War World: Discovery

by Discovery v2 lit

  He did not acknowledge me, but started walking back to town at that robotic pace, his eyes unblinking, that shuddersome glitter colder than even before, as if

  he’d ingested part of Haven’s glacial heart

  “Yes, this site is nicely chosen, Castell,” Anders said, leaning back against a pile of muskylope hides his aide, Tate, had gathered without permission from around the commons room in the acolyte quarters.

  In the room’s center a fire-pit full of coals radiated heat, while along its edges teapots heated water and small cauldrons simmered acorn-squash stew. A few blood-red heartfruits sizzled on hot, flat stones, and one culinary acolyte had a stuffed clownfruit baking, sans nose.

  Lifting a silver flask, Anders took a pull, then smacked his lips and said, “Ambrosia, this brandy. Truly a balm for the soul. So, Castell, you can at least suggest a spot for our soul-troopers to bivouac.”

  Reverend Castell, standing by the door, frowned. “Our fields are vital to survival. We can spare no cultivated land. In fact, we need more.”

  “Oh, no doubt. But face it old man, we, need accommodations. Major?”

  Lassitre glanced at Anders, brows raised but mouth tight.

  Anders smiled at him as if reproving a child. “Major, you’ve given the situation thought. I saw you with your maps before we shuttled down.

  “Along the river that runs east,” he began.

  Anders cut him off “Major, I don’t intend on trudging through manured fields right now.” He pursed his lips. “This town square we just saw, now that shows promise. We could expand the town--”

  “Our buildings are all occupied,” Reverend Castell said.

  “Oh, these rabbit holes shall be demolished, of course. A dignified community requires real buildings. It cannot cower in Neolithic bunkers. Major, your engineering programs can no doubt draw us up some suitable places.”

  “Places, yes. Not palaces, however. In fact, nothing as good as these.” He gestured around us. I caught Major Lassitre’s disgusted and helpless glance at Reverend Castell. “You’ll have to fit yourselves in here, Anders, or go off somewhere and fend for yourselves.”

  Laughing, Anders took another swig of his brandy “Reverend Castell, does the Major speak for you as well? Is this an example of Haven’s charity?”

  “There’ll be precious little of that,” Major Lassitre said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to see to my ground crew.” As he walked to the door and got to his hands and knees to leave, Anders said, “My, he’s certainly taking a more active interest in command these last few days.”

  The mocking tones stopped the Major for an instant.

  “I was cashiered from the CoDominium Marine Corps because I happened to be caught in some political power moves. Bad timing’s my only crime. And at least, Anders, I don’t make grandiose claims based on ignorance and incompetence.”

  Pressing the attack, Reverend Castell told Anders, “Your presence I cannot dispute, but your behavior among my people I must condemn. Haven belongs to the Church of New Universal Harmony.”

  “Precisely,” Anders said. “And the church neither begins nor ends with you, Castell. Leadership’s not an inherited quality.”

  For an instant there was silence. Major Lassitre left the room. The acolytes tensed, offended by Anders. Others in the room, from Tate and the other newcomers to more of the Chosen, watched without comment as the two leaders stared at each other across the pit of glowing coals.

  That’s when Reverend Castell’s eyes rolled back into his head. I saw it and got ready to catch him, thinking perhaps the heat or the strain afflicted him, but he neither swayed nor buckled.

  Standing, he stepped over the rim and entered the fire-pit, his bare feet crunching down on glowing coals. I gasped along with the other acolytes, and no one else in the room made a move or a sound. All gazes fixed upon Reverend Castell; his mouth bore a hint of a smile.

  He walked out onto the coals in the fire-pit and stood at its center.

  Wisps of lazy smoke rose up from the hem of his robe, and I thought I saw small hairs on his legs withering, puffing into nothing. Then his garments burst into flame and he raised his arms.

  I cried out, terrified. Tears coursed down my cheeks. There were shouts of alarm and warning and a few people stood and backed away from the pillar of fire. Raising my hand, I blocked the heat coming off Reverend Castell, and as I did, so I glanced at Anders and saw the look of utter awe on his face.

  Reverend Castell’s beard and hair flashed, then his clothes and hair fell from him in ashes that waded lazy on stray currents of rising air. With that final burst of flame, the light dimmed again, revealing the man at the heart of the fire. He stood naked, hairless, his body luminous in the faint glow of tallow lamps. It was as if he’d been reborn. He opened his eyes and glared again at Anders, and this time the interloper quailed.

  “Peace is ours to offer,” Reverend Castell said. His voice boomed. His eyes flashed. Every soul in that room felt stinging heat and electric thrills. “In concert is harmony’s power found, and in harmony all shall thrive.” Raising a hand, Reverend Castell pointed at Julian Anders. His fingers traced a staff in the air, then added eight symbolic notes in a scale.

  Anders gaped. His flask lay dropped, leaking brandy onto his lap. He quivered. His eyes remained wide, but a new look came upon his features. And then he laughed.

  In the silence it was a strident sound and no one joined in. A sharp edge of hysteria cut the laugh short.

  With an inhalation of breath that seemed to go on forever, Reverend Castell stood so straight and tall that he seemed to grow before our eyes, and in an even, singsong tone broke each word into its component syllables, he said,

  “Anger is the enemy,

  “Act with thought,

  “Strike no false note,

  “Harmonize with all forces,

  “Resonate with all events,

  “Sing with all beings,

  “Be still

  “as the silence

  “at the heart

  “of the song.”

  With that he pitched forward, sprawling amidst hot coals. Ashes swirled, confusing my sight for a time. Sparks flew and some people swatted at their garments in terror.

  Moving forward, I circled the pit and leaned inward. By stretching I reached the reverend’s right hand and grasped it.

  Leaning back, I pulled, dragging him through the embers.

  Other acolytes helped by pulling on me, until another could snare the Reverend’s other hand. Intense heat had my eyes watering. I gasped for breath and inhaled ash and smoke.

  When Reverend Castell’s head came up above the fire-pit’s clay lip, he shouted, Help me, please.

  A woman standing nearby grabbed a tea pot and hurled its water at Castell’s face, raising blisters.

  He shrieked and then bellowed, “Help me, damn you!”

  It was then that I noticed his eyes. They were staring upward, through the hole in the roof. His gaze followed the smoke and ash upwards, and I shuddered, because I knew then that he was demanding help not from us, but from his father.

  A doctor rushed in and at once applied a salve to Reverend Castell’s blistered face, which looked small now without the beard. After a quick examination, the doctor said, “He’s not burned, not even his feet. The water boiled and blistered him, but the coals and flames did nothing.”

  Anders stood and left the room, taking Tate and several newcomers with him. I noticed a few of the Chosen following, too, as they crawled from the room on hands and knees in a childlike herd.

  We would soon discover that Anders kept going when he left the meeting taking eight hundred souls with him into Haven’s wilderness, each carrying as much as possible in the way of provisions and equipment. The loss, echoing the first desertion when we Chosen first arrived on Haven, affected us little as the remaining three thousand or so integrated themselves to our ways in the warm glow left by Reverend Castell’s flaming renewal of our faith in him,
his cause. Whether planned or inspired, the gesture worked, for a while, to weave us back into organized, orchestrated harmony.

  Flopping back, I rested until my breathing evened. I found myself gazing upward through the smoke-hole. I could see only Haven’s wind-scoured sky.

  VI

  Reverend Castell thrust out his hand, in which was a crumpled ball of paper. His face, bare since the fire-pit a few months back, contorted in frustration and impotent rage. “We’ve been on Haven barely three Earth standard years, Kev. There is constant discord over living space, provisions, supplies, equipment and even over the simplest elements of doctrine since the four thousand arrived.”

  I looked at the paper in his hand. Paper was a fairly rare item. I owned none myself, other than my copy of the Writings. Only a few standard months earlier, one of our artisans had produced the first new paper on Haven, using rice and ancient Japanese methods his grandfather had taught him. To crumple such a precious commodity was almost blasphemous because it tempted waste to begin a melody all its own.

  “These were to have been the expansions to our town,” the reverend said. “Improvements, such as birthing pits dug deep to increase the air pressure, even as mine-shafts in South Africa did on Earth. I drew up the plans myself.” He grimaced. “No doubt the miners can help with this.”

  “Shall we strike a chord of harmony?” I asked, seeking a solution as well as trying to console him.

  He appraised me with mockery in his gaze. “You can’t mean that we’re lucky, even as Anders said.” He shook his head. “No, Kev, Kennicott Metals is not harmonious, they are cacophony.” He stood and began pacing. The crumpled papers he tossed into the fire. “My careful plans, ruined in a mob-shout of BuCorrect stupidity and Kennicott greed.” He kicked the altar in the corner, tumbling a candle which went out.

  Hanging my head, I waited for his storm to pass. His rantings lasted longer these days, I noticed. They produced less determination, cleared less mental air, too.

  Reverend Castell had been raging ever since Major Lassitre, who had stayed on Haven, brought word from Splashdown Island that Kennicott Metals, in cooperation with the Bureau of Correction, intended to set up a mining enterprise on Haven. Even as we spoke a shipload of immigrants got closer to shuttle-down.

  My place as head acolyte had grown until I was Reverend Castell’s confidant. He confided doubts, dislikes, and discords to my ears more often than he talked to his wife, whom he saw only during sleeps. Now and then he thought aloud about giving me the post of Deacon, but nothing had come of that yet.

  Burdens stacked on me kept my brow furrowed most hours of my day, and I’d begun losing weight as worry affected appetites.

  As the Chosen harmonized as best they could with the newcomers, my forays into outlying farmland became erratic, hasty jaunts, rather than regular journeys. In town, now called Castell City by jest and general usage, I circulated as best I could. At households where once I found welcome, I’d lately begun finding suspicion. Some called me Castell’s spy to my face. Others hinted that I’d been bought by Kennicott, or some other commercial enterprise.

  “We must organize church services again,” Reverend Castell said. “Secret meetings of the truly faithful.” Bitterness warped that latter phrase into a self-condemnation, so I said nothing. In my mind I railed against the CoDominium. The thousands on their way would be mostly from the United States, and many professed to be Harmonies, as well. Lassitre’s communications shack even caught some cross-talk between BuCorrect officials and CoDo representatives aboard the immigrant ship, and from it he brought us word that we would receive a small food plant, to convert raw protein into edibles, reminiscent of Earthly shortages. It seemed they were serious enough to try helping us slightly.

  Reverend Castell said, “Have you nothing to tell me of how our songs are being sung?”

  I sipped some Hecate tea and savored its piney aromatics. “Our songs are quiet but strong,” I said.

  He chuckled. “You’ve been around me too long, perhaps, if you’re learning the arts of such speech.’

  With a smile I denied that I could ever be too long with him, then said, “My wish is only to hold my own counsel until I know more details. I’ve heard many disturbing things, and I’m sure my ears are among the last to receive such grace notes.”

  A nod cast a shadow as sap flared in the fire. “If it’s about the mineral assays done by Byers’ crew when Haven was first discovered, I’ve dreaded the findings for years.”

  “Only part of what I hear echoes Kennicott Metals and the other mining companies with their supply drops. I’m sure Kennicott has a use for Haven or they’d never have paid the freight for the North Americans who wanted to come here.”

  He looked at me hard again, as if seeking confirmation of a new trait, one not necessarily, pleasing to him. “Politics is a shame in one so young.”

  “Forewarned is forearmed,” I said, at once blushing. I was aghast at the militaristic quotation and doubly aghast that it should fly so readily from my lips.

  Anger darkened his visage as he stood over me. “We seek harmony in all things, and in all ways. Peace is ours to offer only because we hold it so carefully, preserve it so carefully.”

  Bowing my head, I recited with him a short drone. A sharp pain stabbed me in the gut, from within, and I belched and tasted bile at the base of my tongue. Still, I made sure to fold my left hand over my right as I prayed, to cover the skinned knuckles and teeth marks I’d gotten by punching my way out of a debate.

  The newcomers found more than enough work to do, making places to live, and trying to scrabble out more food. They went about the business of settling in, many constructing houses for themselves with our help, others moving in with Chosen families, still others fanning out across the Shangri-La Valley. A few who had been miners took their families to outlying farms, but scratching in the dirt differed too greatly from digging in the dirt to suit most of them and I found on my long circuit walks that many of these became prospectors.

  The few consumer products brought by the transportees stirred up more greed than they pacified. Earthers used to buying things disliked making them, but there were too few manufactured goods to go around, and, until the Kennicott operation got properly started, there was virtually no chance of more being imported. And without factories and refineries, neither of which were planned so far as anyone knew, importing would be the only way to get such things during their probably shortened life span on Haven.

  Handmade, utilitarian, and harmonious items just weren’t as bright and shiny as manufactured consumer goods could be on Earth. Haven’s quaintness wore off.

  Tourism became torture when the newcomers and their families truly understood that they couldn’t leave. Enthusiasms for collecting the charming handmade items evaporated when everyone used the things every day. And with more settlers on the way, even the hint of future scarcity was enough to push haggling into hassles and fights.

  Theft and nuisance sabotage became, if not commonplace, then at least frequent enough to be considered ignorable. Each time I or other acolytes received such complaints, we promised to carry them to Castell, but I also advised, on my own initiative, increased security on the farms and in the shops. Prevention lessened temptation, I reminded them. We acolytes eventually learned some methods of keeping things safer, and taught those with whom we visited each stroll-period.

  One evening Castell turned to me at a communal meal and said, “Our peaceful ways are chafing to those whose tastes run toward depravity.”

  Anger swelled in me because I knew he referred to an incident I’d reported to him. While walking past the palisade’s town square gate between my home and Castell’s house, I had encountered a Chosen woman and a child. Both were crying.

  “He touched her, she says,” the woman told me, stroking the little girl’s head as she hugged it. “Is there nothing to be done? Tell me how to find the harmony in such a vile act.” And she ran from me before I could even ask her
who had done such a thing.

  When Castell heard, he was livid for an instant, then dropped into sudden, disconcerting calm. “The child must visit friends or relatives in the out-farms,” he said. “And Chosen children must be in groups of three or more and accompanied by Chosen when inside the fort.”

  Outrage still roiled in me, but his words held such convincing harmony that I had bowed and crawled out to spread his words on the matter.

  It was only the next night that a drunken man slapped an arm around my shoulder in the town square and asked me, with volatile breath and a leer, where he could find the brothel about which he’d heard such exciting things. Earthly corruptions flourished in Havens miserly environment.

  “Keeping our peace separate from their discord does nothing, I told Reverend

  Castell. “If anything, it weakens our song. Harmony cannot play counterpoint to cacophony and chaos.”

  Reverend Castell spun towards me and pointed at my face. “How dare you quote Writings to me, who helped my father compose them. How dare you interpret to me what my father and I wrestled into words.”

  “But you’ve got to realize that our settlement’s fraying at the edges. Reverend, our children are beginning to mock the ethics of their parents, because they see such mockery every day around them.”

  “Yes, the secular always makes intrusions--”

  “Incursions, more like,” I said, so frustrated that I wasn’t even aware that I’d interrupted him. “The Shangri-La Valley may soon be a bowl of blood.”

  “Your terms of war begin to try me,” Castell said.

  “Then I’ll speak them no more.” And I turned to go.

  Having to drop to one’s knees to leave a room makes melodramatic exits difficult at best. This was no exception, and before I got my head past his curtains he made me laugh by saying, “Oh, get up, for harmony’s sake, I can’t be expected to sing to your posterior.”

  Despite my anger, I laughed, and then I returned to my place beside him and he said, “We must institute town meetings and community votes. Church membership shall be a requirement for voting privileges, but those lone voices who pledge to learn the ways of Harmony will be eligible to serve our cause, and can eventually qualify to join our chorus. Let each of the Chosen choose someone to indoctrinate, and distribute Writings to all who require them.