The Doors Of The Universe (8 page)

“I’m not worried.”

“That’s because you know little of what’s involved. Under some conditions such hypnosis can be extremely dangerous; I wouldn’t dare to try it on a person whose mind I hadn’t previously explored—which rules out older Scholars originally examined by my predecessor. You, however, I know. Your peril lies not in what I’m going to do to you, but in your reaction to the dreams themselves.”

“That’s a chance I have to take,” Noren said firmly.

“You realize this must be begun now, tonight, and the whole series must be completed in quick succession without proper rest breaks?”

Noren nodded. They could afford no delay; having once started the dreams, a candidate could not be permitted long conscious intervals in which to notice discrepancies caused by the necessary omission of the secrets, nor could she be kept under sedation indefinitely.

“You aren’t in fit shape for it,” Stefred said unhappily. “Only this morning you held rites for your wife—”

I killed my wife
, Noren thought,
and if I can do anything toward salvaging some other woman’s future, that may help even the score
. Aloud he said, “If I back out now, how will I feel if Lianne is lost to us? If I must see her isolated, knowing I might have prevented it? Will that heal me, Stefred?”

“It’s too late for either of us to back out,” Stefred conceded. Silhouetted against the window, his face in shadow, he went on, “You’re right, I’m slipping—but I’m human; I saw you suffer last year in a way I don’t want to see again. I staked my conscience and my career on my conviction that you’d take no harm from it, and my belief in you was justified. You took not harm, but strength. I know perfectly well that if you run into problems with this, the same thing will happen. You’ve always been strong. You’ll withstand it.”

“I should hope I’ll withstand it as well as an uninitiated village woman,” replied Noren, indignant. But he was aware that sorrow and exhaustion had made him reckless, that if he were not already half dreaming, he would be afraid.

*
 
*
 
*

He came to his senses in the Dream Machine’s small cubicle. When he opened his eyes, he could see at first only the pattern of dials, switches and colored lights that covered its walls. He was still reclining, and became aware that electrodes were taped not only to his head but to other parts of his body. Dimly, he recalled Stefred’s telling him to remove his tunic before beginning the ritual of hypnotic sedation that, during his time in the City, had become familiar to him. Stefred bent over him now, the concern in his manner all too plain.

“Is it over?” Noren asked. “I—I don’t remember anything!”

“It hasn’t started yet.” Stefred sat on a stool close to the reclining chair, his eyes on Noren’s. “I had to wake you; there’s something troubling you that you haven’t told me about.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I did some routine checking in preparation for giving you hypnotic commands and found evidence of psychological trauma that’s never been there before. It’s too risky for me to proceed without understanding it, yet I’m not willing to probe your mind without your permission.”

“What sort of evidence?” Noren asked slowly.

“Basically, Noren, you respect yourself,” Stefred said. “You’ve never felt guilty about being
you
, or about not seeing things just as other people do. That’s one of the things we go into quite deeply with heretics; the self-confidence that results in defiance of conventions has to be genuine. Yours was extraordinarily so. Now it is—shaken.”

“Well, after what happened last year—”

“I know you doubted yourself then. But it was never a deep-seated doubt; though it caused you pain, what lay underneath was more powerful than your conscious feelings. That was how I knew you’d come through. What I find now is a bit more serious.” Sighing, he declared, “You have the right of privacy, but not the right to force me to work in unknown territory. I must have your consent to probe, or we call this off.”

Noren turned his face aside. “It’s nothing so complicated,” he said. “I’d rather not talk about it, but if you really need to know, I’ll tell you outright. I guess it’s true I don’t respect myself much now; I guess I never will, because I—I killed Talyra.”

Stefred shook his head. “To feel guilt after the death of a loved one is a normal thing. Especially when a man’s wife dies in childbirth, he can’t help thinking he’s partly to blame. I would be much surprised if I found no such feelings in you. What I do find is more than that. It’s as if you are torn by a belief that you’ve done some real and avoidable wrong.”

“Oh, it’s real enough. I did kill her, Stefred. Not just by getting her pregnant—by getting her into a situation that caused genetic damage to the child.”

“You know better than that,” said Stefred, surprised. “You’ve been tested; your reproductive cells are undamaged. She drank far less unpurified water than you’ve drunk, and anyway, the mutation doesn’t kill.”

“I’ve been through all this with the computers! There’s a lot of information no one ever talks about. Isn’t it in the dreams?”

“These dreams? I’m not sure what you mean.”

Briefly, Noren summarized what he had learned. “The Founders knew, they must have,” he concluded. “I thought you did too, that it was why you were afraid I could get hurt by knowing all the First Scholar’s thoughts.”

For a long time Stefred was silent. “No,” he said finally, “no, the First Scholar didn’t record any thoughts about mutation beyond the basic facts in the edited recordings. That does seem strange, now that you raise the issue—you’re right that he must have known much more. As to this teratogenic damage, the danger’s never occurred to anyone. There’s nothing edible here that could cause it, after all.”

No, thought Noren, nothing to eat but products of caged fowl and grain grown in machine-treated fields; nothing to drink but tea and ale, both of which were, of course, made with purified water. And the few drugs kept for emergencies had rarely been used on anyone who happened to be pregnant.

“Even if the child did suffer such damage,” Stefred went on, “you’ve no cause to assume that was the reason Talyra herself died.”

“But it might have been. Could my knowing this account for what you found in my mind?”

“Yes, it could. Guilt based on rational grounds, as if, for instance, she’d died in the crash of the aircar—there are people who wouldn’t feel to blame, but you’re not one of them.” He sighed and continued soberly, “I won’t try to tell you that because you meant no harm, had no way of predicting any harm, it shouldn’t bother you; that’s unrealistic. It does bother you. I—I haven’t an answer for you, Noren.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you would have,” Noren said, relieved that Stefred hadn’t attempted to offer empty consolation. “That’s why I wasn’t going to mention it. Can we go on, now?”

“I’m not sure. With a trauma I can’t remove, a relevant one—”

“Relevant? The First Scholar had no part in his wife’s death.”

“No,” Stefred agreed. “Not in that—but there are some perplexing feelings in these dreams, guilt feelings that are quite strong; and you see, Noren, I can’t give you hypnotic suggestions to remain detached from them. That would set up a conflict your subconscious mind couldn’t resolve.”

“Guilt—in the First Scholar’s thoughts? Besides the guilt he acknowledged about sealing the City and establishing the caste system?” Noren was incredulous. “Surely he never did anything else bad enough to suffer over.”

“Hard as it is to believe, he seems to have—we don’t know what. You realize that what we call the full version isn’t actually unedited; he did some editing himself to remove private things. The cause of his submerged suffering is one of the things he deleted.”

“But he wouldn’t—I mean, he wasn’t self-righteous; if he’d done anything he was sorry for, he wouldn’t hide it,” Noren protested. “And if he did want to hide it, why didn’t he remove all record of his emotions about it at the same time?”

“Those are questions no one has ever been able to answer. After he died, the Founders wondered, too. Even his contemporaries couldn’t believe he’d had grounds for the feelings in these recordings.” Stefred frowned. “Nevertheless, they are there. Which means, Noren, that when you experience them, you’ll transfer them to your own situation—not getting a cause from his mind, you’ll draw it from your own, just as you’ll still see Talyra’s face instead of his wife’s.”

“If that’s true,” Noren said, “then there’s no way around it. I can’t live my whole life without going through these dreams—you said a while ago we both know I’ve got to do it eventually.”

“Yes. But if you’ve chosen to undertake it now because of a hope that you’ll gain more understanding of genetic damage, I can’t let you proceed on that basis. Though people do draw different things from the recordings, that’s too big an area for all of us to have missed.”

“Which in itself is a mystery I can’t back away from. Besides this guilt you say he felt… there are two ways to look at it. He came to terms with that, too, evidently.”

“You’re wise beyond your years,” Stefred murmured. “I can’t contradict you—just so you realize that the real thing won’t be as easy to deal with as the theory.”

“Is it ever? Look, Stefred, I hope you don’t think I’m so stupid as not to feel any fear of this, especially if we’re going straight through to—to the end.” Lying back against the padding of the chair, relaxing his body only by effort of will, Noren could not suppress the chill spreading through him; the end—the facing of the mob, the pain of the wounds, the dying—was very hard.

“Actually, the danger in the last dream is negligible for you now,” Stefred told him, “far less than during your first subjection to it, when you were less mature and when you had no foreknowledge of the outcome. We’ll go right on through, though of course I’ll monitor for your safety as well as for the editing.” He turned to check a panel of dials; as he did so, Noren caught sight of motion in the doorway to the corridor.

A woman stood there, dressed in the beige tunic and trousers all Inner City people wore, yet looking somehow strange in them. She was too tall, for one thing; her skin was too pale; and her hair…

“I woke,” she said simply. “So I thought it must be time to go on. Probably I should not have come here—but then, my door wasn’t locked, and I suppose you’re not surprised if a heretic doesn’t stick to the rules of proper behavior.”

Noren stared. Cool, self-composed, strong—yes, she was all that, and more. He had never seen a woman with so much poise. Nor had he seen one with piercing blue eyes and hair near-white in youth… .

Her hair! That was what was wrong—her hair had already been cut short. Stefred had not mentioned that; but of course he wouldn’t have, for the indignities she’d suffered before entering the City need never be generally known. The cropping of one’s hair was among the humiliations to which one submitted voluntarily on the day of one’s public recantation; short hair was therefore common, and in no way mortifying, among young Scholars. No one who’d not seen her during her candidacy would suspect that Lianne had borne such a badge of shame beforehand.

How had it happened? The High Law stated specifically that convicted heretics must be turned over to the Scholars unharmed; no village official would have dared to cut this woman’s hair after her trial. Only earlier, during the night in jail, perhaps, as the best friend of his childhood had been murdered by an enraged mob, as he himself, while in bonds, had been beaten senseless by drunken bullies—but even they had not gone so far as to crop his hair. If that had been done to Lianne, what more had she undergone? Had she hidden the rest from Stefred, unable to speak of it, not yet guessing, of course, the depth of understanding and compassion he would ultimately offer her? How painful it must have been for him to put her through an inquisition harsh enough to buoy her self-esteem.

Whatever he’d done, it had been successful. Despite the shorn curls, she held her head high, as if she were already on the platform outside the Gates, already grasping the symbolic significance of that ritual exposure to an abusive crowd. Small wonder he considered her promising.

Only a moment had passed since she’d spoken; Stefred, his back to the doorway, had not seen her enter. As he swung around, startled, Noren glimpsed his eyes, and for an instant there was more in them than professional concern.
Of course
, Noren thought.
She’s a match for him, certainly!
And then,
No wonder he feared his decision to let me do this wasn’t objective enough
.

He hoped fervently that Lianne wouldn’t choose a suitor before Stefred was free to seek her love.

She stepped forward into the cubicle. “It was stupid of me not to realize that I must wait my turn,” she said. Then, to Noren, “Are you a heretic, too?”

He could not give her any clue, of course; he said shortly, “I’m a Scholar.”

“But you’re as afraid as I am!” Her blue eyes penetrated him. Then suddenly she lowered them, regretting, apparently, that she’d revealed such intuition of his thought.

“It’s frightening for everyone, sometimes,” Noren told her. “Still we choose to dream.”

“To learn, as I’m learning?”

“Yes—or to reach beyond what can be learned.” He had not expressed this even to Stefred; he was not quite sure that it made sense.