“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?”
“As much as I’m able to give you,” she replied, her voice low.
“I mean the part you don’t know. Does the Service tell individuals facts that can’t be announced openly to their cultures?”
“Occasionally, if there’s urgent need. It must be done very subtly. In this case, to prevent the harm that would result from disclosure of our existence, it would have to be managed in some way that would make your possession of advanced knowledge seem natural both to your fellow Scholars and to this world’s future historians. That may not be feasible. And the time may not be ripe for it in your era—it may be that the genetic change must be thoroughly established before the next step is taken.”
Resentment flared in him again. “They’d let me live my whole life in ignorance of what they foresee? It’s not fair.”
“Life’s never fair to people who set out to change things. In the normal course of progress, strength to strive can hinge on not knowing the future. They won’t tamper with that course unnecessarily.”
“What if I’m not strong enough to keep striving?” Noren began—but then, in a stunning flash of insight, he knew. All Lianne had told him in the past meshed as with a kind of awe he stated slowly, “The decision is mine. It has been, all along. If I quit, they’ll step in and give us aid.”
“Of course.” Lianne’s eyes glistened. “I never denied that it’s in your power to make them do it.”
“I—got things backwards. I believed if I proved deserving enough, I could gain help. I thought they were testing me.”
“You mean you wished they were.” She tried to smile, adding, “Not being tested is harder. I know; I’ve lived both ways, just as you have.”
He’d been living, since his discovery, for the day when he would pass their test and feel triumphant. Now, uncertain not only of his strength but of his talents, would he be right to go on gambling with infants? It wasn’t as if he had no option. . . . He savored a bright vision: open contact with the alien culture; ships landing, unloading more metal than anyone had seen since the Founders’ time; the Prophecy fulfilled in his generation, cities rising almost literally overnight in accord with the villagers’ naive expectations. The caste system abolished forever. Knowledge freely available to him and to everyone, not merely the Six Worlds’ stored heritage, but greater wisdom than the Scholars dreamed could exist. If open contact was deemed unavoidable, there’d be no point in further delay. One word from him, and he could have all he’d ever longed for; his contemporaries could have it too . . . and there would be no more defective babies.
But it would mean the loss of his people’s potential. Overshadowed by older species, they would never evolve to Federation level. Future generations would pay the p
rice.
“You have the power to decide,” Lianne repeated. “At the start, I had it. I could have lied in my initial reports, said there was no one here fit to carry your people forward. But I judged that you and Stefred and others I’d met would want to be the ones to pay.”
There was nothing else to be said. After a while, when he felt able to talk without weeping, Noren went to arrange the rite for his dead son.
Chapter Nine
In the days that followed, Noren immersed himself totally in analyzing what had gone wrong with the genetic change. His error could not have been avoided, he found—it had not been a stupid mistake or even a careless one. And it had been made initially by the geneticist of the First Scholar’s time, whose design he had followed. She, like himself, had been forced into human experimentation long before it would have been tried if test animals had been available. Success at so early a stage would have been almost miraculous.
With painstaking care, he redesigned the change and went back to the Outer City’s labs to prepare a new vaccine. He injected himself with it to make sure it wasn’t virulent, but that, of course, proved nothing about its genetic adequacy. It must be tested on someone whose genes hadn’t been previously altered. His agonized doubt over whether he’d have the courage to perform such a test was mitigated, somewhat, by the fact that he saw no immediate chance of finding a volunteer to perform it on. As long as he was busy, he pushed that problem from his mind.
He continued to preside at religious services whenever his turn came. Lianne insisted that a sincere commitment to priesthood was indispensable to his task, rather than simply a means of gaining power among the Scholars; but she would not explain further. She seemed deeply troubled by the issue. “The knowledge of your course must grow from within you,” she told him. “It’s not beyond your reach, not something you need outside help to discover. To give you specific advice wouldn’t do you any good—while you’re unready to face it, I’d only cause you more pain.”
“Lianne,” he protested, “I’m ready to face anything. I’ve never backed off from the truth, not knowingly, and I won’t start now.” Which she ought to realize, he thought indignantly.
“It’s because I do realize it that I believe you have a chance of achieving the goal,” she replied, grasping more than he’d said, as always.
“I can tell you’re not happy about what you’re concealing,” he said forthrightly, “and I wish you wouldn’t try to spare me. I’d feel better knowing the worst.” Actually, he was sure nothing could be worse than the things to which he’d already resigned himself. The prospect of more pain did not seem to matter.
“There’ll be time enough to worry about it later,” Lianne declared. “I’ll say only that winning the villagers over will demand greater sacrifices than you’ve considered.”
Greater than the sacrifice of contact with her civilization? She did not know his mind as well as she seemed to, Noren thought in misery. Even so, he’d lost peace of conscience, the ability to have children, all hope that the Six Worlds’ technology could be preserved. He’d accepted the likelihood that he would end his days in exile at the now valueless research outpost beyond the mountains. “I’ve considered becoming a martyr like the First Scholar,” he said dryly, “but giving up my life wouldn’t do any good—and barring that, I don’t think there’s anything left for me to give up.”
“That’s because you don’t see how much you have to lose,” she observed sadly.
Contemplating this night after night, Noren confessed inwardly that it did dismay him, not so much because he minded being hurt—he felt past minding, numb—but because of his evident blindness. Why could he not perceive what Lianne foresaw? He tried, yet it eluded him. The fact that the means of gaining village support for a change in the High Law eluded Stefred also, and that she apparently expected no insight into it on Stefred’s part, didn’t cure him of self-doubt.
He saw little of Stefred these days, but Lianne was, of course, a go-between. Stefred allowed Noren to go his way without interference, presumably because he did not guess how far he had gone. Not guessing, he must feel that he, Noren, had turned his back on constructive science, that his youthful promise had gone sour; the thought of this was hard to bear. Some said such things openly of him. He now argued for genetic research and was viewed less as a threat to the established order than as the City eccentric. It had happened before, he’d heard: Scholars disillusioned in youth had become fanatic champions of impractical schemes, and while their right of free speech had been respected, the quality of their judgment had not. He must list the admiration of his peers among his losses, Noren knew, although never having cared much what others thought of him, he did not count it a great sacrifice. The loss of his closeness to Stefred was something else again. He missed that, and like Lianne he hated the deceit he was forced to practice upon the one man in the City most worthy of confidence.
He was free to study genetics; any Scholar was free to study anything—but to devote years to it, abandoning all pretense of research into metal synthesization, was out of the question. Genetic research fell in the avocation class, like art and music. Inner City people were expected to perform essential work, if not out of sheer dedication, then merely because they received food and lodging. Noren, as a trained nuclear physicist, volunteered for a shift in the power plant; and thereafter, since he spent even longer hours on the genetic work, he had a bare minimum of time left to eat and sleep. Fatigue added to his numbness, and for that he was grateful. Only work could insulate him from despair.
Veldry continued to attend Orison whenever he presided. One evening she approached him after the service and asked to talk in private. Too much time had passed for that to start gossip, he decided, and in any case he could refuse no request of Veldry’s. He went with her to her room, suppressing with effort the memories it stirred in him.
“Noren,” Veldry said, “the risk has to be taken again, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he agreed in a low voice. “I’ve—reconciled myself to that. Only there’s no one I can ask.”
“You could use a volunteer who doesn’t need to be asked.”
“I don’t expect to be let off that easily. Who’d offer, when there’s no support for genetic change even in principle?”
“I’m offering,” she told him simply.
“You—what?”
“I’m willing to try again whenever you’re ready.”
“Veldry,” Noren protested, reddening, “I thought you understood. You and I can’t try again; my genes are damaged, and if I tried to repair them it wouldn’t be a valid test—the risk to the child wouldn’t be warranted. The new vaccine has to be used before the man drinks unpurified water.”
“I do understand. The man doesn’t have to drink it, the woman can. Genetically it doesn’t make any difference which parent gets the vaccine, so I’m volunteering to be inoculated.”
“Oh, Veldry,” he burst out, deeply moved. “It’s brave of you, but you mustn’t have a baby who might die, not twice—”
“I lost my special baby,” she said softly. “I want another to take his place—and anyway, why should more people than necessary get involved before we know it’s safe? I’m already committed. It’s better this way, really.”
Perhaps it would be, Noren thought. It had meant a lot to her; perhaps the chance of a happy ending was worth the danger. He paused, embarrassed, wondering if she’d really grasped the extent of the risk she was taking. “What if I fail again?” he asked.
“You won’t.”
“I may. I refused to accept that, the first time; I told you the change I’d made might not work right, but I never actually believed it. Now I do, and it has to be considered.”
“I wouldn’t be the only woman in the world to have lost two children.”
“You’d lose a good deal more,” he reminded her. “You’d lose your ability to have normal ones.”
“I’ve had my share in the past.”
�
�That’s not the only thing,” Noren said bluntly. “There are only a couple of doctors in the City qualified to sterilize a woman, both of them senior people we don’t dare to confide in—”
“I’ve had my share of lovers in the past, too,” Veldry broke in. “I thought I’d made clear that I want to do something more with my life.”
“But—if you should ever find the man you’ve been looking for, the one who’ll see beneath your beauty and whose love for you will last—”
“Then it will last till I’m past the age to have babies, and if he sees beneath my beauty, Noren, he’ll know that’s not such a lifetime away as you think.” She smiled ruefully. “You’d be surprised, I suppose, if you knew just how old I am—but didn’t you ever wonder how it happened that I’d experienced the full version of the First Scholar’s dream recordings long before the secret one was found?”
He drew breath; he had indeed wondered, for he’d assumed she’d arrived in the City only a few years ahead of him, and young people rarely sought the full version. It hadn’t occurred to him that being beautiful might mask the usual effects of age.
“I ask just two things,” Veldry went on levelly. “First, I’ve got to have your permission to tell someone the truth about the first baby.”
“Well, of course. I wouldn’t do this unless the father of the second one was informed. May I—ask who it’s to be, Veldry?”
“No, you can’t,” she replied. “That’s the second thing; I may never be able to name him to you, though I’ll get you a blood sample.” After a short pause she added slowly, “I may have to tell more than one person, and I can’t consult you about who. Do you trust me to choose?”
“You mean you’re just going to . . . persuade somebody?”
“I’m in a better position to do that than you are, after all.” Bitterly she continued, “I’ve got one asset, which has never done either me or the world any good. Is it wrong for me to take advantage of it the one time I might accomplish something worthwhile that way?”
The Doors of the Universe Page 27
