The Doors Of The Universe (19 page)

“In a couple of days you’ll be ready to sit at the lab bench,” Lianne said. “I’ll be around a good deal if you need anything.”

“You mean you’ve been assigned to work in here?” he burst out, dismayed. No other experiments were in progress, and he’d assumed the chance of contagion would ensure his privacy.

“Let’s just say I’ve chosen this week to start my student lab projects,” she said evenly. “That way, no one will touch what’s on the bench; you don’t want somebody else to barge in here and mess up your test tubes, do you? It would be an awful waste of heroic fortitude.”

And so, for the next six weeks, the work proceeded more smoothly than he’d imagined it would. He did not even have to invent a story about needing a pastime to keep his mind off the continuous ache of his muscles, for the doctor assumed all the paraphernalia was Lianne’s. Actually, she did very little on her own. When present she watched him gravely, quietly; sometimes he got the feeling that she knew more about what he was doing than her comments revealed. She had guessed his purpose through uncanny intuition combined with her knowledge of his ultimate aim—but how could she possibly know that he’d progressed to the point of splicing genes?

His physical weakness, the pain of motion and the persistent headache, failed to handicap him greatly. He was not sure just why. Though to concentrate on his task took effort and to steady his hands throughout the hours of intricate lab work was a bigger challenge than he’d foreseen, he found that he was enjoying it. He was truly accomplishing something, after so many seasons of futile study—that must be the reason. Yet he felt something more was involved. Confidence, perhaps, confidence not only in his mind but in his control over his body? As a village boy he’d considered himself too awkward even to make a good craftsman. Now, though, things seemed to be happening to him that extended beyond the ability to cope with the effects of the disease. Lianne taught him to allocate his strength, to relax totally except when his movements demanded tension; then later, when the doctor pronounced it safe, she taught him exercises to recondition his muscles. Evidently her medical training was including physical therapy techniques. Or, he reflected, perhaps she’d been a village witch after all. People did go to witch-women with ailments such as purple fever, for which the Technicians could provide no help; the fact that she hadn’t been charged with witchcraft didn’t mean she’d never practiced any of the healing methods associated with it.

He found himself wishing that he could confide more fully in Lianne, perhaps even let her experience the dream—but that would be too unfair to Stefred. It would be, even if it weren’t for Stefred’s personal interest in her; and in view of that factor, the mere prospect of a close friendship made him uncomfortable. There were times when he saw something in her face that made him turn away. Only the recency of Talyra’s death allowed him to accept Lianne’s companionship, Noren realized. He was doing enough behind Stefred’s back without creating a false impression that he was a rival for the one woman whose love Stefred wanted.

After some weeks in the lab, Lianne brought him fertilized fowl’s eggs, and he proceeded from gene splicing in bacteria to the manipulation of genes of higher organisms. Some of the eggs hatched, and he went further. Finally she managed to smuggle in a grown hen, which he successfully injected with a gene-altering vaccine. She took a sample of the hen’s blood to the computers and brought back a disc proving that its genotype had indeed been modified. Thereafter, the hen laid more eggs, the analysis of which proved that the modification had affected reproductive cells. Lianne took the hen away and returned, in due time, with chicks. Analysis of their blood was unnecessary; they had blue tailfeathers. “Did you know what you were doing,” she inquired, “or did it just happen?”

“I knew.” He frowned and added, “But I didn’t know they were going to hatch early.”

“I hope not. I have enough trouble hiding a poultry coop on the aircar deck without having to explain blue-tailed fowl! I was going to bring them in here before they hatched. And I’m going to have to get rid of the rooster pretty soon; you have no idea what a noise it makes.”

What an odd thing to say, Noren thought. He’d grown up on a farm and so, presumably, had she—or at least she’d lived near one; no village dwelling was beyond the noise of cockcrow. “It’s not only the idea of someone seeing them that worries me,” he said. “I was working with a regulatory gene, one that affects timing of development. They wouldn’t normally have tailfeathers at all so soon after hatching; I used the blue coloring just for a marker. Well, I speeded up the appearance of tailfeathers all right, but evidently I speeded up hatching, too. Either the computer’s gene mapping for fowl isn’t accurate or else I fumbled.”

“No complex experiment works perfectly the first time it’s tried,” Lianne said, sounding as if she’d been a Scholar for decades.

“Lianne,” Noren declared grimly, “the big one has got to.”

“From your standpoint, yes. But if it should fail, if you can have no more children, you’ll still have a chance to—”

“I’ll have no chance, and you know it! People won’t accept the idea even now; what chance would they give me after a failure?”

“I can’t answer that,” she admitted in a low voice. “One step at a time, I guess. What comes next?”

“I find out what went wrong here and try a few other alterations. Till that’s done, I’m afraid you’ll have to hang onto the rooster.” He wondered where he’d be now under his original plan, which hadn’t included steps demanding outside aid. As she turned to go he went on, “Lianne? What are they saying about me? In the refectory, I mean, not officially.”

“They’re upset,” she told him frankly. “Oh, they admire courage, Noren—but any Scholar would have been willing to undergo purple fever if there’d been a request for volunteers; I talked to one young man whose father was crippled by it, and he thinks you usurped his rightful role. The rest see the dark half of your motive. They interpret your being here as a retreat from working toward metal synthesization. And they know that you wouldn’t retreat if you didn’t feel hopeless, so they’re depressed.”

“Then maybe they’ll be readier to consider an alternative, knowing they can’t rely on me the way they’ve been doing.”

“Don’t count on it. The goal was set by the First Scholar, not by you—and if they decide they can’t rely on you, they’ll blame you rather than the goal itself.” Gently she added, “Retreat from hope isn’t appropriate conduct for a priest.”

“You say that as if you were quoting it.”

“Not the words. But it’s what all the older people are thinking.”

Slowly, he observed, “You also say it as if you agree with it, even now that you know human survival and the other hopes aren’t necessarily tied together. Yet you’ve not accepted priesthood yourself—and you’ve helped me get away with neglecting ‘appropriate conduct.’ Could it be that you’re slipping back into heresy, Lianne?”

“If you mean am I questioning the validity of the official religion,” she told him, “then no, I’m not. My reasons for not becoming a priest are… personal. I support the aims of the priesthood and share the underlying faith. So do you, Noren.”

“For a while I was convinced I did. But it’s tangled up with so many things that aren’t true, won’t be true if humanity does survive.”

Faith was a way of dealing with unanswerable questions. Yet now, Noren thought miserably, some of those questions could be answered—and the answer was
no
. Cities and machines for everyone. Knowledge free to everyone, all human knowledge, past and future, being expanded “even unto infinite and unending time,” as the poet had expressed it.
Knowledge shall be kept safe within the City; it shall be held in trust until the Mother Star itself becomes visible to us
. The Mother Star, symbol of the unknowable… until the unknowable becomes clear, then? He had believed that. He’d been sure there would still be priests, as searchers for truth though not as a social caste, after the Prophecy was fulfilled. He’d believed they would explore the universe.
There shall come a time of great exultation, when the doors of the universe shall be thrown open and everyone shall rejoice
. . . . What was priesthood without that goal? What was faith without it? Faith in survival wasn’t enough.

“Of course it’s tangled,” Lianne declared. “Religions usually are.
Were
, I mean, on the Six Worlds,” she added hastily. “But Noren, you aren’t going to get very far with people just by proving chicks can be given blue tailfeathers. So maybe you’ll have to try to untangle it.”

*
 
*
 
*

By the time he was fully recovered and discharged from the medical lab, Noren had taken the experimentation as far as he could with fowl and had even started work with human blood serum. His results with the latter had been confirmed by computer analysis but were not, of course, ready for actual testing. He’d spliced human genes in test tubes, but to prepare a live-virus vaccine for human use would have been far too dangerous without the Outer City’s facilities, even if he’d had the time. And he had no more time. He considered faking a relapse, but that would have negated the success of the purple fever treatment, which had been declared ready for village use. Or else, if the doctor had caught on, his malingering would have put an end to what little sympathy his fellow Scholars still had for him.

They were cool enough as it was. They didn’t show it openly—they went out of their way not to, in fact—but he could tell how they felt. During his past bad times, they’d been sympathetic; yet he’d refused all sympathy, rebuffed every offer of help, not because he disliked people but because he had never known how to respond to them. Perhaps he’d indeed been guilty of what Brek had termed “starcursed pride.” In any case, Noren reflected ruefully, he’d provided more than enough excuse for them to stop trying and let their real feelings surface.

There was nothing personal in these feelings. Lianne told him that, and he believed her. He could see the logic: he had become a symbol. He was the ordained heir, the youth destined to achieve the long-sought breakthrough and, by synthesizing metal, fulfill the Prophecy! He had been viewed as heir even by his first tutor Grenald, an aged man whose own lifework had failed, and who, last Founding Day, had died whispering Noren’s name. That had seemed significant to people, for the failure of Grenald’s research had frightened them. Fear, not moralism, prompted their current disapproval; for if Noren could not advance the work, could anyone? And he was refusing the role in which he’d been cast.

How very ironic, he thought, when he’d indeed been chosen heir to a different task—and by the First Scholar himself.

Would people support the new goal if they knew the full truth about the First Scholar? Logically, they should; the reverence now felt for him should guarantee its acceptance. He probably hadn’t foreseen such veneration when he wrote the programmed cautions… still, he’d already planned his martyrdom, already taken steps to ensure that it wouldn’t lead to his worship outside the City. And he’d nevertheless hidden the secret not only from his contemporary opponents, but from most successors. Something about that made Noren uneasy.

Yet he himself couldn’t delay indefinitely. He felt weak and helpless not so much from the lingering effects of illness as from the fact that as long as his goal remained secret, he was blocked from any action.

He could not return to physics, yet he couldn’t study genetics, either. He could do no more with human genes without better lab facilities, and he could get them only with Council approval. There was other necessary work, many years of it, which during the hours he’d been bedridden he had analyzed. Grain must be enabled to grow in untreated soil and to recover trace elements from organic fertilizers, which could in the future include work-beast manure, more efficiently than at present. Irradiation of seed must be made unnecessary. The need for weather control must be eliminated. Immunity against disease must be made heritable. There were feasible genetic solutions to these problems; the secret file dealt with some of them. But they all depended on the basic alteration of human metabolism being implemented. That alteration had to be tried first, and soon—for it couldn’t be made in the whole species until it was proven in a third generation. Only if his grandchildren were normal could implementation of the change safely proceed in the villages!

He could afford no more lost time. Even without support among the younger Scholars, he must risk telling Stefred.

“I’m glad you’ve finally come,” Stefred said when Noren appeared at his study door three nights after leaving the medical lab.

“You don’t know why I’m here yet.” Noren was sure of this; Lianne had sworn she’d revealed nothing.

Stefred, his smile warm and unsuspecting, pulled another chair close to his. “I thought I did,” he said, “but now—” He broke off, sensing that this wasn’t to be like their previous talks. “You’re—older, Noren.”

“You thought I went into retreat, I suppose, and that I’ve come out to find myself still in need of help.” Noren hoped his own smile was warm; he wanted desperately to preserve this friendship despite the strains he’d been forced to put on it. “I do need help, Stefred, but not the kind you think.”

“Right now I’m not sure what to think,” Stefred admitted. “Your face gives the lie to all the rumors I’ve been hearing. Obviously you’re not here to consult me in my professional capacity.”

“More in your executive capacity. I couldn’t come to you sooner; I’ve learned something I wasn’t ready to bring to the Council. Now I’ve got to. But it’s going to shake people up—even you, Stefred.” Painfully he added, “Especially you, because you’re going to hate me for having concealed it from you.”