Now, however, waking again from the nightmare, he knew that he could retreat no more. He’d completed the formal training sequence and had reached the point where in other sciences one could progress further only with the aid of a tutor. No one was qualified to tutor him in genetics—he himself already knew more about it than anyone had learned for generations. In any case, what a tutor did was to introduce trainees to applications of the knowledge they’d acquired. Genetics had no applications, not in this world, anyway.
On the Six Worlds, which had had a tremendous variety of plant and animal life, genetic engineering had been used for agriculture—it had been, during the last centuries of the civilization’s existence, a major weapon in the battle against hunger. The Six Worlds had been overpopulated and short of food. Genetic alteration of crops and livestock had increased the supply. But there was no food shortage on this alien planet, and no edible lifeforms either, other than the few imported ones already fully utilized. No genetic alteration of native lifeforms could overcome the fact that they were based on alien, damaging chemistry, incompatible with human life. That was the reason human life wasn’t going to be possible after the irreplaceable soil and water purification equipment gave out… .
Everything led back to that one inescapable fact.
Noren, sitting on the side of his bunk, found himself literally, physically sick—sick from fatigue, from frustration, from terror and despair. He had honestly tried to act constructively. He’d put fear out of his mind while learning, and what he’d learned was
important
—all preserved knowledge was important, it all reflected the Six Worlds’ rise. The Six Worlds’ people, his people, had penetrated so far into the mysteries of the universe… how much further might they have gone? It was too late, now. He had learned something worth learning, but he could not pass it on. Someday he would die. Eventually his whole species would die—not in some dim, unforeseeable future, but by a known date, not many generations ahead. All the effort would prove useless. He’d learned a whole new complex of ideas, ideas that should be exciting, and they could be of no use whatsoever. He felt worse despair than what he’d begun with.
The First Scholar had felt despair too; by sharing it in the dreams, one was supposed to learn the way out. One suffered, but one got past that. In real life, Noren realized suddenly, he wasn’t going to get past it. The way out was through action. The First Scholar’s life had been full of action: hard action, action sometimes justifiable only as the lesser of evils, yet action he believed would save his people. He had not faced a situation where the more knowledge he gained, the more clearly he saw that no such action was open to him.
It’s no wonder
, Noren thought,
that I feel trapped in the nightmare
. . . .
He reached for the washbasin, a white plastic basin since, without metal for pump parts, adequate plumbing was a luxury the City’s towers did without. His sickness was no mere feeling. He hadn’t thought he had eaten enough to be so sick; perhaps the cup of tea he’d forced down had been a mistake.
At length, when he was able to stand, he mustered his courage and returned to Stefred, knowing that no alternative remained.
*
*
*
He consented to deep probing not only under hypnosis, but under drugs. A time came when he found himself conscious; Stefred was saying to him, “I’d like to monitor the nightmare itself, Noren.”
“I’m not sure I can go to sleep. I’m not even tired any more.” Saying this, Noren realized he’d undergone prolonged sedation.
“I can induce it, if you’ll let me. It can’t be done against your will.”
Thinking that it had happened against his will all too many times, but ashamed to admit he did not feel he could endure it one time more, Noren agreed. The session was grueling despite Stefred’s calm support, and he came to himself shivering, soaked with sweat.
“What’s wrong with me?” he murmured, for the first time dreading the relentless honesty on which his trust in Stefred was founded. “I could always cope before. Even during my first days at the outpost, when I’d panicked in space and thought I was losing my sanity, I
didn’t
lose it—”
“That thought’s what scares you most,” Stefred observed, “much more than the nightmare does.”
“Yes,” Noren confessed in a low voice. He had never seen insanity, but he’d learned enough from the computers to know it existed. “They told us when we were little, in the village, that we’d turn into idiots if we drank impure water,” he reflected. “I laughed then because I didn’t believe it. And now, of course, I know better, I know it can’t happen that way to me. I even know it wasn’t just like that with my child—” This was true; he had learned from his study of genetics that Talyra’s baby could not have been like the mutants after all. It had perhaps suffered teratogenic damage, but not the same sort of damage that had produced the subhuman creatures in the mountains.
“Is the child in the nightmare some kind of symbol not only of what did happen, but of what I’m afraid is happening to my mind?” he continued. “Things are so… so mixed up—all tied together somehow. The First Scholar’s feelings, too! When I’m awake, I remember his good feelings; why do only bad ones, indescribable ones, come in my sleep?”
“This is hard to say to you,” Stefred admitted, “but I don’t know. And I’ve no means of finding out.”
“You can’t cure me?” whispered Noren, appalled. He had not wanted to seek help, but he’d never doubted Stefred’s ability to provide it.
“There’s nothing to cure, Noren. You are not sick; you’ve in no way lost touch with reality. Difficult though it is for you to accept my estimation of you, I am professionally qualified to diagnose mental illness.” He smiled, though it was obviously an effort for him. “If you can’t take my word, you’re accusing me either of incompetence or of dishonesty.”
Noren raised his head. Put that way, the judgment was indisputable. “You’re telling me the nightmare may not stop,” he said shakily.
“I wish I could tell you otherwise.” replied Stefred gently “But you want the truth, and the truth is that we’re faced with something beyond my skill to analyze. Your sanity is not in question, and the monitoring has shown that the nightmare’s harmless to you. That’s as far as I’m able to see; you will have to find your own way.”
“I’m willing to try,” Noren said, “but I—I don’t think I’m equal to it.”
“With that, I’m on firmer ground,” said Stefred, his smile genuine now. “There are ways of proving to you that you are. At least there would be if you were a candidate and still afraid of me so that I could demonstrate how much you can endure of your own free will.”
“But this isn’t like what you do to candidates; no one could bear it voluntarily—”
“No? Suppose when you’d come to me as a heretic, convinced that my aim was to pressure you into submission, I had induced such terror in you—I could, you know—and demanded your recantation as the price of freeing you of it. Would you have knelt to me and begged my mercy?”
“Well, of course not,” declared Noren. “What a silly question, Stefred.”
“To you, it is. To someone to whom it wasn’t, I would never pose it.”
“I see your point,” Noren conceded. “Why doesn’t it make me feel any better?”
“Because you don’t yet see that you’re in a comparable situation.” Seriously, Stefred went on, “Noren, the mind is strange, and there’s much about it we can’t comprehend. Of this much I’m sure, though: what is happening to you is happening by your own inner choice. Strength, not weakness, has brought the ordeal upon you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve told you in the past,” Stefred reminded him, “that a strong person can open his mind to things a weaker one wouldn’t be willing to confront. The subconscious mind gives you whatever protection you need—there are psychoses and drugs that can circumvent that, but in you I find no trace of interference with normal functioning. Therefore you are experiencing something you’re able to handle and that is in some way purposeful.”
“But what constructive purpose could it serve?”
“That, I can’t answer.”
“I suppose the fact that it’s unpleasant doesn’t rule out inner choice,” Noren said slowly. “After all, we do suffer voluntarily when we reach out in the controlled dreams. You know, what you said about Lianne, when she was being subjected to the candidates’ version of the recordings… it—it’s a little like that, I think. As if I’m trapped by intolerable limits, reaching for something that isn’t there. In the nightmare it’s always just beyond the edge, where I can’t touch it. Is that a reasonable analogy?”
Stefred leaned forward. “It could be more than analogy,” he said, his voice edged with excitement. “Think: did you feel this at all in the controlled dreams?”
“Well, I was definitely reaching for something I didn’t find. Only the rest was so overwhelming that I didn’t mind much, any more than I minded the limits of the candidates’ version when I was younger.”
“We don’t understand just how controlled dreaming works,” Stefred mused. “We’re sure only that the dreamer has a certain degree of freedom. The more courage you have to reach out, the more you gain—”
“You told me that the very first time I was subjected to it,” Noren recalled.
“Yes. You’ve always had that kind of courage—from your earliest childhood you’ve sought knowledge, and even from the first dream you took more than was forced on you. And your identification with the First Scholar is exceptionally strong. I can’t guess what you drew from the full version of his thoughts—but conceivably, it was more than the rest of us have gotten. We’ve always known the editing he did for privacy left gaps we can’t fill.”
“Could that cause nightmares, the way the gaps in the partial recording were agony for Lianne?”
“Yes,” said Stefred thoughtfully. “Yes, it could. The unanswerable questions he pondered aren’t disturbing you, not in the sense of giving you nightmares, anyway. But something he
knew
, yet deleted… if it was an emotional thing, a significant one—”
“But why would he delete anything significant? His goal was to pass on all his knowledge; surely he took out only personal details that were no one’s business but his own.”
“That’s the puzzle,” Stefred agreed. “He wouldn’t have removed anything his successors would care about. And he was skilled in the editing process; he wouldn’t have left gaps that could cause a dreamer to suffer.”
“I wonder. He wouldn’t have left any that would cause harm—but you say that what’s happening to me is not harmful. You say I’ve chosen to experience more than was forced on me. He made a lot of plans that depend on people being willing to do that.”
“For fulfilling the Prophecy, yes—but we know those plans.”
True, thought Noren, and yet… “What if I were to stop shrinking from the nightmare, enter it as I would a controlled dream?” he asked.
“That would be a very wise approach,” Stefred answered soberly, “but I can’t tell you where it would lead. Noren, if you have taken something unprecedented from the First Scholar’s memories, you are already past the point where I can counsel you.” He smiled and added, “But then, I’ve always believed you’ll move beyond me one way or another in time.”
Of course, as the world’s most promising nuclear physicist, Noren thought bitterly—but on the verge of an exasperated reply, he became aware that Stefred was no longer trying to reassure him. On the contrary, he had just presented him with the most frightening challenge of all.
*
*
*
Lying sleepless, Noren courted nightmare, wishing with full sincerity that it would overtake him. Seldom had it come, lately, and when it had, he’d been able to draw nothing more from it. Though it was still acutely painful, he no longer found it terrifying, for he was increasingly convinced that its emotions had originated not with him but with the First Scholar—and it was something he wanted desperately to understand.
Stefred had been speculating about direct transfer from a recorder’s subconscious mind to a dreamer’s; he had reread all the information in the computers about the thought recording process and had even reexperienced the First Scholar’s recordings himself in the hope that he’d get from them whatever Noren had gotten. That hadn’t happened. Noren, embarrassed, realized that now more than ever, Stefred regarded him as having some special rapport with the First Scholar that set him apart from everyone else. He was torn; he did not want such a position—yet could Stefred conceivably be right? Was there something buried in his mind, perhaps, that could explain why he felt unlike other people, even the people who shared his concern for knowledge, the Scholars with whom he’d once thought he wouldn’t be a misfit?
He had been a misfit as a boy in the village. He’d never gotten on well with his father and brothers, who had not cared about any of the things that mattered to him. Once he had despised them, as he’d despised the village life they had found satisfying. He was no longer so callous; for all their rough ways, they had been honest men who’d worked hard and who would leave many descendants. He wondered sometimes what had happened to them. Did they still feel shame at his having been convicted of heresy? The severance of family ties demanded of Inner City residents had been no sacrifice for him, though for most others he knew, it was. It bothered him a little to realize that he’d had nothing to lose.