This Star Shall Abide (22 page)

“We won’t explain,” said Noren.

“But sir, we can’t hide
that
! We mustn’t even try to, because if we do, they’ll wear out the equipment too fast. There’s got to be rationing.”

“There’s got to be more than rationing. People must learn to do without any offworld equipment at all in their daily lives.”

“That’s impossible. We know they can’t survive that way, at least not as human beings. If they drink unpurified water too often, the next generation will have subhuman intelligence.”

“They can survive as long as somebody treats the soil, irradiates the seed, provides rain through weather control, purifies additional water, and vaccinates them against disease.”

“Who’s going to do that after we die?”

“Our successors.”

The man at his left frowned. “We’ve been over all this. I thought it was agreed that our successors will lose their technology if they live in a primitive fashion.”

“They will,” Noren replied. “So the only answer is that they must not live in a primitive fashion. To develop the viewpoint they’ll need to carry on our research, they must live in a city where technology is preserved: a walled city within which the power plant and the computers and all the essential equipment can be kept safe for posterity.”

“That contradicts what you just proposed about learning to do without such equipment in everyday life,” objected another man. “And besides, when the population expands, there won’t be enough to go around.”

“Within the city very little expansion will be possible.”

“We need population growth,” a woman protested. “You said so yourself only yesterday.”

“For the world as a whole, yes. And outside the city we’ll have it; a primitive agricultural society will expand there even more rapidly than the ancient ones, which knew nothing of medicine.”

Everybody stared at him, suddenly grasping the implications of what he was saying. Their eyes were large with dismay; though their faces were indistinct, the eyes seemed huge. “You’re suggesting a
caste system?”

Noren paused; to the First Scholar, the thought of some people being allowed to live in a manner that others weren’t permitted to share was serious heresy indeed. “Yes,” he heard himself declare. “There is no other way.”

There was a cold, shocked silence. “I think you’re right, sir,” one of the men finally conceded. “It could work; those in the city could act as custodians of the equipment and the knowledge, and at the same time they could do the research that would someday enable machines to be manufactured through synthesization of suitable metals. That would solve everything. It’s a brilliant idea, but it has one insurmountable flaw: we can never get the majority to accept it.”

“We certainly can’t,” others agreed. “People won’t vote for a scheme that puts some in a city with all the equipment while the rest are left outside with none. They wouldn’t even if they were aware of the emergency, let alone if we keep the nova secret.”

“I know,” Noren admitted painfully. “There is no possibility whatsoever of establishing such a system by vote.”

“Then we’d better not even propose it. It would be tragic to let them vote down their only chance of survival.”

“I’m glad you see that,” he replied gravely. “I thought I’d have to argue more.”

The faces were blank, for no one yet perceived his meaning. Noren was just beginning to perceive it himself, dipping deep into the First Scholar’s memories in his efforts to understand. The government of the Six Worlds had been wholly democratic, he realized. For countless years no dictator had imposed his will on any of those worlds’ people; the very concept of tyranny had all but died out; that he should suggest that they seize power was beyond his companions’ comprehension.

Noren felt as if he were split in two. He was still the First Scholar, and he shared the First Scholar’s misery; yet at the same time he was enough himself to see that the terrible, radical plan was simply that the Scholars should control the City and its contents without giving the villagers a voice in the matter. And to these Scholars,
that
was heresy! It was the worst heresy any of them had ever heard.

But it was a different sort of heresy from his own. The First Scholar did not believe that his plan was right; he did not believe that the world ought to be as he was trying to make it. He hated his own words even as he said them. Yet he knew that he must say them, for he was describing the one way in which humanity could be saved from extinction.

“There will be no violence,” he continued. “We will simply build the city and bar the research station people from entering. They know as much as we do about how to utilize what natural resources there are; they can manage very well if we treat enough cropland, establish weather control and a supplementary water system, and provide them with seed and fertile eggs from our cargo. They are not armed, so they cannot resist us—”

The blank faces came alive with emotion: shock, horror, anger. “You’re not serious! Impose this by
force?
We’d be setting ourselves up as dictators—”

“The people will remain free,” Noren declared. “They will govern themselves; we’ll assume no power over individuals, nor will we interfere in local affairs. We will control only the offworld equipment and the knowledge that would otherwise be lost.”

Voices assailed him. “Control
knowledge?”
they cried, aghast. “You are taking us back to the Dark Ages! If there is anything that should never be controlled, it’s the right of the people to know.”

“Yes, a Dark Age,” he admitted, “a Dark Age through which our knowledge will be preserved and passed from generation to generation in secret, while the people forget what they once knew. They must forget the Six Worlds; all memory of that vanished civilization must be wiped out so that a new and lasting culture can grow. Otherwise they cannot bear the loss, and there can be no second chance.” He realized with despair that he was arguing against everything he had ever believed, everything he had cared about; yet he could not help himself. And Noren knew that this feeling was not his alone, but was also the First Scholar’s, for to him, as to all his companions, the most sacred thing in life had been the free pursuit of truth.

“He is not himself,” someone murmured. “The death of his wife has unbalanced his mind.”

“His wife was right,” the man opposite him said in an ominous tone. “If it’s come to this, we should have died with the others.”

Grief overwhelmed Noren: grief for his wife, for the Six Worlds, for the ordeals now confronting the survivors. “This plan has been in my mind ever since I assumed leadership of this expedition,” he said quietly. “I shall bear full responsibility for it; I shall not put it to a vote even here among ourselves. Thirty billion people who are now dead charged me with the task of ensuring that something would outlast them. I must fulfill that mandate by the only means open to me.”

“You are insane,” asserted the man angrily. “We of the Six Worlds managed to abolish totalitarianism after centuries of oppression and strife; it was the greatest achievement of our civilization. It would be a poor memorial to those who died if the thing to outlast them was a renewal of that evil.”

“There will be no totalitarianism. As I said, the people will have self-government.”

“You advocate forced stratification of society! That’s evil, too.”

“It is an evil.” Noren answered wretchedly, “but in our present situation it’s a necessary one.” He was appalled to hear such words from his own lips.

“Aren’t you aware that nearly every dictatorship that ever came into power termed itself a necessary evil?”

“Yes, I am,” said Noren, astonished by the things of which the First Scholar had been aware. “But by ‘necessary’ they meant something quite different from what I mean. They meant necessary to whatever they happened to value higher than human freedom.”

“There is nothing of higher value!”

“True. And we’re not going to abridge anyone’s freedom, nor yet the freedom of the new world’s society to develop in its own fashion. We’ll merely be withholding things that cannot last long in any case if we fail to act.” He hesitated; the plan was complex, and there were parts that could not yet be revealed even to his companions, parts that—as Noren—he found beyond reach. There were also justifications so foreign to his past experience that they slid by hazily in the dream… .

“. . . we must choose between imposing a stratified culture and allowing the human race to die out,” he found himself continuing. “Such a choice never arose before. It never could have arisen on the Six Worlds. But we face it now; have we really a choice at all?”

“Yes!” cried his antagonist with rising fury. “I’d prefer to die than to become a dictator.”

“So would I,” agreed Noren in anguish, “so would I. But I would not prefer to let our whole species perish, so I’ll stake my life on the rightness of this course. I shall carry through the plan. If you want to stop me, you will have to kill me.”

The man stood up. He had grown taller, it seemed; and though his features were still dim, he had become more real, more individual. “If I have to, I’ll do it,” he said. “I will kill us all, if need be! I’ll blow this ship to space dust before I’ll allow it to be used as an instrument of despotism.”

Noren could no longer see any of the rest, for this opponent loomed too large in the dream; but he could hear their voices. “Perhaps we will all lose our sanity… perhaps suicides weren’t the worst we had to fear… perhaps it’s true that no one can endure to outlive the Six Worlds! Our two best leaders have become madmen.”

In the man’s eyes there was indeed madness; he looked at Noren with fanatical contempt, and then, abruptly, he turned and ran.

The white table disappeared, and Noren found that he too was running, running down a long bright tunnel toward a thing that the First Scholar knew to be the starship’s main control board. He was dizzy with terror; his breath was torn from him in agonized gasps, for he was too old a man to run easily.

The antagonist whom he pursued stood before an array of switches, levers and flashing lights. “I mean what I say!” he shouted. “I will disable the safety circuits and put on enough power to blow this ship.”

There was no time for argument, no time to wait for other men to come; Noren knew that before they could reach him, the starship would be vaporized. If he had been younger and stronger he could have fought the man and overpowered him, but as the First Scholar he was not. The First Scholar had no alternative. He saw that some of the lights had gone out and he saw hands thrust into an opening in the control board, entangled in bare-ended wires; he raised his arm to touch a single switch.

A flash of blue fire nearly blinded him. Noren shrank back, releasing the switch, and the man’s form crumpled, fell; there was the stench of charred flesh. He stared down in horror.
I’ve killed a man!
he thought dazedly. I
said there would be no violence, yet already I’ve killed by my own hand… .

Others by this time had crowded around. He lifted his head, willing himself to assume the bearing of a leader. They would follow him, he knew; they would go along with the plan. But if this was how it had begun, where was it going to end?

Chapter Ten

Gradually, through many dreams, Noren experienced it all: the building of the City; the unloading of the starships; and the nonviolent but rather ruthless way in which the research station people were transformed into villagers who, given the minimum essential technological aid, could fend for themselves in the wilderness of an alien world. But it wasn’t easy. The First Scholar suffered intensely throughout, and as Stefred had predicted, Noren shared the agony fully.

Many of his sensations were pure nightmare. Because he was still partly himself, the impressions were often incoherent—he was experiencing mental reactions to events rather than events themselves, and though he could call on the First Scholar’s knowledge, the facts that came into his mind were hard to interpret. Even the feelings were sometimes diffuse, chaotic ones that he could not put into words.

At first, during his periods of wakefulness, he found it hard to believe that keeping the secret of the nova had really been necessary. Surely few if any villagers would have gone so far as to kill themselves! Some of the men in the dreams shared this opinion. “Human beings have instincts that enable them to survive and adapt under almost any conditions,” they insisted. “We owe these people the truth! Though some may not prove able to take it, the majority will.”

“You’re missing the point,” others replied. “Of course they could survive physically, but their morale would be destroyed; suicide’s just an extreme expression of the feeling almost everyone would share. And instinct wouldn’t help in this case. To remain human here, we’ve got to
defy
instinct. People’s instinct tells them that water that tastes pure is safe; it’s mere training that stops them from drinking it. The shock of knowing about the nova would strip away their protective training, at least temporarily. And if they turned to instinct—the instinct that would let them drink the water and perhaps even adapt to a diet of native plants, as we expect to adapt the embryonic animals we’ve brought for beasts of burden—their children would suffer irrevocable brain damage. They’d survive, all right, but at the expense of generations yet unborn.”

The First Scholar understood that. He knew that no evil was worse than extinction of the human race, and though dissidents reminded him that at certain points in the Six Worlds’ history similar arguments had been invalidated, he knew such an analogy was false. There’d once been a time when his ancestors had claimed that abridging people’s rights in order to prevent overpopulation of the mother world was essential to survival, but it had not been essential at all. On the contrary, voluntary reduction of the birth rate had worked very well, for if the mother world hadn’t become overpopulated to some degree, interstellar travel would never have been developed—and in that case, nobody would have escaped the nova. This was different, for this was a matter not of how future humans would handle their problems, but of the terrible possibility that the next generation would be subhuman. Such a risk couldn’t be taken. Moreover, he began to see other reasons why keeping the secret was important to the success of his plan.