Yet as they’d increased, so had his realization that those aspirations could never find fulfillment. Soon he would have to choose a way to make his living, and there was no work he wanted to do. He despised farming; he was too inept at working with his hands to became a successful craftsworker; he had neither the money nor the inclination to go into business as a trader. He had talent only for the use of his mind, and in the village that was more of a liability than an asset. The best he could hope for was that some trader or shopkeeper would hire him to keep accounts, since the few people who worked as schoolmasters, radiophonists and so forth obtained their posts only after appointment to the training center by Technicians. Noren had perceived that he would get no such appointment, for each year the school examiners had treated him more scornfully beneath their outward courtesy. They’d guessed his heretical thoughts, perhaps, though they could not take him into custody unless he was first convicted in a civil trial.
The world had grown steadily darker. Noren had turned still further inward after his mother’s death, but because her loss was not his deepest pain, his grief had taken the form of an intensified search for some one good thing to make the future seem worth looking toward. And he had found it, for a time, in Talyra.
They’d known each other since childhood, for she lived on a neighboring farm, but he had not paid much attention to girls. Then all of a sudden he’d noticed her, and within a few weeks he had been in love. Never before had anyone cared for him, needed him, as Talyra did; nor had he ever received such joy from another person’s presence. He’d no longer been lonely. He’d no longer considered the life of a farmer an intolerable one. His secret ideas had still been the core of his thought, but they’d been submerged, overshadowed by new and more powerful feelings. Underneath he had known that if forced to choose, he would not forsake those ideas, but he hadn’t anticipated any choice. He’d told himself that Talyra would accept them, that he could share them with her as he had with Kern and, by the sharing, keep them from bursting forth to destroy him.
But it wasn’t going to be that way. He’d been deluding himself, Noren perceived bitterly. He should have known that no girl, however deeply in love, would marry someone who admitted to being a heretic. Such a thing was unheard of. He had been selfish to ask it of her, for he had exposed her not only to possible peril, but to the scorn of the whole village even if her personal innocence was never placed in doubt. And she was indeed innocent. Why should she take his word against that of the venerated High Priests, the Scholars?
So it had come to a choice after all, and now the futile search would begin again; yet to Noren it would not be the same. He was a man now. He had nothing left to wait for. And he knew that from this night forward he would always be torn, for he still loved Talyra, and truth or no truth, he would never be happy without her.
Chapter Two
When sunlight glared through the window opening, Noren rose and went out to wash his face. The air was already hot, and the smoke of moss fires mingled with the ever-present barn smells. Behind the farmhouse, the jagged yellow ranges of the Tomorrow Mountains were flat against a hazy sky.
At the cistern, he jerked the spigot handle impatiently and water splashed onto the dusty earth. Noren paid scant attention. It was wrong to waste pure water; his father would be angry, for there would be a reprimand from the village council if the family took more of what came from the City than was usual to supplement the rain-catchment supply, besides the extra trips to the common cistern that would entail. But after this morning what went on at his father’s farm would no longer concern him.
That was the decision Noren had reached during his sleepless hours: whatever happened, he could not stay at home. Though he wouldn’t claim a new farm without Talyra, to continue working for his father was not to be endured. He would have to find some other way to earn his living.
He looked around him, surveying the place that for so many years he had found hateful. It was just like all other farms he’d ever seen, though perhaps larger than most, since his family had bought the adjoining one in his grandfather’s time. The undulating grainfields, their ripened stalks orange in the sun, stretched away on three sides, and beyond, to the south, lay rolling wilderness of purple-green. Close by, however, was the grayish fodder patch that surrounded the area bordering the road. That area was ugly, for nothing grew in it but a few scrawny purple bushes. It was reserved for buildings. There was the stone farmhouse with its thick thatched roof; the cistern, also of stone, topped by a huge, saucer-shaped catchment basin; and the wattle-and-daub barn where the work-beasts and the sledge were kept, along with the rows of wicker cages that contained fowl.
Noren grimaced. He disliked all farm chores, but in particular he despised the job of taking fertilizer from the fowl cages to the fields: filling the great baskets that hung on either side of a work-beast and then, with the same pottery scoop, sprinkling it between the furrows left by the Technicians’ soil-quickening Machines. Worst of all was the digging in, which required crawling on hands and knees, as did cultivating. He’d often thought there should be an easier way to hoe; once, in fact, he had envisioned a long, stiff handle for the stone triangle, and had tried to improvise one. Like similar experiments of his younger days, it had been a dismal failure. No plant existed with stalks strong enough not to bend under the pressure, even when several were bound together. His mother had remarked that since the purpose of all large plants was to provide wicker for the weaving of baskets, furniture, and the like, nature had done well to make them flexible. His father, more sharply, had declared that if hoes had been meant to have handles, people would have been taught to make handles at the time of the Founding, just as they had been taught to do everything else. His eldest brother had berated him for fooling around with plant stalks instead of getting on with his share of the work. His other brothers had simply laughed at him.
To Noren it did not seem reasonable that people could have discovered the best way to do everything all at once, whether at some mythical moment called “the Founding” or at any other time; yet he’d been taught in school that this was so, and he had found no evidence to the contrary. People did comparatively few things, after all, and no one had ever heard of their being done differently. Farmers planted, hoed, harvested and threshed; he’d learned from hard experience that the ancestral methods of performing these tasks could not be improved upon. Neither could the equally onerous ones of skinning dead work-beasts, preserving the hides and bones, rendering the tallow, and burying the remains in unquickened ground. Nor was there any imaginable way to make building less laborious: stones must be gathered and joined with mortar; the lightweight, porous softstone used for sledge runners and tables, among other things, must be slowly cut with sharper stone tools; wattles, thatch and wicker were as they were, and one could hardly handle them in a more efficient fashion. The village mill and brewery had existed unchanged since time out of mind, and so had the potter’s shop. Even women’s work remained the same from generation to generation. He had watched his mother, and later Talyra’s, cut trousers, tunics and skirts from City-made cloth with stone knives, stitching the pieces together with needles of polished bone, and he had been sure that there must be a quicker way. But he could think of no such way—except one.
Metal! If knives, needles and other tools could be made of metal, that would obviously solve a great many problems. It was wrong that there should be no metal for anyone but Technicians!
He had wondered where the metal came from. It certainly did not come from the wilderness; the wilderness contained only dust, sand and stone, covered by mosses and other plants that didn’t grow in quickened soil—some gray-green like the fodder patch, some purple-green, but none the bright, clear green of young grain shoots. He knew traders who’d gone far afield to collect the dry moss used for fuel, and they had not seen any metal either. The Book of the Prophecy said that all metal had come into the world during the Founding. Whispered legends suggested that some might b
e found in rock, but that couldn’t be true; Noren had examined every kind of rock there was, and not a speck of it was in the least metallic. The Technicians, he’d concluded, must obtain their metal on the other side of the world.
A very few people did have metal articles, people whose ancestors had been specially favored at the time of the Founding, or who’d bought them from such blessed ones at great cost. Talyra herself owned a narrow silver wristband that had been bequeathed to her by her great-aunt, who, although in every way a pious and deserving person, had borne not a single child, leaving her husband no choice but to petition the council for divorce. Over the years many had said that a barren woman was unworthy to have custody of anything so holy as a metal wristband, but Talyra had felt more sympathy than scorn for the old lady, so in the end the treasure had come to her. She had shown it to him, and she’d promised to wear it at their wedding, along with the blue glass beads that symbolized devotion to the Mother Star and the red necklace, also City-made, that he’d bought for her with the savings of past Founding Day gifts—red, the color of love tokens. . . .
Determinedly Noren wrenched himself back to the present. He must decide where to go. He knew of no open jobs or apprenticeships, but that was just as well, for there was too much restlessness in him to remain nearby; and besides, he could not bear to see Talyra if she was unwilling to marry him.
It was a temptation to leave at once, without seeing anyone, for there was bound to be an argument; yet Noren could not bring himself to do so. There was little love between himself and his father; still the old man had never treated him unkindly. He owed him a farewell. Resignedly, he finished washing, filled the pottery cook-jug, and went in to prepare breakfast.
Since their mother’s death, the boys, having no sisters, had taken turns with the kitchen chores. This morning they were Noren’s; his five brothers were already in the fields, and would be back soon, ravenously hungry and eager to joke with him about his impending marriage. They were expecting him to bring Talyra home, he knew, for the farm had been too long without a woman and he had not confided his plan to claim new land. It hadn’t occurred to them that he would not ask his wife to be a drudge for the whole family, though their own willingness to do so might well account for the fact that the older ones had as yet found no wives for themselves. So they’d have been furious in any case, but he dreaded their derision now that she had turned him down. His being the first pledged to marry had given him a status among them that he, always the different one, had never before attained.
By the time they came in, he had the food ready: porridge, eggs, and large slabs of cold bread to be washed down with tea. Tea was expensive, since the herb from which it was brewed wasn’t grown near the village and had to be bought from the traders, but Noren’s father was not so poor as to give his sons unflavored water with their meals. Meals were monotonous enough as it was; it had sometimes occurred to Noren that it would be nice if there were some source of food besides grain and fowl.
From long habit the boys stood motionless behind their benches and raised their eyes upward while the words of the Prophecy were said: “‘Let us rejoice in the bounty of the land, for the land is good, and from the Mother Star came the heritage that has blessed it; the land has given us life. . . And it shall remain fruitful, and the people shall multiply across the face of the earth, and at no time shall the spirit of the Mother Star die in the hearts of its children.’” Noren repeated them mechanically with the others. They meant nothing to him, yet in a way they recalled the presence of his mother, who had said them with warmth. He found himself thinking of the ceremony held for the sending of her body to the City, when he’d cried not because he was moved by the presiding Technician’s intonation of the ritual phrases, but because she had believed them; it had seemed horrible for her to die believing something that wasn’t grounded in truth.
The blessing complete, everybody sat down and turned noisily to eating. Noren had little appetite, but he knew he must take advantage of the meal, for it might be a long time before he could get another so plentiful. He had no money of his own. If he’d claimed land, he would have been paid in advance by the Technicians to cultivate it, in return for his promise to sell them most of the first year’s harvest. Now, he realized, he would have to earn his keep day by day until he could find some sort of steady employment.
“Have you set the day for your wedding, son?” asked his father.
“No,” replied Noren shortly, “I haven’t.” Everyone’s eyes were on him, and he knew that there was nothing to be gained by delaying the inevitable. “There’s not going to be a wedding,” he continued resolutely.
“Oh, so you’ve lost your nerve?” remarked his eldest brother, and there were good-natured guffaws. No one had taken the declaration seriously. Every man, after all, had occasional fights with his girl; but a betrothal registered with the village council was seldom broken.
“Perhaps he hasn’t lost his nerve,” suggested another brother. “Perhaps Talyra lost hers; maybe she decided she could do better for herself than to marry a lazy dreamer who sits and thinks when he might be working.”
Noren clenched his fists beneath the table and did not answer. He was well practiced in controlling his feelings; he had learned from Kern’s recklessness that one must not reveal one’s inner rage at things, at least not if one expected to accomplish anything of value. So many more vital issues angered him that he was used to hiding fury, and taunts from his brothers were nothing new.
There was an awkward silence. “I’m leaving today,” Noren announced abruptly. “I’ll be seeking work in another village, I think.”
“Work? You?” sneered one of them. “Who will hire a boy who has neither stamina nor skill?”
There was no use in pointing out that if he hadn’t applied stamina to farm work, it was not from any lack but because he had never chosen to. “I can keep accounts,” said Noren in a level voice. “Or—or perhaps I’ll hire on with some trader who’s delivering a load to the markets outside the City.” This last was pure improvisation, but as he spoke he wondered why he had not thought of it before.
His father stared at him. “You can’t do that. You’re needed here. The harvest is just starting.”
“I’m of age, Father. I finished school yesterday and that makes me a free citizen.” As free as anybody could be in a world where people were barred from all that was reserved for Technicians and Scholars, he added inwardly.
“Two of your brothers came of age, and stayed.”
“They chose to work for wages on the farm, which was their right. It’s mine to leave it.”
“Let him go, Father,” the eldest brother said. “He never pulled his weight in any case; he wouldn’t be worth a man’s wage.”
“He’s my son, and however addlebrained he may be at times, I’ll not have him ruin his life. The only sign of responsibility he’s ever shown is his betrothal to Talyra; I’ll not see him break it.”
“There’s little either of us can do about that,” Noren admitted bitterly. “It’s already been broken, and not by me.” He did not say that his own honesty had precipitated the break.
“She changed her mind?” demanded his brother. “I must say, I’m less surprised than when she accepted you in the first place. But I’m disappointed.”
“I don’t wonder,” retorted Noren, “since I won’t be bringing you the housemaid you expected. Let me tell you that if I’d gotten married, I’d have taken my wife to a place of our own. Nothing’s changed as far as you’re concerned.”
“You cultivate your own land, you who’ve spent most of your life with your head in the clouds?” the eldest burst out. “You’re unfit for any work, least of all that. Talyra’s well out of it.”
“No doubt we’re all well out of it,” added the next-eldest. “I’ve doubted all along that she was the sort we should bring into the family. No girl could think this brother of ours a good provider, so it’s clear she chose him for love, and she can find p
lenty of that without doing a farmwife’s work. Once she tired of him, she’d have left to seek it elsewhere.”
Noren’s rigid control gave way; before he knew it he was out of his seat and his fist was swinging into his brother’s face. All the pent-up rage of the past years went into the blow, and the older boy had no time to be surprised. As he slumped to the floor, the others grabbed Noren’s arms. They would not have interfered with a fight, but the blind fury in his eyes told them that he was scarcely aware that his opponent was already unconscious.
“I–I’m sorry, son,” his father said helplessly. “That was ill-said; Talyra is a fine girl and would have borne you many fine children. I would have been proud to have her here.” The other boys stood back, staring at Noren, realizing that they did not really know this brother who had always seemed such a weakling to them.
Noren hardly knew himself. He was numb, dazed; yet he was also free in a way he had not been before. His anger vented, he was sorry for all of them, sorry because they truly did not understand the thing they were lacking. They could not see that there was more to life than working, eating, and making love. “I’ll go now,” he said dully.
“I won’t hold you, if that’s what you want; but this will always be your home.”
“You couldn’t hold me. I don’t need your consent, and as for a home, I don’t have one. I never will.” He turned and walked through the door, not looking back at them, not even stopping to think that he was taking none of his few belongings. He knew that what he had said was true; wherever he went he would be a stranger, for there was no home in the world for such as he.
* * *
He took the road toward the village center, not because he wanted to go there, but because it was the only road there was. To travel cross-country was dangerous, for the wilderness was full of forbidden things. Wild plants held peril; as he’d grown older, Noren had learned that the herb that had killed his mother had not been tasted, but had been a contact poison that attacked her through the scratches on her arms. Ordinarily Technicians with Machines destroyed any such herbs that could be reached from roads or fields, but that rare one had evidently been missed.
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