Excerpt from
This Star Shall Abide

Book One of the Children of the Star science fiction trilogy

by Sylvia Engdahl

As the night waned, Noren wandered aimlessly; though his knee throbbed painfully under the bandage, he was able to limp, and some inner urge would not allow him to keep still. It was not merely an urge to evade capture. Rather, he was irresistibly drawn to a place where the great towers, the central one topped with its blazing beacon, were in full view.

Dawn found him back at the plaza. In front of him the City walls thrust up, solid and forbidding against the pale morning sky. He noticed that their surface was not straight, but curved, and wondered why they had been built that way. There were so many inexplicable things about the City, so many things that he longed desperately to understand. . . .

At the lowest corner of the broad flight of steps leading to the Gates, he slumped wearily. What next? Arrest was imminent; he could neither buy food nor, because of his bad knee, could he work for it; and what hope was there of achieving anything if the only people who recognized the High Law's fallacies wanted either to destroy all that was good in the world or to set themselves up in the Scholars' place?

An aircar, sunlight catching its rotors, hovered briefly and dropped out of sight behind the high barrier. On either side of the steps, produce was being loaded into boxlike caverns in the walls; several Technicians were supervising. Noren eyed them nervously, then turned his back and sat on the bottom step, looking out toward the market stalls that lined the opposite side of the square. A crowd of people was again gathering. All at once music, loud and heart-stirring, burst from somewhere behind the Gates and reverberated through the plaza. It swelled in volume until Noren felt as if he might burst also; it was like nothing he had ever heard, and it made him want to sing or to shout or even to cry.

It faded; the crowd hushed. Above him the huge Gates parted and a blue-robed Scholar appeared, flanked by four Technicians. Immediately the people in the plaza fell to their knees.

Startled, Noren remembered too late the Benison that preceded the daily opening of the markets. The Scholar would read from the Book of the Prophecy. He had no desire to stay, but he would only attract attention to himself if he moved, for everyone was waiting, motionless, eyes raised toward the sky in sober respect. Yet he would not kneel! If he was reprimanded, he decided, he could state quite honestly that the injury to his knee made it impossible.

He turned toward the Gates and lifted his eyes with the rest. A trace of breeze fluttered the sleeves of the Scholar's robe as he opened the book. His voice, mysteriously amplified, floated past Noren, on out to the edge of the plaza with undiminished clarity.

"'Let us rejoice in the bounty of the land! For the land is good, and from the Mother Star came the heritage that has blessed it; the land has given us life--'"

The knowledge they were hiding could give people a better life, thought Noren bitterly.

"'Those who have brought forth life from the land are rich--'"

But not as rich as those who had access to the Power and the Machines.

"'For through the land's taming shall our strength grow, that we may be ready to receive the ancient knowledge--'"

No doubt, when the predicted date arrived, people would be told they weren't ready; the Mother Star would hide its face in shame! Noren scowled. He knew the words well and in fact had read the entire book many times, having been taught his letters from it as a child, but he had not spotted that loophole before. Whoever had inserted it had planned carefully.

"'. . .And the people shall multiply across the face of the earth, and at no time shall the spirit of the Mother Star die in the hearts of its children.'"

All the families, Noren reflected--all the good, sincere people who recited those words every time they sat down to eat--they'd been tricked by the Scholars into putting their trust in something false! Talyra trusted it implicitly, and she too was the victim of cold-blooded deception.

Glaring at the High Priest who stood above him, he was abruptly overpowered by the hot anger that had been building up in him for years. He could no longer contain it. What do you believe, Scholar? he raged. What is it that lets you stand up there and exhort people to attach their natural faith in goodness to what you know is a figment of somebody's imagination?

He looked back at the mass of rapt faces. Those people would never turn against the Scholars. There was no conceivable way he could make them listen, nothing he could do that would be even a small step toward changing the world into the sort of place the Prophecy described. And he was almost too weary to care. He almost wished the Technicians would arrest him and get it over with.

The spired towers glistened overhead, dazzling his vision. All mysteries were sealed away there . . . and he had a right to share those mysteries! Yet neither he nor anybody else would ever be granted that right. The idea of its depending on the appearance of a mythical Mother Star was too firmly entrenched. The spirit of this Star shall abide forever--there was a certain degree of truth in that declaration. By the success of their deceits, the Scholars had made it true.

People wouldn't oppose the High Law on being told that the Prophecy wasn't authentic because that would be acting not so much against bad rulers as against their own beliefs. The real trouble, Noren saw suddenly, was that most people had no reason to think the Scholars were bad. As High Priests, they did not interfere with ordinary villagers' lives. Yet if someone were to commit an act of overt defiance, wouldn't they have to interfere? Wouldn't they be forced to silence him immediately, without waiting for the formality of a civil trial?

Noren clenched wet fingers, an idea forming out of his desperation. They were going to kill him sometime. Why not in front of the whole Benison assemblage? Why not in a way that would provide the people who revered them with proof, real proof, of their underlying ruthlessness?

His heart raced. The Scholar was reading the last page of the Prophecy; within seconds after he closed the book, the music might surge up again. There wasn't time to deliberate, Noren rose from the step and moved forward.

"'. . .through the time of waiting we will follow the Law--'" As those words were reached he was part way up the flight, above the crowd; heedless of the pain in his knee, Noren found himself climbing without stumbling. He marshaled every bit of strength he could collect, throwing it all into his voice.

"No! We will not follow the High Law; it is evil! It's wrong for a few men to create a Law above village law and keep all the knowledge for themselves!" He glanced upward over his shoulder; the Technicians had left the Gates and were coming down toward him, unhurriedly and without any show of emotion. "There should be Machines for everyone, Power for everyone, and knowledge should be free!"

His words resounded hollowly from the walls behind him. Stunned silence pervaded the crowd; what would have been greeted with wrath on a less formal occasion evoked only shock when it came as an interruption of a ceremony like the Benison. "The Prophecy--is--a--fake!" Noren shouted. "It's a fake! There is no Mother Star!"

Something jolted him, thrusting him forward onto his injured knee, and its pain cut through him like the jab of a knife. The Technicians hadn't yet reached him; it was as if he had been assailed by some invisible force from within. Noren crumpled, his agony eclipsed by the growing numbness of his body. Just before the music overrode all other sound, he heard a gasp from the crowd and a woman's cry, "Blasphemer! See, the Star has struck him!" whereupon he realized that in the minds of the people he had been struck down not by the Scholar's order, but by supernatural intervention.

His eyes blurred; the incomprehensible thing they'd done seemed to have immobilized him. He tried to grip the edge of the step above, but his fingers would not move; they were frozen, somehow. None of his muscles would act. It occurred to him that this was very likely a natural part of dying.

The music exploded into the air, vibrating through his head. Hazily Noren was aware of the greenish shapes of the Technicians as they lifted him and carried him through the Gates, into the City itself.