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

saw the sun or not.

Tam would be alone now because Ajela, the Assistant Director, had left him to hold the conference.
Alone, and waiting for death, as someone weary at the end of too long a day might wait for steep.
Waiting, but holding death, like sleep, at bay; because he still hoped for a word from Hal. A word of
success Hal had not been able to bring him.

Three years before, Hal had had no doubt he would bring that word, eventually. Now, after those slow
years with no progress, the time had come when he must face the fact he never would. He must
announce it at the conference of which Ajela had reminded him. He could not be late, after his unusual
offer to attend, when for so long he had avoided such administrative discussions between Ajela and Rukh
Tamani, the faith-holder and kindler of Old Earth's awakening.

Now, Hal tried once more to concentrate on his vision of the knowledge store. He had gone beyond
Tam in the reading of it. Like Tam he could know from a particular part of a glowing wire which specific
bit of knowledge it represented. But, more than Tam, he had been able to reach through to 'hat
knowledge directly; though he had failed at becoming able to read it.

It would not have been a conscious reading in any case. What the knowledge was, would have simply,
suddenly been available there in the back of his memory. A dead and buried bit of memory; but one
which, with an effort, he would have been able to bring alive to his conscious mind. It was not that he
lacked mental space to hold so much information. He had tried, and found that that same back of the
human mind-though not the consciousness up front-could contain all the knowledge the Encyclopedia
itself held; which was all the knowledge remembered and known on the world below.

But so far it was still, to him, an untouchable knowledge ' To bring it back to life required its being put
to use consciously; and this final step his conscious mind had proved incapable of. The human conscious
could only tap stored wisdom along the straight-line, simple route of concrete thought-one piece at a
time.

For the last year and a half he had struggled to find ways to put to conscious use the whole of the stored
knowledge. But he had found none, and in consequence the doorway to the Creative Universe he
believed in had remained closed to him. Yet he knew it was there. All the art and inventions of recorded
history attested to that fact; each piece of art and each invention was an existing proof that a purely
Creative Universe, where anything was possible, could be reached and used. He had made use of it
himself to create poems-good or bad, made no difference, as long as they had had no existence in the
known universe until he made them. And they had not. But still they came only from his unconscious.

So, the doorway was there. But he could not enter it. What he wanted was to physically put himself
inside it, as he might put himself inside another physical universe. The bitter part was to know it could be
entered, but not know how. Since he had been born as Donal Graeme, the Dorsai, he had several times
entered it; but always without knowing how he did so. Once, had been his return to consciousness
among the historically fixed events of the twenty-first century. In that instance he had made use of a dead
man's body to move about, had heard a carved stone lion roar like the living animal; and he had come
back from that past time to a moment eighty years later than he had left, physically changed from an adult
man to a two-year-old boy.

The doorway had been there for him to pass through then, seemingly simply because he had believed
then he could do it. Why could he not find that belief again, now? Unless he could; and unless he could
enter it at will, knowing how he had done it, all he had accomplished and experienced in three different