Free Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains by Sylvia Engdahl Page B

likes.”
    “Not if it would interfere with his duties as a guardian of the Mother Star’s mysteries,” Noren agreed. “He wouldn’t want to be; no Scholar would. Sometimes he has to do things he hates doing, things that seem cruel.”
    He was referring to the interview just past, but Talyra grasped more than he’d meant to reveal. “You’ve been hurt,” she observed sadly.
    “No,” Noren insisted, but she was not convinced; he had never been a good liar. “I haven’t been hurt in the way I feared once,” he assured her. “Not the way you must have thought when I recanted.”
    “Physically? I never thought that! I knew they’d done something that showed you how wrong you’d been. Why, I told you long ago that the Scholars wouldn’t want anyone to recant unless he really meant it.”
    She had, and he’d considered her naive; yet her guesses had come closer to the truth than his own. Perhaps it’s like the inoculations Technicians give , she’d said. The needle hurts, but without it we’d all get sick and die .
    “When the Scholar Stefred questioned me,” Talyra reflected, “I felt awful; he made me say things I’d been afraid even to think. It seemed as if all the firm ground would crumble away and leave me falling. But afterward—well, I was surer of myself than before. Even though I saw I’d had some false ideas, I liked myself better—” She broke off, watching Noren, realizing how much older he looked than when they’d parted. “What happens to heretics is like that, isn’t it? Only it’s harder, and goes on longer?”
    He nodded. “Something like that. We’re not permitted to tell the details.”
    There were so many details he could not tell, so many areas in which there could be no communication between them. She must not ask about his work; she must not question his absence if for hours or days she did not see him; though she might speculate about the hidden mysteries, she must not do so aloud. That was the Inner City’s way, he explained. Technicians did not discuss such things. They didn’t seek information about the duties of friends who were assigned jobs inside the Hall of Scholars, or about why some were given such jobs far oftener than others. Neither did they discuss each other’s past lives.
    “For instance,” he cautioned, “you must never describe my recantation to anyone; you mustn’t even mention that you saw it. What a heretic has been through is best forgotten.”
    “I’m glad,” she said simply. “I want to forget. I know what you had to do was necessary, and—and you were awfully brave… yet you suffered for something you couldn’t help! I couldn’t believe you deserved to suffer just for having been mistaken; that’s haunted me so long.”
    “It’s over. It needn’t haunt you any more, darling.”
    “Nothing will, now that I’m here with you. The spirit of the Mother Star has blessed us both.”
    They kissed again, and for a few minutes he felt carefree, lighthearted, as if he too need no longer be haunted by anything. But after he’d left her with the head midwife, who was to find her lodging space and introduce her to the other women with whom she would work, Noren found that his perplexity had grown. If Talyra’s belief in the Prophecy and the Mother Star was genuine—if she was not, as he’d always assumed, merely sticking by what she’d been taught—then on what grounds was she basing that belief? He himself had been shown the facts, and knew that she wasn’t deceived; at least she wasn’t unless the Scholars were also deceived about the Prophecy’s eventual fulfillment. It was easy to forget that she had never been given any proof. Without proof, how could anyone be deeply convinced?
    *   *   *
    Two things you must go through , Stefred had warned: two trying experiences before the mysterious, suddenly-called meeting that evening, and as to the nature of the second, Noren had been given no clue. An hour remained before the time