“Game? Do you suppose that’s all it is to me?”
“I’d like to believe it’s not. I guess I do believe, now, that you’re sincere about wanting to help us even though you’ve been taught not to interfere. But you aren’t stuck here, as we are. Lianne, the City isn’t our real prison—this planet is! All of us who’ve been through the dreams know that we and our people have been deprived of our rightful heritage. You’re pretending to share that sentence when you’re really free. That’s the deceit I can’t ignore, not that your genes are different or that you concealed your origin from Stefred. It doesn’t matter that you believe the same things as a real heretic, that you’re willing to suffer or even die for them. When you submitted to the sentencing, you were lying, and so you’re not a real Scholar—you’re acting the part without paying the price.”
He could feel her surge of emotion, not anger at his accusation, but a mixture of sorrow and guilt. “I haven’t overlooked that,” she said quietly. “It’s why I haven’t assumed the robe.”
Noren was speechless; it had not occurred to him that Lianne would see more in religion than a mask for secrets. He’d been assuming she wasn’t a priest because she supported the genetic change that would make fulfillment of the Prophecy’s promises impossible.
“Stefred doesn’t understand, of course,” she continued. “He’s eager for me to do it because I can’t appear at inquisitions unrobed, and he feels that by now I could help new candidates more than the Scholars he’s been using as assistants during the open questioning. That’s true; and I’d like to take part in ritual, too . . . I’d like to give hope if nothing else. But you are right, Noren—I am not wholly committed. There are roles I can accept here, but not priesthood.”
“For you it wouldn’t be a religious kind of priesthood anyway, even if your ship never came back,” Noren argued, “so why does it matter ethically whether or not you wear the robe?”
“Why wouldn’t it be religious? That’s what priesthood is.”
“Well, you don’t believe in the Star—”
“Do you?”
“Not the way some do. I don’t believe there are any supernatural powers out there for it to symbolize. But it’s come to mean something to me, it stands for truth I can’t reach—I need that. You don’t.”
“Oh, Noren.” She did not have to use words; attuned now to the emotional channel of communication, he perceived for the first time what Lianne had been trying all evening to convey. No one can reach all truth. Even people who’ve visited many stars can’t, people whose resources aren’t restricted. But the more one does know of the universe, the more one longs to reach further . . . and the harder it is to accept one’s limitations.
“Lianne, I—I take it back,” he said awkwardly. “I think it could all be real for you. Even priesthood could.”
“No. When a priest speaks the ritual, he or she acts as spokesman for the people; that’s universally true. I have no right to be your people’s spokesman. I am limited, but not by the same set of barriers.” She smiled and touched his hand. “Don’t think I lack sources of faith. I have my own symbols, after all.”
“You do?” Almost before the words were uttered Noren was thinking, Sorry—that’s a stupid question.
“It’s not stupid. You associate the need for them with your own world’s unique problems—you’ve never been in a position to generalize.”
He absorbed not only her reply, but the feeling behind it. “Are the problems of other worlds . . . hard, Lianne? As hard to face as ours?
“For individuals, often a great many individuals, they are worse. You’d know that if you’d ever had to fight in a war.”
“I’ve been more naive that I thought, I guess. I’ve read what the computers say about the Six Worlds’ wars, yet I can’t picture them as—reality.”
“Reading doesn’t tell you enough. In the Service we are taught such things through controlled dreaming,” Lianne replied grimly.
“Dreaming? But then when Stefred began it with you—”
“I was afraid,” she acknowledged. “You’ve got to hear the rest of the story. But since you asked a question, I’ll answer it first; I’ll warn you where the story’s heading. For individuals, Noren, life can be worse on many worlds than on this one, and the more immature the civilization, the more suffering people undergo. For whole species, though, the problems are soluble. The suffering leads somewhere; it’s part of evolution. Your species is experiencing an interruption of evolution—perhaps an end to its progress. That is far more serious than problems of other kinds. It’s terrible in ways you’ve not yet conceived. Alone, you would not become aware of them.”
“I want to be aware of them,” Noren declared, inwardly dismayed by the cold terror he’d begun to feel. I’ve always wanted the whole truth; why am I afraid now, almost as if I were undergoing another dream?
He needed no answer—he knew the fear was hers as well as his, that telepathically he was sharing her emotions, much as in controlled dreaming one shared the feelings of the person from whose mind the recording had been made. Lianne was truly afraid for his people. She was not forcing this rapport—he had freedom to reach for it or shut it out, and as always in the dreams, he chose to reach.
* * *
Stefred had been unable to scare Lianne during her inquisition; they had reached an impasse, for measures extreme by his standards could not frighten her. She had been taught more than he could guess: not only self-assurance, but methods of controlling her physical reactions. He suffered far more than she did, both from the seemingly harsh tactics he was forced to employ and from his knowledge of the tragedy that might ensue if they failed to challenge her sufficiently.
Ironically, that was the turning point. When Lianne sensed Stefred’s growing fear for her, she herself began to feel terror.
She could draw no facts from his mind; she knew only that he was an inwardly compassionate person whose ostensible cruelty was designed to protect her best interests. She’d understood all along that he was testing her rather than attempting to break her, but she had assumed it was to satisfy himself of her sincerity. Now she perceived that he’d been satisfied for quite a while, that the point still at issue was her own awareness of strength; he was preparing her for some mysterious ordeal from which he could not save her. He pitied her even as he strove to ensure that she would meet it with confidence. Lianne could not tell whether Stefred’s view was shared by all Scholars or whether he was simply one admirable man playing a dangerous game within a society of tyrants, but she knew he was powerless to spare her the suffering that lay ahead. No hint of its nature came through to her except that in his eyes, the face in store for her would be permanent, and bravery would be her sole defense.
Till this point, she’d expected she could learn the City’s secret and then be rescued in some way. Stefred’s feelings made her realize it would be more complicated. There might be no chance of rescue; she might face ceaseless, futile punishment; worst of all, she might learn nothing to justify her sacrifice. But she did not falter. The unanticipated terror hit swiftly, and it took only an instant for her to pass from fearlessness to courage.
Though she showed no outward sign, Stefred was sensitive enough to her emotions to be immediately aware of the difference and to see that she could now be safely enlightened. Thus her fear was compounded, for his inner relief was mixed with worry. He could not guess why she’d slipped suddenly to the verge of panic; could the foregoing stress she’d withstood too well have brought on a delayed reaction? For the first time he found himself dealing with someone he could not understand—someone he must subject to the dream sequence without anticipating what unusual problems she might face in it.
If he had foreseen how great those problems would be, or if he’d been aware that had he shown her the Dream Machine in the first place there’d have been no need to bother with any other stresses, he might never have dared to begin the dreams at all.
At the moment he judged her ready for enlight
enment, they were not in his study, where the initial steps were to take place. As he escorted her through the corridor, they passed the dream room, the door of which stood open with complex equipment, sinister in appearance to the inexperienced, plainly visible. “Take a good look,” Stefred said casually. “If you persist in your refusal to recant, you will spend a great deal of time strapped into that chair.” The remark wasn’t meant to be cruel; it was a routine instance of the tactics he used with everyone: a true statement that was unnerving when heard as an implied threat, but heartening when remembered later as one successfully withstood. In the light of Lianne’s proven fortitude, he expected her to gain an immediate sense of triumph. To his astonishment and dismay she nearly stumbled against him, her face ashen, and in that moment their fear fed each other’s.
“I’m glad he’ll never have any suspicion of how rough he made my last hours of ignorance,” she told Noren, “because he’d be horror-stricken by what was in my mind.”
“You recognized the function of the equipment, I suppose,” Noren reasoned, “and if they train you to understand things like wars that way, no wonder you were nervous. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“We’re conditioned to fear controlled dreaming, yes,” she agreed, “and not just because it’s the only means of showing us evils that don’t exist in our own civilization. It’s through dreams that we’re taught to meet fear itself—after all, we couldn’t be seriously afraid of our own instructors. I’m used to training dreams, I don’t mind them however scary they are. But there were worse possibilities.” She turned to him, her eyes large with remembered terror. “Some cultures use controlled dreaming in ways Stefred is too innocent to imagine.”
“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.
The Doors of the Universe Page 23
