Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (31 page)

“No. That was your strength, Noren. That was why I believed that if the worst happened, in the end you’d come through.”

“But I didn’t,” Noren said miserably. “I failed you, and if it hadn’t been for the crash, I’d have done even worse damage.”

There was a short silence; Stefred, on the verge of a reply, seemed to think better of it. Steeling himself to the inevitable, Noren asked, “What’s to become of me now? I can’t ever make amends—”

“For the loss of the aircar? No, all you can do is work toward a time when the building of more aircars will become possible.”

A gesture, reflected Noren—yet a more positive one than his attempted martyrdom, which would not have accomplished its purpose either. Stefred had undoubtedly realized that no act of his could endanger the system; otherwise he’d have taken steps to confine him sooner. “Will I be isolated from the Technicians?” he inquired, wondering whether the chance of their believing a renegade would be thought great enough to matter.

“Certainly not, not unless you choose now to formally retract your recantation. And I don’t think that can solve your problem.”

“Can anything?”

“It depends on how much courage you have.”

Bending his head, Noren mumbled, “Not as much as you gave me credit for; we’ve proved
that
, anyway.”

“Really?” Levelly, as if control of his own feelings required effort, Stefred said, “The day you disappeared, Grenald spoke to me with more self-reproach than I have ever heard from anyone. He hadn’t known you had cause to take his accusation seriously; he thought it so preposterous that you’d recognize it for what it was: a calculated challenge to your pride.”

Astonished, Noren looked up as Stefred continued, “This may surprise you, but I think you’ve displayed a good deal of courage all the way along. I think you have enough to go on with what’s been started. It will mean confronting some things that frighten you, but you’ve never wanted to escape that.”

“Yes, I have,” protested Noren shamefacedly. “I volunteered for another space flight, but when they turned me down I was—relieved. And besides, the space work is finished. We can hardly send the shuttle out again just on my account.”

“Of course not. That isn’t what I’m talking about.”

Noren’s skin prickled as he ventured, “There is one way, isn’t there? A—a dream—” He found himself shaking, though he kept the tremor from his voice. “You could make it like that last one, without letting me share the recorder’s thoughts.”

“I could,” Stefred agreed, “but I’m not sure it would be wise.”

“You were lying, then. You don’t think I’d be equal to it.”

“I think you would be. As a matter of fact, you’d probably find it an anticlimax; you’d feel worse than ever about having once let space bother you. Controlled dreaming is a very useful technique, Noren, but it’s not a substitute for life, and in real life one can’t go back. One must come to terms with the past without reliving it.”

“You mean I’ve got to learn to trust myself… without proof.”

“Yourself—and other things.” Stefred smiled. “Since you’re perceptive enough to see that, you don’t need my help. Sometimes psychiatrists do use dreams as therapy, but in your case no therapy is called for. You’re not mentally ill and you never have been. You simply have a mind daring enough to explore questions many people never face up to.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone else being panicked by them?” Noren inquired grimly.

“If I say no,” Stefred observed slowly, “you’ll have the satisfaction of considering yourself a martyr to a unique concern for ultimate truth; and if I say yes, you may find comfort in the thought that you are not alone. Which way do you want it?”

“I want the facts, just as I always have,” Noren asserted, caught off balance. “Are you asking whether I’d rather have you lie?”

“I’m suggesting that you think the situation through a little more objectively, Noren. Do you really suppose you’re the only one of us to whom such questions have occurred?”

With startled chagrin, Noren read the facts from Stefred’s face. “I can’t be,” he admitted in a low voice. “You knew; you must have been tormented by them yourself! Oh, Stefred, how could I have been so weak as to be thrown by it, and then to—to feel that the martyrdom of a public relapse would absolve me?”

“Think deeper,” said Stefred relentlessly. “You couldn’t control your feelings; to reproach yourself for them now is self-abasement. That’s no solution either, and it doesn’t become you, Noren.”

After a long pause, Noren declared, “You’re telling me that panic isn’t uncommon. I was justifiably afraid, and trying to cover it up was false pride.”

Nodding, Stefred agreed, “The questions you framed are unanswerable, and to be terrified by that is a sign not of weakness but of strength. A weak person wouldn’t have opened his mind to such terror. It hit you young, and hard, under circumstances in which you had nothing to hold to—that’s the only difference between your experience and the one most Scholars eventually undergo.”

“But then why—”

“Why didn’t I enlighten you earlier? I couldn’t have, Noren. It wouldn’t have done any good; in this particular adventure one has to proceed at one’s own risk, at one’s own pace.”

A trace of uncontrollable fear brushed Noren’s mind again as he grasped what he was being asked to confront. “Questions that have no answers… Stefred, I don’t see how I can ever face that! Before this happened—well, it was hard not knowing all I wanted to know, but I expected to learn it all in time; at least I thought the answers existed
somewhere
—”

“They do,” Stefred said gently. “The fact that neither you nor any other human being can obtain all the answers doesn’t mean they don’t exist, any more than the fact that we can’t see all the stars in the universe means those stars aren’t there.”

“And someday I’ll just get used to being condemned to ignorance?” Noren demanded bitterly.

“Yes, one way or another. The easy way is to stop searching.”

“I can’t,” retorted Noren with growing anger. “I—well, I still care about truth; I always have, and I’m not going to change.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Stefred dryly. “For a while the reports I was getting from the outpost had me worried.”

Noren flushed, knowing he should have spotted the trap before falling into it. “We know more than the people of the mother world once did,” he mused, “yet if they’d just quit— Did they wonder about the sorts of things I do, too?” Even as he spoke, he realized that it was a foolish question. Of course they had. They must have, if they’d been intelligent enough to discover as much knowledge as they’d accumulated.

“The wisest had thoughts worth preserving about those things,” Stefred told him, “thoughts you can study if you query the computers properly.” Regretfully he admitted, “If I’d known that you visited the computers the day of the conference, I would not have let you go away unsatisfied. I was negligent there, Noren.”

“You had enough to worry about that day without keeping track of me,” Noren said. “Besides, the computers weren’t telling me anything.”

“That was because they are programmed to teach lessons that can’t be learned in one short session,” replied Stefred, “lessons that in your case proved more painful than was intended.” He went on to explain, “The Founders knew that young Scholars would think of the computer complex as the repository of all truth, and must sooner or later be made aware of the distinction between
truth
and
fact
. They also knew that since the beginning of time the key to advancement of human knowledge has lain not in discovering the right answers, but in discovering the right questions to ask. So in certain areas of inquiry—areas that a person doesn’t explore until he is mature enough to grasp such ideas—they deliberately refrained from programming leading responses. They didn’t expect any Scholar to leave the City, of course; and given time, you would have persisted until you caught on.”

“Is that what you meant when you said I’d have access to a kind of knowledge that would help?”

“No,” Stefred declared. “I wasn’t referring to the computers then. You won’t understand what I meant until you attain such knowledge for yourself.”

*
 
*
 
*

Noren went to the computer room; he sat at a console and calmly, carefully, phrased his questions: not
WHAT IS LIFE’S MEANING?
but
WHAT HAVE PEOPLE THOUGHT ABOUT LIFE’S MEANING?
. . . NOT
WHY WERE THE SIX WORLDS DESTROYED?
but
TO WHAT CAUSE DID PEOPLE OF THE PAST ATTRIBUTE UNPREVENTABLE DESTRUCTION?
He stayed there until long past the hour of Orison, and by then he realized that the study of what had been written on these subjects would absorb not mere days, but years. Yet he had seen enough to know certain things.

He knew that others had suffered as he had, and that there was no way to escape it except by giving up the search.

He knew that there were two paths one could follow if one were willing to give up: one could decide it was all too futile to bother with, or one could fool oneself into thinking that one had already found the answers. Some people had done that. Some, in fact, had felt such a great need to convince themselves of what they’d found that whenever anybody appeared whose answers were different, they’d fought over it. If they’d been powerful men with many followers, the fights had, at times, turned into wars.

But Noren also knew that there’d been some who had not given up. They had recognized mysteries that they could not resolve and had borne it; they’d gone on gathering the bits and pieces of truth available, in full knowledge that they would fail to assemble the whole pattern.

And he knew that these people had been sustained only by faith.

Their faith hadn’t always been called a religion. Sometimes it had; but many, particularly the later ones, had simply trusted that there was a pattern without using any symbols for the elements beyond their grasp. For the most part, such people had not been in a predicament as difficult as the Scholars’. Those facing adversity had tended to find symbols indispensable.

Noren thought back to the dreams in which he had become the First Scholar, remembering the painful yet triumphant time while he lay dying. For years the First Scholar had sought symbols; he had, Noren realized abruptly, sought them not only for his people’s comfort but for his own.
WHAT WAS THE FIRST SCHOLAR’S PERSONAL RELIGION?
he keyed in, perplexed.

THE FIRST SCHOLAR WROTE NOTHING ABOUT THAT
,
responded the computer.
IT IS BEST UNDERSTOOD FROM HIS RECORDED MEMORIES
.

But aside from the idea for the Prophecy, the recordings had contained nothing of this, at least not unless one counted the First Scholar’s sureness that a way for humankind to survive permanently would be found. Noren perceived that this surety, which had been so puzzling in the light of his scientific knowledge, must indeed be counted as faith—yet that wasn’t enough. If questions about
why
instead of
how
occurred to all wise and courageous people, they must certainly have occurred to the First Scholar. No such questions had troubled him during the dreams.

He returned to Stefred. “The dreams I had before my recantation were edited,” he declared, “to conceal the First Scholar’s plan for choosing successors. Later I experienced them in a more complete form. Was that edited, too? Is there a third version?”

“Yes,” Stefred admitted, “for those who request it; and it’s a more constructive thing to go through than another dream of space would be. But if I were you, Noren, I’d wait a while. Wait till you understand what happened to you more thoroughly, because something quite similar will happen in those dreams.”

“You mean it happened to
him
?” There had been a gap of many years in the dreams, Noren recalled, and he had never been told exactly what the First Scholar had undergone during the interim.

“I’ve said before that his mind was very like yours,” Stefred replied simply, “and after all, he had witnessed the destruction of the worlds he knew.”

“But he went on to create the Prophecy… and it—it meant more to him than a way to give people hope. It symbolized his whole attitude toward the universe! If anyone had faith in the future, he had.”

“Did you suppose he was born with it? Some people are—people like Talyra, for instance—and their faith is entirely valid. Those who are born to question must find it through experience.”

Noren swallowed. “Is there any chance, do you think, that I—” He broke off, embarrassed by the strange, compassionate look Stefred gave him.
There isn’t
, he thought,
and he doesn’t want to hurt me
. “Only you can be the judge of that,” Stefred answered, and Noren left without asking whether one could live without faith indefinitely.

He found Brek waiting for him in their old room, and it was apparent that he wanted to talk. “I—I messed things up pretty thoroughly,” Noren said after an awkward silence, knowing that any attempt at specific apology would be too weak. “I don’t expect you to understand—”

“It’s not that,” Brek said quickly. “We’ve both done things we’re sorry for, and they’re past. Only there’s something else.” He paced nervously from one side of the compartment to the other. “I wish we could go back to sharing the same ideas, but—well, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, something
you
won’t understand, and that you’ll probably despise me for. I can’t help it. In this I’ve got to make my own decision.”