The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Dedicated you?" she said. "You mean, as Donal, as a child, you dedicated yourself to what you're doing now? How—so early?"

  A remembered pain moved in him. A memory of the cell on Harmony closed around him once more.

  "Do you remember James Graeme?" he asked her.

  "Which James?" she asked. "There've been three by that name down the Graeme generations since Cletus."

  "The James who was Donal's youngest uncle," he answered. "The James who was killed at Donneswort when I—when Donal was still a child."

  He paused, looking at her calm face, resting now with the one cheek against his chest, looking back at him in the remains of the moonlight.

  "Did I tell you the last time I was here about my dreaming about a graveyard and a burial, while I was in the cell on Harmony?" he asked.

  "No," she said. "You told me a lot about the cell and what you thought your way through to, when you were there. But you didn't mention any dream of a burial."

  "It was when I was just about to give up," he said. "I didn't realize it then, but I was just on the brink, finally, of finding what I'd sent myself out as Hal Mayne to find. What I'd come to understand began to crack through the barrier I'd set up to keep myself as Hal from knowing what had happened to me before, and what came through was a memory of the ceremony at Foralie held over James' grave, when I was a boy…"

  His voice was lost in the pain of remembering for a moment, then he brought it back.

  "That was the moment of Donal's decision, his commitment," Hal went on. "James had been closer to him than his own brother—it sometimes happens that way. Mor was between us in age, but Mor—"

  His voice did not die this time, it stuck. Mor's name blocked his throat.

  "What about Mor?" Amanda asked after a moment. Her hand moved gently to touch his, her fingertips resting on the skin at the back of his hand as it lay on the bed.

  "Donal killed Mor," he said, from a long distance away.

  He could feel her fingertips as if they touched the naked nerves below the skin and reached up along them to touch the innermost part of his identity.

  "That's not the truth." He heard her voice a little way off. "You're making more of it than it is, somehow. It's right, but not that right. What is true?"

  "Donal was responsible for Mor's death," he answered, as if she had commanded him.

  The feeling of her reaching into him withdrew.

  "Yes," she said. "That's all right, then, for now. You were telling me about James' death and how it brought about Donal's commitment to what's driven you all these lifetimes and all these years. What happened?"

  "What happened?" His mind pulled itself back from the vision of Mor, as the finally-insane William of Ceta had left him, and came back to the vision of James' burial. "They just accepted it. Even Eachan—even my father—he just accepted James' being killed, reasonlessly, like that; and I… couldn't. I—he went into a cold rage—Donal did. The same sort of thing you brought me back from a little while ago."

  "He did?" Amanda's voice broke on a note of incredulity. "He couldn't—he was far too young. How old was he?"

  "Eleven."

  "He couldn't at that age. It's impossible."

  Hal laughed, and the laugh rang harshly in the quiet bedroom.

  "He did. Kensie felt the same way you're feeling… when Kensie found him, in the stables where he'd gone after the ceremony, when all the rest had gone up to the house. But he could and did. He was Donal."

  With the last word, as if the name had been a trigger, he felt within him a return, not only the coldness, but of a sweep of power that woke in him without warning, threatening to carry him off like a tidal bore sweeping up in its wall of water anything caught in its naked channel at high water time.

  "I am Donal," he said; and the power took and lifted him, irresistible, towering—

  "Not Bleys."

  Amanda's quiet voice reached out and cut the power off at its source. Clear-mindedness came back to him, in a rush of utter relief. He lay for a few seconds, saying nothing.

  "What have I told you about Bleys?" he asked her, then, turning to look through the gloom at her.

  "A great deal," she answered, softly, "that first night you were at Fal Morgan, when you talked so much."

  "I see." He sighed. "The sin of the Warrior, still with me. It's one of the things I still have to leave behind, as you saw… when I remembered Rukh's rescue. No, thank God, I'm not Bleys. But at eleven years old, I wasn't Bleys either. I only knew I couldn't endure that nothing be done about James' unnecessary death, about all such unnecessary evils in the universe—all the things people do to each other that should never be done."

  "And you committed yourself then, to stop that?"

  "Donal did. Yes," he said. "And he gave all his own life to trying. In a sense, it wasn't all his fault he went wrong. He was still young…"

  "What did he do?" her voice gently drew him back onto the path of what he had been about to tell her, earlier.

  "He went looking for a tool, a tool to make people not do the sort of things that had caused James' death," Hal said. "And he found one. I call it—he called it—intuitive logic. It's either logic working with the immediacy of intuition, or intuition that gets its answers according to the hard rules of a logic. Take your pick. Actually, he was far from the first to find it. Creative people—artists, writers, composers of music, musicians themselves, had used it for years. Researchers had used it. He only made a system for it and used it consciously, at his will and desire."

  "But what it is?" Amanda's voice prodded him.

  "It can't be explained—in the same sense a mathematics can't be explained—in words," he said. "You have to talk the language in which it exists to explain it—and even before that, your mind has to begin by making the quantum jump to a first understanding of that language, before you can really start learning what it is. I can give you a parallel example. You'll have seen, at one time or another, some great painting that reached out and captured you, heard a piece of music that was genius made audible, read a book that was beyond question one of the everlasting books?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Then you know how all those things have one element in common, the fact you can come back and back to them. You can look, and look again, at the painting without ever exhausting what's to be found in it. You can listen to the music over and over, and each time find something new in it. You can read and reread the book without ever getting out of it all that's there for you to discover and enjoy."

  "I know," she said.

  "You see," he told her, "what makes all your returning to these things possible is their capability of triggering off in you an infinity of discoveries; and they can do that because there is an infinity of things to be discovered put into them by the creator. That infinity of possibilities could never be marshalled together consciously by one human mind and put to work in one piece of canvas, one succession of sounds, one succession of printed words. You know that. But still, there they are. They did not exist before, and now they do. There was no way they could have come into existence except by being put there by the human being who made each of them. And there was only one way he or she could have accomplished that—the maker had to have built not only with his conscious mind, which is precise but limited in how much it can conceive at any one time, but also with the unconscious, which knows no limits, and can bring all life's observations, all life's experience, to bear on a single rendered shape, sound, or word, placed just so among its fellow shapes, sounds or words."

  He stopped speaking. For a second, she did not reply.

  "And that," said Amanda then, "is what you call intuitive logic?"

  "Not quite," said Hal. "What I was talking about there was creative logic, which is still operating under the control of the unconscious. If the unconscious is displeased with the task, it refuses to work, and no power of will can make it. What Donal did was move that control fully into the conscious area, that's all, and put
it to work there manipulating the threads of cause and effect. Then, when he was still so young, he didn't realize how much he was drawing on what he had learned from reading the works on Strategy and Tactics by his great-grandfather."

  "By Cletus Grahame, you mean?"

  Hal nodded.

  "Yes. You remember, don't you, that Cletus had actually started out with the idea of being an artist? It was only later on he became caught up in the physics of military action and reaction. He used creative logic to build his principles; and in fact, from what's there to be seen in his work, he may have crossed the line himself from time to time, into a conscious control of what he was making."

  "I see," Amanda seemed to think for a moment. "But you don't know if he ever did? You seem to know that Donal did."

  "I was never Cletus." Hal smiled, more to himself than to her. "But I was Donal."

  "And you say creative logic was why Cletus was able to win the way he did, against Dow deCastries and an Earth so rich in everything all the Younger Worlds seemed to have no chance against it? And it was symbolic logic then that brought Donal to the title of Protector of the fourteen worlds, including Earth, before he was in his mid-thirties?"

  "Yes," said Hal, somberly. "And having done it, Donal understood the lesson of the virgin with the bag of gold, after the death of Genghis Khan. He looked at the peace and law he had enforced on all the civilized planets and saw that he'd done nothing. He hadn't changed a single mind, a single attitude in the base structure of the human animal. It was the nadir of everything he had reached out for since that moment when he was eleven years old."

  Her hand reached out and caressed his arm.

  "It was all right," he smiled again, this time ruefully. "He lived through it. I lived through it. Being who I am, I can't give up. That's really what operated in that Militia cell. My conscious mind and body were ready to give up and lay back to do just that—but they weren't allowed to. That that's in me pushed me on, anyway. Just as it pushed Donal on, back then. As Donal, I saw I'd been wrong. The next step was to amend that wrongness—to correct, not an errant humanity, but the overall historic pattern that had made humanity errant."

  "And how did he think he could do that?" her voice led him on to talk, and the talking was the slow unloading of an intolerable burden he had carried for so long he had forgotten that he had ever been without it.

  "By turning his tool of intuitive logic not just upon the present, but on what made it, the causes behind the effects he saw around him and the causes behind those causes, until he came back to a point at which something could be done."

  "And he found it."

  "He found it." Hal nodded, "But he also found that what needed to be done was not something he could do as he had done things up until then. It wasn't something he was yet equipped to do. To operate upon what he needed to operate upon he himself had to change, to learn. To grow."

  "So," Amanda said. "And your second life came from that. Can you tell me about that, now?"

  He was conscious of all the burden he had already laid aside for the first time in his life, in talking to her here and now.

  "Yes," he said. "Now I can."

  He reached his free hand across to lay on the living incurve of her belly. He could feel her ribs rise and fall, slowly and fully with her breathing. He stared into the shadows above him.

  "The problem had several sides," he said. "Humanity couldn't, as he thought he saw it then, be changed from where he stood at the moment, just like you couldn't do much about a tree that was already grown. But if you went back to the time of its planting and made changes that would be effective upon the environment in which it would grow to what it would be in the present…"

  He stopped.

  "Go on," Amanda said.

  "I'm trying to work out the best way of telling you all this briefly," he answered. "And it takes a little thinking. You'll have to take my word for it that by using intuitional logic and working back from the then present effects to the causes he already knew for them, or could discover, he found he could trace back to the closest point in history where all the elements he hoped to alter were available at a single time and place for changing. He found that first point in the twenty-first century, just on the eve of the practical development of the phase drive, just before the diaspora to the Younger Worlds, in a time when all the root stocks of what would later become the Splinter Cultures were to be found together within a single environment—that of Old Earth."

  Amanda rose on her elbow again to look down into his face.

  "You're going to tell me he actually went back in time, to change the past?"

  "Yes and no," Hal said. "He couldn't physically travel back in time, of course. He couldn't actually change the past. But what he found he could do was work his consciousness back along the chain of cause and effect to the time he wanted and there try to make the necessary changes, not in what actually happened then, but in the possible implications of what happened. He could open up to the minds living in that time possibilities that otherwise they might not have seen."

  "How did he think he was going to communicate these possibilities—by stepping into people's dreams, then, or speaking to them, mind to mind?"

  "No," he said, "by interacting—but as someone who actually did not exist at the time. To make the story as short as possible, he ended by reanimating a dead body, a mining engineer of the twenty-first century, who had drowned, named Paul Formain. As Paul Formain, he influenced people who were the forerunners of the Dorsai, the Friendlies and others—but most of all he influenced the people making up something that was then called the Chantry Guild."

  "I remember that from history," said Amanda. "The Exotics came from the Chantry Guild."

  "Yes," said Hal. "In the Chantry Guild and seed organizations of other Splinter Cultures, he introduced possibilities that were to have their effect, not in Donal's time, but in our present day. Now."

  "But when did Donal manage to do this?" Amanda said. "He was in the public eye right up to the moment of his death—when he took that courier ship out alone and was caught by the one-in-a-million chance of not coming out of phase shift."

  "He didn't die," said Hal. "It was simply assumed he'd died, when he didn't arrive where and when he was supposed to and no trace of his ship could be found. He hid in space for over eighty years, until it was time to let the ship be found, drifting into Old Earth orbit."

  She said nothing for a long moment.

  "With a baby aboard," she said. "A very young child—that was you?"

  "Yes." Hal nodded. "It's something the mind can do with the body, if it has to. Even Cletus mended his crippled leg with his mind."

  "I know that story," said Amanda. "But the Exotics helped him."

  "No," said Hal. "They just provided the excuse for him to believe in his own ability to do it."

  She said nothing, looking at him.

  "We've had miracle cures reported all down the centuries," he said. "Long before the Exotics. They, themselves, have quite a library on such incidents, I understand. So, I hear, has the Final Encyclopedia. I believe I was dying in that cell from the pneumonia or whatever it was I had, until I realized I couldn't afford to die. Shortly after that realization, my fever broke. Of course, it could have been coincidence. But mothers have stayed untouched in the midst of epidemics as long as they were needed to care for their sick children."

  "Yes," she said, slowly. "I do know what you mean."

  "That, and taking over a dead body as life leaves it, are only two aspects of the same thing. But I don't want to get off on that business now. The main point is, Donal went back and became Paul Formain, so as to change the shape of things to come—and to change himself."

  "Will you sit up?" Amanda said. "Then I can sit up, too. I can't lie propped on one elbow indefinitely."

  They arranged themselves in seated position, side by side, with their backs protected by pillows from the metal bars of the bedstead behind them. The narrow width of the
single bed left them still close, still touching.

  "Now," said Amanda. "You said—'and to change himself.' Change himself how?"

  "Donal'd seen how he'd gone astray in his own time," Hal said. "He felt it was because he had failed to feel as he should for those around him—and he was right, as far as that went. At any rate, he went out to learn the ability to feel another's feelings, so that he could never again fall into the trap of thinking he had changed people when actually all he'd done was change the laws that controlled their actions."

  "Empathy? That was what he wanted?"

  "Yes," said Hal.

  "And he found it?"

  "He learned it. But it wasn't enough."

  Amanda looked at him.

  "What is it bothers you so about this time Donal—no, not Donal—when you were this animated dead man… what was his name?"

  "Paul Formain," Hal said. "It's not easy to explain. You see as Formain, he—I—did it again. Donal'd played God. He hadn't done it just for the sake of playing God, but that's what the effect he'd had on the populations of fourteen worlds had amounted to. Then when he saw what he'd done it sickened him, and he decided whatever else he did, he wouldn't be guilty of doing it again. Then, as Paul Formain, he went and did just that."

  "He did?" Amanda stared at him. "I don't see why you say that—unless you call it playing God to plant the possibilities of our present time…"

  Her own voice ran down.

  "No!" she said, suddenly and strongly. "Follow that sort of reasoning and you end up with the fact that to try to do anything for people, even for the best of reasons, is immoral."

  "No," Hal said. "I don't mean that. What I mean is that once again, he realized he'd acted without sufficient understanding. As Donal he hadn't considered people at all, except as chess pieces on a board. As Paul Formain, he considered people—but only those with whom he learned to empathize. He was still trying to work with humanity from the outside—that was what hadn't changed in him."