"Yes," she said, slowly. "People talk about phase-shift errors as if they were something romantic - a universe of lost ships. But it's not romantic."
He gazed closely at her.
"Why does that make you so sad?" he asked, deeply moved to see her cheerfulness gone.
She stared at him for a second.
"You're sensitive," she said.
Before he could react to that statement, however, she had gone on.
"But shouldn't I be sad?" she asked. "People have died. To them there was nothing romantic about it. People have been destroyed or lost forever, who might have changed the course of the race if they'd lived. How about Donal Graeme, who brought the fourteen worlds to the closest thing to a unified political whole that they'd ever known - just a hundred years or so ago? He was only in his thirties when he left the Dorsai for Mara, and never got there."
Hal shrugged. He knew the bit of history she referred to. But in spite of the sensitivity she had just accused him of having, he could not work up much sympathy for Donal Graeme, who after all had had nearly a third of a normal lifetime before he was lost. He became aware that Ajela was staring at him.
"Oh, I forgot!" she said. "You were almost lost that way. It was just luck you were found. I'm sorry. I didn't think when I brought the subject up."
It was like her, he thought - already he was thinking of ways in which she was like, although he had only known her a matter of hours - to put the kindest possible interpretation on his indifference to what moved her deeply.
"I don't remember any of it," he said. "I was under two years old when they found me. As far as I'm concerned, it could just as well have happened to someone else."
"Haven't you ever been tempted to try and establish who your parents were?"
Internally, he winced. He had been tempted, hundreds of times. He had woven a thousand fantasies in which by chance he discovered them, still alive somewhere.
He shrugged again.
"How'd you like to go down to the Archives?" she asked. "I can show you the facsimiles of all the art of the race from the Paleolithic cave paintings of the Dordogne, up until now; and every weapon and artifact and machine that was ever made."
"All right," he said; and with an effort hauled himself off thoughts of his unknown parents. "Thanks."
They went to the Archives, which were in another room-area just under the actual metal skin of the Encyclopedia. All the permanent rooms made a layer of ten to twenty meters thick just inside that skin. With the force-panels outside it, that location was as safe as anywhere within the sphere itself; and this arrangement left the great hollow interior free for the movable rooms to shift about it.
As Ajela explained, the rooms were in reality always in motion, being shuttled about to make way for the purposeful movement of other rooms as they were directed into proximity with one another. In the gravityless center of the sphere, with each room having its own interior gravity, this motion was all but unnoticeable, said Ajela; though in fact Hal had already come to be conscious of it - not the movement itself, but the changes in direction. He supposed that long familiarity with the process had made permanent personnel like Ajela so used to it that they did not notice it any more.
He let her talk on, although the facts she was now telling him were some, he had learned years ago from Walter the InTeacher. He was aware that she was talking to put him at his ease, as much as to inform him.
The Archives, when they came to them, inhabited a very large room made to seem enormous, by illusion. It had to be large to appear to hold the lifesize and apparently solid, three-dimensional images of objects as large as Earth's Roman Colosseum, or the Symphonie des Flambeaux which Newton had built.
He had not expected to be deeply moved by what he would see there, most of which he assumed he had seen in image form before. But as it turned out, he was to betray himself into emotion, after all.
"What would you like to see first?" she asked him.
Unthinkingly, his head still full of the idea of testing the usefulness of the Encyclopedia, he mentioned the first thing he could think of that legitimately could be here, but almost certainly would not.
"How about the headstone on Robert Louis Stevenson's grave?" he asked.
She touched the studs on her bank of controls, and almost within arm's length of him the transparent air resolved itself into an upright block of gray granite with words cut upon it.
His breath caught. It was an image copy only, his eyes told him, but so true to actuality it startled him. He reached out to the edge of the imaged stone and his fingers reported a cold smoothness, the very feel of the stone itself. He, with all the response to poetry that had always been in him, had always echoed internally to this before all other epitaphs, the one that Stevenson had written for himself when he should be laid in a churchyard. He tried to read the lines of letters cut in the stone, but they blurred in his vision. It did not matter. He knew them without seeing them:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The untouchable words woke again in him the memory of the three who had died on the terrace, and kindled a pain inside him so keen that he thought for a second or two he would not be able to bear it. He turned away from the stone and Ajela; and stood, looking at nothing, until he felt her hand on his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she said. "But you asked…"
Her voice was soft, and her touch on his shoulder so light he could barely sense it; but together they made a rope by which he was able to haul himself once more back up from the bitter ache of the personal loss.
"Look," she said, "I've got something else for you. Look!"
Reluctantly, he turned and found himself looking at a bronze sculpture no more than seven inches in height. It was the sculpture of a unicorn standing on a little patch of ground with tight-petalled roses growing near his feet. His neck was arched, his tail in an elegant circle, his mane flying and his head uptilted roguishly. There was a look in his eye and a twist to his mouth that chortled at the universe.
It was The Laughing Unicorn, by Darlene Coltrain. He was unconquerable, sly, a dandy - and he was beautiful. Life and joy bubbled up and fountained in every direction from him.
It was impossible for pain and such joy to occupy the same place; and after a moment the pain began to recede from Hal. He smiled at the unicorn in spite of himself; and could almost convince himself that the unicorn smiled back.
"Do you have the originals of any of these facsimiles?" he asked Ajela.
"Some," she said. "There's the problem of available storage space - let alone that you can't buy things like this with credit. What we do have are those that have been donated to us."
"That one?" he asked, pointing at The Laughing Unicorn.
"I think… yes, I think that's one we do," she said.
"Could I see it? I'd like to actually handle it."
She hesitated, then slowly but plainly shook her head.
"I'm sorry," she said. "No one touches the originals but the archivists - and Tam."
She smiled at him.
"If you ever get to be Director, you can keep him on your desk, if you want."
Ridiculously, inexpressibly, he longed to own the small statuette; to take it with him for comfort when he went out alone between the stars and into the mines on Coby. But of course that was impossible. Even if he did own the original himself, it was too valuable to be carried in an ordinary traveller's luggage. Its loss or theft would be a tragedy to a great many people besides himself.