This Star Shall Abide (18 page)

Stefred sighed. “You’ll receive more than words,” he informed Noren, “and the consequences will be grimmer than you suppose. I warn you that a day will come when you’ll be willing to give up everything you care most for in order to escape them.”

Did they think he didn’t know they were going to kill him? Noren wondered. Just because they’d never threatened to, did they think him naive? Aloud he said, “I made my choice long ago. I’ll have no complaints as to where it leads.”

“You’re mistaken. I’m willing to bet that when the time is ripe you will stand here in this very room and give me all sorts of arguments as to why you should be let off.”

Deliberately and with effort, Noren laughed. “I see what you’re trying to do. If you could make me refuse your offer now, under these terms, it’d be the same as making me say that I don’t really care about truth after all.”

“You’re very perceptive,” the Scholar acknowledged. “However, as I explained, it’s less an offer than a judgment. Hard as it may be for you to credit, you’ve convinced me that you do have the right to the facts about the Prophecy, which as you’ve guessed are not quite the same as the official interpretation. They are not the same as your interpretation, either; but then, your information has been very limited. It will be limited no longer, Noren. You’ve won what you wanted.” With a strange note of sympathy he added, “I only hope you’ll never be sorry that you did.”

Chapter Eight

Noren sat in the chair Stefred offered him and waited with a mixture of excitement and resignation, aware that he’d been maneuvered into a position in which, for the time being, he had no choice but to play along. The Scholars’ tactics were diabolically clever. He could not tell whether he would actually be given the truth or whether there’d be further attempts to deceive him, and if he was taken in by deception they would triumph; yet were he to resist truth when it was offered, they would achieve a final and ironic victory.

His spine tinged. To learn the real secrets—the underlying secrets that were kept not only from the villagers but from the Technicians—would be worth all he’d gone through. Perhaps Stefred was sincere; after all, what harm could it do the Scholars to enlighten him before he died? They might even see an advantage to it, for if the truth was as unpleasant as Stefred had intimated, they might think it a fitting punishment; but in that case the triumph would be his! Suddenly Noren recalled the remark that had been made during his inquisition:
Knowledge can be frightening… sometimes people are better off without knowing everything.
He was indeed being challenged, he decided. They were daring him to back up his conviction that it was always preferable to know.

He watched Stefred’s movements curiously, seeing that the Scholar was handling a small Machine of some sort. Then, abruptly and without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness; the bright day of the City had somehow turned to moonless night. There was a penetrating humming sound. Noren clenched his icy fingers and tried to gulp down panic. He counted the seconds.

When he reached forty, a dazzling, fiery sphere burst into being in front of him. It dimmed slightly, so that he was able to look at it without blinking, yet at the same time it grew, tendrils of cold flame trailing out from its edges. It was about to envelop him, Noren felt. He wanted to hold his head up, but he could not bear the sight for more than a few moments; he closed his eyes and crumpled in the chair, biting his lip to keep himself from screaming.

The room turned black again, and Stefred’s hand touched his shoulder. “We’ll try again,” the Scholar said, not unkindly. “We’ll keep trying until you can watch it through, because you will soon be required not merely to watch, but to understand.”

Noren drew himself erect and concentrated on understanding. The fire reappeared, larger and brighter than before; and this time, though his mouth was dry and his heart thumped as if it would burst, his eyes stayed open.

“Do you know what this is, Noren?” Stefred’s voice went on.

“It—it looks like the sun, but there’s no heat.”

“Yes. But it’s not our sun. And it’s only a picture; this is a picture of a star, up close. Star, sun—they’re the same thing.”

“But the stars are much smaller,” Noren protested.

“They look smaller because they are far away.”

That was reasonable. But then how could the Scholars get pictures of them up close? How could they get such pictures in any case, pictures that moved, pictures that looked real? “Is this sun one of the stars we see in the constellations, then?” he asked.

“You have never seen this particular sun. It is the Mother Star.”

Noren controlled his gasp of astonishment and did not reply.

“You’ve been told in school, haven’t you, that the world is round and that it circles the sun?” the Scholar continued. “Well, there are many worlds, Noren; unnumbered worlds, circling other suns, the stars.” The image was instantaneously extinguished and another took its place: a greenish globe, splotched with irregular areas of white and blue and brown. “Here you’re looking at such a world. A whole earth; an earth with fields and streams and mountains—and Cities, hundreds of Cities, many of them larger and grander than you could possibly imagine.”

As Noren watched, he saw the world come alive; the globe faded and it was as though he were flying over the land, and then he seemed to be walking through the streets of the Cities themselves. There were people dressed in exotic clothing like none he had ever seen; there were wide, deep streams with little houses floating on them; and once there was a vast expanse of blue water stretching all the way to the horizon. Even stranger, there were towering plants with dark green foliage and brown stems thicker than a man’s arm! There were also other things that he could not begin to identify. He couldn’t absorb the barest scrap of what he was seeing, and yet it filled him with an agonizing, irresistible longing to be part of it and comprehend it.

But it was gone. There was only the shining globe again, receding into the distance.

He knew then what Stefred’s strategy must be. This glimpse of the forbidden, ultimate secrets was designed to tempt him past endurance; though not a bribe in itself, it was the prelude to a proposition that he would find very hard to stand out against. All the same, he could not regret having had the glimpse.

“Haven’t you any questions, Noren?” Stefred asked.

He had so many questions that he would not have known where to begin even if he had wished to reveal his craving for further knowledge; again, he resolved to remain silent. But Stefred, apparently, was not through tantalizing him. “I’ll give you some of the answers anyway,” he said.

When Noren didn’t respond, the Scholar went right on. “A great many years ago,” he began, “the world you saw had so many Cities and was so crowded that people were dying because they could not get enough food. There was no land left to grow more food. The Technicians of that world were able to travel to other worlds that circled the same sun, but on some of them they found only rock and ice, and some had no solid ground at all. The rest—five that were quite similar to the home world—were quickly filled up. They couldn’t raise enough food there, either.”

Despite himself Noren burst out, “How could they go from one world to another?”

“There is a way. They eventually came to use what was called a starship, a ship that enabled them to visit not only the worlds of their own sun, but those of far-off stars. Look.” A shape grew out of darkness: a Machine, massive and cylindrical, a glistening thing that somehow resembled the towers of the City. “It is propelled by Power. Inside, there is space for hundreds of people to live and work; and in starships like this, Noren, our ancestors arrived at the time of the Founding.”

No, thought Noren desperately. It couldn’t be; the Founding was only a myth… .

“They came upon this world only after years of searching. A new discovery had made it possible for them to reach other suns in less time than it had once taken them to circle their own, but there were few stars of the right type near theirs, and not all worlds are places where people can live. Some are barren; some are too hot or too cold, or have air that is poisonous; some are occupied by other forms of life. This was the first suitable one they found.”

Again, Noren saw living scenes take form in front of him: first the interior of the starship, and then a smaller ship coming down out of the sky and the people getting out of it. In the background were the familiar yellow ridges of the Tomorrow Mountains.

After a long pause, the room grew light once more and the picture disappeared.

The Scholar smiled quizzically. “Well?”

Noren met his eyes. “Even if I were to accept these pictures—if I were to believe in the Founding, and concede that people came out of the sky instead of having once been savages as I guessed—I still couldn’t believe in the Mother Star.”

“But you have seen it. It is the sun of the world you were shown; it is, as the Prophecy says, our source.”

“If that’s so, how is it that we can’t see it in the sky?”

“It is too far away.”

“Will it come closer?”

“No. What will happen is as yet beyond your comprehension—”

Triumphantly Noren broke in, “If it’s not coming closer, then how can you tell us it will someday appear? Nothing can change the fact that you’ve created the Prophecy as an excuse to keep what’s here in the City away from people!”

Stefred returned to his desk, pausing thoughtfully. “Nothing can change that,” he admitted. “Nevertheless, the entire Prophecy is true; you will accept it and revere it.”

“I will not. These things—these pictures—should be for everyone; what right have you not to share them? If our ancestors all came together in a ship, what right have you to hide the knowledge that came with them?”

“You will concede us that right.”

“To buy more enlightenment for myself? If you think so, you’ve underestimated me,” Noren persisted.

“I doubt it,” Stefred said. “If anything, I’ve overestimated you. As I told you, at present you have no option in regard to your enlightenment; it is going to proceed whether you like it or not, and it’s quite possible that you won’t. The next phase is considerably more painful.”

“Oh,” Noren said resignedly, “so you’re threatening me after all.”

The Scholar shook his head. “We don’t want it to be painful for you, Noren. Parts of it will be; truth often is. But the pain won’t be the sort you’ve anticipated, and I will not subject you to any that can be avoided.”

“Which is another way of saying that if somebody won’t go along with you, it’s ‘unavoidable’ for you to punish him. Naturally you don’t want to; you’d be much happier if we all agreed without making trouble—”

“Actually,” Stefred interrupted with a strangely unreadable look, “we’re delighted whenever a person proves willing to do his own thinking.”

“Just so you can demonstrate your power over him?” Noren found, to his amazement, that he was disappointed; for some reason he had begun to think better of Stefred.

Quietly the Scholar replied, “You are not ready to understand why. I can’t ask you to trust me because I’m aware that you have no basis for trust, but all the same, I hope you’ll remember what I’m going to say to you.” He leaned forward again, and his tone carried no trace of cruelty or deception. “You are about to undergo some very difficult and frightening experiences. During the course of them you’ll learn a great deal that you’ve been longing to know, but you will suffer in the process. That can’t be prevented. We Scholars have suffered in the same way. It is not punishment, but an inherent part of the truth you’ve chosen to seek out. You see, Noren, such truth involves not merely facts, but feelings. Some of the feelings aren’t pleasant, but if you really mean the things you’ve been insisting—the things about its being better to know first hand than to believe because you’re told you should—then you won’t mind experiencing them.”

Noren stared. The sympathy in Stefred’s manner seemed too warm to be faked. “Are these experiences designed to make me believe the Prophecy?” he asked suspiciously.

“They are designed to show you the origin of the Prophecy. If you emerge from them believing, it will be because you’ve accepted the proofs; what a person believes is not subject to force.”

“You’re not talking as you did during my inquisition,” Noren observed, bewildered.

“I am not,” the Scholar agreed, “but in neither case have I lied.” He smiled. “You have a quick mind. You’ve spotted an inconsistency between my ultimatum to you and the statement I just made; you think you have me trapped. Think deeper! If you understand your own system of values, you’ll see that no inconsistency exists.”

But it did, Noren thought. The bald assertion that his recantation would be sincere and that it would be obtained through means he’d be powerless to resist surely couldn’t be reconciled with an admission that beliefs could not be forced; that is, it couldn’t unless…

Unless real proof could be presented. If they could
prove
the Prophecy, he’d be unable to resist them. He was indeed vulnerable in that sense, for to ignore proof would be a violation not of their principles, but of his own.

He had never suspected that they might have proof. He’d given no thought to such a possibility; he’d feared only that they might torture him or, more recently, that they would practice some ingenious form of deception. And wasn’t that still a danger? Wasn’t it conceivable that they could make false proofs seem real? How, thought Noren in anguish, was he ever to judge?

“I’ve at last cracked your armor,” Stefred was saying. “For the first time you doubt your convictions, and it hurts. You’re beginning to realize that if by some remote chance we are right and you are wrong, it is going to hurt a great deal.”

The man’s analysis was all too accurate. Noren reflected ruefully. The idea of finding himself wrong was more upsetting than all the earlier warnings; Stefred had gained the upper hand.

“But consider this, Noren,” the Scholar continued seriously. “You wouldn’t be capable of feeling such hurts if you lacked the ability to evaluate what you’re shown. You’d either label all the proofs offered you fakes, or, if we had some way of forcing them on you, you would accept them without question; in neither case would you feel distress. The fact that you do—that you’re willing to open your mind to it—is evidence that your regard for the truth is reliable.”