Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (22 page)

The water-processing and power plants were much smaller than their City counterparts, and had been put together from barely adequate materials obtained by sacrificing reserves. The job had been tricky. At the time Noren had been working on the tower’s upper levels and had not participated; but now, besides his shift of farm labor, he was on duty alternate nights at the fusion reactor, which was located in its original compartment within the former starship. Although not yet knowledgeable enough to deal with any emergency, he could call the head engineer in case of problems, and it was vital that a continuous vigil be kept. Maintenance of nuclear power was the Scholars’ most critical duty, for without that power none of the other essentials could function. Once Noren would have considered his a post of honor, yet he found the long watch hours dark; they left all too much time for thinking.

Brek’s non-farm job was the one he’d held as a Technician: the servicing of radiophone and other electronic equipment. In their spare time, he and Noren continued to study together. This had become a torment for Noren, since it seemed wholly futile, and in his private studies he ignored nuclear physics to concentrate on pure mathematics; still he could not turn Brek’s questions aside. Wearily, he explained the vast difference between the kind of nuclear fusion that occurred in the power plant and the kind that would be needed to synthesize metal. Power generation involved fusion of hydrogen isotopes, the lightest atoms in existence. Because the repulsive force between elements was proportional to the product of their atomic numbers, the fusing of heavier elements would demand great amounts of energy—so great that in nature, such elements were created only in the interiors of stars, where there were temperatures and pressures beyond imagination. Metal-rich stars and planets formed in regions of space where other stars had previously exploded… .

As he said this to Brek, Noren faltered and broke off, overwhelmed suddenly by the implications of a thing he’d originally learned by rote. An exploding star was a nova. Were some types of novas necessary to the evolution of habitable planets? Brek, looking at him, grasped the point and quickly switched the subject. That was the difference between other Scholars and himself, Noren thought ruefully. The others could turn from such enigmas; he could not… but neither could he solve them.

*
 
*
 
*

Every aircar now brought passengers as well as supplies, and many of the passengers were women. Some wives of the original staff members came first, then more couples and a few unmarried girls, those who possessed needed skills or were betrothed to men already in camp. Noren assumed that this was arranged by mutual consent until one afternoon when, without warning, he was called in from the grain fields to meet Talyra.

In the first surge of astonished joy he ran to her and held her tight, not thinking past the loosed emotions that almost overcame him. That did not last, however. “Noren, what’s the matter?” Talyra protested, sensing his deliberate effort to check his feelings.

“It—it’s just that life’s hard here,” he declared, “and I don’t want you to know hardship.” That was true enough, though the main difficulty was that he did not see how he could bear to be near her, knowing as he did that he could not take the step that was prerequisite to their marriage. He knew too that although to allow her to hope would be cruel, he could no more be frank in that regard than with respect to his ignominious failure to complete the task with which he’d told her he had been honored. Talyra had been proud, happy; what would she think if she knew that he’d succumbed to panic?

“You said City life would he hard for me,” she reminded gently, “and it wasn’t. I was content there except for missing you. When they announced that those who served in secret had gone to build a new City and that their loved ones could follow, of course I chose to come.”

“But Talyra,” Noren said, “since the day of my arrest we’ve not been formally betrothed; how is it that they let you?”

“The Scholar Stefred sent for me,” she explained. “He asked whether it was by my choice that there has been no formal renewal of our betrothal. I told him that you did not wish to bind me since you weren’t sure when you could marry, but that I consider myself bound anyway and accept no other suitors. And oh, Noren, he said that in that case, the betrothal is fact! He wouldn’t have if he did not plan to bless our marriage, surely—”

“Permission for our marriage does not depend on the Scholar Stefred alone,” Noren replied, thinking that Stefred, in sending Talyra without consulting him, had employed unfair tactics. But he saw that she could not be discouraged and that if he argued further, she might doubt his love and be hurt; so that evening he stood up with her at Vespers and made again the promises of fidelity they’d exchanged before the village council, which were not really lies because he certainly didn’t intend to marry anybody else.

Since the Technicians had begun to arrive, the Inner City’s custom had been adopted; Orison was held in the tower, and the outdoor service, now called Vespers, became formal. The committed Scholars took turns conducting it, wearing borrowed robes if they had not brought their own. Talyra, as usual, attended regularly; her implicit faith in the promises of the Prophecy nearly broke Noren’s heart. “Darling,” he said to her, “you’ve met many Scholars now; you know that they’re human. Hasn’t it occurred to you that they might mislead us without meaning to, simply by being mistaken?”

“In little things, of course,” she agreed. “In big things like the Prophecy—how could they? They’re
guided
, Noren.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just
do
. Anyway, they said so, just a little while before I left the City. It was the night they all came to Vespers wearing their robes.”

Noren frowned; he had heard of no such occasion. “We’d known for several days that something must be the matter,” Talyra continued. “The Scholars had been looking terribly solemn, and they’d stayed inside their special tower most of the time. A woman I know who’s married to one told me her husband cried in his sleep. Then at Vespers, the Scholar Stefred spoke; he explained that new mysteries had been made manifest to them, mysteries that even they found frightening at first, but that the spirit of the Mother Star would guide them to understanding. And he said we must be patient if our friends and loved ones seemed troubled for a while. During the ritual, though, they didn’t look troubled; they looked—well, brave,” She added reflectively, “I didn’t know before it was so hard to be a Scholar.”

Brave? thought Noren. Was it brave to pretend that some mystical spirit, a mere symbol, would offer answers that rational effort could not uncover? It struck him as far more courageous to admit that one’s life had been built upon delusion. Yet Stefred, who was the most honest man he’d ever met…

He wondered what Stefred would say if he were to confront him with the issue. Remembering their talks, Noren longed sometimes to sit down in the study where despite demanding challenges, he had always felt capable and secure, and to go through the whole wretched series of problems; but there was now a greater obstacle than his pride. From Stefred he could hide nothing, and he still felt unable to declare his relapse openly. He was not strong enough to break the pattern through which his shaky balance was being maintained. He might despise himself for not stating aloud that there was no longer any excuse for maintaining the castes or for failing to share the City’s contents with the villagers, but he could not bring himself to abjure his recantation. Several others had done so; they’d accepted voluntary isolation in protest against the majority’s insistence that the system must be preserved. Something held Noren back. He could not understand it. Perhaps, he thought miserably, it was merely that having lost his self-assurance, he was not sure of anything else either—not even of his own conscience.

On the surface, at least, the majority opinion seemed sincere. As time passed it became increasingly evident that most Scholars really believed there was some remote chance of the system’s fulfilling its purpose. They discussed it at length, of course; when away from the Technicians, either in the tower’s restricted sections or beside one of the small mossfires around which friends met privately in the evenings, they talked of nothing else. Noren avoided these gatherings when possible, joining instead groups that included Talyra, but occasionally he was unable to escape.

“What we face is really the same dilemma that confronted our forebears more than once on the Six Worlds,” the head engineer said on one such night. “It’s harder for us because we know what we’re facing. The time span is shorter. Our personal responsibility is greater, and we’ve been forced by a unique emergency to use stopgap measures that would have been unjustifiable in the normal course of evolution. But otherwise, we are in an identical position: the exhaustion of our world’s resources is predictable, no sure solution is apparent, and the survival of our species depends on a breakthrough we can’t foresee.”

“That’s a dangerous argument,” someone observed. “Look at history that way, and you could make a case for half the schemes that were proposed by well-intentioned men who thought humanity couldn’t survive without a controlled society.”

“False analogy. In the first place, we don’t have a controlled society here; we have control of resources, which is something else entirely. The people of the Six Worlds had to control certain resources too, eventually, and they found ways to do it without abridging individual freedoms, just as we have. They had no moral grounds for controlling what we must control—machines and knowledge—because those weren’t irreplaceable resources there. But what’s more, the whole notion of a controlled society is founded on the supposition that people can foresee all the paths through which progress will come, and we are aware that we can’t.”

“I know that,” Brek said thoughtfully, “but I don’t understand the analogy you do want to draw. On the Six Worlds evolution was working as it’s supposed to work. Over the years people just naturally went on learning and developing and solving problems as they arose—whereas here, since resources are so limited that they can’t, we’re dealing with reversion. If it weren’t that the Prophecy makes them look ahead, I’m told, the villagers would be worshipping their ancestors—or maybe even idols—as well as Scholars! So how is there any comparison between the situations now and before the nova?”

“Human nature hasn’t changed,” explained Emet. “Yes, there’s been reversion here, because progress is inextricably tied to technological innovation, which is not possible in the villages. The regression of village culture to earlier ways has been held in check only by the outlook the Prophecy fosters. Without that, people would have become wholly superstitious about machines, for instance, just as primitive tribes once venerated forces of nature they could neither understand nor control. If there were no High Priests, there would be witch doctors. If there were no public recantations, there would be ritualized blood sacrifice. And if it weren’t for the adoption of Scholars’ children, banishing all heretics would cause the villagers to revert genetically as well. But when we speak of humanity as a whole, we’re including ourselves, through whom it is still evolving, and we’re as helpless and blind as men and women of the past. We have no choice but to learn what we can and then gamble.”

“Gamble?” questioned Noren. “At the conference in the City, Grenald’s assistant said that whenever the Six Worlds’ scientists had to expand their ideas of natural law, the stakes were as high as they are here, though without hindsight they didn’t know it. I don’t see that. When has there been a case in which gambling accomplished anything?”

“Well, take population growth,” suggested the head engineer, “since that issue is directly parallel. When the people of the mother world first realized that their world’s resources weren’t inexhaustible, some believed population growth ought to stop entirely. The idea had a good many fallacies, not the least of which was that it would merely have postponed the problem until it was too late to get enough of a head start on space exploration. Fortunately human instinct, the inborn will to survive, saw to it that growth slowed down without halting. But you can’t blame people of that age for being fearful. They
knew
the resources couldn’t last, and they didn’t know what was going to save them; it was too far ahead of their time.”

“Couldn’t they foresee interstellar travel?” inquired Brek.

“Not with any degree of certainty. For a great many years their experts believed that to travel faster than light was theoretically impossible. It was contrary to some basic principles of their science; the very mathematics of that science proved that no invention could ever circumvent the limitation, just as our mathematics now indicates that we can’t synthesize metal. Only when additional principles were discovered did the way open—and at the last minute, too.”

“We’re going to have to make a comparable breakthrough,” Brek agreed. “Basic scientific theory, not mere technology.”

“Yes, and our population situation is also comparable. Obviously our resources would last longer if the High Law did not encourage large families. But we’re still very few on this planet, too few to limit growth if we’re to survive plagues or other disasters and to reestablish widespread technology at the Time of the Prophecy. And besides, if the Founders hadn’t decided to foster rapid expansion, there would have been less chance of having enough people with the creative genius needed to produce the breakthrough. So they glorified childbearing, even at the price of the sexism that developed in the villages—which is something women of the Six Worlds wouldn’t have tolerated.”