Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains Read Online Free PDF

empty? When he, the First Scholar, had looked down upon his wife’s lifeless form, the face had been Talyra’s face… Still Talyra stood before him, alive, believing, and her sorrow was not for herself but for him. “May the spirit of the Mother Star go with you, Noren… .”
    As the voice faded Noren awoke, dazed and shaken, lying still while he sorted the dream from the reality he had so recently begun to understand. “The First Scholar did not write the Prophecy,” Stefred had told him. “The idea was his, but the words are not in the recording; you supplied them yourself.” And also, much later, “The last dream was particularly dangerous for you, since as a child you watched your mother die by the same poison. I hesitated, Noren. All the rules of psychiatry said I should not let you proceed. Yet what was I to do? You had proven yourself fit to become a Scholar; was I to disqualify you on account of a tragic coincidence that had already caused you more than enough hurt?”
    That Stefred himself could be hesitant and unsure was something Noren hadn’t realized till then. Scholars, as guardians of all mysteries, were, in the villagers’ eyes, omniscient, and though he’d once thought them tyrants, he had not suspected that they were ever doubtful about anything. After coming to trust Stefred, he had assumed that the man’s wisdom was limited only in regard to the basic problem of creating metal. Gradually, however, he’d begun to discover that this was not the case. In the first place, no single Scholar knew everything that had been known on the Six Worlds. The amount of knowledge was so vast that it was necessary to specialize, and Stefred, as a specialist in psychiatry, had little training in other fields. Furthermore, in every field there were areas not thoroughly understood by the experts. The existence of such gaps amazed Noren. Truth was far more complicated than he’d supposed it to be when he had demanded free access to it; the further he got into his training, the more evident that became. On mornings like this one the thought was frightening… .
    His surroundings seemed somehow unfamiliar; as he came fully awake, Noren saw that it was because the room’s study desk was folded back into the wall. When it was out, there was scarcely space to turn around, so to accommodate Brek he’d put it away for the first time since entering training. That was probably why he’d dreamed as he had. In talking things over with Brek, he had allowed his worries to surface, as he had not done on previous days when study had absorbed his entire mind.
    All his life he’d sought opportunity to study; and, Noren reflected, this aspect of being a Scholar had surpassed his greatest hopes. He had natural talent for it—especially for mathematics, on which he had so far concentrated as the first step toward specialization in nuclear physics—and though he’d been told he was progressing much faster than average, the days were not long enough for all he wanted to learn. Much of his time was occupied with more sophisticated training techniques than the reading of study discs; still he always kept a disc on hand to use in spare moments. Brek, on the upper bunk that had until now been unoccupied, was still asleep. Noren rose and restored the study desk to its normal position before even putting on his clothes. It made the cramped room more comfortable, for any link to the Six Worlds’ huge store of knowledge was, to him, a marvel that compensated for all the difficulties and confusions of his strange new life.
    But as he settled himself silently before the desk’s screen, the mood of his dream failed to pass. Talyra’s face loomed between him and the information he was perusing; Talyra’s voice echoed in his ears. Irritably, he blamed Brek for having raised the subject. Brek had been persistent, unwilling to let it drop; they had talked on after bidding Grenald goodnight. “She was the one who got you clothes after