"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 08 - The Chantry Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

that the difference between what most could manage and what Hal had evidently been able to do was the
difference in the creation of what Walter gave the name of vision, as opposed to an image -quoting an
ancient artist of the twentieth century who also had the capability. Most people can, with concentration,
evoke an image, Walter had told him, and, having evoked it, they can draw it, paint it, or build it. But an
image is never the complete thing, imagined. Parts of it are missing because the person evoking it takes
for granted that they're there. While a vision is complete enough to be the thing, itself; if it only had
solidity or life. The difference is like that between a historic episode, thoroughly researched and in the
mind of a historian, ready to be written down; and the same episode in the memory of one who lived
through it. Now, is it an actual vision you're talking about? Yes. Yes! Hal had said eagerly. It's all
there-so much you can almost touch it, as if it was solid. You could even get up and walk around it and
see it from the back! Why can't you try harder and see it? Because I'm not you, Walter had answered.

So, now, under the pressure of his concentration, but for the last time, there seemed to take shape in the
air before Hal a reproduction of the core image of the Final Encyclopedia's stored knowledge.

Its shape resembled a very thick section of cable made of red-hot, glowing wires-but a cable in which
the strands had loosened, so that now its thickness was double that it might have had originally-it
appeared about a meter in cross section and perhaps three meters in length.

In this mass, each individual strand was there to be seen. Not only that; but each strand, if anyone
looked closely enough, was visibly and constantly in movement, stretching or turning to touch the strands
about it, sometimes only briefly, sometimes apparently welding itself to another strand in what seemed a
permanent connection.

Originally it had appeared before him like this thanks to the same technological magic of the
Encyclopedia that had seemed to place him in his old home, below. With the broadcast image he had
formed this continually updated vision in his room so that he could study it. But over the years, as he had
come to learn each strand of it, he had begun to be able to envision it by concentration alone.

He had begun this study after seeing Tam Olyn, then Director of the Encyclopedia, standing in the data
control room and examining the same image perpetually broadcast there. For all Hal knew, at the
moment that room and image could be next door to him now. There was no permanent location within
the Encyclopedia to any of its parts, because it moved them around at the convenience of its occupants.

Tam Olyn had been Director of the Encyclopedia for nearly a hundred years. Before that he had been an
interstellar newsman, who had tried for his own personal revenge to turn the hatred of all the occupied
worlds upon the peoples of Harmony and Association, the two self-named Friendly Worlds colonized by
the Splinter Culture of both true faith-holders and religious fanatics.

Tam had blamed them, then, for the death of his younger sister's husband-to avoid facing his own guilt
for that death. When he had failed to make the Friendlies anathema to the rest of the human race, he had
at last seen himself for what he had become. Then he had come back here, to the Encyclopedia, at which
he had once shown a rare talent. Here, he had risen to the Directorship; and he alone had learned to
identify the knowledge behind each apparently glowing strand, merely by gazing at it, without the help of
the instruments used by the technicians who were always on duty in the core room.

So it had been Tam's example that fired the imagination of Hal. For a moment even the vision before Hal
now dimmed, overlaid in his mind by the gray shadow of the old man. Tam would be sitting alone, now,
in those quarters of his; that had been transformed by the Encyclopedia into an illusion of a woodland
glade with a stream running through it, its day and night always as the surface of Earth directly below him