right. Then the workrooms ended, giving way to bedrooms on both sides. He counted six bedrooms and four offices before the corridor ended at last at a combined master bedroom and office, that took up the full width of that end of the house.

  Coming back from the master bedroom, he found the room that would have been Donal's. Biographies written after Donal's death had identified it as the third back from the master bedroom. Of course, Hal thought, it would be this far back, and this small. The youngest of the family and those ill almost always had the rooms closest to the master bedroom; they would be moved farther from it as the larger, double bedrooms became vacant closer to the living room, through the death or departure of their occupants. Donal had been the youngest in the household at the time he had left home to go out on his first contract; and he had never returned.

  It was a very small room, a closet-like space for a single occupant, in contrast to the bedrooms closer to the living room, which were usually occupied by married members of the family. Many other young Graemes would have owned this room since Donal. Neither the furniture nor any object within it could be counted on to have been in his possession during the years of his growing-up.

  Nonetheless, Hal stood, gazing about, and the lighter, earlier chill took him again, spreading from neck to shoulders. The walls here were the walls remembered; and the view through these windows of the steep slope guarding the back of Graemehouse was as it had been.

  He put out one hand to touch the wood-panelled wall, worn by the cleanings of years to a silky smoothness; and stood, fingertips against the vertical surface, gazing out at the slope seen so many times in the years of Donal's growing up, reaching… reaching. For a long moment he stayed as he was; and a fragment of the poem he had written in the Final Encyclopedia came without warning, to him…

  Within the ruined ch
apel, the full knight

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

  And clashing mailed feet on the broken stones—

  Strode to the shattered lintel and looked out …

  Then it was as if a wind that was purely of the mind blew through the room and he was suddenly made part of a whole—himself, the wall, and the slope outside, all welded together—caught up in one moment of experience no different from another such moment known many times by the one to whom he reached.

  I am here, he thought.

  The chill grew, spreading out to take over his whole body. The hair rose again on the back of his neck; and a soundless shrilling, as if the very temporal structure of the moment was in vibration, commenced and mounted swiftly, in and about him, as his identity with the man who had lived here came finally, fully into existence in his mind. He stood—as Donal—in the room; and he looked out—as Donal—on the scene beyond the bedroom window.

  Chapter Forty-four

  As abruptly as it had arrived, the moment was gone, leaving him unsure that it had ever been. His hand dropped from the wall; and a moment later, when he lifted it to his forehead, he felt the skin there chilled and damp, as if half the strength in him had just been drained away by a massive effort.

  For a moment he continued to stand in the room. Then he turned and went back out into the corridor; and turned again toward the living room. Going up the corridor, the drained feeling was strong within him and he recognized its kinship, much greater, but like, to the emptiness and fatigue that had always followed upon the making of a poem that had come suddenly and unexpectedly to life within him, a reaction from the violence of a massive inner effort that had left him forever changed.

  But with a poem, he told himself, he had always been left with something accomplished, something solid to hold that he had not had before. While in this case… but, even as he thought this, he realized that something had also been accomplished here. A change had taken place in him, so that now he was seeing the house about him with a difference.