The Doors of the Universe

by Sylvia Engdahl

  Appalled, he could do no more than stand silent. He had not known the equipment well enough to foresee that possibility.

  Lianne turned to face him. “I won’t, of course—which you realize, or you’d be calling this session off. So get into the chair.”

  He obeyed, discovering that now that the moment was upon him, he was terrified. The First Scholar had warned that this dream might not be harmless.

  “We’re going to have to trust each other,” Lianne said quietly. “I won’t tell Stefred—and you mustn’t tell him that I know more skills than he’s taught me.” She tilted the chair all the way back and then with quick, deft fingers she unfastened Noren’s tunic and began taping monitor electrodes to his chest.

  “Lianne, how can you possibly—”

  “Know how to monitor? That’s like asking you how you got hold of a recording with a seal that’s been intact since before your grandparents were born.”

  He remained silent as she adjusted the band to his head. “I didn’t have to be so honest with you,” she pointed out. “I could have attached the monitors after you were asleep. But you’re too tired to be plunged into this without deep sedation; I’ll bet you haven’t closed your eyes since the night before last. I’m going to put you into trance, and for that, you’ve got to trust me completely. You’ve got to know I’m hiding no more than I’m required to hide—and that I’m competent.”

  “Stefred hasn’t taught you deep trance techniques yet, either.”

  “Hardly.” Her voice was even, yet somehow reassuring. “Nevertheless, this isn’t the first time I’ve used them. And there’s something else we need to consider. If you fear you might speak openly to Stefred under hypnosis, you might to me. I won’t probe, but if you talk freely—”

  “You wouldn’t understand enough of it to matter.” He looked up into her face and then murmured, “Or would you?”

  “It depends on what you mean by ‘matter.’ You say you’ve no underlying determination to hide the dream content, yet you were ready to risk physical shock rather than confide in Stefred.”

  “Well . . . Lianne, it’s not just a—a personal thing. Stefred couldn’t treat it as a medical confidence. It may be relevant to fulfilling the Prophecy, so he’d be obligated to tell the whole Council.”

  “I’m not bound to that yet. I haven’t assumed priesthood.” She appraised him thoughtfully. “But you have.”

  “Yes.” He saw that he would have to say more. “If a person’s been given cause to suspect a conflict could arise between fulfilling the Prophecy and following the First Scholar’s plans, what should he do?”

  “In your place,” she declared, “I’d be sure I knew all the facts before getting the Council involved. And Stefred is one of its senior members.”

  Noren didn’t answer her. Lying still for the first time since last night’s inspiration, he found his mind beginning to drift. It touched questions he’d overlooked before. Genetic alteration of humans . . . but how? The analysis and modification of genetic material itself was something he’d studied; it would surely work with human cells as well as animal ones. But how would that help? The work-beast modification had been done on embryos. There’d been no room aboard the starships for animals; the embryos had been transported in test tubes. They had in fact been conceived in test tubes on the Six Worlds: an agricultural technique he had read about. Such a thing could hardly be arranged with humans, even if people would tolerate the idea of it, which of course they would not. There was only one way of conceiving babies, after all; the mere suggestion of interference would be indecent . . . and besides, there just wasn’t any means by which. . .

  He felt his face grow hot. Lianne was bending over him; he caught sight of a monitor light flashing red. It was a good thing her “gift of empathy” didn’t extend to the actual reading of minds.

  “I’ll put you in trance, now,” Lianne said. “I won’t use quite the routine you’re used to, but it’ll work the same if you want it to.” As her hand closed on his she added seriously, “Being scared of the dream is all right. But you mustn’t be nervous about me. I understand all kinds of feelings. I suppose you don’t expect that from women, even Scholar women.”

  “Old ones, maybe, who’ve been priests for a long time.”

  “But the young ones, scientists or not, are still influenced by village customs. Noren, I’ve never thought the way the villagers do.”

  “Of course not. You became a heretic.”

  “I don’t mean just that.”

  An idea came to him. “Were you accused of witchcraft?” That could explain a lot. Most alleged witches, village women reputed to have strange powers, were innocent of real heresy and were given Technician status if condemned and delivered to the City; but there were occasional exceptions. And according to Stefred, some witch-women did use hypnosis.

  Lianne laughed. “Witchcraft? No, but I probably would have been if people had known more about me. I’m—different. I can’t pretend not to be.”

  “I used to feel that way myself, sometimes. As if I belonged in some other world.”

  Very quietly she said, “That’s a good way to describe it.”

  “I think if I’d heard then about the Visitors, the aliens who left the sphere we found in the mountains. . . Do you know about that, yet?”

  “Yes,” Lianne said. “I do. I’d like you to tell me more, though, Noren . . . only first you need to sleep. . . .

  She was skillful; he didn’t have time for apprehension.

  * * *

  As in the other dreams, he was the First Scholar, but retained consciousness of his own identity. He was standing in a wide space within the inner courtyard of the City—it was a time when not all the towers had been erected, so he knew it was some years before the end of the First Scholar’s life. The images of the dream, having been recorded as a long-ago memory, were less clear than in most. But the emotions were strong. Though he could not yet comprehend them, Noren was immediately aware that these were the undefined emotions of his nightmare.

  Reaching out as he’d learned to do, he found he could gain no quick understanding of his situation. It was like his first experience in controlled dreaming, when he’d lacked the background to interpret what came into his mind, when he had sensed only that the First Scholar’s underlying thoughts were acutely painful. He would not grasp what was happening till he heard words spoken by himself and people around him; he must confront it one step at a time.

  And the feelings were worse than those in the earlier controlled dreams. There was horror of a different sort from the horror he’d felt while watching the nova, or during the Founders’ reluctant seizure of power. Then, he had been horrified by things outside himself. Even while letting the village people think him a dictator, he’d known that he was not what he was forced to seem and that he was not going to hurt anybody. Now he knew the course he planned might bring someone harm. Indeed, it might bring harm to one intimately close to him. . . .

  “It is unthinkable,” said the man who stood beside him.

  “So was our sealing of the City,” Noren replied. “That went against all our ethical principles, too.”

  “Yes, but we had no choice. There was no other chance for human survival,” the man replied. The personalities of the First Scholar’s companions were dim in the dreams, for he’d focused not on them, but on issues, in recording his memories for posterity. Noren was aware, however, that this man was one of his best friends—they were discussing something that to the Founders as a group would he unmentionable. “We supported you,” the friend continued, “because you convinced us that without preservation of the City, our grandchildren’s generation would be subhuman. It’s presumptuous to tell you that my conscience bears a heavy load. I know yours bears more than mine, and that you suffer from it. I will simply say I cannot bear a heavier load than I now carry—nor can any of us. We could not violate ourselves as you ask even if we saw justification.”

  “Do you not see it? D
eath of our human race will be just as bad generations from now as it would be for our grandchildren.”

  “Will be? Generations from now, a way to synthesize metal will have been found! The technology can be maintained indefinitely then. The City will be thrown open, and more cities will be built. That’s your own plan; you’ve made us believe in it—”

  “It is my hope,” said Noren in a low voice. “And I have planned for its fulfillment. But it is not sure.” With dismay he realized, as himself, that the First Scholar had never been sure! In the full version of the officially-preserved dreams, he had experienced these doubts and the despair to which they led; but there had been editing, the First Scholar’s own editing, still. What he was feeling now had been removed. This was not just discouragement, not just lack of proof that synthesization of metal could be achieved. It was rationally based pessimism akin to what he, Noren, had developed later, when there’d been many years of unsuccessful experiments. From the beginning the true odds against success had been concealed.

  “Think,” he found himself saying as the First Scholar. “There are avenues our descendants can try; nuclear fusion may indeed prove the key to artificial production of metallic elements. But what if it’s inherently impossible to do it that way? No doubt metal can be synthesized, but a likelier route to that goal would be a unified field theory—a way to transform energy directly into matter. You know that as well as I do.”

  “If nuclear fusion won’t work, the unified field theory will be developed. Past physicists have failed, yes, but they never gave it top priority, as our successors will.”

  “There won’t be the facilities to develop a unified field theory, let alone test it,” stated Noren bluntly. “If that weren’t so, I’d have taken that route to begin with. But it would demand an accelerator larger than the City’s circumference, containing more metal than we’ve got tied up in the life-support equipment. You’d know that, too, if you weren’t afraid to think it through.”

  “You’re treading on dangerous ground,” replied his companion, after a short pause. “You’re coming close to telling me that we have sacrificed peace of conscience in a futile cause, that those who died aboard the starships—your wife, for instance—were perhaps wiser than we were.”

  “No! There is a chance for survival in what we’re doing; otherwise there’d be no chance at all.”

  “That’s not good enough. Most of us couldn’t live under this much stress without full belief in the goal.”

  “I know,” agreed Noren. “That’s why I’m approaching people individually with the alternate one.”

  “Oh? I assumed it was because you have the decency not to discuss obscenities in front of the women.”

  “I have approached some women,” he replied quietly. “This thing is not obscene. You are too blinded by tradition to be objective. The Six Worlds are gone, now. A taboo on human genetic research should never have existed even there—but here, it is as meaningless and fatal as our taboo against drinking unpurified water would have been on our native planet.”

  “That may be true. Yet I tell you I’d risk extinction rather than experiment with the genes of my unborn children, and I don’t think you’ll get any different reaction from the others.”

  “I know that, too,” Noren confessed. “You are the last person on my list, and it’s true that the rest reacted as you did. All except . . . one.”

  He, the First Scholar, allowed the memory to surface, and as Noren he accepted it, letting the despair engulf him. Only one supporter . . . just one whose intelligence, whose natural faith in the future, overrode the conditioning of her rearing—and perhaps it was for his sake that she’d opened her mind. Why should she bear the whole burden, she for whom he cared more than anyone else in the whole City?

  Dimly, in the part of himself that was Noren, he felt surprise. The First Scholar had not remarried in all the years he’d lived after the death of his wife. There were no thoughts of love in any of the other dreams. It was a thing many Scholars had found strange—no grief for his wife remained in the later recordings, and his own plans for the new culture encouraged the production of offspring. It was odd that he had not set an example, for in all other ways he had lived by the precepts of the High Law he’d designed. Now, the thoughts coming into his mind made plain that far more editing had been done in the official record than anyone had guessed.

  But though they were thoughts of love, they were not happy thoughts. The recording, of course, had been made many years after the events with which it dealt. The mental discipline required to make such a recording, keeping later emotions below the surface, must have been tremendous. Noren perceived that the First Scholar had not wholly succeeded—the horror of his feelings was not all apprehension; there was recollection involved also. In the dream it was like precognition. Terror began to rise in him. He was doomed to proceed step by step toward disaster.

  “You acknowledge, then, that we must continue as we’ve started?” asked his friend.

  “Yes,” he agreed shortly. He had approached only the people he felt might be receptive to an even more drastic plan than the one he’d originally set in motion. They had rejected it. He’d foreseen that they would, but he had been obliged to try. There was no further step he could take to win open support. He must pursue the alternate course in secret, since he was unwilling to let future survival rest on the nuclear fusion work alone.

  Yet there was risk. If anyone found out what he was doing, he would lose his place of leadership. His companions had accepted much from him, but for this, they would despise him and would vote him down. Even the original plan would then be doomed, for there were steps in it he had not confided to the others. There was the matter of his calculated martyrdom, which would ultimately be necessary in order to win the enduring allegiance both of the villagers and of the City’s future stewards. Without it, there would eventually be fighting. Those who told him no such system as he’d established could last without bloodshed were right; they did not guess that he knew this, and that he expected the blood to be his own. But it would not work unless he retained leadership until the time for it was ripe.

  Was he to die for nothing in the end? He was willing to die, but not without the belief that future generations would live. Synthesization of metal would save them, but it was by no means the most promising way to do so. He’d realized that from the start, though he’d edited this realization from the thought recordings. The recordings weren’t for posterity alone. They were experienced as dreams by his fellow Founders, and there was too much peril in confronting his contemporaries either with doubt about metal synthesization or with its alternative.

  Genetic engineering . . . the mere mention of it was branded as obscenity! The taboo was so strong that the way out of the survival problem had not even occurred to the biologists who’d worked on the animal embryos brought for beasts of burden. They’d genetically modified them to accept a diet of native vegetation, yet had never reasoned that the same principle might work on human beings.

  As things stood, the human race could never adapt biologically to the native environment. The damaging substance in the water and soil would result in offspring of subhuman mentality; within a generation there would be no human beings left. But it was so needless! A simple genetic alteration to permit the alien substance to be metabolized, and the damage would no longer occur. It would not have to be done in any generation but the present one, for the alteration, once made, would be inherited. Water and soil purification would never again be necessary.

  There would be a price, oh, yes—a terrible price. The City’s technology would be permanently lost. The technology couldn’t be maintained without the caste system, and the caste system was justifiable only because there was no way of surviving without it. Once people could drink unpurified water and eat native plants, the City must be thrown open. Its resources would be used up quickly, for they must be equally shared among members of present generations instead of being preserved for
future ones. Some metal must be diverted to farming and craft tools. The research could not continue long; it would be doomed to fail even if metal synthesization was theoretically possible. Once the machines wore out, no more could ever be built.

  This prospect, to him, was a grief beyond measure—yet as the price of ultimate human survival, of a free and open society that could survive, it would be endurable. Some might disagree. But so far, they were not even considering that issue. They could not look far enough ahead to confront it, so great was the taboo on human genetic engineering itself.

  The Six Worlds, long before the invention of the stardrive, had banned all research into modification of human genes. All forms of interference with procreation, in fact, had become anathema once sure contraceptive drugs had been perfected. Medically assisted conception had been abandoned as contrary to the public interest. It had been declared that human reproduction was not the business of science.

  To be sure, there had been legitimate worries about abuse. There had been all too strong a chance that governments would try, by any scientific means that existed, to control people. Agricultural genetic engineering techniques had been discovered while the mother world’s governments were still primitive and corrupt. Use of such techniques on humans was indeed a potential that might have been misused.

  Ironically, however, justified fears of abuse had been magnified into distorted ones. Genetic engineering would have been no more dangerous than other scientific capabilities that could be used wrongly—but there had been political opposition to it. It was known, for instance, that it might lead not only to misuse, but to elimination of genetic disease and to longer lifespan. Such benefits had been less well publicized than the dangers. The Six Worlds’ governments had not wanted to spend money on the research that could lead to starships, and they had not liked the thought of people traveling to other solar systems beyond their control; so they’d encouraged the notion that it was wise to ban anything that might ultimately result in a population increase.