Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains Page 22

  “The truth wouldn’t have harmed people,” Noren protested indignantly. “Truth doesn’t.”

  “No, not if it doesn’t destroy their faith in a greater truth. I agree it’s no kindness to deceive people about important things, not even to spare them unhappiness. That’s why I let you persuade me. Only now—well, now I’m not sure that what we were going to say is true.”

  “You’re afraid to acknowledge it?” Feverish and irritable from the searing thirst that made speech an effort, Noren replied with rancor. “You know as well as I do that there’s no more chance of the human race surviving on this planet than there is of our staying alive here in the mountains.”

  “We’ve managed to hold on so far.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? We’ve had certain resources, resources that won’t last indefinitely. That’s fact, Brek! When they’re gone, we’ll die. I’m afraid, too, but not so afraid I can’t face up to it.”

  Brek looked at him strangely. “Is that what you set out to prove, Noren?”

  With a rage he did not wholly understand, Noren turned his back and started toward the plateau; but Brek was not ready to drop the issue. “I should have seen it sooner,” he declared. “I’m sorry for you, Noren, if what you said that last night in camp is what you believe! But I don’t really think it is.”

  “I do believe it.” Noren said doggedly. “I’ve learned too much to believe anything else. There won’t be a magical, miraculous breakthrough ‘in the last generation of our endurance,’ as ritual has it, any more than there’ll be a magic rescue for us now. What do you expect, some unpredictable solution that we’re led to by the spirit of the Mother Star, the way Talyra does?”

  Brek leaned back against the cliff wall, looking up at the section of fading sky framed by the arch. Then, slowly, he asserted, “It’s not impossible.”

  “You’re no more honest with yourself than the rest,” accused Noren bitterly. “When the going gets rough, the ideas you grew up with come back. You could study all that the Six Worlds knew and still believe that there’s some mysterious force in the universe that provides for people’s welfare.”

  “Yes.”

  Appalled, Noren perceived that Brek meant what he was saying. Against all logic, he had returned to the teachings of the religion in which he’d been reared—not only those the Scholars had planned to substantiate, but the ones that had never had any scientific basis at all. “You wouldn’t have gone through with it, would you?” he demanded. “At the last minute you’d have backed out and left me to reveal the facts alone.”

  “I wouldn’t have abandoned you to the mob, Noren.”

  “Would you have left me in the City? Turned me over to Stefred maybe, to keep me from betraying the sacred trust?” He laughed grimly at the irony of it. Brek, who had once risked himself to save him from the Chief Inquisitor . . .

  “I—I don’t quite know,” Brek confessed. “I think I’d have gone to the village with you and argued against what you said.”

  “That would have been dangerous,” Noren retorted, “for someone who’s decided he wants to live at the price of deception. People wouldn’t have stopped to notice which of us they were stoning.”

  Brek’s rigid control gave way, and he too lashed out in anger. “Are you admitting you wanted to die?”

  “Wanted to? You don’t understand much—”

  “I understand more than you think. You talk to me about self-delusion? You’ve hated yourself ever since that space flight because you’ve been afraid you were a coward, so afraid that a time came when you had to disprove it—at any cost. Even suicide! What we set out to do was suicidal; I knew that. I was willing to die. But not for as many reasons as you were. You were trying to show yourself and everybody else how heroic you could be.”

  Noren stumbled forward, fury amplifying his depleted strength, and seized Brek’s shoulders; but Brek was past the point of restraint. “What’s more, it wasn’t a very big sacrifice, was it?” he went on, his voice harsh and unpitying. “Your life wasn’t worth much to you or to anyone, the way you were sulking—”

  Outraged, unable to control the conflicting feelings the suggestion aroused, Noren swung on Brek and struck his face. Both of them were in bad shape; both fell, Brek letting out an involuntary cry as his injured rib hit stony ground.

  In dismay, Noren bent over him, overwhelmed by remorse. Brek, he thought, oh, Brek, I don’t blame you for despising me—everything I do ends in disaster. . . . Aloud he said, “I’m sorry. You look at things differently, but you’re entitled to, I guess. Maybe you’re even right. I don’t know myself any more; I don’t understand half of what I think. Yet I can see facts. I can still reason, and reason says there’s no hope for us on this planet—”

  “Go tell her that,” Brek said, glancing toward the plateau where Talyra waited. “Tell her that whether she lives to bear your child or not makes no difference.”

  Noren bowed his head. “I can’t, Brek. I can’t, and I don’t know why. I still believe that truth’s the most important thing there is—I’ll never deny that—so if I love her, don’t I owe her honesty? She doesn’t want to be shielded. She’s stronger than I used to think.”

  Brek did not reply. After a while Noren pulled himself to his feet and left the archway. But he saw no beauty in the plateau that night, and though Talyra slept in his arms, he felt no peace.

  The next day his fever was worse, yet he drank barely enough to keep it below the danger level. Talyra helped him to the shade and sat silently beside him; none of them wasted energy on talking. The world was unreal again to Noren, this time as the result of near-delirium; he felt the heat, and the air seemed full of bursting suns.

  “The spirit of this Star shall abide with us, and with our children, and our children’s children. . . .” Neither Talyra nor Brek whispered it aloud, but he knew that both believed it, and were the stronger for their belief; he knew that if they had not believed, all three of them would now lie dead in the canyon where they had crashed. He had not insisted that they make the effort to move on. He had not found the water that had staved off death this long. Yet he did not want to die any more; he wanted, desperately, to live! He wanted humankind to live. Though it was hopeless, he wanted to work with all his strength toward the future so many believed in. He wanted his child—the child that might already be conceived—to continue after him, whether as villager or as Scholar. Why had he begun to feel this way only when it was too late?

  If he had believed as Talyra and Brek did, there would have been no crash. But what good did it do to realize that? Wanting to believe was not the same as believing; he could no more force faith on himself than those who’d condemned his heresy could have forced it upon him. He was what he was, and he could not discount the facts he knew.

  “Noren,” Talyra said softly, “are you awake?”

  He nodded, for his mouth was too dry for him to force out words. “I see something up there,” Talyra continued, pointing to a portion of cliff wall that was visible beyond the arch. “I was looking, thinking how bare it is, and then the sun struck something shiny. I—I think it’s metal.”

  “Metal . . . there? But that’s not possible,” Brek declared, getting painfully to his feet. “No other aircar has ever come down in the mountains.” He walked through the arch and shaded his eyes, staring upward.

  “Are you sure?” asked Talyra. “Maybe the Scholars once landed here.”

  Brek frowned; he knew, as did Noren, that the Scholars had not. If the small object glinting in the midday sun was indeed metal, it could only be that one of the people from whom the mutants were descended had penetrated farther into the wilderness than had been supposed; first-generation villagers had possessed whatever articles they’d had with them when they were locked out of the City.

  “A Scholar would not have left any metal behind,” said Brek, answering Talyra’s suggestion without touching on unrevealed secrets.

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “And we
must not leave it unprotected, either! However it got there, it is sacred and should be guarded.”

  How futile, Noren thought miserably. The piece of metal didn’t look big enough to make a real difference in the resources of humanity; still every scrap was precious, and if they had been going to get back he’d have been the first to say that it should be recovered. But they weren’t. What benefit could there be in retrieving it to eventually corrode in company with the salvage from the aircar?

  Corrode . . . that was odd; if it had lain in a niche in the cliff wall since shortly after the Founding, it should have corroded long ago. Even equipment that did not have to be stored in air-conditioned buildings required occasional protective treatment, for the planet’s atmosphere was hard on the alloys that had met the Six Worlds’ needs. To be sure, some metals did not corrode at all, but they were rarer than those that did, and far less likely to have been among the personal belongings of the mutants’ ancestors. This object shone like silver, yet had too much bulk for any sort of jewelry. His curiosity aroused, he pulled himself up from the half-reclining position in which he’d been resting, but he was too weak to rise and join Brek.

  The question of retrieval was academic, he realized. None of them would be able to climb that cliff; it would be dangerous to try it without ropes even if they had their normal strength. As it was, besides being debilitated by hunger and thirst, Talyra had neither the skill nor a long enough reach, Brek was incapacitated by the broken rib, and he himself was giddy with fever. “We can’t do anything,” he asserted through cracked lips.

  “Darling, we must!” insisted Talyra. “It’s a sin to let a holy thing like that be lost in the wilderness.”

  “We’re lost ourselves.”

  “No!” she burst out. “I won’t let you give up, Noren! If we die expecting to live, we’ll be none the worse for it; but if we stop living because we expect to die, we’ll have thrown away our own lives.”

  Noren looked at her, seeing a confidence that her growing recognition of their doom could not shake, and he knew that for the sake of their love he must make her believe he shared that confidence. Through some flamboyant, mad gesture he must offer proof that he did—for otherwise, in her view, he would be throwing away not only his life and hers, but very possibly that of an unborn child.

  A child who belonged to the future . . . the future that wasn’t going to come . . . He was no longer thinking coherently. Somehow, what he was about to do seemed no less a defiance of wrong than the gesture he’d planned to make in the village.

  * * *

  Crawling to the stream, Noren thrust his face into it and drank deeply, then splashed water over the rest of his body. He lay there, letting the moisture cool him, realizing that this gave him but two more days’ leeway and that after that, during the remaining time before they starved, he would stop rationing himself and sleep alone. At length, when he was somewhat restored, he got shakily to his feet and approached the cliff.

  Brek accompanied him. “I wish I could help,” he said quietly.

  “You don’t consider this—suicidal?”

  “Not in quite the same way.”

  It was not the same. Surveying the rock wall above him, Noren did not doubt that he would succeed in scaling it, and somehow he did not expect to fall to his death. Strength surged through him, as if he had tapped a resource to which he’d previously had no access, and with cautious movements he began to climb.

  There were handholds and footholds, but they were widely spaced and hard to judge. He could not judge them accurately, Noren knew; he must simply make the best estimates he could and then gamble. Surprisingly, he was unafraid, despite the handicaps of faintness and pain from his bandaged feet. He saw everything very clearly: the shades of rock color; the shapes of the crevices; and, over his head, the gleaming piece of metal. It beckoned him, and the closer he got the more peculiar its appearance seemed. It was round! He had never seen a spherical metal object of that size—about as large as his fist—and he could not imagine why it had been placed in such a niche.

  Balancing precariously with one foot well supported and the other braced by a mere toehold, Noren clung to an orange-yellow crag and stretched his free arm to grasp the strange ball. “Push it out,” called Brek. “There’s no need to carry it down.” Noren ignored the advice; for some reason he felt that he should not risk smashing the thing. It was more than scrap metal, though what its function had been might remain obscure. He inserted it carefully into the open neck of his tunic.

  Climbing down was harder than climbing up, since the footholds below could not be seen. Gingerly Noren probed for them, assisted by Brek’s guidance from the ground. Fatigue made his muscles tremble. He was sustained only by the touch of the smooth metal sphere against his chest; near the bottom, when at last he slipped, he instinctively clasped his hands over it as he fell.

  Talyra rushed to him, Brek at her side. Noren’s burst of unnatural energy had faded; he was bruised, one foot was twisted, and even with help he could not stand. He wanted to lie where he’d fallen and never move again. Yet the sphere’s fascination was too great for that. Sitting up, he drew it out and examined it thoughtfully. It wasn’t uniformly smooth; there were oddly arranged indentations, some of which were almost translucent.

  “That isn’t just metal,” Talyra observed. “It’s a Machine.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is,” Noren agreed. He pressed his finger into the deepest indentation, feeling its texture. Abruptly, to his amazement, one of the translucent ones gave forth a greenish glow.

  For a long time he stared, while Brek and Talyra looked on with the respectful awe any unknown machine merited. Then he tried pressing other hollows, obtaining other variations of light and memorizing the scheme whereby the number of glowing points could be increased or decreased. Finally, with the sphere wholly dark again, he raised his eyes. He could not comprehend the thing; he could not be sure that he wasn’t taking a terrible risk; yet to reject any potential opportunity . . .

  “Talyra,” he asked slowly, “does this machine frighten you?”

  “No, Noren.”

  “It should be put with the other metal on the plateau, but I can’t walk, and Brek shouldn’t. Will you take it?”

  “Of course; I’m not hurt. Do you mean right now?”

  “Yes.” He placed the sphere into her hands, adding, “Just before you leave it, Talyra, press here and here and here—so that all the lights will glow.”

  Brek started to speak, but Noren shook his head. “All right, Noren,” Talyra said, puzzled, but trusting him and perceiving that he did not want to be questioned. She walked swiftly through the archway and disappeared.

  “I suppose you had to send her away,” Brek said, “so that we could talk about it. But I’d have liked to look at it more. What was it? I’ve never heard of any equipment like that.”

  “I don’t think anyone has,” Noren declared, “here, or on the Six Worlds either. It’s not the product of our technology, Brek. I—I think it must have been left by the Visitors.”

  “An alien artifact?” demanded Brek incredulously. “How do you know?”

  “Well, I can’t be positive, but it just doesn’t follow the principles of Six Worlds’ engineering. And those holes were made for fingers . . . but not ours; they aren’t placed right.”

  “Noren,” Brek objected, “if that’s the case, why did you want it taken up to the plateau where we can’t study it? And why, for the Star’s sake, did you tell her to turn it on? We’ve no idea what it’ll do.”

  “I think it may give out some kind of radiation.”

  “That could be dangerous.”

  “It could also be detectable—from a distance.”

  “From the City!” Brek breathed excitedly.

  “There’s a chance. Don’t say anything to her; it may not reach that far, and even if it does it may be lethal as far as we’re concerned. It could even explode, though I don’t think it will while she’s activating it, si
nce it didn’t when I was experimenting.” Noren lay back, gazing at the wild and inhospitable peaks of the Tomorrow Mountains. “We have nothing to lose,” he murmured. “If we don’t try this, we’re dead, so isn’t any attempt—even one we’re not sure of—better than none at all?”

  Chapter Eight

  The aircar came just before sunset, dropping out of the eastern sky to hover above the plateau. Brek heard it first, and in that instant Noren—who had not really dared to hope—knew from his face that the gamble had paid off.

  Raising his head from Talyra’s lap, he cried, “Run, darling! Wave, make them see you!” She’d heard it too and scrambled to her feet, racing back through the arch toward the faint but unmistakable humming sound. She did not connect the aircar’s arrival with the mysterious metal sphere, yet she showed little surprise; she had felt all along that in the end the spirit of the Mother Star would bring help.

  Noren was unable to walk; the two Scholars from the rescue car had to carry him to the flat place where they’d landed. Brek, with assistance, got there on his own. He explained about the sphere while Talyra stayed beside Noren.

  It was indeed alien, the Scholars agreed. They had not known what to expect, for the radiation was powerful and unlike any the computer complex had monitored before, although it was not of a hazardous sort. No one had seen how it could be coming from the lost aircar, yet because its source was in the region where the crash was presumed to have occurred, a team had been sent at once. Now, with reluctance, it was decided that the sphere must be left where it was until more could be learned about it; to take it into the City would be an unjustified risk. It could be found again, and indeed would serve to mark the pile of metal that the rescue car, which was already overloaded with passengers, could not carry. After that it would be studied at the outpost.