This Star Shall Abide (19 page)

Noren looked up, seeing his antagonist with new respect. Why hadn’t Stefred used his advantage? He was certainly shrewd enough to have done so, for he had uncanny knowledge of what went on in people’s thoughts; yet he’d strengthened the defense he must destroy. He’d spoken as if truth were important to him, too!

Meeting the Scholar’s gaze straightforwardly, Noren said, “I’m not afraid to be wrong about the Prophecy, sir. I won’t deny it, if it’s proven, but what difference will that make? I still won’t recant, because recanting means more than accepting the Prophecy; it means accepting your right to keep things away from people. I won’t acknowledge that no matter what you prove about the Mother Star.”

Stefred showed no sign of disapproval; in fact he looked almost as if he’d received the answer he wanted. But his reply was impassive. “You’ll be amazed at what you can be brought to do,” he said dryly, touching a button at the corner of his desk.

The door of the room slid open, and the two Technicians reappeared. Noren’s stomach contracted. All at once his fear rushed back, more debilitating than ever before.
He’s playing with me,
he thought in despair.
He encourages me only to prolong the pleasure of breaking my spirit
. At Stefred’s nod, Noren felt his arms gripped firmly; then he was being taken down a ramp and along a narrow, solid-walled corridor in which there was no apparent opening.

*
 
*
 
*

They ordered him to sit in a heavy, padded chair with a weird-looking leather headrest and an appalling assortment of unfathomable apparatus attached to it. Noren obeyed, seeing no use in resistance. He was tilted backward so that he was half-reclining. The cramped little room was windowless; light came, somehow, from the ceiling, dimly illuminating a panel of dials and switches on the opposite wall. One of the Technicians moved a lever at the top of the panel, causing a small red light to glow.

Resolutely, Noren told himself that they must not see his terror, and from somewhere he got courage to relax his muscles while they fastened various bands and wires to his head. He realized that this Machine would do something mysterious and overwhelming to him, and he was filled with foreboding; the interview with Stefred had left him deeply shaken. Yet part of him wanted desperately to believe Stefred. The Scholar had said the things he’d said as if he meant them, and some of them were things no one else—not even Talyra—had been willing to admit.

Thinking of Talyra, Noren felt a surge of sadness. He would never see her again. And what had he achieved? He had convinced only one person; he had not made the faintest dent in the Scholars’ aura of power; and he would die in the end, no matter how bravely he bore this ordeal. Why, he wondered, wasn’t he sorry? Why was he still so determined never to give in?

A young woman entered, dismissing the Technicians, whom she evidently outranked although she wore no Scholar’s robe. She carried a syringe; taking Noren’s arm, she wiped it with a chilling, pungent solution. Her eyes avoided him, but there was pity in them as she plunged down on the needle.

The sting was intense, but brief; he felt a flash of heat spreading through his veins. It was not unduly unpleasant in itself. He lost awareness of touch and seemed to be falling through miles of emptiness, though he could see the unyielding walls and the woman standing before the control board, her hand on a switch below a winking yellow bulb. Then the room was black, and colored suns were expanding somewhere in his mind—not pictures, but images totally independent of sight. His eyes would no longer open, but he heard the switch close with a resounding metallic click.

He expected pain, but it did not come.

Instead, he was in the starship. He recognized it immediately and was perplexed over the sudden transference; then in the next moment he was conscious of the fact that he was not himself any longer. No… he was himself, but he was someone else too, simultaneously. The other person’s thoughts and knowledge came naturally into his mind as if they were his own.

He was a Scholar. He stood at the round window of the ship—a viewport, it was called—and looked out at the earth, the other earth, the world of many cities. He could not see them from where he watched, but he knew what they were like; he knew countless things about them that had never been in the pictures. He knew the people, also, for they were his own people; he was a Scholar not of his world, but of theirs.

And in that world a Scholar had no rank, no secrets. It was all as it should be: knowledge was free to everyone. The part of him that was Noren rejoiced. It
could
be that way, it was not a foolish idea! That was how it had been meant to be all along.

But his rejoicing did not last, for somewhere, buried deep inside him, lay knowledge so terrible that he dared not bring it forth consciously. It had nothing to do with High Priests or their secrets. It concerned something more basic than that, some horror too vast for contemplation. The Scholar could deal with such thoughts; Noren realized that it was he, as himself, who lacked courage to let them surface. He must find the courage, he knew. He must not shrink from any knowledge that was available to him.

Deliberately, he suppressed his own identity, allowing the feelings of the Scholar to surge into his mind. He looked out at the green globe beneath him and thought of the people… millions upon millions of people, the people not only of this world but of its neighboring ones: their lives, their achievements, their hopes; their harrowing struggle to create a civilization in which everyone had equal rights to power and machines and wisdom; their audacious dream of interstellar expansion.

And he knew that the people were going to die. All of them.

It was not because they couldn’t get enough food. That problem could have been solved. Though of the fifteen planets in the solar system, the six fertile ones were fully settled, already one world of a distant star was being explored; there would someday have been many more. But there was a far worse problem that he and his fellow-Scholars had discovered very recently, and it had no solution.

He, the Scholar, was counted among the wisest of his people, and everyone agreed that if he could not save them, no one else could. Nevertheless he had consulted all the other Scholars in all the cities of the Six Worlds, hoping that someone would prove wiser than himself. No one had. The tragedy that was about to strike was beyond the scope of human wisdom to prevent. It would take place soon, and instantaneously; there was no possible way to stop it. All that humankind had accomplished in the thousands of years since the first civilization had grown out of savagery was going to be wiped out—all, that is, but the knowledge preserved in the computers aboard the starship and its sister ships of the fleet. With sorrow he accepted the fact that there was nothing he could do, nothing but to stand at the viewport and passively observe what was going to happen.

Men approached him. “It’s nearly time,” said someone.

Noren nodded. “Take us out,” he replied curtly, as if accustomed to command.

There was a peculiar sensation, not so much of motion as of dislocation. The green globe disappeared. After a little while the other men returned. “We are well beyond the solar system,” one of them said. “Ten minutes to zero, sir.” He added hesitantly, “Will you—watch?”

“I must.” Noren was not quite sure why he must; he certainly did not want to. Even as the Scholar, he was afraid. Yet for some reason he felt a responsibility to do it. He could not save the Six Worlds, but he might perhaps save the people of the new and far-off research station, a handful of people who, with the fleet’s passengers, would soon be the sole survivors of the entire human race. His plan for saving them was vague and very desperate. Somehow observation of the disaster would contribute to that plan.

“Maximum filters,” he ordered. The glass in the viewport darkened. He could no longer see the stars. He could not even see the sun, which at this distance was no brighter than a large star in any case.

But it soon would be.

I’m dreaming,
thought Noren in panic,
it’s like other nightmares; before anything dreadful happens I’ll wake up.
 . . . One did not feel nameless terror like this except in nightmares. One certainly did not become someone else, someone whose thoughts were beyond understanding.

His eyes were fixed on the center of the viewport; his companions had dissolved, as people do in dreams. The ship too was dissolving. Before him, a pinprick of light began to grow.

It grew as it had in the picture, but it was not harmless now, not cold; it expanded into a swollen mass of incandescence, a blinding, pulsating sphere of pure light and intolerable heat, and though his flesh was not burned, he felt the pain of burning. He had doubted when told that the picture showed the Mother Star. He could not doubt now, for he knew that this star was unlike others. Surely normal stars did not explode like this, engulfing their worlds, turning them not merely to ash, but to vapor! There was a word for such stars, drawn from the mind of the Scholar, and the word was
nova
.

Passage of time had no meaning. Even before the nova’s light had become visible, the worlds circling that star had ceased to exist, and their people with them; yet the blazing brilliance of it would endure. It would someday reach far galaxies. The Scholar, perhaps, had watched in silence; but Noren was so overpowered by it that he could not hold back his screams.

*
 
*
 
*

When he awoke, Stefred was beside him. They were in the little room with the Machine, but the woman had gone and the apparatus no longer touched his body. He lay back in the reclining chair, sweating.

“Do you understand what happened to you?” Stefred asked quietly. His tone was concerned, compassionate; Noren turned to him with an instinctive, unreasoned conviction that the compassion was real.

“I—I was dreaming, I guess,” Noren replied dazedly. “Those pictures you showed me must have brought it on. It was sort of a nightmare; did I cry out, or anything?” He averted his face, mortified at the thought that he might have done so.

“It wasn’t an ordinary dream,” Stefred told him. “You see, Noren, when there’s need we can make people dream what we want them to.”

Noren drew back, stunned less by surprise than by his own near-surrender. Once again they’d tried to weaken him through terror, and this time they’d come all too close to succeeding. Furthermore, if they’d done it once, they could do it over and over; no wonder they’d been so confident of their ability to break him without physical torture! “I do see,” he said hopelessly. “You think I’ll give in rather than go through worse nightmares.”

Stefred’s hand closed reassuringly on his. “You have it twisted. I think you’ll consent to go through them, because dreams of this kind aren’t mere nightmares; they are true. What happens in them once did happen; they will teach you much that would otherwise remain beyond your grasp.”

Horrified, Noren whispered, “You mean it—it really was like that? The sun grew so big that it burned up its worlds… and all the people died?”

“Yes,” Stefred admitted with sorrow. “I know how it feels to watch; I’ve dreamed the same dream myself. All Scholars have.”

Noren frowned. It had never occurred to him that Scholars, despite their privileges, might undergo ordeals of their own. “Then you’re not expecting to break me this way,” he reflected. “Is it done to all heretics?”

“Just to those who will not be satisfied with anything less. Truth, Noren, can be quite terrible. Not everyone can face it. I’m exposing you to this only because you convinced me that you could.”

For a long time Noren thought. He was not sure just how he knew that the dream was indeed true; it was partly that the feelings of the person he’d become had been real feelings, separate from his own terror—and partly that he could sense Stefred’s sincerity. There was a subtle difference in the Scholar’s manner that made plain that in earlier interviews, his emotions had been deliberately concealed.

Slowly Noren declared, “I—I believe you, sir. I believe that by keeping such secrets from the villagers and Technicians you’re trying to be kind. But I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think people need to be protected from the truth. Even when it does hurt, it’s—well, it’s how things
are
.

“I agree with you,” the Scholar said gravely. “In this case, however, the issue’s not that simple. There’s still a lot you don’t know. Are you willing to dream again, Noren?”

“Do I have a choice? You said before that I didn’t have.”

“Your choice at that point had already been made. But you’ve had complete freedom to choose from the very beginning; the Technicians at the inn, for instance, couldn’t have induced you to speak as you did if you hadn’t wanted to. We don’t control people. We don’t even try. You would not be here if you hadn’t chosen to seek knowledge that wasn’t available elsewhere.”

“I haven’t been fully informed about what I was choosing, though,” Noren protested.

“No one ever is; information’s a matter of degree. And as you become better informed, the decisions get harder.”

Stefred paused and then asked again, “How about the dream?”

“It’s… nightmarish?”

“Yes. Even more so than the first, but as you say, it’s how things are.”

“Then I guess I can’t stop now. I don’t want to stop.”

“I thought not.” The approval in Stefred’s voice was unmistakable. He prepared a syringe, continuing calmly, “I’m going to give you something to make you sleep, and for many hours you’ll sleep peacefully; you must have rest and nourishment, which you’ll receive from injections, to regain your strength. After that you will find yourself back in the starship. What you hear and what you feel won’t be faked; like the witnessing of the nova, it was recorded long ago from the memories of the First Scholar. He was a real person, and he actually experienced it. For him it wasn’t a dream from which he could wake up.”

“Why did he make himself watch the sun explode?”