The Exotic smiled at him.
"I think what you're suggesting is a sort of conversation of minds," he said. "It's been speculated about for hundreds of years and called a lot of different names - telepathy is one of them. But every test we've ever been able to make shows that at best telepathy's an occasional phenomenon of the unconscious mind, and there's no way to be sure you can use it when you want it. Most people never experience it at all."
"But it could be," said Hal. "Couldn't it?"
"If it could be, then perhaps you'd be right." A single, thoughtful crease formed for a second between the eyebrows of the young Exotic. Then it went away and he smiled again at Hal. "…Perhaps."
They turned from the ant hill and went on together to look at other things about the estate. Later, Hal overheard the younger Exotic speaking privately to Walter.
"He's very bright, isn't he?" the visitor was saying.
Walter's reply had been too low for Hal to catch. But he had been fascinated by the compliment implied in the young Exotic's final words - a compliment none of his three tutors had ever chosen to give him. But thinking about it, afterward, the feeling came even more strongly to him than it had at the time, that he had not so much suddenly stumbled then upon the question that had impressed the young Exotic, as found it already there in some part of him with which he was unfamiliar. Now, fascinated by it anew, after all these years, he let go of his dream about the visitor and came back to awareness of the cell.
That one idea was a piece of the whole that had brought him to this moment. It was also - he thought now, with his racing brain - a part of one of the tools of understanding he had just earlier imagined could be forged by a linking of the forward and back parts of his mind. He reached out to develop that idea, trying to touch with his consciousness other knowledges and awarenesses beyond the membrane, things that he could sense were there, but could still not see clearly. However, these still hid from him. It occurred to him once again that these hidden elements might be from a time farther back than his aware memory knew, that perhaps they lay shrouded partly by the darkness of that mystery about himself to which he had always hunted unsuccessfully for an answer, the mystery of who he was and where he had come from.
With that thought, it came to him that the unconscious might know what the conscious did not. Buried within it must be specific memories from before the time when he had been old enough to make conscious observations of what was around him. Memories, perhaps, of what it had been like aboard the old-fashioned courier spaceship on which he had been found as a child. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the cold wall of the cell, willing awareness of his body to depart from him again, reaching out for a vision of the past before the remembered times…
But the picture that he finally summoned up, half dream, half autohypnotic hallucination was limited in ways that disappointed him. He was able to see something that was clearly like a room, but most of it was shadowy or out of focus. Parts of it - a pilot's chair, some steadily glowing lights on a panel just above his reach - stood out in sharp focus as seen with the unmarred, fresh-born attention of the very young. But the rest was remote or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. Clearly, he thought, he was looking at the space that had combined the functions of main cabin and control room of the craft in which he had been found. However, he could deduce nothing beyond that fact to help him with the questions in his mind. There was no indication of a particular moment in which he might have been seeing this and no sign of other humans within the remembered range of his vision.
A sharp disappointment woke in him, kindling into near anger. All through the life he could remember, he had dreamed and longed to find out about his origins, imagining a thousand fanciful tales of who he might be and where he might have come from. Now it was almost as if he was deliberately being prevented from that discovery, when it lay at his fingertips. In frustration he turned his mind upon the inmost recesses of his unconscious with all the fury of someone running down empty corridors, pounding on door after unresponsive door. Until, at last, he burst his way through one such door to a point where he found himself brought up short, face to face against a barrier the existence of which he had not expected.
His imagination pictured it for him as a massive, round, metal door, like that on a vault. It was an unnatural barrier, that made no secret of the fact it had been put there by someone so much more capable than his present self, that there was no hope of his forcing it open. It stood, speaking a silent, unyielding message to him from the fact of its very existence.
I will stand open when you no longer need what I hide.
In itself, it represented a defeat. But at the same time it gave a confirmation of what he had often suspected; and that confirmation made it not a defeat but a victory. The barrier's very existence was proof at last that he was, and always had been, something more than his conscious self had realized. Also it meant that the way blocked off was no more than one tried by an earlier self and found to be a dead end. He was being directed by this to find some other path to the goal they had both tried to reach; and a newly possible means for that journey to that goal lay now in the understanding that had just come to him in this cell.
He let himself go back, therefore, to full consciousness of the cell, back to his laboring, suffering body. But with a new freedom now of will and thought, he began consciously to commence the forging of those special mental tools he had imagined earlier when it had come to him how the conscious mind might reach back and tap not only the knowledge but the abilities of the unconscious. He set himself, even as he struggled to breathe, to the building of a poem, sending his desire for that which he needed through the membrane to search among the relationships between the as-yet-unclear shapes and meanings stored back there.
And the search brought those relationships to him finally; in the sharply focused, creative images of the poem itself.
ARMAGEDDON
Yes, they are only deer.
Nervous instincts, fitted with hooves and horns,
That foolishly stamp among these Christian pines
Affixed like seals to the legal foolscap of winter;
And, illiterately facing the line of the snowplowed asphalt
Scrawled by a book-learned hand among these hills,
Cross to the redcapped men.
Armageddon.
Of course. The title and the words of the poem burned in his mind's-eye as the Final Encyclopedia had made his poem about the knight burn amongst the stars that appeared to surround his carrel there. Then, what he had found himself discovering in poetic form had been the irresistible inner force that was to drive him forth from the Encyclopedia, toward his years on Coby and this present moment of realization. Now, with this latter verse he had rendered a picture of the self-created cataclysm toward which the human race was now hurling itself, like a drunken man too intoxicated to realize the consequences of what he did.
Of course. Armageddon - Ragnarok - whatever you wanted to call it, was finally upon all of them. It had caught up all people like an avalanche, gaining speed as it plunged down a mountainside; and there was no one now who could fail to be aware of it on some level or another of his or her senses.
Tam Olyn had told him of it bluntly and plainly. But he also remembered Sost, in the tunneled corridors of Coby, referring to it. Hilary had talked about it to Jason as he had driven Jason and Hal to their meeting with Rukh's Command… and, just a few hours since, Barbage had once more used the term "Armageddon," here in this very cell.