The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner Page A

precisely the right concepts didn’t matter. At least he had something to take hold of in his mind.
    The effect of this on the workers was to create dismay. Just when they had shamed themselves into seeing that the object of their superstitious fear was an apathetic and harmless being who hardly offered a word even when spoken to, and never any violent act, he turned to this baffling dynamic person who did not seem able to find time even for sleep, but must always be demanding knowledge of themselves, how they thought, why they thought as they did, what they thought about life and awareness, problems that few of them had ever considered and none of them could discuss.
    His whole world had opened out again, like a shell being cracked. It was as it had been when Bryda had him taken to the shore of the sour-water lake, and he had known discomfort because he was out of sight of buildings. His perspectives had broadened in a day—from the Dyasthala to the whole of Berak then, and knowledge that human affairs could transcend such business as he had learned in the Dyasthala; from that hesitant halfway stage now, to a burgeoning concept of the stars. It was painful in a way, but it was necessary and sometimes it was also exciting.
    He was intelligent, they had told him. This was what it meant to be intelligent: not to close in the universe around oneself for comfort and reassurance, but to have the itch in the brain which demanded return again and again to insoluble problems. Who? What? Why? How? The archetypal simplicity of basic questions astonished him. It had never struck him before that the simpler a question the more general it is, and hence the more complete the answer it demands. All this from wondering how he could tell whether he was Kazan or a black devil acting in Kazan’s name!
    Like firecrackers spitting tiny red sparks in darkness,asuccession of memories crackled in his head. Bryda, throwing back her dark hair scornfully—she had been very beautiful, no denying—and being afraid of what she had brought about, afraid of the gutter-born thief on whose shoulders she had shifted a burden she dared not carry herself, and who mocked her by displaying a power that could have been hers had she not lacked courage. That was clear at once. She had wished Luth free not for any love she bore him—because gratitude then would have made her repay him, Kazan—but for the hope of regaining some lost power and position in the state. In Kazan she had seen a rival with good cause to hate her. So she had ordered him disposed of. He could almost pity her now.
    And back beyond Bryda and everything that she had stabbed into the flesh of his life like a bright dagger were the people of the Dyasthala that he had known, not in friendship—for hunger was the eternal enemy who could split the fondest allies—but objectively, as those parts of his environment who were characterized by the ability to move and communicate. A certain woman with a scrofulous head who had kept a dirty bakery; a youth who, when Kazan was ten or twelve years old, had made himself the joyous subject of all the Dyasthala gossip by getting himself enrolled on someone else’s birth record into the law force, so that by day he was the guardian of the city, and by night plundered it. He had had the first power-gun Kazan ever saw.
    He had killed himself with it the day his confidence overreached itself and he was discovered for what he was.
    These pawns of circumstance! These people who must have shared with his new self the power to ask questons and organize events, but to whom simple material problems were the equal of the bonds holding Yarco! Clary had said that but for the clearing of the Dyasthala and the compulsion to find somewhere else to go, she who had dreamed all her adolescent life of getting out, and had taken the dream seriously enough to sell her body in exchange for being taught to read and count, would never have actually gone.
    True. Why?
    Once he went