It will be here for now, whether the knowledge for the hospital of how to cure a brain tumor or glaze a cooking-pot for the kitchen; and when Moray runs up against problems in his structured society, as he inevitably will, the answers will be here. The whole history of the world we came from; we can pass by all the blind alleys of society, and go straight to a technology which will take us back to the stars one day--to rejoin the greater community of civilized man, not crawling around on one planet, but spreading like a great branching tree from star to star, universe upon universe.
We can all die, but the thing which made us human will survive--entire--and some day we will go back. Some day we will reclaim it.
He lay and listened to the distant sound of singing from the New Skye hall, in the dome which had become his whole life. Vaguely it occurred to him that he should get up; dress; go over to them, join them. They had something to preserve too. He thought of the lovely copper-haired girl he had known so briefly; who, amazingly, bore his child.
She would be glad to see him, and surely he had some responsibility, even though he had fathered the child half-knowing, maddened like a beast in rut--he flinched at the thought. Still she had been gentle and understanding, and he owed her something, some kindness for having used and forgotten her. What was her strange and lovely name? Fiona? Gaelic, surely. He rose from his bed, searching quickly for some garments, then hesitated, standing at the door of the dome and looking out at the clear bright sky. The moons had set and the pale false dawn was beginning to glow far to the east, a rainbow light like an aurora, which he supposed was reflected from the faraway glacier he had never seen; would never see; never cared to see.
He sniffed the wind and as he drew it into his lungs a strange, angry suspicion came over him. Last time they had destroyed the ship; this time they would destroy him, and his work. He slammed the dome and locked it; double-locked it with the padlock he had demanded from Moray. This time no one would approach the computer, not even those he trusted most. Not even Patrick. Not even Camilla.
"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 re-create 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 blue 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 galaxies 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 budding 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.
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