Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (11 page)

He put out his hand to touch the silvery surface of the horizontal tower, feeling a kind of wonder. Disoriented he might be, but his mind was clear; the impressions he was gathering were sharp, detailed—not hazy as they’d been in dreams where he had struggled with abstractions that were beyond him. He was near the tower’s top, at least what would have been the top had it been standing. Seizing a handhold that projected from the wall, he reached for another above and began to pull himself around—“up” in terms of his present position, though there was little of the effort involved in climbing—curious as to what might be visible from greater height. To his astonishment, he got no higher. He passed handhold after handhold, only to see the convex wall stretch on and on above him as if its span had become infinite.

Once again fear stirred in Noren. A black shadow cut sharply across the wall, coming ever closer; if he kept going he would soon re-enter darkness. And he had no choice. He had no volition as far as the actions of his body were concerned; when he tried to control them, he discovered that the Dream Machine was doing so after all. His only freedom was in his personal inner response. To be sure, that had been the case in the previous dreams, but always before there had been the compensation of shared thought. He had not been compelled to proceed into the unknown with no idea of what his alter ego’s goal had been. Then too, he had not been so alone. There had been people around, talking to him, listening to words that came from his lips and by their reaction guiding his adjustment. Here he was isolated; it was all taking place in utter silence.

He approached the shadow, thinking how very odd it was that the tower, when first seen from a short distance, had been fully illuminated. Something behind him must be casting that shadow, some monstrous thing that was advancing… If only he could turn his head! His heart thudded painfully and he felt chills permeate his flesh, yet his hands were firm as he moved them from grip to grip. The physical symptoms of fear must be his own, he realized; they were occurring in his sleeping body, while the recording contained only the confident motions of a man who had not trembled. He held to that thought as his right arm disappeared into the dark.

Then, without any foreknowledge of the intent, he did turn for an instant, looking back over his shoulder toward the source of light he was leaving behind; and it so startled Noren that he felt he was not only falling, but spinning. Though the tower was still there, he was sure that he’d lost contact with it, that he would fall forever toward a fire that was worse than darkness. There was no shape to cast a shadow. There was only a vast black sky dominated by a sun, immense and horribly brilliant, that looked much as it had on film and in his first controlled dream and in all too many of his natural ones; but he had no shelter from it now. He was in the presence of the nova…

One glance was enough. It was a relief to creep on into the dark where that intolerable flame could not reach him. Why couldn’t it? Noren wondered, momentarily baffled. A sun, when it shone, shone everywhere. Why wasn’t it shining on the whole tower? His head and shoulders were by this time enveloped in blackness; he raised his free hand to turn a knob on the helmet he hadn’t realized he was wearing. Instantly there was light again: not sunlight, but innumerable swarms of blazing points that could be nothing but stars.

Awestruck, Noren clung to the wall of the tower, facing outward, while comprehension flooded into his mind. It came not from the recorder’s thoughts, to which he still had no access, but from his own power of reason; the pieces at last began to fit. He’d been climbing not up, but around—around the circular tower to the side opposite from the sun. And it wasn’t really a tower yet; it was still a starship. He was in space!

Noren had seen space from the viewport of the First Scholar’s starship during the first controlled dreams he had experienced, but that was not at all the same as being outside such a ship. Aboard the starship there had been artificial gravity; he had encountered neither weightlessness nor the absence of “up” and “down,” although he’d since been told of these conditions. He had also been told that stars would appear abnormally bright outside the atmosphere of the planet on which he’d been born, which was even thicker than the Six Worlds’ atmospheres, and that the sun, too, would be brighter—but mere words had not prepared him for the actuality.

It was not the nova he’d just glimpsed, he perceived. The nova had been observed only from the escaping fleet, which had gone into stardrive minutes after the explosion; no one could have been outside a ship then. He must have seen the Mother Star at some time before it went nova. Yet he had never heard of thought recordings having been brought from the Six Worlds, and this dream seemed so real, so immediate, that he felt sure it had been recorded in real time rather than from memory.

The stars… he could not grasp what it meant to be seeing the stars this way! Obscured by the polarization that had protected his eyes from the naked sun, they’d burst into visibility when he, the astronaut, had changed the filter setting of his helmet. The astronaut had no doubt seen them often, but Noren did not share his thoughts and was still overpowered as he clambered further around the ship—and came face to face with the most awesome sight of all.

It was a planet, a huge planet half-filling his field of vision, that except for some yellow splotches was shrouded in grayish-white. Noren turned cold. Not one of the Six Worlds had looked like that! He had seen films showing all of them; most had been predominantly green or blue, with their white areas forming clear, though shifting, patterns. Was this then an alien solar system, one judged unsuitable for use and quickly abandoned? There had been many such. The planet looked inhospitable enough; some deep, racial instinct told him that it was not right for colonizing, that it could not support life of his kind. As a human refuge it would indeed be useless…

No, he thought suddenly. Inhospitable, yes, but not quite useless. It was not an abandoned planet. It was his own.

*
 
*
 
*

The waking was as it had frequently been in recent weeks: slowly, naturally, Noren slipped back into the real world, feeling not the relief of escape from nightmare, but a sense of loss, of exile from a place he had not wished to leave. Before he reached full consciousness, there were flashes of memory from other dreams—a surging ocean, a broad green meadow dotted with shade trees, a city without walls where men and women partook freely of wonders past description—but he clung longest to the glory of the unveiled stars.

“You adapted.” Stefred’s approval seemed tinged, somewhat, by a trace of feeling Noren couldn’t identify. Turning from the panel of dials that enabled him to monitor a dreamer’s well-being, he continued, “If I asked you to go through that again, with some variations—perhaps to do so repeatedly—would it bother you?”

“No,” Noren replied confidently. “It’s only a dream, after all. Besides, I understand it now, and there were parts that were—exciting.”

Stefred smiled ruefully. “Some people find them so, others don’t. I was practically certain that you would.”

“Who recorded it?” asked Noren. “The other dreams, except the First Scholar’s, were of the Six Worlds, but this was here. I looked down on
this
world.”

“We don’t know his name. He was one of the shuttlecraft pilots who dismantled the starships and brought them down to be reassembled as towers.” With odd hesitancy, as if it was painful to go on, Stefred added, “For him, of course, it was more than a dream.”

“It was his job, and he—he must have liked it,” Noren commented, making a guess as to Stefred’s own immediate job and resolving to face what must be faced squarely.

“Would you like it if it were yours?”

To consider that was frustrating, but Noren made no attempt to evade the question. Part of the discipline of a Scholar’s education, he knew, lay in coming to terms with the fact that the vast universe beyond this one deficient planet—the universe accessible to his forefathers—could not be reached outside of dreams. This was necessary. Scholars were not supposed to be content with what they had; they were supposed to long for the unattainable, since only in that way could the goal of restoring the Six Worlds’ lost riches be kept constantly in view. People who want what they don’t have progress faster than those who are satisfied. The Prophecy itself had been created to ensure that they would never stop wanting the changes it promised.

“You’re tantalizing me,” he said, determined to take it in stride.

“Not this time,” Stefred replied. “This time I’m doing something quite different.” He drew breath, then persisted, “How would you feel about going into space not in a dream, but in reality?”

“That’s impossible.”

“No. A space shuttle still exists. Some of the starships are still in orbit, though in the First Scholar’s time they were stripped of all useful equipment.”

Yes, awaiting the Time of the Prophecy, when each hull would become the nucleus of a new city; Noren knew that. He tried to make light of the matter by stating the obvious: “I don’t know how to bring down a starship.”

“You know as much as anyone on this planet, or at least you will after you’ve been through that dream in its complete and unedited form often enough.”

Looking into Stefred’s face, Noren exclaimed, “You’re…
serious!”

Stefred nodded soberly. He detached the Dream Machine apparatus, saying, “Save your questions, Noren. I realize that’s difficult, but there is no time for them now, and at the meeting tonight they will be answered.”

Dazed by the overwhelming implications of what he was hearing, Noren sat up. “One thing more,” Stefred cautioned. “I must ask you to say nothing of this dream, particularly not to Brek.”

“Can’t you let him in on it, too?” protested Noren, thinking that when Brek did find out, he would be justifiably envious.

“I intend to, and the test isn’t valid unless a person comes to it unsuspecting, as you did.” With a sigh Stefred admitted, “Quite possibly it’s not valid even then, but there’s a limit to what I can devise on three days’ notice.”

Noren knew better than to prolong the discussion. He took leave of Stefred and headed downstairs to meet Brek, in such turmoil over the momentous happenings of the day that he found it hard to keep his composure. Only a little while remained before the meeting. There wasn’t time to go to the main refectory open to all Inner City residents, where he had hoped to see Talyra; he and Brek must again eat at the one in the Hall of Scholars.

It was crowded, for the coming assembly was on everyone’s mind and few had wished to interrupt their speculations about what might take place, as would have been necessary in the presence of Technicians. Steering clear of that topic, Noren talked instead of Talyra. If she had arrived on any other day, he would be sharing supper with her, not with Brek, he thought ruefully. He would never have spent her first evening in the City at the Hall of Scholars, the one tower she was barred from entering unless summoned for specific duties. He was torn; he longed to be with her, yet excitement about what lay ahead outweighed everything else. If the starships were to be retrieved from orbit, that could only mean that a breakthrough in the research was much closer than anyone had guessed!

They went to Orison. For that also, more Scholars were present than usual; even regular attendees did not come every night, since they often worked late, but this evening all work had been stopped. Besides, the room in which Orison was held was the only one large enough for a general assembly and people had already begun to gather.

Noren did not know the liturgy well, except for the parts that were direct quotations from the Book of the Prophecy. He was aware, of course, that in ritual created by the Scholars for their own use the Mother Star was meant to be viewed neither in the villagers’ way, as a magical power in the sky, nor in the scientific way, as a sun that had become a nova. It was representative of something else. The difficulty lay in grasping what the “something else” was. “You told me that some things Scholars do can’t be explained in advance, but have to be experienced,” Brek reminded him as they went in. “Maybe this is one of them.”

“But when I come,” Noren objected, “I don’t experience anything.”

This time he did.

Perhaps it was the larger group, the air of tense expectancy; perhaps, too, it was the fact that he was already thoroughly shaken by the events of the past two days. There was nothing different in the dimly lighted room itself, with its prismatic glass sunburst, larger than the one in the refectory, affixed to the ceiling’s center. Nor was there anything unique in the Six Worlds’ stirring orchestral music that no longer overwhelmed him as it had when he’d first heard it outside the Gates. There was no apparent difference in the ritual. The presiding Scholars were robed, as was customary, but all the others wore everyday clothes like his own. The words, presumably, were the same ones always used, allowing for a normal amount of daily variation.

He was standing, staring upward at the light glinting from myriad facets of the sunburst, and had allowed his mind to drift. Talyra… some of the words were those Stefred had used to bless Talyra, except for being expressed in first person plural:
“May the spirit of the Mother Star abide with us… may we gain strength from its presence, trusting in the surety of its power.”
But there was no surety! That was the truth he’d hidden from… .

All day it had lain at the surface of his thoughts; still he had not dared to consider its full significance.
You must grapple with it alone
, Stefred had said, yet he hadn’t done so. What was the matter with him? Noren wondered in dismay. He did not want to shrink from the truth! Truth had always been what he cared most about, and though he’d known it could sometimes be painful, he had not ever meant to let that deter him. He had not faltered when confrontation of the facts had required him to give up his most cherished theories and to undergo the ordeal of recanting. He would not falter now. Grimly, Noren forced himself to face the thing his recent doubts implied: it was possible that he would someday find that recanting had been a terrible mistake.