Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (19 page)

“They went to war over the
symbols?”
Noren burst out incredulously. He had learned enough about the mother world to know what war was, and he could understand why it had occurred when dictatorships had tried to rule by force. But over religion…

“Think of how the people among whom you grew up felt about heresy,” the man suggested, “and then imagine them deciding that all the citizens of the next village were heretics. Or picture a case where quite a few of them agreed with some new interpretation of the Prophecy, and were condemned as a group, including their families—”

A sharp cry interrupted him. On the opposite side of the bonfire, one of the older men had collapsed.

*
 
*
 
*

It was Derin, the camp’s Chief Mason. A heart attack, the doctors called it, an attack brought on by the exertion of the contest, in which he had won third place. No one could have predicted it, for he’d been pronounced fit upon examination in the City; still, because of his age, his friends had tried to persuade him to be content with designing the structure. Derin had laughed at them. Stonework was his pride, and he had won setting contests before. Unlike most Scholars, he had lived in his village until middle life, and had been a highly respected craftsman. City confinement had been a real sacrifice for him, though his natural engineering talent had been put to good use in the drawing of plans for the building to be done during the Transition Period.

People clustered around. “It is good construction,” Derin whispered. “The stone will endure—”

“The stone will endure,” his friends agreed. Two or three of them knelt beside him, clasping his hands. There was nothing the doctors could do. On the Six Worlds, physicians had been able to replace failing hearts, but on this one the equipment for such surgery was unavailable. Even therapeutic drugs were lacking. As in so many other ways, things had moved backward.

Noren watched in horror as Derin, half-conscious, went on, lapsing into the viewpoint of his youth. “My great-grandfather built the arch of the meeting hall; his name’s over it still. This will stand as long; it will stand until the Star appears, and the Cities rise to replace it.”

“It will stand far longer,” people assured him. “It is part of a City; the Prophecy’s fulfillment has begun.”

“Yes… yes, I forget…” He sighed, and Noren saw from his face that he was still in pain, though he was trying to conceal it. “In the village we thought Scholars were immortal. We thought they knew all the answers. I… I think I wish it were true.”

“The answers exist, Derin.”

Although the City was contacted by radiophone, all knew that return could not save Derin even if he lived until an aircar came. The outpost’s chief brought a blue robe, which he laid over Derin’s helpless form. “May the spirit of the Star abide with you,” he said gently, as one of the doctors began induction of hypnotic anesthesia.

Abide with him? thought Noren, aghast. Abide with him
where?
The man knew he was dying, and there were no non-Scholars present; surely this was not a time for pretense.

But the words seemed a solace, somehow, for when Derin closed his eyes he was smiling.

In the morning, when the aircar arrived and everyone gathered for the formal ritual of sending the body to the City, it took all Noren’s self-control to attend. He had been to such ceremonies before, not only his mother’s but those held for other people of his village—but that had been before he knew what was done with bodies. The idea of one’s mortal remains being sent to the mysterious City, where they were given into the custody of revered High Priests, was accepted by villagers as entirely fitting. Even Technicians viewed it so; they were unaware of the necessity for recycling all chemical elements and had no information about the converters that had once been standard equipment aboard the starfleet. Yet to Noren the use of corpses for the same purpose as other human wastes, however well disguised, did not seem dignified. And the recitation of words designed to mask deception ought not, certainly, to be practiced among Scholars who knew the facts.

“Now to the future we commit him, our beloved friend, knowing that in death he will continue to serve the hidden end he served in life, as shall we all, being eternally heirs to that which has been promised us through the spirit of the Mother Star… .”
Staring dizzily at Derin’s body, wrapped in its blue robe as a villager’s would be wrapped in white, Noren feared that he was going to be sick before the ceremony concluded. How could these men listen to such words? Many of them had been close to Derin, had loved him!

Yet the words went on.
“For as this spirit abides with us, so shall it with him; it will be made manifest in ways beyond our vision… .”
That, Noren perceived, did not appear to fit the case. That kind of statement was applicable less to one’s body than to one’s mind. He frowned, puzzled; all the symbolism of public ritual was supposed to be translatable by the enlightened. He must be overlooking something.

As a child, when he had asked what happened to people’s minds when they died, he had received the usual reply. “That is a mystery,” his mother had said serenely. “People cannot understand such things as that; only the Scholars know them.” It was a matter in the same category as how Machines worked, why soil must be quickened before crops would grow, and by what means the Prophecy had been transmitted from an invisible star to the hand of whoever had first written it down. About these other things he’d gone on wondering, and his curiosity had in due course been satisfied; to the first he had not given much attention—not, that is, until recently.

The Scholars around him did not seem perplexed. What if he were to ask someone what those words were meant to signify? His pride, of course, was too great for that, since it would mean confessing that the issue troubled him; yet a Scholar would reply honestly… .
“He is forever of humankind, holding a share in human destiny; his place is assured among those who lived before him and those who will come after, those by whom the Star is seen and their children’s children’s children, even unto infinite and unending time… .”
That was all right for villagers… or was it? Would that particular bit of poetry contribute to humankind’s permanent survival, or had the High Priests, in this at least, exceeded their bounds?

The rites ended, the aircar rose and hovered silently over the circle of people whose faces were still turned devoutly upward toward the sky, the original source of human knowledge and the domain of all secrets. He had seen that sky more clearly than most, Noren thought; he could still see fierce blazing stars beyond the soft blanket of life-sustaining air, which from above was not blue, but gray and foul-looking. So had the Founders, however. How had they endured such a view? Had they closed their eyes to the question of meaning, of whether there was any logic at all to life, to death, to the evolution and destruction of worlds?

All his life Noren had questioned, but never so deeply as this; he had never encountered problems that seemed to make less and less sense as he continued to ponder them. He had assumed that the City held all the answers. And it did! he thought suddenly while he watched the aircar start toward it, ascending to cross the Tomorrow Mountains. It must! Realization struck him forcefully, bursting the bonds of his terror. Was not the computer complex the repository of all truth? In the City he was free to ask the computers anything he wished, and though he had not previously framed such queries as were now torturing him, there was no bar to his doing so. His fellow Scholars had perhaps done it long ago. Neither they nor the Founders could have closed their eyes completely; yet they could scarcely be at peace with themselves—and even, at times, laugh about things—unless they had information that he did not. To get the information, he had merely to go back, as he’d been advised.

But he could not go so soon. That would look as if he had decided to seek Stefred’s help; it would be an admission that he felt unfit to finish the job at the outpost. He was unwilling to concede anything of the sort, and not only because of what others would think, for he knew that without proving his capability he could not live with himself. He could never rely on himself again.

So in the weeks that followed, he went on working; he went on studying; he went on tutoring Brek; and though these pursuits gave him no pleasure, neither did he find them intolerable. From time to time he was struck with amazement at his ability to follow them while doubting their real significance, but for the most part, he kept doubt from his thoughts. He no longer let himself worry, nor did he have spells of unaccountable fear. Life in camp was simply neutral—gray, like the surrounding wilderness of unquickened land. He was suspended from the world. He had not yet returned from space. Yet in the depths of his mind he knew there would be a re-entry, a resumption of the search for truth; and for that he began to plan. The planning was a light in the grayness.

He had come to understand, Noren felt, what Stefred had meant when they’d talked over the radiophone. The reminder about their last discussion had referred not to the ignored warnings, but to the final part.
You will need more than courage
, Stefred had told him the night he left the City.
The kind of knowledge that will help is one you must find for yourself. It exists, and you will have access to it
. That was typical of Stefred’s subtle guidance. Though he couldn’t have known what would happen in space, Stefred might well have guessed that sooner or later certain questions would arise. He would not provide answers in advance. He would expect a person of intelligence to know where to look for the answers.

Eagerly, desperately, Noren planned his questions: the questions he would ask the computers when the opportunity came.

*
 
*
 
*

The final space flight was completed safely, with the shuttle bringing back the portion of starship that contained the weak and faltering beacon. Slowly the tower took shape, rising ever higher as level after level was added to it. The work was fantastically difficult, for without any materials with which to build scaffolding, the builders had to attach each section while standing on the one below, assisted only by ropes and lightweight plastic pulleys. Noren and the members of the space teams did the actual rejoining of the starship, but many Scholars helped get pieces into place, and one fell to his death from great height. There were several lesser accidents. Meanwhile, other men began the job of interior compartmentalization, which was to be far less extensive than in the City’s towers since relatively little of the limited plastic material could be transported.

Noren found it hard to work high above the ground, not because he feared falling, but because it reminded him of the way he had clung helplessly to the starship in space. He suspected that others had the same thought; during supper of the evening before the attachment of the tower’s top, Emet, one of the outpost administrators, sat down beside him. “I’m going for supplies tomorrow,” he said, “and we thought you might like to come along. There’s to be a conference in the City—”

“I have work to do,” Noren said stubbornly.

“You can be spared for a day. We heard this afternoon that a conference is being held to discuss some results of the experimentation. You and Brek are the only people here specializing in nuclear physics, and one of you should attend. You will learn by listening.”

Noren’s spirits lifted. This was the chance he’d been waiting for! What Emet was proposing might not be a mere excuse; they might really think it of some value for him to go. Obviously, the experiments had not yet been completed successfully, for if they had, it would have been announced and everyone would be jubilant. However, there could well be new data of importance. The thought didn’t excite him as it once would have, but he was elated for another cause: in the City he might have time to spare… enough time to consult the computers.

Since Derin’s death an aircar had been kept in camp at night, so that in an emergency it could set out for the City at dawn. This also made it possible for people to go after supplies, take care of other necessary business, and return before dark the same day. It was not safe to cross the mountains after dark; carrying irreplaceable equipment over them was risky enough in broad daylight. The outpost had been located where it was only because of the need to have it well separated from the City in case of future nuclear accident, yet at the same time within easy range of the aircars. This outweighed the inherent danger of flying back and forth across a tall ridge. Still, at times when vital metal things, such as components of the new power and water purification plants, were being brought, everybody was nervous lest there be a crash. Aircars were not hard to pilot, but they had been used almost exclusively at low altitudes, and the mountain country was hazardous.

It was also strange and forbidding, Noren thought, as he looked down on it the next morning. Little grew there, and many of the rocks were a garish yellow instead of gray or white like most stone of the lowlands. No one knew much about the mountains. They had not been explored except through occasional aerial surveys that had added nothing to the data obtained by the Founders from orbit, other than to verify that the mutant “savages” did exist there. Expeditions on foot were, of course, impossible, since not enough pure water could be carried.

Noren had never been in an aircar before. As a small boy he had once touched one that had come to his father’s farm, and ever since, he had longed to fly in one; now, like so many things, it had come to him too late. There was no thrill left. He had lost the capacity to feel. Emet looked at him worriedly, and Noren sensed that the camp’s leaders had hoped attendance at the conference might cheer him up. He knew they were still deeply concerned about him, although they concealed it just as he concealed his own feelings. Determined to forestall any suggestion that his free time in the City might well be spent in a visit to Stefred, Noren asked quickly, “Could I try the controls, Emet?”