Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains by Sylvia Engdahl Page B

minutes after the explosion; no one could have been outside a ship then. He must have seen the Mother Star at some time before it went nova. Yet he had never heard of thought recordings having been brought from the Six Worlds, and this dream seemed so real, so immediate, that he felt sure it had been recorded in real time rather than from memory.
    The stars… he could not grasp what it meant to be seeing the stars this way! Obscured by the polarization that had protected his eyes from the naked sun, they’d burst into visibility when he, the astronaut, had changed the filter setting of his helmet. The astronaut had no doubt seen them often, but Noren did not share his thoughts and was still overpowered as he clambered further around the ship—and came face to face with the most awesome sight of all.
    It was a planet, a huge planet half-filling his field of vision, that except for some yellow splotches was shrouded in grayish-white. Noren turned cold. Not one of the Six Worlds had looked like that! He had seen films showing all of them; most had been predominantly green or blue, with their white areas forming clear, though shifting, patterns. Was this then an alien solar system, one judged unsuitable for use and quickly abandoned? There had been many such. The planet looked inhospitable enough; some deep, racial instinct told him that it was not right for colonizing, that it could not support life of his kind. As a human refuge it would indeed be useless…
    No, he thought suddenly. Inhospitable, yes, but not quite useless. It was not an abandoned planet. It was his own.
    *   *   *
    The waking was as it had frequently been in recent weeks: slowly, naturally, Noren slipped back into the real world, feeling not the relief of escape from nightmare, but a sense of loss, of exile from a place he had not wished to leave. Before he reached full consciousness, there were flashes of memory from other dreams—a surging ocean, a broad green meadow dotted with shade trees, a city without walls where men and women partook freely of wonders past description—but he clung longest to the glory of the unveiled stars.
    “You adapted.” Stefred’s approval seemed tinged, somewhat, by a trace of feeling Noren couldn’t identify. Turning from the panel of dials that enabled him to monitor a dreamer’s well-being, he continued, “If I asked you to go through that again, with some variations—perhaps to do so repeatedly—would it bother you?”
    “No,” Noren replied confidently. “It’s only a dream, after all. Besides, I understand it now, and there were parts that were—exciting.”
    Stefred smiled ruefully. “Some people find them so, others don’t. I was practically certain that you would.”
    “Who recorded it?” asked Noren. “The other dreams, except the First Scholar’s, were of the Six Worlds, but this was here. I looked down on this world.”
    “We don’t know his name. He was one of the shuttlecraft pilots who dismantled the starships and brought them down to be reassembled as towers.” With odd hesitancy, as if it was painful to go on, Stefred added, “For him, of course, it was more than a dream.”
    “It was his job, and he—he must have liked it,” Noren commented, making a guess as to Stefred’s own immediate job and resolving to face what must be faced squarely.
    “Would you like it if it were yours?”
    To consider that was frustrating, but Noren made no attempt to evade the question. Part of the discipline of a Scholar’s education, he knew, lay in coming to terms with the fact that the vast universe beyond this one deficient planet—the universe accessible to his forefathers—could not be reached outside of dreams. This was necessary. Scholars were not supposed to be content with what they had; they were supposed to long for the unattainable, since only in that way could the goal of restoring the Six Worlds’ lost riches be kept constantly in view. People who want what they don’t have