“How could they have limited growth if they’d wanted to?” Noren asked. “I thought the contraceptive drugs used on the Six Worlds couldn’t be made here, and surely they wouldn’t have put anything into the High Law restricting love.”
“There are other means of lowering the birth rate, which the High Law forbids in language so archaic that few today grasp its meaning. By now, there’s no longer any need for it to do so—after all, you and Talyra wouldn’t want
not
to have children, would you, even though you can’t keep them?”
“To make love, and not wish for our love to be fruitful?” Repelled, Noren declared, “The idea’s unthinkable.”
“Yes, in our culture. On a crowded world it would not be. The Founders came from planets that were running out of food; they’d grown up feeling it was unthinkable for a couple to bring more than two children into the world. It wasn’t tradition that made them frame the High Law as they did; they had to alter their own fundamental attitude, although they knew they were deliberately cutting short the time the survival equipment and the chemicals for initial land treatment could last. With humankind so nearly wiped out, that was the lesser risk—but it was a risk all the same. There’s always risk in human affairs. We can never know exactly what the future will bring; we know only that things cannot and will not remain the same.”
“They’ve stayed the same here for a long time,” Noren contended.
“Unnaturally long, after the initial abrupt reversion of the villagers. That couldn’t happen if there were the resources to make normal innovation possible, and without the Prophecy, which makes even the villagers
want
change, we couldn’t survive it. If people can’t go forward they go backward; they don’t stand still.”
Quite true, thought Noren, but also quite irrelevant. The men—Emet, the head engineer, all of them—spoke as if there were just two alternatives. They were ignoring what happened when the promise proved false: when people could not go forward, and were thereby doomed to inevitable, though belated, extinction.
*
*
*
Talyra adjusted to the camp just as she had to the Inner City: with serenity. There was no work for a midwife, since because of the outpost’s short rations pregnant women had not been allowed to come; but minor injuries occurred frequently and as a nurse she was kept busy tending them. She also took her turn at meal preparation as cheerfully as the men accepted the farm work, though cooking was not a task she enjoyed. Hunger, which she had never known before, did not faze her. “We were warned before we came that it would not be comfortable here,” she declared, “but Noren, what does that matter when we’re actually helping to fulfill the Prophecy?” She gazed up at the towering spire and added, “When I was a schoolgirl I used to look at the mountains and wish I could live till the Cities rose beyond them. I never thought such wishes could come true.”
“And I always supposed you liked things as they were in the village,” Noren said, realizing how little he’d actually known her then.
“Nobody who believes the Prophecy could be content with things as they are!” she protested. “Oh, I know there are some who only pretend to be devout, and want life to stay the same forever; but it’s as much a sacred duty to prepare for the Time of the Prophecy as to obey the High Law. I was silly once; I imagined all the changes were going to come on the day the Star appears. I didn’t stop to think of how much work it would take.”
They were sitting alone by their own small fire, while dozens of other fires, stone-encircled, made glowing dots in the mossland that surrounded the moonlit tower. “Talyra,” Noren began hesitantly, “do you ever want to know more about the work than you’ve been told? Where the Scholars got the tower, for instance?”
“Of course I do,” she admitted, “but there’s much, after all, that’s beyond knowing.”
“I mean… do you still believe it’s right for the Scholars to have mysteries they don’t share?”
Talyra regarded him seriously, her face illumined by firelight. “Yes,” she declared. “The world is full of mysteries we can’t expect to understand. You still do expect it, darling, and I think that’s why you’re not happy—though I know it’s not a thing you should be blamed for.”
Stefred had been right about her, Noren saw. Talyra did not have the sort of mind for heresy. She was brave; she was intelligent; but though she would never want arbitrary power for herself, she perceived no evil in its being given to others, and that made her unfit to exercise the responsibility of a Scholar. If he’d wanted to assume the robe, there’d have been no need to postpone commitment longer for her sake. She would lose nothing by becoming technically ineligible for a status she’d neither seek nor earn. Yet he was still pretending that no final decision could he made about their marriage… .
The fire had burned down to smoldering ashes; Noren made no move to rekindle it. Drawing Talyra close, he kissed her, and for a little while his mind was far from the dark reaches of that which he could not know. The warmth of the moment was all that mattered… And then, abruptly, she pulled away, and he saw that she was crying.
“Talyra, what is it? What did I do?” he demanded.
“You—you haven’t done anything,” she faltered.
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing, except I realized that you don’t really want to be betrothed to me.”
Astonished, he burst out, “I’ve always wanted to be betrothed to you! Why should you question that now?”
She flushed and did not answer. “Darling,” Noren persisted, “haven’t I told you over and over again—”
Not facing him, Talyra murmured, “If you wanted me, you’d do more than talk about it.”
“But you know I’m not yet free to marry.”
“Are you also forbidden to love?” she demanded fiercely.
He sat up, not trusting himself to touch her, much less to admit how often his thoughts had turned in that direction. “That wouldn’t be fair to you,” he declared with pain.
“Why wouldn’t it? It isn’t the same now as in the village; when an Inner City woman has a child, she must give it up for adoption whether she’s married or not. I would not be dishonored, for our betrothal is public and everyone knows that I let no one else pay court to me. What more would marriage be except sharing quarters?”
“It would be permanent,” replied Noren.
“Are you suggesting that someday you’ll want some other girl?”
“Of course not! But suppose I can never marry you, Talyra?” He dropped his head, adding wretchedly, “There may come a time… soon… when I will know positively that I cannot; and you must then forget me, Talyra… and choose some other suitor.”
“I couldn’t! I never could! Do you think I won’t love you forever because I’ve not yet sworn it by the Mother Star in a marriage ceremony?”
“I haven’t the right to bind you, Talyra—that’s why the ceremony can’t be held. And I—I can’t bind myself either, in certain ways.”
“How can you say such things?” She began to cry again, quietly. “If you loved me, you couldn’t say them.”
“I say what I must,” Noren replied brusquely, knowing that he dared not let himself go further. So many of his once-firm principles had crumbled—already he’d delayed declaration of renewed heresy despite knowledge that the Prophecy was false. He could not count on himself to stand fast about anything.
What Talyra had said was true: there was no real reason why a betrothed couple should not make love, not when the rearing of families was impossible in any case, and when the bearing of offspring for adoption was, under the High Law, a virtue. Though in the villages it was shameful to father a child one was not willing to support, among Inner City people that did not apply. Yet he could not love Talyra casually; his feeling for her went too deep. Once she was wholly his he would be unable to endure the thought of her marrying someone else. Might not priesthood then seem merely one more step in the path of hypocrisy he had taken, and might he not assume the robe for the sake of freedom to seal their union?
In the days that followed, such thoughts worried him more and more. Maybe Talyra was the cause of his reluctance to speak out, he reflected. After all, once he announced formally that he was no longer willing to uphold the system, he would be isolated from the Technicians and would never see her again. Originally, in the village, he had not been stopped by that, but perhaps he was incapable of making the sacrifice a second time. As far as he knew there was no other reason for hesitancy.
The pressure within him built up. He was guilt-ridden by the rankling memory of the space flight, and equally so by his conflicting impulses. He could not trust his judgment any more. At times he hated himself because he had ceased to live by the code of honesty that had once meant everything to him; at others he thought honesty meaningless in a world devoid of ultimate truth; and it was hard to tell which torment was the worst. Inaction became unbearable—and so, with bitterness that masked his shame, he spoke at last to the one person in whom it was possible to confide. He confessed his hypocrisy to Brek.
Brek listened to the whole story, from the source of the panic in space to the facts presented at the conference, and he did not dispute Noren’s assertions, though it was apparent that he did not share the terror Noren had felt on discovering areas the computers could not deal with. It was not in Brek to probe the universe that deeply. What he did share was hot anger at the betrayal, at the idea that he’d been led to endorse a system that could not deliver what it promised. He too had recanted solely on the basis of that promise, and Noren’s statements about the scientific impossibility of fulfilling it were persuasive.
“I wasn’t sure,” Brek admitted. “Everyone goes on hoping, and I don’t have the math background to judge. But if
you
say the proof’s conclusive—”
“Absolutely conclusive.” Noren told him. “I—I’ve been weak, Brek, and I’m confused about a lot of things, but not about math. Mathematical truth does exist. It’s the only kind that’s really definite.”
“Good and evil are definite, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Noren agreed, that being one conviction he’d never thought of doubting. “And all of us—all the heretics who’ve ever become Scholars—believe that this system is evil! We accepted it only because extinction of the human race would be a worse evil, and we thought it could prevent extinction.”
“If it can’t—” Brek paused, torn by indecision. Finally he said, “Noren, if it can’t, it should be abolished; there’s no question about that. But declaring ourselves relapsed heretics wouldn’t abolish it, any more than the work we’re doing now sustains it. We’re not priests, and here, we live much as the villagers do. We haven’t any City comforts. We don’t have access to the computers or to dreams. Actually, we’ve got fewer privileges than we’d have if we were confined to the Hall of Scholars.”
Noren’s heart lightened; he had not looked at it that way. “The only privilege for us here is study,” he said slowly, “and that, we can give up.”
“Even the math?” inquired Brek, scrutinizing Noren closely. “Are you positive that when you’re so gifted—”
“The advanced fields would not be open to me if it weren’t for my rank,” Noren said firmly. It was a small price to pay for peace of conscience, though math was the one pursuit that had offered him temporary mental distraction.
Week followed week. The Day of the Prophecy, observed annually on the date of the Mother Star’s predicted appearance, came and went; Noren was appalled to find that the Scholars went right ahead with the usual celebration. In the villages this was the most joyous festival of the year, surpassing even Founding Day, and in the Inner City it was also customary to make merry. It seemed monstrous to do so under these circumstances. All the same, people followed the traditions. Though no one had green holiday clothes in camp, the women baked Festival Buns for supper instead of ordinary bread, and after an exceptionally solemn and elaborate Vespers, there was dancing. Noren was obliged to participate for Talyra’s sake, but he loathed such pretense.
Upon abandoning his studies he had volunteered for an additional shift in the grain fields, where he labored far more industriously than he ever had in his father’s. The work was still hateful to him, a fact that brought him satisfaction of sorts. Crawling on his hands and knees along a furrow, stone cultivating tool in hand, he could almost forget that he had ever recanted. He could almost forget that he had become a Scholar, thereby implicating himself in fraud that was none the less real for being unintentional.
Almost, but not quite. He
was
a Scholar, and moreover, his fellow Scholars’ attitude toward him seemed to be changing. Although at the time of his disastrous space flight, they’d shown no signs of the contempt he was sure they must feel, he now noticed that their friendliness had cooled. Why? Noren wondered. No Scholar looked down on farm work. It had always been emphasized that one was free to do whatever available work one chose, though one could hardly expect to receive one’s living if one did none at all. Could it be that the others despised themselves too, underneath, for not having the honesty to acknowledge the pointlessness of research even to the extent that he had acknowledged it?
He mentioned this to Brek one evening; but surprisingly, Brek was dubious. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said slowly. “No one was upset when
I
stopped studying. But you—you’ve too much talent to waste. People feel that you’re letting them down by quitting. They’d all hoped the foundation for a new theory might come from you, that you’d develop into some kind of a genius.”