The Doors Of The Universe (31 page)

“I’d be surprised if there’s much that Stefred is naive about,” observed Noren. “He’s read a lot of things he doesn’t speak of, evils that sometimes occurred on the Six Worlds. If you mean controlled dreaming could be used for torture, well, even I’ve imagined that. But you knew he wouldn’t do it.”

“I wasn’t sure how much power he held; I thought I might be taken over by some higher authority—he was afraid of something bad happening to me, certainly, and I realized that what he’d said was less a threat than a true warning. I could deal with torture, though, if it were temporary—”

“It couldn’t very well be permanent.”

“Yes, it could. A body can be maintained indefinitely with life support equipment and dream input. Only that’s not the worst, because if the mental input is pure nightmare, the brain dies relatively soon, and I did know that wasn’t going to happen to me. He was thinking in terms of wasted life, not lingering death. The other thing sometimes done isn’t called torture; there are worlds where people actually choose it. A person can be kept alive year after year on a machine like that with
pleasant
dreams.”

Noren struggled with sudden nausea. “Lianne—that’s horrible.”

“Of course. To you and to Stefred and to me, to anyone who values consciousness. But it matched the pattern of what I knew at that point. There are societies where it would be considered fitting punishment for heretics, and others where it would be viewed as a merciful alternative to imprisonment in close quarters. I had visions of a compartment somewhere in the City with row after row of encapsuled dreamers, like frozen sleep quarters on a slow, primitive starship except with no oblivion and no promised awakening.”

“Oh, Lianne.” Noren put his arm around her, found she was trembling.

“I’m not looking for sympathy, you know that,” she said quietly. “But understanding how I’m vulnerable is related to the rest of what you need to understand. The next part’s even more so, only you won’t like what you hear.”

“I have to hear it. I want to. But—but Lianne, it’s hard because I’ve always thought of the universe as, well,
good
, somehow. In spite of freak disasters like the nova, I’ve believed there are more than enough wonderful things out there to balance.”

She was radiant for a moment; he sensed an emotion new to him. “There are!” she burst out. Then, slowly, “There are wonders past your imagination. But if I were to show them to you at this stage, you would only feel more bitter. Right now you believe that I am heir to all the glories while you are doomed by fate to a dark prison world. You must see that darkness, too, is universal—then later you’ll find that you do have access to some of the light.”

Of course
, Noren thought as the surge of elation ebbed.
You’ve got to have seen more good than I have, or else you couldn’t possibly bear to confront all you’re telling me about
. Aloud he said, “If I’ve shown any courage in my life, it’s been only because I’ve had no choice. But you, you
chose
—not only here, but at the start, when you chose to be exposed to evils you would never have had to know exist. I admire your strength more than ever; don’t think my finding out who you are has changed that.”

“You chose, too, by becoming a heretic,” she answered.

“I couldn’t have been anything else on this world.”

“No, because you wouldn’t have been content not to look at all sides of things. But it was a choice all the same. Elsewhere you’d have had more options, and you’d have picked the one that let you see farthest. Which on any world would have meant looking at darkness, just as my choice did.” With a wry smile she added, “That’s why you share my horror at the idea of perpetual sweet dreams.”

He shuddered. “Lianne—when you were hooked up to the Dream Machine for your first session, did you really think that was what would happen?”

“No, I knew better by then. I’d been shown the films of the Six Worlds and the Mother Star before that point, and I recognized a nova when I saw one. I’d begun to piece things together—and it was more of a shock than you’ve guessed, worse than the other, much worse.”

The hardest act she’d put on had been concealing the fact that she understood the film of the nova. There was no actual revelation of the Six Worlds’ destruction in that film, but for Lianne, of course, its mere identification as the Mother Star was the key to the colony’s situation—it would have been even if she hadn’t received Stefred’s powerful emotions.

The Service had known from the beginning that the people of the planet were not only colonists but lost colonists, out of touch with their world of origin. That had been evident from the converted starships used as living quarters in the City, which like the orbiting hulls were made of an alloy that couldn’t be melted and used for other purposes with the facilities available. Lost colonies, however, were not particularly uncommon. In the early phases of every civilization’s interstellar expansion, some starships failed to get home. Descendants of their passengers weren’t necessarily in danger—they often survived successfully enough, and in due course, were contacted by other explorers of their own species. In any vase they were not the sole representatives of their species. The Service did not worry about the welfare of lost colonies.

Novas were another matter entirely. And when Lianne perceived that she would be forced to dream of the nova, she wasn’t at all sure she would be able to endure it.

Her experience in controlled dreaming, in voluntary acceptance of nightmare, made it harder rather than easier. She knew in advance that this would be so. She realized that the dreams were ordinarily used with people who did not have any foreknowledge about novas, or even about worlds unlike their own. For them, there would be terror and emotional pain—but there would not be complete grasp of significance. They would not absorb anywhere near all the feelings of the person who’d made the recording, while she would share those feelings fully. And she would suffer other feelings beyond that. One experienced a dream according to one’s own background, and her background was such that to her, destruction of an entire human species was an ultimate, intolerable evil. Lesser evils she’d been taught to bear on the basis of evidence that they occurred in all species and were thus apparently part of the evolutionary process. But what answer was there for an evil that robbed all the rest of meaning?

The Service was, of course, aware that novas sometimes destroyed populated solar systems. But never before had such a case been observed—once a nova was detected, there was no way to determine whether the planets of the star had been populated or not. If the star of a Federation solar system novaed, the event was predictable and the population was evacuated. The same was true when a known immature species was similarly endangered… .

“Wait a minute!” Noren broke in. “You’re saying that if your Service had been observing the Six Worlds before the nova, it would have saved the people?”

“Not all of them; that would have been impossible. But enough to make sure your species was safe.”

“But then you’re admitting you do intervene sometimes.”

“If nothing else can prevent extinction, yes. There is no evil worse than extinction of a whole human species. The Founders were right about that; every Scholar who recants is right about it. I know what you’re going to ask next, Noren—but don’t ask it, not yet. Hear me out.”

Deeply though she feared the dreams, having grasped what they would contain, Lianne had been obliged to undergo them willingly. That was required of her not only by the role she was playing with Stefred, but by her own oath to the Service. Her awareness of the nova changed everything. She now knew that the colonists might be the sole survivors of their home system; it was her responsibility to find out for sure. And if they were indeed the only survivors it was her responsibility to determine whether or not they had the resources to go on surviving.

The dream sequence proved even more taxing than she’d anticipated, for she identified in a close personal way with the First Scholar. She hadn’t expected recordings made by anyone with insight so far ahead of most of the people of his civilization. The agony was somewhat tempered by his courage, yet on the other hand, she knew his specific hope for survival to be groundless. It was evident to Lianne that the nuclear research goal was unattainable with the City’s facilities—she drew more detail from his thoughts about these than less knowledgeable dreamers could—and she knew from the start what Noren had learned gradually, what most other Scholars, even Stefred, still could not bring themselves to believe. If they relied on synthesization of metal, the colony was doomed.

Furthermore, there was the edited state of the recordings to cope with. “It was bad in the way Stefred explained it to you,” she told Noren, “more of a torment than he realized, in fact, to have my mind held within unrealistic limits, because I was so accustomed to full recordings. If you hadn’t done what you did to spare me that, there’s no telling what would have happened. Even knowing the editing was drastic, I trusted Stefred enough to believe it hadn’t been done for deception. But I might have cracked up during the later part of the dream sequence.”

She had not been in touch with her teammates at that point; when she’d first grasped the nature of her inquisition, she had broken off with them so as to have no unfair advantage. She had asked them not to resume telepathic communication until she initiated contact herself, and she’d resolutely refrained from doing so not only during the intervals between dreams, but throughout the ceremony of recantation. They had witnessed that ordeal without understanding it. Afterward, however, she had passed on the whole story, and she’d told them what they already saw from the discoveries she reported: there was no question of her leaving the City until she had learned whether anyone had found the route to permanent survival of the colony.

“Genetic engineering, you mean? But I didn’t find out about it till weeks after you recanted,” Noren objected. “Why did you stay so long?”

“You’d begun to be interested in genetics—I’d learned that much.”

“Telepathically?” he inquired uncomfortably.

“No, at least not till you came to me with the secret recording. I sensed your goal then because I already knew you’d studied the field, and because I’d been looking for the same thing you had in the full version of the First Scholar’s memories.”

Did it give you nightmares, too?
he wondered. He’d never told her of his own.

“I have skills for gaining access to my subconscious mind,” Lianne said, “so I perceived the clues he left without being disturbed by them. I didn’t follow them through; I waited to see what you’d come up with.”

“What would you have done if I hadn’t found the secret file? The timing was quite a coincidence, after all—generations passing, and then its being discovered the year you got here.”

“Not really a coincidence. Your finding the sphere in the mountains triggered both my arrival and the thoughts that led you to pursue genetics. As to what I’d have done if you hadn’t pursued it, well, after a while I’d have used telepathy to steer you in that direction.”

Noren frowned. “You mean you can control people that way?”

“Definitely not. They must choose to respond, but I sensed that you would. I had you identified as the potential leader even before I knew you were on the right path.”

Keeping himself under rigid control, Noren ventured, “What if there’d been no potential leader?” He would not ask the more fundamental question directly; Lianne was aware that the inconsistencies in what she’d revealed were obvious to him.
You were trained by the same principles Stefred follows
, he thought,
and like Stefred, you expect people to work out the answers on their own
. . . .

“I could have told you the answers hours ago,” she agreed, “but you’d simply have rejected them. I had to give you the emotions, the conflicts, make you feel the paradox for yourself. I’ve tried to state enough of the facts for you to resolve it.”

Slowly, Noren said, “You’re sure in your mind that if there’d been no potential leader, the outlook wouldn’t be bright. In that case your people would save us, as they would have from the nova, because nothing else could prevent our extinction.”

“Save you from extinction, yes, since there’s no greater evil.”

“But some other evil would follow that they couldn’t save us from,” he went on painfully, “one of those scenarios I don’t know about.”
That’s got to be how it is—I’ve had proof that you feel as strongly as I do about what happens to us: Stefred’s judgment, and now direct communication from your mind to mine. What’s more, your feeling is tied in with how you feel about the Service! The conflict’s not between two loyalties, and you’re not so timid as to stand back just for fear your action might miscarry
. . . .

“The results of intervention are well known from the Federation’s past history,” said Lianne, her voice remote and sad. “In the early days some species were brought in too soon. It was thought mature civilizations could help young ones, that if an effort was made to respect their cultures, it would work like the merging of ethnic groups on a single mother world. But that’s not comparable.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Different cultures on a mother world are made up of people of the
same
species. There’s no difference in length of evolutionary history involved. But with separate species that have evolved on separate worlds, a certain level has to be reached before contact is fruitful, before it’s safe, even. If a species hasn’t yet attained that level, all the struggle of its past evolution goes for nothing.”