His head was buzzing, and he staggered as he walked across the clearing. In a thicket near the stream he saw motionless bodies—dead or wounded or sated, he could not tell; a quick glance told him Camilla was not there and he went on. The ground seemed to rock under his feet and it took all his concentration not to dash madly off into the trees, looking for . . . looking for . . . he wrenched himself back to awareness of his search and grimly went on.
Not in the recreation hall, where members of the New Hebrides Commune were sprawled in exhausted sleep or vacantly strumming musical instruments. Not in the hospital, although on the floor a snowstorm of paper showed him where someone had gone berserk with the medical records . . . stoop down, scoop up a handful of paper scraps, sift them through your fingers like falling snow, let them whirl away on the wind . . . MacAran never knew how long he stood there listening to the wind and watching the playing clouds before the wave of surging madness receded again, like a tidal wave dragging and sucking back from the shore. But the racing clouds had covered the sun, and the wind was blowing ice-cold by the time he recovered himself and began, in a wave of panic, hunting madly in every corner and clearing for Camilla.
He entered the computer dome last, finding it darkened (what had happened to the lights! Had that explosion knocked them all out, all the power controls from the ship?) and at first MacAran thought it was deserted. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, he made out shadowy figures back in the corner of the building; Captain Leicester, and—yes—Camilla, kneeling at his side and holding his hand.
By now he took it for granted that he was actually hearing the Captain’s thoughts, why have I never really seen you before, Camilla? MacAran was amazed and in a small sane part of his mind, ashamed at the wave of primitive emotion that surged over him, a roaring rage that snarled in him and said, this woman is mine!
He came toward them, rising on the balls of his feet, feeling his throat swelling and his teeth drawn back and bared, his voice a wordless snarl. Captain Leicester sprang up and faced him, defiantly, and again with that odd, heightened sensitivity, MacAran was aware of the mistake the Captain was making . . .
Another madman, I must protect Camilla against him, that much duty I can still do for my crew . . . and coherent thought blurred out in a surge of rage and desire. It maddened MacAran; Leicester crouched and sprang at him, and the two men went down, gripping one another, roaring deep in their throats in primitive battle. MacAran came uppermost and in a flick of a moment he saw Camilla lying back tranquilly against the wall; but her eyes were dilated and eager and he knew that she was excited by the sight of the struggling men, that she would accept—passively, not caring—whichever of them now triumphed in the fight—
Then a wash of sanity came over MacAran. He tore himself free of the Captain, struggling to his feet. He said, in a low, urgent voice, “Sir, this is idiotic. If you fight it, you can get out of this. Try to fight it, try to stay sane—”
But Leicester, rolling free, came up to his feet, snarling with rage, his lips flecked with foam and his eyes unfocused and quite mad. Lowering his head, he charged full steam at MacAran; Rafe, quite cool-headed now, stepped back. He said regretfully, “I’m sorry, Captain,” and a well-aimed single blow to the point of the chin connected and knocked the crazed man senseless to the floor.
He stood looking down at him, feeling rage drain out of him like running water. Then he went to Camilla and knelt beside her. She looked up at him and smiled, and suddenly, in the way he could no longer doubt, they were in contact again. He said gently, “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant, Camilla? I would have worried, but it would have made me very happy, too.”
I don’t know. At first, I was afraid, I couldn’t accept it; it would have changed my life too much.
But you don’t mind now?
She said aloud, “Not just at this minute, I don’t mind, but things are so different now. I might change again.”
“Then it isn’t an illusion,” MacAran said, half aloud, “we are reading each other’s minds.”
“Of course,” she said, still with that tranquil smile, “didn’t you know?”
Of course, then, MacAran thought; this is why the winds bring madness.
Primitive man on Earth must have had ESP, the whole gamut of psi powers, as a reserve survival power. Not only would it account for the tenacious belief in them against only the sketchiest proof, but it would account for survival where mere sapience would not. A fragile being, primitive man could not have survived without the ability to know (with his eyesight dimmer than the birds’, his hearing less than a tenth of that of any dog or carnivore) where he could find food, water, shelter; how to avoid natural enemies. But as he evolved civilization and technology, these unused powers were lost. The man who walks little, loses the ability to run and climb; yet the muscles are there and can be developed, as every athlete and circus performer learns. The man who relies on notebooks loses the ability of the old bards, to memorize day-long epics and genealogies. But for all these millennia the old ESP powers lay dormant in his genes and chromosomes, in his brain—and some chemical in the strange wind (pollen? dust? virus?) had restimulated it.
Madness, then. Man, accustomed to using only five of his senses, bombarded by new data from the unused others, and his primitive brain also stimulated to its height, could not face it, and reacted—some by total, terrifying loss of inhibition; some with ecstasy; some with blank, blind refusal to face the truth.
If we are to survive on this world, then, we must learn to listen to it; to face it; to use it, not to fight it.
Camilla took his hand. She said aloud, in a soft voice, “Listen, Rafe. The wind is dying; it will rain, soon, and this will be over. We may change—I may change again with the wind, Rafe. Let us enjoy being together now—while I can.” Her voice sounded so sad that the man, too, could have wept. Instead, he took her hand and they walked quietly out of the dome; at the door Camilla paused, slipped her hand gently free of Rafe’s and went back. She bent over the Captain, slid her rolled-up windbreaker gently under his head; knelt at his side for a moment and kissed his cheek. Then she rose and came back to Rafe, clinging to him, shaking softly with unshed tears, and he led her out of the dome.
High on the slopes, mists gathered and a soft fine foggy rain began to fall. The small red-eyed furred creatures, as if waking from a long dream, stared wildly about themselves and scurried for the safety of their tree-roads and shelters of woven wood and wicker. The cavorting beasts in the valleys bellowed softly in confusion and hunger, abandoned their cavorting and stampeding and began quietly to graze along the streams again. And, as if waking from a hundred long confused nightmares, the alien men from Earth, feeling the rain on their faces, the effects of the wind receding in their minds, woke and found that in many cases, the nightmare, acted out, was dreadfully real.
Captain Leicester came up slowly to consciousness in the deserted computer dome, hearing the sounds of rain beating in the clearing outside. His jaw ached; he struggled up to his feet, feeling his face ruefully, fighting for memory out of the strange confused thoughts of the past thirty-six hours or so. His face was furred with stubble, unshaven; his uniform filthy and mussed. Memory? He shook his head, confused; it hurt, and he put his hands to his throbbing temples.
Fragments spun in his mind, half real like a long dream. Gunfire, and a fight of some sort; the sweet face of a redheaded girl, and a sharp unmistakable memory of her body, naked and welcoming—had that been real or a wild fantasy? An explosion that had rocked the clearing—the ship? His mind was still too fuzzed with dream and nightmare to know what he had done or where he had gone after that, but he remembered coming back here to find Camilla alone, of course she would protect the computer, like a mother hen her one chick, and a vague memory of a long time with Camilla, holding her hand while some curious, deep-rooted communion went on, intense and complete, achingly close, yet somehow not sexual, although there had been that too—or was that i
llusion, confused memory of the redheaded girl whose name he did not know—the strange songs she had sung—and another surge of fear and protectiveness, an explosion in his mind, and then black darkness and sleep.
Sanity returned, a slow rise, a receding of the nightmare. What had been happening to the ship, to the crew, to the others, in this time of madness? He didn’t know. He’d better find out. He vaguely remembered that someone had been shot, before he freaked out—or was that, too, part of the long madness? He pressed the button by which he summoned the ship’s Security men, but there was no response and then he realized that the lights were not working, either. So someone had gotten to the power sources, in madness. What other damage? He’d better go and find out. Meanwhile, where was Camilla?
(At this moment she slipped reluctantly away from Rafe, saying gently, “I must go and see what damage has been done in the ship, querido. The Captain, too; remember I am still part of the crew. Our time is over—at least for now. There’s going to be plenty for all of us to do. I must go to him—yes, I know, but I love him too, not as I do you, but I’m learning a lot about love, my darling, and he may have been hurt.”)
She walked across the clearing, through the blowing rain which was beginning to be mixed with heavy wet snow. I hope someone finds some kind of fur-bearing animals, she thought, the clothes made for Earth won’t face a winter here. It was a quiet routine thought at the back of her mind as she went into the darkened dome.
“Where have you been, Lieutenant?” the Captain said thickly. “I have a queer feeling I owe you some kind of apology, but I can’t remember much.”
She looked around the dome, quickly assessing damage. “It’s foolish to call me Lieutenant here, you’ve called me Camilla before this—before we ever landed here.”
“Where is everybody, Camilla? I suppose it’s the same thing that hit you in the mountains?”
“I suppose so. I imagine before long we’ll be up to our ears in the aftermath,” she said with a sharp shudder. “I’m frightened, Captain—” she broke off with an odd little smile. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Harry,” Captain Leicester said absent-mindedly, but his eyes were fixed on the computer and with a sudden, sharp exclamation Camilla went toward it. She found one of the resin-candles issued for lights and lit it, holding it up to examine the console.
The main banks of storage information were protected by plates from dust, damage, accidental erasure or tampering. She caught up a tool and began to unfasten the plates, working with feverish haste. The Captain came, caught up by her air of urgency, and said, “I’ll hold the light.” Once he had taken it, she moved faster, saying between her teeth, “Someone’s been at the plates, Captain, I don’t like this—”
The protective plate came away in her hands, and she stared, her face slowly whitening, her hands dropping to her sides in horror and dismay.
“You know what’s happened,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat. “It’s the computer. At least half the programs—maybe more—have been erased. Wiped. And without the computer—”
“Without the computer,” Captain Leicester said slowly, “the ship is nothing but a few thousand tons of scrap metal and junk. We’re finished, Camilla. Stranded.”
CHAPTER TEN
High above the forest, in a close-woven shelter of wickerwork and leaves, the rain beating softly outside, Judy rested on a sort of dais covered with soft woven fabric and took in, not with words entirely, what the beautiful alien with the silver eyes was trying to tell her.
“Madness comes upon us too, and I am deeply sorrowful to have intruded into your people’s lives this way. There was a time—not now, but lost in our history—when our folk travelled, as yours do, between the stars. It may even be that all men are of one blood, back in the beginning of time, and that your people too are our little brothers, as with the furred people of the trees. Indeed it would seem so, since you and I came together under the madness in the winds and now you bear this child. It is not that I regret, entirely—”
A feather’s-touch upon her hand, no more, but Judy felt she had never known anything as tender as the sad eyes of the alien. “Now, with no madness in my blood, I feel only deep grief for you, little one. No one of our own would be allowed to bear a child in loneliness, and yet you must return to your own people, we could not care for you. You could not even bear the cold of our dwelling-places in high summer, in winter you would surely die, my child.”
All of Judy’s being was one great cry of anguish, will I never see you again?
I can reach you so clearly only at these times, the answer flowed, although your mind is more open to me than before, the minds of your people are like half-shut doors at other times. It would be wisest for me to let you go now, for you never to look back to the time of madness, and yet—long silence, and a great sigh. I cannot, I cannot, how can I let you go from me and never know . . .
The strange alien reached out, touching the jewel which hung about her neck on a fine chain, and drew it forth. We use these—sometimes—for the training of our children. Mature, we do not need them. It was a love-gift to you; an act of madness, perhaps, perhaps unwise, my elders would certainly say so. Yet perhaps, if your mind is opened enough to master the jewel, perhaps I can reach you at times, and know that all is well with you and the child.
She looked at the jewel, which was blue, like a star-sapphire, with small inner flecks of fire, only a moment; then raised her eyes to look again with grief on the alien being. Taller than mortal, with great pale-gray eyes, almost silver, fair-skinned and delicate of feature, with long slender fingers and bare feet even in the bitter chill, and with long almost colorless hair floating like weightless silk about the shoulders; strange and bizarre and yet beautiful, with a beauty that struck at the woman like pain. With infinite tenderness and sadness, the alien reached for her and folded her very briefly against the delicate body, and she sensed that this was a rare thing, a strange thing, a concession to her despair and loneliness. Of course. A telepathic race would have little use for demonstrative displays.
And now you must go, my poor little one. I will take you to the edge of the forest, the Little Folk will guide you from there. (I fear your people, they are so violent and savage and your minds . . . your minds are closed . . .)
Judy stood looking up at the stranger, her own grief at parting blurring in the perception of the other’s fear and anguish. “I understand,” she whispered aloud, and the other’s drawn face relaxed a little.
Shall I see you again?
There are so many chances, both for good and evil, child. Only time knows, I dare not promise you. With a gentle touch, he folded her in the fur-lined cloak in which, earlier, he had wrapped her. She nodded, trying to hold back her tears; only when he had disappeared into the forest did she break down and follow, weeping, the small furred alien who came to lead her down the strange paths.
“You are the logical suspect,” Captain Leicester said harshly. “You have never made any secret of the fact that you don’t want to leave this planet, and the sabotage of the computer means that you will get your way, and that we will never be able to leave here.”
“No, Captain, you’re quite wrong,” Moray looked him in the face without flinching. “I have known all along that we would never leave this planet. It did occur to me, during the—what the hell shall we call it? During the mass freakout? Yes; it occurred to me during the mass freakout that maybe it would be a good thing if the computer was nonfunctional, it would force you to stop pretending we could fix the ship—”
“I was not pretending,” said the Captain icily.
Moray shrugged. “Words don’t matter that much. Okay, force you to stop kidding yourself about it, and get down to the serious business of survival. But I didn’t do it. To be honest, I might have if it had ever occurred to me, but I don’t know one end of a computer from the other—I wouldn’t know how to go about putting it out of action. I suppose I could have blown it
up—I know I heard the explosion—but as it happens, when I heard the explosion I was lying in the garden having—” suddenly he laughed, embarrassed, “having the time of my life talking to a cabbage sprout, or something like that.”
Leicester frowned at him. He said, “Nobody blew the computer up, or even put it out of action. The programs have simply been erased. Any literate person could do that.”
“Any literate person familiar with a starship, maybe,” Moray said. “Captain, I don’t know how to convince you, but I’m an ecologist, not a technician. I can’t even make up a computer program. But if it’s not out of commission, what’s all the fuss about? Can’t you re-program it, or whatever the word is? Are the tapes, or whatever they are, so irreplaceable?”
Leicester was abruptly convinced. Moray didn’t know. He said dryly, “For your information, the computer contained about half of the sum total of human knowledge about physics and astronomy. Even if my crew contained four dozen Fellows of the Royal College of Astronomy of Edinburgh, it would take them thirty years to re-program just the navigational data. That’s not even counting the medical programs—we haven’t checked those yet—or any of the material from the ship’s Library. All things considered, the sabotage of the computer is a worse piece of human vandalism than the burning of the Library at Alexandria.”
Darkover: First Contact Page 12
