He reached out toward Talyra, more gently this time, suddenly noticing how she was shaking. “Talyra—oh, Talyra, I didn’t want to scare you—”
“How could you not scare me by such ideas? I—I thought we were going to be married, Noren.”
“We are,” he assured her, hugging her close to him again. “Of course we are.”
She wrenched away. “No, we’re not! Do you suppose I want a husband who’s a heretic? One I’d always be afraid for, and who—”
“Who could put you in danger,” Noren finished slowly. chilled with remorse. “Talyra, I just didn’t think—it was stupid of me—” He dropped his head in his hands, realizing that in his concern for being honest with her, he’d forgotten that if he was ever tried for heresy, she would be questioned, too. She would be called to testify. Wives always were, yet she would be called whether they were married or not, for everyone knew they were betrothed, and she could no longer say that she knew nothing. “I’ve compromised you,” he whispered in anguish. “You could be punished for not reporting me.”
Talyra gave him a pained look. “Darling, don’t you trust me? Don’t you know I’d never tell anyone? I love you, Noren!”
“Of course I trust you,” he declared. “It’s you I’m afraid for. It’s not only that you’d be suspect because you hadn’t told; it’s that I’ve said enough to open your eyes. Before, you might never have thought of doubting, but now—well, now you’re not innocent, and if you’re questioned on my account you’ll have to admit it.”
“What do you mean, I’m not innocent?” she protested. “Do you think I believe any of those awful things, Noren? Are you suggesting that I’ll become a heretic myself? I love you and I won’t betray you, but you’re wrong, so wrong; I only hope that something will restore your faith.”
Noren jumped to his feet, angry and bewildered. He had not thought she’d consider him mistaken. It had never occurred to him that Talyra wouldn’t accept the obvious once it was pointed out to her. She was brighter than most girls; he’d liked that, and only because of it had he dared to speak of his conviction that the orthodox faith was false. To be sure, not even the smartest village elders ever questioned anything connected with religion, but he’d attributed that to their being old or spineless.
“I don’t want my faith restored,” he said heatedly. “I want to know the truth. The truth is the most important thing there is, Talyra. Don’t you care about finding it?”
“I already know what’s true,” she maintained vehemently. “I’m happy—I was happy—the way we are. If I cared about anything besides you I could have it, and if you’re going to be like this—”
“What do you mean, you could have it?”
She faced him, sitting back on her heels. “I kept something from you. I know why the Technician came tonight. He spoke to me; he said I could be more than the wife of a farmer or a craftsman. He asked if I wanted to be more.”
“Well, so there are rewards for blind faith in the righteousness of Technicians!”
“He said,” she went on, “that if I liked, I could go to the training center and become a schoolteacher or a nurse-midwife.”
Noren’s thoughts raged. If he were to ask for even a little knowledge beyond that taught in the school, he’d be rebuffed, as he had been so many times, times when his harmless, eager questions had been turned aside by the Technicians who’d come to work their Machines in his father’s fields. But Talyra, who seldom used her mind for wondering, had been offered the one sort of opportunity open to a villager who wanted to learn! To be sure, the training center vocations were semi-religious, and he was known to be anything but devout; yet it did not seem at all fair.
“I knew you’d be furious; that’s why I didn’t plan to mention it.” She got up, brushing the straw from her skirt, and climbed back onto the seat. “When I told him I was pledged to marry, he said I was free to be whatever I chose.”
“Even a Technician or a Scholar, maybe?” Noren said bitterly.
“That’s blasphemous; I won’t listen.”
“No, I don’t suppose you will. I can see how fraud has greater appeal than truth from your standpoint.”
“You’re questioning my piety, when you’re calling the High Law a fraud? You had better take back what you’ve said if you expect to go on seeing me!”
“I’m sorry,” he conceded. “That was unfair, and I apologize.”
“Apologizing’s not enough. I don’t mean just the angry things.”
Slowly Noren said, “I guess if I were to swear by the Mother Star never again to talk of the heretical ones, you’d be satisfied.”
Her face softening, Talyra pleaded, “Oh, Noren—will you? We could forget this ever happened.”
He knew then that she had not understood any of what he had revealed. In a low voice he replied, “I can’t do that, Talyra. It wouldn’t be honest, since I’d still be thinking them, and besides, an oath like that wouldn’t mean anything from me. You see, I wouldn’t consider it—sacred.”
Talyra turned away. Her eyes were wet, and Noren saw with sadness that it was not merely because their marriage plans were in ruins, but because she really thought him irreverent. She did not put a reverence for truth in the same category as her own sort of faith.
“T–take me home,” she faltered, not letting herself give way to tears.
He took his seat, giving the reins a yank, and the work-beast plodded on, the only sound the steady whish of the sledge’s stone runners over sand. Neither of them said anything more. Noren concentrated on keeping to the road; two of the crescent moons had set, and the dim light of the third wasn’t enough to illuminate the way ahead.
What now? he wondered. He had intended to go to the radiophonist’s office the next morning and submit his claim for a farm, but without Talyra that would be pointless. He did not want to be a farmer; he’d worked more than half each year, between school sessions, on his father’s land, and he had always hated it. Since he didn’t want to be a trader or craftsworker either, he had thought farming as good a life as any; a man with a wife must work at something. He had planned it for her sake. Now he had no plans left.
None, that is, but an idea he scarcely dared frame, the exciting, irrepressible idea that although there was no way to get more knowledge himself, he might someday manage to convince people—as many as possible, but at least some people—that knowledge should be made free to everyone without delay. He was not sure how to put such an idea into action, much less how to avoid arrest while doing so. He was not sure that arrest could be avoided. Noren was sure of only one thing: if and when he was convicted of heresy, he was not going to recant.
Most heretics did, he knew. Most of them, after a week or two in the City, knelt before the Scholars in a ceremony outside the Gates and publicly repudiated every heretical belief they’d ever held. And that was no great surprise, Noren thought, cold despite the oppressive heat of the evening. It was all too understandable, when the penalty for not recanting was reputed to be death.
* * *
It was close to dawn when Noren unhitched the work-beast in his father’s barn and went in to bed, undressing silently to avoid waking his brothers. He did not sleep. Talyra . . . it was hard to accept what had happened with Talyra. He had never been close to other people; he had always felt different, a misfit; but he’d had Talyra, whom he loved, and for the past year he had looked forward increasingly to the day when he would have her as his wife. Now, with the day almost upon him, his one hope for the future had been dashed. If only he’d been less honest!
But he could not have been. It was not in him to live as a hypocrite, Noren realized ruefully. The only thing in the world that meant more to him than Talyra was . . . Truth. He thought about it that way sometimes—Truth, with a capital letter—knowing that people would laugh at him if they knew. That was the difference between himself and the others: he cared about the truth, and they did not.
Looking back, he could not remember just when h
e’d started to reject the conventional beliefs; he was aware of much he had not known in the beginning, and could not trace the development of his doubts, which at first had been only a vague resentment at the fact that knowledge existed that was unavailable to him. Perhaps he’d begun to formulate them on the evening the Technician had come unannounced to his father’s farm.
That had been before his childish admiration of Technicians had turned to inexplicable dislike; he’d been quite a young boy, and the sight of the aircar floating down over his own family’s grainfield had thrilled him. The Technicians who quickened the soil at the start of each growing season seldom arrived in aircars, for they simply moved on from the adjacent farm, pushing their noisy Machines back and forth over the continuous strip of cleared land. So, with his brothers, Noren had run excitedly to meet the descending craft.
The man had asked lodging for the night, and had offered to pay well for it; Technicians never took anything without paying. Noren’s father would have been within his rights to refuse the request. But of course it would never have occurred to him to do that, any more than it would have occurred to him to wonder why a Technician needed lodging when the aircar could have taken him back to the City in no time at all. Nobody ever questioned the ways of Technicians.
This Technician had been a young man with a pleasant smile and a friendly manner that had put the boys immediately at ease. He had allowed them to come close to the aircar, even to touch it. At least Noren had touched it; his brothers had hung hack in awe, as people generally did in the presence of a Machine. He would have liked to climb inside, but that, the Technician would not permit. Noren had to content himself with running his hand over the smooth, shining surface of the craft and, later, with fingering curiously the green sleeve of the Technician’s uniform, so different from the coarse brown material of which ordinary clothing was made. And still more wondrous were the metal tools that the Technician carried, for metal was sacred and few villagers had opportunity to see it at close range. Only if wealthy or especially blessed might one possess a small metal article of one’s own.
Those things, however, had not been what impressed him most about the Technician, for to his surprise Noren had found that this was a man he could talk to. Even in childhood he had found it difficult to talk to his friends about anything more significant than their day-by-day activities. Certainly he couldn’t talk to his family. His father, though intelligent enough, cared for nothing but the price of grain and the problems of getting in the harvest; his brothers were stolid boys who spoke of happenings, but never of ideas. At times he’d felt that his mother had deeper interests than they; still, she was not one to go against women’s custom by displaying such interests. She gave him love, yet could communicate with him no better than the others. The Technician was not like any of these people. The Technician spoke to Noren as if the use of one’s mind was something very important. They had talked for a long time after supper, and Noren had felt a kind of excitement that he had never before imagined.
But in the morning, when the Technician had gone, the excitement had turned to frustration; and that day he had done a great deal of thinking.
He’d sprawled under a tall outcropping of rock in the corner of the field where he was supposed to be cutting grain, staring at his laboriously-sharpened stone scythe with the thought that a metal one—if such a thing existed—would be vastly more efficient. And gradually, with a mixture of elation and anger, he had become aware that Technicians were not the unique beings people presumed them to be. They were men! What they knew, other men could learn. Noren had been convinced, as surely as he’d ever been of anything, that he himself would be fully capable of learning it.
He’d also known that he would not be allowed to.
Someday, he’d decided fiercely, someday I’ll . . . He had not let himself complete the thought, for inwardly he’d been afraid. Inside he’d already sensed what would happen someday, though he had not recognized his heresy for what it was until the following season.
He’d assumed that there was nobody in the world with whom he could talk as he had with the Technician, but he’d been mistaken. That year he had at last found a real friend: not just a companion, but a friend who had ideas, and spoke of those ideas. Kern had been much older than Noren and in his final year of school; but once during noon hour, when Noren had asked to borrow a book not available in his own schoolroom, they’d discovered that they had more to say to each other than to their contemporaries. Instinctively Noren had avoided mentioning his opinion about Technicians to anyone else, but Kern he’d told freely and gladly, only to find that Kern was already far beyond him.
He had looked up to Kern as he’d never been able to look up to his father and brothers. Not that Kern had been considered admirable by the villagers, for he’d been a wild boy, a boy who laughed a great deal, belying the true gravity of his thoughts; and he had defied as many conventions as he could get away with. Though he’d spent much of his time with various girls—too much, their families felt—it was to Noren that he had turned with the confidences to which no ordinary person would listen. He’d been recklessly brave and proud of his secret heresies. He had said terrible things, shocking things that Noren had never expected to hear from anyone. He’d said that Scholars were as human as Technicians. He’d said that they were not immortal, but were vulnerable to the same injuries as other people. He had even said that they were not all-wise and were therefore unworthy of the reverence accorded them. But Kern had been careful to whom he expressed such views, at least until one night when he’d forgotten himself to the extent of telling a blasphemous joke within the hearing of a respectable tavernkeeper.
Noren had been in the village that night; he’d seen the marshals arrest Kern, and he’d seen the crowd gather around the jailhouse with blazing torches held aloft. There was to be a heresy trial the next day, but everyone had known that there could be no doubt as to its outcome. Kern himself had known, for once apprehended, he’d abandoned caution and vaunted offenses that even Noren had not suspected. He had gone so far as to boast of having drunk impure water—water neither collected from rain nor sent from the City—a claim few had believed, since had it been true he would most assuredly have been transformed into a babbling idiot. Having dared to laugh at an inviolable provision of the High Law, however, he’d incurred still greater contempt than heretics usually did.
Sick with dread, Noren had stood in the shadows watching the enraged mob. Kern would not cringe at his trial, he’d realized; Kern would laugh, as always, and when the Technicians took him away to the City, he would go with his head high. The terror of such a fate had overwhelmed Noren, but he’d tried very hard to look upon it as an adventure, as Kern surely would. They had often talked about the City, and there had been more to Kern’s speculations than idle bravado. One time, in a more serious tone than usual, he had said, “There are mysteries in the City, Noren, but we mustn’t fear them. Our minds are as good as the Scholars’. We can’t be forced to do or to believe anything against our will. Don’t worry about me, because I’m ever condemned I’m going to find out a lot that I can’t learn here.”
Kern never did find out. He’d never reached the City; he’d received no chance to explore the mysteries and test himself against the powers he had defied. There had not even been any trial, for the mob was inflamed, the councilmen were not present, and though the High Law decreed that all heretics must be turned over to the Technicians, there were no Technicians present either. Somehow the thatched roof of the jailhouse had caught fire—Noren had known how, as had everyone, but there’d been no particular man who could be accused—and when the Technicians had come, they’d found only the blackened stones.
At first Noren had blamed the Technicians because they hadn’t arrived in time to claim the prerogative given them by the High Law; later he’d blamed them for that Law itself. Who was to say that death by fire had not been the most merciful alternative? That thought had haunted Noren. School, which
he’d once liked, became dreary, for having abandoned all friends but Kern, he was too absorbed in his bitterness to accept the inanities of his classmates. Besides, his liking for Kern was well known, and he was wary of talking much lest he arouse the suspicion with which, had he been older, he would certainly have been viewed. There had been little left for the school to teach him in any case. He began to seek elsewhere for answers, but soon learned that they could be found only within his own mind. The villagers were ignorant of things that interested him, and the Technicians who came to the farm were unlike the young man who’d once taken lodging there. They would not respond to his questions even when he bridled his resentment, approaching them with deference for the sake of the knowledge he craved. Sometimes it had seemed as if they were deliberately trying to frustrate him.
And then, the next year, his mother had died. She’d fallen ill suddenly while gathering sheaves at the outermost edge of their land, and he had found her lying there, her face contorted with pain, arms cruelly scratched by the wild briars into which she had fallen. The Technicians sent for had declared that she’d been poisoned by some forbidden herb, but Noren had been sure that she, of all people, would never have tasted anything not grown from seed blessed by the Scholars. They’d tried to save her, at least they’d said they were trying, but afterwards he’d never been quite certain. All knowledge was theirs; if they’d truly wanted her to live, surely they could have cured her illness as they did ordinary maladies. Or perhaps it was merely that they had again come too late. If he, Noren, had possessed the syringes they’d brought—if he’d known how to use them—he might have saved her himself; it was not right that such things should be only in the hands of Technicians!
He had said so to their faces, too stricken by grief and rage to care what they did to him. Surprisingly, they had not done anything. They had simply stated that he must not aspire to knowledge beyond his station; and from that moment, his aspirations had increased.
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