He stopped again. And this time he folded his hands. The gesture was final and I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart.
"So," I said. "I've got all this - and still you don't want me for whatever it is you want me?"
"Mark wants you to take over from him, eventually, as Controller, building the Encyclopedia," said Padma. "So do we, on the Exotics. For the Encyclopedia is such a device that its full purpose and use, when completed, can only be conceived of by rare individuals; and that conception can only be continually translated into common terms, by a unique individual. Without Mark, or someone like him to see its construction through at least until it is moved into space, the common run of humanity will lose the vision of the Encyclopedia's capabilities when it's finished. The work on it will run into misunderstandings and frustrations. It will slow down, finally stall, and then fall apart."
He paused and looked at me, almost grimly.
"It will never be built," he said, "unless a successor for Mark is found. And without it, Earth-born man may dwindle and die. And if Earth-born man goes, the human strains of the younger worlds may not be viable. But none of this matters to you, does it? Because it's you who don't want us, not the other way around."
He stared across the room with eyes that burned with a hazel flame against me.
"You don't want us," he repeated slowly. "Do you, Tam?"
I shook off the impact of his gaze. But in the same moment I understood what he was driving at, and knew he was right. In that same moment I had seen myself seated in the chair at the console before me, chained there by a sense of duty for the rest of my days. No, I did not want them, or their works, on Encyclopedia or anywhere else. I wanted none of it.
Had I worked this hard, this long, to escape Mathias, only to throw everything aside and become a slave to helpless people - all those in that great mass of the human race who were too weak to fight the lightning for themselves? Should I give up the prospect of my own power and freedom to work for the misty promise of freedom for them, someday - for them, who could not earn that freedom for themselves, as I could earn my own, and had? No, I would not - I would not, I would have no part of them, of Torre or his Encyclopedia!
"No!" I said harshly. And Mark Torre made a faint, rattling sound deep in his throat, like a dying echo of the wounded grunt he had given earlier.
"No. That's right," said Padma, nodding. "You see, as I said, you've got no empathy - no soul."
"Soul?" I said. "What's that?"
"Can I describe the color of gold to a man blind from birth?" His eyes were brilliant upon me. "You'll know it if you find it - but you'll find it only if you can fight your way through that valley I mentioned. If you come through that, finally, then maybe you'll find your human soul. You'll know it when you find it."
"Valley," I echoed, at last. "What valley?"
"You know, Tam," said Padma more quietly. "You know, better than I do. That valley of the mind and spirit where all the unique creativity in you is now turned-warped and twisted-toward destruction."
'DESTRUCT!"
There it thundered, in the voice of my uncle, ringing in the ear of my memory, quoting, as Mathias always did, from the writings of Walter Blunt. Suddenly, as if printed in fiery letters on the inner surface of my skull, I saw the power and possibilities of that word to me, on the path I wanted to travel.
And without warning, in my mind's eye, it was as if the valley of which Padma had been speaking became real around me. High black walls rose on either side of me. Straight ahead was my route and narrow - and downward. Abruptly, I was afraid, as of something at the deepest depth, unseen in the farther darkness beyond, some blacker-than-black stirring of amorphous life that lay in wait for me there.
But, even as I shuddered away from this, from somewhere inside me a great, shadowy, but terrible joy swelled up at the thought of meeting it. While, as if from a great distance above me, like a weary bell, came the voice of Mark Torre sadly and hoarsely tolling at Padma.
"No chance for us, then? There's nothing at all we can do? What if he never comes back to us, and the Encyclopedia?"
"You can only wait - and hope he does," Padma's voice was answering. "If he can go on and down and through what he has created for himself, and survive, he may come back. But the choice has always been up to him, heaven or hell, as it is to all of us. Only his choices are greater than ours."
The words pattered like nonsense against my ears, like the sound of a little gust of cold rain against some unfeeling surface like stone or concrete. I felt suddenly a great need to get away from them all, to get off by myself and think. I climbed heavily to my feet.
"How do I get out of here?" I asked thickly.
"Lisa," said Mark Torre, sadly. I saw her get to her feet.
"This way," she said to me. Her face was pale but expressionless, facing me for a moment. Then she turned and went before me.
So she led me out of that room and back the way we had come. Down through the light-maze and the rooms and corridors of the Final Encyclopedia Project and at last to the outer lobby of the Enclave, where our group had first met her. All the way she did not say a word; but when I left her at last, she stopped me unexpectedly, with a hand on my arm. I turned back to face down at her.
"I'm always here," she said. And I saw to my astonishment that her brown eyes were brimming with tears. "Even if no one else is - I'm always here!"
Then she turned swiftly and almost ran off. I stared after her, unexpectedly shaken. But so much had happened to me in the past hour or so that I did not have the time or desire to try to discover why, or figure out what the girl could have meant by her strange words, echoing her strange words earlier.
I took the subway back into St. Louis and caught a shuttle flight back to Athens, thinking many things.
So wound up I was in my own thoughts that I entered my uncle's house and walked clear into its library before I was aware of people already there.
Not merely my uncle, seated in his high wing chair, with an old leather-bound book spread open, face down and ignored on his knees, and not only my sister, who had evidently returned before me, standing to one side and facing him, from about ten feet away.
Also in the room was a thin, dark young man some inches shorter than myself. The mark of his Berber ancestry was plain to anyone who, like myself, had been required in college to study ethnic origins. He was dressed all in black, his black hair was cut short above his forehead, and he stood like the upright blade of an unsheathed sword.
He was the stranger I had seen Eileen talking to at the Enclave. And the dark joy of the promised meeting in the valley's depths leaped up again in me. For here, waiting, without my need to summon it, was the first chance to put to use my newly discovered understanding and my strength.
Chapter 4
It was a square of conflict.
So much already of the discovery I had made in the place of lightning was already beginning to work in my conscious mind. But almost immediately, this new acuteness of perception in me was momentarily interrupted by recognition of my own personal involvement in the situation.
Eileen threw me one white-faced glance as she saw me, but then looked directly back at Mathias, who sat neither white-featured nor disturbed. His expressionless, spade-shaped face, with its thick eyebrows and thick hair, still uniformly black although he was in his late fifties, was as cold and detached as usual. He, also, looked over at me, but only casually, before turning to meet Eileen's emotional gaze.