It would be soundless, they knew, and they would hardly feel the motion. The shuttlecraft was not a rocket; Noren and Brek had read of the rockets used in ancient times, but the nuclear-powered shuttles that had been carried aboard starships were far more advanced. The craft would simply move out of the tower’s bay and rise vertically into the dark. The liftoff would be totally out of their control. They would be in the hands of the automatic pilot and of the City’s computers, which for countless years had held the program for this maneuver in unchanging memory. To the computers the passage of generations had no meaning; the last docking with an orbiting starship might have been yesterday.
Noren trusted the computers implicitly, for they were, after all, the repository of all knowledge, and if they were fallible in anything, the whole cause of human survival might as well be given up. Brek too was confident, although the role of passive crewman seemed less natural to him than to Noren because as a Technician he’d occasionally flown aircars. Neither of them had any real doubt as to their safety; the computers had checked the failing beacon signal and had pronounced it strong enough to home in on. In preprogrammed sequence, they had tested every circuit in the shuttlecraft and had certified its functioning. There was nothing tangible to worry about.
Nevertheless, as he waited through the automatic countdown, Noren was more terrified than ever before in his life.
He had not been seriously alarmed by Stefred’s warning. When they’d taken leave of each other, he’d been angry, and he still was; if Stefred had purposely tried to infuriate him, he could scarcely have done a better job of it, Noren thought bitterly. To be challenged was one thing, a thing he’d always enjoyed, but to be told that this was not mere challenge and then to be denied full knowledge of the facts—it wasn’t fair! He’d arrived at the shuttlecraft hot with the desire to get on with the job.
There had been a sizable group gathered to see them off—the other space teams, their tutors and closest acquaintances, Scholars with whom they’d be working at the outpost—and at first Noren had felt a sense of belonging that he’d never had occasion to experience. Having been a loner throughout boyhood, he hadn’t formed many relationships in the City, despite people’s friendliness. He found the warmth of their send-off surprisingly moving. But then had come a bad moment: a small incident, unimportant, yet somehow of sufficient impact to change his enthusiasm to dread.
The council chairman had been present, clad, strangely, in his blue robe, which seemed inappropriate since it was the middle of the night and not a ceremonial occasion. At least Noren hadn’t anticipated any ceremony. But just before he and Brek entered the space shuttle, the group had fallen silent. People had stood, eyes lifted, and the chairman—a down-to-earth man who a short while before had been talking casually to Noren about the aircar expedition that had previously been dispatched to pinpoint the landing site—had suddenly become all priest. “We embark this night on a mission of utmost gravity,” he’d said. “May the Star’s spirit abide with us, and in committing ourselves to its guidance, may we be mindful that only in trusting have we any hope of success. We have made all preparations that are within our power to make. We have calculated the risks and herewith incur them, though there has been honest division among us as to whether they are justified. It is possible that only our descendants can judge. We can do no more than act in the light of such knowledge as is accessible to us. . . .”
They were frightening words, yet Noren sensed that in some way they were meant to comfort. If so, it was cold comfort, certainly. The robed priest continued into ritual: “. . . There is no surety save in the light that sustained our forefathers . . . our future is vain except as we have faith. . . .” followed by some of the Prophecy. The memory of that last Orison engulfed Noren, and he recalled with vivid clarity the dream-image that had shaken him so. In the training dreams he’d concentrated on the ship, not the view of the desolate planet, and he had shared enough of the original astronaut’s thoughts to be unaffected by the sight of it. Confronting that sight in reality would be less easy.
“. . . May the spirit of the Mother Star safeguard you,” the High Priest had concluded, clasping Noren’s hands and then Brek’s. Now, strapped down inside the sealed cabin, Noren was kept from panic only by determined pride. This was the most thrilling opportunity he would ever have, he told himself. Space . . . zero gravity . . . the stars . . . all the things he’d been looking forward to with such eagerness—was he losing his sanity? How could he be chilled, shaking, unmanned not by fear of death but by some nameless foreboding he could not even define?
Unable to endure the silence, he said the first thing that came to mind, hoping that his voice revealed no tremor. “Did Stefred talk to you tonight, Brek? Alone, I mean?”
“Yes,” Brek said. “He came by our room; he wanted to see us both. I’m sure he was sorry to miss you, though the ceremony just now was much the same as what he said.”
That was an odd comparison, Noren reflected, for the ceremony had been mostly ritual, and he’d never known Stefred to use ritual terms in private conversation. “How do you mean?” he questioned.
“Why, he wished me the Mother Star’s protection—that sort of thing.”
“Stefred spoke to you privately . . . as a priest?” Noren asked incredulously.
“Not exactly; it was more like any two people saying a formal goodbye.”
“But he used the symbolic phrasing.”
“Of course. Didn’t you and Talyra use it?”
“Talyra doesn’t know any other kind,” Noren pointed out.
“Noren, there isn’t any other kind, not for this. Would you have expected him to say just ‘good luck, and I hope the shuttle works’? To invoke nothing greater than his personal friendship for me?”
He’d have expected Stefred to be honest, Noren thought in bafflement; one couldn’t conceive of his being anything else. The protection of the Mother Star . . . well, that could be translated as the protection of the Founders’ knowledge in building the shuttlecraft and programming the computers, or perhaps as the protection of their own knowledge passed down from the Six Worlds. But Brek hadn’t interpreted it that way; like Talyra, Brek had read in some sort of magic. And Stefred knew Brek’s mind too well not to have foreseen that he would do so.
A vibration, noiseless but powerful enough to penetrate their bones, spread through the craft, passing into their firmly restrained bodies. “We’re moving,” Brek whispered. They looked at each other, and Noren’s terror receded, replaced by excitement.
Yet as the vibration intensified a new thought struck him. He was leaving the City—the City, the citadel of knowledge he’d sought so long and finally reached. He would be in the wilderness for many weeks to come, and though he wanted to go, he found himself once again torn. The City had never seemed a prison to him. He would miss it.
To rendezvous with the starship did not take long. As in the dreams, Noren and Brek felt the abrupt shift to weightlessness when the engines cut off; they saw the series of colored lights that told them they were docking; they felt the bump that meant the shuttlecraft had come to rest in a bay like the one it had recently left. They put on their helmets, marveling at the feel of moving under their own volition in a realm without gravity, a realm where up and down did not exist. They threw the switch to start cabin depressurization, waited for the large green light, unfastened the hatch . . . and emerged into a “tower” vestibule whose outer doors stood open to a vast black sky.
No stars were visible, for the faceplates of their helmets had been darkened lest on exiting, they confront the sun. It was like the test dream, where he’d fallen blindly and in utter silence. To Noren it was silent, anyway, for there was only one radiophone for communication with the City, and Brek—whose job as a Technician had been the servicing of radiophone equipment—was carrying it. There had been no real justification for allocating two, although Stefred had seemed to feel that two were needed. He’d been overruled, since radiophones were
vital for intervillage communication and like everything else had to last until the Time of the Prophecy. Noren did not mind. He could talk to Brek when necessary by touching helmets with him, and anything he might wish to say to the ground team could be relayed.
He was no longer afraid. He felt free, euphoric, just as he’d expected he would. To float in limitless vacuum, restricted only by the thin tether that anchored him to the ship; to move almost without effort by means of a skill that had become familiar to him in dreams; to take up the tools and use them upon a Machine more awesome than any from which village taboos had once barred him—that these things were possible filled him with elation. He and Brek, grasping the handholds, made their way out to the tail of the starship where dismantling was to begin. The sun at their backs, they worked without speaking. There was no need for speech. Absorbed by the task and by the wonders of their situation, secure in their trust of each other and of the technology that enabled them to do what no one had done since the Founding, they encountered no difficulty in performing the job assigned to them.
They had been told to work steadily but unhurriedly; Brek was to report their progress at intervals over the radiophone. Noren could hear neither the reports nor the replies, but he knew that if any exchange of significance took place, Brek would tell him. Each section of hull, once unjoined, was to be fastened to a line and pulled into the shuttlecraft bay. The plan was to stow them all aboard later, when there were enough to fill the hold. Brek motioned that he would take the first one in. The thing wasn’t heavy, of course, since it too lacked weight, and a slight push from Noren was enough to give it momentum.
While Brek was gone Noren paused to rest. He was not really tired, but he’d never been one to stick unceasingly to a task when there was something interesting to think about—and in space there certainly was. He pulled himself around the ship to the side away from the sun, not wanting to miss this chance to adjust his helmet’s filters for one quick look at the stars.
They were overwhelming. He had seen them in the dream, but not like this, not immediate, tangible, many of them brighter and more splendid than Little Moon. He was no longer dreaming. The stars were real.
And all at once everything else became unreal. The villages . . . the City . . . the Six Worlds that were now mere space dust . . . those were no part of reality! He was detached from them. It was they that were dreams; he, Noren, was alone in space, unshielded from the boundless void and the stars that burned with a beauty he could not bear. Suns . . . all of them suns . . . how many of them had worlds where peoples beyond contact lived and worked and sought knowledge? How many still had worlds? They were light-years away; some, like the Mother Star itself, might have gone nova long ago . . . he might be seeing only their ghosts . . . but if so, was anything in the universe less illusory?
He turned cold, for it was an appalling thought. Always he had trusted in the existence of truth that was firm and absolute. He had searched for it unceasingly, and had supposed he was on his way to finding it. Yet if all was illusion, if the uncertainty he’d found so dismaying involved not only human survival but the very nature of things, then he had no more of an anchor to true reality than to the planet from which he was adrift. He could not even depend on the workings of his own mind.
Once again Noren was engulfed by terror he could not understand. He wanted to cry out, to call and be answered by Brek or by someone, but there was no means of doing so. He wanted to run, to feel air touch his face, to feel life surge through his weightless body; but that was impossible too. He was paralyzed. He was cut off from life. In desperation, knowing himself powerless to combat what was happening to him, he reached out for the next handhold. At first he could not make his arm move. But in time—he was not sure whether it was a long time or a short one—he was floating in a place where he saw not only stars, but the immense rim of the gray, mist-shrouded world.
It was, as he had known it would be, empty. He had always known that no one lived anywhere but in the one small settlement maintained through the Founders’ wisdom, but he had not sensed it as he did now, isolated from all contact with that settlement—that island in a huge expanse of emptiness. And there might well come a time when there would be no island! The human race would have no refuge once the City’s equipment gave out. Somewhere in the immeasurably great region of dark, Noren thought, were the rays of light from the nova—the Mother Star—traveling at inconceivable speed but not yet close to him. He would die before they came close; soon after their arrival, his people might all be dead. If there was no scientific breakthrough . . .
Had other human races perished also? Abruptly, as he looked out into the depths, new horror assailed him; he questioned in a different way from before. Those blazing suns . . . uncounted billions, he had been told, in the whole universe . . . why did some become novas? He had heard the facts in terms of astrophysics; he knew what triggered the change physically—but that was not the answer he sought now. Why did such facts exist? Why should a star consume its worlds, its people, exiling the escapees to an alien land where the attempt to survive might be futile? For that matter, why did either stars or people come into being at all?
For the first time since learning the truth about the Mother Star, it occurred to Noren to ask not how things happened, but why.
His mind could not cope with such questions. Yet it had never failed him in the past! He’d relied on it to reason things out, to find meanings. . . . Maybe there were no meanings. Or maybe no effort of his mind was valid. He had broken away from the world; he was drifting, falling, into a black starlit cosmos he could not comprehend. There was nothing solid or concrete to hold to. In the grip of panic, Noren lost touch with the starship itself. A remote part of him knew that if he could clutch the safety tether, he could pull himself back; at least, he should shut out the view that was so unnerving.
But this time his hand would not obey his will. This time he was truly paralyzed and could not turn the knob to remove the stars from his sight. He could not even close his eyes. He remained staring, no longer in command of either his body or his thoughts, while his panic overmastered him.
Chapter Five
It was Brek who got him back into the shuttlecraft, Brek who activated the automatic control sequence that took them down to solid, but hitherto unexplored, ground. Noren had no memory of it afterward. He was told that Brek had contacted the City by radiophone and had been advised to return at once without cargo.
The ship landed according to plan at the site of the new outpost, to which a guide-beacon had been transported by aircar, since descent to the city by daylight was undesirable and Brek was not judged competent to reset the automatic pilot in any case. A vague impression of gray rolling mossland under an even grayer sky was all Noren recalled of his first steps beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. Yet the sky seemed studded with flaming suns. Later, in the night, he was not sure whether this had been dream or hallucination; but he found his mind clear enough to know the circumstances and feel the shame.
Waking in the dark to the dry oppressive heat of the planet’s natural climate, he at first thought himself back in the village; but there were no buildings. He lay on a blanket spread upon moss, and overhead was open sky. Open sky! Noren turned onto his stomach and buried his head in his arms, for he knew that if the clouds should disperse he could not bear even a glimpse of starlight. He remained still, paralyzed once more, conscious that men slept nearby and that he did not want to be seen by them. After a while he became aware that his face was wet with tears.
He had not experienced failure before, at least not of a kind caused by any personal inadequacy, and certainly not in a venture that affected the welfare of others. Tears stung and sobs wracked him, though he made no sound. The trip useless . . . precious hours of the beacon’s functioning wasted . . . some later crew might well he endangered by his loss of nerve, and completion of the tower might prove impossible. He could not live with that knowledge! He could not face those who had trusted
him. He could not face anyone, least of all Brek, who had witnessed his weakness. But it was worse than that. He could not face the world itself. Fear swept through him again as he saw that to him, the world was not the same place as it had been; it still seemed unreal, without meaning, like some of the ancient films he’d been shown that bore no relationship to anything he could interpret. This had nothing to do with space flight, Noren realized. Space had merely opened his eyes to a less substantial view of reality.
He had thought he could not rise and move and speak, but when morning came he found otherwise. It proved possible to go through the motions. An image came into his mind: a creature he’d heard of, a tiny mother-world creature that had over a hundred legs . . . he’d wondered how it knew which to move next. Had it stopped to ponder the matter it couldn’t have known, yet it walked. He too would proceed without pondering. To do so was better than to reveal that what had happened to him was more than a temporary spell of panic; in any case, he could scarcely lie there and let people assume he was sick. He got up, washed his face in the basin that stood on a stone table at the edge of camp, and joined the group clustered around the breakfast fire, marveling that his muscles seemed to function just as they always had. Men greeted him cordially, with studied matter-of-factness; and when he opened his mouth to reply, words came out, despite his conviction that he would find himself mute.
The camp’s leaders wanted him to go back to the City at once by aircar. Noren flatly refused. “I’m all right,” he maintained, feeling inside that he was not all right, that very probably he would never be, but determined to let no one suspect it.
They frowned and shook their heads, but Noren was so insistent—and outwardly so composed—that they agreed to let Stefred decide. He shrank from talking to Stefred even by radiophone, but since he was gently informed that if he didn’t, he would be sent back without his consent, there was little choice. They went away and allowed him to make the call in private.
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