The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "There's only one way for them to do this, as things stand," he told her. "They've got to work inside the social structure and pattern of Earth if they want to bring about a large enough division of opinion there to keep its people as a whole stalemated. And that's what they've been trying to do from the start with the individuals they've already got there, talking up their cause. But with things on all the other worlds moving to a showdown—"

  He paused and shrugged.

  Somewhere in the depths of the garden a soft chime rang once, and a small sound in Amid's throat intruded on the silence. Hal turned to look at the smaller man.

  "I'm afraid I've been waiting for a chance to tell you something," Amid said. "You remember, you wanted it arranged for you to talk to the Exotics as a whole. A gathering of representatives from both Mara and Kultis are here, now; and they're ready to listen to you as soon as you can talk to them; by using single-shift phase, color code transmission, we're going to try to make it possible for everyone on both worlds to see and hear you as you talk—this may not work, of course."

  "I understand," said Hal. As phase shifting went, the distance between the two worlds under the sun of Procyon was easily short enough to be bridged in a single shift. But the problem here would be the tricky business of ensuring that the distance between disassembly point and reassembly point of the transmitted data was bridged exactly at all moments during transmission. Even with no more than a single shift, and orbital points whose positions were continuously calculated from outside referrents like that of Procyon itself, keeping precise contact over that distance for any period of time at all would be a staggering problem.

  "However, what I really have to tell you is that Bleys Ahrens is here, here on Mara—here with us." The voice of Amid held no change of expression. "He seems to be remarkably lucky at making guesses; because he apparently assumed you'd be coming to speak to us at this time. Under the circumstances, the sooner we finish talking here and let you go to that talking, Hal, the better. Everyone's ready, including Bleys. He's asked for a chance to address us, himself. We said yes."

  "I wouldn't expect you to do anything else," answered Hal. "As far as his ability to guess my being here to talk, he could be using an intuitional logic, like the one Donal worked with."

  Amid's eyes narrowed, and his gaze sharpened.

  "You think the Others have that, too, now?"

  "No… not the Others as a group," Hal said. "Bleys alone might—but almost certainly no one else. Or, he could just have made a lucky guess, as you say. It doesn't disturb me that he's going to talk. Before me—or after me?"

  "Which would you prefer?" Amid's voice was still expressionless.

  "Let him speak first."

  Amid nodded; and Hal turned back to Rukh.

  "As I was saying," he went on, "there's no real alternative for the Others, then. They're going to have to send to Earth some of their own number, plus as many disciples as they can who seem to be able to use something of the charismatic talent. With these they can try to make an all-out effort to enlist enough of Earth's population to build a division of opinion large enough to block anything that might be done by Earth people who could realize what the Other's control of the civilized worlds will mean."

  She nodded.

  "So," he said, "Bleys knows he's got people with the talent to do that; and his assumption will be we've got no one to stop them. But we do—we've got you Rukh; and those like you. I escaped from the Militia by getting out of an ambulance that was taking me to the hospital; and the reason I could escape was because the ambulance was caught in the crowd listening to you speak in that square at Ahruma. I heard you that day, Rukh—and there's nothing permanent in the way of changing minds Bleys or any others of his people can do, talking to an audience, that you can't match. In addition, you know other true holders of the Faith who could join you in opposing the crowd-leaders Bleys will be sending to Earth. Those others like you are there—on Harmony and Association. They'd never listen to me, if I tried to convince them to come. But you could—by coming yourself first and sending your words back to those who're left behind you as well as those you'll be speaking to on Earth."

  He stopped speaking.

  "Will you?" he asked.

  She sat, looking at and through him for a little while. When she did begin to speak, it was so softly that if he had not been straining to hear her answer, he would have had difficulty understanding her.

  "When I was in my cell alone, there, near the end of the time I was prisoner of the Militia," she said, talking almost as if to herself, "I spoke to my God and thanked Him for giving me this chance to testify for Him, I resigned myself once more to His will; and asked Him to show me how I might best serve Him in the little time I thought I had left."

  Her eyes came back and focused penetratingly only on him.

  "And His answer came—that I should know better than to ask. That, as one of the Faith, I already knew that the way I must travel at any time would always become plain and clear to me, once it was time for me to take it up. When I accepted this, a happiness came over me, of a kind I hadn't felt since James Child-of-God left the Command to die alone, so the rest of us might survive. You remember that, Hal, because you were the last to speak to him. I understood, then, that all I had to do was wait for my path to appear; for I knew now that it would do so, in its own good time. And I've been waiting, in peace and happiness, since then—"

  She reached out to take Hal's hand.

  "And it's a special joy to me, Hal, that you should be the one to point it out to me."

  He held her hand; wasted, weak and fragile within his own powerful fingers and wide palm; and he could feel the strength that flowed between them—not from him to her, but the other way around. He leaned forward and kissed her again, then got to his feet.

  "We'll talk some more as soon as I've done what I came here for," he said. "Rest and get strong."

  "As fast as I can." She smiled; and smiling, she watched them go.

  The amphitheater into which Amid brought Hal was deceptive to the eye. Hal's first impression was that it was a small place, holding at most thirty or forty people in the seats of the semicircle of rising tiers. Then he caught a slight blurring at the edges of his vision and realized that in any direction in which he looked, the faces of those in the audience directly in focus were clear and sharp; but that beyond that area of sharpness and clarity, there was a faint ring of fuzzily visible faces. He seemed to be looking across an enormous distance at mere dots of people. With that he realized that the smallness of amphitheater and audience was a deception; and that a telescopic effect was bringing close any area he looked at directly to give the impression of smallness to an area that must hold an uncountable number of individuals—who each undoubtedly saw him at short distance.

  Padma, the very aged Exotic he had met before, was standing on the low platform facing up at the seats of the amphitheater, dwarfed by the slim, erect, wide-shouldered shape of Bleys, now dressed in a loose, light gray jacket, over dark, narrow-legged trousers, and towering over the aged Exotic. The illusion Hal had encountered so frequently—of Bleys standing taller than human—was here again; but as Hal himself approached the two men, it was as if Bleys dwindled toward normal limits of size. Until at last when they were finally face to face, as it had also happened the last time they had met, he and the leader of the Others stood level, eye to eye, the same size.

  It registered in Hal's mind that Bleys had changed since that last meeting, in some subtle way. There were no new lines of age in his features, no obvious alteration in any part of his features. But nonetheless there was an impression about him of having become worn to a finer point, the skin of his face drawn more taut over its bones. He looked at Hal quietly, remotely, even a little wistfully.

  "Hal Mayne," said Amid at Hal's elbow, as the two of them reached Padma and Bleys, "would prefer that Bleys Ahrens speaks first."

  "Of course," Bleys murmured. His eyes rested for a moment
longer in contact with Hal's. It seemed to Hal that in Bleys' expression, there was something that was not quite an appeal, but came close to being one. Then the Other's gaze moved away, to sweep out over the amphitheater.

  "I'll leave you to it, then," said Hal.

  He turned and led the two Exotics back off the platform to some chair floats that were ranked on the floor beside it. They sat down, the back of their floats against the wall that backed the platform. They sat, looking out at the amphitheater and the side and back of Bleys.

  Standing alone on the stage, he seemed once more to tower, taller than any ordinary human might stand, above audience and amphitheater, alike.

  Unexpectedly he spread his long arms wide, at shoulder height, to their fullest extent.

  "Will you listen to me?" he said to the Exotic audience. "For a few moments only, will you listen to me—without preconceptions, without already existing opinions, as if I was a petitioner at your gates whom you'd never heard before?"

  There was a long moment of silence. Slowly, he dropped his arms to his side.

  "It's painful, I know," he went on, speaking the words slowly and separately, "always, it is painful when times change; when everything we've come to take for granted has to be reexamined. All at once, our firmest and our most cherished beliefs have to be pulled out by the roots, out of those very places where we'd always expected them to stand forever, and subjected to the same sort of remorseless scrutiny we'd give to the newest and wildest of our theories or thoughts."

  He paused and looked deliberately from one side of the amphitheater to the other.

  "Yes, it's painful," he went on, "but we all know it happens. We all have to face that sort of self-reexamination, sooner or later. But of all peoples, those I'd have expected to face this task the best would have been the peoples of Mara and Kultis."

  He paused again. His voice lifted.

  "Haven't you given your lives, and the lives of all your generations to that principle, ever since you ceased to call yourselves the Chantry Guild and come here to these Exotic Worlds, searching for the future of humankind? Not just searching toward that future by ways you found pleasant and palatable, but by all the ways to it you could find, agreeable or not? Isn't that so?"

  Once more he looked the audience over from side to side, as if waiting for objection or argument; and after a moment he went on.

  "You've grown into the two worlds of peoples who dominated the economies of all the inhabited worlds—so that you wouldn't have to spare time from your search to struggle for a living. You've bought and sold armies so that you'd be free of fighting, and of all the emotional commitment that's involved in it—all so you'd have the best possible conditions to continue your work, your search. Now, after all those many years of putting that search first, you seem ready to put it in second place to a taking of sides, in a transient, present-day dispute. I tell you frankly, because by inheritance I'm one of you, as I think you know, that even if it should be the side I find myself on that you wish to join, at the expense of your long struggle to bring about humanity's future, I'd still stand here as I do now, and ask you to think again of what you have to lose by doing so."

  He stopped speaking. For a long moment there was no sound at all; and then he took a single step backwards and stood still.

  "That's all," he said quietly, "that I've come here to say to you. That's all there is. The rest, the decision, I leave to you."

  He stopped speaking and stood in silence, looking at them a moment longer. A long moment of silence hung on the air of the amphitheater. Then he turned and walked off the platform to the chairs from which Hal, Amid and Padma rose to face him.

  Behind him, in the amphitheater, the silence continued.

  "I'd like to speak privately to these people," said Hal.

  Bleys smiled, a gentle tired smile, nodding.

  "I'll see to it," said Amid, answering even before Bleys had nodded. He turned to the Other. "If you'll come with me?"

  He led the tall man out by the door in through which he had brought Hal, a short few minutes earlier. Hal stepped up on the platform, walked to the front of it and looked at the audience.

  "He doesn't hope to convince you, of course," Hal said to them. "He does hope he might be able to lull you into wasting time which his group can put to good use. I know—it's not necessary to point that out to you; but having been in the habit of being able to take the time you need to consider a question sometimes makes it hard to make decisions in little or no time."

  He was searching his mind for something to say that would reach them as he had finally reached the Grey Captains at Foralie; and he suddenly realized that what he was waiting for was some response from them to what he had already said. But this was not a single room with a handful of people all within easy sight and sound of his voice. Here, he must simply trust to his words to do the job he had set them, as Bleys had been forced to do a few moments before. He remembered the mental image that had come to him in his final moments before parting with Amanda—of being for a brief time at the hub of a great, inexorably turning wheel. But this place in which he now stood was no longer at that hub—nor were these who sat here as his audience.

  "The river of time," he said, "often hardly seems to be moving about us until we see the equivalent of a waterfall ahead or suddenly find the current too strong for us to reach a shore. We're at that point now. The currents of history, which together make up time's current as a whole have us firmly in their grip. There's no space left to look about at leisure for a solution, each in his own way. All I can do is tell you what I came to say.

  "I've just come from the Dorsai," he said. "They've made their preparations there now for this last fight. And they will fight, of course, as they've always fought, for what they believe in, for the race as a whole—and for you. What I've come to ask you is whether you're willing to make an equal contribution for the sake of what you've always believed in."

  He suddenly remembered the first stanza of the Housman poem, carved above the entrance to the Central Administrative Offices in Omalu on the Dorsai. He shook off the memory and went on.

  "They've agreed to give up everything they have, including their lives, so that the race as a whole may survive. What I've come to ask of you is no less—that you strip yourselves of everything you own and everything you've gained over three hundred years so that it may be given away to people you do not know and whom you've never spoken to; in the hope that it may save, not your lives, but theirs. For in the end you also will almost surely have to give your lives—not in war, like the Dorsai, perhaps—but give them up nonetheless. In return, all I have to offer you is that hope of life for others, hope for those people to which you will have given everything, hope for them and their children, and their children's children, who may—there can be no guarantee—once more hope and work for what you hope now."

  He paused again. Nothing had changed, but he no longer felt so remote from his audience.

  "You've given yourselves for three hundred years to the work and the hope that there's a higher evolutionary future in store for the human race. You haven't found it in that time; but the hope itself remains. I, personally, share that hope. I more than hope—I believe. What you look for will come, eventually. But the only way to it now is a path that will ensure the race survives."

  The feeling of being closer to his audience was stronger now. He told himself that he was merely being moved by the emotion of his own arguments, but nonetheless the feeling was there. The words that came to him now felt more like words that must move his listeners because of their inarguable truth.

  "There was a time," he said, "in the stone-age, when an individual who thought in terms of destruction could possibly smash in the heads of three or even four human beings before his fellows gathered about him and put it beyond his power to do more damage. Later, in the twentieth century, when the power of nuclear explosive was uncovered and developed for the first time, a situation was possible in which a single pe
rson, working with the proper equipment and supplies, could end up with the capability of destroying a large metropolitan area, including possibly several millions of his fellow human beings. You all know these things. The curve that measures the destructive capability of an individual has climbed from the moment the first human picked up a stick or stone to use as a weapon, until now we've come to the point where one man—Bleys—can threaten the death of the whole race."

  He took a deep breath. "If he achieves it, it won't be a sudden or dramatic death, like that from some massive explosion. It will take generations to accomplish, but at its end will be death, all the same. Because for Bleys and those who see things as he does, there is no future—only the choice between the present as they want it or nothing at all. He and those like him lose nothing in their own terms by trading a future that is valueless for them for a here and now that sees them get what they want. But the real price of what they want is an end to all dreams—including the one you all have followed for three hundred years. You, with all the wealth and power you still have, cannot stop them from getting what they want; the Dorsai can't stop them, nor, by themselves, can all the other groups and individuals who are able to see the death that lies in giving up dreams of the future. But all together we can stop them—for the saving of those who come after us."

  He let his eyes search from one side of what he saw as the amphitheater to the other.

  "So I'm asking that you give me everything you have—for nothing in return but the hope that it may help preserve, not you, but what you've always believed in. I want your interstellar credit, all of it. I want your interstellar ships, all of them. I want everything else that you've gained or built that can be put to use by the rest who will be actively fighting the Others from now on—leaving you naked and impoverished to face what they will surely choose to do to you in retaliation. You must give it, and I must take it; because the contest that's now shaping up can only be won by those who believe in the future if they work and struggle as one single people."