“Come on, now!” I said. “I’m willing to swallow a lot about your Exotics. But don’t tell me they can calculate exactly where anyone in the sixteen worlds is going to be ahead of time!”
“Not anyone!” she answered angrily. “You. You and a few like you-because you’re a maker, not a made part of the pattern. The influences operating on someone who’s moved about by the pattern are too far reaching, and too complicated to calculate. But you aren’t at the mercy of outside influences. You have choice, overriding the pressures people and events bring to bear on you. Padma told you that five years ago!”
“And that makes me easier to predict instead of harder? Let’s hear another joke.”
“Oh, Tarn!” she said, exasperated. “Of course it makes you easier. It doesn’t take ontogenetics, hardly. You can almost do it yourself. You’ve been working for five years now to get Membership in the Newsman’s Guild, haven’t you? Do you suppose that hasn’t been obvious?”
Of course, she was right. I had made no secret of my ambitions. There had been no reason to keep them secret. She read the admission in my expression.
“All right,” she went on. “So now you’ve worked your way up to Apprentice. Next, what’s the quickest and surest way for an Apprentice to win his way into full Guild membership? To make a habit of being where the most interesting news is breaking, isn’t that right? And what’s the most interesting-if not important-news on the sixteen worlds right now? The war between the North and South Partitions on New Earth. News of a war is always dramatic. So you were bound to arrange to get yourself assigned to cover this one, if you could. And you seem to be able to get most things you want.”
I looked at her closely. All that she said was true and reasonable. But, if so, why hadn’t it occurred to me before this that I could be so predictable? It was like finding myself suddenly under observation by someone with high-powered binoculars, someone whose spying I had not even slightly suspected. Then I realized something.
“But you’ve only explained why I’d be on New Earth,” I said slowly. “Why would I be here, though, at this particular party on Freiland?”
For the first time she faltered. She no longer seemed sure in her knowledge.
“Padma…” she said, and hesitated. “Padma says this place and moment is a locus. And, being what you are you can perceive, and are drawn to, loci-by your own desire to use them for your own purposes.”
I stared at her, slowly absorbing this. And then, as suddenly as a sheet of flame across my mind leaped the connection between what she had just said and what I had heard earlier.
“Locus-yes!” I said tightly, taking a step toward her again in my excitement. “Padma said it was a locus here. For Graeme-but for me, too! Why? What does it mean for me?”
“I…” she hesitated. “I don’t know exactly, Tarn. I don’t think even Padma knows.”
“But something about it, and me, brought you here! Isn’t that right?” I almost shouted at her. My mind was closing on the truth like a fox on a winded rabbit. “Why did you come hunting me now then? At this particular place and moment, as you call it! Tell me!”
“Padma…” she faltered. I saw then with the almost blinding light of my sudden understanding that she would have liked to lie about this, but something in her would not let her..”Padma… only found out everything he knows now because of the way the Encyclopedia’s grown able to help him. It has given him extra data to use in his calculations. And recently, when he used that data, the results showed everything up as more complex-and important. The Encyclopedia’s more important, to the whole human race, than he thought five years ago. And the danger of the Encyclopedia’s never being finished is greater. And your own power of destruction…”
She ran down and looked at me, almost pleadingly as if asking me to excuse her from finishing what she had started to say. But my mind was racing, and my heart pounded with excitement.
“Go on!” I told her harshly.
“The power in you for destruction was greater than he had dreamed. But, Tarn”-she broke in on herself quickly, almost frantically-“there was something else. You remember five years ago how Padma thought you had no choice but to go through that dark valley of yours to its very end? Well, that’s not quite true. There is a chance-at this point in the pattern, here at this locus. If you’ll think, and choose, and turn aside, there’s a narrow way for you up out of the darkness. But you Ve got to turn sharply right now! You’ve got to give up this assignment you’re on, no matter what it costs, and come back to Earth to talk to Mark Torre, right now!”
“Right now,” I muttered, but I was merely echoing her words without thought, while listening to my racing mind. “No,” I said, “nevermind that. What is it I’m supposed to be turning my back on? What special destruction? I’m not planning anything like that-right now.”
“Tarn!” I felt her hand distantly on my arm, I saw her pale face staring tensely up at me, as if trying to get my attention. But it was as if these things registered on my senses from a long distance away. For if I was rignt -if I was right-then even Padma’s calculations were testifying to the dark strength in me, that ability I had worked these five years to harness and drive. And if such power were actually mine, what couldn’t I do next?
“But it isn’t what youp&w!” Lisa was saying desperately. “Don’t you see, a gun doesn’t plan to shoot anyone. But it’s in you, Tarn, like a gun ready to go off. Only, you don’t have to let it go off. You can change yourself while there’s still time. You can save yourself, and the Encyclopedia-”
The last word rang suddenly through me, with a million echoes. It rang like the uncounted voices I had heard five years ago at the Transit Point of the Index Room in the Encyclopedia itself. Suddenly, through all the excitement holding me, it reached and touched me as sharply as the point of a spear. Like a brilliant shaft of light it pierced through the dark walls that had been building triumphantly in my mind on either side of me, as they had built in my mind that day in Mark Torre’s office. Like an unbearable illumination it opened the darkness for a second, and showed me a picture-myself, in the rain; and Pad ma. facing me; and a dead man who lay between us.
But I flung myself away from that moment of imagination, flung myself clear back into the comforting darkness, and the sense of my power and strength came back on me.
“I don’t need the Encyclopedia!” I said loudly.
“But you do!” she cried. “Everybody who’s Earth-born-and if Padma’s right, all the people in the future on the sixteen worlds-are going to need it. And only you can make sure they get it. Tarn, you have to-”
“Have to!”
I took a step back from her, myself, this time. I had gone fiercely cold all over with the same sort of fury Mathias had been able to raise in me once, but it was mixed now with my feeling of triumph and of power. “I don’t ‘have to’ anything! Don’t lump me hi with the rest of you Earth worms. Maybe they need your Encyclopedia. But not me!”
I went around her with that, using my strength finally to shove her physically aside. I heard her still calling after me as I went down the stairs. But I shut my mind to the sense of her voice and refused to hear it. To this day I do not know what the last words she called after me were. I left the balcony and her calling behind me, and threaded my way through the people of the floor below toward the same exit through which Bright had disappeared. With the Friendly leader gone, there was no point in my hanging around. And with the newly rearoused sense of my power in me, abruptly I could not bear them close around me. Most of them, nearly all of them, were people from the younger worlds; and Lisa’s voice rang on and on, it seemed, in my ear, telling me I needed the Encyclopedia, reechoing all Mathias’ bitter lesson-giving about the relative helplessness and ineffectuality of Earthmen.
As I had suspected, once I gained the open air of the cool and moonless Freiland night outside, Eldest Bright, and whoever had called him from the party, had disappeared. The parking-lot attendant told me that they had left.
There was no point in my trying to find them, now. They might be headed anywhere on the planet, if not to a spacefield off-world entirely, back to Harmony or Association. Let them go, I thought, still bitter from the implication of my Earth-born ineffectiveness that I thought I had read in Lisa’s words. Let them go. I alone could handle any trouble Dave might get in with the Friendlies, as a result of having a pass unsigned by one of their authorities.