Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains Page 14

  Speculation about the Visitors had never ceased among the Scholars, although without more data no conclusions could be reached. In the City the topic was mentioned occasionally, but in camp, around the evening fires, it was attacked with renewed interest. In the back of everyone’s mind was the wild hope, “What if we should find something? What if we should uncover evidence not only of their presence, but of their origin, or of how long ago they came?”

  Noren sat frozen during these discussions, unnaturally silent, cold with an apprehension he could neither analyze nor push aside. His people were not the only sentient beings; they had absolute proof that they were not . . . yet they could make no contact with their predecessors or even determine whether any of them still lived. What sort of a universe was it where such barriers prevailed? Were all human races isolated, condemned to perpetual ignorance of the rest? Did others, too, rise to greatness and then, through senseless, futile tragedy, die out, like grain shoots crushed beneath the hoofs of work-beasts loosed into a field? Perhaps the Visitors’ sun had also ceased to exist except in the form of light rays out somewhere between the stars, invisible because no one was there to see. Were stars, like men, inescapably doomed to death?

  He had never thought much about death except in an abstract way. He’d believed himself beyond reprieve during his trial and inquisition and had been afraid; he had felt vague surprise while sharing the dying thoughts of the First Scholar, who as an old man had given up life without fear; he had, earlier, grieved over the deaths of his mother and of a boyhood friend. He had been horrified by the concept of racial extinction and had pledged himself unhesitatingly to its prevention. But he had barely begun to face the implications of prevention being impossible, and somehow, doing so raised the awareness that he himself would someday really die. Alone in the darkness of the outdoor nights, Noren let himself consider death not merely as an abstraction but as a future certainty, feeling terror such as he had never imagined. He, to whom knowledge was all-important, confronted the depths of the unknown, and was overpowered. Had this been buried in him all along? he wondered in dismay. Had his panic in space been based on physical fear after all? The idea added both to his inner shame and to his determination to show no further weakness, but the memory of that paralyzing moment continued to haunt him; though he drove himself to exhaustion in an attempt to suppress it, it followed him into his dreams.

  Exhaustion was the common lot of the entire team, of course; strenuous work on short rations had its effect on everyone. Yet all the men had their pride. Moreover, as village youths many had taken pleasure in competition, and camp life brought back remembrance if not full prowess. Stewards and High Priests they might be, but there was nothing somber about them; before long somebody suggested a stonesetting contest, a proposal adopted with great enthusiasm. Though the accompanying festivities could not take place without women and children to watch, to reward the victor, and to prepare the traditional feast, it seemed a good way to initiate work on the water purification plant, which in the absence of domes would have to be installed in an ordinary stone structure.

  The stonework of such structures was crude, since without metal tools it was necessary to rely mainly on rocks small enough not to require cutting. Fortunately these were abundant in the area; the men not engaged in erecting the tower had been able to gather them without too much difficulty. Everybody wanted to take part in the contest, so on the day chosen, tower construction was temporarily suspended, and only the current space crew had to miss out. As was usual in the villages on such occasions, people rose and ate before daybreak, and by the time the sun appeared the workers were in place around the square marked off in the gray earth where the building’s walls were to be. Sunrise came late beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. The nearby ridges to the east blocked all rays long past the normal hour of dawn. Noren stood facing them, wondering as he waited how they could look so tall when from space, they’d been merely a yellowish blotch. He felt no excitement; the high spirits of his companions lowered his own by contrast—but he was resolved that as far as stonesetting was concerned, he was not going to make a poor showing.

  At sunup the men began a song, taking stones into their hands in readiness. It was the folk hymn prescribed by custom, passed on from one generation to the next as the building skills themselves had been passed on:

  May our strength be everlasting,

  May our skill be sure.

  Till the Star’s light shines upon it

  May the stone endure.

  Noren did not join in, not even when the work started and the songs became livelier and, before long, bawdier. He was kept from it by more than the new depression; his boyhood had not been happy enough to be brought back willingly. Some of the others, apparently, had had fun in the villages, heretics though they were. They were enjoying this chance to relive bygone years. Or was it simply that they were hoping to forget what they knew of the future?

  Not once in camp had Noren heard anyone express doubt about the successful outcome of Grenald’s experiments. The issue had been argued at the meeting in the City, but after the vote, even the skeptics seemed to have convinced themselves that they, here beyond the mountains, were the pioneers of the Transition Period. Had not another city in fact begun to rise? Was not real evidence of the Prophecy’s fulfillment at last before them? Surely the breakthrough would come soon, people declared; surely the vision they saw when they surveyed the drab and desolate camp would be transformed into reality! Noren had always felt that villagers were prone to believe in things because they wanted to, but it was disillusioning to find that Scholars were no different.

  He attacked the work that day as never before, conscious only of the stones he handled, not bothering to count them or to notice the rate at which his own section of wall grew in comparison to others; not even noticing when fresh mortar was brought by one of the men who’d chosen not to compete. As the sun rose higher and the day’s heat increased, he stripped to the waist, throwing aside his tunic without a glance. Sweat poured from his body and ran into his eyes so that he could scarcely see. He could not see anyway; he was giddy; but it did not seem to matter. Vaguely he perceived that the pain in his arms and back was more severe than any he could remember, yet that did not matter either. He did not pause except during the rest periods called at intervals, when he waited apathetically for the signal to resume work. His body moved of its own accord. It was as though it were no part of him.

  Eventually the light began to fade, and Noren decided that he was on the verge of passing out. He did not mind; it might, he thought, be a good thing. Not until men surrounded him, thrusting a mug of ale into his hands, did he become aware that the sun had dropped below the horizon and that the contest was over. And even then he could not take in the fact that he had won.

  Dazed, he looked around at the stone walls that had not been there that morning. Stone was real, stone was tangible; it would indeed last till the Mother Star’s light shone upon it . . . but what did that mean? The stone might well outlast the men, and perhaps, in some dim future age, other Visitors would come and wonder who the builders had been. Such things ought to fit together in a pattern, Noren felt, but he could see no pattern at all. He let his fellows carry him to the bonfire, and he drank the ale that, in lieu of a feast, was to supplement the usual food ration; but he knew no joy of victory. The best he could manage was grim satisfaction in not having disgraced himself.

  Sparks from the blazing moss flew upward, mingling with the stars. Noren’s eyes did not follow them; he had avoided looking up of late. But a recollection of other campfires came to him: fires in the village square, where he and Talyra had sat together in the first season of their betrothal. “If she were here—” Brek began, congratulating him, and Noren turned away. If she were here, she would place the victor’s string of polished pebbles around his neck, and she would kiss him while the people watched and cheered; but later, when they were alone, it would be no good at all. She would sense his emptine
ss, and Talyra’s pity was one thing he could not bear.

  He drooped with a weariness that was as much of spirit as of body. The singing, which had not continued past early morning, was taken up again: not only the bawdy songs, but slow, sad ones, love songs and laments for nameless things lost in the haze of legend. One after another men recalled ballads they had not heard since boyhood, marveling that those from different villages knew them. It was not really surprising, considering their common ancestry and the fact that the traders who traveled from place to place spent their nights in taverns; yet somehow the provincial attitude of their youth was hard to shake.

  “You know, we have one great advantage in this world,” someone remarked during a lull. “Despite the reversion, despite all that was taken from us, we still have the part of our heritage our forebears struggled longest and hardest for. We have unity.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Brek, who had not yet studied much of the Six Worlds’ history.

  “We have a single culture that’s expanding instead of many that must eventually merge. That wouldn’t be good, of course, if it hadn’t been based on a combination of the mother world’s cultures. Diversity is valuable. But it means we won’t have to go through the painful business of resolving cultural conflicts all over again.”

  “The Founders spared us that,” another man agreed. “Think what we’d have faced if people had reverted to more primitive customs without keeping any sense of common identity! All the villagers’ frustration over their inability to progress would have been turned into disputes between separate villages.”

  “I’m still confused,” Brek admitted. “We’re united by the Prophecy and the High Law; we couldn’t survive without them. But those of us who know the secrets don’t like the system. We’re working to get rid of it. So how can you call such unification an advantage?”

  “We’re working toward the time when we can reveal the secrets, relinquish our control of the City, and abolish stratified castes. We’re not trying to get rid of the High Law, though. That will always be necessary here.”

  “Well, yes. People won’t ever be able to drink unpurified water, or cook in pots made from unpurified clay. And religion’s certainly not going to become obsolete.”

  Wasn’t it? Noren thought. What good would it do, once its promises had been kept? And if keeping them should prove impossible, it would become a hoax, an inexcusable deception—the Founders themselves had been horrified by the idea of upholding a false religion. “Brek,” he protested, surely you don’t think heresy should be a crime after the Prophecy’s fulfillment is . . . settled.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Heresy is not a crime under the High Law,” someone else reminded them. “Only village laws forbid it, and those laws aren’t going to be changed overnight; it will take time for intolerance to be outgrown.”

  “But can’t we issue some kind of proclamation?”

  “Certainly not. We mustn’t interfere with democratic government then any more than we do now.”

  “The point I was making about unity,” explained the first man, “is that in the culture that’s grown up on this planet, religious tradition will never be a cause of strife. Individual heretics may be persecuted—although we as priests will always offer them sanctuary—but groups of people with different symbols for the same idea will never go to war over it, as happened on the mother world when intolerance prevailed.”

  “They went to war over the symbols?” Noren burst out incredulously. He had learned enough about the mother world to know what war was, and he could understand why it had occurred when dictatorships had tried to rule by force. But over religion . . .

  “Think of how the people among whom you grew up felt about heresy,” the man suggested, “and then imagine them deciding that all the citizens of the next village were heretics. Or picture a case where quite a few of them agreed with some new interpretation of the Prophecy, and were condemned as a group, including their families—”

  A sharp cry interrupted him. On the opposite side of the bonfire, one of the older men had collapsed.

  * * *

  It was Derin, the camp’s Chief Mason. A heart attack, the doctors called it, an attack brought on by the exertion of the contest, in which he had won third place. No one could have predicted it, for he’d been pronounced fit upon examination in the City; still, because of his age, his friends had tried to persuade him to be content with designing the structure. Derin had laughed at them. Stonework was his pride, and he had won setting contests before. Unlike most Scholars, he had lived in his village until middle life, and had been a highly respected craftsman. City confinement had been a real sacrifice for him, though his natural engineering talent had been put to good use in the drawing of plans for the building to be done during the Transition Period.

  People clustered around. “It is good construction,” Derin whispered. “The stone will endure—”

  “The stone will endure,” his friends agreed. Two or three of them knelt beside him, clasping his hands. There was nothing the doctors could do. On the Six Worlds, physicians had been able to replace failing hearts, but on this one the equipment for such surgery was unavailable. Even therapeutic drugs were lacking. As in so many other ways, things had moved backward.

  Noren watched in horror as Derin, half-conscious, went on, lapsing into the viewpoint of his youth. “My great-grandfather built the arch of the meeting hall; his name’s over it still. This will stand as long; it will stand until the Star appears, and the Cities rise to replace it.”

  “It will stand far longer,” people assured him. “It is part of a City; the Prophecy’s fulfillment has begun.”

  “Yes . . . yes, I forget . . .” He sighed, and Noren saw from his face that he was still in pain, though he was trying to conceal it. “In the village we thought Scholars were immortal. We thought they knew all the answers. I . . . I think I wish it were true.”

  “The answers exist, Derin.”

  Although the City was contacted by radiophone, all knew that return could not save Derin even if he lived until an aircar came. The outpost’s chief brought a blue robe, which he laid over Derin’s helpless form. “May the spirit of the Star abide with you,” he said gently, as one of the doctors began induction of hypnotic anesthesia.

  Abide with him? thought Noren, aghast. Abide with him where? The man knew he was dying, and there were no non-Scholars present; surely this was not a time for pretense.

  But the words seemed a solace, somehow, for when Derin closed his eyes he was smiling.

  In the morning, when the aircar arrived and everyone gathered for the formal ritual of sending the body to the City, it took all Noren’s self-control to attend. He had been to such ceremonies before, not only his mother’s but those held for other people of his village—but that had been before he knew what was done with bodies. The idea of one’s mortal remains being sent to the mysterious City, where they were given into the custody of revered High Priests, was accepted by villagers as entirely fitting. Even Technicians viewed it so; they were unaware of the necessity for recycling all chemical elements and had no information about the converters that had once been standard equipment aboard the starfleet. Yet to Noren the use of corpses for the same purpose as other human wastes, however well disguised, did not seem dignified. And the recitation of words designed to mask deception ought not, certainly, to be practiced among Scholars who knew the facts.

  “Now to the future we commit him, our beloved friend, knowing that in death he will continue to serve the hidden end he served in life, as shall we all, being eternally heirs to that which has been promised us through the spirit of the Mother Star. . . .” Staring dizzily at Derin’s body, wrapped in its blue robe as a villager’s would be wrapped in white, Noren feared that he was going to be sick before the ceremony concluded. How could these men listen to such words? Many of them had been close to Derin, had loved him!

  Yet the words went on. “For as this spirit abides
with us, so shall it with him; it will be made manifest in ways beyond our vision. . . .” That, Noren perceived, did not appear to fit the case. That kind of statement was applicable less to one’s body than to one’s mind. He frowned, puzzled; all the symbolism of public ritual was supposed to be translatable by the enlightened. He must be overlooking something.

  As a child, when he had asked what happened to people’s minds when they died, he had received the usual reply. “That is a mystery,” his mother had said serenely. “People cannot understand such things as that; only the Scholars know them.” It was a matter in the same category as how Machines worked, why soil must be quickened before crops would grow, and by what means the Prophecy had been transmitted from an invisible star to the hand of whoever had first written it down. About these other things he’d gone on wondering, and his curiosity had in due course been satisfied; to the first he had not given much attention—not, that is, until recently.

  The Scholars around him did not seem perplexed. What if he were to ask someone what those words were meant to signify? His pride, of course, was too great for that, since it would mean confessing that the issue troubled him; yet a Scholar would reply honestly. . . . “He is forever of humankind, holding a share in human destiny; his place is assured among those who lived before him and those who will come after, those by whom the Star is seen and their children’s children’s children, even unto infinite and unending time. . . .” That was all right for villagers . . . or was it? Would that particular bit of poetry contribute to humankind’s permanent survival, or had the High Priests, in this at least, exceeded their bounds?

  The rites ended, the aircar rose and hovered silently over the circle of people whose faces were still turned devoutly upward toward the sky, the original source of human knowledge and the domain of all secrets. He had seen that sky more clearly than most, Noren thought; he could still see fierce blazing stars beyond the soft blanket of life-sustaining air, which from above was not blue, but gray and foul-looking. So had the Founders, however. How had they endured such a view? Had they closed their eyes to the question of meaning, of whether there was any logic at all to life, to death, to the evolution and destruction of worlds?