The Doors Of The Universe (22 page)

On the east side of the Inner City courtyard was a sort of garden. It was just outside the dome containing the water purification plant—in the triangular area between that dome’s wall and the adjacent one were rocks, some native shrubs, and a waterfall. The water poured out of a spout in the wall, draining back into the dome after splashing into a stone basin. This water was, of course, unpurified; and it had practical functions as well as aesthetic ones. Its main use came when the purification plant underwent one of its periodic partial breakdowns. On those occasions people too old to have children drank there, since most of the pipes to the Inner City, which always bore the brunt of resource shortages, were cut off. Also, if one wore long plastic gloves, the impure water could be used for washing articles that weren’t absorbent. Perhaps the chief reason for the waterfall, however, was psychological. Villagers lived within sight and sound of cool water they were forbidden to touch, despite year-round blistering heat. For Scholars to do the same was a poignant reminder of the alien planet’s restrictions.

Staring at the moonlit glimmer of the plunging water, Noren thought back to the day he’d first quenched his thirst in a forbidden stream. How triumphant he’d felt, how sure that by defying the High Law he was asserting his trust in his own mind, his independence from foolish taboos! He’d turned out to be wrong, that time.

Then there was the other time, the time in the mountains, the days when in agony of thirst and fever, he’d barely moistened his lips. Had that restraint indeed been meaningless? No, for if he’d suffered genetic damage then, he could not be doing this work now; and if no one else was willing to do it, the future of the world would be grim. But there was still no sense in what had happened to Talyra. If he were now married to her, he’d have no choice but to be faithless, at least during this first experiment. Yet her death and their child’s had been too high a price for avoiding that.

No
! All of a sudden, he saw…
even her death wasn’t meaningless!
If she and the child hadn’t died, he would never have begun to study genetics. The secret might never have been found. The means of human survival might never have been imagined by anyone.

Holding to this thought, inspired by it, Noren thrust his cupped hands into the waterfall and, over and over again, he drank.

Chapter Six

The weeks of waiting were hard, as Noren had known they would be. And he also knew that this was just the beginning. If the water he’d drunk had damaged his genes, the obstacles to continuing the work might prove insurmountable, a prospect he refused to think about. But if it hadn’t, he would nevertheless face a long period during which his self-discipline would be severely tested. For that, he began to prepare himself.

He could do nothing active toward the goal till enough time had elapsed for the water’s effect on him to become detectable. To spend that time in pointless reanalysis of the genetic work was a temptation, yet he would only be putting off his return to physics. He realized that he had to return. Once a child was conceived, seasons must pass before the experiment’s outcome was known, and during those seasons, when no progress could be made in genetic research, he must pretend to have abandoned his interest in it. He must earn the other Scholars’ respect again, so that later, armed with proof that the genetic change worked, he would have hope of winning support. Furthermore, he must provide evidence that metal synthesization was a lost cause. He owed people that, he felt.

And he owed it to his child-to-be.

At night, alone in the dark, he worried about the child. What he’d resolved to do was wrong; he could not deny that. Though the mother would consent, the child could not. And it was wrong to experiment on any unconsenting human being!

Yet the choice was between risk to a few babies and the sure extinction of the entire human race. He was sure—as sure as it was humanly possible to be—that metal could not be synthesized in any way short of a Unified Field Theory, which, as the First Scholar had known, could not be developed and tested without large-scale equipment that was unobtainable. Wrong as it was to experiment with his child, to let humankind die when the life-support machines wore out would be a greater wrong.

If he could find a mathematical basis for a Unified Field Theory, Noren thought—show how metal had to be synthesized in principle—people might admit that their faith was misplaced. This, then would be his task. It was an impossible one; the greatest physicists of the Six Worlds had sought a Unified Field Theory for centuries, and the chances of his coming up with it within his lifetime, let alone within the next year, were therefore effectively zero. Yet he had to do something with the year! And it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant prospect, even knowing himself foredoomed to failure. It would help keep fear of a worse failure from his mind.

The day after reaching this decision, he mentioned it to Lianne. He’d been seeking her company casually, in the refectory and in other gathering places, since modifying his genes. She did not know about the vaccine; he had not yet told her how far he’d gone in genetics, or how far he planned to go. That must wait till he had checked the impure water’s effect on him. But considering what he planned to ask of her, he must strengthen their friendship. Though he would not court her as if he loved her, he could scarcely ignore her until it was time to broach the subject. And he discovered, with some surprise, that he did not want to ignore her. That troubled him; it seemed disloyal to Talyra. Having pledged himself to Talyra in mid-adolescence, he’d never paid attention to any other girl. Now to his dismay he found himself enjoying Lianne’s companionship—even, on occasion, looking forward to the time when they would share more than companionship.

Lianne knew how he still felt about Talyra. He was sure she did, for though she quite evidently welcomed his company, she was as careful as he to shy away from anything suggesting courtship. She was on guard, he felt, against displaying her feelings, and sometimes joy in her eyes turned to pain. Yet it was not his lack of ardor that was hurting her. Lianne’s pain went deeper. Whatever her secrets, they seemed to weigh heavily upon her, and Noren sensed that he could not have helped even if his heart had been free to give.

Nor did Lianne need help. She was… self-sufficient. He could not doubt her ability to handle problems. For some reason, however, her self-sufficiency was unlike his own—she was not a loner, as he was, and nobody thought her cold or unapproachable. Lianne radiated warmth. He felt comfortable in her presence, despite the fact that her mind was inscrutable. Her wisdom was baffling at times, but never irritating. The Unified Field Theory, for instance…

“It’s not a thing I can explain,” Noren told her, “not to someone who hasn’t studied physics. But matter and energy are—well, two aspects of the same thing. The power plant converts matter to energy. If we really understood the relationship, completely understood it, we might reverse the process, convert energy to matter, to metal, perhaps—”

“But you don’t have the facilities you’d need to do that,” Lianne replied promptly. “They didn’t fully understand it on the Six Worlds, even studying particles with far higher energies than we can produce here.”

Noren gaped, incredulous. To be sure, Lianne had experienced the secret dream by now, and the First Scholar had spoken of the Unified Field Theory in that dream. But had he thought specifically about subnuclear particles? Even if he had, how could a village woman—one now studying psychiatry, not physics—have drawn their significance from the recording?

“Some of the mathematical foundation might be laid,” she went on, “only I think it’s beyond you, Noren.”

“Of course it’s beyond me,” he agreed. “That’s the point! It’s beyond all of us; that’s what I’ve got to prove before I can make people accept the alternative.”

“Can you really work with math at that level, or are you going to fake it?”

“Fakery,” he replied quietly, “is something I’ve never been willing to stand for.”

“So I thought,” she murmured, troubled. She seemed about to say more, yet held back. “It’s so hot,” she burst out, “let’s find someplace cooler! I don’t see how people bear this endless heat.”

The heat was, to be sure, scorching, as it always was outside and had been every day within Noren’s memory; the cool interiors of the towers and domes had been startling to him on his initial entry to the City. Lianne had been in the City less than a year. “We’ll go indoors if you like,” he said, wondering if her white hair and extraordinarily pale skin made her sensitive to sunlight.

“I guess that’s our only choice. Don’t you wish, though, that we could walk somewhere in the shade, under trees?”

“You’ve been spending too much time with library dreams,” he told her, smiling. He knew what trees were; five of the Six Worlds had had them.

“Dreams?” Lianne, who made incredibly complex connections between abstract things, was often dense about simple ones.

“Yes—hasn’t Stefred explained about them? The pleasant ones aren’t just recreation; they’re designed to show us what this world hasn’t got, to make us feel the lacks in a way non-Scholars don’t. So that we’ll never be satisfied, always keep struggling. And maybe someday, once we have metal, we can find a better planet—” He broke off, aware with renewed anguish that this goal was among those that must be renounced.

“I didn’t mean to stir that up,” Lianne said hastily. “I’m not quite sure how I managed to.”

“What you said about trees, of course. Why not ask for an ocean?”

She turned even paler than her normal coloring, as if the casual remark had been an unpardonable slip of some kind. Noren took her arm. “Lianne—don’t be sorry! I have to learn to bear this; we all do. It’s just that when we’ve believed in the Prophecy so long, believed not only in survival but in a better future—”

“Yes,” she agreed; but she was still trembling. “Yet a—a simple thing like trees—”

“We could have them, maybe!” Noren cried excitedly. “That might be done with genetic engineering after the essential jobs are finished. There are plants with thick stems, they just aren’t strong enough to stand upright. I never thought before, but in principle I could alter them. There’s a lot I could do! Oh, I know we’re going to lose the City—the power and the computers—in time, but as long as I’m alive I can keep them going; I can keep the genetic technology long enough to make this world better for our descendants. And though we don’t have oceans, there are big lakes. Villages could be built near them once it’s safe for people to touch the water. Do you know what swimming is?”

“Well, of course—” She broke off. “I have experienced a dream of swimming,” she said slowly. “And boats. If there were trees, and wood, we could build some. Even Stone Age peoples have boats.”

Noren stared at her. “You’ve studied the Six Worlds more than most of us,” he observed thoughtfully. “Not only the dreams, but facts stored in the computers. It’s not just what you know, but how you think, as if—as if you came from the Six Worlds, like the Founders.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” she confessed. “I—I’m different, I’ve always told you that… and there’s the empathy Stefred talks about… and I—well, I identify in the dreams, not just the First Scholar’s, but the library dreams, too. I mix them too much with reality, perhaps. I suppose that sounds like a retreat, a coward’s course.”

“No,” Noren said. “No, it takes courage—don’t you see? Because you’re here, in the real world, and you’re not deluding yourself, not even with the Prophecy. You experience those dreams fully, think about them while you’re awake, knowing all the time you’ll never get out of this prison we’re in, not the City but our whole planet—”

“Please don’t! You’re giving me credit I don’t deserve.”

“You do deserve it. I know it hurts to talk about this—but Lianne, you
choose
to. Most people don’t. They enjoy the library dreams, but in the daytime they can’t bear to remember them. I’m like that myself—I push them out of my mind because awareness of our limits here is just too painful. Oh, I can take it; I force myself to think it through sometimes just to make sure I can. But you seem to live with it naturally.”

“I—I wish I were what you believe.” Lianne’s eyes glistened with tears.

“I’ll bet I can prove you are.” He had led her to a spot in the courtyard shaded by the shadow of a tower, where they could look up into the blueness of the sky. “You remember you said once you’d like me to tell you more about the alien sphere I found in the mountains?”

Abruptly Lianne pulled back, withdrawing her arm from his; she stiffened. Noren smiled. “I’m testing you; already you see that. Which is part of the test, because most people aren’t even perceptive enough to shrink. They look at the sphere and it fascinates them, and they talk endlessly about what sort of beings the Visitors must have been, and they speculate about what function the thing might have had—and their emotions aren’t involved at all.”

“But yours are?”

“What do you think about the sphere, Lianne?”

“I’d rather hear what you think,” she said levelly.

“I think there’s a good chance that the civilization that once came to this world and left the sphere still exists somewhere. That things that used to be real on the Six Worlds are still real, other places. Maybe millions of places. Has that idea ever come into your mind?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “it has.”