He broke off as the old head before him made the same minuscule side to side movement. Tam's hand stirred slightly between his two palms, and he was puzzled for a second before he realized the other was trying to return a pressure to his touch.
Once more Tam's lips moved. But this time the ghost of a voice came from them. "Hal...
But the faint exhalation of breath died, the heavy eyelids wavered and closed. Tam was utterly motionless and the moment of his stillness stretched out and out.... "Tam!" cried Ajela suddenly, and both Rukh and Amanda moved in on the chair where Tam sat. But Tam's heavy eyelids fluttered briefly and rose. For a second he focused on Ajela, and that small attempt at a smile once more turned up the corners of his lips for her.
Hal rose and moved back out of the way, as Ajela slipped forward onto her knees where he had been, threw her arms around Tam and buried her face against the ancient body.
Rukh bent over the gold-haired, kneeling figure. Hal felt a touch on his elbow and looked to see Amanda's eyes meaningfully upon his. He turned and followed her out of the door by which they had just come in. As the door closed behind them, he turned back to face her and they stood, looking at each other. "What can I do?" said Hal. "is there anything I can do at all for her?" "Not directly," said Amanda. "Leave her to Rukh and me. Both of us have been through this sort of experience in our own lives. For me, it was Ian, when I was still young. For Rukh it was James Child-of-God. We can help her. You can't, except by getting on with your own work." "Which is what I intend starting immediately," he said. "With luck, I can still achieve something before-"
He broke off. Rukh had just come through the door and joined them, "How is she?" Hal asked. "She's best left alone with him for now," said Rukh. "Later it'll be a matter of getting her away from him to rest for a while. Let's go to her office to talk."
With another brief use made of the Final Encyclopedia's magic, and another short walk down the corridor, they entered the office. It was, like the office of any of the others from Tam on down who worked with the Encyclopedia, merely one room of the personal living space of each within the massive structure that was the TFE. But illusion made the space chosen appear as large as was wished and hid all doors to more rooms beyond, to all but those who knew the quarters intimately.
So as with Tam's forest glade, Ajela's working space was a reflection of her own individual identity. As his did, hers had water, but not a stream. Where Ajela worked was a round, shallow pool in which brightly colored fish lazily swam. There was indeed a desk beside the pool but the floor space about it was furnished in lounge fashion, except that the chairs, like the desk, were floats, instead of solidly floor-standing, oldfashioned furniture.
However, the largest difference between the two personalized rooms lay in their general concept. Tam's was a slice of Old Earth. Ajela's was a nostalgic reconstruction of part of a typical Exotic countryside residence, one of those artfully constructed dwellings in which it was possible to move from indoors to outside without having realized it, so well were the two environments integrated in the design and furnishings.
The inside surface of the wall through which Hal, Amanda and Rukh now entered was simple wood paneling. But where the wall connecting to it at an angle on their right would normally be was the seeming of a vertical face of roughly cut, warm brown granite. The wall to their left seemed a trellis overgrown with vine from which hundreds of varicolored sweetpea blossoms looked inward at them. While the wall that should have been opposite the one through which they had entered appeared not to exist. Instead, they looked out on a vista of green treetops in a bowl-shaped valley lifting in the distance to bluish mountains wreathed in soft tendrils of moving white mist. "Let's take the desk," said Rukh. She stepped ahead, leading the way, and went forward and around to seat herself behind the desk. It was a piece of office furniture that could be expanded both lengthwise and in width to make a conference table seating up to fifteen people, but at the moment it was down to its minimal size of a meter in width and two in length. Rukh sat down behind it, in a float near one end, and Amanda and Hal moved, respectively, to the end itself and the front of the desk directly opposite Rukh. Two nearby floats, their sensory mechanisms triggered by the heat of the bodies close to them, moved forward to be used, and Hal and Amanda sat down.
Hal looked at the desk. Its present state was the one thing in the room that did not resonate of Ajela. In all the time Hal had been in the Final Encyclopedia, he had seen its surface in either one of only two states. Either it was completely bare and clean, except for a stylus next to the screen inset in the desktop where Ajela usually sat, or it was high-piled and adrift with the flotsam of hard copies of official papers, correspondence, contracts and the like.
Now, it was in neither state. It held a number of hard copies, but they were neatly stacked in orderly piles. Hal looked at these as the desk top opened before both Amanda and himself to make available to each of them a screen and stylus like that now in front of Rukh.
The neatly stacked papers were not the product of Ajela's hands. The desk showed the touch of Rukh. Hal raised his eyes to her. "Have you taken over here for her completely, then?" he asked. "I'm afraid so," said Rukh. "It's not official, of course. Ajela's authority comes from Tam - I should say, from you, since Tam named you Director, only you've never used the authority. She has. But aside from the fact she's got no right to pass it to someone else while you're alive, we daren't let word get out to Earth or anywhere else that she's not, effectively, at the helm. There're a handful of inner circle secretaries that know, but they keep it to themselves. Not even most of the Encyclopedia personnel realize how much she's out of the picture most of the time." "You'd think they'd guess something like that was going on, with Tam as close to the end as he is," said Amanda. "They do," said Rukh. "They're just loyal enough not to ask embarrassing questions. But Hal- " Her brown eyes leveled on his. "They'll feel better now you're back." "I never did run things here," said Hal. "No, but they know Tam looked on you to finally succeed him, and in fact you were already made Director years ago, when the shield went up. They'll feet better with you actually in the Encyclopedia." "How are you managing on your own?" Amanda asked Rukh.
The brown eyes moved to meet the turquoise ones. "It's all decision-making," said Rukh. "The internal problems I turn over to the heads of departments. In special cases, I go to Ajela if I have to. The rest of it, particularly the problems coming up to her from Earth, are usually just a matter of common sense or mediating between two unreasonable points of view. In fact, nearly everything that comes up here for decision from the surface is something that could and should have been handled by the people down there. They did, in fact, until they woke up to the fact that we were in a war and the Encyclopedia was the one their defenders were contracted to. Not that I make any military decisions. I leave that up to the Dorsai. "But Hal," she turned back to him, "these things aren't important. Tam is. Is there anything, anything at all, you can do for him and Ajela before he has to let go completely? In spite of what you may think by what you saw in there, he'll fight it out to the last minute. It's the way he's made. If there's the slightest chance of you discovering anything, or doing something that would make him feel he was free to go..." "I have found something," said Hal, "and I'm going to try to do something. Is Jeamus Walters still with us?"
Rukh smiled. "Does it seem that you've been gone that long, Hal?" Rukh smiled. "Right now you ought to find him in his office. Shall I call and find out?"