"Now you see," he said, "why the Encyclopedia has to have you. Only Mark Torre was able to bring it this far; and only you can finish the job, because the great mass of Earth's people can't yet see the vision of the future implicit in its being finished. You, who've bridged the gap in yourself between the people of the Splinter Cultures and the Earth-born, can build your vision into the Encyclopedia, so that when it's done, it can do as much for those who now can't see, and so begin the remodeling that will come when the Splinter Culture peoples turn back to recombine with Earth's basic stock into a new, evolved form of man."
His powerful gaze seemed to soften a little in the strengthening light. His smile grew a little sad.
"You'll live to see more of it than I will. Goodbye, Tam."
Without warning, then, I did see it. Suddenly it flowed together and clicked in my mind, the vision and the Encyclopedia as one reality. And, in the same moment, my coursing mind leaped full-throated onto the track of the opposition I would face in bringing about that reality.
Already they began to take shape in my head, out of my knowledge of my own world - the faces and the methods I would encounter. My mind raced on, caught up with them, and began to run on into plans ahead of them. Even now, I saw how I would work differently than had Mark Torre. I would keep his name as our emblem and only pretend the Encyclopedia continued to build on according to his forelaid plans for it. I would name myself as only one of a Board of Governors, who all in theory would have equal powers with me.
But actually I would be directing them, subtly, as I could; and I would be free, therefore, of the need for Torre's cumbersome protections against madmen like the one who had killed him. I would be free to move about Earth, even while I was directing the building, to locate and frustrate the efforts of those who would be trying to work against it. Already I could see now how I would begin to go about it.
But Padma was turning to leave me. I could not let him go like that. With an effort I tore my attention away from the future and came back to the day, the fading rain and the brightening light.
"Wait," I said. He stopped and turned back. It was hard for me to say it now that I had come to it. "You ..." My tongue stumbled. "You didn't give up. You had faith in me, all this time."
"No," he said. I blinked at him, but he shook his head.
"I had to believe the results of my calculations." He smiled a little, almost ruefully. "And my calculations gave no real hope for you. Even at the locus
point of Donal Graeme's party of Freiland, with five years' added information from the Encyclopedia, the possibility of your saving yourself seemed too small to plan for. Even on Mara, when we healed you, the calculations offered no hope for you."
"But - you stayed by me . . ," I stammered; staring at him.
"Not I. None of us. Only Lisa," he said. "She never gave you up from the first moment in Mark Torre's office. She told us she had felt something - something like a spark from you - when you were talking to her during the tour, even before you got to the Transit Room. She believed in you even after you turned her down at the Graeme locus; and when we set up to heal you on Mara, she insisted on being part of the process, so that we could bind her emotionally to you."
"Bind." The words made no sense.
"We sealed her emotional involvement with you, during the same process by which we repaired you. It made no difference to you, but it tied her to you irrevocably. Now, if she should ever lose you, she would suffer as greatly, or more greatly, than Ian Graeme suffered his loss of a mirror-twin at Kensie's death."
He stopped and stood watching me. But I still fumbled.
"I still don't... understand," I said. "You say it didn't affect me, what you did to her. What good, then-"
"None, as far as we could calculate then, or we've been able to interpret since. If she was bound to you, you were of course bound to her, as well. But it was like fastening a song-sparrow by a thread to the finger of a giant, as far as the relative massivity of your effect on the pattern, compared to hers. Only Lisa thought it would do some good."
He turned.
"Good-bye, Tam," he said. Through the still misty, but brightening air I saw him walking alone toward the church, from which came the voice of the single speaker within, now announcing the number of the final hymn.
He left me standing, dumbfounded. But then, suddenly, I laughed out loud, because I suddenly realized I was wiser than he. Not all his Exotic calculations had been able to uncover why Lisa's binding herself to me could save me. But it had.
For it surged up in me now, my own strong love for her; and I recognized that all along my lonely self had returned that love of Lisa's, but would not admit it to myself. And for the sake of that love, I had wanted to live. A giant may carry a songbird without effort against all the beating of little wings. But if he cares for the creature he is tied to, he may be made to turn aside out of love where he could not be turned by force.
So, along that invisible cord binding us together, Lisa's faith had run to join with my faith, and I could not extinguish my own without extinguishing hers as well. Why else had I gone to her when she called me to come at Mark Torre's assassination? Even then I was turning to compromise my path with hers.
Seeing this now, the whole needle of my life's compass abruptly spun right about, a hundred and eighty degrees, and I saw everything suddenly straight and plain and simple in a new light. Nothing was changed for me, nothing of my hunger and my ambition and my drive, except that I was turned right about. I laughed out loud again at the simplicity of it; for I saw now that one aim was merely the converse of the other.
DESTRUCT : CONSTRUCT
CONSTRUCT - the clear and simple answer that I had longed for all those years to refute Mathias in his emptiness. It was this which I was born to do, this which was in the Parthenon, and the Encyclopedia, and all the sons of men.
I had been born, as were we all - even Mathias - if we did not go astray, a maker rather than a smasher, a creator, not a destroyer. Now, like one clean piece of metal, hammered free finally of impurities, I chimed clear through every atom and fiber of my being to the deep, unchanging frequency of the one true purpose in living. Dazed and weak, I turned away at last from the church, went to my car and got in. Now the rain was almost over and the sky was brightening faster. The faint mist of moisture fell, it seemed, more kindly; and the air was fresh and new.
I opened the car windows as I pulled out of the lot into the long road back to the spaceport. And through the open window beside me I heard them beginning to sing the final hymn inside the church.
It was the Battle Hymn of the Friendly Soldiers that they sang. As I drove away down the road the voices seemed to follow me strongly, not sounding slowly and mournfully as if in sadness and farewell, but strongly and triumphantly as in a marching song on the lips of those taking up a route at the beginning of a new day.
Soldier, ask not - now or ever!
Where to war your banners go! ...
The singing followed me as I drove away. And as I got farther into the distance, the voices seemed to blend at last until they sounded like one voice alone, powerfully singing. Ahead the clouds were breaking. With the sun shining through, the patches of blue sky were like bright flags waving, like the banners of an army, marching forever forward into lands unknown.
I watched them as I drove forward toward where they blended at last into open sky; and for a long time I heard the singing behind me, as I drove to the spaceport and the ship for Earth and Lisa that waited in the sunlight for me there.