* * *
“I’m still awfully confused,” he admitted to Stefred the next morning, not yet able to acknowledge, even in his own mind, the reason he’d sought him out. “How could she have known something I didn’t know about myself, when so much has been kept secret from her?”
“You’ve no doubt that she was right?”
“None.”
“Then be thankful that she had the wit and the spirit to tell you what you would not have accepted from me.” With warmth, Stefred went on, “I could have given you the key when we talked two days ago. You were so bewildered, so torn by problems you weren’t able to resolve, that it was hard to remain silent. But a lecture wouldn’t have helped. You needed to fit the pieces together—which you can do now, if you try.”
There was a long pause; then Noren said thoughtfully, “All that time . . . when I held back from declaring myself a relapsed heretic . . . was it not cowardice after all? Was it that I still believed the Prophecy without knowing I did? How could I—”
“Noren,” Stefred interrupted, “have you ever wondered why you and Talyra love each other?”
“Why—why we just do! A thing like that isn’t something to be analyzed, Stefred.”
“Certain feelings can’t be,” Stefred observed dryly. “A scientist’s ability to analyze is a priceless gift, Noren, but it sometimes gets in the way. However, in this case my question wasn’t meant as an object lesson.”
Smiling, he continued, “You and Talyra share something deeper than a casual love affair. Why? Back in the village you were little more than children, and you didn’t know each other any better than villagers usually do at the time of betrothal; it wasn’t surprising that you were in love then. But when you parted, you considered yourselves unalterably opposed on an issue very basic to your view of life. You expected to be separated permanently, and you both had opportunity to meet others whose beliefs were more compatible. Isn’t it rather strange that your love endured’?”
“You mean how could she go on caring for someone who scorned what she values most? I—I don’t know, Stefred.”
“I’d have thought you’d be asking how you could go on caring for someone who valued what you scorned.”
Noren contemplated it. “There’s just one answer,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t scorn it as much as I thought I did, and—and she sensed that. Perhaps I sensed it, too, underneath; perhaps I wanted it all along.”
“You had it all along.”
“Yet I was so sure I valued only the truth,” Noren declared ruefully.
“And you were right. Not all truth can be expressed in scientific terms, Noren, not even by us; and from the beginning you valued the whole truth, including the parts unavailable to you. At your trial and inquisition you said so specifically.”
“I assumed you could make it available if you chose,” Noren reflected, “and then when you gave me access to your own sources of knowledge—” He broke off, realizing with chagrin that although as a boy he had questioned what he’d been taught about the Scholars’ supernatural supremacy, he’d never doubted that they possessed the answers to all mysteries. To find that they did not—and could not—had shaken him in a way he hadn’t thoroughly understood, for despite himself, he had clung to a naive picture in which they and their City symbolized the knowledge he craved. When the City’s computers failed him, he had held all the harder to the one thing left that was sure: mathematics. He’d been afraid to believe the Prophecy after mathematics discredited it! That would have meant admitting that math itself was not absolute. . . .
“I couldn’t give up my symbol any more than Talyra could give up hers,” he concluded. “I needed one.”
“So do we all,” Stefred replied.
Startled, Noren stared at him, then turned slowly to survey the room, the tower’s view, the far-off outline of the Tomorrow Mountains where for a time he had abandoned despair and fear. Countless things meshed into a previously invisible pattern, a pattern that made unexpected sense of them. “I—I think I see now,” he said at last. “The Mother Star is a symbol of . . . the unknowable. Not just to villagers and Technicians who can’t know our secret, but to us, too, because there’s so much we can’t know.”
Stefred nodded. “There is no magical virtue in that particular symbol, and some Scholars prefer to adopt their own, or one of those used on the Six Worlds. But symbolism is most powerful when it is shared, and on the whole, those of us who have inherited that of the Prophecy find it more meaningful than anything else we could employ.”
“And priesthood is more than receiving people’s homage—”
“A High Priest does not receive. He gives. He gives hope and faith to people who might otherwise have neither.”
“But in order to do that,” Noren mused, “he has to find those things himself. I never thought I would, but now . . . oh, Stefred, if it weren’t that I set out to destroy them—”
“You wouldn’t have destroyed anyone’s faith, Noren.”
“I suppose nobody would have listened, but if it hadn’t been for the crash I’d have tried. At any rate, I’d have destroyed the prospect of my accomplishing something important in the research. Why should a chance accident like that determine the course of a person’s life—perhaps even of . . . a world’s history?”
“Look at it the other way around,” Stefred suggested, “and ask yourself why the accident occurred.”
Noren frowned. If anything was unanswerable, that was, yet he had been at the controls. . . . “You mean—I didn’t really want to do what I was planning to?”
“That’s one possibility. There are others, none of which depend upon chance. Neither of us will ever know what forces were operative, Noren. This much is certain, though: when brought to the test, you would not have chosen the destruction of hope over a gamble on the truth that lies beyond your vision.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You had the power to destroy Talyra’s,” Stefred pointed out, “and you didn’t use it.”
Stunned once again, Noren sat motionless while the implications grew clear in his mind. He’d known he owed Talyra honesty, known she did not want false comfort, yet he hadn’t been able to speak truth as he saw it. This too had been the result of inward knowledge! This too had been not a betrayal of truth, but an expression of his real belief.
He had not seen the analogy. He had not stopped to think that it was all or nothing: the affirmation of life, of survival, for the world of the future as well as for Talyra and himself—or the denial of his deepest feelings. Had his view of “truth” been so narrow as to permit him to repudiate the Prophecy publicly, it would have crushed his buried hope for their lives and for that of their child.
“You were sure beforehand,” he said in wonder.
“Of course. During your inquisition I studied your subconscious feelings; could I have done that without seeing your underlying faith? Would I have exposed you to emotional peril if I had not seen it? For that matter, I wouldn’t have judged you a potentially gifted scientist if I hadn’t believed that in due time you would plunge beyond our knowledge, just as you plunged beyond the villagers’—and to take such a plunge, one must sense that there’s something ahead.”
“You—you had faith in me. And you knew that sooner or later, as long as I was outside the City, some kind of test would arise; that’s why you insisted on letting me stay.”
“It was the only way for you to regain your self-trust,” Stefred agreed. “Once you’d begun to doubt, the thing had to be carried through to the end.”
All or nothing. . . . Very softly Noren declared, “Commitment’s not something you decide on . . . you just find you’re already committed. And when you put on the robe you’re merely offering to share what you’ve found.”
“Are you ready to offer that, Noren?”
“Yes,” Noren replied, overcome by emotions for which no speech seemed adequate. “Yes, I guess I am.”
* * *
Alo
ne, he stood in the dim assembly room under the glittering sunburst, looking up with reverence he had not felt before; and the once-frightening words echoed in his mind as words of comfort. “. . . There is no surety save in the light that sustained our forebears; no hope but in that which lies beyond our sphere; and our future is vain except as we have faith. Yet we are strong in the faith that as those of the past were sustained, so shall we be also. What must be sought shall be found; what was lost shall be regained; what is needful to life will not be denied us. And though our peril be great even unto the last generation of our endurance, in the end humankind shall prevail; and the doors of the universe shall once again be thrown open. . . .”
Noren’s eyes blurred with tears. He had never been so moved. There had been excitement and sometimes pleasure in things he had done during his first term in the City, but never this particular kind of happiness. Lately he had felt that for him no happiness was possible. How incredible, he thought, that in the space of a few hours he could be so changed.
The new peace of mind was not permanent, he knew. There would still be bad times. Yet there would be satisfactions, too—in his studies; his work; his growing comprehension of all he must absorb if he was to contribute significantly to the research upon his return to the outpost beyond the mountains; in the love he shared with Talyra; in the children they would give to a world that would someday be transformed. Wasn’t that how it had always been, for everyone?
Humankind will survive, he thought, because people do survive: not all of them, under all conditions, but some at least to carry forward the heritage that is ours. In our natural environment instinct ensures that—the instinct that enabled us to evolve from mere animals into human beings with the mind and spirit to advance—and in an alien world where evolution can’t progress normally, our instinct guides us in different ways. We do what we must. Hating it, knowing it involves evil and injustice that ought not to exist, the human race lives on in the only way it can; but we who recognize the evils go on working to abolish them, just as our forebears did. It is all part of the same pattern.
Crossing the room to the small closed alcove he’d never before entered, he knelt at the low shelf where, beneath a miniature sunburst, a thick, well-worn book rested: the roll book of the committed. Noren leafed through it with awe, for on the first page, under the faded legend, “We the undersigned do hereby hold ourselves answerable for the preservation of human life on this alien planet and for the restoration of our people’s birthright,” was inscribed the seldom-pronounced name of the First Scholar himself. And below it were other strange names with even stranger dates: birthdates in four figures—Six Worlds’ reckoning—with the Year One listed as date of commitment. That had been before the Prophecy was conceived; further on was written a formal pledge to work toward the keeping of its promises and to fulfill the solemn obligations of priesthood. And then came page after page of two- and three-digit dates opposite the names of those who had upheld the trust through all the years since the Founding.
At the last, on a still half-empty sheet, Brek’s signature stood out, clear and fresh and decisive, showing no trace of hesitancy. Noren signed below it with a firm hand, wondering how many others would do so before the need for such commitment was past.
There would never be an end, he realized as he rose and left the alcove. The book would be filled and a new one begun; the Time of the Prophecy would come and go; but there would always be priests because no matter how much future Scholars might learn, some things would remain unknowable. It would not be the same once the Prophecy was brought to fulfillment. Scholar status would carry neither rank nor privilege, and heresy would cease to be regarded as a crime; people who wished to offer themselves would apply voluntarily for acceptance. They would no longer be the only ones engaged in scientific investigation. Yet the search for truth—all truth—being the proper function of a priest, such work would naturally remain one of their prime concerns. They would begin to look ahead to the time when interstellar travel must be resumed, for the world would never have rich resources, and once people learned what their forebears of the Six Worlds had possessed, they would look to their religion for a new promise. And would not the Scholars give them one, one less specific than the Prophecy, yet just as sure in the sense that if it was not fulfilled, humankind would someday die? No race could endure forever confined to a single world—knowing that, the Scholars would be committed to the discovery and mastery of still another alien environment. Someday they themselves might crew the exploratory starships. Someday, perhaps, they might meet face to face the Visitors who’d made the mysterious sphere. . . .
That evening, as the hour of Vespers approached, Noren drew the blue robe from the storage compartment beneath his bunk and unfolded it, remembering the day it had been given to him, the day of his recantation; and he was suddenly conscious of the distance he’d come since then. He would stand before people now not as a despised rebel, a hero in his own eyes if not in theirs, but as an avowed representative of their most cherished traditions. It was odd, Noren thought, that he no longer seemed to mind.
Carrying the robe with him, he went back to the Hall of Scholars, for though he had neither time nor desire to eat anything, he hoped he might speak to Brek. He encountered him coming out of the refectory; they gripped hands wordlessly, and both were aware that the temporary rift between them need never be mentioned. “I’ll find Talyra,” Brek said, “and tell her you want to see her before the service.”
Noren nodded gratefully. He was barred from disclosing his status before he appeared robed, which by tradition he must not do until Vespers, and the sight of him so attired would stun Talyra; it would be best if they could exchange a few private words as he emerged from the Hall of Scholars. Returning to the tower’s vestibule, he stood just inside its door till he saw her approaching. Then he flung the robe over his shoulders and, feeling its full weight for the first time, he walked forward to meet her.
She inclined her head in the automatic gesture of respect, not yet recognizing him; then as he drew near, she froze in startled disbelief. Noren waited, stricken by fear that this revelation would turn her love to deference. But the face she raised to him was radiant, and when he opened his arms she came unhesitatingly.
“Talyra,” he said, “I’m free now! The waiting’s over—” His heart lifted at the thought that soon, perhaps within a few days, she would come to him in the festive red skirts of a bride.
Nestling close to him, enveloped by the blue folds of the robe, she whispered, “It was this all the time? Not the heresy, but—this?”
“It was both,” he admitted, saying all he would ever be able to say. “They were—well, mixed up.”
“And the things you suffered, the ones you couldn’t tell me about, were . . . preparation?”
“You might put it that way.”
“I should have guessed,” Talyra murmured. “I should have guessed when I first heard that villagers could become Scholars. You wanted so much to learn everything they knew, I should have known that once they saw what kind of person you are, they’d let you.”
“You had no cause, since I wasn’t permitted to reveal any of it. There will always be secrets I can’t reveal. That’s why our wedding had to be postponed; it wouldn’t be fair for a wife to suddenly find herself married to someone who is bound by such great secrecy.”
“Did you think I’d object, darling?”
“Not really. But it was your right to be warned before choosing.”
“As if I’d choose to leave you! But that you’ve chosen me . . . I’m honored. After the way I doubted your faith—”
“I doubted it, too,” he told her. “If it weren’t for you, Talyra, I’d still be doubting. They taught me secrets; they are teaching me to do a Scholar’s work; to that I was sealed long ago. But I wasn’t ready for priesthood until you opened my eyes.”
They embraced quickly; then she walked by his side to the semicircular platform around which Techni
cians and Scholars were gathering. The dusk was clear, and the stars that sparkled overhead seemed uncommonly bright. He could gaze at them undismayed, Noren realized with gladness. Their image would not haunt him any more.
Around him, the assembled people had begun the vesper hymn. Just before he released her hand Talyra asked softly, “Will you bless me, Noren?”
“The blessing is our heritage from the Mother Star,” he replied gravely, “and is not mine to bestow. It falls upon all of us; I merely proclaim what I’ve found to be true.”
Mounting the steps, Noren looked out at familiar upturned faces: Brek’s, Stefred’s, those of many whom he could always count as friends. To his surprise he felt no nervousness; and though he held the Book of the Prophecy, he had no need to consult it, for the words came readily to his lips. “. . . So long as we believe in it, no force can destroy us, though the heavens themselves be consumed. . . .” He glanced up at the surrounding towers, envisioning the starships that would someday be rebuilt, as he extended his hands to pronounce the sacerdotal blessing: “May the spirit of the Mother Star abide with you. . . .” And with me, he thought reverently. May I hold fast to that upon which we all must draw. Talyra smiled at him, glowing with love and pride; and Noren knew joy that his faith was no less genuine than hers.
#
Afterword
Today’s readers may perhaps think of a way that the people of Noren’s world might have been enabled to survive without the drastic system imposed by the Scholars. But in 1972, when the first book of this trilogy This Star Shall Abide was first published, science was not as far advanced as it is now, and I myself was unaware of any other way. I believed that there was no alternative to what the Scholars did; if I had not, I wouldn’t have written two novels that endorsed it—for of course, I would not have sanctioned it on any lesser basis than my conviction that the extinction of their human race would have been worse. So when, some years later, I learned of a new possibility, I was dismayed. I feared that new readers would assume that I had ignored it for plot reasons and had knowingly justified the social evils in the story on false grounds.
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