But Walter, usually so mild and comforting in all things, had told him sternly then that instead of being unhappy he should feel lucky that he had been able to do it at all. The ability Walter had said, was not unknown, but rare, and few people had ever been able to conceptualize on that level. He had explained that the difference between what most could manage and what Hal had evidently been able to do was the difference in the creation of what Walter gave the name of "vision, " as opposed to an "image" - quoting an ancient artist of the twentieth century who also had the capability. "Most people can, with concentration, evoke an image," Walter had told him, "and, having evoked it, they can draw it, paint it, or build it. But an image is never the complete thing, imagined. Parts of it are missing because the person evoking it takes for granted that they're there. While a vision is complete enough to be the thing, itself, if it only had solidity or life. The difference is like that between a historic episode, thoroughly researched and in the mind of a historian, ready to be written down, and the same episode in the memory of one who lived through it. Now, is it an actual vision you're talking about?" "Yes. Yes!" Hal had said eagerly. "It's all there - so much you can almost touch it, as if it was solid. You could even get up and walk around it and see it from the back! Why can't you try harder and see it?" "Because I'm not you," Walter had answered.
So, now, under the pressure of his concentration, but for the last time, there seemed to take shape in the air before Hal a reproduction of the core image of the Final Encyclopedia's stored knowledge.
Its shape resembled a very thick section of cable made of red-hot, glowing wires - but a cable in which the strands had loosened, so that now its thickness was double that it might have had originally - it appeared about a meter in cross section and perhaps three meters in length.
In this mass, each individual strand was there to be seen. Not only that, but each strand, if anyone looked closely enough, was visibly and constantly in movement, stretching or turning to touch the strands about it, sometimes only briefly, sometimes apparently welding itself to another strand in what seemed a permanent connection.
Originally it had appeared before him like this thanks to the same technological magic of the Encyclopedia that had seemed to place him in his old home, below. With the broadcast image he had formed this continually updated vision in his room so that he could study it. But over the years, as he had come to learn each strand of it, he had begun to be able to envision it by concentration alone.
He had begun this study after seeing Tam Olyn, then Director of the Encyclopedia, standing in the data control room and examining the same image perpetually broadcast there. For all Hal knew, at the moment that room and image could be next door to him now. There was no permanent location within the Encyclopedia to any of its parts, because it moved them around at the convenience of its occupants.
Tam Olyn had been Director of the Encyclopedia for nearly a hundred years. Before that he had been an interstellar newsman, who had tried for his own personal revenge to turn the hatred of all the occupied worlds upon the peoples of Harmony and Association, the two self-named Friendly Worlds colonized by the Splinter Culture of both true faith-holders and religious fanatics.
Tam had blamed them, then, for the death of his younger sister's husband - to avoid facing his own guilt for that death. When he had failed to make the Friendlies anathema to the rest of the human race, he had at last seen himself for what he had become. Then he had come back here, to the Encyclopedia, at which he had once shown a rare talent. Here, he had risen to the Directorship, and he alone had learned to identify the knowledge behind each apparently glowing strand, merely by gazing at it, without the help of the instruments used by the technicians who were always on duty in the core room.
So it had been Tam's example that fired the imagination of Hal. For a moment even the vision before Hal now dimmed, overlaid in his mind by the gray shadow of the old man. Tam would be sitting alone, now, in those quarters of his, that had been transformed by the Encyclopedia into an illusion of a woodland glade with a stream running through it, its day and night always as the surface of Earth directly below him saw the sun or not.
Tam would be alone now because Ajela, the Assistant Director, had left him to hold the conference. Alone, and waiting for death, as someone weary at the end of too long a day might wait for steep. Waiting, but holding death, like sleep, at bay, because he still hoped for a word from Hal. A word of success Hal had not been able to bring him.
Three years before, Hal had had no doubt he would bring that word, eventually. Now, after those slow years with no progress, the time had come when he must face the fact he never would. He must announce it at the conference of which Ajela had reminded him. He could not be late, after his unusual offer to attend, when for so long he had avoided such administrative discussions between Ajela and Rukh Tamani, the faith-holder and kindler of Old Earth's awakening.
Now, Hal tried once more to concentrate on his vision of the knowledge store. He had gone beyond Tam in the reading of it. Like Tam he could know from a particular part of a glowing wire which specific bit of knowledge it represented. But, more than Tam, he had been able to reach through to that knowledge directly, though he had failed at becoming able to read it.
It would not have been a conscious reading in any case. What the knowledge was, would have simply, suddenly been available there in the back of his memory. A dead and buried bit of memory, but one which, with an effort, he would have been able to bring alive to his conscious mind. It was not that he lacked mental space to hold so much information. He had tried, and found that that same back of the human mind - though not the consciousness up front - could contain all the knowledge the Encyclopedia itself held, which was all the knowledge remembered and known on the world below.
But so far it was still, to him, an untouchable knowledge. To bring it back to life required its being put to use consciously, and this final step his conscious mind had proved incapable of. The human conscious could only tap stored wisdom along the straight-line, simple route of concrete thought - one piece at a time.
For the last year and a half he had struggled to find ways to put to conscious use the whole of the stored knowledge. But he had found none, and in consequence the doorway to the Creative Universe he believed in had remained closed to him. Yet he knew it was there. All the art and inventions of recorded history attested to that fact, each piece of art and each invention was an existing proof that a purely Creative Universe, where anything was possible, could be reached and used. He had made use of it himself to create poems - good or bad, made no difference, as long as they had had no existence in the known universe until he made them. And they had not. But still they came only from his unconscious.
So, the doorway was there. But he could not enter it. What he wanted was to physically put himself inside it, as he might put himself inside another physical universe. The bitter part was to know it could be entered, but not know how. Since he had been born as Donal Graeme, the Dorsai, he had several times entered it, but always without knowing how he did so. Once, had been his return to consciousness among the historically fixed events of the twenty-first century. In that instance he had made use of a dead man's body to move about, had heard a carved stone lion roar like the living animal, and he had come back from that past time to a moment eighty years later than he had left, physically changed from an adult man to a two-year-old boy.