“To whom? To the thirty billion dead?” She began to cry hysterically.
He felt tears on his own face. “Dearest,” he murmured, “dearest, we can’t know. We can’t see what end we serve; we know only that there’s no one but us to keep up the struggle.”
“I—I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t, knowing what I do.”
“You’ve known for weeks, as we all have. Nothing has changed.”
“It has! Before, it was theory; we were told it would happen, but it wasn’t real. Now all the worlds are consumed, The universe is empty—empty! No one can live knowing that! The people on that planet will die when they find out, as I am dying now.”
“You’re not dying,” he said soothingly. “The doctors will cure you, and you’ll feel differently when you’re well. Trust me, dearest. I won’t let you die.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “Darling, there’s no cure. I . . . couldn’t face it . . . I took some pills.”
“Talyra!” he cried out. The sights and sounds of the dream were fading; he was aware only of the woman who had gone limp in his arms. Somewhere in the background he could hear voices, faint and far away: “An overdose . . . three people so far . . . if it’s affecting us this way, we who knew beforehand and bore the knowledge, those who didn’t know are bound to be crushed by it.”
He looked down at his wife’s colorless face, and it was Talyra’s face; Talyra’s eyes looked up at him, and she was not dying, but already dead. He wept, and the voices receded further into the distance. “The others may give up too, when they hear.”
“No!” Noren exclaimed, his own voice as remote and unreal as the others. “They will not hear; I now see that we mustn’t tell them. If we don’t, they’ll have no way of knowing, for the new world is so many light-years away that the nova will not be visible there for generations.”
* * *
Noren awoke wrenched by sobs, deep, silent sobs over which he had no control. Talyra . . . he’d been holding her in his arms and she was dead, dead because civilization was gone and humankind was gone and it was futile to go on trying. The whole human race was going to die out.
At the sight of his surroundings, he came abruptly to himself. Talyra wasn’t dead. It had been the wife of the First Scholar who had died. Moreover, the human race had somehow lasted after all. Why had it, when its doom had seemed so sure?
Stefred stood in a corner of the little room, his back turned. Noren sat up; his feet touched the floor and found it solid, though in the wrong place, somehow. “Why didn’t things happen as the people of the fleet expected?” he asked.
“Do you think there was real danger?” Stefred replied, his voice giving no clue as to what he himself thought.
“There must have been,” Noren said positively. “Even though the nova was kept secret—which I’m still not sure was right—there didn’t seem to be any way around the other problems.”
“The First Scholar found a way,” said Stefred, coming to Noren’s side. “If he hadn’t, none of us would be here.”
“It was something frightening, something he felt awful about,” Noren recalled. “He—he had the idea, but I just couldn’t get hold of it.”
“His plan was not in this particular recording,” Stefred told him. “It’s hard when you reach for a thought that won’t come; but Noren, many of the First Scholar’s thoughts are too complex for anyone who knows little of the Six Worlds. They can’t be made available until a person’s ready to understand their significance.”
“There are other dreams, aren’t there?”
“Yes. But they keep getting rougher. You need not go on unless you choose to.”
“I want to go on, sir.” Noren took deep breaths, steadying himself, and then burst out, “Why did she have Talyra’s face?”
“A dream is more than a recording,” Stefred explained gently. “Each person experiences it differently, depending on what he or she brings to it. The recording contains no sounds, no pictures, but only thoughts; and when you as the First Scholar thought of the woman you loved, her face came not from his memory, but from yours.”
“Will it work that way with other things?”
“It may.” Stefred looked at him with sympathy. “Perhaps you’ve wondered, Noren, why it was necessary for me to give you drugs during your inquisition; perhaps you felt it an indignity. I had no choice. It wasn’t that I suspected you of lying, but merely that I had to know more about what’s buried deep in your mind than you could have told me while you were fully conscious. There is an element of risk in these dreams, for with some people they can stir memories better left untouched, and I don’t want you to be harmed.”
He spoke as if he cared, Noren noticed with wonder. Why should he care whether a heretic was harmed or not?
Another thought hit him, an appalling thought. “Sir, I—I’ve drunk impure water! I didn’t believe before—”
“How often, Noren?” asked Stefred gravely.
“Five or six times, maybe.”
“Don’t worry about it. The damage is done only if you drink more than that.”
Noren sighed with relief before he recalled that he was not going to live long enough to father children in any event. Somehow, despite his grim prospects, he had stopped thinking of what lay ahead. He even found Stefred’s prediction that he wouldn’t mind sharing the feelings of the First Scholar to be quite true. “What . . . became of him?” he faltered, as Stefred took his arm for another injection.
“You must experience it in order to understand. We’ll proceed now; you’re taking this well, and I see no reason to delay.”
After that Noren lost track of time. He was never fed, but neither was he hungry; they controlled all bodily needs with injections as they controlled sleep. He was not plunged directly into the dreams without sedation as he had been the first time when, Stefred admitted, they had been making one last attempt to see if he could be panicked into capitulation. Since then they’d attached no apparatus to his head until he was unconscious. During his periods of awareness they questioned him searchingly as to his impressions; he was required to think the experiences through. Then he would sleep again, and dream again.
Someone was always with him when he awoke: usually Stefred, but occasionally the young woman who operated the Dream Machine. She was a Scholar, he was sure, for she knew what was in the dreams and discussed them. He no longer saw any Technicians; that seemed strange until it occurred to him that it was feared that he, who disapproved of secrets, might give some away.
At first he was puzzled because the woman Scholar wore no robe; but since Stefred rarely wore his either, he concluded that the robes, which he’d learned were mere outer garments that covered ordinary clothes, were put on primarily when it was necessary to impress someone. Except for the sexes dressing alike, Scholars looked just like anybody else. Noren had once thought them ageless, as did all villagers, but this woman seemed very little older than he was; and when he stopped to think about it, he realized that within the City there must be other young ones, even children. How did they feel about things? he wondered. Were they, too, frightened when they were first made to dream?
He was still frightened; he grew cold with apprehension every time he was given an injection, for being the First Scholar was not at all enjoyable; yet he wanted to keep dreaming. Stefred would grant him respite if he asked, Noren knew, but he couldn’t do that. It was not just a matter of pride. It was more a matter of an unquenchable desire to know all that had happened, however dreadful those happenings might have been.
He understood, of course, that dreams were proving certain aspects of the Prophecy; that had become evident when he’d absorbed the truth about the Mother Star. Gradually, Noren became aware that they were also proving something else. This awareness was painful, but the pain of giving up long-cherished theories was overshadowed by the First Scholar’s suffering, which he found bearable only because of his knowledge that others—including the young woman—had
borne it and had survived. If they could, so could he! After all, the First Scholar himself had borne it, and as Stefred had pointed out, for him it hadn’t been a dream from which he could wake up.
But the First Scholar had not survived. Somehow, without being told, Noren knew that the final dream would end with the First Scholar’s death.
* * *
He was back in the room with the white table, again surrounded by the members of his staff, and this time he knew he must present the plan. He must make them accept it, though he was well aware that they would not like it any better than he did himself.
“It’s easy enough not to tell the research station people about the nova,” someone was saying, “but it’ll be a good deal harder to explain why no more supply ships are going to arrive.”
“We won’t explain,” said Noren.
“But sir, we can’t hide that! We mustn’t even try to, because if we do, they’ll wear out the equipment too fast. There’s got to be rationing.”
“There’s got to be more than rationing. People must learn to do without any offworld equipment at all in their daily lives.”
“That’s impossible. We know they can’t survive that way, at least not as human beings. If they drink unpurified water too often, the next generation will have subhuman intelligence.”
“They can survive as long as somebody treats the soil, irradiates the seed, provides rain through weather control, purifies additional water, and vaccinates them against disease.”
“Who’s going to do that after we die?”
“Our successors.”
The man at his left frowned. “We’ve been over all this. I thought it was agreed that our successors will lose their technology if they live in a primitive fashion.”
“They will,” Noren replied. “So the only answer is that they must not live in a primitive fashion. To develop the viewpoint they’ll need to carry on our research, they must live in a city where technology is preserved: a walled city within which the power plant and the computers and all the essential equipment can be kept safe for posterity.”
“That contradicts what you just proposed about learning to do without such equipment in everyday life,” objected another man. “And besides, when the population expands, there won’t be enough to go around.”
“Within the city very little expansion will be possible.”
“We need population growth,” a woman protested. “You said so yourself only yesterday.”
“For the world as a whole, yes. And outside the city we’ll have it; a primitive agricultural society will expand there even more rapidly than the ancient ones, which knew nothing of medicine.”
Everybody stared at him, suddenly grasping the implications of what he was saying. Their eyes were large with dismay; though their faces were indistinct, the eyes seemed huge. “You’re suggesting a caste system?”
Noren paused; to the First Scholar, the thought of some people being allowed to live in a manner that others weren’t permitted to share was serious heresy indeed. “Yes,” he heard himself declare. “There is no other way.”
There was a cold, shocked silence. “I think you’re right, sir,” one of the men finally conceded. “It could work; those in the city could act as custodians of the equipment and the knowledge, and at the same time they could do the research that would someday enable machines to be manufactured through synthesization of suitable metals. That would solve everything. It’s a brilliant idea, but it has one insurmountable flaw: we can never get the majority to accept it.”
“We certainly can’t,” others agreed. “People won’t vote for a scheme that puts some in a city with all the equipment while the rest are left outside with none. They wouldn’t even if they were aware of the emergency, let alone if we keep the nova secret.”
“I know,” Noren admitted painfully. “There is no possibility whatsoever of establishing such a system by vote.”
“Then we’d better not even propose it. It would be tragic to let them vote down their only chance of survival.”
“I’m glad you see that,” he replied gravely. “I thought I’d have to argue more.”
The faces were blank, for no one yet perceived his meaning. Noren was just beginning to perceive it himself, dipping deep into the First Scholar’s memories in his efforts to understand. The government of the Six Worlds had been wholly democratic, he realized. For countless years no dictator had imposed his will on any of those worlds’ people; the very concept of tyranny had all but died out; that he should suggest that they seize power was beyond his companions’ comprehension.
Noren felt as if he were split in two. He was still the First Scholar, and he shared the First Scholar’s misery; yet at the same time he was enough himself to see that the terrible, radical plan was simply that the Scholars should control the City and its contents without giving the villagers a voice in the matter. And to these Scholars, that was heresy! It was the worst heresy any of them had ever heard.
But it was a different sort of heresy from his own. The First Scholar did not believe that his plan was right; he did not believe that the world ought to be as he was trying to make it. He hated his own words even as he said them. Yet he knew that he must say them, for he was describing the one way in which humanity could be saved from extinction.
“There will be no violence,” he continued. “We will simply build the city and bar the research station people from entering. They know as much as we do about how to utilize what natural resources there are; they can manage very well if we treat enough cropland, establish weather control and a supplementary water system, and provide them with seed and fertile eggs from our cargo. They are not armed, so they cannot resist us—”
The blank faces came alive with emotion: shock, horror, anger. “You’re not serious! Impose this by force? We’d be setting ourselves up as dictators—”
“The people will remain free,” Noren declared. “They will govern themselves; we’ll assume no power over individuals, nor will we interfere in local affairs. We will control only the offworld equipment and the knowledge that would otherwise be lost.”
Voices assailed him. “Control knowledge?” they cried, aghast. “You are taking us back to the Dark Ages! If there is anything that should never be controlled, it’s the right of the people to know.”
“Yes, a Dark Age,” he admitted, “a Dark Age through which our knowledge will be preserved and passed from generation to generation in secret, while the people forget what they once knew. They must forget the Six Worlds; all memory of that vanished civilization must be wiped out so that a new and lasting culture can grow. Otherwise they cannot bear the loss, and there can be no second chance.” He realized with despair that he was arguing against everything he had ever believed, everything he had cared about; yet he could not help himself. And Noren knew that this feeling was not his alone, but was also the First Scholar’s, for to him, as to all his companions, the most sacred thing in life had been the free pursuit of truth.
“He is not himself,” someone murmured. “The death of his wife has unbalanced his mind.”
“His wife was right,” the man opposite him said in an ominous tone. “If it’s come to this, we should have died with the others.”
Grief overwhelmed Noren: grief for his wife, for the Six Worlds, for the ordeals now confronting the survivors. “This plan has been in my mind ever since I assumed leadership of this expedition,” he said quietly. “I shall bear full responsibility for it; I shall not put it to a vote even here among ourselves. Thirty billion people who are now dead charged me with the task of ensuring that something would outlast them. I must fulfill that mandate by the only means open to me.”
“You are insane,” asserted the man angrily. “We of the Six Worlds managed to abolish totalitarianism after centuries of oppression and strife; it was the greatest achievement of our civilization. It would be a poor memorial to those who died if the thing to outlast them was a renewal of that evil.”
“There
will be no totalitarianism. As I said, the people will have self-government.”
“You advocate forced stratification of society! That’s evil, too.”
“It is an evil.” Noren answered wretchedly, “but in our present situation it’s a necessary one.” He was appalled to hear such words from his own lips.
“Aren’t you aware that nearly every dictatorship that ever came into power termed itself a necessary evil?”
“Yes, I am,” said Noren, astonished by the things of which the First Scholar had been aware. “But by ‘necessary’ they meant something quite different from what I mean. They meant necessary to whatever they happened to value higher than human freedom.”
“There is nothing of higher value!”
“True. And we’re not going to abridge anyone’s freedom, nor yet the freedom of the new world’s society to develop in its own fashion. We’ll merely be withholding things that cannot last long in any case if we fail to act.” He hesitated; the plan was complex, and there were parts that could not yet be revealed even to his companions, parts that—as Noren—he found beyond reach. There were also justifications so foreign to his past experience that they slid by hazily in the dream. . . .
“. . . we must choose between imposing a stratified culture and allowing the human race to die out,” he found himself continuing. “Such a choice never arose before. It never could have arisen on the Six Worlds. But we face it now; have we really a choice at all?”
“Yes!” cried his antagonist with rising fury. “I’d prefer to die than to become a dictator.”
“So would I,” agreed Noren in anguish, “so would I. But I would not prefer to let our whole species perish, so I’ll stake my life on the rightness of this course. I shall carry through the plan. If you want to stop me, you will have to kill me.”
The man stood up. He had grown taller, it seemed; and though his features were still dim, he had become more real, more individual. “If I have to, I’ll do it,” he said. “I will kill us all, if need be! I’ll blow this ship to space dust before I’ll allow it to be used as an instrument of despotism.”
This Star Shall Abide Page 17
