"Oh, no. No, of course not." He was aware that he fumbled, and he felt embarrassment kindle in him. "Come along right now, if you want."
"Thank you."
The screen lost its image, returning to a uniform pearl gray without depth. Hastily, he finished his meal and pushed his emptied utensils down the disposal slot. They had hardly disappeared when the annunciator chimed again.
"Can I come in?" asked the voice of Ajela, from the blank screen.
"Certainly. Come along - " he went to the door but it opened before he could reach it, and she stepped through it.
She was wearing a loose saffron robe that tied at the waist and reached to her knees. In spite of her youth, she was clearly an Exotic; and she seemed to have the Exotic ability to make everything about her seem as if it could never have been otherwise. So the saffron robe seemed to him, in that first moment in which he really looked at her, as if it was the only thing she should ever wear. Her impact on him was so profound that he almost drew back defensively. He might, indeed, have been even more wary of her than he was; but the open, smiling face and disregard of pretense reassured his prickly young male fear of making the wrong move, suddenly finding himself face to face with a startlingly beautiful woman - he, who had had so little normal acquaintance with women of any age until now.
"You're all right now?" she asked him.
"Fine," he said. "I - thank you."
"I'm sorry," she said. "If we could have warned you, we would have. But the way it is with the Transit Point, if we warn people, we'd never know… it's all right if I sit down?"
"Oh, of course!" He backed away and they sat down in facing floats.
"What wouldn't you know?" he asked, his unquenchable curiosity rising even above his feelings of social awkwardness.
"We'd never be sure that they weren't imagining what they said they heard."
Hal shook his head.
"There wasn't any imagination in what I heard," he said.
"No." She was looking closely at him. "I don't believe there was. What exactly did you hear?"
He looked at her closely, cautiously.
His mind was now almost completely recovered from the unsureness he had felt on first talking to her.
"I'd like to know more of what this is all about," he said.
"Of course you would," she said warmly. "All right, I'll tell you. The fact is, early in the building of the Final Encyclopedia they discovered by accident that someone stepping into the Transit Point for the first time might hear voices. Not voices speaking to them - " She stopped to gaze closely at him. "Just voices, as if they were overhearing them. Mark Torre, in his old age, was the first to hear them. But only Tam Olyn, the first time he stepped into the Encyclopedia, heard them so plainly that he collapsed - the way you did."
Hal stared at her. All his training had ingrained in him the principle of going cautiously, the more unknown or strange the territory. What Ajela had just said was so full of unknown possibilities that he felt a danger in showing any reaction at all before he had had time to understand the matter. He waited, hoping she would simply talk on. But she did not. She only waited in her turn.
"Tam Olyn," he said at last.
"Yes."
"Just Tam Olyn and me? In all these years?"
"In all these years," she said. Her voice had a note in it he could not interpret, a note that was almost sad, for no reason that he could understand. She watched him, he thought, with an odd sympathy.
"I think," he said carefully, "you ought to tell me all about this; and then give me a chance to think about it."
She nodded.
"All right," she said. "Mark Torre conceived of the Encyclopedia - you know that. He was Earth-born, no Exotic, but the Exotics found his conception so in agreement with ontogenetics and our other theories of human and historical evolution that we ended by financing the building of this - " she gestured at the structure around them.
Hal nodded, waited.
"As I said, it was in his late years Mark Torre first heard the voices at the Transit Point." She looked at him with a seriousness that was almost severity. "He theorized then that what he'd heard was just the first evidence of the first small use by any individual of the potential of the Encyclopedia. It was as if someone who'd had no knowledge of what to listen for had suddenly tuned in to all the radio noise of the universe. Sorting out the useful information from that roar of noise, Torre said, would take experience."
Again she paused, almost frowning at him. Hal nodded again, to show his appreciation of the importance of what she was saying.
"I see," he said.
"This idea," she went on, "is what meshed with some of our theories on the Exotics, because it seemed to say that using the Encyclopedia the way Mark Torre dreamed of it being used - as a new sort of tool for the human mind - called for some special ability, an ability not yet to be found in all of the human race. Torre died without making any sense out of what he heard. But he was convinced someone would eventually. After him, Tam took charge here; but Tam's lived in the Encyclopedia all these years without learning how to handle or use what he hears."
"Not at all?" Hal could not help interrupting.
"Not at all," Ajela said, firmly.
"But, like Mark Torre, he's been certain that sooner or later someone would come along who could; and when that finally happens the Encyclopedia is at last going to be put to use as what it was built to be, a tool to unravel the inner universe of the race - that inner universe that's been a dark and fearful mystery since people first started to be conscious of the fact they could think."
Hal sat looking at her.
"And now," he said, "you - and Tam Olyn - you think I might be the one to use it?"
She frowned at him.
"Why are you so cautious… so fearful?" she asked.
He could not tell her. The implication he thought he heard in her voice was one of cowardice. He bristled instinctively.
"I'm not fearful," he said, sharply. "Just careful. I was always taught to be like that."
She reacted instantly.
"I'm sorry," she said with unexpected softness; and her eyes made him feel as if he had made a most unjustified inference from what she had said. "Believe me, neither Tam nor I are trying to push you into anything. If you stop and think, you'll realize that what Mark Torre and Tam were thinking was something that never could be forced on anyone in any case. It'd be as impossible to force that as it'd be impossible to force someone to produce great art. A thing that'd be as great and new as that couldn't ever be forced into existence. It can only come out of some person willing to give her or his life to it."
These last words of hers echoed with a particular power in his mind. In his heart he had never yet been able to delude himself that he was adult, in any ordinary social sense. Even though he was taller than most men already and had already packed into his sixteen years more learning than a normal person would have pushed upon him by twice that time, secretly, and inwardly, he had never been able to convince himself that he was grown up yet. Because of this he had been very conscious of the fact that she was probably a year or two older than he was, and had suspected her of being contemptuous of him, of looking down on him because of it. In a way, the capability of his three tutors had so overshadowed him that they had kept him feeling like a child beyond his years.
But now, for the first time in talking to her, he began to be conscious also of an independence and a strength that he had never felt before. He found himself looking on her and thinking of her, and all the rest of them in this Encyclopedia, with possibly the exception of Tam Olyn, as potential equals, rather than superiors; and, thinking this, he found himself - although the thought did not surface as such in his conscious mind - beginning to fall in love with Ajela.