This Star Shall Abide

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “They’re part of the sham. If you believe me, you know you won’t get anywhere by more talk, so you’ve no recourse but to put me to torture. There’s no mystery about that.”

  “Does the prospect frighten you?”

  “No,” said Noren staunchly, hoping his knees wouldn’t give way.

  “That’s the first lie you’ve told,” the Scholar observed. He hesitated, giving Noren an appraising look. “I’ll be frank with you, Noren. If I thought I had a chance of getting your recantation in that way, I could not proceed without trying it; there are some good reasons why we don’t resort to the method I’m about to use with a person who can be made to cooperate through any other means. Fortunately, I already know you well enough to be sure that torture wouldn’t work.”

  Astonished, Noren barely suppressed his breath of relief. This was undoubtedly another trap; still the admission restored not only his hopes, but his wavering self-esteem. Perhaps they had no mysterious means of defeating him after all, and he would not give in from mere fear of them!

  Stefred regarded him soberly. “You’re surprised. You weren’t sure in your own mind, were you? You believed you could stand up under it, but you weren’t absolutely sure.” Keeping his voice level, he continued, “That’s something one seldom knows about oneself, but we Scholars are usually able to tell. You see, we’re interested not only in what people do, but in why they do it; and once we’ve determined why a heretic is holding out, we can judge what sort of persuasion he’s susceptible to. In your case I am certain that physical discomfort, however severe, would have no effect. What I’m going to do is rather more complicated, and as I’ve said, it’s undertaken only as a last resort.”

  They stared at each other, Noren resolving that he would not be the first to drop his eyes. There was something strange in Stefred’s manner; though the words were cold, Noren sensed none of the calculated coldness he had felt during the inquisition. Why, he admires me! he realized suddenly. This Scholar needs to break me, but underneath he admires me for standing up to him. He acknowledges me as a true opponent. The thought was heartening; on the strength of it, he managed a forced smile.

  Stefred returned it, his own smile looking surprisingly genuine. “You’re wondering what can possibly be worse than the pain to which you’d steeled yourself. Tell me, what makes you think it’s going to be?”

  Caught off guard, Noren could only stammer, “Why—why—”

  “You haven’t an answer. You’ve got plenty of intelligence. but you haven’t yet learned to make full use of it. You question a great many things that other people accept, but still, inside yourself, you’re holding to premises for which you have no valid grounds. That’s one of the ways in which you’re vulnerable, Noren. I’m not going to treat you like a helpless victim; I shall fight on your own terms: the terms you chose when you stood before us and claimed intellectual equality as your birthright.”

  “I claimed the right to knowledge. There’s no equality as long as it’s hidden from me.

  “True. You will be armed with what you need. But first, let’s dispose of some of those false premises. Number one: we never said that you were our inferior, or for that matter, that any other villager was. Because many of them told you so, you assumed it was our idea. It wasn’t.”

  Noren scowled, stricken by confusion. This was scarcely the kind of attack he’d been anticipating. “Number two,” the Scholar went on, “we never threatened you with torture. We never threatened you at all. We merely told you that we could compel you to recant, and you assumed that we had no better weapon than fear. Like many of your other assumptions, that’s wrong. Some of what I do to you will be terrifying, but you won’t be swayed by that; when in the end you recant, you’ll do so of your own free will, because your innate honesty will leave you no choice.”

  “No,” Noren insisted, “I’ll never go back on what I believe.”

  “That’s a very dogmatic statement, and it’s unworthy of you. If you cling to it, you’ll be going back on the key point in your defense: the assertion that you care more for truth than for comfort.” Rising, Stefred fixed penetrating gray eyes on Noren. “The next few days aren’t going to be comfortable; truth, when it conflicts with your personal opinions, is not easy to confront. Yet you maintained over and over again that you wanted to know the truth. All right. Your wish is hereby granted. My weapon is not like anything you ever expected, Noren. I’m simply going to give you what you asked for.”

  Noren shook his head. “You tried to bribe me before; I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “This isn’t a bribe. There are no strings attached, and you aren’t being offered a choice. You’ve already passed the point of no return.”

  “There must be a catch,” protested Noren skeptically. “As you yourself told me, there’s a price for knowledge.”

  “Of course there is,” Stefred agreed. “In the first place, once you’ve become privy to the secrets I’m about to reveal, you will be confined to the City for the rest of your life.”

  That, thought Noren, was unlikely to be long. “It would have happened anyway,” he said. “No heretic has ever left the City.”

  “Not often, but there’s a small chance when a person’s repentance comes early. For an enlightened heretic, however, there is no release; our secrets must stay within these walls. And there are other consequences. You’re in deeper waters than you realize; before I’m through with you, you’re going to be shown things—unpleasant things—that even the Technicians don’t know.” The Scholar approached Noren, his tone carrying more force, yet at the same time more feeling. “Did you demand truth for its own sake, or merely to prove yourself right? Do you value it enough to take its consequences without protest?”

  “I do,” Noren declared, “if you can convince me that what you tell me is really true. I won’t accept empty words.” With chagrin, he saw that he had made a concession by admitting the possibility that Stefred might not lie; yet somehow he couldn’t help feeling that this man was not like most Scholars. In any case, he could scarcely have answered otherwise.

  Stefred sighed. “You’ll receive more than words,” he informed Noren, “and the consequences will be grimmer than you suppose. I warn you that a day will come when you’ll be willing to give up everything you care most for in order to escape them.”

  Did they think he didn’t know they were going to kill him? Noren wondered. Just because they’d never threatened to, did they think him naive? Aloud he said, “I made my choice long ago. I’ll have no complaints as to where it leads.”

  “You’re mistaken. I’m willing to bet that when the time is ripe you will stand here in this very room and give me all sorts of arguments as to why you should be let off.”

  Deliberately and with effort, Noren laughed. “I see what you’re trying to do. If you could make me refuse your offer now, under these terms, it’d be the same as making me say that I don’t really care about truth after all.”

  “You’re very perceptive,” the Scholar acknowledged. “However, as I explained, it’s less an offer than a judgment. Hard as it may be for you to credit, you’ve convinced me that you do have the right to the facts about the Prophecy, which as you’ve guessed are not quite the same as the official interpretation. They are not the same as your interpretation, either; but then, your information has been very limited. It will be limited no longer, Noren. You’ve won what you wanted.” With a strange note of sympathy he added, “I only hope you’ll never be sorry that you did.”

  Chapter Eight

  Noren sat in the chair Stefred offered him and waited with a mixture of excitement and resignation, aware that he’d been maneuvered into a position in which, for the time being, he had no choice but to play along. The Scholars’ tactics were diabolically clever. He could not tell whether he would actually be given the truth or whether there’d be further attempts to deceive him, and if he was taken in by deception they would triumph; yet were he to resist truth when it was offered, they
would achieve a final and ironic victory.

  His spine tinged. To learn the real secrets—the underlying secrets that were kept not only from the villagers but from the Technicians—would be worth all he’d gone through. Perhaps Stefred was sincere; after all, what harm could it do the Scholars to enlighten him before he died? They might even see an advantage to it, for if the truth was as unpleasant as Stefred had intimated, they might think it a fitting punishment; but in that case the triumph would be his! Suddenly Noren recalled the remark that had been made during his inquisition: Knowledge can be frightening . . . sometimes people are better off without knowing everything. He was indeed being challenged, he decided. They were daring him to back up his conviction that it was always preferable to know.

  He watched Stefred’s movements curiously, seeing that the Scholar was handling a small Machine of some sort. Then, abruptly and without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness; the bright day of the City had somehow turned to moonless night. There was a penetrating humming sound. Noren clenched his icy fingers and tried to gulp down panic. He counted the seconds.

  When he reached forty, a dazzling, fiery sphere burst into being in front of him. It dimmed slightly, so that he was able to look at it without blinking, yet at the same time it grew, tendrils of cold flame trailing out from its edges. It was about to envelop him, Noren felt. He wanted to hold his head up, but he could not bear the sight for more than a few moments; he closed his eyes and crumpled in the chair, biting his lip to keep himself from screaming.

  The room turned black again, and Stefred’s hand touched his shoulder. “We’ll try again,” the Scholar said, not unkindly. “We’ll keep trying until you can watch it through, because you will soon be required not merely to watch, but to understand.”

  Noren drew himself erect and concentrated on understanding. The fire reappeared, larger and brighter than before; and this time, though his mouth was dry and his heart thumped as if it would burst, his eyes stayed open.

  “Do you know what this is, Noren?” Stefred’s voice went on.

  “It—it looks like the sun, but there’s no heat.”

  “Yes. But it’s not our sun. And it’s only a picture; this is a picture of a star, up close. Star, sun—they’re the same thing.”

  “But the stars are much smaller,” Noren protested.

  “They look smaller because they are far away.”

  That was reasonable. But then how could the Scholars get pictures of them up close? How could they get such pictures in any case, pictures that moved, pictures that looked real? “Is this sun one of the stars we see in the constellations, then?” he asked.

  “You have never seen this particular sun. It is the Mother Star.”

  Noren controlled his gasp of astonishment and did not reply.

  “You’ve been told in school, haven’t you, that the world is round and that it circles the sun?” the Scholar continued. “Well, there are many worlds, Noren; unnumbered worlds, circling other suns, the stars.” The image was instantaneously extinguished and another took its place: a greenish globe, splotched with irregular areas of white and blue and brown. “Here you’re looking at such a world. A whole earth; an earth with fields and streams and mountains—and Cities, hundreds of Cities, many of them larger and grander than you could possibly imagine.”

  As Noren watched, he saw the world come alive; the globe faded and it was as though he were flying over the land, and then he seemed to be walking through the streets of the Cities themselves. There were people dressed in exotic clothing like none he had ever seen; there were wide, deep streams with little houses floating on them; and once there was a vast expanse of blue water stretching all the way to the horizon. Even stranger, there were towering plants with dark green foliage and brown stems thicker than a man’s arm! There were also other things that he could not begin to identify. He couldn’t absorb the barest scrap of what he was seeing, and yet it filled him with an agonizing, irresistible longing to be part of it and comprehend it.

  But it was gone. There was only the shining globe again, receding into the distance.

  He knew then what Stefred’s strategy must be. This glimpse of the forbidden, ultimate secrets was designed to tempt him past endurance; though not a bribe in itself, it was the prelude to a proposition that he would find very hard to stand out against. All the same, he could not regret having had the glimpse.

  “Haven’t you any questions, Noren?” Stefred asked.

  He had so many questions that he would not have known where to begin even if he had wished to reveal his craving for further knowledge; again, he resolved to remain silent. But Stefred, apparently, was not through tantalizing him. “I’ll give you some of the answers anyway,” he said.

  When Noren didn’t respond, the Scholar went right on. “A great many years ago,” he began, “the world you saw had so many Cities and was so crowded that people were dying because they could not get enough food. There was no land left to grow more food. The Technicians of that world were able to travel to other worlds that circled the same sun, but on some of them they found only rock and ice, and some had no solid ground at all. The rest—five that were quite similar to the home world—were quickly filled up. They couldn’t raise enough food there, either.”

  Despite himself Noren burst out, “How could they go from one world to another?”

  “There is a way. They eventually came to use what was called a starship, a ship that enabled them to visit not only the worlds of their own sun, but those of far-off stars. Look.” A shape grew out of darkness: a Machine, massive and cylindrical, a glistening thing that somehow resembled the towers of the City. “It is propelled by Power. Inside, there is space for hundreds of people to live and work; and in starships like this, Noren, our ancestors arrived at the time of the Founding.”

  No, thought Noren desperately. It couldn’t be; the Founding was only a myth. . . .

  “They came upon this world only after years of searching. A new discovery had made it possible for them to reach other suns in less time than it had once taken them to circle their own, but there were few stars of the right type near theirs, and not all worlds are places where people can live. Some are barren; some are too hot or too cold, or have air that is poisonous; some are occupied by other forms of life. This was the first suitable one they found.”

  Again, Noren saw living scenes take form in front of him: first the interior of the starship, and then a smaller ship coming down out of the sky and the people getting out of it. In the background were the familiar yellow ridges of the Tomorrow Mountains.

  After a long pause, the room grew light once more and the picture disappeared.

  The Scholar smiled quizzically. “Well?”

  Noren met his eyes. “Even if I were to accept these pictures—if I were to believe in the Founding, and concede that people came out of the sky instead of having once been savages as I guessed—I still couldn’t believe in the Mother Star.”

  “But you have seen it. It is the sun of the world you were shown; it is, as the Prophecy says, our source.”

  “If that’s so, how is it that we can’t see it in the sky?”

  “It is too far away.”

  “Will it come closer?”

  “No. What will happen is as yet beyond your comprehension—”

  Triumphantly Noren broke in, “If it’s not coming closer, then how can you tell us it will someday appear? Nothing can change the fact that you’ve created the Prophecy as an excuse to keep what’s here in the City away from people!”

  Stefred returned to his desk, pausing thoughtfully. “Nothing can change that,” he admitted. “Nevertheless, the entire Prophecy is true; you will accept it and revere it.”

  “I will not. These things—these pictures—should be for everyone; what right have you not to share them? If our ancestors all came together in a ship, what right have you to hide the knowledge that came with them?”

  “You will concede us that right.”

&
nbsp; “To buy more enlightenment for myself? If you think so, you’ve underestimated me,” Noren persisted.

  “I doubt it,” Stefred said. “If anything, I’ve overestimated you. As I told you, at present you have no option in regard to your enlightenment; it is going to proceed whether you like it or not, and it’s quite possible that you won’t. The next phase is considerably more painful.”

  “Oh,” Noren said resignedly, “so you’re threatening me after all.”

  The Scholar shook his head. “We don’t want it to be painful for you, Noren. Parts of it will be; truth often is. But the pain won’t be the sort you’ve anticipated, and I will not subject you to any that can be avoided.”

  “Which is another way of saying that if somebody won’t go along with you, it’s ‘unavoidable’ for you to punish him. Naturally you don’t want to; you’d be much happier if we all agreed without making trouble—”

  “Actually,” Stefred interrupted with a strangely unreadable look, “we’re delighted whenever a person proves willing to do his own thinking.”

  “Just so you can demonstrate your power over him?” Noren found, to his amazement, that he was disappointed; for some reason he had begun to think better of Stefred.

  Quietly the Scholar replied, “You are not ready to understand why. I can’t ask you to trust me because I’m aware that you have no basis for trust, but all the same, I hope you’ll remember what I’m going to say to you.” He leaned forward again, and his tone carried no trace of cruelty or deception. “You are about to undergo some very difficult and frightening experiences. During the course of them you’ll learn a great deal that you’ve been longing to know, but you will suffer in the process. That can’t be prevented. We Scholars have suffered in the same way. It is not punishment, but an inherent part of the truth you’ve chosen to seek out. You see, Noren, such truth involves not merely facts, but feelings. Some of the feelings aren’t pleasant, but if you really mean the things you’ve been insisting—the things about its being better to know first hand than to believe because you’re told you should—then you won’t mind experiencing them.”