Moray looked at him with a deep pity. "Is it possible that you still don't understand? Let me spell it out for you, Captain, and you, Patrick. This planet will not support any advanced technology. Instead of a nickel-iron core, the major metals are low-density non-conductors, which explains why the gravity is so low. The rock, as far as we can tell without sophisticated equipment we don't have and can't build, is high in silicates but low in metallic ores. Metals are always going to be rare here--terrifyingly rare. The planet I spoke about, with enormous use of electric power, had huge fossil-fuel deposits and huge amounts of mountain streams to convert energy... and a very tough ecological system. This planet appears to be only marginally agricultural land, at least here. The forest cover is all that keeps it from massive erosion, so we must harvest timber with the greatest care, and preserve the forests as a lifeline. Added to that, we simply can't spare enough manual labor to build the vehicles you want, to service and maintain them, or to build such small roadways as they would need. I can give you exact facts and figures if you like, but in brief, if you insist on a mechanized technology you're handing down a death sentence--if not for all of us, at least for our grandchildren; we might make it through three generations, because with such small numbers we could move on to a new part of the planet when we'd burned out one area. But no more."
Patrick said with deep bitterness, "Is it worth while surviving, or even having grandchildren, if they're going to live this way?"
Moray shrugged. "I can't make you have grandchildren," he said. "But I have a responsibility to the ones already on the way, and there are colonies without advanced technology which have just as long a waiting list as the one planned around massive use of electricity. Our lifeline isn't you people, I'm sorry to say; you are--to put it bluntly, Chief--just so much dead weight. The people we need on this world are the ones in the New Hebrides Commune--and I suspect if we survive at all, it's going to be their doing."
"Well," Captain Leicester said, "I guess that tells us where we stand." He thought it over a minute. "What's ahead for us, then, Moray?"
Moray looked at the records, and said, "I note on your personnel printout that your hobby at the academy was building musical instruments. That isn't very high priority, but this winter we can use plenty of people who know something about it. Meanwhile, do you know anything about glass blowing, practical nursing, dietetics, or elementary teaching?"
"I joined the service as a Medical Corpsman," Patrick said surprisingly, "before I went into Officer's Training."
"Go talk to Di Asturien in the hospital, then. For the time being I'll mark you down as assistant orderly, subject to drafts of all able-bodied men in the building program. An engineer should be able to handle architectural work and designing. As for you, Captain--"
Leicester said irritably, "It's idiotic to call me Captain. Captain of what, for God's sake, man!"
"Harry, then," Moray said, with a small wry grin. "I suspect titles and things will just quietly disappear within three or four years, but I'm not going to deprive anyone of one, if he wants to keep it."
"Well, consider I've phased mine out," Leicester said. "Going to draft me to hoe in the garden? Once I'm out as a spaceship captain, it's all I'm good for."
"No," Moray said bluntly. I'm going to need whatever it was in you that made you a Captain--leadership, maybe."
"Any law against salvaging what technological know-how we have? Programming it into the computer, maybe, for those hypothetical grandchildren of ours?"
"Not so hypothetical in your case," Moray said, "Fiona MacMorair--she's over in the hospital as 'possible early pregnancy'--gave us your name as the probable father."
"Who the hell, pardoning the expression, who on this hell-fired world is Fiona Macwhatsis?" Leicester scowled. "I never heard of the damn girl."
Moray chuckled. "Does that matter? I happened to spend most of this wind making love to cabbage sprouts and baby bean plants, or at least listening to them telling me their troubles, but most of us spent it a little less--seriously, shall we say. Dr. Di Asturien's going to ask you the names of any possible female contacts. "
Leicester said, "The only one I remember, I had to fight for, and I lost." He rubbed the fading bruise on his chin. "Oh, wait--is this a redheaded girl, one of the Commune group?"
Moray said, "I don't know the girl by sight. But about three--fourths of the New Hebrides people are red-haired--they're mostly Scots, and a few Irish. I'd say the chances were better than average that unless the girl miscarries, you'll have a red-headed son or daughter come nine-ten months from now. So you see, Leicester, you have a stake in this world."
Leicester flushed, a slow angry blush. He said, "I don't want my descendants to live in caves and scratch the ground for a living. I want them to know what kind of world we came from."
Moray did not answer for a moment. Finally he said, "I ask you seriously--don't answer, I'm not the keeper of your conscience, but think it over--might it not be best to let our descendants evolve a technology indigenous to this world? Rather than tantalizing them with the knowledge of one that could destroy this planet?"
"I'm counting on my descendants having good sense," Leicester said.
"Go ahead and program the stuff into the computer, then, if you want to," Moray said with the same small shrug, "maybe they'll have too much good sense to use it."
Leicester turned to go. "Can I have my assistant back? Or has Camilla Del Rey been assigned to something important, like cooking or making curtains for the hospital?"
Moray shook his head. "You can have her back when she's out of the hospital," he said, "although I've got her listed as pregnant, for assignment to light work only, and I thought we'd ask her to write some elementary mathematics texts. But the computer isn't very strenuous; if she wants to go back to it, I've no objection."
He looked pointedly at the work charts cluttering his desk, and Harry Leicester, ex-captain of the starship, realized that he had been, for all practical purposes, dismissed.
Chapter
THIRTEEN
Ewen Ross hesitated over the genetic charts and looked up at Judith Lovat. "Believe me, Judy. I'm not trying to make trouble for you, but it's going to make our records a lot simpler. Who was the father?"
"You didn't believe me when I told you before," Judy said flatly, "so if you know the answer better than I do, say whatever you like."
"I hardly know how to answer you," Ewen said. "I don't remember being with you, but if you say I was--"
She shook her head stubbornly, and he sighed. "The same story of an alien. Can't you see how fantastic that is? How completely unbelievable? Are you trying to postulate that the aborigines of this world are human enough to crossbreed with our women?" He hesitated. "You aren't by any chance being funny, Judy?"
"I'm not postulating anything, Ewen. I'm not a geneticist, I'm simply an expert in dietetics. I'm simply telling you what happened."
"During a time when you were insane. Two times."
Heather touched his arm gently. "Ewen," she said, "Judy's not lying. She's telling the truth--or what she believes to be the truth. Take it easy."
"But damn it, her beliefs aren't evidence." Ewen sighed and shrugged. "All right, Judy, have it your way. But it must have been MacLeod--or Zabal. Or me. Whatever you think you remember, it must have been."
"If you say so, of course it must have been," Judy said, quietly stood up and walked away, knowing without needing to look that what Ewen had written down was father unknown; possible: MacLeod, Lewi; Zabal, Marco; Ross, Ewen.
Heather said quietly behind the closing door, "Darling, you were a little rough on her."
"I happen not to think we have room for fantasy on a world as rough as this. Damn it, Heather, I was trained to save life at all costs--all costs. And I've already had to see people die… I've let them die--when we're sane, we've got to be supersane to compensate!" the young doctor said wildly.
Heather thought about that for a minute and finally said
, "Ewen, how do you judge? Maybe what seems sanity on Earth might be foolishness here. For instance, you know the Chief is training groups of the women for prenatal care and midwifery--in case, he says, we lose too many people this winter for the Medical staff to cope. He also said that he himself hadn't delivered a baby since he was an intern--you don't in the Space Service of course. Well, one of the first things he told us was; if a woman's going to miscarry, don't take any extraordinary measures to prevent it. If having the mother rest and keep warm won't save the child, nothing else; no hormones, no fetal-support drugs, nothing."
That's fantastic," Ewen said, "it's almost criminal!"
"That's what Dr. Di Asturien said," Heather told him. "On Earth, it would be criminal. But here, he said, first of all, a threatened miscarriage may be one way of nature discarding an embryo which can't adapt to the environment here--gravity, and so forth. Better to let the woman miscarry early and start over, instead of wasting six months carrying a child who will die, or grow up defective. Also, on Earth, we could afford to save defective children--lethal genes, mental retardates, congenital deformities, fetal insults, and so forth. We had elaborate machinery and medical structure for such things as exchange transfusions, growth-hormone transplants, rehabilitation and training if the child grew up defective. But here, unless some day we want to take the harsh step of exposing defective infants or killing them, we'd better keep them down to an absolute minimum--and about half the defective children born on Earth--maybe ninety per cent, nobody knows, it's such routine now on Earth to prevent a miscarriage at any cost--are the result of preventing children who really should have died, nature's mistakes, from being selected out. On a world like this, it's absolute survival for our race; we can't let lethal genes and defects get into our gene pool. See what I mean? Insanity on Earth--harsh facts for survival here. Natural selection has to take its course--and this means no heroic methods to prevent miscarriages, no extreme methods to save moribund or birth-damaged babies."
"And what's all this got to do with Judy's wild story about an alien being fathering her child?" Ewen demanded.
"Only this," Heather said, "we've got to learn to think in new ways--and not to reject things out of hand because they sound fantastic."
"You believe some nonhuman alien--oh, come, Heather! For God's sake!"
"What God?" Heather asked. "All the Gods I ever heard of belong to Earth. I don't know who fathered Judy's baby. I wasn't there. But she was, and in the absence of proof about it, I'd take her word. She's not a fanciful woman, and if she says that some alien came along and made love to her, and that she found herself pregnant, damn it, I'll believe it until it's proved otherwise. At least until I see the baby. If it's the living image of you, or Zabal, or MacLeod, maybe I'll believe Judy had a brainstorm. But during this second Wind, you behaved rationally, up to a point. MacAran behaved rationally, up to a point. Evidently after the first exposure, a little control remains on subsequent exposures to the drug, or pollen. She gave a rational account of what she did this time, and it was consistent with what happened the first time. So why not give her the benefit of the doubt?"
Slowly, Ewen crossed out the names, leaving only "Father; unknown."
"That's all we can say for sure," he said at last, "I'll leave it at that."
In the large building which still served as refectory, kitchen and recreation hall--although a separate group-kitchen was going up, built of the heavy pale translucent native stone--a group of women from the New Hebrides Commune, in their tartan skirts and the warm uniform coats they wore with them now, were preparing dinner. One of them, a girl with long red hair, was singing in a light soprano voice:
When the day wears away,
Sad I wander by the water,
Where a man, born of sun,
Wooed the fairy's daughter,
Why should I sit and sigh,
Pulling bracken, pulling bracken
All alone and weary?
She broke off as Judy came in:
"Dr. Lovat, everything's ready, I told them you were over at the hospital. So we went ahead without you."
"Thank you, Fiona. Tell me, what was that you were singing?"
"Oh, one of our island songs," Fiona said. "You don't speak Gaelic? I thought not--well, it's called the Fairy's Love Song--about a fairy who fell in love with a mortal man, and wanders the hills of Skye forever, still looking for him, wondering why he never came back to her. It's prettier in Gaelic."
"Sing it in Gaelic, then," Judy said, "it would be fearfully dull if only one language survived here! Fiona, tell me, the Father doesn't come to meals in the common room, does he?"
"No, someone takes it out to him."
"Can I take it out today? I'd like to talk to him," Judy said, and Fiona checked a rough work-schedule posted on the wall. "I wonder if we'll ever get permanent work-assignments until we know who's pregnant and who isn't? All right, I'll tell Elsie you've got it. It's one of those sacks over there."
She found Father Valentine toiling away in the graveyard, surrounded by the great stones he was heaving into place in the monument He took the food from her and unwrapped it,laying it out on a flat stone. She sat down beside him and said quietly, "Father, I need your help. I don't suppose you'd hear my confession?"
He shook his head slowly. "I'm not a priest any more, Dr. Lovat. How in the name of anything holy can I have the insolence to pass judgment in the name of God on someone else's sins?" He smiled faintly. He was a small slight man, no older than thirty, but now he looked haggard and old. "In any case, I've had a lot of time to think, heaving rocks out here. How can I honestly preach or teach the Gospel of Christ on a world where He never set foot? If God wants this world saved he'll have to send someone to save it… whatever that means." He put a spoon into the bowl of meat and grain. "You brought your own lunch? Good. In theory I accept isolation. In practice I find I crave the company of my fellow man much more than I ever thought I would."
His words dismissed the question of religion, but Judy, in her inner turmoil, could not let it drop so easily. "Then you're just leaving us without pastoral help of any sort, Father?"
"I don't think I ever did much in that line," Father Valentine said. "I wonder if any priest ever did? It goes without saying that anything I can do for anyone as a friend, I'll do--it's the least I can do; if I spent my life at it, it wouldn't begin to balance out what I did, but it's better than sitting around in sackcloth and ashes mouthing penitential prayers."
The woman said, "I can understand that, I suppose. But do you really mean there's no room for faith, or religion, Father?"
He made a dismissing gesture. "I wish you wouldn't call me 'father'. Brother, if you want to. We've all got to be brothers and sisters in misfortune here. No, I didn't say that, Doctor Lovat--I don't know your Christian name--Judith? I didn't say that, Judith. Every human being needs belief in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don't think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that's only a memory, and won't even be that to our children and our children's children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes. Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity--yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not
a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we're in now."
"Yet you would have worked in the Church structure at the Coronis colony?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't really thought about it. I belong to the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it--not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on my rock pile I've had a lot of time to think." He smiled faintly. "No wonder they used to put criminals to breaking rocks, back on Earth. It keeps your hands busy and gives you all your time for thought."
Judy said slowly, "So you don't think behavioral ethic
s are absolute, then? There's nothing definite or divinely ordained about them here?"
"How can there be? Judith, you know what I did. If I hadn't been brought up with the idea that certain things were in themselves, and of their very nature, enough to send me straight to hell, then when I woke up after the Wind, I could have lived with it. I might have been ashamed, or upset, or even sick at my stomach, but I wouldn't have had the conviction, deep down in my mind, that none of us deserved to live after it. In the seminary there were no shades of right and wrong, just virtue and sin, and nothing in between. The murders didn't trouble me, in my madness, because I was taught in seminary that lewdness was a mortal sin for which I could go to hell, so how could murder be any worse? You can go to hell only once, and I was already damned. A rational ethic would have told me that whatever those poor crewmen, God rest them, and I, had done during that night of madness, it had harmed only our dignity and our sense of decency, if that mattered. It was miles away, galaxies away, from murder."
Judy said, "I'm no theologian, Fa--er--Valentine, but can anyone truly commit a mortal sin in a state of complete insanity?"
"Believe me, I've been through that one and out the other side. It doesn't help to know that if I'd been able to run to my own confessor and get his forgiveness for all the things I did in my madness--ugly things by some standards, but essentially harmless I might have been able to keep from killing those poor men. There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat. As for madness--nothing can come out in madness that wasn't there already. What I really couldn't face, I begin to realize, wasn't just the knowledge that in madness I'd done some forbidden things with other men, it was the knowledge that I'd done them gladly and willingly, that I no longer believed they were very wrong, and that forever after, any time I saw those men, I'd remember the time when our minds were completely open to one another and we knew each other's minds and bodies and hearts in the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. I knew I could never hide it again, and so I took out my little pocket knife and started trying to hide from myself." He smiled wryly, a terrible death's head grin. "Judith, Judith, forgive me, you came to ask me for help, you asked me to hear your confession, and you've ended up listening to mine."
Darkover Landfall Page 14
