The Doors Of The Universe (35 page)

“Noren,” she broke in, “no one’s found out. No one ever will. But the baby’s—dead.”

“What?” His legs buckled; he reached out for support, and Veldry clung to him, led him to the bunk where they sat side by side. “How—
how
?” Noren whispered.

“The nursery attendants don’t know. He was just—weak, as if he hadn’t had enough to eat, though he’d been nursing well. He… he was never strong after the first, Noren, only I didn’t want to see it, I kept thinking he’d gain weight soon… . I didn’t nurse my others personally, you know, I didn’t have anything to compare with. The women who took care of him between feedings didn’t tell me because there wasn’t anything to do except hope. But when I went in yesterday morning, I knew something was wrong. I held him all day, but finally in the night he stopped breathing.”

“Didn’t they call a doctor?”

“Yes, near the end, but he wasn’t sick in any of the ways doctors can help with.”

“The doctor must have said something,” Noren protested.

Veldry was silent. “You can’t hide it from me,” he urged. “He was my son; I have to know what the doctor thought he died from.”

“Well, at first she said malnutrition, but we knew he’d had plenty of milk.” She didn’t meet his eyes.

“Would you rather I talked to the doctor myself?” he asked gently.

“No! If you’re going to crack up, it had better be here instead of in front of people.” She turned to him fearfully; he wondered if she thought that like a traditional village father, he might blame her for failure to produce a perfect infant. “She said,” Veldry continued, “that apparently this baby’s body couldn’t get the right nourishment from milk, couldn’t—metabolize it properly.”

“That’s crazy! All babies live on milk.”

“Of course, but she said there could be something wrong, some congenital problem—”

Congenital. The room spun around Noren. “A genetic defect, you mean.”

“The doctor didn’t know if there could be a defect just like this, she said she’d have to ask the computers.”

“It doesn’t matter what the computers say.” Noren’s voice was cold, remote; in his own ears it didn’t sound like his own. “Don’t you see, Veldry, whether such a disease has occurred before or not—and the blood test I did shows it hasn’t—in this case I
created
it. I altered the genetic pattern of metabolism. I brought a baby to life who was foredoomed to starve.”

“You couldn’t have known ahead of time,” she said in a carefully rehearsed tone, “and you tried the metabolic change on yourself, you told me—the baby’s metabolism was like yours.”

“Yes, I tested it on myself first. But I don’t drink milk, after all; there isn’t any milk on this planet except human milk. Probably I can’t metabolize it any more, either.” He wondered how he could have been so stupidly, tragically blind as to believe he’d checked everything.

After a long pause Veldry said steadily, “We knew there was risk. We wouldn’t have done what we did if it hadn’t been a choice between that and letting all our descendants die. We’ll grieve, we can’t ask not to suffer—but you mustn’t blame yourself.”

“I can’t not blame myself,” Noren declared.

“I—I suppose that’s true. I guess that’s part of the burden you’ve taken on. And I still admire you for taking it, Noren.”

Hazily, he was aware that he should comfort her, should turn from his own guilt and despair long enough to give her the support that was her due. He did not know how. He couldn’t marry her, of course; he would never be able to remarry, since to attempt a second alteration of his genes would not test the change to be used on other people. To father a child for his own sole benefit would not be a justifiable form of human experimentation. So there was nothing he could offer Veldry.

Not till she was gone did he reflect that he might have offered the solace of ritual words. With Talyra he’d used such words to mask secrets; Veldry, who knew those secrets, also viewed them as a source of strength. Though she had long ago accepted accountability for the Scholars’ stewardship by assuming the robe, she never functioned as a priest, perhaps less from scorn of convention than from lack of self-respect. She honored his active priesthood and must have wished him to exercise it in sorrow as in joy. But he couldn’t have done so even for her sake—not when his newfound grounds for faith had proven hollow.

How could they, Lianne’s people, have let it happen?

Strangely, he felt no resentment against Lianne herself, nor did he shrink from companionship as he normally did in times of anguish. It was to her quarters that he went, following an urge he did not stop to question.

He was not sure how much he told her verbally. Lianne held him, and wept. Noren too shed hot tears, not only of grief and remorse, but of outrage. “How could they?” he demanded. “I expected trials, defeats—but how could they let an innocent baby—”

“It wasn’t a question of letting; they had no way to know. We aren’t gods, Noren.”

“Gods?” He did not know the term.

“I forget,” Lianne said, “that concept’s not in your world’s religion, and I don’t suppose you’ve read much about the cultural history of the Six Worlds. In many cultures the power symbolized here by the Star is personified, attributed to supernatural beings. Primitive cultures worship whole groups of gods, but civilizations advanced enough to know there’s only one Power often conceive of it as a Being, too. The Founders didn’t happen to have that tradition. Some Federation worlds do.”

“They believe there’s a
being
off in the sky like the Star, controlling things?”

“Well, not in a physical sense. It’s simply a different symbol.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain when you don’t understand the Star either; you’re so literal-minded, Noren. The point is that we acknowledge a power beyond our own power. We’re not gods in the Service, and we don’t play at being gods! To see ourselves that way would be blasphemy.”

Forcing himself to speak levelly, Noren reflected, “It would be making light of the truth, you mean. In the village people called me blasphemous—yet they cared less about truth than I did, or so I thought. I knew the power’s not in a magic star. You’re saying it’s not in the Service, either.”

“No more than in the Scholars,” Lianne said gently, “who would be gods to the villagers had not the Founders very wisely used an impersonal star as the symbol of something higher. You don’t want to be worshipped; do you suppose my people do, or that we merit it?”

“Oh, Lianne.” As understanding flooded his mind, he was overcome by a sense of sin unlike any he’d experienced before. “I—created my own false symbol; I’ve been imagining them as gods, all right. You don’t know—” He broke off, unable to confess that he had done so consciously even when performing the offices of priesthood.

“I do know,” she admitted miserably. “When I came to tell you about the baby and found you thinking such thoughts, I was horrified. I saw then why acting as a priest had been getting easier for you, and I knew that sooner or later I’d have to set you straight.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Noren said grimly. “I can see for myself. I knew in the beginning there was risk, only I didn’t want the responsibility—after I found somebody to pass it on to, I refused to believe it was real. But it has to be real if it’s to accomplish anything. If your people were gods, what I’m doing would be futile after all.”

“You’d be merely a puppet—your whole race would become puppets—if we could protect you from error,” she agreed, “or even if we could ensure your ultimate success.”

He sat hunched over on Lianne’s bunk, his head buried in his hands, unable to think of the future. Going out to face people, bearing the secret not only of the baby’s existence but of his accountability for its death, was past contemplation. He could not endure that even privately. Starvation… the baby had
suffered
. Even the subhuman mutants like the First Scholar’s son didn’t suffer… .

Lianne’s arm was warm across his shoulders. “I prayed you wouldn’t have to learn through disillusionment,” she was saying, “and I evaded my job. I should have been prepared. Though I couldn’t have saved the baby, I should have kept going to see him—but I was a coward. I knew if he wasn’t thriving I wouldn’t be strong enough to tell you. Yet now in the space of a few hours you’ve got to make a very difficult adjustment, when I could have bought you more time.”

“A few hours—I don’t understand.” He was not sure he’d be able to accept the consequences of his failure in weeks, let alone hours.

“You’ve got to preside at the service for the baby,” Lianne said.

“Lianne, I can’t!” he burst out, appalled. “I couldn’t do that even for Talyra, and now, after my—my blasphemy, I can’t ever preside as a priest again. I couldn’t anyway in this case. I couldn’t stand up and declare it’ll turn out for the best, knowing the death was my fault.”

“It’s going to be hard. But you are obligated.”

“You’re right, of course,” he conceded. “Veldry will expect it, and I owe it to her.”

“Noren,” Lianne questioned after a short silence, “Do you intend to go forward with the work?”

He didn’t answer; she, being telepathic, ought to know he wasn’t ready to talk about that. “If you do,” she continued, “you’re obligated not just for Veldry’s sake but for everyone’s. When you tell future volunteers about this baby, they’ll know whether or not you were the one who spoke at his death rite.”

Yes, and if he was not, they’d feel he was either too weak to accept the responsibility or not convinced that the experiment had been justifiable. There would then be no volunteers. Furthermore, there might not even be opportunity to seek any, for the secret would be out. It was a father’s place to arrange the service for a dead child. If he himself presided, it would be assumed that the father was unwilling to reveal his identity and that Veldry had simply gone to the priest who’d officiated at the earlier Thanksgiving for Birth. But if he sought a substitute, there could be no hiding the reason for his involvement.

“There’s something more,” Lianne went on. “Now’s a bad time to stir up an issue I’ve held off raising, yet it’s only fair to warn you.” Her arm tightened around him, and he sensed, beneath her sorrow, the ache of a deeper one—pain not merely for the present tragedy, but for some other that lay ahead of him. “You’ve no conception yet of where you’re going,” she said. “You’re thinking that if you can get through this one service it will be the last act of your priesthood. Don’t look at it that way. Make it a beginning, not an end; it’s as a priest that you must lead your people later on.”

Noren raised his face, startled into anger. “I told Brek that,” he recalled bitterly. “To protect your secret I led him to believe I’d turned hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite, and I won’t use priesthood as a route to power.”

“Do you think I’d want you to do it hypocritically?”

“No more than you want me to create congenitally defective babies,” he replied, his voice harsh, “but I suppose hypocrisy too can be justified in the name of survival. Reason tells me it can. Well, you’ve sometimes said I rely too much on reason. About this, I’ll follow my feelings.”

“And your feelings don’t include faith right now. But they used to, before you found out who I am.”

“In survival of my race, yes. Not in the Prophecy’s promises, not after I became sure that genetic engineering is our only chance to survive. If the Service isn’t backing those promises, I can’t affirm them any more than the rest of the Scholars can give them up.”

Hesitantly, Lianne said, “I’ve affirmed them, knowing the Service hasn’t the power to make them come true.”

“On what grounds?” Noren challenged, thinking with regret of how logical his speculations about her motive had seemed.

“Your reasoning wasn’t all wrong,” Lianne told him. “I’m sure that some way does exist for your descendants to regain the technology that will be lost here, so that the Prophecy can ultimately be fulfilled. If that weren’t true, open intervention by the Service would be judged essential—because without it, the evolution of your species would reach an end worse than the consequences of artificial interruption. And you are right that we wouldn’t let you engage in human experimentation to no purpose if such intervention were considered inevitable. We’d intervene now, not as gods but simply as human beings abiding by ethics, balancing lesser evils against greater, just as you do.”

“But then your people know the way!”

“Yes, they must—but that doesn’t mean they can make sure it’ll be implemented. They’re dealing in probabilities, not certainties. They too need faith; but we have evidence that they do have grounds for it.”

Noren’s head swam. “If you hadn’t come, I wouldn’t know that. I couldn’t act as a priest, yet you say it’s in that role I must lead—”

“So by speaking like this, I’ve altered the odds,” she admitted. “I haven’t an answer. We are… agents, Noren, not only as representatives of the Service, but in the sense that once we interact at all, we influence histories to an extent we’re not able to compute. It goes back to what I said about trusting the universe. Things we can’t explain do happen, things like your finding the sphere that brought us here, for instance—they are not mere coincidences. We’ve observed such things on enough worlds to know that they follow statistical laws other than laws of random chance. But we can’t predict which problems synchronicity of that kind will solve.”

“Lianne, don’t hold out on me,” he pressed. “Will I receive help in finding the solution once I’ve gone as far as I can alone?”