Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains

Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains

(Children of the Star, Book Two)

by

 
Sylvia Engdahl

Ad Stellae Books, 2010

Copyright © 1973, 2000 by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

All rights reserved. For information contact [email protected]. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold, given away, or altered.

This is the second book of a trilogy.
 
It is preceded by
This Star Shall Abide
and followed by
The Doors of the Universe
. It can be read independently, although doing so will eliminate the suspense of the first book.

Atheneum edition (hardcover) published in 1973

Meisha Merlin edition (with minor updating) published in 2000 in the single-volume
Children of the Star
trilogy

More information available at
www.adstellaebooks.com

Author website:
www.sylviaengdahl.com

Cover photo © by Ryan Pike / 123RF

“. . .The land was barren, and brought forth neither food nor pure water, nor was there any metal; and no one lived upon it until the Founding. And on the day of the Founding humankind came out of the sky from the Mother Star, which is our source. But the land alone could not give us life. So the Scholars came to bless it, that it might be quickened: they built the City; and they called down from the sky Power and Machines; and they made the High Law lest we forget our origin, grow neglectful of our bounden duties, and thereby perish. Knowledge shall be kept safe within the City; it shall be held in trust until the Mother Star itself becomes visible to us. For though the Star is now beyond our seeing, it will not always be so… .

“There shall come a time of great exultation, when the doors of the universe shall be thrown open and everyone shall rejoice. And at that time, when the Mother Star appears in the sky, the ancient knowledge shall be free to all people, and shall be spread forth over the whole earth. And Cities shall rise beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, and shall have Power, and Machines; and the Scholars will no longer be their guardians. For the Mother Star is our source and our destiny, the wellspring of our heritage; and the spirit of this Star shall abide forever in our hearts, and in those of our children, and our children’s children, even unto countless generations. It is our guide and protector, without which we could not survive; it is our life’s bulwark. And so long as we believe in it, no force can destroy us, though the heavens themselves be consumed! Through the time of waiting we will follow the Law; but its mysteries will be made plain when the Star appears, and the children of the Star will find their own wisdom and choose their own Law.”
     
—from the Book of the Prophecy

Chapter One

The room was high in one of the City’s towers. Its window viewed a vast panorama of grain fields dappling gray-purple wilderness, and of more wilderness beyond: a vista rimmed by the jagged yellow ridges of the Tomorrow Mountains. Noren was not looking at the view, however. His back to it, he sat nervously on the edge of a low couch, eyeing the closed-circuit video built into the opposite wall and thinking of the heavy responsibility that soon would fall to him. He was too young and unskilled to conduct an interview so crucial as the one to come; he had been told that frankly—still it was deemed best that he be entrusted with it. He’d accepted the job gladly, despite his inexperience. Only now, with the time at hand, had he begun to feel other misgivings.

The screen before him showed the ceremony taking place outside the City, on the wide stone platform before the Gates. It was a public recantation. The robes of the Scholars were brilliant blue against the white pavement, a sharp contrast to the green uniforms of the Technicians and the mud-stained gray garment of the prisoner whom they guarded. The crowd in the plaza was not visible, being behind the camera, but the audio picked up hostile murmurs. The sentencing was over and the people were beginning to jeer again, though they would throw no actual dirt in the Scholars’ presence; it would not be seemly, for Scholars were High Priests and were revered.

The prisoner, Brek, knelt before the Scholars, his hands bound behind him. His hair had been cropped short, a sign of penitence and shame, but there was neither penitence nor shame in his bearing; he held his head high. Through the ordeals of the ceremony, his spirit had not faltered. The spectators might think that he’d been broken, but it was not true. On the contrary, Brek had just passed the final test of indomitability.

Noren’s heart warmed with sympathy and admiration. It took courage to do what Brek was doing. He was a heretic: he had maintained that it was wrong for the Scholars to keep their knowledge secret and that the sacred Prophecy in which the villagers and Technicians believed was a fraud, a foolish story invented to forestall rebellion against the priest caste’s supremacy. He’d refused to recant despite his assumption that refusal was punishable by death. Yet now he was recanting after all, voluntarily denying most of his former convictions, though it meant exposing himself not only to the contempt of believers, but to the abuse and scorn of fellow-rebels who would think that he had sold out.

Noren understood how hard an act that was; he had recanted himself less than a year before.

Loud music burst forth, drowning the noise of the crowd, as the attending Scholars, in solemn procession, left the platform. Noren switched off the screen; Brek had been surrounded by a protective cordon of Technicians and was no longer in sight. A few minutes later the door of the room slid open and the Scholar Stefred, Chief Inquisitor, stood in the archway, still clad in his ceremonial robe. Unfastened, it flapped open to reveal plain beige clothing like Noren’s own. “Brek’s on his way up here,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone with him; you can help him more than I can at this point. Set his mind at ease, Noren.”

Noren nodded. “I’ll try. He must have caught the symbolism of what was happening to him out there; he took it well.”

“Very well indeed, and it was a greater triumph for him than for you; he lacks your natural self-confidence. But as you know, the next step’s difficult, and Brek has suffered more than you did. You had nothing in your past life to feel guilty about.”

“Neither does he.”

“No, but he thinks he does, and I couldn’t let him know otherwise. In the early stages of his inquisition I had to play on it.” Stefred sighed, troubled. “I was ruthless with Brek. I manipulated him more cruelly than I do most heretics; that’s necessary in the case of a Technician. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been sure of him, and even surer of you. How you handle the next few days will determine whether it leaves lasting scars.”

Alone once more, Noren paced back and forth with growing apprehension. He hoped fervently that Stefred’s confidence would prove justified, for he owed Brek a great deal. The two had met only briefly, some time back, when as a villager Noren had never imagined friendship with a Technician; Technicians, who lived in the enclosed City and were permitted to handle machines, were of a higher caste than villagers and were viewed by most of them with awe, though Noren himself had felt bitter envy. Yet Brek had defied both custom and religious law in an attempt to save him from the heretic’s supposed fate: punishment, perhaps torture, at the hands of the Chief Inquisitor. In those days neither of them had shared the prevailing trust in the Scholars’ goodness.

Once actually in Stefred’s hands, one learned to trust, but the trust developed gradually. Terror had to come first. At the outset Stefred concealed his true sympathies, not only to test the prisoner’s resolution but because he knew that no committed heretic who doubted his own ability to withstand terror would be able to make an objective decision about voluntary recantation. During the inquisition, before learning the secret facts about the Prophecy, a heretic must feel real fear: worse fear than of the rumored death sentence to which he was resigned. With Noren there’d been no need to generate that fear; as a villager to whom the forbidden City was awesomely mysterious and who had never before seen a Scholar at close range, he had been sufficiently terrified by his mere surroundings. For a Technician it was different. Noren knew what had been done to make Brek afraid, and he did not like to think about it; it was a grim piece of deception. Not that any lies had been told—but Brek’s imagination must have tormented him in more ways than one during the solitary confinement he’d experienced.

Again the door opened, and this time it was Brek who appeared. His wrist manacles had been removed, but he still wore the gray penitent’s garb; he’d had no opportunity to remove it or to wash the mud from his face and arms. Though at one time Noren would have raged at the idea of a person’s being subjected to such degradation, he knew that what Brek had undergone had not been degrading. Stefred never degraded anyone. Heretics who agreed to recant under pressure were not exposed to the abuse of the crowd. Those permitted to face such abuse did not suffer from it; one mark of a person ready to share the Scholars’ secrets was the ability to endure outward humiliation without loss of inner dignity.

Brek’s difficulties weren’t over, to be sure—nor, for that matter, were Noren’s. The consequences of heresy were grave. They changed the course of one’s whole life, and the interval since Noren’s own recantation was still relatively short. During that interval he had acquired both privileges and burdens; to these he must now introduce Brek.
Set his mind at ease
, Stefred had said… yet, Noren reflected ruefully, he himself felt no peace of mind. There were certain things he dared not let himself contemplate, and it would be hard to keep them out of the coming discussion. In the past half-hour uncertainty had stricken him. Was it right to keep such things out, to conceal from Brek his recent fear that the Prophecy’s fulfillment was less sure than one believed when, in recanting, one affirmed it?

The escort of Technicians withdrew. Brek stepped forward into the room, his drawn face lighting with startled recognition. “I didn’t know whether they’d let me see you,” he said, his voice low but steady. “I wanted to, Noren, though I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me.”

“No, I can’t,” said Noren, determined to keep worry from his smile. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

“But you were condemned because of me! You were living a normal life back in your village until I tricked you into a public admission of heresy.”

“You did the job assigned to you, as you were bound to under the High Law. And then after the village council convicted me, you helped me to escape from jail; you gave me your Technician’s uniform and stayed behind in my place! You claimed you weren’t risking anything, but I know better now.”