The Doors Of The Universe (45 page)

So at last, beyond the end of the road, Noren came to Futurity; high on a knoll, looking out toward the Tomorrow Mountains, he chose its site. At sunset the people climbed to it in wedding garb: red skirts for brides, red-trimmed white for those already married, with white tunics for everyone but him. He himself wore, as always, the blue robe—and it occurred to him that he would be the only person there that night who would sleep alone.

They stood in a circle around a blazing moss fire as one by one, the couples exchanged vows and received his blessing. When the solemnities were over someone started a song, and the others joined in while two went to the campsite to fetch ale for the toast. Returning, they said to him in puzzlement, “Sir, most of the jugs are empty; there’s not even any water—”

Though he’d been waiting for this discovery, Noren felt a sick chill of fear. If their trust in him was not strong enough, the whole scheme would fall in ruins—and he found himself worrying less over his own fate, or even the world’s, than about the feelings of these young people whose wedding night would be spoiled. How had he had the audacity to think he could make the occasion joyous for them?

He kept his voice calm. “This is the mystery for which I’ve prepared you, for which the rite set you apart from your generation. We drink water fresh from the land, here; fill the jugs from the stream and you will not be condemned. A day will come when the High Law is changed, but you and your children need not wait for that day. Here grain will grow in unquickened fields—did you think you were not to harvest it, though that too is now contrary to the Law?”

Their eyes widened in shock. They had been reared to believe that eating or drinking anything impure was not only sinful, but likely to have dire results. Even those who suspected that prevalent nursery tales were exaggerations knew that to consume impurities, or merely to use pots made of unpurified clay, was an offense equivalent to heresy for which one would be sent to the City in bonds.

After a long pause one woman spoke out, saying, “Reverend Sir, you are testing us, lest having been honored, we might think ourselves above the Law. Perhaps also you test again our willingness to endure hardship. There is no need. We will go thirsty, and hungry, too, if you ask it of us. Rest assured that we won’t defile what is sacred.”

Aghast, Noren realized they’d naturally take it that way. Having picked the hardiest and most dedicated, he could well imagine their abstaining even through heavy labor within sight of the stream. They might persist till they collapsed, trusting him, ironically, to eventually provide them with sustenance. And though he could pronounce water pure by decree, that would do nothing toward freeing them from dependence.

“This is indeed a test of courage,” he said soberly, “but not the sort you suppose. I know what it is to deny thirst, for I have done so; once I came near death thus, seeing that to use impure water would be a wrong. Yet I have also done something else. I have drunk such water deliberately, in dread of the outcome, for the sake of those who may face an age when the City cannot supply the world. The Star did not strike me down for it.”

They all stared at him, amazed less by his impunity—for could not a Scholar do as he pleased?—than by the implicit admission that he was neither immortal nor exempt from fear. Noren stood up, opening the fastenings of the blue robe to show the commonplace clothes underneath. “Look at me,” he said. “I am human, a man like other men, although it has been given to me to know mysteries. I will not tell you impure water did not harm me. It did, for someone among the Scholars had to pay the price of new knowledge. But it harms me no longer and has not harmed anyone to whom I have done what I did to you in the rite of pledging; the spirit of the Star revealed to me what I must do. From that same source I have knowledge of how to make grain sprout in this wasteland. Someday all will have such knowledge, for does not the Prophecy tell us that a time will come when the Scholars no longer are guardians?”

The young couples remained very still, clinging tightly to each others’ hands; but he knew they were responding to him. “I forbade your families and friends to attend your marriage feast,” Noren went on, “because it must not yet become known what we do here. Village people would bring you to trial; they would send you to the City for the Scholars’ discipline, and from that I cannot, and will not, shield you if you are charged. But once Futurity’s land bears fruit, people’s feelings will change. They will acknowledge you subject to a new Law and will look forward to the age of that Law: the time when all land will be fruitful and all wedding feasts will be as this one.”

Slowly, the faces circling him took on confidence. “We will fill the jugs as you command,” said someone at last. And as several went to do so, Noren, striving to keep the mood to which he’d roused them, started a familiar wedding hymn:

May the Star of our hope be with us,

As the joy of this night we celebrate.

May the heirs of our love be many,

As the world of its light we await.

He took the water they brought him and mixed in a scant portion of ale. “This is a night of celebration,” he said, smiling, “and who would not wish ale on such a night? Yet it is also something more. That is what the water means: henceforth, when in love we give life to children, we are pledged not to the world that must pass but to the one that must come.” Raising his cup, he added, “I will drink first, and on my head be it. I have performed rites and made prophecies, and have not been struck down. Yet should they prove false, in the end I will be stricken. The Star’s spirit will be withdrawn from me; my priesthood will be nullified; I will be accursed in the sight of the Scholars, and indeed of all people, if I lead you unwittingly to harm.”

The cups were passed around, in readiness for the toast; people handled them not fearfully, but with awe. Plainly they believed in him. The only thing they did not believe, thought Noren in anguish, was his last statement. They did not guess there was real danger of its becoming the truest prophecy of all.

“To these unions: may they be fruitful and bring lasting joy.” Hiding the shaking of his hands, Noren drank; and all the others followed.

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The ensuing seasons were hard beyond measure. Looking back on them afterward, Noren wondered how anyone had endured. Backbreaking labor was, of course, taken for granted by farm and village people; the clearing of fields with stone tools and the erection of stone buildings did not dismay them. Hunger was a newer concept. Since the time of the Founders, the full burden of any food shortage had been taken by the Inner City, and a Scholar, by instinct and by training, shrank from the thought of villagers having to subsist on short rations. Yet though native plants could now be safely eaten, their taste was unpleasant; and alone, they were not nutritious enough to sustain anyone whose time was spent doing heavy work—they were no substitute for grain crops. Trusting Noren wholly, the people of Futurity would have expected their land to bring forth a harvest in the first cycle after clearing had he not warned that they must stretch the meager supply of grain their dowries and savings would buy. “I cannot know when the land will bear fruit,” he was obliged to tell them. Privately, he was afraid it might not happen before he himself, who took no more than one scant serving of bread a day, was close to starvation. He could have requisitioned supplies from the Technicians, but the power of his scheme lay in forgoing City aid. He must prove it was possible to survive without that; his people must put their faith in the new way.

Delaying work on their own homesteads, they built a dwelling for him, built it tall, at the summit of the knoll, although the stones couldn’t be brought by sledge when there was no road. It was not his idea; they did it out of love. Noren could not demur, for he saw that such a building was vital. Futurity was to be a new city, and the mark of a city in their eyes, evidently, was less the presence of actual towers than the presence of a resident Scholar. The Scholar must, to satisfy them, be fittingly housed. As he mounted his steps for the first time—steps unlike any ever built in a village—he found himself aware, with a stab of pain, that this might be where he would live out his years. Many years… even worldwide implementation of genetic change would not free him to leave these people. He owed them more than bountiful harvests.

The steps became the center of the community; he held Vespers there. Each evening after the service, the others gathered around informal bonfires, but he soon found that accompanying them put a damper on the fun. They revered him; they loved him—but they would not tell jokes or sing bawdy songs until he had retired into his house and shut the door. They’d have been shocked to know Scholars enjoyed such activities, and for him to say so would not be seemly. It would deprive people of something they valued. It was his good fortune to have been born a loner, Noren realized, because he could never again be anything but alone.

Once a small plot of land was cleared, his genetic work progressed. He ordered a radiophone sent out, and Technicians in the Outer City labs read to him from his data discs as instructed. When necessary they carried scientific materials to and fro by aircar. If computer analysis of genotypes was needed, they were told to leave the samples in a place where he knew they’d be found by Denrul—who was to have been informed of the situation by Lianne—but Noren communicated no more with Denrul than with Stefred or Lianne herself. His supporters in the City would keep track of his progress, for those who’d assumed the robe were as free to command Technicians secretly as he was. Direct contact, however, was out of the question. The safety of what he was doing depended on his complete repudiation by the City in case of failure; no Technician must be given grounds to testify that Scholars had done more than watch. He was honestly glad they resisted the temptation to send messages.

All the same, indirect contact with the City was harder to bear than the dreamlike detachment that had dominated the first weeks of his exile. Now again functioning as a scientist, he could not forget that his work would lead to the end of science—that his success would mean exile for others as well as for him. To his people, he spoke with hope of “the day when all the world will live as Futurity lives,” the day when no land would be quickened, no water piped from within the City’s walls. But on that day the City would begin to die. Was it true that in time a means of regaining technology would appear, or was Lianne’s faith in this only illusion?

Cities shall rise beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, and shall have Power, and Machines
. . . . He used those words in ritual and now considered himself honest. He had, in Futurity, dropped the capital letter from his conception of “cities” and no one had been dissatisfied, so no doubt the same would be true when it came to power and machines. He could accept that. He was willing to search for a truth beyond truth. And yet… Lianne had said that without technology, evolution would stop. That particular truth was more than metaphorical, at least it was unless the Service, too, was naive.

He did not often think of the Service. He did not even think of Lianne as alien. He’d be satisfied, Noren thought grimly, with the City and with the Lianne he knew; but they were as inaccessible now as the rest of the universe.

His plants, after a few terrifying setbacks, grew vigorously. On hands and knees with a stone cultivating tool, his robe cast aside in the hot sun, Noren laughed at the irony: this was the way he’d started, in his father’s fields, and he’d despised every moment of it. His brothers had derided him for lack of persistence. If they could see the effort he now expended on nurturing each slender stalk, they would think it a greater marvel than the vivification of unquickened land.

The people of Futurity were surprised less by the plants’ growth than by the fact that there were so few. “Did you think I could raise my hand and bring all the fields to life at once?” Noren chided, realizing as he spoke that they had indeed thought so. “It takes work! It is with plants as with people, as you well know: the seed of a few in time engenders many. I will give you seed for planting, but I cannot produce it any faster than these grain stalks can.”

So in the first cycle, “harvest” meant only seed for the test garden, though he held the traditional ceremonies. But on that day a greater event occurred. Stefred knew, of course, the date of the harvest festival, for this was fixed according to season zone, staggered region by region for efficient use of land treatment machines in the villages; the invariant climate had nothing to do with it. Thus it was that when Futurity’s citizens gathered for the Blessing of the Seed, Noren looked up to see an aircar appear unsummoned, bringing Technician women who gave three Wards of the City into his care. And the oldest of these children had Veldry’s features, but his eyes were like Stefred’s own.

The arrival of the children, which Noren placed with the couples to whom they had been promised, marked a change in the settlement. While there was still hard work and hunger, living became less camplike and more family-oriented. Many of the brides were pregnant, and though Noren could not banish all worry over that large group of genetically altered babies, sustained by unpurified water from the time of conception, he managed to conceal his mixed feelings. He kept up his dual work as priest and scientist, but was no longer required to lead in practical matters; Futurity elected its own council and began to make civil laws.

The new crop sprouted, a patch large enough to be seen from aircars. Word of green shoots in unquickened earth soon spread, for the Technicians, by whom it was also viewed as a miracle, had occasion to talk in village taverns. Despite lack of a road, people began arriving to see the wonder. Having expected this, the community had built ordinary rain-catchment cisterns so that visitors could quench their thirst, and the absence of pipes to the City was not noticed. The council also built a wall around the test garden; sightseers were charged a fee, not only to obtain much-needed funds for grain but to keep the precious young plants from being trampled. This Noren approved with considerable relief. His religious services, however, were open to all comers, and he now spoke of a time when the miracle would extend elsewhere. He mentioned, without emphasis, that this would bring changes in the High Law. The idea did not bother anyone. His status as a prophet was firm as long as both the plants and the adopted children were thriving.