This Star Shall Abide (3 page)

This Technician had been a young man with a pleasant smile and a friendly manner that had put the boys immediately at ease. He had allowed them to come close to the aircar, even to touch it. At least Noren had touched it; his brothers had hung hack in awe, as people generally did in the presence of a Machine. He would have liked to climb inside, but that, the Technician would not permit. Noren had to content himself with running his hand over the smooth, shining surface of the craft and, later, with fingering curiously the green sleeve of the Technician’s uniform, so different from the coarse brown material of which ordinary clothing was made. And still more wondrous were the metal tools that the Technician carried, for metal was sacred and few villagers had opportunity to see it at close range. Only if wealthy or especially blessed might one possess a small metal article of one’s own.

Those things, however, had not been what impressed him most about the Technician, for to his surprise Noren had found that this was a man he could talk to. Even in childhood he had found it difficult to talk to his friends about anything more significant than their day-by-day activities. Certainly he couldn’t talk to his family. His father, though intelligent enough, cared for nothing but the price of grain and the problems of getting in the harvest; his brothers were stolid boys who spoke of happenings, but never of ideas. At times he’d felt that his mother had deeper interests than they; still, she was not one to go against women’s custom by displaying such interests. She gave him love, yet could communicate with him no better than the others. The Technician was not like any of these people. The Technician spoke to Noren as if the use of one’s mind was something very important. They had talked for a long time after supper, and Noren had felt a kind of excitement that he had never before imagined.

But in the morning, when the Technician had gone, the excitement had turned to frustration; and that day he had done a great deal of thinking.

He’d sprawled under a tall outcropping of rock in the corner of the field where he was supposed to be cutting grain, staring at his laboriously-sharpened stone scythe with the thought that a metal one—if such a thing existed—would be vastly more efficient. And gradually, with a mixture of elation and anger, he had become aware that Technicians were not the unique beings people presumed them to be. They were
men!
What they knew, other men could learn. Noren had been convinced, as surely as he’d ever been of anything, that he himself would be fully capable of learning it.

He’d also known that he would not be allowed to.

Someday,
he’d decided fiercely,
someday I’ll 
. . . He had not let himself complete the thought, for inwardly he’d been afraid. Inside he’d already sensed what would happen someday, though he had not recognized his heresy for what it was until the following season.

He’d assumed that there was nobody in the world with whom he could talk as he had with the Technician, but he’d been mistaken. That year he had at last found a real friend: not just a companion, but a friend who had ideas, and spoke of those ideas. Kern had been much older than Noren and in his final year of school; but once during noon hour, when Noren had asked to borrow a book not available in his own schoolroom, they’d discovered that they had more to say to each other than to their contemporaries. Instinctively Noren had avoided mentioning his opinion about Technicians to anyone else, but Kern he’d told freely and gladly, only to find that Kern was already far beyond him.

He had looked up to Kern as he’d never been able to look up to his father and brothers. Not that Kern had been considered admirable by the villagers, for he’d been a wild boy, a boy who laughed a great deal, belying the true gravity of his thoughts; and he had defied as many conventions as he could get away with. Though he’d spent much of his time with various girls—too much, their families felt—it was to Noren that he had turned with the confidences to which no ordinary person would listen. He’d been recklessly brave and proud of his secret heresies. He had said terrible things, shocking things that Noren had never expected to hear from anyone. He’d said that Scholars were as human as Technicians. He’d said that they were not immortal, but were vulnerable to the same injuries as other people. He had even said that they were not all-wise and were therefore unworthy of the reverence accorded them. But Kern had been careful to whom he expressed such views, at least until one night when he’d forgotten himself to the extent of telling a blasphemous joke within the hearing of a respectable tavernkeeper.

Noren had been in the village that night; he’d seen the marshals arrest Kern, and he’d seen the crowd gather around the jailhouse with blazing torches held aloft. There was to be a heresy trial the next day, but everyone had known that there could be no doubt as to its outcome. Kern himself had known, for once apprehended, he’d abandoned caution and vaunted offenses that even Noren had not suspected. He had gone so far as to boast of having drunk impure water—water neither collected from rain nor sent from the City—a claim few had believed, since had it been true he would most assuredly have been transformed into a babbling idiot. Having dared to laugh at an inviolable provision of the High Law, however, he’d incurred still greater contempt than heretics usually did.

Sick with dread, Noren had stood in the shadows watching the enraged mob. Kern would not cringe at his trial, he’d realized; Kern would laugh, as always, and when the Technicians took him away to the City, he would go with his head high. The terror of such a fate had overwhelmed Noren, but he’d tried very hard to look upon it as an adventure, as Kern surely would. They had often talked about the City, and there had been more to Kern’s speculations than idle bravado. One time, in a more serious tone than usual, he had said, “There are mysteries in the City, Noren, but we mustn’t fear them. Our minds are as good as the Scholars’. We can’t be forced to do or to believe anything against our will. Don’t worry about me, because I’m ever condemned I’m going to find out a lot that I can’t learn here.”

Kern never did find out. He’d never reached the City; he’d received no chance to explore the mysteries and test himself against the powers he had defied. There had not even been any trial, for the mob was inflamed, the councilmen were not present, and though the High Law decreed that all heretics must be turned over to the Technicians, there were no Technicians present either. Somehow the thatched roof of the jailhouse had caught fire—Noren had known how, as had everyone, but there’d been no particular man who could be accused—and when the Technicians had come, they’d found only the blackened stones.

At first Noren had blamed the Technicians because they hadn’t arrived in time to claim the prerogative given them by the High Law; later he’d blamed them for that Law itself. Who was to say that death by fire had not been the most merciful alternative? That thought had haunted Noren. School, which he’d once liked, became dreary, for having abandoned all friends but Kern, he was too absorbed in his bitterness to accept the inanities of his classmates. Besides, his liking for Kern was well known, and he was wary of talking much lest he arouse the suspicion with which, had he been older, he would certainly have been viewed. There had been little left for the school to teach him in any case. He began to seek elsewhere for answers, but soon learned that they could be found only within his own mind. The villagers were ignorant of things that interested him, and the Technicians who came to the farm were unlike the young man who’d once taken lodging there. They would not respond to his questions even when he bridled his resentment, approaching them with deference for the sake of the knowledge he craved. Sometimes it had seemed as if they were deliberately trying to frustrate him.

And then, the next year, his mother had died. She’d fallen ill suddenly while gathering sheaves at the outermost edge of their land, and he had found her lying there, her face contorted with pain, arms cruelly scratched by the wild briars into which she had fallen. The Technicians sent for had declared that she’d been poisoned by some forbidden herb, but Noren had been sure that she, of all people, would never have tasted anything not grown from seed blessed by the Scholars. They’d tried to save her, at least they’d said they were trying, but afterwards he’d never been quite certain. All knowledge was theirs; if they’d truly wanted her to live, surely they could have cured her illness as they did ordinary maladies. Or perhaps it was merely that they had again come too late. If he, Noren, had possessed the syringes they’d brought—if he’d known how to use them—he might have saved her himself; it was not right that such things should be only in the hands of Technicians!

He had said so to their faces, too stricken by grief and rage to care what they did to him. Surprisingly, they had not done anything. They had simply stated that he must not aspire to knowledge beyond his station; and from that moment, his aspirations had increased.

Yet as they’d increased, so had his realization that those aspirations could never find fulfillment. Soon he would have to choose a way to make his living, and there was no work he wanted to do. He despised farming; he was too inept at working with his hands to became a successful craftsworker; he had neither the money nor the inclination to go into business as a trader. He had talent only for the use of his mind, and in the village that was more of a liability than an asset. The best he could hope for was that some trader or shopkeeper would hire him to keep accounts, since the few people who worked as schoolmasters, radiophonists and so forth obtained their posts only after appointment to the training center by Technicians. Noren had perceived that he would get no such appointment, for each year the school examiners had treated him more scornfully beneath their outward courtesy. They’d guessed his heretical thoughts, perhaps, though they could not take him into custody unless he was first convicted in a civil trial.

The world had grown steadily darker. Noren had turned still further inward after his mother’s death, but because her loss was not his deepest pain, his grief had taken the form of an intensified search for some one good thing to make the future seem worth looking toward. And he had found it, for a time, in Talyra.

They’d known each other since childhood, for she lived on a neighboring farm, but he had not paid much attention to girls. Then all of a sudden he’d noticed her, and within a few weeks he had been in love. Never before had anyone cared for him, needed him, as Talyra did; nor had he ever received such joy from another person’s presence. He’d no longer been lonely. He’d no longer considered the life of a farmer an intolerable one. His secret ideas had still been the core of his thought, but they’d been submerged, overshadowed by new and more powerful feelings. Underneath he had known that if forced to choose, he would not forsake those ideas, but he hadn’t anticipated any choice. He’d told himself that Talyra would accept them, that he could share them with her as he had with Kern and, by the sharing, keep them from bursting forth to destroy him.

But it wasn’t going to be that way. He’d been deluding himself, Noren perceived bitterly. He should have known that no girl, however deeply in love, would marry someone who admitted to being a heretic. Such a thing was unheard of. He had been selfish to ask it of her, for he had exposed her not only to possible peril, but to the scorn of the whole village even if her personal innocence was never placed in doubt. And she was indeed innocent. Why should she take his word against that of the venerated High Priests, the Scholars?

So it had come to a choice after all, and now the futile search would begin again; yet to Noren it would not be the same. He was a man now. He had nothing left to wait for. And he knew that from this night forward he would always be torn, for he still loved Talyra, and truth or no truth, he would never be happy without her.

Chapter Two

When sunlight glared through the window opening, Noren rose and went out to wash his face. The air was already hot, and the smoke of moss fires mingled with the ever-present barn smells. Behind the farmhouse, the jagged yellow ranges of the Tomorrow Mountains were flat against a hazy sky.

At the cistern, he jerked the spigot handle impatiently and water splashed onto the dusty earth. Noren paid scant attention. It was wrong to waste pure water; his father would be angry, for there would be a reprimand from the village council if the family took more of what came from the City than was usual to supplement the rain-catchment supply, besides the extra trips to the common cistern that would entail. But after this morning what went on at his father’s farm would no longer concern him.

That was the decision Noren had reached during his sleepless hours: whatever happened, he could not stay at home. Though he wouldn’t claim a new farm without Talyra, to continue working for his father was not to be endured. He would have to find some other way to earn his living.

He looked around him, surveying the place that for so many years he had found hateful. It was just like all other farms he’d ever seen, though perhaps larger than most, since his family had bought the adjoining one in his grandfather’s time. The undulating grainfields, their ripened stalks orange in the sun, stretched away on three sides, and beyond, to the south, lay rolling wilderness of purple-green. Close by, however, was the grayish fodder patch that surrounded the area bordering the road. That area was ugly, for nothing grew in it but a few scrawny purple bushes. It was reserved for buildings. There was the stone farmhouse with its thick thatched roof; the cistern, also of stone, topped by a huge, saucer-shaped catchment basin; and the wattle-and-daub barn where the work-beasts and the sledge were kept, along with the rows of wicker cages that contained fowl.

Noren grimaced. He disliked all farm chores, but in particular he despised the job of taking fertilizer from the fowl cages to the fields: filling the great baskets that hung on either side of a work-beast and then, with the same pottery scoop, sprinkling it between the furrows left by the Technicians’ soil-quickening Machines. Worst of all was the digging in, which required crawling on hands and knees, as did cultivating. He’d often thought there should be an easier way to hoe; once, in fact, he had envisioned a long, stiff handle for the stone triangle, and had tried to improvise one. Like similar experiments of his younger days, it had been a dismal failure. No plant existed with stalks strong enough not to bend under the pressure, even when several were bound together. His mother had remarked that since the purpose of all large plants was to provide wicker for the weaving of baskets, furniture, and the like, nature had done well to make them flexible. His father, more sharply, had declared that if hoes had been meant to have handles, people would have been taught to make handles at the time of the Founding, just as they had been taught to do everything else. His eldest brother had berated him for fooling around with plant stalks instead of getting on with his share of the work. His other brothers had simply laughed at him.