“Lie still, beloved. Look, the moons have set, it will be morning soon,” Rafe murmured. “How warm it is, under the stars in the wind. Why are you crying, Camilla?”
She smiled in the darkness. “I’m not crying,” she said softly, “I’m thinking that some day we’ll find an ocean—and islands—for the songs we heard tonight, and that some day our children will sing them there.”
“Have you come to love this world as I do, Camilla?”
“Love? I don’t know,” she said tranquilly, “it’s our world. We don’t have to love it. We only have to learn to live with it, somehow. Not on our terms but on its own.”
All across Base Camp, the minds of the Earthmen flickered into madness, unexplained joy or fear; women wept without knowing why, or laughed in sudden joy they could not explain. Father Valentine, asleep in his isolated shelter, woke and came quietly down the mountain, and unnoticed, came into the Hall in New Skye, mingling with them in love and complete acceptance. When the winds died he would return to solitude, but he knew he would never be wholly alone again.
Heather and Ewen, sharing the night duty in the hospital, watched the red sun rise in the cloudless sky. Arms enlaced, they were shaken out of their silent ecstatic watching of the sky (a thousand ruby sparkles, the brilliant rush of light driving back the darknesses) by a cry behind them; a shrill, moaning wail of pain and terror.
A girl rushed toward them from her bed, panicked at the sudden pain, the gushing blood; Ewen lifted her and laid her down, mustering his strength and calm, trying to focus sanity (you can get on top of it! Fight! Try!) but stopped in the very act, arrested by what he saw in her frightened eyes. Heather touched him compassionately.
“No,” she said, “no need to try.”
“Oh, God, Heather, I can’t, not like that, I can’t bear it—”
The girl’s eyes were wide and terrified. “Can’t you help me?” she begged. “Oh, help me, help me—”
Heather knelt and gathered the girl in her arms. “No, darling,” she said gently. “No, we can’t help you, you’re going to die. Don’t be afraid, Laura darling, it will be very quick, and we’ll be with you. Don’t cry, darling, don’t cry, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” She held the girl close in her arms, murmuring to her, comforting her, sensing every bit of fear and trying with the strength of their rapport to soothe her, until the girl lay quiet and peaceful on her shoulder. They held her like that, crying with her, until she stopped breathing; then they laid her gently on the bed, covered her with a sheet, and sorrowfully, hand in hand, walked out into the sunrise and wept for her.
Captain Harry Leicester saw the sun rise, rubbing weary eyes. He had not taken his eyes from the console of the computer, watching over the only hope to save this world from barbarism. Once, shortly before dawn, he had thought he heard Camilla’s voice calling to him from the doorway, but it was surely delusion. (Once she had shared his dream. What had happened?)
Now, in a strange, uneasy half-doze, half-trance, he watched a procession through his mind of strange creatures, not quite men, lifting strange starships into the red sky of this world, and, centuries later, returning. (What had they been seeking, in the world beyond the stars? Why had they not found it?) Could the quest after all be endless or even come full circle and end in its beginning?
But we have something to build on, the history of a world.
Another world. Not this one.
Are the answers of another world fit for this one?
He told himself furiously that knowledge was knowledge, that knowledge was power, and could save them—
—or destroy. After the long struggle to survive, will they not seek old answers, ready-made from the past, and try to recreate the desperate history of Earth, here on a world with a more fragile chain of life? Suppose, one day, they come to believe, as I seemed to believe for a time, that the computer really does have all the answers?
Well, doesn’t it?
He rose and went to the doorway of the dome. The shuttered window, made small against the bitter cold, and high, swung wide at his touch and he looked out at the sunrise and the strange sun. Not mine. But theirs. Someday they will unlock its secrets.
With my help. My single-handed struggle to keep for them a heritage of true knowledge, a whole technology to take them back to the stars.
He breathed deep, and began to listen silently to the sounds of this world. The winds in the trees and the forests, the running of the streams, the beasts and birds that lived their own strange secret lives deep in the woods, the unknown aliens whom his descendants would one day know.
And they would not be barbarian. They would know. If they were tempted to explore some blind alley of knowledge, the answer would be there, ready for their asking, ready with its reply.
(Why did Camilla’s voice echo in his mind? “That only proves that a computer isn’t God.”)
Isn’t the truth a form of God? he demanded wildly of himself and of the universe. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
(Or enslave you? Can one truth hide another?)
Suddenly a horrid vision came into his mind, as his thoughts burst free from time and slid into the future, which lay quivering before him. A race taught to go for all its answers here, to the shrine which had all the right answers. A world where no question could ever be left open, for it had all the answers, and what lay outside it was not possible to explore.
A barbarian world with the computer worshipped as a God.
A God. A God. A God.
And he was creating that God.
God! Am I insane?
And the answer came, clear and cold. No. I have been insane since the ship crashed, but now I am sane. Moray was right all along. The answers of another world are not the answers we can use here. The technology, the science, are only a technology and a science for Earth, and if we try to transfer them here, whole, we will destroy this planet. Some day, not as soon as I would wish, but in their own good time, they will evolve a technology rooted in the soil, the stones, the sun, the resources of this world. Perhaps it will take them to the stars, if they want to go. Perhaps it will take them into time or the inner spaces of their own hearts. But it will be theirs, not mine. I am not a God. I cannot make a world in my own image.
He had brought all the supplies of the ship from the bridge to this dome. Now, quietly, he turned and began to fashion what he sought, old words from another world ringing in his mind;Endless the world’s turn, endless the sun’s spinning
Endless the quest;
I turn again, back to my own beginning,
And here, find rest.
With steady hands he lighted a resin-candle and, deliberately, set a light to the long fuse.
Camilla and MacAran heard the explosion and ran toward the dome, just in time to see it erupt skyward in a shower of debris, and rising flame.
Fumbling with the padlock, Harry Leicester began to realize that he wasn’t going to get out. This time he wasn’t going to make it. Staggering from the blow and concussion, but coldly, gladly sane, he looked at the wreckage. I’ve given you a clean start, he thought confusedly, maybe I am God after all, the one who drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and stopped telling them all the answers, letting them find their own way, and grow . . . no lifelines, no cushions, let them find their own way, live or die. . . .
He hardly knew it when they forced the door open and took him up gently, but he felt Camilla’s gentle touch on his dying mind and opened his eyes into the gray compassionate stare.
He whispered in confusion, “I am a very foolish fond old man. . . .”
Her tears fell on his face. “Don’t try to talk. I know why you did it. We began to do it together, last time, and then . . . oh, Captain, Captain. . . .”
He closed his eyes. “Captain of what?” he whispered. And then, at his last breath, “You can’t retire a Captain. You have to shoot him . . . and I shot him. . . .”
And then the red sun went out, forever, and blazed into luminous g
alaxies of light.
EPILOGUE
Even the struts of the starship were gone, carried away to the hoarded stores of metal; mining would always be slow on this world, and metals scarce for many, many generations. Camilla, from habit, gave the place a glance, but no more, as she went across the valley. She walked lightly, a tall woman, her hair lightly touched with frost, as she followed a half-heard awareness. Beyond the range of vision she saw the tall stone memorial to the crash victims, the graveyard where all the dead of the first terrible winter were buried beside the dead from the first summer and the winds of madness. She drew her fur cloak around her, looking with a regret so long past that it was no longer even sadness, at one of the green mounds.
MacAran, coming down the valley from the mountain road, saw her, wrapped in her furs and her tartan skirt, and raised his hand in greeting. His heart still quickened at the sight of her, after so many years; and when he reached her, he took both her hands for a moment and held them before he spoke.
She said, “The children are well—I visited Mhari this morning. And you, I can tell without asking that you had a good trip.” Letting her hand rest in his, they turned back together through the streets of New Skye. Their household was at the very end of the street, where they could see the tall East Peak, beyond which the red sun rose every morning in cloud; at one end, the small building which was the weather station; Camilla’s special responsibility.
As they came into the main room of the house they shared with half a dozen other families, MacAran threw off his fur jacket and went to the fire. Like most men in the colony who did not wear kilts, he wore leather breeches and a tunic of woven tartan cloth. “Is everyone else out?”
“Ewen is at the hospital; Judy is at the school; Mac went off with the herding drive,” she said, “and if you’re dying for a look at the children I think they’re all in the schoolyard but Alastair. He’s with Heather this morning.”
MacAran walked to the window, looking at the pitched roof of the school. How quickly they grew tall, he thought, and how lightly fourteen years of childbearing lay on their mother’s shoulders. The seven who had survived the terrible famine winter five years ago were growing up. Somehow they had weathered, together, the early storms of this world; and although she had had children by Ewen, by Lewis MacLeod, by another whose name he had never known and he suspected Camilla herself did not know, her two oldest children and her two youngest were his. The last, Mhari, did not live with them; Heather had lost a child three days before Mhari’s birth and Camilla, who had never cared to nurse her own children if there was a wet-nurse available, had given her to Heather to nurse; when Heather was unwilling to give her up after she was weaned, Camilla had agreed to let Heather keep her, although she visited her almost every day. Heather was one of the unlucky ones; she had borne seven children but only one had lived more than a month after birth. Ties of fosterage in the community were stronger than blood; a child’s mother was only the one who cared for it, its father the one who taught it. MacAran had children by three other women, and cared for them all equally, but he loved best Judy’s strange young Lori, taller than Judy at fourteen and yet childlike and peculiar, called a changeling by half the community, her unknown father still a secret to all but a few.
Camilla said, “Now you’re back, when are you off again?”
He slid an arm around her. “I’ll have a few days at home first, and then—we’re off to find the sea. There must be one, somewhere on this world. But first—I have something for you. We explored a cave, a few days ago—and found these, in the rock. We don’t have much use for jewels, I know, it’s really a waste of time to dig them out, but Alastair and I liked the looks of these, so we brought some home to you and the girls. I had a sort of feeling about them.”
From his pocket he took a handful of blue stones, pouring them into her hands, looking at the surprise and pleasure in her eyes. Then the children came running in, and MacAran found himself swamped in childish kisses, hugs, questions, demands.
“Da, can I go to the mountains with you next time? Harry goes and he’s only fourteen!”
“Da, Alanna took my cakes, make her give them back!”
“Dada, Dada, look here, look here! See me climb!”
Camilla, as always, ignored the hullabaloo, calmly gesturing them to quiet. “One question at a time—what is it, Lori?”
The silver-haired child with grey eyes picked up one of the blue stones, looking at the starlike patterns coiled within. She said gravely, “My mother has one like this. May I have one, too? I think perhaps I can work it as she does.”
MacAran said, “You may have one,” and over her head looked at Camilla. Some day, in Lori’s own time, they would know exactly what she meant, for their strange fosterling never did anything without reason.
“You know,” Camilla said, “I think some day these are going to be very, very important to all of us.”
MacAran nodded. Her intuition had been proven right so many times that now he expected it; but he could wait. He walked to the window and looked up at the high, familiar skyline of the mountains, daydreaming beyond them to the plains, the hills, and the unknown seas. A pale blue moon, like the stone into which Lori still stared, entranced, floated up quietly over the rim of the clouds around the mountain; and very gently, rain began to fall.
“Some day,” he said, offhand, “I suppose someone will give those moons—and this world—a name.”
“Some day,” Camilla said, “but we’ll never know.”
A century later they named the planet DARKOVER. But Earth knew nothing of them for two thousand years.
TWO TO CONQUER
PROLOGUE: THE ALIEN
Paul Harrell woke, blurred and semi-conscious, with a sense of having survived nightmares for a long time. Every muscle in his body ached like a separate toothache, and his head felt as if he had a truly monumental hangover. Blurred memories, vague, a man with his face, his own voice asking, Who the hell are you, you’re not the devil, by any chance? Not that he believed in the devil, or hell, or any of those things invented to try to force men to do what other people thought they should do instead of what they wanted to do.
He moved his head, and the pain in it made him wince. Whew! I really must have tied one on last night!
He stretched, trying to turn over, and found that he was lying, his legs flung out at ease, comfortably stretched out. That brought him wide awake, in shock.
He could move, stretch; he wasn’t in the stasis box!
Had it all been a nightmare, then? The flight from the Alpha police, the rebellion he had led in the colony, the final confrontation, with his men shot down around him, the capture and the trial, and finally the horror of the stasis box closing around him forever.
Forever. That had been his last thought. Forever.
Painless, of course. Even pleasant, like going to sleep when you were completely exhausted. But he had struggled and fought for that last instant of consciousness, knowing that it would be the last; he would never waken.
Humane governments had abolished the death penalty long ago. Too often, new evidence, a few years after the prisoner was executed, had proved him innocent. Death made the mistake irrevocable, and embarrassed the whole judicial system. The stasis box kept the prisoner safely removed from society. . . but he could always be reprieved and recalled to life. And no prisons, no traumatic memories of association with hardened criminals, no prison riots, no need for counseling, recreation, rehabilitation. Just stick them away in a stasis box and let them age there, naturally, and finally die, unconscious, lifeless. . . unless they were proved innocent. Then you could take them out.
But, Paul Harrell thought, they couldn’t prove him innocent. He was guilty as hell, and furthermore, he’d admitted it, and tried as hard as he could to be shot down before capture. What was more, he made sure he took about ten of the damn cops with him, so they couldn’t legally grant him the option of Rehab.
The rest of his men, the ones
they didn’t shoot down, went meekly down to Rehabilitation like so many sheep, to be made over into the conformist nothings which are all they want in this stupid world. Pussycats. Gutless wonders. And right up to the end, he could see that the judge and all his legal advisers were hoping he’d break down and beg for executive clemency—a chance for Rehab, so they could tinker with his brain, with drugs and re-education and brainwashing, so they could make him over into a nobody, to march along in lockstep just like everybody else through what they call life. But not me, thanks. I wouldn’t play their damned game. When I finished my run, I was ready to go, and I went.
And it had been a good life while it lasted, he thought. He’d made hash of their stupid laws because for years they couldn’t even imagine that anyone would break laws except through accident or ignorance! He’d had all the women he wanted, and all the high living.
Especially women. He didn’t play the stupid games women tried to make men play. He was a man, and if they wanted a man instead of a sheep, they learned right away that Paul Harrell didn’t play by their conformist, ball-less rules.
That damned woman who led the police down on me.
Her mother had probably taught her that you had to make noises about rape, unless the man got down on his knees and pretended to be a capon, a gutless wonder who’d let a woman lead him around by the nose and never touch her unless she said she wanted it! Hell, he knew better than that. That was what women wanted and they loved it, when you gave it to them and didn’t take no for an answer! Well, she found out; he didn’t play their games, even with the stasis box hanging over him! She probably thought he’d go and whine for a chance at Rehab, and they’d make him over into a pussycat she could lead around by the balls!
Well, the hell with her, she’ll wake up nights all the rest of her life, remembering that for once she had a real man. . . .
Darkover: First Contact Page 19
