The Doors Of The Universe (43 page)

City dwellers were not hardened as villagers were; in years of confinement, one lost one’s physical prowess. Even his labor at the outpost was now far behind him. The oppressive heat, hour after hour, began to drain him, and he appreciated, for the first time, how Lianne felt about it. As a boy he’d been inured to heat, had never known the cool relief of a tower’s interior. He could become inured again. In his renunciation of the City, he had not counted physical comforts among his sacrifices. All the same, he found to his surprise that his body’s demands were the cause of his first role crisis.

If villagers thought Scholars ageless and sexless, they gave even less thought to such mundane matters as these awesome beings’ bodily needs. Noren didn’t recall this until he realized that he was thirsty. He had been on his feet half a day in the hot sun, speaking to groups most of that time, repeating the same blessing over and over. No one had offered him a drink of water; it would never occur to anyone that he might want one. He could, of course, ask for it—but that was awkward. No one had pure water in hand, and in any case, how could he pronounce the blessing in one breath and ask for a drink in the next? It would be undignified. He himself wouldn’t mind that, but his audience would; he must uphold the ideal image they expected. His mouth got drier and drier. He began to wonder, half-seriously, whether the sacrament of drinking impure water should be established far sooner than he’d planned; but no, he could not yet break the High Law in their presence. There was not even any impure water, since streams close to the City were all diverted to the purification plant. Longingly, as he left the market area, he eyed roadside taverns.

By the time sunset approached he was, by supreme irony, suffering more seriously from thirst than from any emotional burdens.

The blue robe was a hot garment, never designed for long wear. Under it, sweat drenched Noren’s clothes. How, he thought in dismay, was he going to wash? How would he manage other bodily functions that might be assumed unnecessary for Scholars? He could not remove the robe except in privacy, and at a farmyard cistern there’d be none; as for excusing himself to use a privy, the very thought was ludicrous.

These concerns overrode that of food, but he’d eaten nothing all day and eventually must do so. This was the one such problem he’d considered before leaving the City. Technicians, when in the villages, bought food; they never took from the villagers without paying. But he could have carried no large amount of money, and in any case, people might be insulted if he tried to pay. No one had ever dreamed of such an honor as seating a Scholar at table, yet an honor it would be, and in that one respect he must let people serve him. He must also, he now saw, request a private sleeping room—though it would mean turning its occupants out—as well as the unheard-of luxury of an individual wash-water jug and slop jar. His hosts would hardly begrudge this, but he disliked the thought of demanding privileges. Furthermore, it wasn’t quite the fashion in which he’d choose to prove himself human… or was it? On second thought, Noren decided, the vulgar gossip that would spread would be a healthy thing.

He had not traveled far the first day, for he had spent most of it with the market crowds. By nightfall they had thinned out; after once being blessed, people didn’t presume to follow him without invitation. He must eventually, he supposed, choose followers. It wouldn’t be fitting to go alone, and he’d rejected the idea of a Technician escort such as would appear with a Scholar before the Gates. Besides, to build a new “city” he would need help, and it must come from people willing to abandon their past lives, willing to take the frightening steps he would ultimately ask them to. But that was in the future. For now, he could think no further than water and rest.

At the crest of a long hill overlooking the City was a farmhouse. Leaving the last cluster of suppliants, Noren, dizzy with fatigue, climbed the path to its door. To his immense relief the family saw him coming and met him outside. “May the spirit of the Star be with you,” whispered Noren hoarsely. The formal greeting was now, and must remain, automatic, for it would be a terrible breach of courtesy to inadvertently omit it. “I should like to share your table if I may.”

The farmer, a graying man, was so stunned he couldn’t reply; but his wife was a woman of presence. “Reverend Sir, you will be welcome,” she said simply. She met his eyes squarely, even from her knees; Noren liked that.

“If I enter your house, you must not kneel to me,” he said. “That is fitting only in public places, and I wish to be your guest.” He wondered if he would be able to stand on his own feet long enough for the others to rise to theirs.

They gave him a room, obviously their own, and after he’d bathed, a hearty meal. Like all farm and village families, they had ample food and no need to apologize for its quality, since only one type of food existed—he was served bread and stewed fowl, just as he would have been in the Inner City’s refectory. They waited silently before eating; he realized they expected him to recite the customary words. It had been many years since he’d done that, though he’d used those words in other rituals.
“Let us rejoice in the bounty of the land, for the land is good, and from the Mother Star came the heritage that has blessed it… . And it shall remain fruitful, and the people shall multiply across the face of the earth… .”
That took him back to his childhood, even to the time when his mother was alive, and to the later time when he’d burned with resentment at the idea that she’d been led to believe in the Scholars’ blessings. What would his mother think if she could see him now?

“I must rise at dawn and be on my way,” he told the family, “‘for I go to build a new City… .” They listened solemnly to the new prophecy that had in a single day become more real to Noren than that of the Founders. No one, not even the old man, seemed surprised. It fit; it was right; it was
natural
. It was the business of Scholars to build Cities, to make the land fruitful, to enable the people to multiply. The change was not going to be hard to effect after all. It required only his wit—and his willingness to pay the price.

At daybreak he stood on the hilltop and watched the sun rise. As he’d seen the City first, coming by another road down this same hill, he looked his last upon it. The lighted beacons atop the towers faded as the sky brightened. Sunlight struck the silvered surface of the domes, which from this distance appeared as a single scalloped wall encircling the tall spires within. Inside one of those towers, Lianne would be waking… . Resolutely, Noren turned his back on the scene and started down the other side of the hill.

*
 
*
 
*

Gradually his life assumed a new pattern, a pattern composed not only of what he must cope with on the journey, but of his blossoming plans for its end. So the First Scholar had felt, embarking upon another “impossible” scheme, hating his own role, expecting no happy ending for himself, yet believing more and more that it would work. That future generations would be saved by it. It was so simple… one committed oneself
first
, and
then
faith came! Noren had never understood that; even after experiencing the dreams repeatedly, he had not. But both Stefred and Lianne had seen.

Stefred, though unable to see the specific way to success till it was pointed out to him, had committed himself by fathering Veldry’s child. He would not have done that without believing underneath that a way would be found. There was the child to consider; he would not have risked that child’s welfare merely out of kindness to Veldry or desire to support Noren’s cause.

Noren, too, had believed strongly enough to take risks. In the end, he had committed himself not to mere risk but to outright sacrifice. Yet in his conscious mind, he’d been uncertain that it would achieve anything; he had left the City less out of faith than out of the knowledge that to stay would be to concede defeat. He had imagined a long period of vagueness—of grayness, like the moss-covered land into which he’d come—during which he must live in utter despair. He’d thought it would be like the time at the outpost, only more permanent. It wasn’t. Once his commitment was complete, he felt hope, even excitement. The pieces began to mesh. The plan was really going to enable humanity to survive!

The experimental children, all of them, must live in the new “city.” Stefred would be able to arrange that—it had already been agreed that they’d be named by their parents according to a code both he and Noren could recognize. Having them sent where he ordered wouldn’t be hard, for village-bound Technicians were accustomed to obeying Stefred’s instructions without informing other Scholars. If his interference with normal procedures ever came out, he’d have only to say his aim was to make Noren answerable for those children’s welfare. Already, word of the new prophecy would have reached him; he would contrive to delay the adoption of his son till he heard that the settlement was established. He would understand that the children must eat food from unquickened land.

Their adoptive parents also would have to eat it, which meant they must have their own genes altered. This, the human experimentation among villagers, was the part Noren liked least. Yet it wasn’t as if it were an untried change, and he’d already resigned himself to the fact that a comparable situation would arise as soon as the children came of age. Better to have them together than scattered throughout the population, and better, too, to place them with families composed of volunteers. The couples would give informed consent; he could tell them the essential truth in terms they’d understand. People would come to his settlement as Technicians sought admission to the Inner City, knowing the hardships involved, but nothing of the real reason these must exist.

Noren’s own task, apart from bringing to pass the miracle on which he’d now staked his life, was to choose the residents of—of what? He spoke of it as a new city, but he could not think of it that way in his own mind. The research outpost had been conceived as “a new City beyond the Tomorrow Mountains,” but everybody called it simply the outpost. Villages had names: Abundance, Prosperity, and so forth. He named the planned settlement Futurity. He began to talk about it by name. Rumor spread ahead of him; it was not long before people in the villages he entered were already believers in the place, starting to wonder who would be fortunate enough to live there.

They turned out to meet him now in holiday garb, green instead of everyday brown, adorned with the blue glass beads that symbolized religious devotion. They filled the village squares as they normally would on feast days. Their bearing toward him was not so much worshipful as jubilant; his coming was cause for celebration. The farther he got from the City, the truer this was, for not everyone had opportunities to travel—some had lived to old age without a pilgrimage to the Gates, and had not seen Scholars even from a distance.

It was impossible, of course, for him to individually bless every man, woman and child in each and every village along the road. He spoke to those on outlying farms, but in the centers he held services. Once, he thought ruefully, he had shrunk from the role of presiding priest at small City gatherings; now he was assuming it before hundreds—and on those occasions, he could not stop them from kneeling.

He was also asked to bless wedding parties. Weddings were solemnized by village councils and blessed, when possible, by Technicians as the Scholars’ representatives; but naturally people were eager for the unprecedented distinction of a benediction from a real priest. At first Noren wondered how there could be so many weddings. Were these boys and girls marrying hastily simply because of his appearance? No doubt a few dates were advanced, but he soon learned that some couples were traveling long distances on connecting roads from villages on other radials, bringing their families and friends along. His days were long, hot and thirsty, but at night there was invariably a wedding feast—and he saw that when the time came to introduce innovations, there’d be no lack of enthusiasm.

He did not mind weddings or the rites of Thanksgiving for Birth, but services for the dead were another matter. The first time he was called upon he was, unreasonably, stunned. It was the job of Technicians to conduct such services! But no one sent for the Technicians when a priest was present; instead, they thanked providence for their good fortune. And in fact it was whispered that the aged woman who’d died, after outliving her grandchildren, had declared that now—having seen a Scholar with her own eyes—she could depart in peace. Horrified, shivering despite the heat, Noren went through with the service, though of course the Technicians had to be summoned first to bring the aircar, which he was incapable of calling down from the sky as he’d been expected to. Watching it lift away afterward, he nearly lost his self-control. His face was wet with tears. What would happen when there were no more aircars? Ultimately, when genetic change was complete, recycling of bodies would not be necessary; his new crops would have genes to recover trace elements efficiently from organically fertilized soil. But the people, who knew nothing of the disposal of bodies in any case, would wish to continue sending them to the City as long as the City stood. It was a symbol not to be lightly cast aside. And indeed, thought Noren, did he not want his own body to go there; did he not wish to think that in death if not in life, he would someday return?

He got through that service by rote, as he had the one for his son, without letting himself think of the words. But it wasn’t the only such rite he performed, and the words did bother him.
Not in memory alone does he survive, for the universe is vast
. Was it right to tell the people something he wasn’t sure of? They trusted him! He owed them comfort, and yet…
Were the doors now closed to us reopened, as in time they shall be, still there would remain that wall through which there is no door save that through which he has passed
. Lianne didn’t think such words were foolish, although she had no more real knowledge of the matter than he did. And he had none, after all. He certainly did not know they expressed a false idea—he could not say it was false any more than he could say the Prophecy was. Like the Prophecy, those words were more metaphor than blueprint.