And they have no grounds for believing the Prophecy can come true without it, Noren remembered. If he had not learned Lianne’s identity, neither would he. And to go on affirming religion’s promises under those conditions would have been impossible.
“There’s more involved,” Lianne said. “Not all of them feel that losing technology would be intolerable—they don’t all see, as you do, that it would mean the end of your civilization’s evolution. But as long as they believe there’s hope of synthesizing metal, they can’t endorse an alternate plan. They’re afraid the caste system might be maintained longer than is necessary for mere survival.”
“But we wouldn’t maintain it if the alternate could be implemented!”
“No? For a while you suspected even the Founders had done so.”
“It would be a—a hard decision,” he conceded. “There’d be a fight over it. Some would say that as long as there was any chance of bringing the Prophecy to fulfillment, we should keep the capability even though it would mean keeping the castes. I haven’t faced that because I knew, even before you told me, that the Founders’ plan offers no chance.”
Lianne’s eyes weren’t visible in the darkness of the courtyard. “You must face what you’re asking your followers to face,” she said levelly.
Yes. I can’t be spared anything merely because I know the point’s a moot one, he perceived. Knowing nothing of the Service, what would he say? After a long time he ventured, “There might be a compromise. The research outpost’s set up for the nuclear work; we could move the essentials there so they wouldn’t be lost when the City’s opened to everyone and its resources are quickly exhausted. Each Scholar could choose personally whether or not to go there. But oh, Lianne, the aircar traffic would stop, and the people who went would be exiled futilely—”
“You know that.”
“And knowing, I should try to talk them into it?”
“It may be the only arguing point you have. But it won’t be enough. To win out, you’ll have to—to act, Noren.”
He pondered the implications. “In the end, when the genetic change is accomplished and I’m old, I’d have to go there myself and continue nuclear research. Die there as leader of that lost cause.”
Her calm tone gave way to hesitancy. “Perhaps.”
He would have to promise that, certainly, and he would have to mean it. He couldn’t go to the outpost until his work was finished, since the computer complex was indispensable to analysis of genotypes. But afterward . . . wasn’t it what he’d have wanted if he hadn’t known the truth about Lianne? To preserve technology—some remnant of knowledge at least—after sharing of metal with the Villagers made maintenance of the City impossible, simply as a monument to what the Six Worlds had once accomplished? The gesture would be empty now; this must be why Lianne had told him he’d suffer for his discovery. Whatever the Service offered him, he must return to play out the charade, unless the real route to restoring technology appeared during his lifetime.
“I’ll do whatever’s necessary,” he declared, wondering if he was as sincere as he wished to be, and if she could assure her seniors that he was.
“I believe you will,” Lianne agreed, not happily. “But even action won’t be enough; people need—inspiration. You’ll have to give them that.”
As a priest gives hope. In the past he’d given little of anything. When he’d offered the truth, which was what he most valued, it had often been rejected.
“Noren,” Lianne said suddenly. “You’re willing to give, I know that, yet I—I think you also must learn to receive. You’re—you’re more isolated here than I am, even. You don’t know how to interact.”
His heart ached for her. She, warm and loving by nature, had made her feeling toward him plain, and in this he’d been the one to reject the offering. “You do understand, don’t you—” he began, knowing that with her, there was no need to complete the thought in words.
“About Talyra? Yes, very well—more than you do, maybe.”
He didn’t probe her meaning; he knew only that although it had been nearly two years since Talyra’s death, he could not love Lianne in the same way. There were times when he wanted to. He certainly wasn’t held back by the fact that she was alien—and although that made marriage impossible, since it precluded an honest commitment to permanence, there was no rational reason for not turning what City gossip now held to be fact into the truth. Perhaps he hesitated only because Talyra had said simply that he must have children, not that he should love for love’s own sake. Yet he sensed that there was more to it than loyalty.
Besides, he must indeed have more children. With Veldry? She was as dedicated to the future as the rest of the Scholars, and less narrow-minded. Maybe he should marry her. She would accept him; he could make her happy; on his side, it would be no worse than any other marriage of convenience. Veldry had taken no lover since the night their child was conceived, and if for his second genetically-changed baby he turned to someone else, she would be hurt as he’d never expected her to be. He did not want to seek another bride. Why, then, did he not want to marry Veldry, either?
It did not matter what he wanted. If he married her, he could acknowledge their son publicly without implying anything extraordinary. Most Scholars would be surprised but not suspicious—yet on the other hand, if any did support his proposal, they would recognize that he had acted upon it. Lianne would let it be known that she was barren; that was no shame among her own people and would not bother her. With rumor as it stood, he would appear to be giving her up on that account, which would show potential allies that his talk of genetic change was more than talk, more even than cold science. It would be seen as a human commitment. A gesture, a symbol, yes—but in such things lay power. Only so could he inspire anybody to follow him.
But he did not look forward to the end of Veldry’s confinement, knowing what he must say to her when he told her of his joy about the child.
* * *
Women stayed in the birthing room three days, then rejoined friends and loved ones at the noon meal in the commons. Everyone came forward to congratulate new mothers; Noren had no chance to speak to Veldry privately. No one saw anything odd in the warmth of his felicitations, or even in the fact that he took the chair next to hers—Lianne was on his other side, and it was assumed they were simply being friendly. Veldry was radiant. “You’ve given a great gift to the world,” said Noren, and his intensity was noticed only by her; the people present thought it merely a conventional phrase. But Veldry took his true meaning without need of further words.
“I am fortunate,” she replied; and that too had double meaning. It struck him that when they married, many would be less surprised by his choice than by hers. Desiring her for her beauty, they would be envious. There was envy in their looks as they waited for the unnamed father to appear. It embarrassed him; he should not acknowledge the child, perhaps, until the interest had died down. So he told himself.
To see her alone, he would have to go to her room, which he felt himself obligated to do. But that evening when he joined the group gathering for Orison, she stood in the front row. Only then did it dawn on him that he—never attentive to religious observances—had overlooked a more obvious duty: she’d assumed he would arrange the roster so as to preside at the ritual Thanksgiving for Birth. Hastily he found the priest scheduled to officiate and with the excuse that he wouldn’t be free for his regular turn, asked to switch, donning a borrowed robe in lieu of his own. There was no time to review the service. He had heard it, naturally, but had never read it through, and almost stumbled over the substitution of “this mother” for “these parents” which he should have been prepared to manage smoothly. Otherwise he found the experience strangely moving.
Veldry came forward—without kneeling, of course, since it was not fitting for one Scholar to kneel to another—and met his gaze with high spirits as he placed his hands on her head in the formal gesture. “The blessing of the Star’s spirit has been besto
wed upon her, for she has given herself freely in love and in concern for the generations on which its light will fall. Now in their name we acknowledge their debt to her, and wish her joy in the knowledge that her child will live among those whose heritage we guard as stewards.” Her child, and his! Ever after, he’d know that somewhere a part of him lived on.
She expected no private talk, Noren perceived as she stepped back. It was too soon for her to start another pregnancy; without conscious decision, he put off making any move. Days passed. And then early one morning, awakened by a knock at his own door, he opened it in dismay to Veldry.
He hardly knew her; there were lines in her face he’d never noticed before, and she was red-eyed from weeping. “What’s wrong?” he demanded, his voice rough with anger not at her, but at whoever had found out and now scorned her. It was the only explanation he could think of—and marriage would not mend matters, not if she with her pride had been reduced to this by someone’s branding of the experimentation as “obscene.”
“I—I don’t know how to tell you,” she faltered. “You don’t deserve so much tragedy in your life. It’s not fair, when you meant to do good.”
“Look, Veldry,” Noren said, gripping her shoulders, “I’m ready to face up to anything that happens—don’t worry about me. But I won’t stand for it if people are blaming you for trying to do good yourself. I’ll take full responsibility, I’ll lie if I have to, say I didn’t tell you till afterward—”
“Noren,” she broke in, “no one’s found out. No one ever will. But the baby’s—dead.”
“What?” His legs buckled; he reached out for support, and Veldry clung to him, led him to the bunk where they sat side by side. “How—how?” Noren whispered.
“The nursery attendants don’t know. He was just—weak, as if he hadn’t had enough to eat, though he’d been nursing well. He . . . he was never strong after the first, Noren, only I didn’t want to see it, I kept thinking he’d gain weight soon . . . . I didn’t nurse my others personally, you know, I didn’t have anything to compare with. The women who took care of him between feedings didn’t tell me because there wasn’t anything to do except hope. But when I went in yesterday morning, I knew something was wrong. I held him all day, but finally in the night he stopped breathing.”
“Didn’t they call a doctor?”
“Yes, near the end, but he wasn’t sick in any of the ways doctors can help with.”
“The doctor must have said something,” Noren protested.
Veldry was silent. “You can’t hide it from me,” he urged. “He was my son; I have to know what the doctor thought he died from.”
“Well, at first she said malnutrition, but we knew he’d had plenty of milk.” She didn’t meet his eyes.
“Would you rather I talked to the doctor myself?” he asked gently.
“No! If you’re going to crack up, it had better be here instead of in front of people.” She turned to him fearfully; he wondered if she thought that like a traditional village father, he might blame her for failure to produce a perfect infant. “She said,” Veldry continued, “that apparently this baby’s body couldn’t get the right nourishment from milk, couldn’t—metabolize it properly.”
“That’s crazy! All babies live on milk.”
“Of course, but she said there could be something wrong, some congenital problem—”
Congenital. The room spun around Noren. “A genetic defect, you mean.”
“The doctor didn’t know if there could be a defect just like this, she said she’d have to ask the computers.”
“It doesn’t matter what the computers say.” Noren’s voice was cold, remote; in his own ears it didn’t sound like his own. “Don’t you see, Veldry, whether such a disease has occurred before or not—and the blood test I did shows it hasn’t—in this case I created it. I altered the genetic pattern of metabolism. I brought a baby to life who was foredoomed to starve.”
“You couldn’t have known ahead of time,” she said in a carefully rehearsed tone, “and you tried the metabolic change on yourself, you told me—the baby’s metabolism was like yours.”
“Yes, I tested it on myself first. But I don’t drink milk, after all; there isn’t any milk on this planet except human milk. Probably I can’t metabolize it any more, either.” He wondered how he could have been so stupidly, tragically blind as to believe he’d checked everything.
After a long pause Veldry said steadily, “We knew there was risk. We wouldn’t have done what we did if it hadn’t been a choice between that and letting all our descendants die. We’ll grieve, we can’t ask not to suffer—but you mustn’t blame yourself.”
“I can’t not blame myself,” Noren declared.
“I—I suppose that’s true. I guess that’s part of the burden you’ve taken on. And I still admire you for taking it, Noren.”
Hazily, he was aware that he should comfort her, should turn from his own guilt and despair long enough to give her the support that was her due. He did not know how. He couldn’t marry her, of course; he would never be able to remarry, since to attempt a second alteration of his genes would not test the change to be used on other people. To father a child for his own sole benefit would not be a justifiable form of human experimentation. So there was nothing he could offer Veldry.
Not till she was gone did he reflect that he might have offered the solace of ritual words. With Talyra he’d used such words to mask secrets; Veldry, who knew those secrets, also viewed them as a source of strength. Though she had long ago accepted accountability for the Scholars’ stewardship by assuming the robe, she never functioned as a priest, perhaps less from scorn of convention than from lack of self-respect. She honored his active priesthood and must have wished him to exercise it in sorrow as in joy. But he couldn’t have done so even for her sake—not when his newfound grounds for faith had proven hollow.
How could they, Lianne’s people, have let it happen?
Strangely, he felt no resentment against Lianne herself, nor did he shrink from companionship as he normally did in times of anguish. It was to her quarters that he went, following an urge he did not stop to question.
He was not sure how much he told her verbally. Lianne held him, and wept. Noren too shed hot tears, not only of grief and remorse, but of outrage. “How could they?” he demanded. “I expected trials, defeats—but how could they let an innocent baby—”
“It wasn’t a question of letting; they had no way to know. We aren’t gods, Noren.”
“Gods?” He did not know the term.
“I forget,” Lianne said, “that concept’s not in your world’s religion, and I don’t suppose you’ve read much about the cultural history of the Six Worlds. In many cultures the power symbolized here by the Star is personified, attributed to supernatural beings. Primitive cultures worship whole groups of gods, but civilizations advanced enough to know there’s only one Power often conceive of it as a Being, too. The Founders didn’t happen to have that tradition. Some Federation worlds do.”
“They believe there’s a being off in the sky like the Star, controlling things?”
“Well, not in a physical sense. It’s simply a different symbol.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain when you don’t understand the Star either; you’re so literal-minded, Noren. The point is that we acknowledge a power beyond our own power. We’re not gods in the Service, and we don’t play at being gods! To see ourselves that way would be blasphemy.”
Forcing himself to speak levelly, Noren reflected, “It would be making light of the truth, you mean. In the village people called me blasphemous—yet they cared less about truth than I did, or so I thought. I knew the power’s not in a magic star. You’re saying it’s not in the Service, either.”
“No more than in the Scholars,” Lianne said gently, “who would be gods to the villagers had not the Founders very wisely used an impersonal star as the symbol of something higher. You don’t want to be worshipped; do you suppose my people do, or that we
merit it?”
“Oh, Lianne.” As understanding flooded his mind, he was overcome by a sense of sin unlike any he’d experienced before. “I—created my own false symbol; I’ve been imagining them as gods, all right. You don’t know—” He broke off, unable to confess that he had done so consciously even when performing the offices of priesthood.
“I do know,” she admitted miserably. “When I came to tell you about the baby and found you thinking such thoughts, I was horrified. I saw then why acting as a priest had been getting easier for you, and I knew that sooner or later I’d have to set you straight.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Noren said grimly. “I can see for myself. I knew in the beginning there was risk, only I didn’t want the responsibility—after I found somebody to pass it on to, I refused to believe it was real. But it has to be real if it’s to accomplish anything. If your people were gods, what I’m doing would be futile after all.”
“You’d be merely a puppet—your whole race would become puppets—if we could protect you from error,” she agreed, “or even if we could ensure your ultimate success.”
He sat hunched over on Lianne’s bunk, his head buried in his hands, unable to think of the future. Going out to face people, bearing the secret not only of the baby’s existence but of his accountability for its death, was past contemplation. He could not endure that even privately. Starvation . . . the baby had suffered. Even the subhuman mutants like the First Scholar’s son didn’t suffer. . . .
Lianne’s arm was warm across his shoulders. “I prayed you wouldn’t have to learn through disillusionment,” she was saying, “and I evaded my job. I should have been prepared. Though I couldn’t have saved the baby, I should have kept going to see him—but I was a coward. I knew if he wasn’t thriving I wouldn’t be strong enough to tell you. Yet now in the space of a few hours you’ve got to make a very difficult adjustment, when I could have bought you more time.”
The Doors of the Universe Page 26