Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains (9 page)

There were so many details he could not tell, so many areas in which there could be no communication between them. She must not ask about his work; she must not question his absence if for hours or days she did not see him; though she might speculate about the hidden mysteries, she must not do so aloud. That was the Inner City’s way, he explained. Technicians did not discuss such things. They didn’t seek information about the duties of friends who were assigned jobs inside the Hall of Scholars, or about why some were given such jobs far oftener than others. Neither did they discuss each other’s past lives.

“For instance,” he cautioned, “you must never describe my recantation to anyone; you mustn’t even mention that you saw it. What a heretic has been through is best forgotten.”

“I’m glad,” she said simply. “I want to forget. I know what you had to do was necessary, and—and you were awfully brave… yet you suffered for something you couldn’t help! I couldn’t believe you deserved to suffer just for having been mistaken; that’s haunted me so long.”

“It’s over. It needn’t haunt you any more, darling.”

“Nothing will, now that I’m here with you. The spirit of the Mother Star has blessed us both.”

They kissed again, and for a few minutes he felt carefree, lighthearted, as if he too need no longer be haunted by anything. But after he’d left her with the head midwife, who was to find her lodging space and introduce her to the other women with whom she would work, Noren found that his perplexity had grown. If Talyra’s belief in the Prophecy and the Mother Star was genuine—if she was not, as he’d always assumed, merely sticking by what she’d been taught—then on what grounds was she basing that belief? He himself had been shown the facts, and knew that she wasn’t deceived; at least she wasn’t unless the Scholars were also deceived about the Prophecy’s eventual fulfillment. It was easy to forget that she had never been given any proof. Without proof, how could anyone be deeply convinced?

*
 
*
 
*

Two things you must go through
, Stefred had warned: two trying experiences before the mysterious, suddenly-called meeting that evening, and as to the nature of the second, Noren had been given no clue. An hour remained before the time appointed for him to report back to Stefred’s office.

He found Brek still in the computer room. “It’s—tremendous,” Brek said, his eyes shining. “I never conceived of a setup like this, not even after the dreams. You can ask
anything
—”

“The trick is in learning what to ask,” said Noren. He entered Brek’s console booth and sat down next to him, preparing to key in a question; there was a principle of chemistry he wanted to verify.

“I know; I’ve been experimenting,” Brek agreed. “Most of the time I couldn’t understand half of what showed up on the screen. And once I had to press
INTERRUPT
just to get a chance to rephrase.”

“What had you requested?”

Grinning sheepishly, Brek admitted, “I’d asked for a full description of the mother world’s history.”

Noren smiled, knowing that the response to such an inquiry would have gone on for days if uninterrupted. He was past the stage of unrestrained eagerness himself. Yet communication with the computers never lost its fascination for him; study discs were marvels, but the thought of direct access to an infallible repository of all truth thrilled him in a way that nothing else could match.

In theory, he knew, it would be possible for all Scholars to have computer access from their own rooms; aboard the starships, study desks’ screens had indeed functioned as full consoles. But the metal wire of the connecting cables had been diverted by the Founders to more essential uses. Though unlike the computers themselves, the remote screens had been adapted to run on solar-charged batteries, they could not do anything more than display the contents of discs. Only those in the computer room were fully functional.

The computer complex consisted of the separate computers that had served the ships of the fleet, now located adjacent to each other and interlinked. The Founders had planned carefully, distributing the knowledge that had come from the Six Worlds among the various ships in such a way that the most vital portions had backup, and had reprogrammed the system upon assembly to operate as a unified whole. It was self-monitoring and, with regard to its programs, self-maintaining—fully protected against inadvertent erasure of data—and no accident short of power failure could damage it. Such a failure would, of course, make it impossible to access any of the data, and if prolonged would cause all storage media to deteriorate in the planet’s hot, corrosive atmosphere. For that reason as well as for the preservation of life-support, maintenance of not only of the computer complex but of the power plant on which it depended was, in the Scholars’ eyes, a task of the highest and most sacred priority.

To be sure, under the High Law all machines were sacred, as was metal itself. Villagers viewed them with reverence and awe, believing them to be of supernatural origin, for they had been told—quite truthfully—that they came from the Mother Star. Noren had doubted this; in the days of his heresy he had held the very unorthodox opinion that machines were made by Technicians and Scholars. To his great surprise, he had found that he was mistaken. Machines were irreplaceable, except insofar as worn parts could be recycled, a process carried out under the computers’ control. It was not just that there was no more metal for making parts; a few, in fact, could be made out of plastics derived from the planet’s native vegetation. The problem was more complicated than that. There was also a lack of the machines needed to fabricate new parts. The Founders had brought what equipment they could, but they’d been unable to transport enough to reproduce the industrial facilities of the Six Worlds.

Though villagers stood in awe of machines, they assumed that the Technicians—in their eyes superior beings—must have no such feeling, but this was not so. Villagers did not handle machines at all; Technicians, who bore responsibility for them, were reared to view the mishandling of a machine as a sacrilege. To damage a machine beyond repair was a mortal sin, punishable by deprivation of Technician status. This provision of the High Law was entirely just; the loss of a machine could cause serious harm to generations yet unborn; enough instances of damage would bring about the extinction of humankind. Yet Noren had been startled by the diffidence with which Brek had first approached a computer console. “Are you sure it’s fitting for me to touch it without more instruction?” Brek had asked incredulously.

“Fitting? You’re a
Scholar
, Brek.” Noren had frowned; he too considered the computers sacred, in the sense that all knowledge was sacred to him; but he had never doubted his own worthiness to use them.

“But the Law is more binding than ever now that I know its justifications,” Brek had protested.

“The Law… oh, you mean the part about mishandling. Yes, of course, it is; but you don’t need a High Law any more—none of us do. We’d be careful anyway, wouldn’t we? Besides, you can’t hurt a console by pushing keys, and the computers themselves are sealed behind that partition.”

With that assurance, Brek had lost his anxiety; but Noren saw that in some ways new training might be harder for a Technician than for a villager. He himself had never hesitated to touch whatever he found in the laboratories.

Now, turning to him, Brek said, “I still can scarcely believe I can come here whenever I want without supervision.”

“We’re not supervised at all,” Noren told him. “We were put through a lot to prove ourselves trustworthy, but now that we have proven it, we’re trusted.”

“In everything? What happens if we break the rules?”

“There aren’t any rules. Well, there are, I suppose, but they’re called policies, and they’re not arbitrarily imposed—they’re simply principles no Scholar would violate.” He paused, trying to think of a concrete example. “About ten weeks ago, before your arrest, you were living in the Outer City, I suppose. Was there any water shortage?”

“Water shortage? Of course not; there’s always plenty of water.”

“There is when the purification plant works. When it doesn’t, like the week I’m talking about, most of the pipes to the Inner City are shut off. People too old to have children drink unpurified water, and the rest of us ration ourselves so that there’ll be no interruption of the Outer City or village supply. No one checks up, but would you have drunk enough to keep yourself from being thirsty?”

“I see what you mean,” Brek mused. “But Noren, weren’t you scared? Knowing what could happen if the breakdown lasted?”

“We were all terrified,” Noren admitted, without going into detail about what his feelings had been before he’d heard that breakdowns were periodic occurrences to which the older Scholars, who had seen many repaired, were well inured. “It’s the same way with everyday things,” he continued. “All goods on this planet are in short supply—at least processed ones are, since there are so few machines for manufacturing them—so we in the Inner City restrict ourselves to the barest minimum. Only what’s absolutely essential is bought from the Outer City merchants. As heretics we arrive with nothing, not the smallest token of our former lives, and we never acquire anything, Brek. We have no personal belongings but the clothes we wear.”

It was an unnatural way to live, and not, according to what he’d been told of the Six Worlds, one that fostered the progress of a society. But the Inner City wasn’t a society; it was an association of people who, for one reason or another, had voluntarily given up normal life to pursue an extraordinary goal. Most were dedicated in a religious sense. Moreover, having grown up with the idea that Scholars belonged to a supreme and privileged caste, most could not have felt comfortable had no austerities been practiced. Noren had found that Inner City privations were not merely tolerable, but welcome.

Outside, there was no privation except what the planet itself imposed. The villagers and Outer City Technicians traded freely in what goods the existing machines could turn out, as well as in the few that could be handmade from the world’s limited resources. There were not many such, since no trees grew and wood was unknown—there wasn’t even any fuel, other than tallow and dried moss. So glass had to come from the Outer City’s domes, as did cloth, paper produced from rags, and other essential commodities. Villagers had plenty of money to purchase these things; the Technicians paid them well in plastic coinage for food. Food was abundant, although, Noren had been told, it was by his forebears’ standards even more monotonous than furnishings. The hybrid grain once developed to meet the nutritional needs of the overpopulated mother world was the sole crop, aside from an herb tea, and it was supplemented only by the flesh and eggs of caged fowl. Work-beasts were inedible, having been adapted through controlled mutations to a diet of native fodder.

“The First Scholar often went hungry,” reflected Brek, recalling the dreams. “Do we?”

“We would if the harvests were small, as they were in the Founders’ time. There’s no need nowadays. On Founding Day, though, it’s traditional to fast in remembrance.” Noren thought of how strange that had seemed to him. In the village where he’d grown up, Founding Day had been a time of feasting.

“All this… assuming hardships to avoid imposing them on the villagers and Technicians… is it what was meant by ‘discipline’ in the sentencing?” Brek asked.

“In a way. But for those of us who choose to study, the real challenge is mental discipline—learning to use our minds efficiently.”

“I don’t see,” Brek admitted, “how I’m ever to absorb all I’ll need to know to become a nuclear physicist, or a scientist of any kind, for that matter. The computers told me that on the Six Worlds people my age had been studying for years and still weren’t ready to specialize.”

“That was the custom, one started long before anything was known about faster methods. But now it’s possible to catch up in a hurry.”

Noren went on to explain how it worked. One learned mental discipline through a game played with the computers, a game that demanded logic and fast thinking. “It almost threw me at first,” he confessed, “because in the village school I’d never had to think; all we did beyond learning our letters from the Book of the Prophecy was to memorize parts of the High Law, figure a little, and listen to the teacher talk. The computer measures your capacity the first day and holds you to it. You have to score at your level or admit defeat—you aren’t given any other type of training, except in non-scientific work, until you’ve passed that hurdle.”

It had been a harsh lesson, but not one Noren had minded. Having based his whole defense during his trial and inquisition on the idea that he was not the Scholars’ inferior, his pride hadn’t let him quit. Nobody had forced him. He had simply been told that before he could work with tutors or receive study discs he must earn an acceptable score in the game. When first informed that the game was merely a matter of pushing the proper buttons, he had thought it would be ridiculously simple, and indeed, the initial session had been great fun. What was so hard about watching colored lights and following the instructions on a screen?

That had been before the lights multiplied, the instructions grew complex, and the pace increased to the point where he was given only a few seconds to react.

Intense concentration had never been required of him before and he’d been prone to daydream as a defense against the dullness of village activities. In the game one could not afford to let one’s mind wander. Noren had been appalled by the lowness of his scores and yet, during the first week or so, he’d been unable to improve them—he would freeze, find himself worrying over the unexpected failures, and the seconds allotted for response would be gone. The computer was infinitely patient; it never got tired of presenting comparable, although somewhat altered, instructions, and in fact would not proceed to the next degree of complexity until the current one had been mastered. Noren himself got exhausted; several times he kept at it all night. Eventually, after passing from despair through anger and grim determination, he’d learned to focus on the task and had begun to make progress. Thereafter, the game was exhilarating.