The Doors Of The Universe (15 page)

“
Will
be? Generations from now, a way to synthesize metal will have been found! The technology can be maintained indefinitely then. The City will be thrown open, and more cities will be built. That’s your own plan; you’ve made us believe in it—”

“It is my hope,” said Noren in a low voice. “And I have planned for its fulfillment. But it is not sure.” With dismay he realized, as himself, that the First Scholar had never been sure! In the full version of the officially-preserved dreams, he had experienced these doubts and the despair to which they led; but there had been editing, the First Scholar’s own editing, still. What he was feeling now had been removed. This was not just discouragement, not just lack of proof that synthesization of metal could be achieved. It was rationally based pessimism akin to what he, Noren, had developed later, when there’d been many years of unsuccessful experiments. From the beginning the true odds against success had been concealed.

“Think,” he found himself saying as the First Scholar. “There are avenues our descendants can try; nuclear fusion may indeed prove the key to artificial production of metallic elements. But what if it’s inherently impossible to do it that way? No doubt metal can be synthesized, but a likelier route to that goal would be a unified field theory—a way to transform energy directly into matter. You know that as well as I do.”

“If nuclear fusion won’t work, the unified field theory will be developed. Past physicists have failed, yes, but they never gave it top priority, as our successors will.”

“There won’t be the facilities to develop a unified field theory, let alone test it,” stated Noren bluntly. “If that weren’t so, I’d have taken that route to begin with. But it would demand an accelerator larger than the City’s circumference, containing more metal than we’ve got tied up in the life-support equipment. You’d know that, too, if you weren’t afraid to think it through.”

“You’re treading on dangerous ground,” replied his companion, after a short pause. “You’re coming close to telling me that we have sacrificed peace of conscience in a futile cause, that those who died aboard the starships—your wife, for instance—were perhaps wiser than we were.”

“No! There is a chance for survival in what we’re doing; otherwise there’d be no chance at all.”

“That’s not good enough. Most of us couldn’t live under this much stress without full belief in the goal.”

“I know,” agreed Noren. “That’s why I’m approaching people individually with the alternate one.”

“Oh? I assumed it was because you have the decency not to discuss obscenities in front of the women.”

“I have approached some women,” he replied quietly. “This thing is not obscene. You are too blinded by tradition to be objective. The Six Worlds are gone, now. A taboo on human genetic research should never have existed even there—but here, it is as meaningless and fatal as our taboo against drinking unpurified water would have been on our native planet.”

“That may be true. Yet I tell you I’d risk extinction rather than experiment with the genes of my unborn children, and I don’t think you’ll get any different reaction from the others.”

“I know that, too,” Noren confessed. “You are the last person on my list, and it’s true that the rest reacted as you did. All except… one.”

He, the First Scholar, allowed the memory to surface, and as Noren he accepted it, letting the despair engulf him. Only one supporter… just one whose intelligence, whose natural faith in the future, overrode the conditioning of her rearing—and perhaps it was for his sake that she’d opened her mind. Why should she bear the whole burden, she for whom he cared more than anyone else in the whole City?

Dimly, in the part of himself that was Noren, he felt surprise. The First Scholar had not remarried in all the years he’d lived after the death of his wife. There were no thoughts of love in any of the other dreams. It was a thing many Scholars had found strange—no grief for his wife remained in the later recordings, and his own plans for the new culture encouraged the production of offspring. It was odd that he had not set an example, for in all other ways he had lived by the precepts of the High Law he’d designed. Now, the thoughts coming into his mind made plain that far more editing had been done in the official record than anyone had guessed.

But though they were thoughts of love, they were not happy thoughts. The recording, of course, had been made many years after the events with which it dealt. The mental discipline required to make such a recording, keeping later emotions below the surface, must have been tremendous. Noren perceived that the First Scholar had not wholly succeeded—the horror of his feelings was not all apprehension; there was recollection involved also. In the dream it was like precognition. Terror began to rise in him. He was doomed to proceed step by step toward disaster.

“You acknowledge, then, that we must continue as we’ve started?” asked his friend.

“Yes,” he agreed shortly. He had approached only the people he felt might be receptive to an even more drastic plan than the one he’d originally set in motion. They had rejected it. He’d foreseen that they would, but he had been obliged to try. There was no further step he could take to win open support. He must pursue the alternate course in secret, since he was unwilling to let future survival rest on the nuclear fusion work alone.

Yet there was risk. If anyone found out what he was doing, he would lose his place of leadership. His companions had accepted much from him, but for this, they would despise him and would vote him down. Even the original plan would then be doomed, for there were steps in it he had not confided to the others. There was the matter of his calculated martyrdom, which would ultimately be necessary in order to win the enduring allegiance both of the villagers and of the City’s future stewards. Without it, there would eventually be fighting. Those who told him no such system as he’d established could last without bloodshed were right; they did not guess that he knew this, and that he expected the blood to be his own. But it would not work unless he retained leadership until the time for it was ripe.

Was he to die for nothing in the end? He was willing to die, but not without the belief that future generations would live. Synthesization of metal would save them, but it was by no means the most promising way to do so. He’d realized that from the start, though he’d edited this realization from the thought recordings. The recordings weren’t for posterity alone. They were experienced as dreams by his fellow Founders, and there was too much peril in confronting his contemporaries either with doubt about metal synthesization or with its alternative.

Genetic engineering… the mere mention of it was branded as obscenity! The taboo was so strong that the way out of the survival problem had not even occurred to the biologists who’d worked on the animal embryos brought for beasts of burden. They’d genetically modified them to accept a diet of native vegetation, yet had never reasoned that the same principle might work on human beings.

As things stood, the human race could never adapt biologically to the native environment. The damaging substance in the water and soil would result in offspring of subhuman mentality; within a generation there would be no human beings left. But it was so needless! A simple genetic alteration to permit the alien substance to be metabolized, and the damage would no longer occur. It would not have to be done in any generation but the present one, for the alteration, once made, would be inherited. Water and soil purification would never again be necessary.

There would be a price, oh, yes—a terrible price. The City’s technology would be permanently lost. The technology couldn’t be maintained without the caste system, and the caste system was justifiable only because there was no way of surviving without it. Once people could drink unpurified water and eat native plants, the City must be thrown open. Its resources would be used up quickly, for they must be equally shared among members of present generations instead of being preserved for future ones. Some metal must be diverted to farming and craft tools. The research could not continue long; it would be doomed to fail even if metal synthesization was theoretically possible. Once the machines wore out, no more could ever be built.

This prospect, to him, was a grief beyond measure—yet as the price of ultimate human survival, of a free and open society that could survive, it would be endurable. Some might disagree. But so far, they were not even considering that issue. They could not look far enough ahead to confront it, so great was the taboo on human genetic engineering itself.

The Six Worlds, long before the invention of the stardrive, had banned all research into modification of human genes. All forms of interference with procreation, in fact, had become anathema once sure contraceptive drugs had been perfected. Medically assisted conception had been abandoned as contrary to the public interest. It had been declared that human reproduction was not the business of science.

To be sure, there had been legitimate worries about abuse. There had been all too strong a chance that governments would try, by any scientific means that existed, to control people. Agricultural genetic engineering techniques had been discovered while the mother world’s governments were still primitive and corrupt. Use of such techniques on humans was indeed a potential that might have been misused.

Ironically, however, justified fears of abuse had been magnified into distorted ones. Genetic engineering would have been no more dangerous than other scientific capabilities that could be used wrongly—but there had been political opposition to it. It was known, for instance, that it might lead not only to misuse, but to elimination of genetic disease and to longer lifespan. Such benefits had been less well publicized than the dangers. The Six Worlds’ governments had not wanted to spend money on the research that could lead to starships, and they had not liked the thought of people traveling to other solar systems beyond their control; so they’d encouraged the notion that it was wise to ban anything that might ultimately result in a population increase.

By the time interstellar travel became a reality—just in time, as it turned out, to save one small colony from the nova—human genetic engineering was a forgotten concept. People had been conditioned to believe that application of science to alteration of human genes, unlike all other medical science, was somehow “unnatural.” Perhaps, eventually, this might have changed. But the discovery of the impending nova had come… and it was too late to regain the lost ground.

If it had not been for the ban, specific techniques for genetically adapting to the alien world would have been already available, even routine—he had known this when he received the mandate to lead the final expedition. He had known when he made his plans that if his ancestors had not restricted freedom of research, those plans would not have been necessary.
There would have been no need to establish the caste system in the new world at all
.

Noren, absorbing this thought, grew cold with the dismay of it. The Founders and all generations since had upheld a system they knew was evil, supposing that the necessity for it was an unavoidable quirk of fate. No one could have prevented the destruction of the Six Worlds. No one could have made the new world different. But if the Six Worlds had not taken a wrong turning, if people there had been allowed to pursue knowledge freely as he himself had always believed it should be pursued, the evil could have been avoided! And the First Scholar
knew
. No wonder he’d kept this particular recording hidden.

But there were worse things in it than the pain of knowing what might have been. The First Scholar wouldn’t have used a dream instead of a computerized text if all he’d had to present was Six Worlds’ history. What had happened so far was only background… .

The scene shifted, as happens in dreams, and he soon realized that there was a shift of time as well as scene. It came to him that several recordings had been spliced. Episodes that would normally be separate dreams were to be experienced in unbroken sequence, without intervening rest periods, without time to think and adjust. For the first time in controlled dreaming, Noren found himself fighting to be free of an experience he did not wish to share. He had been warned that he would be placed under great stress; still he had not expected to be as afraid as this… not when there was no physical danger. How could he feel such dread, such revulsion, when neither he nor the First Scholar believed genetic change to be wrong?

Resolutely he willed to surrender. His own identity was primary now, and with a corner of his mind he remembered, thankfully, that Lianne was monitoring the safety of his sleeping body. Unaccountably, he saw an image of her face: a pale oval framed with white curls, eyes searching him. Then he was caught up again in the mind and body of the First Scholar.

He was with Talyra. He was happy—he could not think beyond that. The future did not matter while he was with her… .

It was not Talyra, of course, but the woman the First Scholar had loved. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he became aware that be had not seen her at all in the dream—he had experienced only feelings. He, Noren, could not associate such feelings with anyone but Talyra, but as the First Scholar they’d been aroused in him by the woman now at his side. Since the recording contained no pictures, her form was dim; but from his thoughts he knew that she was beautiful and good and that she was the most important person in his life.

“We are committed now,” she said, her voice trembling a little.

“Are you afraid?”

“Not for myself. Not even for you, though you’ve risked the most; you chose to take the chance. But the child—”