The Doors of the Universe

by Sylvia Engdahl

  Then somehow the data had been randomly garbled. CAN SEX BE DETERMINED? Noren inquired, groping.

  ON THE BASIS OF MATCHING CHROMOSOME PAIRS, SEX IS FEMALE.

  What kind of garbling would leave the pairs intact? It just wasn’t reasonable, even if one assumed that the computer program could garble input data, which it never had in any other field of science.

  Noren, nonplused, recalled the original data from temporary storage and ran a comparison. The two samples were identical; whatever the problem, it wasn’t sporadic. He asked specific questions about physical characteristics, most of which were answered with the comment iNSUFFICIENT DATA—and this, had the sample really not been human, would be logical, since lacking a map for the species being analyzed, the program would be unable to locate the particular genes involved. There was just no characteristic he could pinpoint.

  Or was there? He had used the blood sample only for genetic data, but short-term memory still contained other data about the blood itself. Personally, he knew little about blood proteins, but he realized that the program could analyze them in much the same way that it could analyze the genes that coded for them. And it could compare them against norms. Slowly he entered appropriate commands.

  The blood was nearly human. There were, he was told, abnormalities, but none so great as to make the program insist it had come from some nonhuman species. Yet the genetic content of the same blood was undecipherable! It was as if the hundreds of thousands of genes that made up Lianne’s genotype had been shuffled; not even those that coded for proteins found in the sample could be located on their chromosomes.

  COULD THE INPUT BE FROM A MUTANT HUMAN? Noren asked doubtfully.

  NO MUTATION OF SUCH MAGNITUDE COULD PRODUCE A VIABLE ORGANISM. THE EVOLUTION OF THIS GENOME WOULD REQUIRE MILLIONS OF YEARS.

  Transfixed, Noren stared at the words while a stunning thought surged into his mind. On impulse be keyed, WHAT WOULD BE THE RESULT OF CROSSBREEDING BETWEEN THIS FEMALE AND A HUMAN MALE?

  CROSSBREEDING WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE, the screen declared. CONCEPTION COULD NOT OCCUR.

  She had not said, “I can’t bear a child,” he remembered suddenly. She’d said, “I can’t bear you a child.”

  And she had told him from the beginning that she was different.

  This different? A different species? But there weren’t any other human species, not here, not anywhere the Six Worlds’ starships had traveled. The only proof alien civilizations existed was the sphere left on this planet by the Visitors who’d come and gone long before the arrival of his own people’s first exploratory team.

  The alien sphere . . . a communicator, Lianne had guessed—she’d been sure it hadn’t harmed Talyra’s baby. Might she not have been guessing at all? Could Lianne herself be alien, an emissary of some off-world civilization brought here by the sphere’s activation?

  Incredible as that was, it would explain a lot.

  She had been arrested in a village where no one knew her. There’d been a barrier in her mind Stefred could not get through; she’d admitted frankly that she was keeping secrets from him. The City had not awed her, and she had understood the dreams fully from the very first, suffered as if she’d grasped what destruction of populated worlds would be like.

  She knew techniques Stefred hadn’t taught her. She had incredible insight into things, and into people’s feelings. . . .

  But she’d been surprised by the crowing of a rooster. She found hot sunlight hard to bear and had spoken wistfully of trees as if she had seen real ones.

  Over and over again she’d shown she did not think as village women did . . . or, for that matter, as anyone else did.

  Noren’s heartbeat quickened as the implications bit him. Lianne—not of his species, born into an alien civilization? But she’d come here on a starship, then! He wouldn’t have thought the radiation from the sphere able to cross interstellar space, but there might have been emanations the computer system couldn’t detect. There must have been. If the sphere was a communicator, it must be a faster-than-light communicator; he’d turned it on less than a year before her entry to the City, and there were no other solar systems less than a light-year away.

  The Six Worlds hadn’t had such communicators. Only their ships had traveled faster than light; that was why no news of the nova had reached this world except through the Founders. But there might be a civilization with faster-than-light communication capability, a more advanced civilization. It might respond to unexpected signals.

  Such a civilization would have metal . . . it could help!

  Why Lianne alone and not a whole team of aliens? Why the secrecy? Why hadn’t the help yet been offered, and why, when Lianne understood how he felt about isolation from the universe, had she not let him know that he would not be cut off forever?

  There must be answers. He could not bear to wait till she revealed the truth in her own time. He was, Noren told himself, quite possibly hallucinating in any case; it was too fantastic, too good—literally too good—to be true. Yet everything fit! The more he thought, the more pieces he found that did fit. He would have to confront her with the evidence.

  Methodically, suppressing excitement he feared would consume him, he set about transferring the evidence from computer memory to a disc.

  * * *

  To sleep the rest of the night was impossible, though Noren knew he should get some sleep. Stefred had told him that when Lianne woke from the training dream, they would spend all morning discussing it, might even have their noon meal brought to Stefred’s study. He’d been warned not to appear with the results of the blood test until later in the day. Now, he didn’t want to take the results to Stefred in any case, not till he’d seen Lianne alone. The delay he must endure before seeing her stretched endlessly ahead.

  He sat in his room, going over the evidence on his study screen, and watched sand dribble slowly through his time-glass. Surely, he thought, more hours had gone by than it indicated—perhaps it had gotten stuck. Yet as always when tense, he craved solitude, so he could go nowhere to check the time. Aside from the courtyard’s stone sundials there were only a few clocks in the entire City. Time-glasses must serve to measure passage of hours in personal quarters, for small though the traces of metal in electronic or mechanical timepieces would be, the world did not have even small traces to spare. Or rather, it had not . . . now, all at once, there was going to be metal! Each random thought heightened the thrill of it. Noren clenched icy hands and willed the sand to run faster. He could not see people, make casual conversation, with a secret like this on his mind. He could not act as if nothing had happened, as if the world were not about to be transformed.

  It was as if the Mother Star itself had indeed sent supernatural aid. There was nothing supernatural about an alien communicator, of course. And yet the fact that he’d crashed at just the right place in the mountains, that Talyra had spotted the sphere and that he’d climbed the cliff to retrieve it simply as a gesture for her sake. . . .

  Had she died to summon help for the world?

  To be sure, the sphere’s radiation evidently hadn’t harmed her. Still, the mountain water might have caused teratogenic damage—if not, what had been accomplished by the deaths? He had thought he’d found an answer. Those deaths had led him to study genetics. But genetic change wouldn’t be necessary now! Not if an alien civilization, a civilization with metal, had come.

  Strange . . . Lianne had encouraged his genetic work. Why, when she’d known all along that it was needless? The acquisition of knowledge was never a waste, he supposed; since for some mysterious reason she must postpone the revelation of her identity, she’d undoubtedly thought genetics a more constructive occupation for him than futile worry about synthesizing metal that could be supplied in its natural form.

  But why had she wanted him to risk having a child with altered genes? She’d given herself away over that, admitted a physical abnormality, when she could simply have said she didn’t believe human experimentation was ju
stified. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t! Her urging him to go ahead didn’t make sense, unless . . . could it be that there was no real risk involved? A person from an advanced civilization probably knew enough about genetics to gain access to the secret file. She must have studied not only its original content, but what he himself had stored in it—she must know his work was accurate and would be successful.

  Was there anything Lianne’s people didn’t know?

  All his life he’d sought knowledge. As a boy he’d been taught that the Scholars knew everything; he’d assumed, on becoming one of them, that he could learn. And he’d indeed learned, Noren thought ruefully—he had learned that too much was unknowable. Though he’d faced this limit when necessary, he had often repressed the thought of it, living day by day without stopping to envy peoples elsewhere in the universe who really did possess the knowledge his own civilization lacked. Could he have gone on that way for a lifetime?

  No, he thought as he lay back on the bed, shaking with the release of feelings he’d kept below the surface. He could never have borne it. In time it would have destroyed him, just as living in the village, shut out of the City, would have destroyed him. How could anyone aware of the universe live with closed doors?

  The doors of the universe shall once again be thrown open. . . . Not till now could he fully acknowledge how much he cared. He had said it mattered only for future generations’ sake. For one’s own sake it was adolescent to care, or so he’d told himself. Growing up was learning not to let oneself long for the unattainable. At least it was called “growing up,” but wasn’t that merely an excuse for hiding from the pain of longing?

  The open universe . . . he’d waited years, hopelessly. Now he did not see how he could wait through another half-day.

  At noon he went to the refectory on the chance she would appear, but she didn’t, though he waited till no more food was being served. She might, he supposed, have eaten in the commons open to Technicians, though that wasn’t her habit. Or she might be still with Stefred. What could she discuss with Stefred during all those hours of “training”—Lianne, who knew far more, probably, than Stefred himself? To be sure, her own culture’s psychology might be very different from this one’s. Perhaps that was why she’d chosen psychiatric training; perhaps her people felt they must understand his thoroughly before any open contact could be made. In any case, she’d been right when she’d remarked that Stefred would give anything to know her secrets. How stunned Stefred was going to be.

  Noren looked for her in the computer room, where he now suspected she must spend most of her free time. There was no sign of her. He resisted the temptation to try Stefred’s study, for if she was there he could say nothing, and if she wasn’t, Stefred would ask about the blood test. Instead he tried the medical lab; he tried the gym and other recreation centers; finally, in desperation, he went to Lianne’s own room, discourteous as it was to visit someone’s quarters uninvited. He knocked, but there was no response.

  All afternoon, as he combed the Inner City, his tension grew. By suppertime it had become intolerable. He returned to the refectory early, to be sure not to miss her, and ate less from hunger than for a reason to linger inconspicuously. When he was finished with his food, he got back into line and refilled his mug with ale. It took the edge off his nervousness. There was nothing else to do while waiting—more than ever he shrank from the idea of talking to anyone, particularly to Brek and Beris, who, fortunately, were on the far side of the room and had not noticed him. He took pains, after refilling his mug the second time, to sit in a corner where they would not.

  When at last he gave up expecting Lianne to come, it was past time for Orison, which she rarely missed. That was the only place left to look. Entering the room late with the service already in progress, Noren stood in the back. He felt giddy, partly with extra ale but partly, too, because Orison still stirred him uncomfortably in a way he could not fathom. He wondered why Lianne, who hadn’t been reared by people who believed in its symbols, found it meaningful.

  His heart jumped; she was standing only a few rows ahead of him. Her face, raised reverently toward the symbolic sunburst, was more than solemn; he saw to his astonishment that there was worry in it, almost sadness. That made no sense at all. Lianne, above all others present, knew the Prophecy was to be fulfilled. He could understand if she were unmoved by the ritual phrasing. He could also understand joy, the joy believers felt, enlightened ones as well as the unenlightened—yet when he stopped to think about it, he could not recall ever having seen that kind of elation in Lianne. He had supposed she was simply too mature to start out with illusions, that she must sense what the experienced Scholars knew about the odds against survival. How could she not feel joy if survival was certain?

  The Mother Star is our source and our destiny, the wellspring of our heritage; and the spirit of this Star shall abide forever in our heart . . . . And so long as we believe in it, no force can destroy us, though the heavens themselves be consumed! Through the time of waiting we will follow the Law; but its mysteries will be made plain when the Star appears, and the children of the Star will find their own wisdom and choose their own Law.” No more waiting, Noren thought. No more mysteries. We will not have to find our own wisdom.

  The ritual dragged to a close. Noren pushed his way forward to Lianne’s side; at the sight of him, the shadow of sorrow in her eyes gave way to brightness. “There’s something I want to show you,” he said, keeping his voice as level as possible.

  On the way to his room they said little, for he could think of no way to express it. How did one tell somebody that one had found out she’d come from another world? He couldn’t possibly be mistaken, yet she seemed so—so normal. Her spirits were rising; it occurred to him she might have feared she’d lost his friendship by her refusal to have his child. He couldn’t guess how she’d react to his discovery. Would she look on it as a betrayal? With the confrontation at hand, Noren became aware that it mattered to him—how she felt mattered. He couldn’t think of her as alien.

  Wordlessly he pointed to the study desk, where the first screen of the disc he’d prepared was already displayed. Lianne sat down and began to read.

  Gradually, she whitened; her pale skin turned nearly colorless. Though she was obviously stunned, she didn’t seem angry and certainly was not bewildered—the data she was scanning surprised her only by being in his possession. She read through to the end without speaking, her very silence confirming his interpretation of her origin. Suddenly the silence terrified him. He’d hoped, underneath, that she would be glad she need no longer keep up the pretense. But the face she finally turned to him was a mask of pain and despair.

  “How did you get the blood sample?” she asked in a low voice.

  Noren told her. “We weren’t trying to pry,” he added. “We meant it for your good, Lianne. We never guessed we’d learn anything except whether you could be cured of barrenness.”

  “I know. The fault’s not yours, it’s mine. I said the wrong thing. I got—emotional. If I’d remembered how people in your world feel about sterility, I wouldn’t have blundered. I’d have told you I drank too much impure water as a village girl; you’d never have questioned that.” As she rose from the study desk Noren saw to his dismay that she was crying, not hysterically this time but silently, as if she were facing some profound and private grief.

  Puzzled, he guided her to the bunk and sat on its edge beside her, putting his arm around her trembling shoulders. “I know you must have some reason for not wanting to tell us yet,” he said, “but is it really so terrible that we’ve found out?”

  “We?” she inquired anxiously. “You haven’t told Stefred, I was with him almost all day—”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you first. I guess I felt I needed verification of anything so—tremendous. Lianne, you surely don’t believe I think less of you for it, do you? That I think of you as inhuman or something? Why do you mind so much having me know?”

  “Bec
ause it’s you who will suffer for my mistake,” she whispered.

  “Suffer? Oh, no, Lianne! I suppose you mean you need to keep the secret awhile longer. If that’s important I’ll go along, and you’re right that it’ll be hard for me—but I’d still rather know than not know. Even just the knowledge that we’re to be saved—” He broke off, perplexed. “Why did you say before that rescue’s impossible, that I mustn’t hope?”

  Lianne met his eyes. “I told you how things are.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is a great deal you’re not going to understand. And you will be hurt by that, as well as in other ways you can’t imagine so far. I’d have done anything to prevent it, Noren, because I—I care about you. I wanted your love, I wished I could have your child—that’s why I wasn’t thinking clearly. I betrayed my responsibilities, and I betrayed you, too, without meaning to. Now it’s too late; nothing can undo the damage.”

  “But Lianne, just because I know a little ahead of time—”

  “You weren’t ever meant to know.”

  “That you’re alien? But why not?”

  “You weren’t ever to know aliens came.” She drew away from him, pausing as if she needed time to collect herself; when she faced him again she was very calm, composed not just as she usually was, but in a way that made her seem indeed the daughter of a different world.

  “We would have to know eventually,” he pointed out, “I mean, when it comes to replenishing our world’s metal—”

  “Noren,” Lianne interrupted, “I’ve got to set you straight, and it’s best if I don’t put it off. You want the truth, I think, even if it’s not pleasant to hear.”

  “I’ve always wanted the truth.”

  “And today—all the hours you couldn’t find me—you’ve been building your hopes on the idea that you’re about to receive it, all of it, from my people. That we’re here to give you metal, restore the Six Worlds’ lost civilization and more.” He had the odd feeling that she was drawing this directly from his mind, though she knew him well enough, he supposed, to have guessed that he personally expected more than the Prophecy’s fulfillment, that it was her people’s knowledge that excited him most.