The Doors Of The Universe (37 page)

He drew back from a deep relationship with Lianne, even from the friendship that had grown strong between them. She knew him better than any human being ever had; she understood his dreams, his longings—his whole outlook on the world—in a way that hadn’t been possible for Talyra. It was due not only to her telepathic gift, but to the compatibility of their minds. With Lianne he knew, for the first time in his life, what it was not to be lonely. Yet this kinship of spirit had become a searing agony. He wanted desperately to glimpse the universe as she had seen it, to share the ideas she was now willing to discuss, but at the same time he could not bear to talk of them. What he could not have, he must forget, or lose his grip on the routine of everyday living. To his dismay he found himself avoiding his sole chance to exchange thoughts about the things that mattered most to him, shunning all reminders of the realms he had renounced.

There was little time to talk to Lianne anyway, considering his double workload; when he saw her, he fell into casual comments on daily happenings or technical points of the work. He was not fully aware of the extent to which this was deliberate. Looking back, however, he knew his one opportunity for real communication was slipping away. Lianne obviously knew, too, and was saddened. It occurred to him that she, left alone in his world for an indefinite number of years, was desperately in need of his companionship though she was resigned to not having his love. If she was the only person in the City he’d found who cared about the universe, the reverse was even more true. He was nevertheless powerless to help himself. Inwardly aching, he let their moments of contact run out in empty conversation.

Some weeks after Veldry had begun drinking unpurified water, she told him, radiantly, that she was pregnant. She seemed even more elated than she’d been the first time; Noren thought with chagrin that her courage outmatched his own. He was pleased by the news, but he could scarcely feel good about it—he knew that as time went on his terror would grow in pace with the growing child. Did joy in a new love override her fear? “I don’t suppose—” he began awkwardly.

“That I can say who the father is? No, he made me swear not to tell even you.”

With discouragement, Noren reflected that he would never be able to sway people, as a priest or otherwise. He just wasn’t the kind of person they confided in. Did someone think, after all the risks he’d taken privately, that he’d betray a supporter who desired secrecy, much less spread rumors about one brief and probably extramarital relationship?

“I’ll say, though, that you’d approve of him,” Veldry added, her eyes alight with fierce pride.

“He’s made you happy, then. I’m glad.”

“In the way you did, yes, he made me happy. He offered me respect, and he’ll share my feeling about the child whatever happens. But I meant you’d approve of him as—well, since you can’t be the biological father of the new race yourself—”

So the man was admirable, not a casual lover but someone who truly cared about future generations. For that he was thankful. Yet he was not sure he’d wholly approve of someone unwilling to declare his convictions openly. To conceal the experimentation was one thing, and necessary—but experimentation would serve no purpose unless the idea of genetic change eventually gained defenders.

Since he seemed unable to progress toward finding any, he finally broached the topic with Lianne. “No amount of sacrifice on my part will help matters if the majority can’t be won over,” he complained.

Lianne was silent, thoughtful, for a long moment. “What was the hardest part of what the First Scholar achieved?” she asked slowly.

Noren pondered it. Not martyrdom; that had been only the climax. Not the secret genetic experiment, which had achieved nothing in his time. “The worst was having to endorse a system he knew was evil,” he said. “We all know that, and we all relive it.”

“Yes, you reconcile yourselves to it, to the pattern of hardship his plan demands. But he himself had to do more. He had to break away from his society’s pattern. The truly difficult step was accepting the fact that a social structure like the one the Six Worlds had—the one he was used to and believed worked best—would not work in this colony. You probably got so wrapped up in the ethical issues that you haven’t grasped what a tremendous innovation it was for him to think of making any change at all.”

“I guess I haven’t.”

“I have,” Lianne told him. “Because I’ve studied lots of societies, I can make comparisons. People normally want to hang onto what they’re used to. The villagers’ feeling about the High Law is simply an exaggerated form of a tendency that exists in every culture, and what’s more, so is the Scholars’ outlook. It affects even your own thinking. You’re resigned to the necessary evils, therefore you haven’t separated the customs that are still necessary from those that aren’t.”

“Are you saying I’ve condoned evils that needn’t exist?” he protested, shocked.

“No, but you haven’t examined what’s essential as opposed to what’s merely traditional. For the Founders, changing their old system was hard not just because it meant condoning wrongs, but because it involved abandoning traditions. The First Scholar was the only one among them who questioned those traditions enough to see that some could be altered.”

“And if I were his equal, I could do that here?”

“Because you
are
his equal, you
will
do it.”

“That doesn’t sound—sacrificial,” Noren said. “If I’m not expected to lose my life in the process, where can I go but up?”

Soberly Lianne said, “Giving up the pattern of customs you’ve come to depend on is harder than you may think. I know! When we join the Service, we renounce allegiance to our native worlds, and we’re required to analyze thoroughly what it is we’re putting behind us.”

“That’s different,” he reflected. “You do it because you want the new pattern the Service offers; you don’t have to strike out on your own without one.”

“I never claimed
I’m
the equal of the First Scholar,” said Lianne.

Startled, Noren shielded his thoughts from her, unwilling to let her sense the dismay in them. “I… think I just got the point,” he said.

It was disconcerting to realize he had not questioned all his premises. As a heretic, had he not always been a questioner? Had he not, since, challenged the Founders’ plan itself? He’d never hesitated to break rules when he saw purpose in it; now, during the next weeks, Noren began looking for rules to break. None seemed relevant to his cause.

He could, to be sure, devise plans that went against tradition. For instance, it would help tremendously if the outpost were turned into a center for genetic research instead of nuclear research. Genetically altered crops could then be grown there by Scholars, who, beyond the mountains, did their own farming in any case. He’d by now nearly completed his computer work on the design of the changes necessary for growing food without soil treatment, weather control or irradiation of seed; at the outpost he could test them personally. By an even more radical breach of custom, parents of genetically altered children might rear their own families at the outpost, which would eliminate the large problem of keeping watch on those children and arranging intermarriages between them. But there was no way he could take over the outpost in the face of majority opposition. Besides, such a course would be useless for bringing about eventual genetic change in the villages, and that, rather than the research, was his main problem.

The seasons passed. Veldry once more became great with child, and it was Noren who felt the sickness by which she herself seemed untouched. “What did you do to her during that last birthing?” he asked Lianne. He had read that posthypnotic suggestion could be employed in powerful ways, though neither she nor Stefred had ever insulted him by offering it as alleviation of anxiety.

“Nothing lasting,” Lianne assured him, following his thought. “I only helped with the delivery. Now, I think, she’s got a real sense of destiny. But you are right that hypnosis can do more than anyone here uses it for. I was appalled when I first saw how commonplace it is in the City. Many societies misuse it before they understand the powers of the mind.”

Noren waited, hoping to hear more. He still knew little of those powers, and it was a subject she usually steered away from. “I needn’t have worried,” she went on. “Stefred is competent; he knows what not to try, and the others trained in induction don’t go beyond hypnotic sedation and anesthesia for physical pain. I stay within comparable limits, though I’m tempted sometimes to use my own training.”

“I wouldn’t want—anesthesia, not for mental things,” he told her.

“Of course not. But hypnosis can increase awareness, too. I could open whole areas of your mind that you’ve shut off—” She stopped, sorry, evidently, to have said something that might tantalize him.

“I suppose that isn’t permitted,” he said, unable to keep bitterness front his voice.

“Technically it isn’t, but that’s not what holds me back. It would be… disorienting, Noren. You’d be badly scared at first.”

“Well, I wouldn’t let that matter,” he declared with sudden hope.

“All the same it would interfere with your functioning as a scientist. You’d have to adjust to new states of consciousness; you wouldn’t be able to work till you’d regained confidence in your own sanity.”

“Like—like after my space flight,” he reflected.
Like what?
Lianne’s thought echoed, and he recalled that she could not know. He’d never told anyone but Stefred what had underlain his panic in space, where he’d been literally paralyzed not by physical fear but by what was happening in his mind. He rarely thought of it himself any more, having learned to put such things aside and get on with life. Now, at Lianne’s silent insistence, he let it well into memory: the detachment from ordinary reality, the horror of feeling that nothing had meaning in a universe too immense for rational comprehension… .

Lianne was speaking, urgently and aloud. “Those are feelings you connect with religion?”

He shook himself back. “I felt them first at Orison,” he admitted, “though not as strongly as later on. I know they don’t make sense. I doubt if they did even to Stefred, despite what he said about its being normal to get upset by unanswerable questions.”

“They make sense,” Lianne stated positively, surprisingly undisturbed by this most painful recollection of his past. “The fact that you’ve experienced them is—significant.”

“Stefred called it a sign of strength.” Noren had never fully understood that, though he’d tried to take Stefred’s word for it.

“He was right, as he usually is within the limits of his knowledge. What’s puzzled me is how anyone as strong as you could have shied away from them entirely, both the dark side and the bright. Now I see. You went part way on your own, young, in circumstances of great stress; and you got burned.”

“Part way to what?” Noren whispered.
What bright side?

“To another state of consciousness where perception is not tied to reasoning. If you want a physical explanation, such a state involves separate areas of the brain; but it’s more than that, and more complicated. People react differently. Some find it pleasant—euphoric, even—but it can be terrifying, too, especially to anyone who values reason as much as you do.”

But it’s a way to see more of the truth
, he thought, sensing from her emotion that the abyss that had haunted him was merely a stage on the road to the sort of mental power her own people possessed.

“I’ve been concerned,” Lianne said, “because your culture has no real mystic tradition. The Founders were scientists and preserved little of what they could not analyze. The computer record glosses over what other values were cherished on the Six Worlds. Normally, you see, a planetary civilization at your level has both science and mysticism; and both are needed to reach the levels ahead.”

Perplexed, Noren considered this. “Are you saying we’ll never learn the meanings of things, no matter how far advanced our science gets?”

“Through science alone you won’t. But there is a state of—of
knowing
the meaning, knowing in a way beyond faith that everything fits together.” Sighing, she added, “I can’t describe it any more than you can describe the bad part. There are no words.”

“You could show me… telepathically, couldn’t you?”
Please, Lianne, please don’t withhold this from me!
he pleaded silently.

“I have tried,” she said gently. “At Orison I’ve tried to reach you, but you shut me out. I know why, now. You were burned once; underneath you’re afraid to enter those regions again.”

“Never mind that. Use deep trance if you need to; I’m willing.”

She pressed his hand between hers, meeting his eyes. “Noren, to get there artificially, through hypnosis or drugs, is extremely dangerous. I’m trained to some extent, I could keep you from permanent harm, yet even if there weren’t that past panic to be overcome, it would interrupt your working life. I’m not a psychiatrist in my own culture, you know—I can do more than Stefred only because a standard Service education covers more information about the mind than Six Worlds psychiatrists possessed. I am no better qualified to heal you quickly than he was.”

And in the future when his work was completed, Noren thought in anguish, she would be gone. What would it be like to know that Lianne was out among the stars somewhere, seeing worlds he could never see, probing spheres of consciousness he could not attain?