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the sphere as early in pregnancy as Talyra could yet have given birth, for Talyra had been the first.
    CAN TERATOGENIC DAMAGE BE CAUSED BY RADIATION HARMLESS TO ADULTS? N oren asked.
    YES.
    BY THE UNKNOWN RADIATION THAT LAST YEAR TRIGGERED AN ALARM?
    INSUFFICIENT DATA, replied the screen tersely. That was what it always said when one asked a question for which the programmers hadn’t had an answer.
    Noren dropped his head, burying his face in his folded arms. He was indeed responsible, he thought despairingly—for the child’s death and no doubt Talyra’s also, for would it not be too great a coincidence if she’d died of some other cause? As a scientist, he could see that there was no conclusive proof. But how could he ever, in the face of so many suspicious factors, believe otherwise?
    And for how many more deaths might he become responsible, if women at the outpost now carried unborn children damaged by the sphere?
    It would have been better not to have found it. It would have been better if they had died in the mountains, as they’d expected they would. Yet Talyra had viewed its discovery as a confirmation of her faith. She’d believed the spirit of the Mother Star would guard them, and in her eyes it had —they had been led to an utterly unpredictable deliverance, as the Prophecy proclaimed would someday happen for their whole race. Though our peril be great even unto the last generation of our endurance, in the end humankind shall prevail; and the doors of the universe shall once again be thrown open . . . . On the basis of the analogy, he had accepted priesthood. So great an irony as that was past bearing… .
    No. The whole chain of events had begun with his unwillingness to live with his own failings; he would not make the same mistake twice. Wearily, Noren sat upright once more and went on questioning.
     
     
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    As dusk came on, Noren waited alone in Stefred’s secluded study high in the Hall of Scholars. Beyond the window three waning moons hung between the lighted pinnacles of adjacent towers. There had been moonlight on the plateau in the mountains, too, he found himself thinking, the harsh, desolate wasteland that to him and Talyra had been a place of beauty. And long before, the same three crescents had shone on the village square where they’d made their first pledge of love. Life had been simple then, despite his dissatisfaction with its injustice and his inner knowledge that he might someday face punishment for heresy. He hadn’t imagined how much things could change.
    What was left for him now? he thought numbly. It would be better if he had some constructive job to turn to. He didn’t expect happiness—without Talyra, how could he know happiness again? Nor did he still look for peace of mind. But tomorrow morning would come, and the next, and the next… he would have to do something, since no one was idle in the City, and how could he go back to work—futile work—when all hope for its success was dead in him?
    This was not a question to ask Stefred, or for that matter, anyone else. Even from Brek, he knew, he would receive an all-too-ready answer. It would be said that if his actions had caused deaths, that was all the more reason why he was obligated to work toward the ultimate preservation of lives. By many of his fellow-priests, in fact, he would be told that if he’d survived last year’s events at high cost, it was because he might be destined to preserve humanity; that was the basis on which they’d justified the loss of the aircar. He must therefore avoid letting the issue be raised in the light of what he’d learned about the baby, for he could not endure the thought of its life, and Talyra’s, being figured into the balance. The proffered answers would no doubt be the same.
    No price would be thought too high for his salvation. He, Noren, was regarded by most as a genius who, in his later years, would bring about the advance in physics needed to