Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (24 page)

“It was a vain hope,” Noren declared fiercely. “I wouldn’t quit if I thought I had any chance of helping matters; you know that! Years of study and research that can’t lead anywhere, though… that’s something else. It’s self-delusion, and it’s deluding others.” His throat tightened painfully, for still, inside, he ached at the thought of the scientific career that had once seemed so exciting. It was the only kind of life he’d ever wanted; it would always be, if it were not so meaningless… .

All knowledge was meaningless. That was what hurt the most. Knowledge was the one thing he had cared deeply about, and the discovery that its very roots weren’t secure was even more disillusioning than the insurmountable problem in the research. When Truth was not to be found, the harsh pronouncement of the physicists’ mathematics was reassuring, in a sense. Grim certainty was easier to bear than no certainty at all.

A few at a time, the Scholars who had worked with Grenald in the City began arriving at the outpost, where their main task—in addition to the hours of farm labor that were shortened when shared among more people—was the outfitting of the tower. They were subdued, in some cases obviously crushed, but that did not seem to alter their diligence in readying lab facilities for the future. The equipment brought by the aircars was even less adequate than that used in the City; men devoted endless days to designing schemes whereby portions of it could be made to serve purposes for which they had never been intended. A way to hook up two machines with a featherweight’s less wire than had previously been required was cause for major jubilation. These men were, Noren thought, like children playing a game where the winning of pebbles
mattered
.

Life in camp had settled into a routine, a mode of existence that to people of any other time and place would have seemed wholly incredible. The single tower, built of the most remarkable substance ever created by technology, rose out of gray wasteland, bordered, at a short distance, by a narrow ring of green. Inside the tower were sophisticated laboratories, a satellite computer linked by radio to the City, an air-conditioning system built to sustain life in interstellar space—but no plumbing. There were electronic devices but no electric lights; workers carried battery-powered lanterns from room to room because there was no wire for installing permanent fixtures. They sat on the floor because as yet no one had had time to weave wicker furniture. Around the tower were low primitive structures of uncut stone that housed not people, but a nuclear-powered water-processing plant and similar equipment. The people were still sleeping on the open ground.

To be sure, the ground was comfortable, since it was covered with thick, spongy moss; the cubbyholes most had chosen amid the undulating hillocks were private; and the weather was such that sleeping outside was preferable to confinement in a stuffy building. Everybody was too busy to bother with houses. Houses would have been superfluous. In the villages their value lay in permanence, but the camp’s inhabitants felt none. They could not make homes outside the City; they could rear no families. They had more hardships than villagers with fewer compensations. They cooked on open campfires, ate from unglazed pottery bowls, and washed infrequently because in the absence of rain, the watering of crops had priority. Yet looking at the tower, they envisioned the new city it might someday grace; and irrational though their optimism seemed, most looked with lifted hearts.

Noren did not enter the laboratories. Except when on duty at the power plant, he kept away from the tower itself, avoiding with bitter determination all contact with memories that had become too great a hurt. But at length, just before supper one evening, he was summoned inside. The Scholar Grenald had come and wanted to talk with him.

*
 
*
 
*

Grenald had looked old on the night of the decision to build the outpost; now he looked aged, older even than the doddering graybeard who had sold pots in the village of Noren’s birth. He had been ill for some weeks after the unhappy finish of his research, and it was common knowledge that he had little time to live. It had been his wish to see the place where his successors would carry on after him. The wish had been respected, though everyone feared that the strain of leaving the City might prove fatal.

He and Noren faced each other in a cool, cavernous compartment of the unfurnished tower, Noren wondering what Grenald would say. It would be disapproving, no doubt. There would be an attempt to talk him into continuing his studies. The disapproval was mutual, for he felt that Grenald, of all people, should have accepted the finality of the verdict, considering that it was the result of a theory he himself had proven. Still, the old man had been an inspiring tutor, and Noren hoped that it would be possible to reply honestly without revealing that in him, all inspiration was dead.
You are his heir
, Stefred had said… .

“You are not what I once thought,” Grenald declared, after appraising Noren for some time in silence. In a harsh voice, as if each word was forced out by effort, he added, “It’s been the worst blow of all, Noren, to learn that you are a coward.”

Despite his stunned surprise, Noren kept his face impassive. At last it had been stated openly. He had supposed that at the time of the space flight Grenald had been too absorbed by the research to pay much attention, but no doubt he’d been talking to people since.

Grenald seemed somewhat taken aback by Noren’s failure to respond with hot denial; he continued less brusquely, “I did not expect you to take that from me. I hoped simply to jar you; I assumed you yourself didn’t realize—”

“How could I not?” Noren mumbled.

“People deceive themselves sometimes.”

True, thought Noren, but Grenald was hardly the man to talk. “You once expected to die for your heresy,” Grenald went on, “and you were willing. Has a year so changed you that you now refuse a lesser risk? Perhaps it’s for the girl’s sake; I warned Stefred that you shouldn’t be allowed to become involved.”

“Wait a minute,” protested Noren, puzzled. “I’ve refused no risk! Maybe they didn’t tell you, but I volunteered—”

“For extra farm work, yes, but you will not be kept here long on that account. You and Talyra will return to the City years before any experimentation is resumed. If this outpost blows up you’ll remain quite safe.”

“You thought… that I’ve given up science because I was afraid of being killed in the
experiments?”
For the moment Noren was too astonished to be angry.

“What else can one think when a boy of your gifts suddenly decides not to use them for the world’s benefit?” demanded Grenald. “It’s not as if you disliked study; if that were so, I would not speak as I do, whatever I might think privately about your lack of responsibility. But I know you too well to believe you’d ever tire of it. I also know that if you were totally without faith in the power of science to save us, you would have opted for dissent long ago; you’ve never been one to hide your convictions. That’s why I’m sure you have fears you’re not aware of. Though you may say I’m not qualified to judge, since the physicists of my generation did not face the perils those of yours will, I cannot believe you’d consciously abandon research for that reason.”

Noren met the penetrating eyes that seemed too clear for the thin, wrinkled face before him. “You’re right,” he said stonily “I would not.”

He turned his back on Grenald and strode out of the dim tower into sunlight, heading for the fields automatically because there was nowhere else to go. Was that what everyone thought—that he’d quit from fear? he asked himself. Was that the real cause behind people’s growing scorn of him? Enraged though he was, he could scarcely blame them; a man who had panicked in space might logically be expected to panic at the idea of working under constant threat of thermonuclear disaster… .

Sickness came over him; he knelt by a freshly fertilized row of grain shoots, pretending to cultivate, and his face burned crimson although he was alone. Was it
true?
No… no, he could honestly say that such a fear had never so much as occurred to him. His preoccupation with death had not taken concrete form.

But cowardice was the root of the trouble, all the same. He had indeed abandoned both his responsibility and his most cherished personal convictions. He had held back from declaring the truth others refused to recognize: people were alone in a cold, vast universe that had capriciously destroyed their predecessors and would offer no better chance to their descendants. Yet if there was any meaning at all to life, then there was meaning to the dictates of conscience—and conscience decreed that men who were doomed anyway must die free. Since the Scholars’ supremacy could not save the human race, all must have equal voice in the affairs of the last era.

Grenald had been right, Noren thought, in spite of the way he’d misinterpreted things. He, Noren, was a coward; and though he’d known that, he had not faced the full extent of it. He had not realized what was keeping him from expressing his belief that the system should no longer stand. Now, as if the idea were entirely new, he guessed why he had hesitated. He guessed that all along he must have perceived the one real path of redemption.

But it was a path he could not take alone. He could not leave camp alone in an aircar he did not know how to fly. Noren frowned, considering it. Brek… Brek was a pilot, and in Brek he had already confided. Brek shared his view and would share the action it demanded.

That evening he ate no supper, for he had no appetite and he did not want to confront Talyra. She would not seek him at his private sleeping place, though she had made plain that she would welcome him to hers. Nor would others intrude on a night when he wasn’t on duty. Brek, however, would be concerned if he didn’t appear, and would search everywhere.

He was lying face down, as had been his habit since he’d come to fear the sky, when he heard Brek approach. Scrambling to his feet, he announced without preamble, “Refusing to become priests, or even scientists, isn’t enough, Brek. That’s passive—and if we don’t believe that people should be kept in ignorance, we’ve got to demonstrate how we feel.”

“I don’t see that there’s anything we can do,” Brek said.

“There’s one thing,” replied Noren grimly.

“Didn’t we decide that to abjure our recantation would be pointless? Our being isolated from non-Scholars wouldn’t abolish the system; we could do no good by it.”

“Brek,” Noren maintained, “it’s the principle that counts. We recanted on false grounds—we affirmed a Prophecy that can’t come true and a caste system that the Founders themselves would no longer consider justified! We ought to speak out to the Scholars whether we could do any good or not… but that’s not exactly what I have in mind.”

Brek studied him. “You wouldn’t speak to the Technicians!”

“Here? No, there are too few, and they wouldn’t listen; they’d just think we were crazy. But villagers will know us for City dwellers. They may not believe we’re Scholars since we’ll have to go unrobed, and we haven’t Technicians’ uniforms either; still, our clothes aren’t like any obtainable in the villages. Besides, we know enough to speak in a way no village heretic could. We’ll be heard.”

Brek sat down, pondering the idea. “Just what will be heard?” he asked slowly. “A proclamation that the end of the world is coming, that the Time of the Prophecy will be a day of doom instead of rejoicing? Somehow, Noren, that doesn’t strike me as very constructive.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s
true
.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Think, Brek!” Noren persisted. “The villagers and Technicians are being deceived. Does it make any difference whether the Scholars are maintaining the deception to stay in power, the way we once thought, or because they themselves are deluded?” He paced back and forth, treading the moss to a hard mat. “No!” he exclaimed in answer to his own question. “Truth is truth, and people have a
right
to it! I’ve always believed that truth is more important than anything else. If human survival could be made possible by hiding it from all but those who care enough to prove themselves, that would be tolerable, but since it can’t, everyone ought to know the facts. They ought to know that there’s no use in their being denied the tools and machines we’re safeguarding for posterity, that the villagers alive now could live better if the City were thrown open—”

“I’m not sure we know all the facts ourselves,” Brek interrupted.

“I studied more than you did,” Noren said. “I may not know all the details, but I know enough of the basic theory to be sure that creation of metal will always be contrary to it.”

“Everybody concedes that; if basic theory weren’t involved we’d have no need for a major breakthrough.”

“‘Breakthrough’ is just another word for ‘miracle.’ It’s what you call an event that doesn’t fit natural laws, that goes against logic.” Groping for a way to express the thing that had confused him since long before his disillusionment, Noren continued, “Actually, an idea like that underlies all the symbolism that’s grown up around the Mother Star. People expect something more of it than fulfillment of the Prophecy would give them even if every promise could be kept. You know they do, Brek—sometimes I think you do yourself.”

Brek didn’t look up. “I used to,” he admitted in a low voice.

Slowly, another thought took form in Noren’s mind. Brek, who had believed in the Mother Star, had been more cruelly deceived than heretics like himself, he saw; and as for people like Talyra… “For the machines and the knowledge to be sealed away to no good purpose is wrong,” he said soberly. “But there’s something even worse.” The words came with difficulty; he did not know how to describe what he was feeling. “Do you remember how in the dream, when the First Scholar proposed that his successors should become High Priests, his friends protested… and how he reassured them?”