The Doors Of The Universe (2 page)

Then, in the mountains, everything had changed. He’d thrown problems to the wind and followed his instincts, and instinct led him not only to love, but to strive beyond reason for their survival and their child’s. They’d had no sure knowledge, of course, that there was a child—yet what couple would believe their first union unfruitful?

He couldn’t remind Talyra that she would not live long enough to give birth; certainly he couldn’t remind her that perhaps she had failed to conceive. More significantly, he found he could not tell her that it made no difference to the world one way or the other. Science had proven the Prophecy vain—according to all logic, the human race was doomed by the alien world’s lack of resources. But he could not destroy Talyra’s faith. This too had been instinct, and through this, he’d discovered to his surprise that he could serve as a priest without hypocrisy. The role of a Scholar was to work toward a scientific breakthrough that could fulfill the Prophecy’s promises; the role of a priest was to affirm the Prophecy without evidence. He no longer felt the two were inconsistent.

He owed much to the child he would never be permitted to see, Noren thought: the child who would grow up as a villager—where, and under what name, he would not be told—and who, knowing nothing of his or her parentage, might someday in turn fight the High Law’s apparent injustice… .

“Noren—”

He looked up, expecting news from the nursery, but it was his friend Brek who stood in the doorway. “I guess you’re wondering why I didn’t come to the refectory,” Noren said. It was their habit to take their noon meal together in the Hall of Scholars, the central tower where as advanced students, they normally worked. “I wasn’t hungry, I’m as nervous as all fathers—just wait till it’s your turn.” Brek, quite recently, had married a fellow-Scholar; their delight in their own coming child had been plain.

Brek hesitated. “By the Star, Brek,” Noren went on, “it’s taking a long time, isn’t it? Should it take this long?”

“Noren, Beris asked me to tell you. They’ve sent for a doctor.” Brek’s tone was even, too even.

A doctor? Noren went white. Rarely had he heard of a doctor being called to attend a birth. The villages had no resident doctors; babies were delivered by nurse-midwives, trained, as Talyra had been trained in adolescence, for a vocation accorded semi-religious status. In the City there was no cause to usurp their prerogatives. Besides, it was improper to intervene in the process of bringing forth life. Only if the child were in danger…

Vaguely, from his boyhood, he recalled that babies sometimes died. So too, in the village, had mothers who were frail. It was not a thing discussed often, unless perhaps among women—though he had never known a woman whose eagerness for another child wouldn’t have overshadowed such thoughts.

“I think you’d better come,” Brek was saying.

As they descended in the lift, other boyhood memories pushed into Noren’s mind. The child might be past saving… against many ills doctors were powerless. They’d failed to save his mother. Though at the time he’d been outraged, he now knew she couldn’t have been helped; the poison in the briars she’d touched had no antidote. But some things without current remedies had been curable with Six Worlds’ technology.

Had the Six Worlds had ways of ensuring safe births? The computer complex could answer that, of course; he wondered, suddenly, if any past Scholar had been moved to ask. He himself was prone to ask futile questions as well as practical ones, a tendency not widely shared when it could lead only to frustration.

Brek was silent. That in itself was eloquent—Brek, Noren reflected, knew him much too well to offer false reassurances.

It had never occurred to Noren that the baby might die. He could face that himself, he supposed; he was inured to grim circumstances. The seasons since his marriage had been the happiest of his life, too good, he’d sometimes felt, to last. But Talyra’s sorrow he might find past bearing. It was so unjust that she should suffer… after all the grief and hardship he’d brought her in the past, he’d wanted to make her content. He’d vowed not to let her see that a priest could have doubts, or that even when closest to her he knew loneliness.

Was it only because of her pregnancy that he’d succeeded? If the child died, if she was desolate over what she’d surely perceive as a failure as well as a sorrow, would her intuition again lead her to sense that his own desolation went deeper? “You are what you are,” she had told him long ago, “and our loving each other wouldn’t make any difference.” It hadn’t; for a time this had seemed unimportant, yet throughout that time, the child had bridged the gulf between them… .

Talyra would blame herself if it wasn’t healthy; village women always did, and she’d been reared as a villager. It wouldn’t matter that no one in the City would consider her blameworthy. Noren cursed inwardly. Village society, backward in all ways because of its technological stagnation, was both sexist and intolerant; and while Talyra might be openminded enough to be talked out of most prejudices, she wouldn’t listen to him on a subject viewed as the province of women. Among Technicians there was less stigma attached to the loss of a child. Brek’s wife Beris had been born a Technician, in the Outer City, as had Brek himself. Maybe later on Beris would be able to help.

Yet Brek had said Beris sent the message—that was odd, since she was neither midwife nor nursery attendant. As a Scholar, Beris had work of her own in water purification control, vital life-support work she could not leave except in an emergency. As they reached the nursery level, Noren faced Brek, asking abruptly, “What’s Beris doing here?”

“She—she was called as a priest, Noren. I don’t know the details.”

The door where he and Talyra had parted was in front of them; Noren pushed and found it locked. He felt disoriented, as if he were undergoing a controlled dream like those used in Scholars’ training. Beris called as a priest? To be sure, no male priest would be summoned to the birthing room, and Talyra knew Beris well. But why should any priest be needed? At the service for the dead, yes, if the baby didn’t survive… but that would be held later, and elsewhere. He would be expected to preside himself, at least Talyra would expect it, and for her sake he would find the courage, disturbing though that particular service had always been to him. What other solace could a priest offer? Had they felt only a robed Scholar could break the news of her baby’s danger? That didn’t make sense—Talyra would know! She was a midwife; if the delivery didn’t go well, she would know what was happening.

She’d rarely spoken to him of her work. He knew only that she liked it, liked helping to bring new life into the world. Yet there had been times when she’d come to their room troubled, her usual vitality dimmed by sadness she would not explain. It struck him now that she might have seen babies die before. Perhaps she had seen more than one kind of pain.

That women suffered physically during childbirth was something everyone knew and no one mentioned. It was taken for granted that the lasting joy outweighed the temporary discomfort. Midwives were taught to employ a modified form of hypnosis that lessened pain without affecting consciousness, or so he’d been told, though Talyra wasn’t aware that the ritual procedures she followed served such a purpose. Doctors—and often priests—could induce full hypnotic anesthesia. Had Beris been summoned for that reason? Had Talyra’s pain been abnormally severe, could that be why they’d sought a doctor’s aid? Anguish rose in Noren; her confidence had been so great that he had not guessed she might be undergoing a real ordeal.

“I’ve got to go in there,” he told Brek. Having never been one to let custom stand in his way, he felt no hesitancy.

“You can’t do any good now. When you can, they’ll call you—”

“For the Star’s sake, she may need me! The doctor may not be here yet, she may be suffering—she’s not been trained to accept hypnosis as we have, and she’s not awed enough by a blue robe to let just any priest put her under.”

“Beris said something about drugs.”

“Drugs for childbirth?” Drugs were scarce and precious, not to be used where hypnosis would serve and surely not on anyone who wasn’t ill; Talyra would not accept them during the biggest moment of her life. Unless her baby had already died… but no, not even then; Talyra was no coward.

“I don’t understand,” he protested.

“Neither do I,” Brek said. “We don’t know enough about these things; sometimes I think women keep too much to themselves. I’d never have thought it could be risky for Talyra. She’s young and strong—”

Stunned, Noren burst out, “You mean there’s danger to
Talyra
? Not just to the child?” In sudden panic he threw his weight against the door, but it would not yield.

Brek grasped his arm, pulling him aside. “The child was stillborn, I think,” he admitted.

The door slid back and Beris emerged, still wearing the ceremonial blue robe of priesthood over her work clothes. She blocked Noren’s way.

“Let’s go down,” she said quietly. “I know a room that’s empty where we can go.”

“I’ve got to see Talyra.”

“You can’t, not here.”

“Where, then?” He wondered if they would move her to the infirmary; he knew nothing of what illness might strike during a delivery.

“Noren.” Beris kept her voice steady. “It was over faster than anyone expected. Talyra is dead.”

*
 
*
 
*

Later, he wondered how Brek and Beris had gotten him to the lift. They took him to a room on the next level that was temporarily unused. Once there, he collapsed on the narrow couch and gave way to tears. For a long time they said nothing, but simply let him weep.

When he was able to talk, there was little Beris could tell him. “It happens,” she said. “Usually with older women, or those who’ve never been strong; but occasionally it happens with a girl who seems healthy. Talyra knew that. She knew better than most of us; all midwives do.”

“She never said—”

“Of course not. You would be the last person to whom she’d have said such a thing.”

“Did it happen on the Six Worlds, too?” Noren asked bitterly. “Or could she have been saved there?”

“I don’t know. At least I don’t know if she could have been saved at this stage. It’s possible—they had equipment we haven’t the metal to produce, and they could tell beforehand if there were complications, so that their doctors could be prepared. Sometimes they delivered babies surgically before labor even began.”

Beris paused, glancing uncomfortably at Brek; her own pregnancy, though not yet apparent, could scarcely be far from their thoughts. “Talyra wasn’t a Scholar—she didn’t know how it was on the Six Worlds. But I do. I suppose men don’t absorb all that I did from the dreams the Founders recorded… but you do know it wasn’t the same as here. I mean, people didn’t have the same feelings—”

Noren nodded. The Six Worlds had been overpopulated; women hadn’t been allowed more than two children, and they’d had drugs to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Hard though it was to imagine, people hadn’t minded—at any rate, that was what all the records said. Sterility hadn’t been considered a curse. Some couples had purposely chosen to have no offspring at all; they had made love without wishing for their love to outlast their lifetime.

“Well,” Beris went on, “it was the custom there for women to be seen by doctors, not just during delivery, but all through pregnancy. They knew a long time ahead if things weren’t going right. And so pregnancies that were judged dangerous were—terminated.”

Noren was speechless. Brek, aghast, murmured, “You mean deliberately? They killed unborn children?”

“Their society didn’t look on it as killing. And it wasn’t done often once they had sure contraceptives—only when the child would die anyway, or when the mother’s health was at stake.”

“Talyra would not have done it at all,” declared Noren.

“No. That’s what I’m trying to say, Noren. She wouldn’t have, even if the option had been open, because in our culture we just can’t feel the way our ancestors did. Our situation is different. So unless the Six Worlds’ medical equipment could have saved her without hurting the baby, our having that equipment wouldn’t have changed anything.”

But the baby died too, Noren thought. She’d given her life for nothing. Perhaps these things happened, but why—why to Talyra? It was the sort of useless question that had always plagued him, yet he could not let it rest.

“She was so strong, she loved life so much… there’s got to be a
reason
,” he said slowly. He recalled how in the aftermath of the crash, Talyra’s indomitable spirit had kindled his own will to live. She had refused to let him give in. All the hardships—the terror of the attack by subhuman mutants, the heat, the exhaustion, the hunger and above all the thirst—had left Talyra untouched. How could she have come through all that, only to die as a result of the love that had led to their near-miraculous rescue?

“She believed the Star would protect her,” he persisted, “even in the mountains where we
knew
we were dying, she kept believing! You were there, Brek—you saw. I couldn’t disillusion her. That was what pulled us through. It’s so ironic for her faith to let her down in the end.”

“Talyra was a realist,” Brek declared, “I remember she said, ‘If we die expecting to live, we’ll be none the worse for it; but if we stop living because we expect to die, we’ll have thrown away our own lives.’”