The Doors of the Universe Read online

  “Is the child in the nightmare some kind of symbol not only of what did happen, but of what I’m afraid is happening to my mind?” he continued. “Things are so . . . so mixed up—all tied together somehow. The First Scholar’s feelings, too! When I’m awake, I remember his good feelings; why do only bad ones, indescribable ones, come in my sleep?”

  “This is hard to say to you,” Stefred admitted, “but I don’t know. And I’ve no means of finding out.”

  “You can’t cure me?” whispered Noren, appalled. He had not wanted to seek help, but he’d never doubted Stefred’s ability to provide it.

  “There’s nothing to cure, Noren. You are not sick; you’ve in no way lost touch with reality. Difficult though it is for you to accept my estimation of you, I am professionally qualified to diagnose mental illness.” He smiled, though it was obviously an effort for him. “If you can’t take my word, you’re accusing me either of incompetence or of dishonesty.”

  Noren raised his head. Put that way, the judgment was indisputable. “You’re telling me the nightmare may not stop,” he said shakily.

  “I wish I could tell you otherwise.” replied Stefred gently “But you want the truth, and the truth is that we’re faced with something beyond my skill to analyze. Your sanity is not in question, and the monitoring has shown that the nightmare’s harmless to you. That’s as far as I’m able to see; you will have to find your own way.”

  “I’m willing to try,” Noren said, “but I—I don’t think I’m equal to it.”

  “With that, I’m on firmer ground,” said Stefred, his smile genuine now. “There are ways of proving to you that you are. At least there would be if you were a candidate and still afraid of me so that I could demonstrate how much you can endure of your own free will.”

  “But this isn’t like what you do to candidates; no one could bear it voluntarily—”

  “No? Suppose when you’d come to me as a heretic, convinced that my aim was to pressure you into submission, I had induced such terror in you—I could, you know—and demanded your recantation as the price of freeing you of it. Would you have knelt to me and begged my mercy?”

  “Well, of course not,” declared Noren. “What a silly question, Stefred.”

  “To you, it is. To someone to whom it wasn’t, I would never pose it.”

  “I see your point,” Noren conceded. “Why doesn’t it make me feel any better?”

  “Because you don’t yet see that you’re in a comparable situation.” Seriously, Stefred went on, “Noren, the mind is strange, and there’s much about it we can’t comprehend. Of this much I’m sure, though: what is happening to you is happening by your own inner choice. Strength, not weakness, has brought the ordeal upon you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve told you in the past,” Stefred reminded him, “that a strong person can open his mind to things a weaker one wouldn’t be willing to confront. The subconscious mind gives you whatever protection you need—there are psychoses and drugs that can circumvent that, but in you I find no trace of interference with normal functioning. Therefore you are experiencing something you’re able to handle and that is in some way purposeful.”

  “But what constructive purpose could it serve?”

  “That, I can’t answer.”

  “I suppose the fact that it’s unpleasant doesn’t rule out inner choice,” Noren said slowly. “After all, we do suffer voluntarily when we reach out in the controlled dreams. You know, what you said about Lianne, when she was being subjected to the candidates’ version of the recordings . . . it—it’s a little like that, I think. As if I’m trapped by intolerable limits, reaching for something that isn’t there. In the nightmare it’s always just beyond the edge, where I can’t touch it. Is that a reasonable analogy?”

  Stefred leaned forward. “It could be more than analogy,” he said, his voice edged with excitement. “Think: did you feel this at all in the controlled dreams?”

  “Well, I was definitely reaching for something I didn’t find. Only the rest was so overwhelming that I didn’t mind much, any more than I minded the limits of the candidates’ version when I was younger.”

  “We don’t understand just how controlled dreaming works,” Stefred mused. “We’re sure only that the dreamer has a certain degree of freedom. The more courage you have to reach out, the more you gain—”

  “You told me that the very first time I was subjected to it,” Noren recalled.

  “Yes. You’ve always had that kind of courage—from your earliest childhood you’ve sought knowledge, and even from the first dream you took more than was forced on you. And your identification with the First Scholar is exceptionally strong. I can’t guess what you drew from the full version of his thoughts—but conceivably, it was more than the rest of us have gotten. We’ve always known the editing he did for privacy left gaps we can’t fill.”

  “Could that cause nightmares, the way the gaps in the partial recording were agony for Lianne?”

  “Yes,” said Stefred thoughtfully. “Yes, it could. The unanswerable questions he pondered aren’t disturbing you, not in the sense of giving you nightmares, anyway. But something he knew, yet deleted . . . if it was an emotional thing, a significant one—”

  “But why would he delete anything significant? His goal was to pass on all his knowledge; surely he took out only personal details that were no one’s business but his own.”

  “That’s the puzzle,” Stefred agreed. “He wouldn’t have removed anything his successors would care about. And he was skilled in the editing process; he wouldn’t have left gaps that could cause a dreamer to suffer.”

  “I wonder. He wouldn’t have left any that would cause harm—but you say that what’s happening to me is not harmful. You say I’ve chosen to experience more than was forced on me. He made a lot of plans that depend on people being willing to do that.”

  “For fulfilling the Prophecy, yes—but we know those plans.”

  True, thought Noren, and yet . . . “What if I were to stop shrinking from the nightmare, enter it as I would a controlled dream?” he asked.

  “That would be a very wise approach,” Stefred answered soberly, “but I can’t tell you where it would lead. Noren, if you have taken something unprecedented from the First Scholar’s memories, you are already past the point where I can counsel you.” He smiled and added, “But then, I’ve always believed you’ll move beyond me one way or another in time.”

  Of course, as the world’s most promising nuclear physicist, Noren thought bitterly—but on the verge of an exasperated reply, he became aware that Stefred was no longer trying to reassure him. On the contrary, he had just presented him with the most frightening challenge of all.

  * * *

  Lying sleepless, Noren courted nightmare, wishing with full sincerity that it would overtake him. Seldom had it come, lately, and when it had, he’d been able to draw nothing more from it. Though it was still acutely painful, he no longer found it terrifying, for he was increasingly convinced that its emotions had originated not with him but with the First Scholar—and it was something he wanted desperately to understand.

  Stefred had been speculating about direct transfer from a recorder’s subconscious mind to a dreamer’s; he had reread all the information in the computers about the thought recording process and had even reexperienced the First Scholar’s recordings himself in the hope that he’d get from them whatever Noren had gotten. That hadn’t happened. Noren, embarrassed, realized that now more than ever, Stefred regarded him as having some special rapport with the First Scholar that set him apart from everyone else. He was torn; he did not want such a position—yet could Stefred conceivably be right? Was there something buried in his mind, perhaps, that could explain why he felt unlike other people, even the people who shared his concern for knowledge, the Scholars with whom he’d once thought he wouldn’t be a misfit?

  He had been a misfit as a boy in the village. He’d never gotten on well with his fat
her and brothers, who had not cared about any of the things that mattered to him. Once he had despised them, as he’d despised the village life they had found satisfying. He was no longer so callous; for all their rough ways, they had been honest men who’d worked hard and who would leave many descendants. He wondered sometimes what had happened to them. Did they still feel shame at his having been convicted of heresy? The severance of family ties demanded of Inner City residents had been no sacrifice for him, though for most others he knew, it was. It bothered him a little to realize that he’d had nothing to lose.

  Except, of course, Talyra. And he had not lost her because of his heretical ideas after all. Ironically, he had lost her for no purpose whatsoever; and worse, she’d lost her own life. . . .

  The First Scholar had come to terms with grief. But his wife had chosen to die—chosen tragically and mistakenly, to be sure, but nevertheless she had made her own decision. Talyra hadn’t. He could never reconcile himself to that! If some end had been served by it, something she would have chosen had she known . . . but it had achieved nothing.

  He could endure his own guilt. He knew, from the dreams, that the First Scholar had lived with some terrible and mysterious horror for which he’d felt to blame, and had endured it—he could never have been at peace in the end if he had not. The end, the deathbed recording, contained no traces of any horror. There was sadness in it, and physical pain, but otherwise only hope: the exultant hope that had engendered the Prophecy. For himself, Noren thought, there would never be hope again. Talyra had died uselessly, and the things she’d believed in, the things the Prophecy said, were never going to come true in any case.

  It always came back to that.

  Turning over in the dark, the total darkness of a windowless room in which for lack of metal wire, there could be no illumination when no battery-powered lamp was in use, he found himself thinking again about genetics. It was strange he could not put that out of his mind. He’d long since learned all he could about it, lacking practical applications to focus on. He had satisfied his curiosity as to the specific way in which unprocessed soil and water damaged human reproductive cells. It was an incredibly complex process requiring understanding of both chemistry and biology at the molecular level; he’d spent weeks wholly immersed in it, and even so, only the mental discipline acquired from his past study of nuclear physics had enabled him to master the concepts. He was by now, he supposed, the greatest authority on useless information who’d ever lived in the City. The greatest shirker of responsibility, too, people would say, had he not gone back to an outward pretense of devotion to the unattainable goal of metal synthesization.

  Yet he could not let his new knowledge drop. He did not know why. It wasn’t escape from terror any longer, nor was it still escape from the futility of his official work—for was not genetics equally futile?

  How frustrating that he couldn’t justify devoting more time to it. He would like to experiment. He might genetically modify some native plant to grow in treated soil, and that would give people relief from the monotony of a diet based on a single crop. But the cost would be too high, not only in his time, but in the time the land-treatment machines would last. A second crop would be welcomed by village farmers; they would want extra fields to grow it in. The Founders had been wise to provide only one kind of food. They had also been wise, perhaps, not to encourage even the Scholars to learn that if it were not for the limitation imposed by the machines’ durability span—which had been calculated on the basis of necessary population increase—more variety would be possible.

  The Founders had made just one practical use of genetic knowledge: they had developed the work-beasts. Everyone knew that, of course; even the villagers said that the work-beasts had been created by the Scholars at the time of the Founding. It was one of the notions he had scorned during his boyhood, but from the dreams of his enlightenment as a Scholar candidate, he had learned to his astonishment that it was true. Animal embryos had been brought from the Six Worlds and had been genetically altered so that they could eat native vegetation and drink from streams. They were essential to the villagers as beasts of burden as well as for hides, tallow and bone . . . what a pity that there wasn’t a way to make the meat usable, too. But genetic alteration couldn’t accomplish that. Work-beast flesh, like any creature’s, contained chemical traces of the food and water that had nourished it; the High Law decreed that it must be burned or buried. You couldn’t deal with the damaging substance in the soil and water by biological modification of what people consumed. The problem—the biological problem—was not in the food sources, but in people themselves. . . .

  Noren sat upright, his heart pounding. Why wasn’t it possible to make biological modifications to people?

  It was all too possible in nature. That was the trouble. The mutants were biologically changed. They ate native vegetation and drank from streams as work-beasts did; what had been accomplished with the work-beasts was called controlled mutation. It had been detrimental to their intelligence, not as seriously as in the case of the mutants descended from humans, since the beasts hadn’t been very intelligent to begin with, but a similar type of brain damage had been involved. Only it needn’t have been. He had studied the research done by the Founders, and he knew—with hindsight it had been recognized that the brain damage could have been avoided. The world had needed strong work-beasts, fast, more than it had needed smart ones. The researchers had been working against time and they had not tried to deal with the complexities of the genes that regulated brain development. Later on, they could not retrace their steps, for the inherited brain damage was irreversible.

  But if that damage had been needless, if it could be averted if controlled mutation were done in the right way, why couldn’t mutation in people also be controlled? Biologically, genetically, people were animals. . . .

  He fumbled for the lamp, suddenly unable to bear the darkness. He knew he would not sleep until he had discovered the answer.

  There must be an answer, of course. The Founders were not stupid; they could scarcely have failed to perceive what he had just perceived. They would hardly have established a system they loathed, a caste system they knew to be evil, if there had been any alternate means of human survival—they had maintained over and over again that they would not. They’d experienced heartbreak during their decision and its implementation. The factors in the decision had been considered in full and painful detail by the First Scholar, who had suffered most agonizingly over it. Noren knew, beyond any possible question, that the First Scholar would not have done the things he did if there had been any choice. Nor would he have overlooked any conceivable future way of saving humanity from extinction.

  But it was surely very strange that his recorded memories hadn’t included any regret about whatever it was that precluded controlled genetic alteration of humans.

  Noren pulled on his clothes, his hands shaking, and took a small lantern; it was so late that the corridor lamps had been turned off. Outside, only the lights at the tower pinnacles still burned. He strode across the courtyard to the Hall of Scholars. The computers could tell him what he needed to know. They preserved all knowledge, and the answers he now sought had once been known. They must have been.

  He looked up at the dazzling tower lights and the faint stars that showed between them. Off to his left was the red-gold glow of Little Moon, now rising. As bright as Little Moon, said the Prophecy; the Mother Star, when it appeared in the sky, would outshine any other. He would not live to see that, but his people must . . . his descendants must. Talyra had been right, he knew—he must eventually have other children. He did not feel he would want love again, not for itself, but he did want to believe that his offspring would live after him. She’d understood that, and her last thought for him had been to send word that she understood.

  The towers . . . the City . . . to him they had always been a symbol. Of the future. Of the knowledge he craved. Outside, as a heretic, he’d gazed at them with more lon
ging than he could bear. Had he offered his life for conviction’s sake alone, or only because without access to knowledge it had meant little to him? City confinement had been no more a hardship for him than separation from his family had. In his very arrest he’d had nothing to lose, though he’d believed himself soon to die. Had it been right to accept priesthood when he’d made no real sacrifice?

  Approaching the computer room, he knew again that it had been. The essence of priesthood, for him at least, was guardianship of knowledge and extension of it—only by that means could knowledge ultimately be made free to all people. Only through its use could metal become available. Yes, that aim might fail, probably would fail; in the end everything would be lost . . . but the human race must die striving for life.

  Suppose, just suppose, it had been possible to alter humans genetically so that the species need not die. Noren realized, with his hand poised above a console keyboard, that he did not want to crush this fantasy yet. The replies to his questions were going to crush it. But suppose that option had been open to the Founders—the Prophecy’s promises would already have been fulfilled! He would be living in the era all Scholars wished to see. The City would long since have been thrown open, knowledge and machines would be available to everyone. . . .

  Or would they?

  No! There would be no more metal than there already was. Its synthesization wouldn’t have been achieved, and in fact it wouldn’t need to be achieved—people wouldn’t even have kept working toward it. If people could drink unpurified water and eat plants grown in untreated soil, they could survive without metal, without machines!