Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (16 page)

Yet as the vibration intensified a new thought struck him. He was leaving the City—the City, the citadel of knowledge he’d sought so long and finally reached. He would be in the wilderness for many weeks to come, and though he wanted to go, he found himself once again torn. The City had never seemed a prison to him. He would miss it.

To rendezvous with the starship did not take long. As in the dreams, Noren and Brek felt the abrupt shift to weightlessness when the engines cut off; they saw the series of colored lights that told them they were docking; they felt the bump that meant the shuttlecraft had come to rest in a bay like the one it had recently left. They put on their helmets, marveling at the feel of moving under their own volition in a realm without gravity, a realm where up and down did not exist. They threw the switch to start cabin depressurization, waited for the large green light, unfastened the hatch… and emerged into a “tower” vestibule whose outer doors stood open to a vast black sky.

No stars were visible, for the faceplates of their helmets had been darkened lest on exiting, they confront the sun. It was like the test dream, where he’d fallen blindly and in utter silence. To Noren it was silent, anyway, for there was only one radiophone for communication with the City, and Brek—whose job as a Technician had been the servicing of radiophone equipment—was carrying it. There had been no real justification for allocating two, although Stefred had seemed to feel that two were needed. He’d been overruled, since radiophones were vital for intervillage communication and like everything else had to last until the Time of the Prophecy. Noren did not mind. He could talk to Brek when necessary by touching helmets with him, and anything he might wish to say to the ground team could be relayed.

He was no longer afraid. He felt free, euphoric, just as he’d expected he would. To float in limitless vacuum, restricted only by the thin tether that anchored him to the ship; to move almost without effort by means of a skill that had become familiar to him in dreams; to take up the tools and use them upon a Machine more awesome than any from which village taboos had once barred him—that these things were possible filled him with elation. He and Brek, grasping the handholds, made their way out to the tail of the starship where dismantling was to begin. The sun at their backs, they worked without speaking. There was no need for speech. Absorbed by the task and by the wonders of their situation, secure in their trust of each other and of the technology that enabled them to do what no one had done since the Founding, they encountered no difficulty in performing the job assigned to them.

They had been told to work steadily but unhurriedly; Brek was to report their progress at intervals over the radiophone. Noren could hear neither the reports nor the replies, but he knew that if any exchange of significance took place, Brek would tell him. Each section of hull, once unjoined, was to be fastened to a line and pulled into the shuttlecraft bay. The plan was to stow them all aboard later, when there were enough to fill the hold. Brek motioned that he would take the first one in. The thing wasn’t heavy, of course, since it too lacked weight, and a slight push from Noren was enough to give it momentum.

While Brek was gone Noren paused to rest. He was not really tired, but he’d never been one to stick unceasingly to a task when there was something interesting to think about—and in space there certainly was. He pulled himself around the ship to the side away from the sun, not wanting to miss this chance to adjust his helmet’s filters for one quick look at the stars.

They were overwhelming. He had seen them in the dream, but not like this, not immediate, tangible, many of them brighter and more splendid than Little Moon. He was no longer dreaming. The stars were
real
.

And all at once everything else became unreal. The villages… the City… the Six Worlds that were now mere space dust… those were no part of reality! He was detached from them. It was they that were dreams; he, Noren, was alone in space, unshielded from the boundless void and the stars that burned with a beauty he could not bear. Suns… all of them suns… how many of them had worlds where peoples beyond contact lived and worked and sought knowledge? How many still had worlds? They were light-years away; some, like the Mother Star itself, might have gone nova long ago… he might be seeing only their ghosts… but if so, was anything in the universe less illusory?

He turned cold, for it was an appalling thought. Always he had trusted in the existence of truth that was firm and absolute. He had searched for it unceasingly, and had supposed he was on his way to finding it. Yet if all was illusion, if the uncertainty he’d found so dismaying involved not only human survival but the very nature of things, then he had no more of an anchor to true reality than to the planet from which he was adrift. He could not even depend on the workings of his own mind.

Once again Noren was engulfed by terror he could not understand. He wanted to cry out, to call and be answered by Brek or by someone, but there was no means of doing so. He wanted to run, to feel air touch his face, to feel life surge through his weightless body; but that was impossible too. He was paralyzed. He was cut off from life. In desperation, knowing himself powerless to combat what was happening to him, he reached out for the next handhold. At first he could not make his arm move. But in time—he was not sure whether it was a long time or a short one—he was floating in a place where he saw not only stars, but the immense rim of the gray, mist-shrouded world.

It was, as he had known it would be, empty. He had always known that no one lived anywhere but in the one small settlement maintained through the Founders’ wisdom, but he had not sensed it as he did now, isolated from all contact with that settlement—that island in a huge expanse of emptiness. And there might well come a time when there would be no island! The human race would have no refuge once the City’s equipment gave out. Somewhere in the immeasurably great region of dark, Noren thought, were the rays of light from the nova—the Mother Star—traveling at inconceivable speed but not yet close to him. He would die before they came close; soon after their arrival, his people might all be dead. If there was no scientific breakthrough…

Had other human races perished also? Abruptly, as he looked out into the depths, new horror assailed him; he questioned in a different way from before. Those blazing suns… uncounted billions, he had been told, in the whole universe… why did some become novas? He had heard the facts in terms of astrophysics; he knew what triggered the change physically—but that was not the answer he sought now. Why did such facts exist? Why should a star consume its worlds, its people, exiling the escapees to an alien land where the attempt to survive might be futile? For that matter, why did either stars or people come into being at all?

For the first time since learning the truth about the Mother Star, it occurred to Noren to ask not
how
things happened, but
why
.

His mind could not cope with such questions. Yet it had never failed him in the past! He’d relied on it to reason things out, to find meanings… . Maybe there were no meanings. Or maybe no effort of his mind was valid. He had broken away from the world; he was drifting, falling, into a black starlit cosmos he could not comprehend. There was nothing solid or concrete to hold to. In the grip of panic, Noren lost touch with the starship itself. A remote part of him knew that if he could clutch the safety tether, he could pull himself back; at least, he should shut out the view that was so unnerving.

But this time his hand would not obey his will. This time he was truly paralyzed and could not turn the knob to remove the stars from his sight. He could not even close his eyes. He remained staring, no longer in command of either his body or his thoughts, while his panic overmastered him.

Chapter Five

It was Brek who got him back into the shuttlecraft, Brek who activated the automatic control sequence that took them down to solid, but hitherto unexplored, ground. Noren had no memory of it afterward. He was told that Brek had contacted the City by radiophone and had been advised to return at once without cargo.

The ship landed according to plan at the site of the new outpost, to which a guide-beacon had been transported by aircar, since descent to the city by daylight was undesirable and Brek was not judged competent to reset the automatic pilot in any case. A vague impression of gray rolling mossland under an even grayer sky was all Noren recalled of his first steps beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. Yet the sky seemed studded with flaming suns. Later, in the night, he was not sure whether this had been dream or hallucination; but he found his mind clear enough to know the circumstances and feel the shame.

Waking in the dark to the dry oppressive heat of the planet’s natural climate, he at first thought himself back in the village; but there were no buildings. He lay on a blanket spread upon moss, and overhead was open sky. Open sky! Noren turned onto his stomach and buried his head in his arms, for he knew that if the clouds should disperse he could not bear even a glimpse of starlight. He remained still, paralyzed once more, conscious that men slept nearby and that he did not want to be seen by them. After a while he became aware that his face was wet with tears.

He had not experienced failure before, at least not of a kind caused by any personal inadequacy, and certainly not in a venture that affected the welfare of others. Tears stung and sobs wracked him, though he made no sound. The trip useless… precious hours of the beacon’s functioning wasted… some later crew might well he endangered by his loss of nerve, and completion of the tower might prove impossible. He could not live with that knowledge! He could not face those who had trusted him. He could not face anyone, least of all Brek, who had witnessed his weakness. But it was worse than that. He could not face the world itself. Fear swept through him again as he saw that to him, the world was not the same place as it had been; it still seemed unreal, without meaning, like some of the ancient films he’d been shown that bore no relationship to anything he could interpret. This had nothing to do with space flight, Noren realized. Space had merely opened his eyes to a less substantial view of reality.

He had thought he could not rise and move and speak, but when morning came he found otherwise. It proved possible to go through the motions. An image came into his mind: a creature he’d heard of, a tiny mother-world creature that had over a hundred legs… he’d wondered how it knew which to move next. Had it stopped to ponder the matter it couldn’t have known, yet it walked. He too would proceed without pondering. To do so was better than to reveal that what had happened to him was more than a temporary spell of panic; in any case, he could scarcely lie there and let people assume he was sick. He got up, washed his face in the basin that stood on a stone table at the edge of camp, and joined the group clustered around the breakfast fire, marveling that his muscles seemed to function just as they always had. Men greeted him cordially, with studied matter-of-factness; and when he opened his mouth to reply, words came out, despite his conviction that he would find himself mute.

The camp’s leaders wanted him to go back to the City at once by aircar. Noren flatly refused. “I’m all right,” he maintained, feeling inside that he was not all right, that very probably he would never be, but determined to let no one suspect it.

They frowned and shook their heads, but Noren was so insistent—and outwardly so composed—that they agreed to let Stefred decide. He shrank from talking to Stefred even by radiophone, but since he was gently informed that if he didn’t, he would be sent back without his consent, there was little choice. They went away and allowed him to make the call in private.

“Don’t you want to come for a day or two, at least?” Stefred asked. “You can go out again with the next supply car—”

“No,” Noren declared. It was not merely that he wasn’t willing to admit any need to consult a psychiatrist, for he was sure that once he met Stefred face to face and confessed the whole truth, as he would feel compelled to do, he would not be allowed to go out again. He would not be trusted to do anything. And furthermore, he could not endure the thought of confronting Talyra.

“I won’t force you, Noren,” Stefred said slowly. “If you need help, I’m here—we’re all here, and we’ll stand by you. But quite possibly this is something you have to resolve alone. Perhaps work at the outpost is the best thing for you right now.” There was a long pause, so long that Noren wondered whether the radiophone was malfunctioning. Finally Stefred’s voice continued, “There’s a good deal I could say, but I don’t think you’re ready to understand it. Just remember what I told you the other night.”

Noren was too numb to be angry, and though his impulse was toward rage when he recalled their talk in the observation lounge, he was too honest not to know that it was mostly rage against himself. There had been plain suspicion of his vulnerability to panic. Stefred had been troubled from the beginning, and had offered warnings that he, Noren, had chosen to ignore. Still, it was unlike Stefred to take an “I told you so” attitude.

Avoiding Brek, Noren went to the camp leaders and asked for work. There was plenty to be done. The camp was in wilderness, and not all the allocated equipment had yet arrived. Little would be provided in any case; the occupants would live under conditions of extreme difficulty, much as the first-generation villagers had, but with the added hardships of the Founders. They would receive nothing but what was necessary to sustain life.

The first priority was construction of a foundation for the tower. It was being built of stone and mortar without the aid of either machines or metal tools. The hardiest men among the Scholars had arrived some days earlier to start it, but the job was not finished, and Noren’s strong back was welcomed. He in turn welcomed heavy physical labor that left him no time to think.