This Star Shall Abide (25 page)

“Tell us,” urged the others. “We will finish it for you, just as we’ll carry out the instructions you’ve left for completing your plan. You must rest now.”

“I’m dying!” he cried in anger. “Do you think I don’t know I’m dying? What need have I of rest when I’m to get more than enough after tonight? Bring me the thought recording equipment; I have not yet recorded all I wish to.”

“You would not have us record your death!” they exclaimed.

“I would have you record what I must think out before my death, since I haven’t the strength to write it, or even to speak. It’s there in my mind, but I’ve never been able to frame it as it should be—” He fell back against the pillows, exhausted, the pain overwhelming him. “I’m a scientist, not a poet,” he whispered. “If I were a poet, I could find words.”

“He’s raving,” said the voices. “We must give him sedation.”

Noren struggled to rise. “No!” he cried again. “Do what I ask of you, but hurry—”

They obeyed, but he sensed their concern. “If he should die while he was recording, it would be dangerous; a dreamer could die, too.”

Hearing that, Noren felt renewed terror, but he was detached from it, for the First Scholar was dominant in him now. The recording equipment was attached to his head, and his mind went momentarily blank; then all at once the detachment increased. Dimly, as Noren, he realized that he had never before dreamed anything that had been recorded while it happened; all the rest—even the episode just past, which must have been spliced into sequence—had come from the First Scholar’s memories. This was different. This was real, immediate, and he knew that he
was
dying.

But he was no longer so afraid.

“It—is—evil, what we’ve done,” he gasped. “To—to keep knowledge… from the people… is not right—”

“We know it’s not right,” his companions assured him. “We’ve always known; but if we had not done it, the human race would have perished.”

“Yes, it was… necessary. But it will not be necessary forever. They hate us now—”

“They wouldn’t hate you if they were aware of what you’ve given,” a woman broke in sorrowfully. “They would honor you, as we do.” She began to cry.

A burst of strength came into him; he must make them see, or they would not know how to use this last recording. “You don’t understand,” he said, mustering his waning resources. “They
should
hate us! They should keep on hating us, or at least the system we’ve imposed—but they won’t. They will forget their birthright. When they forget the Six Worlds, as they must if they’re to survive, they will forget that what we hold here in the City belongs to them. Then their hatred will fade.”

“But you’ve sacrificed your life to achieve that!”

“Yes. Hate was destroying them.” He paused; he was in no shape to explain the paradox coherently, yet he
must
make them see. “They must accept this system, still they shouldn’t come to like it too much; and they may, since it will never be oppressive. That’s the biggest danger in it! Benevolent controls are the most dangerous kind because the people forget what is theirs. We must not allow that to happen. Their hatred will fade, but their desire for what we hold in trust must never fade. We must tell them—”

“We can’t,” the others reminded. “Record more memories if you wish; tell all that you long to tell before you die; but you must know, sir, that nothing can be given to the people until our research succeeds.”

“Not from my memories, no; we must keep the secret as long as our stewardship is required. But we must give the villagers a promise. They must be told that our control of the City is temporary.”

“How could we tell them that without saying why? And even if we could, they would not believe us.”

“They will believe,” he declared. “If it’s done right, they… will… believe… .”

He could not do it right. He was too weak; there was too much pain; and besides, he was not a poet. “If I had a gift for poetry, I could do it as I’ve wanted to—”

“He speaks of poetry again,” the voices said. “His mind is going. We had better remove the recording contacts before he dies.”

“Please, please,” Noren begged, “give me the time I have left to think out what I cannot say! Someday, someone will make a book of it; the people are not quite ready yet in any case. But when all who came from the Six Worlds are gone, their descendants will need a promise—”

They conceded to his wish; he was an old man whom they loved, and he was dying. Noren had not guessed how it would feel to die. It seemed as if one ought to be afraid, but the First Scholar was not afraid. He was only weak and tired, and of course, he was in pain. If he had let them stop the pain his mind would not be clear to think, and he must think; he must not give in until this task was done.

The people must have a promise! They must not be content with a Dark Age; they must hope for something more: machines, cities, free access to knowledge—they must want them, and they must not be allowed to forget that they wanted them. Furthermore, they must not forget the spirit that had once driven explorers out from their mother world—and eventually, from their mother star itself—toward something that must one day be sought again. That spirit must stay with them if the human race was to have another chance. They must believe in it without knowing that humankind needed another chance; they must do so until such time as their foothold was strong and their own culture well established.

He must give them the promise and the belief.

The mother star… the sun that gave humanity life… it would be visible someday, but by then, no one save the Scholars would understand what it meant. Yet they must understand! They must realize that it meant something very important! And perhaps—yes, almost surely—that would be time enough. If it was not, humankind was doomed, for the equipment could scarcely last longer; so wouldn’t it be justifiable to gamble?
Symbols for the truths we cannot express openly,
he’d said to his friends, but though he had left them a plan formed in the dark nights of many years, the symbols themselves had eluded him. Now, in his last hour, the central one became clear… .

The First Scholar had the idea and the purpose, and groped for words; but Noren already knew them.
“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.”

For the first time he found comfort in those words. To the First Scholar, the thought behind them was a solace he had ached for during all the years of sorrow past. The tragedy had been surmounted. His work was finished; he could let go and sink into death, for the fierce, lethal explosion of the Mother Star had been made a symbol not of futility, but of hope.

*
 
*
 
*

The people crowded round, but he could not see them; he was too close to death. He was too weary, too crushed by the burden of leadership; too sick at the thought that people could survive only so long as he withheld from them that which was rightfully theirs. He’d done enough; why wouldn’t they let him die in peace?

They would not. They called him name, urgently: “Noren! Noren!” Over and over they called until he opened his eyes and found that it was Stefred who was bending over him—Stefred and other men and women, all of whom seemed genuinely concerned for his life.

“I was… dying,” Noren whispered. “I was
really
dying!”

“Yes,” Stefred admitted. “The last dream is dangerous, and the more closely a person has shared the feelings of the First Scholar, the more dangerous it is. You would have died when he did if we hadn’t been here to rouse you.”

Why had they bothered? Noren wondered. They were going to kill him anyway. And yet of course they couldn’t let him die while they were still hoping he’d recant.

“You would have died in spite of us,” Stefred went on, “if you had not been brave enough to live. I knew that beforehand; I had to make the decision to let the last dream begin. I knew during our first interview that someday the decision would be mine. Do you envy me my job, Noren?”

That was when Noren looked into Stefred’s face and knew, with chagrin, astonishment, and a kind of awe, that they were not going to kill him. There had never been any intention of killing him. Whether he recanted or not had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The other Scholars had silently left the room. “Stefred,” Noren said haltingly, “The rumors were false. I—I don’t believe you’ve ever killed anyone. I don’t believe you could.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Stefred declared. “I knew, of course, what you’ve been assuming, but I hoped I could win your trust without bringing it up.”

“You weren’t trying to scare me into recanting?”

“At the beginning, yes. If you’d been susceptible, the truth would not have been shared with you.”

“I—I guess I see,” Noren said slowly. “You don’t like the system any better than I do, but it’s—necessary. You have to make people respect it. If somebody cares enough to give up his life, though, he earns the right to know why.”

“It’s something like that. As you know, the Founders didn’t want to keep knowledge from people; they made provision for it to be given to anyone who values it highly enough.”

“More knowledge than was in the dreams?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never lied to me,” Noren mused. “When you said that if I recanted voluntarily I’d be given access to more than I could absorb in a lifetime, you meant it, didn’t you?”

The Scholar was silent. It didn’t add up, Noren realized. He’d been right to refuse the bribe; he was sure he had been, and even at the time it had been evident that Stefred was pleased by his refusal. “They just wouldn’t have arranged it like that,” he reflected aloud.

“How would they, then?”

“There are different sorts of knowledge,” Noren said thoughtfully. “If I’d accepted the offer, I might have been told things Technicians know, but not the secret—not what’s in the dreams. And now, well, now I can go on learning whatever else happens. Recantation isn’t a condition.”

“That’s right. Still, you have problems ahead of you; there’ll be difficult ones even if you do recant.”

Noren shivered, knowing Stefred’s warning that the consequences of truth would seem terrible must also have been sincere; but he was too overwhelmed to worry about it. He lay back, still weak and shaken by the death he had so nearly shared. “Why,” he asked softly, “weren’t people ever told that the First Scholar wrote the Prophecy? They look up to Scholars now; they would honor him even without understanding what he really did.”

“They’d go beyond that,” replied Stefred, “and it was his wish that the facts about him never be revealed. To be worshipped was the last thing he wanted; it’s not what any of us want, though it happens. We try to remain as anonymous as we can.”

That was true, thought Noren in surprise. They had never demanded obeisance; they had never claimed to be innately superior; they had never declared that to speak against them was blasphemy. All those ideas—the ones that weren’t mentioned in the Prophecy—had been originated not by the Scholars, but by the villagers themselves. The First Scholar deserved every honor short of worship, but people wouldn’t have stopped there. He had been a martyr; when their hatred faded, they’d have built statues of him and pronounced it heresy not to bow down.

Unjust though it seemed, it was better that he was remembered only in legend: the distorted legend about the evil magician who’d tried to rule by force and who had been vanquished by the proclamation of the High Law. He would be glad that forced rule was still thought evil.

“There’s something I must explain,” Stefred went on. “The First Scholar did not write the Prophecy, at least not the words. The idea was his, but the Book of the Prophecy itself was written later by a man who experienced that last dream many times.”

“But the words were in the dream,” protested Noren.

“No,” Stefred said. “They are not in the recording, Noren; you supplied them yourself.”

“If I did, if I put the idea and the words together, then—” Noren drew breath, suddenly taking in the implications of what he was about to say. “Then inside I must have known that they—fit.”

“That the symbols are an accurate expression of the idea, yes. All words are symbols. These, being familiar to you, came naturally into your mind. They are figurative words, poetic words, and as such have more power than the scientific ones the First Scholar knew weren’t suited to his purpose.”

“I could say them and not be lying,” Noren declared wonderingly. “The Prophecy is true!”

“You could; you passed that hurdle without even making an effort. The real question is whether you
should
.” Stefred looked down at Noren, his eyes filled with compassion and warmth, adding, “Remember that long ago you conceded that you would accept the Prophecy if I could prove it, and you were well aware that recanting means far more.”

Chapter Eleven

Alone in his old quarters, the tiny green-walled room, Noren thought it through. He knew that he would receive no help from Stefred, much less any pressure; his decision was to be entirely free. It would be freer than it could ever have been while he hated the Scholars. Of all the strange things that had happened to him in the City, to have been granted this freedom was the strangest.