This Star Shall Abide

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “I don’t want anybody kneeling to me,” said Noren, not bothering to point out that taking over the City was manifestly impossible. “No man should ever kneel to another. It’d be just as wrong for us to have that kind of power as for the Scholars to have it.”

  “I’d say it was our turn,” someone asserted, and others muttered agreement.

  In desperation Noren switched tactics. “The Technicians wouldn’t obey us,” he said.

  “Them?” The young man laughed. “We’d kill them in any case. That’s something we can start on right now.”

  Aghast, Noren exclaimed, “You’re speaking of murder!”

  “I didn’t take you for the squeamish type.”

  “I’m no murderer,” Noren declared. “And anyway, some of the Technicians are on our side.”

  The whole group turned on him with renewed hostility. “Where’d you get a stupid idea like that? All Technicians are our enemies.”

  “That’s not true—” Noren broke off, helpless, for he might imperil the one who’d helped him if he told about his arrest and escape; it was becoming more and more apparent that these men were not the kind he was looking for. “I mean—well, they’d be on our side if we could talk to them, because the Scholars are hiding knowledge from them, too.” In contrast to his hopes, he had seen few Technicians around the markets; there would be little opportunity for persuasion, yet they were still potential allies. Certainly they weren’t to blame for a Prophecy by which they themselves were deceived or a High Law in which they had no voice.

  “Look,” the trader told him roughly, “you’d better get this straight. We don’t trust no Technicians! If we get a chance, we’ll kill as many as we can; they’ve been on top too long as it is.”

  “Killing people’s wrong,” insisted Noren.

  “Since when are Technicians people?”

  Noren stared, horrified. There was no real difference between these rebels and the villagers he’d known all his life! One kind thought Technicians were more than human; the other, less; neither had any true concern for the right of each man to be judged on his own merits.

  Yet on second thought he saw that there was indeed a difference. His present companions were worse. They were even worse than the Scholars, who at least did not murder and destroy. There was a legend, he recalled, that told of how at the time of the Founding, before the Prophecy had been made known, an evil magician, whose name was unspeakable, had tried to rule the world by force—and of how he had been vanquished by the Scholar’s establishment of the High Law, which forbade such rule. It was likely that they’d started that legend themselves to mask the Law’s real intent; still, overthrowing them would hardly solve the world’s problems if men like these were to seize power instead.

  “We don’t trust nobody that talks to Technicians, either,” announced the big man in an ominous tone. “How do we know you’re not a starcursed spy?”

  “You’ll have to take my word,” said Noren heatedly. “I’m as much against the High Law as any of you, but I’ll not go along with your ideas for what to do about it.”

  At that moment somebody glanced through the open door of the shed and cried, “Technicians! Outside, watching—”

  “He must’ve brought them here; none ever came before.”

  Cold with dismay, Noren realized that they were right. He very probably had been followed, and instead of arresting him immediately, the Technicians were gathering evidence against his companions. He should have known that his presence would expose them to danger! Though they couldn’t be seized directly, a trap could be arranged, as it had been for him; and little as he liked their talk, he had no desire to see them condemned for it. They had not, after all, actually done anything, nor were they ever likely to. They were powerless against the City, and if they tried to murder any Technicians, the villagers would deal with them in short order.

  “By the Mother Star, he’ll not leave here in one piece,” growled the big man. They converged on Noren; then, abruptly, the light from the doorway was cut off by the Technicians’ silhouetted figures. It was the last thing he saw.

  When he came to, it was night, and he was lying on the dirt floor of the now-abandoned shed. He sat up, rubbing new bruises and realizing that only the entrance of the Technicians had saved him from worse. Why hadn’t he been arrested? They must have known his identity; why else would they have followed him? It didn’t make sense! Or perhaps . . . yes, perhaps they’d been unwilling to lay hands on him in the presence of the others. The men, being heretics unlikely to take their word, wouldn’t have believed Technicians had authority to touch him, since it was unheard of for someone already in their custody to escape; it would have looked as if they themselves were disobeying the High Law.

  Noren reached into the inner pocket of his tunic, knowing even before he did so that Talyra’s coins were gone. He had no chance to make converts, for he was friendless, without money to live on, and there could be little doubt that his recapture was at best only a few hours away.

  * * *

  As the night waned, Noren wandered aimlessly; though his knee throbbed painfully under the bandage, he was able to limp, and some inner urge would not allow him to keep still. It was not merely an urge to evade capture. Rather, he was irresistibly drawn to a place where the great towers, the central one topped with its blazing beacon, were in full view.

  Dawn found him back at the plaza. In front of him the City walls thrust up, solid and forbidding against the pale morning sky. He noticed that their surface was not straight, but curved, and wondered why they had been built that way. There were so many inexplicable things about the City, so many things that he longed desperately to understand. . . .

  At the lowest corner of the broad flight of steps leading to the Gates, he slumped wearily. What next? Arrest was imminent; he could neither buy food nor, because of his bad knee, could he work for it; and what hope was there of achieving anything if the only people who recognized the High Law’s fallacies wanted either to destroy all that was good in the world or to set themselves up in the Scholars’ place?

  An aircar, sunlight catching its rotors, hovered briefly and dropped out of sight behind the high barrier. On either side of the steps, produce was being loaded into boxlike caverns in the walls; several Technicians were supervising. Noren eyed them nervously, then turned his back and sat on the bottom step, looking out toward the market stalls that lined the opposite side of the square. A crowd of people was again gathering. All at once music, loud and heart-stirring, burst from somewhere behind the Gates and reverberated through the plaza. It swelled in volume until Noren felt as if he might burst also; it was like nothing he had ever heard, and it made him want to sing or to shout or even to cry.

  It faded; the crowd hushed. Above him the huge Gates parted and a blue-robed Scholar appeared, flanked by four Technicians. Immediately the people in the plaza fell to their knees.

  Startled, Noren remembered too late the Benison that preceded the daily opening of the markets. The Scholar would read from the Book of the Prophecy. He had no desire to stay, but he would only attract attention to himself if he moved, for everyone was waiting, motionless, eyes raised toward the sky in sober respect. Yet he would not kneel! If he was reprimanded, he decided, he could state quite honestly that the injury to his knee made it impossible.

  He turned toward the Gates and lifted his eyes with the rest. A trace of breeze fluttered the sleeves of the Scholar’s robe as he opened the book. His voice, mysteriously amplified, floated past Noren, on out to the edge of the plaza with undiminished clarity.

  “‘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—’”

  The knowledge they were hiding could give people a better life, thought Noren bitterly.

  “‘Those who have brought forth life from the land are rich—’”

  But not as rich as those who had access to the Power and the
Machines.

  “‘For through the land’s taming shall our strength grow, that we may be ready to receive the ancient knowledge—’”

  No doubt, when the predicted date arrived, people would be told they weren’t ready; the Mother Star would hide its face in shame! Noren scowled. He knew the words well and in fact had read the entire book many times, having been taught his letters from it as a child, but he had not spotted that loophole before. Whoever had inserted it had planned carefully.

  “‘. . .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.’”

  All the families, Noren reflected—all the good, sincere people who recited those words every time they sat down to eat—they’d been tricked by the Scholars into putting their trust in something false! Talyra trusted it implicitly, and she too was the victim of cold-blooded deception.

  Glaring at the High Priest who stood above him, he was abruptly overpowered by the hot anger that had been building up in him for years. He could no longer contain it. What do you believe, Scholar? he raged. What is it that lets you stand up there and exhort people to attach their natural faith in goodness to what you know is a figment of somebody’s imagination?

  He looked back at the mass of rapt faces. Those people would never turn against the Scholars. There was no conceivable way he could make them listen, nothing he could do that would be even a small step toward changing the world into the sort of place the Prophecy described. And he was almost too weary to care. He almost wished the Technicians would arrest him and get it over with.

  The spired towers glistened overhead, dazzling his vision. All mysteries were sealed away there . . . and he had a right to share those mysteries! Yet neither he nor anybody else would ever be granted that right. The idea of its depending on the appearance of a mythical Mother Star was too firmly entrenched. The spirit of this Star shall abide forever—there was a certain degree of truth in that declaration. By the success of their deceits, the Scholars had made it true.

  People wouldn’t oppose the High Law on being told that the Prophecy wasn’t authentic because that would be acting not so much against bad rulers as against their own beliefs. The real trouble, Noren saw suddenly, was that most people had no reason to think the Scholars were bad. As High Priests, they did not interfere with ordinary villagers’ lives. Yet if someone were to commit an act of overt defiance, wouldn’t they have to interfere? Wouldn’t they be forced to silence him immediately, without waiting for the formality of a civil trial?

  Noren clenched wet fingers, an idea forming out of his desperation. They were going to kill him sometime. Why not in front of the whole Benison assemblage? Why not in a way that would provide the people who revered them with proof, real proof, of their underlying ruthlessness?

  His heart raced. The Scholar was reading the last page of the Prophecy; within seconds after he closed the book, the music might surge up again. There wasn’t time to deliberate, Noren rose from the step and moved forward.

  “‘. . .through the time of waiting we will follow the Law—’” As those words were reached he was part way up the flight, above the crowd; heedless of the pain in his knee, Noren found himself climbing without stumbling. He marshaled every bit of strength he could collect, throwing it all into his voice.

  “No! We will not follow the High Law; it is evil! It’s wrong for a few men to create a Law above village law and keep all the knowledge for themselves!” He glanced upward over his shoulder; the Technicians had left the Gates and were coming down toward him, unhurriedly and without any show of emotion. “There should be Machines for everyone, Power for everyone, and knowledge should be free!”

  His words resounded hollowly from the walls behind him. Stunned silence pervaded the crowd; what would have been greeted with wrath on a less formal occasion evoked only shock when it came as an interruption of a ceremony like the Benison. “The Prophecy—is—a—fake!” Noren shouted. “It’s a fake! There is no Mother Star!”

  Something jolted him, thrusting him forward onto his injured knee, and its pain cut through him like the jab of a knife. The Technicians hadn’t yet reached him; it was as if he had been assailed by some invisible force from within. Noren crumpled, his agony eclipsed by the growing numbness of his body. Just before the music overrode all other sound, he heard a gasp from the crowd and a woman’s cry, “Blasphemer! See, the Star has struck him!” whereupon he realized that in the minds of the people he had been struck down not by the Scholar’s order, but by supernatural intervention.

  His eyes blurred; the incomprehensible thing they’d done seemed to have immobilized him. He tried to grip the edge of the step above, but his fingers would not move; they were frozen, somehow. None of his muscles would act. It occurred to him that this was very likely a natural part of dying.

  The music exploded into the air, vibrating through his head. Hazily Noren was aware of the greenish shapes of the Technicians as they lifted him and carried him through the Gates, into the City itself.

  Chapter Seven

  Noren regained consciousness in a tiny room, without doors or windows but dimly lit by Power. It did not look like a jail cell: the walls were of a pale, clear green that was rather pleasant; the floor was covered with thick padding; and the couch on which he lay was smooth and soft. Moreover, everything was very clean. Even his garments were clean, for they were new ones, made of ordinary fabric but beige, not brown, and styled exactly like Technicians’ clothing.

  How had he arrived in this place? he wondered, getting to his feet. He had no recollection of anything else in the City. Strangely enough, his exhaustion was entirely gone and his arms and legs seemed to work normally; the pain in his knee had disappeared along with the bandage. Yet if he’d slept long, he should feel hungry, and he did not. What had happened? They’d lifted him from the steps . . .

  He pressed his hand to his mouth, a surge of nausea rising in company with an overpowering sense of failure and of fear. His impulsive attempt to expose the Scholars’ ruthlessness had not done any good; he was to be killed in secret after all. His death would be wasted: worse than wasted, for they’d managed to turn his words to their advantage by creating the impression that they’d had no hand in his falling, that the Mother Star itself had punished him.

  He should have foreseen, Noren thought despairingly, that they would not kill him before making an effort toward getting his recantation.

  Why hadn’t he realized that? he asked himself in perplexity. Had he dreaded their unimaginable ways of coercion so much that he’d wished for immediate death . . . or had he actually wanted to be caught?

  With honest self-appraisal, he saw that he had indeed wanted it. He had wanted to enter the City on any terms whatsoever! Furthermore, he’d known underneath that there was only one way left in which he could defy the Scholars: by confronting them and proving to them that not all heretics could be subjugated.

  All right, he thought grimly, He was in their hands and totally helpless, but there would be certain compensations, compensations of which he’d been inwardly aware, and that gave him an edge of sorts. The circumstances of his recapture had been of his choosing, not theirs, and he was the stronger for it. It was impossible to guess how long it would be before they killed him, but he had little doubt that horrible things would be done during the interim. They would try to make him recant. He must not attempt to imagine how, for if he did, fear might sap his new-found strength; he must simply take the things as they came.

  An opening appeared in the wall where a door, made of the same solid green material instead of matting, was swinging back. Two Technicians stood there; Noren straightened and, at their command, stepped into the corridor without protest.

  He had hoped that he might see something of the City during his remaining days of life, but the room to which he was brought was as featureless as the hall leading to it. It was quite large, again lighted by Power, again with softly colored wa
lls and floor. At one end was a dais upon which three Scholars sat at a curved table. Strangely, one of them was a woman; apparently the women among the Scholars shared in their decisions. All three wore the usual blue robes and their faces were indistinct; Noren had the impression that he might as well be facing a row of Machines. Certainly these judges showed no more feeling.

  “Aren’t you going to kneel?” asked one of the Technicians, who, oddly, had not done so themselves.

  “I am not,” replied Noren. He stood at the foot of the dais, his arms folded.

  Nobody tried to force the issue; the Technicians left without restraining him in any way, and as yet none of the Scholars had spoken. He stood in silence for a long time before he realized that they were measuring his nerve.

  Watching their faces, he saw that the apparent lack of feeling was deliberate, a mask. It was presumably meant to frighten him. But beneath the mask they were alert, intelligent people, people with whom a real argument might be held. At the trial he hadn’t been able to argue with his judges; they’d simply labeled his statements as heresy and let it go at that. Though the Scholars might do the same, they would be capable of going further if they chose. They could not believe the Prophecy as the councilmen did. While they wouldn’t admit that in public, mightn’t they to a person who was going to die anyway? If he could convince them that he would never be coerced into recanting, he might at least have the satisfaction of hearing them concede that his theories were correct.

  He had nothing to lose by trying, Noren decided. Taking the initiative, he began, “You must have been surprised when I gave you the chance to arrest me.”

  “Not at all,” replied one of the Scholars. “We could have arrested you at any time since you left your village; we had you under constant surveillance. But it was more to our purpose to let you come to us.”