This Star Shall Abide (10 page)

He had been aware that the switching of places could be an elaborate plot, but no motive for it had occurred to him. Now he wondered. The two Technicians could be working together. The other man, who might not be going in the aircar, could be watching Talyra’s house, expecting to get evidence against her; and he could have seen to it that there would be villagers there, too.

Noren could not take that chance. He was sure enough of the young Technician to gamble his own safety, but he was not willing to jeopardize Talyra’s.

Yet what else was there to do? This was a spoke road; he could reach no other village except by way of the center he’d just left, and it was too late to return there, for dawn was already brightening the sky. He would have to lie low somehow until the next night. Though farms lined the road, to be seen from a distance by farmers would not endanger him; they would not approach unless faced by an emergency such as illness, since Technicians, whose ways were inscrutable, were left to their own devices. Real Technicians, however, would surely search the area. He’d have to hide in the wilderness, and he could not get to the wilderness without passing both Talyra’s farm and his family’s.

Despairingly, Noren trudged ahead. If there was anyone he did not want to encounter, it was one of his brothers; yet since Talyra’s house might be under observation, he must go by it without a glance. What could he do if he ever did reach another village? he wondered. He could buy clothing without challenge, perhaps—though most people’s clothes were made at home, a few shops did carry garments sewn by seamstresses—but he had no money and besides, Technicians would undoubtedly be expecting such a move. The shopkeepers would be either watched or warned.

Someone was coming toward him along the road. Noren felt a chill of apprehension, but he knew he must walk calmly forward. Though in the dim light he could not make out whether it was a farmer, there was no reason to suppose that it wouldn’t be, and if he kept his lantern down and gave no greeting he would be ignored. To his surprise, as the figure came closer he saw that it was a woman. For a woman to be out alone before sunrise was very odd.

And the woman did not ignore him. “Sir!” she called out clearly. “Forgive me for presuming to approach you, but I could not wait at home. My parents don’t wish me to accept midwife’s training.”

Noren froze, overwhelmed by astonishment. It was Talyra’s voice.

As she approached, he was torn between his desire to run to her and the impulse to run away. When she recognized him, she would be stunned; he must reveal himself with care, lest she become too upset to cope with the situation. Setting the lantern on the ground, he raised one hand to his face, and disguising his voice as best he could, called back, “My greetings, citizen! May I be of service to you?”

She was by this time near enough to see him, but as was normal for villagers, she noticed only the uniform. “I am pleased by your concern, sir,” she replied formally. “Are you not the Technician who is coming to take me to the training center? If I’ve erred in addressing you, I’m most sorry.”

He reached for the large bundle she carried, turning from her to set it beside the lantern. “Talyra,” he said quietly.

The girl let out a gasp, and Noren whirled; before she could speak, he had caught her in his arms and was holding her close to him.

*
 
*
 
*

As the first rays of sunlight touched the Tomorrow Mountains, gilding the uppermost ridges with gold, Noren and Talyra left the road for the shelter of a dense purplish thicket, for Noren realized that although a Technician alone would arouse no curiosity among the farmers, a Technician embracing a village woman would be a strange sight indeed. Though presumably, men and women Technicians embraced in the privacy of the City, villagers assumed they had no such feelings; no doubt the High Law forbade them to look upon ordinary people with love of that kind.

They sat on the ground, sinking into the spongy gray moss that grew beneath the webbed-stemmed shrubs, and kept low enough to be well concealed. At first Talyra sobbed hysterically, too overcome by Noren’s miraculous appearance to care about anything else. After a short while, however, she pulled away, voicing the inevitable protest. “Noren,” she exclaimed in wide-eyed horror, “to wear a Technician’s clothes—it’s blasphemy!”

“I’m already convicted of blasphemy, Talyra, and of heresy as well. Is this so much worse? I didn’t steal the uniform; it was given to me.”

Talyra dropped her head, her long dark hair hiding her face from him. “I—I’m all mixed up,” she faltered miserably. “Everything you’ve been doing is wrong, but at the trial, I could think only of how I couldn’t bear to have you punished. It was all my fault—” She began to cry again. “Why do you even speak to me, let alone kiss me? I thought you must hate me! And it’s sinful—indecent—for me to be letting you touch me when you’ve committed such sacrilege; I hate myself both ways.”

“Darling,” he said gently, “you mustn’t. It’s not sinful! My arrest wasn’t your fault, either; I never for a minute thought you’d report me. Don’t you know why I had to say what I did? It was the only way to convince them that you’re innocent.”

“You—you lied? You wouldn’t lie to save yourself, yet you did to protect
me?”

“That wasn’t the same kind of lying,” he said gravely.

“I guess not,” she agreed. “Noren, you were so brave to talk to the councilmen as you did I—well, I understand a little, I think.”

“You see now how bad it is for the Scholars to keep things from us?” he asked eagerly. “You see how they’ve tricked people with the Prophecy?”

“No! I know you’re mistaken, and I’ll never see how you can believe the things you said. But I understand that you do believe them. I understand that being honest means more to you than anything else. Oh, Noren, I’m sure the Scholars won’t punish you harshly! They couldn’t!”

“I’m not going to give them a chance,” he declared. “Talyra, you realize that I’ve escaped, don’t you? That if I’m recaptured, I’ll be killed?”

“Killed!” She stared, incredulous. “They’ve never sentenced anybody to die, not even for impenitence! It’s a terrible thing to escape, but I just won’t believe they’d kill you for it.”

“Not for escaping,” he explained patiently. “For refusing to recant.”

“But all heretics recant,” Talyra protested. “Whether they’re penitent or not they at least retract whatever they’ve said.”

“I’m not going to. Do you think that when I wouldn’t deny the truth for your sake, I’d do so to save my life?”

“No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t think you would. And the Scholars wouldn’t want you to.” Frowning, she went on, “I don’t know how they get heretics to recant, but they surely don’t ask them to lie. Your idea of the truth’s twisted around, Noren, and somehow they’ll make you see that. Perhaps… perhaps it’s like the inoculations Technicians give; the needle hurts, yet without it we’d all get sick and die.”

“Talyra,” he demanded, “do you believe it’s right for the Scholars to hurt people to make them see things their way?”

She averted her eyes. “I—I’m not sure,” she confessed in a low voice. “It doesn’t seem so, yet the Scholars are High Priests, and they know everything; how could they do anything wrong? You said yourself that truth’s more important than comfort. Well, the Prophecy is
true—”

Noren could see that she was genuinely unable to imagine that it might not be. “I’ll put it another way,” he said. “If you believe that what’s done to heretics is for their good, then why didn’t you denounce me? You would have called the Technicians if I’d been sick, even if it meant having me taken away to the hospital outside the City; why didn’t you feel the same way about getting me cured of heresy?”

There was a brief silence. Then, baffled by a paradox she could not resolve, Talyra cried, “Because I don’t want you hurt! I don’t want you imprisoned! May the spirit of the Mother Star not forsake me; I want you to go free!”

“You’ll help me, then?”

“I’ll help you even if I’m condemned for it, Noren.”

“You won’t be, and you mustn’t condemn yourself, either,” Noren said with concern. “You must trust me, darling, as I’m trusting you. I know some things you don’t, and there are Technicians who know them, too, like the one who gave me his uniform.” He went on to tell her what had happened, hastily and with little detail, for he knew they hadn’t much time. “You’ll hear that I attacked him,” he concluded, “but it’s not true; we made up that story to save him from punishment.”

The idea of a Technician taking a heretic’s side against the Scholars was bewildering to Talyra, but she accepted Noren’s word, giving her own that she would never repeat any of what he’d disclosed. “It’s not going to be easy getting clothes for you,” she said thoughtfully. “Have you any idea how we’re to manage it?”

“Can’t you get some of your brother’s old ones?” he asked, puzzled. “By this time he and your father will be working in the fields.”

“But I can’t go back now. Mother would be there, and she’d not let me out of her sight again. I left a note, you see, when I came away this morning.”

Noren frowned. He had forgotten for the moment what Talyra had said about leaving home against her parents’ wishes. “You haven’t told me why you changed your mind about the training center,” he muttered, deciding that to reveal the reason she’d been appointed would be needlessly cruel.

“Do you have to ask?” she replied, blushing. “Being a nurse-midwife would be much better than living with my parents forever, or working in a shop or an inn. Mother doesn’t understand. She thinks I’ll get married someday.”

“Won’t you?” he inquired painfully.

“Noren! When I broke our betrothal, you surely didn’t think I’d ever marry someone
else!”

He held out his arms and she came eagerly, as if there had never been any rift at all. The ways of girls, Noren decided, were even more mysterious than those of Scholars.

“After the trial,” Talyra continued softly, “when I knew they’d take you away and I’d never see you again, I spoke to the Technician who had offered me the appointment. I asked if I could still accept, and he said yes, he’d come for me today or send his partner. I was glad because I thought that while I was being trained, I’d at least be somewhere near the City where they were keeping you. But Mother was dreadfully worried. There are those stories, you know, about people who go to the training center and then just disappear—”

Noren held her tight. “I’m worried, too,” he declared. It was quite true that there were occasional unexplained disappearances from the training center. To be sure, the Technicians always told families that they must not grieve, that the person who’d vanished was not dead, but had been honored by being given special and secret work of his own choosing. And it happened rarely; still, feeling as he did about the Scholars’ secrets…

“Are you saying you don’t want me to learn as much as they’ll teach me?” she asked.

He could scarcely say that, Noren realized; he’d have gone gladly to the training center himself. Talyra would make a good midwife. She wouldn’t mind following the orders of Technicians, for she’d feel no resentment at not knowing all that they did. Nurse-midwives lived in every village to tend the ill and injured before the Technicians arrived, to carry out whatever treatment was prescribed, and to deliver babies; they were admired and respected by everyone.

“No, darling,” he told her. “If you’ll be happy as a nurse-midwife, that’s what you must become.”

She lay back against his shoulder. “I’ll never be happy without you,” she admitted. “But I would like the work, I think. I’m of age, and if I’d waited at home for the Technician, Mother couldn’t have stopped me from going with him; but I thought it would be easier if I just slipped away.”

“That puts your helping me in a different light,” Noren said ruefully. “If you can’t go home without being seen, we must forget it, for I won’t have you do anything dangerous.”

“Do you think I’m afraid?” Talyra demanded indignantly. “Noren, nothing matters to me but your safety! There must be some way I can get clothes for you in the village; no one even knows you’ve escaped yet.”

There’d be no dissuading her, Noren saw. She had hesitated at first not from fear or unwillingness to defy convention, but from a real conflict of conscience; Talyra had never lacked spirit when it came to getting her own way. Having determined her course, she would hold to it.

“I could buy clothes and say they were for my brother,” she suggested.

“I haven’t any money.”

“I have: the coins I’ve been given each Founding Day. And there’s my great-aunt’s silver wristband.”

“I couldn’t let you use those,” Noren protested.

“They’ve always been yours,” she said simply. “I was saving them for my dowry.”

“But Talyra,” he went on, “later, when they’re searching for me, they would question the shopkeeper, and your brother, too. You’d be at the training center by then, and the Technicians there would make you tell them everything.”

“I suppose they would,” she agreed unhappily. “Whatever I do, they’ll find out afterwards. Noren, there’s just one way it will work; they’ve got to think you forced me. We’ve got to make up a story the way you did with the Technician.”

“How could I force you even if I wanted to?”

She turned scarlet. “You’re stronger than I am. You could make me swear by the Mother Star to do anything you say.”

“But I wouldn’t—not that way!”

“Of course you wouldn’t, but people will believe just about anything of you now. After what you said about having drunk impure water, any girl would be scared to death of you. And besides, anybody who’d attack a
Technician—”

That was all too true, Noren realized. It would be assumed that he had no integrity whatsoever. Yet Talyra’s alleged refusal to break an oath by the Mother Star, even one forcibly extracted, would arouse no suspicion, for her piety had been acknowledged by the village council itself.

“Could you carry it off, Talyra?” he asked dubiously. “Accusing me, I mean?”

“I could to put them off your trail,” she declared. “I won’t wait for the Technicians to ask; I’ll go to the councilmen as soon as your escape’s made known, and send them to look for you in the wrong direction. It’s the same sort of lie you told about not trusting me, isn’t it? And since they’re convinced you don’t trust me, they’ll be ready to believe that you’d try to get even.”