The Doors Of The Universe (46 page)

The veneration he received still bothered him, and yet, he reminded himself, the quickening of land with Machines had been considered supernatural in the first place. Who was to say what “supernatural” was? He’d made no claims that were not true, and none he was not backing with his life. Was it worse, really, for people to assume what they did than for Stefred to believe that psychic powers were against nature? If Lianne were to display her gifts openly—not only the gifts he, Noren, had been shown, but others at which she’d merely hinted—the villagers and Technicians wouldn’t be the only ones to believe they were seeing miracles.

He was once again besieged with pleas for blessings; people approached him whenever he emerged from his door. During his journey, he’d been so dazed by his new role that, except during rites, he’d pronounced the words of the benediction mechanically. Now he searched the faces of the suppliants and tried to convey personal warmth each time he said them. Once he wouldn’t have been able to do this; he perceived that he had grown. He knew more about giving than he had in the City. And he knew the pattern of his years was formed: to give, and receive nothing; to live, as had the First Scholar, without hope of attaining more than the world’s future good.

And then one morning as he raised his hands for the hundredth time in the formal gesture of benison, Noren froze, seeing an upturned face so like Lianne’s that he must be dreaming.

It was not Lianne, of course; it was not even a woman. The man who knelt before him had… what? Not piercing blue eyes—though the eyes were what drew him, they were green, not blue. Not white hair or near-white skin. The impression of resemblance had been an instant, instinctive thing that didn’t bear up under analysis. Or… could it have been a purely mental resemblance? Yes—not likeness, but the touch of a mind similarly trained. A powerful telepathic touch. He knew, in less time than it took to say the blessing, that the skill behind it was greater than Lianne’s and would be used at a far deeper level.
Don’t panic
, he told himself.
Reach as you would in controlled dreaming, open your mind to whatever experience may come; nothing will happen to which you have not consented
. And in the next moment he realized he’d not told himself this at all, but had been wordlessly informed.

They paused only a brief time; no one nearby noticed anything strange. But to Noren it seemed that hours were passing. There were no words, it was not silent conversation. He sensed none of the man’s thoughts as he had sensed Lianne’s, and though he reached out for knowledge, he was given none. Instead, all he felt—all the pain and uncertainty and longing, the anguish of exile, the hunger to search out truth, all the fears and regrets of his past, the grief for those he had lost… and, too, all his hopes for the future, all his faith born of commitment to them—rose to the surface at once. He was engulfed, overwhelmed. His head roared and light blazed behind his eyelids; he was reeling… .

He opened his eyes and met calm green ones that held not reverence, but something quite like it: a mixture of sympathy and awed, startled admiration. “Reverend Sir, I am honored by your blessing,” the stranger said with sincerity.

Struggling to maintain his balance, Noren repeated it. “May the spirit of the Star go with you—wherever you may travel.”

“May it abide with you also,” replied the man softly, rising from his knees, “and with all people of this earth, until the Star’s light falls upon them and the Prophecy comes to fulfillment.”

It was a farewell. This could be no one but an alien from the starship, which meant the starship had returned for Lianne. They would be leaving: in mere days, or even hours, they would leave this world forever. Noren knew he had been examined and found equal to his task; he knew, as he had long known, that he would receive no help with it. He had not expected them to relent, had not even wanted them to, in view of the cost—the decision had been his, and he did not wish to alter it. He should now rejoice, for he had just been told specifically that his sacrifices were not vain, that not only survival, but fulfillment of the Prophecy, was judged assured.

But he did not feel like rejoicing. When the stranger had gone, Noren retired into his house and threw himself down on his moss pallet; and for the first time since leaving the City, he wept.

*
 
*
 
*

Several days passed. Noren got through them with set face and level voice, but his hard-won, precarious peace had been shattered. No fire of hope warmed his words of blessing. He felt no joy at the sight of the flourishing green seedlings that meant salvation of the world. For him the light had gone out, as in due course, the lights of the City would flicker and then fail. He had saved his people—but he was no longer able to care.

He was not sure why this was so. He had learned nothing from the alien’s visit that he’d not been expecting, and the only words said to him had been a confirmation of faith in his world’s future. Furthermore, he’d received clear assurance that he need not doubt his fitness to fill the role in which fate had cast him. Why then did he doubt more than ever? Why did he not just fear, but know, that his strength would not last a lifetime?

Lianne’s departure? But he had known for years that she must leave his world. His last night in the City, he had faced how much that mattered to him; still he had risen from their bed and walked out through the Gates alone. He should be buoyed by that memory, not crushed, for if he had done that, he’d have courage for all lesser things—only he did not think he’d be able to do it twice. It was a foolish point to be unnerved by, Noren thought miserably. That was one test to which he would not be brought again. Lianne was gone.

No. He was not certain she had gone yet; the starship had arrived, but had not necessarily departed… and before it left, Lianne might come to say goodbye.

That was the source of his despair, Noren perceived suddenly. She might come, thinking him strong, and he would not be strong enough. He had the power to make her people stay. He had only to say he was quitting; that he was not a prophet, not a savior, but human; that it was their job to save worlds, not his. They were not gods, but neither was he—and he was alone while they were many. He’d done all that could be asked of him. He could return to the City with Lianne and let them finish what he had started.

As he thought this, lying sleepless on his pallet while dawn brightened the stone casing of his window, he looked up and Lianne was there.

It was telepathy, he realized, not coincidence; he’d never have guessed she might come had he not sensed that she was close. She had left the City by darkness, and under cover of darkness the alien shuttlecraft had brought her here. It must be waiting nearby to return to the starship. They’d hardly deny her a brief visit; Lianne too was human, and in love.

As she stood in the doorway, her hand white against the matting she’d drawn back, he felt her love sweep over him: a far more powerful mental radiance than she’d loosed within the City’s walls. He understood that this was the telepathic mode natural to her, and that love heightened it, that physical love would heighten it still more. She had suppressed it to spare him, even during their one night together; she hadn’t wanted him to glimpse what he was giving up. She had not wanted to show him what true intimacy was among her kind, what powers his own mind could attain, through love, that no less intense experience could awaken.

But now it seemed she herself was weakening; her thought was more for him than for his world’s welfare, or even for the bright realm to which she’d soon return. Their loss of each other was a grief that would be with her always. And Noren found that what hurt most was not anything he had sacrificed, but the heartbreak he had caused her.

He lay motionless, not daring to go to her. “Lianne,” he said, his voice flat and remote. “Don’t come in. Don’t even speak to me. Leave quickly, while there’s still a chance.”

She moved close, ignoring the words. A blue blur brushed his cheek as she bent down, the sleeve of her robe… how odd that was; he’d never seen Lianne robed before. All these years, despite Stefred’s puzzled disappointment, she’d been adamant about refusing priesthood. She had remained unwilling to make a sham commitment lacking permanence. Now, he supposed, she’d had to wear a robe in case people saw her enter his house, and after all, no Scholars would ever know. Yet if she did encounter people, they’d kneel to her! That would be still worse than it was for him. She would feel she had no right to pronounce the blessing.

“Please go,” he repeated, not looking at her face.

“Don’t you want me here?” It wasn’t really a question, and her voice was light; in the emotion he sensed, love overpowered all pain.

Noren sat up, resisting the urge to take her in his arms, knowing that even to kiss her would mean defeat of the cause to which he’d given himself. “You know how much I want you, how much I’ll always love you,” he said tonelessly. “But you don’t know, I guess, that I have limits. Maybe you think I’m as superhuman as the villagers do. By the Star, Lianne—” He broke off, aware that the phrase, in this case, was not profanity; he meant it seriously. “In the name of the Star, I ask you to leave this world before all that’s behind us loses its point. I’m on the verge of cracking up right now. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get my nerve back after you’re gone; but if you tempt me to keep you here, I’ll do it—at the cost of everything we both believe.”

She dropped to the pallet beside him and took his face between her hands. “You won’t have to,” she said. “I’m staying.”

Stunned, afraid of the thoughts that idea roused in him, Noren drew away from her touch. “Staying? You’d let the ship go and come back for you another time?”

Very quietly Lianne said, “It won’t be coming back, Noren.”

He stared at her, appalled. “That’s not possible. Your people wouldn’t abandon you.” He wanted her to stay, yes, but not at that price. Not if she’d be exiled from her heritage, as he was from his.

“They haven’t abandoned me,” she told him. “I chose.”

“Chose
this
world, when you could have the whole universe?”

“Not quite the whole universe. There’s a lot more to it than this galaxy, after all. Everybody’s got boundaries, and life is life, on one world or a thousand.”

“I—I can’t look at it that way,” confessed Noren dazedly.

“I know you can’t. That’s one reason I’m here.”

“To enlarge my prison by sharing it? Lianne, what good would it do me to know you were suffering, too?”

“Oh, Noren. I’m not going to suffer, not as long as we have love.”

Abruptly, he grasped the whole of what she was offering. She would not stay in the City; she was no more free to return there now than he was, for she’d have told Stefred she was joining him so as to spare Stefred’s feelings by not disappearing unaccountably. She meant to live here, in Futurity. She would share not only the exile, but the commitment—that was why she had assumed the robe.

But how could she? “Your oath to the Service—” Noren protested.

“I won’t violate it. The Oath demands that I put the best interests of your people above all else, but my being with you isn’t contrary to them. I won’t be intervening. I’ll be living just as you do.”

As he did. Years without respite from the oppressive heat she found so taxing outside the towers; hard physical labor in the fields, using Stone Age tools she’d never before handled; isolation not merely from her heritage but from such sources of knowledge as she’d had in the City, poor as they were by her own civilization’s standards… . And, too, the burden of priesthood among people not even her biological kin: people who, once they discovered the healing powers she wouldn’t deny them, would venerate her in a way not merely symbolic. Whatever she said now, she would suffer. And she might not always have his love, for there was still danger that the genetic change would prove unsafe, still a possibility that he might fail and die for it. If the people turned against him, Lianne might die too. Or she might be left to grieve—she might outlive him in any case, for the lifespan of their species wasn’t the same; she’d already lived more years than he had, perhaps many more, and yet she didn’t age as fast. For her to stay with him awhile was one thing, a thing she evidently wanted to do. But she must not send her people away forever.

“Surely someday they’ll come back for you,” he said.

“No. Besides, I don’t want them to. I couldn’t bear to have you come to hate me.”

“I could never hate you.”

“You could, and would, in time, Noren—if the starship were going to return for me, yet not for you.”

He was silent. She was right, of course; he wouldn’t be able to suppress envy—but he wouldn’t have let her know… .

“I’d know. I’m telepathic, remember? But even if I weren’t, I’d have known, whatever worlds I went to, all the rest of my life.”

Noren drew Lianne to him, embracing her, no longer doubting his own self-control. He had feared he’d not be strong; now he knew better. He loved her too much to be anything else. His destiny demanded sacrifice, but hers did not, and he would not let her suffer for his sake. If she must go with the ship or remain permanently, then he must make her go.

“Lianne,” he said slowly, “you once said I was born to be apart. That’s true. I am what I am, and you can’t soften it. Maybe it all has meaning, I don’t know—I guess neither of us knows the why of things. Maybe my losing everything,
everything
, is in some way necessary to the future of this world; anyway so far it’s seemed to be, and I don’t mind paying that price. I’m not paying it for nothing. The man who came from the starship affirmed the Prophecy—”