Chapter Three

The nightmare was unlike anything one might imagine; he knew of no words that could convey its content. There were no thoughts: not his, not the First Scholar’s, not anyone’s. There was only horror and revulsion. This horror . . . nameless, shapeless . . . was part of him, or he of it; the scope of it had no boundaries. He knew it not from sight or sound but as pure emotion. It was as if he’d fallen into another dimension . . . no, as if he’d created such a dimension and had been trapped there. Its evil was of his own making, yet he’d meant no evil; he had tried to achieve something good. He must not stop trying, though he knew he would be punished for it by this unbearable deprivation of all rational connection to the universe he knew, to the form of life he knew. . . .

There were no concrete images in the nightmare itself, but just before waking he saw the mutant—not an adult mutant such as he’d killed in the mountains, but a hideous mutant child. Its body was like that of a human child just able to walk, but it was not human. It was mindless. There was only emptiness behind its eyes. Noren came to himself with long gasps, not sure if he’d been sobbing or retching. By the Star, he thought, not again! I can’t take it again. . . .

Gradually his head cleared. He sat up, finding himself as always in his own quarters, his own bed, knowing that many weeks had passed since his first waking from this agony. Knowing, too, that more weeks—perhaps years—might go by before he’d be free of it, if indeed he ever would be. He wondered how long his courage would last.

It was not a recollection of anything in the controlled dreams. Those had been all right: terrible at times, of course, but also uplifting. Though he’d shared depths of the First Scholar’s feelings that surpassed anything in the edited versions, the heights, too, had been correspondingly more intense. He had begun to grasp what it meant to come to terms with depression and fear that couldn’t be banished, evil that was part of a world from which no escape existed. He’d felt the rising of a faith that was more than escape, and pondering it, he knew why the full version of the recording was considered worth going through. It would be a long time, he realized, before he could consciously understand all he had learned from the First Scholar.

About the controlled dreams he had no regrets, except for disappointment at the fact that they’d indeed contained no additional ideas on the subject of genetic damage. But the ensuing nightmare was another matter.

Even Stefred was puzzled. It wasn’t the kind of problem he’d anticipated; and at first, during the long, deep follow-up discussions they’d had after the completion of the machine-induced dream sequence, he had said Noren had reacted remarkably well to the ordeal. There had been no signs of trouble then. Even the inexplicable guilt feelings of the First Scholar’s later years—which Noren perceived less as remorse than as a grief too dark and too personal for any dreamer’s comprehension—had not been unduly disturbing.

He had gone back to his own quarters, resigned to a return to study. In the days that followed, his grief for Talyra, though still painful, had gradually receded. He found himself not thinking about her till some small, sharp reminder—the sight of a Technician woman’s red bead necklace, for instance—brought back a temporary wave of engulfing sorrow. He’d quelled his rage at the way of things, recalling acceptance he’d drawn from the First Scholar’s mind; and once he had even presided at Vespers. He’d said the ritual phrases of hope with renewed confidence that they might, in the end, prove true.

Then the nightmare had begun.

The first time, he’d discounted it as fatigue mixed with too much ale. The second night he was more shaken, yet during the day he’d carried on and had relaxed with Brek and Beris in the evening. He’d been only a little apprehensive when he left them at bedtime; but that night, the third, had been the worst of all. After that, he’d been unable to eat, and as darkness came he’d gone in helpless, shamefaced panic to Stefred for formal consultation.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Stefred had said calmly, though his eyes were troubled. “First we’ll check to see if it’s my fault.”

“Stefred, that’s nonsense—”

“Possibly not. There shouldn’t have been risk in what I did to you, but I was so tired that week I may have botched it, left you with some posthypnotic suggestion that’s creating a problem. If so, I can remove it; you must let me explore, Noren.”

Seeing the logic, Noren had agreed to further hypnosis, but it had solved nothing. “If a person were to have recurrent nightmares of this sort without cause, we would call him ill,” Stefred said, “but in your case we know the cause. It hit you harder than I believed it could, despite all my misgivings; you’re handling it better than you realize.”

“But other people who go through the full version of the dreams don’t react this way. Even Lianne—”

“Lianne owes a great deal to you, Noren. She has said so.”

“You told her about me?” That surprised him; he did not want her assuming he’d done it for her sake when that hadn’t been his main motive.

“Not specifically. After her recantation, though, when I had to explain the edited secrets, she guessed a good deal more than I’d have expected she could about why I’d finally yielded to her request for less editing of other things. Lianne’s adapted to the Inner City fast, and she’s remarkably good at putting two and two together.”

Although she was now a Scholar, Noren had not seen Lianne often, for her work shift was at night. Surprisingly, despite obvious scientific aptitude, she had not chosen to study nuclear physics. Instead, she was working as a technical assistant in the controlled dreaming lab. Ordinary dream material, not the First Scholar’s thoughts but memories other Founders had recorded of the Six Worlds, required no monitoring; those who wished to experience such dreams did so during normal sleep hours. Someone must be on duty to operate the equipment, but this was not skilled work, and the job was often given to young, new Scholars who had not yet chosen permanent vocations—those most eager to dream of the Six Worlds themselves when the Dream Machine wasn’t being used for anything of higher priority.

“Why did Lianne withstand the full version better than I did, when she has so much less experience?” Noren persisted.

Stefred’s look was grave, yet a little perplexed. “Perhaps because you haven’t forgiven yourself for what happened to Talyra.”

Noren frowned. “You said I might transfer the First Scholar’s guilt to my own situation—but that’s not how it is in the nightmare; Talyra isn’t in it. None of the personal things are involved. I do still feel guilty about them, but I’ve . . . accepted that.”

“I know,” Stefred agreed. “You acknowledge it consciously, which in theory should keep it from causing you subconscious trouble. Yet there’s the image of the mutant.” He continued thoughtfully, “That might have appeared anyway in your natural dreams; you and Brek are the only people living who’ve actually seen mutants, and now that you fear your stillborn child might have been damaged—well, we may be dealing with a separate problem. It’s not the sort of thing the First Scholar’s memories could have triggered in you.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Noren declared. Certainly there’d been no thoughts about mutants in the recording; he had been alert for them. “Besides, the focus of the nightmare is something else, something I can’t put a name to, not an image at all—something I can’t face because I can’t even define what it is.”

Stefred appraised him searchingly. “Noren, posthypnotic suggestion could free you of this nightmare, let you sleep peacefully. Do you want that kind of help?”

“No!” Noren burst out.

“Why not?”

“Because—because it wouldn’t solve anything. I’d still not know why.”

“Given a choice, you prefer to go on suffering?”

“I—I deserve it, I guess. Or it wouldn’t be happening.”

Soberly, Stefred reflected, “That could be true.”

“That it’s punishment? Oh, Stefred, you don’t really believe the spirit of the Mother Star can reach down and strike me, the way villagers would think!” No such preposterous idea was implied by official liturgy; only the villagers’ corrupted notions of blasphemy endowed the Star with power to punish.

“Of course I don’t,” Stefred assured him. “But you are quite capable of punishing yourself; your subconscious mind can do more than you realize, and you are strong enough to take a good deal of voluntary punishment.”

“You mean that’s really what’s happening?”

“It’s one of the things that can happen. But it’s not a healthy response, and with you I think the situation’s more complex. You don’t despise yourself enough to abandon all constructive aims for destructive ones, any more than you did last year.”

“By the Star, Stefred, I want to do something constructive! Only I—I feel so helpless, because there’s nothing to do.” He remembered just in time not to mention the uselessness of his work specifically.

“You’re still searching for something.”

“Yes, I suppose so. It was why I insisted on the dreams . . . but I seem to have hit a dead end.”

“I’m not so sure,” Stefred said slowly. He was silent for a while, then went on. “You want to get to the bottom of this. You don’t want me to stop it for you artificially—which, incidentally, I was counting on when I offered to, because suppression of such a dream might do you real harm. So we’re going to have to wait and see what happens.”

“You mean I’ve got to just—live with it?” Noren faltered. Talyra’s sad voice echoed in his memory: You simply have to live with the consequences of what you are. She had not blamed him for being different, but she’d always felt it would doom him to suffering, and for that, she had wept.

“For the time being. I’m not callous; I know how bad it is, and I’m too much of a realist to tell you not to let it frighten you. In fact the best advice I can give you is not to fight that—fighting will only make it worse.” Pressing Noren’s hand, he added, “Come back to me in a week or two if the nightmare doesn’t stop; there are some other things I can do if necessary.”

It had not stopped. It hadn’t come every night, but Noren had learned to fear sleep. At first he’d thrown himself into his work in the daytime; that was a strategy that had brought him through bad times before. It was no longer one that worked. He found it wholly impossible to fix his mind on the mathematical problems he had once found engrossing. The image of the mutant child haunted him, looming between the study screen and his eyes.

One day in desperation, unable to work, unable to face Brek’s well-meant solicitude or to confess that he had not eaten, he’d hidden in the computer room. Idly, without conscious plan, he had asked, IS THERE A TRAINING PROGRAM IN GENETICS? The computers were programmed to give systematic training in sciences relevant to the Scholars’ work, training designed to enable young people with no schooling beyond that offered in the villages—the mere rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic—to rapidly master material that on the Six Worlds would have required years to absorb. It was done through individually generated study discs, intensive quizzing, and memorization of details under hypnosis: a fast-paced, demanding process, yet enjoyable if one wished to learn. Noren had been through such programs in math, physics and chemistry; he knew there were certain others, but he did not expect genetics to be among them. Surprisingly, it was.

Feeling uncomfortable about so blatant a departure from the job to which he was committed, he told himself that a short break could do no harm; he was only going through the motions with regard to nuclear physics anyhow. He embarked on the genetics program—and soon found why the Founders had provided it for the benefit of posterity. No one could possibly be expected to assemble such a program from scratch after fulfillment of the Prophecy, for no non-specialist would be able to ask the right questions. The basic vocabulary and concepts alone took him days to acquire even with hypnotic aid. He had not known what genetics involved; he’d assumed it just had something to do with reproduction and biological inheritance. He hadn’t imagined every cell in every organism’s body was continuously controlled by the interactions of countless genes. In fact he’d had no real idea of what a gene was—that it consisted of a chemical code so complex as to demand computer analysis amazed and fascinated him. No wonder the First Scholar’s memories contained no details about genetics. They contained no details about the mathematics of nuclear reactions, either.

The short break from physics stretched on, week after week. Noren’s days became bearable; often they extended from one to the next—it was a good excuse for not sleeping. It was customary for Scholars pursuing specific training programs to work far into the night. Among the young initiates, this was viewed as a game, a challenge. To force one’s mind to the point of exhaustion was a gesture of protest against living a life one had looked upon as privileged. Noren was past that stage. He’d long since learned that the so-called “privilege” of Scholar rank entailed hardship and deprivation beyond the imagination of the relatively prosperous villagers. But his long hours in the computer room were not thought strange; even Brek accepted a new study program as a legitimate retreat from grief. That it was also a retreat from terror, Noren confided to no one.

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.

Except, of course, Talyra. And he had not lost her because of his heretical ideas after all. Ironically, he had lost her for no purpose whatsoever; and worse, she’d lost her own life. . . .

The First Scholar had come to terms with grief. But his wife had chosen to die—chosen tragically and mistakenly, to be sure, but nevertheless she had made her own decision. Talyra hadn’t. He could never reconcile himself to that! If some end had been served by it, something she would have chosen had she known . . . but it had achieved nothing.

He could endure his own guilt. He knew, from the dreams, that the First Scholar had lived with some terrible and mysterious horror for which he’d felt to blame, and had endured it—he could never have been at peace in the end if he had not. The end, the deathbed recording, contained no traces of any horror. There was sadness in it, and physical pain, but otherwise only hope: the exultant hope that had engendered the Prophecy. For himself, Noren thought, there would never be hope again. Talyra had died uselessly, and the things she’d believed in, the things the Prophecy said, were never going to come true in any case.

It always came back to that.

Turning over in the dark, the total darkness of a windowless room in which for lack of metal wire, there could be no illumination when no battery-powered lamp was in use, he found himself thinking again about genetics. It was strange he could not put that out of his mind. He’d long since learned all he could about it, lacking practical applications to focus on. He had satisfied his curiosity as to the specific way in which unprocessed soil and water damaged human reproductive cells. It was an incredibly complex process requiring understanding of both chemistry and biology at the molecular level; he’d spent weeks wholly immersed in it, and even so, only the mental discipline acquired from his past study of nuclear physics had enabled him to master the concepts. He was by now, he supposed, the greatest authority on useless information who’d ever lived in the City. The greatest shirker of responsibility, too, people would say, had he not gone back to an outward pretense of devotion to the unattainable goal of metal synthesization.

Yet he could not let his new knowledge drop. He did not know why. It wasn’t escape from terror any longer, nor was it still escape from the futility of his official work—for was not genetics equally futile?

How frustrating that he couldn’t justify devoting more time to it. He would like to experiment. He might genetically modify some native plant to grow in treated soil, and that would give people relief from the monotony of a diet based on a single crop. But the cost would be too high, not only in his time, but in the time the land-treatment machines would last. A second crop would be welcomed by village farmers; they would want extra fields to grow it in. The Founders had been wise to provide only one kind of food. They had also been wise, perhaps, not to encourage even the Scholars to learn that if it were not for the limitation imposed by the machines’ durability span—which had been calculated on the basis of necessary population increase—more variety would be possible.

The Founders had made just one practical use of genetic knowledge: they had developed the work-beasts. Everyone knew that, of course; even the villagers said that the work-beasts had been created by the Scholars at the time of the Founding. It was one of the notions he had scorned during his boyhood, but from the dreams of his enlightenment as a Scholar candidate, he had learned to his astonishment that it was true. Animal embryos had been brought from the Six Worlds and had been genetically altered so that they could eat native vegetation and drink from streams. They were essential to the villagers as beasts of burden as well as for hides, tallow and bone . . . what a pity that there wasn’t a way to make the meat usable, too. But genetic alteration couldn’t accomplish that. Work-beast flesh, like any creature’s, contained chemical traces of the food and water that had nourished it; the High Law decreed that it must be burned or buried. You couldn’t deal with the damaging substance in the soil and water by biological modification of what people consumed. The problem—the biological problem—was not in the food sources, but in people themselves. . . .

Noren sat upright, his heart pounding. Why wasn’t it possible to make biological modifications to people?

It was all too possible in nature. That was the trouble. The mutants were biologically changed. They ate native vegetation and drank from streams as work-beasts did; what had been accomplished with the work-beasts was called controlled mutation. It had been detrimental to their intelligence, not as seriously as in the case of the mutants descended from humans, since the beasts hadn’t been very intelligent to begin with, but a similar type of brain damage had been involved. Only it needn’t have been. He had studied the research done by the Founders, and he knew—with hindsight it had been recognized that the brain damage could have been avoided. The world had needed strong work-beasts, fast, more than it had needed smart ones. The researchers had been working against time and they had not tried to deal with the complexities of the genes that regulated brain development. Later on, they could not retrace their steps, for the inherited brain damage was irreversible.

But if that damage had been needless, if it could be averted if controlled mutation were done in the right way, why couldn’t mutation in people also be controlled? Biologically, genetically, people were animals. . . .

He fumbled for the lamp, suddenly unable to bear the darkness. He knew he would not sleep until he had discovered the answer.

There must be an answer, of course. The Founders were not stupid; they could scarcely have failed to perceive what he had just perceived. They would hardly have established a system they loathed, a caste system they knew to be evil, if there had been any alternate means of human survival—they had maintained over and over again that they would not. They’d experienced heartbreak during their decision and its implementation. The factors in the decision had been considered in full and painful detail by the First Scholar, who had suffered most agonizingly over it. Noren knew, beyond any possible question, that the First Scholar would not have done the things he did if there had been any choice. Nor would he have overlooked any conceivable future way of saving humanity from extinction.

But it was surely very strange that his recorded memories hadn’t included any regret about whatever it was that precluded controlled genetic alteration of humans.

Noren pulled on his clothes, his hands shaking, and took a small lantern; it was so late that the corridor lamps had been turned off. Outside, only the lights at the tower pinnacles still burned. He strode across the courtyard to the Hall of Scholars. The computers could tell him what he needed to know. They preserved all knowledge, and the answers he now sought had once been known. They must have been.

He looked up at the dazzling tower lights and the faint stars that showed between them. Off to his left was the red-gold glow of Little Moon, now rising. As bright as Little Moon, said the Prophecy; the Mother Star, when it appeared in the sky, would outshine any other. He would not live to see that, but his people must . . . his descendants must. Talyra had been right, he knew—he must eventually have other children. He did not feel he would want love again, not for itself, but he did want to believe that his offspring would live after him. She’d understood that, and her last thought for him had been to send word that she understood.

The towers . . . the City . . . to him they had always been a symbol. Of the future. Of the knowledge he craved. Outside, as a heretic, he’d gazed at them with more longing than he could bear. Had he offered his life for conviction’s sake alone, or only because without access to knowledge it had meant little to him? City confinement had been no more a hardship for him than separation from his family had. In his very arrest he’d had nothing to lose, though he’d believed himself soon to die. Had it been right to accept priesthood when he’d made no real sacrifice?

Approaching the computer room, he knew again that it had been. The essence of priesthood, for him at least, was guardianship of knowledge and extension of it—only by that means could knowledge ultimately be made free to all people. Only through its use could metal become available. Yes, that aim might fail, probably would fail; in the end everything would be lost . . . but the human race must die striving for life.

Suppose, just suppose, it had been possible to alter humans genetically so that the species need not die. Noren realized, with his hand poised above a console keyboard, that he did not want to crush this fantasy yet. The replies to his questions were going to crush it. But suppose that option had been open to the Founders—the Prophecy’s promises would already have been fulfilled! He would be living in the era all Scholars wished to see. The City would long since have been thrown open, knowledge and machines would be available to everyone. . . .

Or would they?

No! There would be no more metal than there already was. Its synthesization wouldn’t have been achieved, and in fact it wouldn’t need to be achieved—people wouldn’t even have kept working toward it. If people could drink unpurified water and eat plants grown in untreated soil, they could survive without metal, without machines!

But the knowledge in the computers could not.

Computers depended on metal parts and on a supply of nuclear power. The knowledge in them could not be accessed without those essentials. If the power failed, if the electronically stored data could never again be retrieved, then that knowledge would be lost. The Founders had known this; it had been one of their main reasons for sealing the City, for if the knowledge were to be lost, the machines essential to survival would be lost too, along with any chance of ever obtaining the metal for more machines.

It was a circle. If it was broken, humanity would die. Yet if it had been broken in another way, a way that had enabled humans to live without the City . . . then the City would no longer exist. He would be living the Stone Age life of the villagers, and without metal resources, without people trained to preserve even the remnants of a metal-based technology, there would be no possibility of regaining such a technology in the future.

The universe would be closed to his race. Forever.

The accumulated knowledge of the Six Worlds would be lost forever.

And the First Scholar must have foreseen that outcome.

Numb, paralyzed, Noren closed his eyes; the room had begun to swim dizzily around him. The nightmare that had eluded him earlier was assailing him now—though he was still conscious, he began to feel the familiar horror. He no longer wanted to understand its basis. He knew he could not face such understanding. He knew what significant facts the First Scholar had edited from his memories; he wished he could edit them from his own.

He should go now, walk away from the computers, forget genetics and return to his study of physics. Life would go on, as it had gone on throughout the generations since the Founding. As it would go on for a few more after him. No one else would learn what he had learned. People would be content. The villagers and Technicians would be content because they believed the Prophecy, and the Scholars would be content because they had faith in their power to bring about the Prophecy’s fulfillment. There shall come a time of great exultation . . . 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. Everyone believed that. Would they be happier knowing that it was false? Had he not faced exactly the same decision last year, when he’d first lost confidence in the nuclear research, and had Talyra not died because of his mistaken attempt to offer truth in place of illusion?

But it was not the same. Then, truth as he’d seen it had been a destructive truth. He could not have saved anyone by exposing the Prophecy’s emptiness. He could not, by sacrificing all he personally valued, have enabled future generations to live.

Could he now?

Could the Founders have done so? The First Scholar?

They had not, certainly, been insincere in what they did. Their suffering had been real. They had made a choice, a hard one, too hard to impose on their successors, and they had made it for humanity’s benefit. They had chosen a relatively short era of social evil to attain a long era of future advance, evidently. He did not have to judge whether they’d been right or wrong; the option was no longer open. For him, knowing that synthesization of metal had been proven impossible, the choice was simply between preservation of knowledge and a chance for permanent preservation of life . . . if in fact there was now any choice at all.

He had better start finding out, Noren told himself grimly. If he left the computers without knowing, he might lack the courage to come again.

*  *  *

Afterward, he did not remember his whole line of questioning. He was dazed and couldn’t be sure which of his words triggered a long-hidden branch in the control program. For a time, quite a long time, he was conversing normally; then all of a sudden he found himself waiting, the light at the top of his console glowing orange, as auxiliary memory was searched.

A wait in itself was not unusual; information about subjects not of immediate concern to the world was kept in auxiliary storage to be called up only on request. The computer complex, he’d been told, was not really well designed for its role as a central library. It had been put together from the separate smaller computer systems of the dismantled ships of the starfleet, a task the Founders had accomplished under the extreme handicap of having no unit with adequate capacity for a central server and no materials or equipment for the manufacture of extra parts. The resulting system was therefore inefficient and slow by Six Worlds’ standards. It was no great problem; rarely did anyone need data such as he’d just requested. Yet he had already waited once upon his initial request for the genetics file, which he’d supposed was a single entity . . . evidently, that wasn’t the case.

There had been a contingency plan, then. The Founders had not burned their bridges; they had known metal synthesization might fail. He was, he supposed, going to be given specific instruction in the process of modifying human genes. How excited he’d have been if this had happened earlier tonight, before he’d perceived the implications! He wondered if the program would spell them out. Probably not, he thought bitterly; no doubt the Founders hoped the implementer of the contingency plan would work as an unwitting tool. So much for the sacred principle of access to knowledge for the priesthood, and the even more sacred one of equal share in the burdens. . . .

That was what hurt worst, Noren saw. He had never wanted to be a priest, but he had come to feel it was wrong to refuse the responsibility. He had become convinced that the priests’ world-view was genuine, that the role involved no sham or delusion. Now it seemed that the whole edifice had been built on sham after all. When in recantation, one went through symbolic reenactment of the First Scholar’s death, one believed one had shared the full burden of the Founders’ moral dilemma—but if they had made the hardest choice of all and then hidden the fact that such choice existed, their successors had been duped! The Scholars were all tools. Right from the beginning it had been that way. How could the First Scholar have been a party to that? How could he have founded a religion on such a basis, a religion he’d believed valid? In the dreams he had believed; those feelings couldn’t have been faked. . . .

Words appeared on the console screen. YOU HAVE ASKED QUESTIONS THAT PROVE YOU ARE NOT OF THE FIRST GENERATION. HOW MANY PLANET YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE ARRIVAL OF THE FINAL EXPEDITION?

But the computer knew that! thought Noren in amazement. It was the computer that had kept track of the time since the Founding; the Scholars relied on its internal clock. It told them, not the other way around. Odd, too, that the word “Founding” had not been used in the question. “The final expedition” was an obsolete phrase, one he knew only because the First Scholar had used it in the dreams.

He was not a trained programmer, but he’d learned enough since becoming a Scholar to realize that the normal executive program was no longer operating; the information he was to receive had been so well protected that it was not to be processed by the integrated system at all. Some vestige of a first-generation master routine had assumed control. Slowly he keyed in the requested number of years.

HAS METAL YET BEEN SYNTHESIZED? the program asked.

NO. THAT IS NOW KNOWN TO BE IMPOSSIBLE. He might not be given the full truth unless he made clear from the outset that there was no remaining hope in the original plan.

YOUR INQUIRIES CONCERN GENETICS. HAVE YOU COMPLETED THE TRAINING PROGRAM IN THAT SCIENCE?

YES.

YOU MUST BE EXAMINED WITH REGARD TO YOUR READINESS TO RECEIVE FURTHER INFORMATION. THE TEST IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT AND WILL REQUIRE SEVERAL HOURS. ARE YOU WILLING TO UNDERTAKE IT NOW?

YES, replied Noren. He was a fool, probably; the night was far gone and he was giddy with fatigue and emotion. Common sense told him that he would do better on such a test if he took it when fresh. But having come this far, he could not back away.

He had been tested many times before by the computer system, though never as a prerequisite to obtaining answers to his questions. Usually information was simply presented—if one couldn’t understand it, one had to study up on background material and then ask again. Testing was reserved for the formal training programs, and it was made very arduous. One was pushed to the limits of one’s individual capacity and a little beyond; computer programs excelled at that. Noren had learned not to mind it. Once he’d discovered that tolerance of one’s failures was a carefully calculated factor in the scoring, he had even learned to enjoy the challenge. But no previous test had come close to the one to which he was now subjected.

At first it was simply a matter of understanding basic concepts of genetics, not too different from the tests in the training program he’d recently completed. Then, when he thought he was nearing the end, a new phase began. It turned into a fast-response exercise. This was similar to the computer game in which, as a new Scholar, he’d been trained in the mental discipline needed for advanced study. He knew how to deal with it. He was aware that he was not expected to respond within the allotted time to every question; the aim was to see how well he could cope with confusion. But in this case, the confusion was compounded. Not only did the questions demand thought, being full of technical details often over his head, but irrelevant inquiries were interspersed, presumably to throw him off the track. He was asked about his personal life. He was asked his opinion of various Inner City policies. Noren tried ignoring these superfluous matters, but that did not suit the testers’ strategy; he found that if he neglected to respond to any demand, however foolish, he would be forced to restart the current series of technical problems from the beginning. And to make things even rougher, he was given no feedback whatsoever concerning his scores.

This went on literally for hours.

Eventually, when he was trembling with exhaustion, the screen cleared, and a nine-digit figure appeared upon it. MEMORIZE THIS ACCESS CODE, he was told. OTHERWISE, IF YOU SEEK INFORMATION FROM THIS FILE IN TILE FUTURE, YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO REPEAT THE TEST.

Too overcome to protest, Noren committed the digits to memory. What, for the Star’s sake, was wrong with his name? The computer system kept track of everyone’s test scores, but name was the only identification needed to refer to them.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES PUT THE CODE IN WRITING, the instructions continued. IT HAS BEEN RANDOMLY GENERATED AND IS RECORDED ONLY WITH YOUR TEST RESULTS. EVERY PRECAUTION MUST BE TAKEN TO ENSURE THAT WHAT I AM ABOUT TO TELL YOU IS NOT COMMUNICATED TO ANYONE I’VE HAD NO OPPORTUNITY TO JUDGE.

Noren stared incredulously. The reason for using an access code had become clear enough, but the word “I” created a greater mystery.

FORGIVE ME FOR TESTING YOU SO RIGOROUSLY, the displayed wording went on. IT WAS NECESSARY. SURVIVAL ON THIS PLANET MAY DEPEND ON MY SECRET BEING PASSED TO A PERSON WHO WILL USE IT WISELY. I DO NOT KNOW HOW THE WORLD’S CULTURE WILL CHANGE AFTER I AM GONE. I KNOW ONLY THAT I CANNOT LET THIS KNOWLEDGE PERISH, AS MY FRIENDS WOULD WISH.

Who had programmed this? The computer complex never referred to itself by personal pronouns; he was reading the words of some past Scholar who’d chosen to speak to posterity as an individual—who had, moreover, carefully chosen to whom he would speak. The Founders had not done things that way. Everything, even the separate control routine, indicated that the file had been added to the system not as an official contingency plan, but secretly.

DO YOUR CONTEMPORARIES STILL HAVE HOPE OF SYNTHESIZING METAL?

YES, Noren replied. I MYSELF HAVE NONE.

IS YOUR INTEREST IN GENETICS SHARED BY OTHERS?

I HAVE TOLD THEM NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE. THEY THINK IT A MERE PASTIME.

YOU ARE IN A DIFFICULT POSITION, THEN, MUCH MORE DIFFICULT THAN YOU KNOW. I HAD HOPED IT WOULD BE OTHERWISE.

It gave him an uncanny feeling to see such phrasing; it was as if he were conversing with a conscious being, though he knew his responses would merely determine which of various preprogrammed statements would be presented to him. In the same way as in a programmed text, the writer had provided comments to fit differing circumstances. I HAVE GUESSED A GREAT DEAL ABOUT THE DIFFICULTIES, Noren confessed. I HAVE GUESSED WHY INFORMATION ABOUT HUMAN GENETICS WAS CONCEALED BY THE FOUNDERS.

YOUR GUESS IS UNLIKELY TO BE CORRECT, FOR IF YOU KNEW THE REASON, YOU WOULD NOT HAVE HAD TO GUESS—IT WOULD HAVE SEEMED OBVIOUS. POSSIBLY YOU THINK WE WERE UNWILLING TO LOSE THE CHANCE OF PRESERVING THE SIX WORLDS’ KNOWLEDGE. DO YOU APPROVE OF CONCEALMENT FOR THAT PURPOSE?

Noren hesitated. Finally he responded, I HAVE NEVER APPROVED OF DECEIT.

THAT IS TO YOUR CREDIT. BUT YOU ARE EMBARKING ON A COURSE INVOLVING FAR MORE COMPLEX ISSUES THAN THE ONE YOU HAVE IMAGINED.

This was like what Stefred had said to him long ago, Noren recalled, during his candidacy, when he’d objected to the withholding of the truth about the nova from non-Scholars. Was it really so much worse for the Scholars themselves to have been kept in partial ignorance? No . . . but the Founders had lied! The First Scholar had lied! They had said specifically to their successors that there was no means of human survival apart from guardianship of the City. To be sure, the First Scholar had lied to the villagers of his own time by pretending to be an insane tyrant; he had told open falsehoods about his motives. Yet that was different. He had not led them to make moral choices on false grounds.

The programmer of this file had been very clever. By using the personal pronouns he had created an illusion that encouraged trust. Perhaps he’d been one of the Founders after all; he had said “we” at one point. There might, of course, have been a rebel among the Founders—but what basis was there for judging such a person’s credibility? He, Noren, had been judged, and he saw now he had been judged on more than his knowledge of genetics; the seemingly irrelevant personal questions had been the most significant of all. He had undergone a thorough psychological examination. How was he to evaluate whoever had devised that? How much of the programmed sympathy could he believe?

WHOSE WORDS ARE THESE? he inquired, not really hoping for a meaningful answer. Few of the Founders were remembered by name, since when they’d assumed priesthood they had chosen anonymity in fear of worship.

Promptly, as if the statement had no greater import than any other computerized response, an answer was displayed. YOU KNOW ME. I WAS LEADER OF THE FINAL EXPEDITION FROM THE SIX WORLDS, AND SO FAR, I HAVE LED THE CITY. SOON, WITHIN A FEW WEEKS AT MOST, I MUST DIE; IF IT DOES NOT SO HAPPEN I SHALL DESTROY THIS FILE, FOR I CANNOT RISK ITS DISCOVERY DURING MY LIFETIME.

The First Scholar himself? Utterly bewildered, Noren sat motionless, trying to quiet the racing of his heart.

ARE MY RECORDED MEMORIES FAMILIAR TO YOU?

YES, Noren keyed, glad that no fuller reply was needed; his hands were unsteady.

IN THEIR FULLEST FORM?

YES. BUT EVEN THAT WAS EDITED BY . . . YOURSELF.

THAT IS TRUE. AND IF YOU NOW KNOW ENOUGH TO ASK THE QUESTIONS YOU’VE ASKED AND TO RESPOND AS YOU’VE RESPONDED, YOU HAVE GROUNDS TO DISTRUST ME.

Noren paused; how could one possibly tell the First Scholar that one distrusted him? Perhaps this whole night’s experience was unreal, not a thing truly happening. Perhaps he was still in his own bed. . . .

He was aware, suddenly, that it was not happening—not distrust. Though logic did give him grounds for it, logic wasn’t what mattered. He had shared this man’s inner thoughts and emotions, had done so repeatedly. He could not help trusting him! He would always trust him, just as after experiencing the candidates’ version of the dreams, he had trusted enough to recant on that basis. Logic had told him then that the Scholars might deceive him; but in controlled dreaming there could be no deceit. Editing, yes. Since the First Scholar could not possibly have done what the evidence indicated he’d done, perhaps someone had tampered with the recordings later, reedited them as Stefred had prepared the version for Lianne. That, in fact, might explain the incomplete cuts that had caused his nightmare. Things could indeed be cut from thought recordings—but the thoughts that weren’t cut could not be altered. Having shared the First Scholar’s mind, Noren knew positively that he was trustworthy.

I STILL TRUST YOU, he declared. BUT THERE IS MUCH I WISH TO KNOW. He hoped this secret file had been designed as a crosscheck; since tampering was technically feasible, the First Scholar might have foreseen that it could occur.

YOUR QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED. BUT BEFORE I CAN TELL YOU ANYTHING CRUCIAL I MUST ASK YOU FOR A COMMITMENT. WILL YOU PROMISE TO PURSUE FULL ENLIGHTENMENT WITH REGARD TO THE ISSUES THAT HAVE BEEN CONCEALED, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU MAY SUFFER FROM IT?

YES! The First Scholar too had been forced to trust, Noren perceived. No promise keyed into a computer could be binding except in the mind of the person who made it—yet he would feel bound. Had the psychological examination predicted that he would?

I MUST SUBJECT YOU TO A GRIM ORDEAL. I AM DEEPLY SORRY, BUT IT IS UNAVOIDABLE. I CAN GIVE YOU NO ASSURANCE THAT IT WILL BE HARMLESS TO YOU; IT MAY PROVE SERIOUSLY DISTURBING—YET OUR PEOPLE’S FUTURE WELFARE IS AT STAKE. AND YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW THE FACTS IT WILL REVEAL.

I AM NOT AFRAID TO KNOW, Noren replied, aware that although this was not wholly true, any other response would be unthinkable.

OF THAT, I HAVE MADE SURE: YOU HAVE BEEN TESTED IN MORE WAYS THAN YOU REALIZE. THE STATEMENT NEXT IN SEQUENCE IN THIS PROGRAM WOULD NOT BE PRESENTED TO YOU IF YOU WERE NOT BOTH QUALIFIED AND COMMITTED TO ACT UPON IT. ITS MERE EXISTENCE IN COMPUTER MEMORY IS DANGEROUS.

The screen went blank for an instant, and Noren drew breath. Then more words appeared. THE KNOWLEDGE YOU SEEK CANNOT BE EXPLAINED VERBALLY. YOU MUST ACQUIRE IT THROUGH A DREAM. THERE IS A HIDDEN RECORDING; I HAVE PUT IT WHERE IT CANNOT BE FOUND BY ACCIDENT. I AM RELYING ON YOU TO EXPERIENCE THAT RECORDING, AND TO LET NO ONE ELSE KNOW OF IT UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE SO.

A dream, an unknown dream, hidden for generations? The shock of the idea wasn’t unwelcome; Noren’s mood began to rise. There was some tremendous secret here, something far more complex than he’d imagined, and perhaps even . . . hope! Valid hope for the world! He felt ashamed to have doubted the First Scholar even briefly.

ARE YOU WILLING TO FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS?

YES. The hardest part would be keeping it from Stefred. . . .

I WARN YOU THAT THE DREAM WILL NOT BE PLEASANT.

NONE OF THEM ARE, Noren acknowledged. Not the First Scholar’s, anyway.

THIS CONTAINS ELEMENTS NOT PRESENT IN THE OTHERS, BOTH IN RECORDING TECHNIQUE AND IN CONTENT. YOU WILL UNDERGO CONSIDERABLE STRESS.

More than in the deathbed recording? But of course, when the First Scholar had programmed these words, he hadn’t expected to make that one. It had been the result of the last-minute inspiration he’d had about the Prophecy. He had planned his martyrdom—to prevent widespread violence, he’d purposely incited the villagers to kill him—but he had not known when he made those plans that all future Scholar candidates would experience his death, or be required to ceremonially reenact it. He had not yet conceived of viewing the Mother Star as a symbol, even.

So one could hardly swear by the Star to do as he asked. Feeling foolish at the thought that he’d been about to do just that, Noren keyed simply, WHERE WILL I FIND THE RECORDING?

IN THE OLDEST DOME, BEHIND THE MAIN RADIOPHONE CONTROL BOARD. THERE IS A SMALL LOCKED PANEL. The lock’s combination followed; Noren memorized it.

Putting the recording in a dome rather than a tower had been a brilliant tactic, he saw. If it had been concealed anywhere in the Inner City, Scholars might easily have come across it. But the Technicians of the Outer City, bound by the High Law to avoid touching machines they hadn’t been personally trained to handle, would never disturb its hiding place. A combination lock would be a “machine” in their eyes, and to tamper with it would be sacrilege.

ONCE YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED THE DREAM YOU MUST BE THE SOLE JUDGE OF WHETHER IT SHOULD BE SHARED WITH TOUR CONTEMPORARIES. YOU MUST ALSO MAKE CERTAIN OTHER JUDGMENTS. THEY WILL NOT BE EASY.

WILL I RECEIVE FURTHER INSTRUCTION?

THIS FILE CONTAINS DATA YOU MAY CHOOSE TO RETRIEVE. I HAVE LEFT YOU NO MORE WORDS. I CAN OFFER YOU NO COUNSEL, FOR CIRCUMSTANCES IN YOUR TIME WILL NOT BE THE SAME AS IN MINE. MAY THE INFINITE SPIRIT GUIDE AND PROTECT YOU; AS I DIE, YOU WILL BE IN MY THOUGHTS.

Stunned, Noren absorbed the significance of this final message, written mere weeks before the First Scholar’s death, the death he himself, dreaming, had come near to sharing. The full version of that particular recording was, of course, wholly unedited. And there was a mystery about it. “There’s a sense of deliberate effort to channel his mind away from something that haunted him,” Stefred had said. “The self-control needed for that would have been staggering, especially for someone in as much pain as he was. And it seems so unnecessary. No one would have thought less of him for failing to hide his private worries.”

He had not intended to make such a recording. Faced with an impelling reason to make it, he’d been obliged to guard this secret.

At that time, had he indeed thought of the successor to whom the secret would be passed? In the deathbed dream one’s thoughts were framed in the symbolic language of the Prophecy, since one had known those words all one’s life. But they had not been written till after the First Scholar’s time; the recording itself contained only the concepts, later translated into poetic phrasing. There was controversy over the interpretation of some passages. We are strong in the faith that as those of the past were sustained, so shall we be also: what must be sought shall be found, what was lost shall be regained, what is needful to life will not be denied us. . . . That was usually taken to mean that the First Scholar had been absolutely positive that somehow or other, the synthesization of metal would be achieved. But could the underlying idea have been a less specific one?

Had the First Scholar, dying, believed that some future priest might find a different solution?