He hesitated, then went on.
"It's not that easy to explain," he said, "put it that I've found I've got things I have to do with people, too; and in any case, right now, there's something more immediate and important. I'd like to talk to you and Tam together, about it. Is that possible?"
"Of course," she said. "I haven't told him you're here yet; simply because I wanted a minute or two with you myself, first. The fact is, he's sleeping right now; but he'll be upset if I wait until he wakes up to tell him you're back. Just a second. I'll call him - "
She swung around and reached back over her desk.
"No. Wait," said Hal. "Let me give you a general idea of what I'm talking about, first. Let him sleep. There're things with me now, I want you to understand, and it'll take me a few hours just to bring you up to date."
"All right," Ajela drew her arm back and turned to face him, smiling again. "Now, are you sure you don't feel like having something to eat?"
Hal laughed.
"Well, maybe…" he said.
They went to eat at a table in one of the dining rooms; and Ajela, touching the table's sensor controls, enclosed them this time in something new to him, the privacy of four illusory stone walls.
"Could we have the stars, instead?" Hal asked. "All around us the way I can have them in a carrel?"
She smiled, moved her fingers over the control pad on the white cloth surface of the table, and abruptly they seemed to float in space, with the large, blue-white circle of Earth appearing to hang only a small distance off to their side, and Earth's moon just beginning to emerge from behind it.
In all other directions were the lights and distances of the universe. Hal looked about and overhead and down below his feet at them, picking out Earth's sister worlds of Mars and Venus; and gazing toward the other suns of the race - Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Procyon, Epsilon Eridani, Fomalhaut, Altair. In his mind's eye he saw beneath them what his physical eyes could not, humanity's other thirteen planetary homes - Freiland and New Earth, Newton and Cassida, Ceta, Coby, Ste. Marie, Mara and Kultis, Dorsai, Harmony and Association, Dunnin's World.
Imaginatively, he saw not only them but the people upon them; and for a second he breathed deeply, the emptiness he had felt earlier at the thought of their numbers returned.
"What is it?" Ajela asked, her voice suddenly more soft, her summer-green eyes deeply watching him now.
"Too much to tell at once, probably," he said, recovering. He smiled to reassure her. "Anyway, let's have that food, and I'll tell you what's been happening to me."
They sat among the stars, eating; and he talked. He told her of the mines on Coby and Sost, Tonina and John; and Jason, Rukh and James Child-of-God on Harmony; and of his own solitary breakthrough in the cell on that world, with everything that had happened since.
"But what is it you think you can find here, to deal with the Others?" she asked, when he was done.
"To deal with the problem of present history, you mean," he said. "I'm not sure. But the answer's either here or nowhere. It's not just that I've got to find a way to stop the Others. What I have to find is a way that'll be both obvious and convincing to the Exotics, the Dorsai and anyone else who's needed to fight them."
"And you really think what you're looking for is here?"
"It has to be here," he said. "Didn't Mark Torre originally say that the Final Encyclopedia eventually had to be something more than just a storehouse of knowledge? Hasn't Tam guarded it all these years so that a way might be finally found to do something larger with it than anyone's ever conceived of, yet? If it was my idea alone, I might doubt. But we all can't have been wrong. Three of us - all three - coming to the same conclusion about it, each on his own."
"But if it's really true that the ultimate use of the Encyclopedia has always been something more - " She broke off, suddenly thoughtful.
"That's right," he said. "If it's true, then a lot of things begin to make sense. The historical equation balances, then. Otherwise, the dice have been loaded too overwhelmingly by the race-animal in favor of the Others; and that makes no sense. Because the race-animal isn't out to choose one favorite out of the factions within it to win - it's out to get answers on how to survive. The root-causes behind the emergence of the Others go back and back in history; and so do the causes leading to the building of the Final Encyclopedia."
"How sure can you be of that, though?" she asked.
He gazed at her across the table.
"Did you ever hear of Guido Camillo Delminio, or the Theater of Memory?" he asked her.
"The Theater of Memory?" She frowned. "I think I have heard that mentioned, or read about it someplace…"
"Mark Torre mentions it in his Memoirs of Construction," Hal answered. "That's where I ran across it, myself, when I was young, in the library of my home. It was a great library; and back when I was young enough, anything I read about, that sounded interesting, I wanted. So when I read the Memoirs and saw the words 'Theater of Memory' the first thing I thought of was that I wanted to build one. I went to Walter InTeacher to show me the way to find out how, and he helped me research the actual, historical article."
Ajela frowned at him.
"There actually was something built that was called a Theater of Memory?"
"Partially built, at least, first in Bologna, and later in Paris with the help of funds from Francis I of France. The Guido Camillo I mentioned conceived of it and spent his life trying to turn it into a reality. That was in the sixteenth century, and his aim was to build a theater where anyone could stand on a stage and look out at art objects ranked on rising levels and put in a certain order, and give speeches calling on all the knowledge in the world, which would be cued by the sight of the art objects before him as he spoke."
She stared at him.
"Where did he get the idea for something like that?" she said. "The sixteenth century…" Her voice trailed off, thoughtfully.
"He was born about 1480," said Hal. "He had a professorship at Bologna, but he was always hard up for funds to build with - that's how he and the Theater came to be connected with Francis I. There was a strong desire in Renaissance times to unify all knowledge and that way see through it to the very essence of creativity. The idea of objects as mnemonic cues goes back into classical Greece, at least. The early churchmen and scholastics made it a moral practice, and later on Renaissance mysticism saw it as a framework for esoteric enlightenment. It produces Guido's Theater in the sixteenth century, in the thirteenth century it had already produced Ramon Lull's combination-of-wheels device; and that was nothing less than a sort of primitive computer. The same idea affected people from Bacon to Leibnitz, who in the seventeenth century actually did invent calculus. In effect, the Theater of Memory was one of the root causes of later technology and of this Encyclopedia, itself."
"I see," she said.
"I thought you would," he said. "The point is, the whole chain of effort from the Theater to the Final Encyclopedia represents a struggle, an effort by the race-animal to discover greater possibilities in itself. This is the important truth that underlies the struggle between the Others and everyone else - that's where the real battlefield is and is going to be for a while. So that's where I'll have to be for a time, yet."
"I see," she said, again. "All right. I understand, then."
She nodded slowly, her eyes abstracted.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. I think, after all, the sooner you talk to Tam, the better. If you're through eating, I'll call him and we'll go now."
"Even if I wasn't through," he smiled. "But as it happens, I am."
They went.
To Hal's eye, it was as if Tam Olyn had not altered in appearance or moved since he had seen the very old man last. Tam's suite, with its illusion of a forest and stream, and all its float furniture - chairs, desk, and everything else - seemed not to have been shifted a millimeter out of place, in the intervening years. Above all, the expression of Tam's face was the same.