He lost himself after that in looking at a number of other facsimiles of art, all sorts of works, books and other artifacts that Ajela summoned up with her control bank. In an odd way, a barrier had gone down between the two of them with the emotions that had just been evoked in him, first by the Robert Louis Stevenson gravestone and then by the Laughing Unicorn. By the time they were done, it was time for another meal. This time they ate in another dining room - this one imaged and decorated to give the appearance of a beer hall, full of music, loud talk, and the younger inhabitants of the Encyclopedia - although few of these were as young as Ajela, and none as young as Hal. But he had learned that when he remembered to act soberly and trade on his height he could occasionally be taken for two or three years older than he actually was. No one, at least, among those that stopped by the booth where they sat, showed any awareness that he was two years younger than she.
But the food and drink hit him like a powerful drug, after the large events of the last two days. An hour or so in the dining room, and he could barely keep his eyes open. Ajela showed him how to code for his own room on the booth's control bank, and led him down another short corridor outside the dining room to a dilating aperture that proved, indeed, to be the door to his own quarters.
"You think there'll be time for me to work with the Encyclopedia tomorrow?" he said as she left.
"Easily," she said.
He slept heavily, woke feeling happy, then remembered the deaths on the terrace - and grief rushed in on him again. Again he watched through the screen of the bush at the edge of the pond and saw what happened. The pain was unendurable. It was all too close. He felt he had to escape, the way a drowning man might feel, who had to escape from underwater up to where there was air and light. He clutched frantically for something other to cling to, and fastened on the recollection that today he would have a chance to work with the Encyclopedia itself. He clung to this prospect, filling his mind with it and with what he had done the day before when Ajela had taken him around.
Still thinking of these things he got up, ordered breakfast, and an hour later Ajela called to see if he was awake yet. Finding him up, she came to his room.
"Most people work with the Encyclopedia in their rooms," she told him. "But if you like I can add a carrel to this room, or set one up for you elsewhere."
"Carrel," he echoed. He had assumed for some years now that there were no words worth knowing he did not know, but this was new to him.
"A study-room."
She touched the controls on his desk and a three dimensional image formed in the open center of his quarters. It showed something not much larger than a closet holding a single chair float and a fixed desk surface with a pad of control keys. The walls were colorless and flat; but as she touched the controls in Hal's room again, they dissolved into star filled space, so that float and desk seemed now to be adrift between the stars. Hal's breath caught in his throat.
"I can have the carrel attached to my room here?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Then I think that's what I'd like."
"All right." She touched the control. The light shimmer of the wall opposite the door that was the entrance to his room moved back to reveal another door. As he watched it opened and he saw beyond it the small room she had described as a carrel. He went to and into it, like a bee drawn to a flower blossom. Ajela followed him and spent some twenty minutes teaching him how to call up from the Encyclopedia whatever information he might want. At last she turned to leave him.
"You'll make better use of the resources of the Encyclopedia," she said, "if you've got a specific line of inquiry or investigation to follow. You'll find it'll pay you to think a bit before you start and be sure you're after information that needs to be developed from the sources it'll give you, rather than just a question that can be simply answered."
"I understand," he said, excitement moving in him.
But once she had gone and he was alone again, the excitement hesitated and the grief in him, together with the cold ancient fury toward Bleys Ahrens he had felt earlier, threatened to wake in him once more. Resolutely he shoved it back down inside him. He pressed the control set in the arm of his chair that sealed the room about him and set its walls to an apparent transparency that left him seemingly afloat in space between the stars. His mind hunted almost desperately, knowing that he must find something to occupy it or else it would go back to the estate again, to the lake and the terrace. The words of Malachi's evoked image came back to him.
"… the concerns of the living, must be with the living, even if the living are themselves …"
He made a powerful effort to think only of the here and now. What would he want if he was simply here at the Final Encyclopedia in this moment and nothing at all had happened back at his home? Reaching out, his mind snatched again at the dreams built up from his reading. He had asked to see the gravestone of Robert Louis Stevenson yesterday. Perhaps he should simply ask for whatever else the Encyclopedia had to tell him about Stevenson that he had never known before? But his mind shied away from that idea. The image of Stevenson was now tied in his mind to the image of a gravestone, and he did not want to think of gravestones.
He flung his mind wide. The Three Musketeers? D'Artagnan? What about Nigel Loring, the fictional hero of two of the historical novels by the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle - the novels Sir Nigel and The White Company.
The idea of Sir Nigel, the small but indomitable hero of those two novels of the days of men in iron and leather welcomed his imagination like a haven. Nigel Loring was a character who had always glowed with an unusual light and color in his imagination. Perhaps Conan Doyle had even started a third novel about him, and never finished it? No, not likely. If that had been true he would almost undoubtedly have run across some word of it before now. He pressed the query key of the keypad on the arm of his chair and spoke aloud to the Encyclopedia.
"List for me all that Conan Doyle ever wrote about the character Nigel Loring, who appears in the novels The White Company and Sir Nigel by Conan Doyle."
A hard copy coiled up out of the void into existence and dropped in his lap. At the same time a soft bell note chimed and a voice replied to him in pleasant female tones.
"Data from sources delivered in hard copy. Would you also like biographical details about the historical individual who is antecedent?"
Hal frowned, puzzled.
"I'm not asking for data on Conan Doyle," he said.
"That's understood. The historical individual referred to was the actual Nigel Loring, knight, of the fourteenth century AD." Hal stared at the stars. The words he had just heard echoed in his head and a bubble of excitement formed within him. Almost fearful that it would turn out there had been some mistake, he spoke again.
"You're telling me there actually was someone named Nigel Loring in England in the fourteenth century?"
"Yes. Do you want biographical details on this person?"
"Yes, please. All possible details - " he added hastily, "and will you list references to the real Nigel Loring in documents of the time and after. I want copies of these last, if you can give them to me."
Another coil of hard copy emerged from the desktop, followed by a number of paper sections and pictures. Hal ignored the hard copy but picked up the second half of the delivery and went quickly through it. There was an amazing number of things, running from excerpts from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart; an account list of presents given by Edward, the Black Prince of England, to courtiers in his train; and ending with an image of a stall in a chapel. With the image of the chapel stall was a printed description identifying it, which Hal found the most fascinating of all the material.