“Place of warm darkness. Strong World. Dwelling. Wide water.”
“I knew it!” said Allison. “One must have come from far south. Recall hand in river?”
“Hand of five fingers.”
“It is Thiranne. She was from the jungles; she might even have been a Guardian.”
Casimir asked, “Will other, er, conjoin-mates come back to see you?”
“That depends. Rash and Ghar did last time, though Ghar was always closer. One year half a dozen called on me from different conjoinings, remembering me in various bits and pieces. It felt very odd.”
“I’ll bet it did.”
“Plant-spike?” queried the Fraction at last.
“Yes, Lherin?”
“Why do blood-sharers ask endless questions?”
Taken aback, Allison tried to shape a reply, but Casimir began to laugh. “What is your problem, Friend Casimir?” she demanded.
He went on laughing, then abruptly began to cough and choke.
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” She grabbed his arm to steady him. Then the fumes hit her; she turned in an instant, fingers flying. “Lherin, stop that! Stop now!”
The air cleared in a few minutes, and Casimir’s coughing subsided.
“Are you all right?” Allison asked.
“Guess so. What in space was that for?” he asked, wiping his streaming eyes.
“I’m not sure.” She turned a stem face to the commensal.
“One tried to help,” Lherin explained. “He looked ill.”
Perhaps. No harm had come, after all.
“Seeding time,” Lherin observed.
“Good,” Allison replied, “take care to seed away from travel roads.”
But Lherin was already moving off down the hill.
“Was she offended, somehow?” Casimir asked.
“No, that’s how they are.” She sighed. “Sometimes they ‘affirm existence’ in the course of exchange, but they don’t say anything like ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye.’”
He nodded. “Speaking of which, I suppose I’ve taken enough of your time by now.”
“That’s all right. Though I do have a couple things to get done, before the Quaker citizens arrive today.”
“Yes. Say—what are those?” He pointed to a swarm of tiny creatures which rose from a bush nearby.
“We call them ‘copterflies,’ because they whirl up and down. Their swarms darken the air by midsummer.”
Casimir watched the shimmering forms, entranced. Allison bit her lip; she had a question to ask, but was unsure how to begin. “Casimir…you love all of these living things, even though they’re not Terran?”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s why I came here.”
“But sometimes you thermolyze whole planets, like Vinlandia.”
He continued to watch the copterflies. “Vinlandia was uninhabitable,” he said at last. “Ask Kyoko about it sometime; she took part in one of the earlier expeditions.”
“But it wasn’t uninhabitable for native things, like those ‘sunspirals.’”
“We save as many samples as possible. That’s why we keep ecological preserves, like the garden you saw on our ship.”
“Is that what you did with people after the Last War—pick the best samples?”
Casimir turned, and anger creased his face. “You don’t know what you’re saying, citizen.”
“Don’t I? What are you saying?” Her pulse quickened. Casimir seemed to check himself, and he sighed. “Allison…suppose you ask the System for a UNI census.”
She did so, and her credometer announced a number over two hundred million.
“That’s a lot of humans, isn’t it?”
Allison frowned. “Millions” were fine for stars or atoms, but she had trouble connecting such numbers with people. “Still,” she recalled, “I thought Earth used to have billions.”
“Earth is not the same,” he reminded her. “We can’t support that many. Only a fraction of Terran farmland has been reclaimed. We farm the oceans, too, and Vinlandia will help. But it’s never enough.”
She shivered. She thought it might be better never to see Earth again, but to keep the Records, crude and imperfect though they were.
“We need good planets,” he added, “to settle future generations. Our population is expanding.”
“That’s a social concern. Can’t you use ‘credit’ or something to regulate growth?”
Casimir chose his words carefully. “That is less simple than it sounds. Incubators and increased lifespan make it possible for a citizen to have two or three families in one lifetime.”
This puzzled Allison. She felt relieved to know that the System could not control the incubators outright, but was surprised that such an advanced society would have a population problem.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “When you plow a field under for crops, you destroy the preexisting community of organisms. Does that disturb you?”
“That’s different. We don’t kill off entire species, much less a planet full.”
“But, always, some things must die so that others may live.”
No immediate answer came to mind, and Allison was confused. Casimir stood there on the moss, relaxed as before, and a breeze ruffled his hair. “I’ve taken enough of your time,” he said at last. “Thanks for the help.”
Allison nodded. “Come back next Tuesday, for the committee on Extraplanetary Concerns. Seth will surely return by then.”
“I’ll do that.”
As the shuttle ascended, a thought struck Allison. She had not yet passed any UNI “tests,” to her knowledge; did the System consider her “undermature”?
The atmosphere of a picnic pervaded the scene at the landing strip. The turnout was even larger than when the first citizens had arrived, since many Friends had come from other settlements. Allison and David joined the crowd.
“Yes,” Martha was saying nearby, “I understand transcomms will be installed in all settlements soon.”
“Allison,” called her aunt, who had come to the transcomm the other day. “Do you know, I accepted this gadget from the frog-suits that day, and it’s given me nothing but trouble since? Day and night folks call me from Lord knows where, just to talk to a ‘Real Quaker from Foxfield’ or a ‘Pioneer from Aurora,’ whatever that means, and I just can’t turn them away.”
“Just raise a credit barrier for privacy.”
“But how can one refuse them?” asked Ed Crain. “They’re calling from light-years away; it’s not right.”
“They don’t see it that way,” Allison tried to explain.
Frances said, “Nonsense. Just take off the infernal thing; that’s what I did, as soon as they were out of sight.”
“But credometers will be invaluable for emergencies,” said Allison.
The doctor tilted her head. “That may be. What I’d like to know is, if our UNI friends are so clever, why don’t they invent an answering service, hm?”
“Why, I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder if—”
Dave yanked her arm. “Mom, when are they coming?”
“Soon, very soon.” She wondered why the UNI citizens didn’t inform them of some of these simple things. Was there just too much to tell? Or did they want Foxfielders to learn from their own mistakes—like children, undermature? An informal education, to say the least.
The crowd hushed as a shuttle craft appeared and settled to the ground. The first of the Quaker citizens stepped out.
He wore a cloak of deep gray with white collar and cuffs. His dark shoes were square-toed with large brass buckles. Under a wide-brimmed hat his hair was cropped level, and ruddy cheeks graced his smile.
“Greetings, good Friends,” he said. “I am called William Penn, of the Quaker Preservation Society.”
Lowell gasped. “Surely not…time travel?”
“No, indeed, Friend!” The citizen beamed. “I thank thee for the compliment, nonetheless.”
One by one the six of them coll
ected outside—for all the world, thought Allison, like so many “Quaker apples” all in a row.
VIII. All the Kingdoms of the World
Allison found it difficult to concentrate this morning among the silent Sunday worshipers. She watched the shadow patterns which danced across the next bench back. She glanced furtively at the Quaker citizens, whose features were composed almost to the point of self-righteousness, and wondered what thoughts filled their prim heads.
She missed Seth badly. To gaze into his fierce eyes, to touch the dimple of his chin, to hold him until she gasped…He was right; it was not good for them to be parted so long. But it was he who had left again so soon.
Rennie Fuller, Allison’s cousin, raised herself with care. Just about everyone was related to everyone else on Foxfield in a tangled web, a continuum of flesh; an expanding continuum, to which Rennie would soon contribute. And thousands of other mothers in the galaxy at the same time—no, Allison corrected herself, incubators now.
“I’ve something stirring in my mind today,” Rennie began conversationally. “I’ve been mulling over desire and temptation. Now, I know some of you are going to squirm in your seats and think, well, here she’s going to preach at us about sin and all; but that’s not what I’m after, really.
“In fact, ‘desire’ in general can’t be a wholly bad thing, since if we didn’t desire anything, we wouldn’t ever do anything, would we? I mean, if we didn’t desire to live, we’d just curl up and die and that would be the end of it.
“But sometimes the things we desire do not help us to live, not in the long run, and that’s when we need our conscience to help us out, to tell the light from the dark. That’s what temptation is, and often it’s just a simple little thing; like when my alarm rings early and I just want to lie in bed instead of getting up to send the kids to school, to stew the beans, to start the tractor…”
Allison closed her eyes and conjured up all the perverse things she would like to do. Forget the Center and lose herself in the moss fields, watching the clouds chase the sun. Take off somewhere with that cute biosphere analyst and find out whether UNI citizens had learned any new tricks in the past hundred years, besides how to kill planets. Probably not, she decided. So why not just leave Foxfield for good and spend the rest of her life figuring out how “empty” quarks fit in with the strange, charmed and colored?
“These things are minor worries,” Rennie was saying. “Sometimes we resist, sometimes not; more often than not, I hope. But what happens when something really important turns up; which of us can know how we will act then? Jesus was starving in the wilderness when the Devil came upon him and offered him all the kingdoms of the world. How can we be sure to do right when the real trial comes?”
Indeed, thought Allison, perhaps we would eat our own children, were we starving like one of Rodin’s damned souls. That, too, was human.
A loud beep shattered the stillness. Allison caught her wrist. “Hold,” she hissed, acutely embarrassed. She got up and walked down the aisle, burning with shame and annoyance. This had to be the limit, the very limit.
“All right, who’s calling?” she demanded when she reached the annex.
“Questor Zeba Dadachanji, Chandrabad, Mars, registered 024717008. Accept?”
“Oh, all right, go ahead.”
A woman’s voice began. “Friend Allison, I’m terribly sorry if we interrupted something, but you could have set up a credit barrier, you know.”
“I thought I did.”
“Oh, did you? It didn’t seem so—in any case, my mates and I have heard of the great interest you’ve taken in the Stargo games, and since our whole family is into them, we’d just love to view with you and see what the Lost Colony thinks of our modern spectacles. I’m sure they’re quite tame by your standards, but—”
She broke off, and whispered voices were heard.
“Oh, yes, Mithua, I forgot that—” She muttered about something like “pacifist.”
“Can I call you back later?” Allison suggested. “I’ll use the transcomm, then.”
“’Sponential, Friend Allison.”
“Good. Good-bye. System call; raise present privacy level by a factor of a hundred.”
“Done. Privacy level ten thousand credits per minute.”
She checked her credit level; it was dropping, now, but would be O.K. for a while. She hurried back to the hail.
At the rise of Meeting, Lowell read announcements, and the Quaker citizens introduced themselves again. All their names were touchstones of Friends tradition: William Penn, John Woolman, Aelfrida Tillyard, Rufus Jones…At the latter name, Dave elbowed her with a question.
“No, it’s not the same one,” she snapped. As attenders rose and mingled, Allison went to hear what the citizens had to say.
“The spirit of thy Meeting,” said William Penn, “the feeling of it impressed us wondrously.”
“In faith,” agreed Aelfrida Tillyard, “it appeared so authentic as to ring truer than ever I imagined those Meetings of old. Thus spake my namesake: ‘The spark of spiritual apprehension is kindled into flame by contact with the gathered fire of many souls together.’”
William adjusted the brim of his hat. “True enough, thee’s hit the mark there,” he said.
“Let me see, now,” said Clifford, scratching his scalp. “I’d say William Penn was quite a renowned statesman, even outside Friends circles, wasn’t he?”
“Truly he was. As a young Englishman, his trial for ‘preaching to the people’ became a landmark precedent for the right to trial by jury. He founded a major colony in America—verily, a brave task in those times, not unlike that which faced thine own twenty-first century forebears. And he paid twice for the land thereof: once to the English sovereign, and again to the Indian natives of that new world.”
Clifford nodded. “A master of politics and of conscience, he was both.”
“But thee knows, alas,” said Aelfrida, “that Penn was not the most renowned Quaker politician who ever lived.”
“Really? Who else, I wonder; not John Woolman?”
She shook her head. “One who led all the United States, but fell for scandal.”
“Oh no. He was a Quaker in name only. Philadelphia Meeting disowned him, I recall,” Clifford finished lamely.
“A sad story,” Aelfrida commented.
Allison shuddered. She could not imagine such an action taking place on Foxfield; for if it did, it would be a death sentence.
Martha said, “You praised our ‘authenticity’ before. I’m curious to know what you had in mind. Did you expect something different?”
“Thee is direct,” said Aelfrida, “in the true manner of Friends. But I see that you all have more than the ‘manner’ of worship; you people possess true belief in the Spirit, as well, do you not?”
“Lord willing, yes,” said Martha.
“Amazing. I’ve not seen the like elsewhere in my lifetime, nor expect to see again. We of the Society exist but as a mirror of the supernatural culture whose history is long past.”
A stunned silence fell.
“Not quite past,” William corrected, “as thee sees here, my dear. Friends, our Preservation Society is like a museum, a ‘cultural museum’ if you will, which preserves historical tradition for the edification of the citizenry. Our activities are registered, of course.”
Someone muttered, “Well, I’ll be, just like a zoo.”
“Are there other ‘Preservation Societies’?” asked Allison.
“Oh, yes. There are Catholics, Jews, Moslems. The Catholics even tried to refuse sterilization; now, that’s carrying authenticity a bit far. Then there are various African tribes, and the Youth Cultists of the Age of Uncertainty, all in relatively small numbers, of course.”
“But still,” Martha persisted, “you no longer value faith as we know it, any of you?”
“Well, now,” said Aelfrida, “faith per se is an entirely different matter. Faith in something—life, hope, whatever—is essenti
al to the human condition. That is a principle of psychosynchrony. The brain pathways which produce faith, hope and suchlike have been discovered and are regulated chemically when the need arises.” She smiled under her bonnet like a demure sunflower.
“I see.” Martha’s gray eyes never wavered.
“Good Friends,” said William at last, “you all have shown us wondrous hospitality, and I heartily welcome you to visit us at any time, in the once-green land of Pennsylvania which is our home. Our doors are open to all, of course, in the manner of Friends; and truly, we have received many callers of late, have we not, Aelfrida? Fascination with Friends is the great fashion, it seems.”
“My dear,” Aelfrida objected, “speak not of fashion with such glee. For fashion is frivolity; and frivolity, thee knows, is a sure path to perdition.”
“Mom, let’s go, now,” Dave whined.
“Okay, I’m coming.” She let him pull her away from the group and out of the room. As they walked the scarred road back to the Center, her thoughts were far away, and she nearly sprained her ankle in a pavement crack.
In the transcomm Allison prepared to return the call which had interrupted her during Meeting. She had to admit she was curious to hear from someone involved in the “games.”
“Call Zeba, holoview.”
“Registered number?” the System asked.
“Ah…the ‘questor’ from this antimorn.” The surname escaped her recollection.
“Zeba Dadachanji, Chandrabad, Mars, registered 024717008. Interstellar call, bimodal or direct?”
“Direct, I guess.”
She found herself within a plush living room. Two women and a man sat before her on a semicircular divan. They all wore robes of pale violet gauze. They faced one another with strained features, and did not seem to notice Allison.
“I don’t know what’s come over you,” said one, her voice like that of the questor earlier. “What is wrong?” she asked the man.
Allison cleared her throat. “Excuse me, citizens—”
“Zeba, let him be,” said the other woman, extending an arm. “Truth-telling won’t come off, this way.”
“Posit. Come on, Shujaath, what’s eating you?”
Still Forms On Foxfield Page 10
