The Doors Of The Universe (11 page)

Except, of course, Talyra. And he had not lost her because of his heretical ideas after all. Ironically, he had lost her for no purpose whatsoever; and worse, she’d lost her own life… .

The First Scholar had come to terms with grief. But his wife had chosen to die—chosen tragically and mistakenly, to be sure, but nevertheless she had made her own decision. Talyra hadn’t. He could never reconcile himself to that! If some end had been served by it, something she would have chosen had she known… but it had achieved nothing.

He could endure his own guilt. He knew, from the dreams, that the First Scholar had lived with some terrible and mysterious horror for which he’d felt to blame, and had endured it—he could never have been at peace in the end if he had not. The end, the deathbed recording, contained no traces of any horror. There was sadness in it, and physical pain, but otherwise only hope: the exultant hope that had engendered the Prophecy. For himself, Noren thought, there would never be hope again. Talyra had died uselessly, and the things she’d believed in, the things the Prophecy said, were never going to come true in any case.

It always came back to that.

Turning over in the dark, the total darkness of a windowless room in which for lack of metal wire, there could be no illumination when no battery-powered lamp was in use, he found himself thinking again about genetics. It was strange he could not put that out of his mind. He’d long since learned all he could about it, lacking practical applications to focus on. He had satisfied his curiosity as to the specific way in which unprocessed soil and water damaged human reproductive cells. It was an incredibly complex process requiring understanding of both chemistry and biology at the molecular level; he’d spent weeks wholly immersed in it, and even so, only the mental discipline acquired from his past study of nuclear physics had enabled him to master the concepts. He was by now, he supposed, the greatest authority on useless information who’d ever lived in the City. The greatest shirker of responsibility, too, people would say, had he not gone back to an outward pretense of devotion to the unattainable goal of metal synthesization.

Yet he could not let his new knowledge drop. He did not know why. It wasn’t escape from terror any longer, nor was it still escape from the futility of his official work—for was not genetics equally futile?

How frustrating that he couldn’t justify devoting more time to it. He would like to experiment. He might genetically modify some native plant to grow in treated soil, and that would give people relief from the monotony of a diet based on a single crop. But the cost would be too high, not only in his time, but in the time the land-treatment machines would last. A second crop would be welcomed by village farmers; they would want extra fields to grow it in. The Founders had been wise to provide only one kind of food. They had also been wise, perhaps, not to encourage even the Scholars to learn that if it were not for the limitation imposed by the machines’ durability span—which had been calculated on the basis of necessary population increase—more variety would be possible.

The Founders had made just one practical use of genetic knowledge: they had developed the work-beasts. Everyone knew that, of course; even the villagers said that the work-beasts had been created by the Scholars at the time of the Founding. It was one of the notions he had scorned during his boyhood, but from the dreams of his enlightenment as a Scholar candidate, he had learned to his astonishment that it was true. Animal embryos had been brought from the Six Worlds and had been genetically altered so that they could eat native vegetation and drink from streams. They were essential to the villagers as beasts of burden as well as for hides, tallow and bone… what a pity that there wasn’t a way to make the meat usable, too. But genetic alteration couldn’t accomplish that. Work-beast flesh, like any creature’s, contained chemical traces of the food and water that had nourished it; the High Law decreed that it must be burned or buried. You couldn’t deal with the damaging substance in the soil and water by biological modification of what people consumed. The problem—the biological problem—was not in the food sources, but in people themselves… .

Noren sat upright, his heart pounding. Why wasn’t it possible to make biological modifications to
people
?

It was all too possible in nature. That was the trouble. The mutants were biologically changed. They ate native vegetation and drank from streams as work-beasts did; what had been accomplished with the work-beasts was called controlled mutation. It had been detrimental to their intelligence, not as seriously as in the case of the mutants descended from humans, since the beasts hadn’t been very intelligent to begin with, but a similar type of brain damage had been involved.
Only it needn’t have been
. He had studied the research done by the Founders, and he knew—with hindsight it had been recognized that the brain damage could have been avoided. The world had needed strong work-beasts, fast, more than it had needed smart ones. The researchers had been working against time and they had not tried to deal with the complexities of the genes that regulated brain development. Later on, they could not retrace their steps, for the inherited brain damage was irreversible.

But if that damage had been needless, if it could be averted if controlled mutation were done in the right way, why couldn’t mutation in people also be controlled? Biologically, genetically, people were animals… .

He fumbled for the lamp, suddenly unable to bear the darkness. He knew he would not sleep until he had discovered the answer.

There must be an answer, of course. The Founders were not stupid; they could scarcely have failed to perceive what he had just perceived. They would hardly have established a system they loathed, a caste system they knew to be evil, if there had been any alternate means of human survival—they had maintained over and over again that they would not. They’d experienced heartbreak during their decision and its implementation. The factors in the decision had been considered in full and painful detail by the First Scholar, who had suffered most agonizingly over it. Noren knew, beyond any possible question, that the First Scholar would not have done the things he did if there had been any choice. Nor would he have overlooked any conceivable future way of saving humanity from extinction.

But it was surely very strange that his recorded memories hadn’t included any regret about whatever it was that precluded controlled genetic alteration of humans.

Noren pulled on his clothes, his hands shaking, and took a small lantern; it was so late that the corridor lamps had been turned off. Outside, only the lights at the tower pinnacles still burned. He strode across the courtyard to the Hall of Scholars. The computers could tell him what he needed to know. They preserved all knowledge, and the answers he now sought had once been known. They must have been.

He looked up at the dazzling tower lights and the faint stars that showed between them. Off to his left was the red-gold glow of Little Moon, now rising.
As bright as Little Moon
, said the Prophecy; the Mother Star, when it appeared in the sky, would outshine any other. He would not live to see that, but his people must… his descendants must. Talyra had been right, he knew—he must eventually have other children. He did not feel he would want love again, not for itself, but he did want to believe that his offspring would live after him. She’d understood that, and her last thought for him had been to send word that she understood.

The towers… the City… to him they had always been a symbol. Of the future. Of the knowledge he craved. Outside, as a heretic, he’d gazed at them with more longing than he could bear. Had he offered his life for conviction’s sake alone, or only because without access to knowledge it had meant little to him? City confinement had been no more a hardship for him than separation from his family had. In his very arrest he’d had nothing to lose, though he’d believed himself soon to die. Had it been right to accept priesthood when he’d made no real sacrifice?

Approaching the computer room, he knew again that it had been. The essence of priesthood, for him at least, was guardianship of knowledge and extension of it—only by that means could knowledge ultimately be made free to all people. Only through its use could metal become available. Yes, that aim might fail, probably would fail; in the end everything would be lost… but the human race must die striving for life.

Suppose, just suppose, it had been possible to alter humans genetically so that the species need not die. Noren realized, with his hand poised above a console keyboard, that he did not want to crush this fantasy yet. The replies to his questions were going to crush it. But suppose that option
had
been open to the Founders—the Prophecy’s promises would already have been fulfilled! He would be living in the era all Scholars wished to see. The City would long since have been thrown open, knowledge and machines would be available to everyone… .

Or would they?

No! There would be no more metal than there already was. Its synthesization wouldn’t have been achieved, and in fact it wouldn’t need to be achieved—people wouldn’t even have kept working toward it. If people could drink unpurified water and eat plants grown in untreated soil, they could survive
without
metal,
without
machines!

But the knowledge in the computers could not.

Computers depended on metal parts and on a supply of nuclear power. The knowledge in them could not be accessed without those essentials. If the power failed, if the electronically stored data could never again be retrieved, then that knowledge would be lost. The Founders had known this; it had been one of their main reasons for sealing the City, for if the knowledge were to be lost, the machines essential to survival would be lost too, along with any chance of ever obtaining the metal for more machines.

It was a circle. If it was broken, humanity would die. Yet if it had been broken in another way, a way that had enabled humans to live without the City… then the City would no longer exist. He would be living the Stone Age life of the villagers, and without metal resources, without people trained to preserve even the remnants of a metal-based technology, there would be no possibility of regaining such a technology in the future.

The universe would be closed to his race. Forever.

The accumulated knowledge of the Six Worlds would be lost forever.

And the First Scholar must have foreseen that outcome.

Numb, paralyzed, Noren closed his eyes; the room had begun to swim dizzily around him. The nightmare that had eluded him earlier was assailing him now—though he was still conscious, he began to feel the familiar horror. He no longer wanted to understand its basis. He knew he could not face such understanding. He knew what significant facts the First Scholar had edited from his memories; he wished he could edit them from his own.

He should go now, walk away from the computers, forget genetics and return to his study of physics. Life would go on, as it had gone on throughout the generations since the Founding. As it would go on for a few more after him. No one else would learn what he had learned. People would be content. The villagers and Technicians would be content because they believed the Prophecy, and the Scholars would be content because they had faith in their power to bring about the Prophecy’s fulfillment.
There shall come a time of great exultation… and at that time, when the Mother Star appears in the sky, the ancient knowledge shall be free to all people, and shall be spread forth over the whole earth. And Cities shall rise beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, and shall have Power, and Machines; and the Scholars will no longer be their guardians
. Everyone believed that. Would they be happier knowing that it was false? Had he not faced exactly the same decision last year, when he’d first lost confidence in the nuclear research, and had Talyra not died because of his mistaken attempt to offer truth in place of illusion?

But it was not the same. Then, truth as he’d seen it had been a destructive truth. He could not have saved anyone by exposing the Prophecy’s emptiness. He could not, by sacrificing all he personally valued, have enabled future generations to live.

Could he now?

Could the Founders have done so? The First Scholar?

They had not, certainly, been insincere in what they did. Their suffering had been real. They had made a choice, a hard one, too hard to impose on their successors, and they had made it for humanity’s benefit. They had chosen a relatively short era of social evil to attain a long era of future advance, evidently. He did not have to judge whether they’d been right or wrong; the option was no longer open. For him, knowing that synthesization of metal had been proven impossible, the choice was simply between preservation of knowledge and a chance for permanent preservation of life… if in fact there was now any choice at all.

He had better start finding out, Noren told himself grimly. If he left the computers without knowing, he might lack the courage to come again.

*
 
*
 
*

Afterward, he did not remember his whole line of questioning. He was dazed and couldn’t be sure which of his words triggered a long-hidden branch in the control program. For a time, quite a long time, he was conversing normally; then all of a sudden he found himself waiting, the light at the top of his console glowing orange, as auxiliary memory was searched.

A wait in itself was not unusual; information about subjects not of immediate concern to the world was kept in auxiliary storage to be called up only on request. The computer complex, he’d been told, was not really well designed for its role as a central library. It had been put together from the separate smaller computer systems of the dismantled ships of the starfleet, a task the Founders had accomplished under the extreme handicap of having no unit with adequate capacity for a central server and no materials or equipment for the manufacture of extra parts. The resulting system was therefore inefficient and slow by Six Worlds’ standards. It was no great problem; rarely did anyone need data such as he’d just requested. Yet he had already waited once upon his initial request for the genetics file, which he’d supposed was a single entity… evidently, that wasn’t the case.