In retrospect, it is now thought that perhaps Castell's church was given the license to colonize Haven precisely because he had not only the money to pay for the privilege, but the people ready and waiting for a new place to go.
When Garner "Bill" Castell died, his son, Charles, a scholarly man of thirty-six Earth Standard years, took over the leadership of the church, and actually led the group called The Chosen to colonize Haven, which his father had literally died to give them.
In concert
E.R. Stewart
I
They say Charles Castell knelt and kissed the ground when he arrived on Haven, but I know better because I'm the oaf who tripped him. My name's Kev Malcolm, and at sixteen standard years of age, I stood beside our leader in the open side hatch, half proud to be one of the reverend's acolytes, half scared to death I'd do something clumsy.
Sure enough, as the freighter's shuttle was winched against the dock, I somehow got my foot in the wrong place.
Castell smiled, I remember that. His gaze scanned the horizon of Haven, his world, his church's place of salvation. "Eden," he whispered. I looked up at his face so serious and serene, with its strong nose and jutting chin. Just looking at him got me giddy. Power was ours, I knew, because we were blessed. We knew the key-note of the Cosmos, and we Harmonized fully, our bodies and souls as one with the All.
Fishy freshwater breezes entered the hatch now, wafting away some of the stench of the transport.
The fast leg of our journey had been accomplished in a freighter, with us as piggyback cargo. At nine hundred souls, we were too few to justify, or to afford, hiring an entire transport, which can carry, they say, up to fifteen thousand people. I'd hate to imagine such crowding, and turned my attention back to my immediate surroundings.
We heard sounds of water lapping, a lone bird or something calling out in harsh joy, and the murmur at our backs of the nine hundred Chosen, each eager for a first glimpse of the new, the promised, land. With darkness behind us, we stood in the hatch in orange light, squinting.
I studied Reverend Castell's eyes, seeking a clue. Did he see his destiny as he absorbed the first sights of his hard-won, costly last chance? Did he smell on the chilly air a cornucopia of plenty, or the stench of decay? Were any of his senses of this world, or all?
Someone said our First Prayer, "Be still as the silence/At the heart of the note/As it swells to fill the song," as if intoning a hymn, and Reverend Castell broke his pose to step forward. The shuttle bumped the dock.
The next thing I knew a look of surprise crossed his face and he sprawled forward onto the dirt levee on which the dock was built.
So it was that my first step onto our new home was a leap of consternation and mortification. "Reverend," I said, along with three other acolytes, kneeling to help him rise. Knowing it had been my foot which had caused this undignified advent upon Haven, I blushed and tried to stammer an apology.
His electric gray eyes sparked a gaze toward me. That old familiar tingle of, what? Awe? Terror? It held me, that feeling, and my mouth fumbled into silence as he said, "We must all embrace our home, this Haven." And he gestured for us to lie down, too.
Word passed back in a chain of whispers as near to silence as the circumstance allowed, and the next few Chosen jumped down from the ship and fell prostrate for a few seconds. It was the inauguration of Reverend Castell's ritual of return, which he used at the termination of every journey thereafter.
Of course the ship's crew jeered and shouted catcalls. Our church had hired their transport ship and a crew, but we hadn't even made a bid for their support or loyalty. "Clumsy lot," one tough said. Another spat at us repeatedly. To them, we were rag-tag fanatics off on some wild goose hegira, a doomed group of dupes led by a megalomaniac with a simplistic Christ complex.
I'd heard all that and more, during our purgatorial months of motion between Earth and Haven, and not all of it muttered or whispered, either. We bore their assaults upon our dignity with stoic silence, some of us not even bothering to wipe the spittle from our faces or hair.
Some of us may have wondered of what use a tiny act of cleanliness might be to a group as filthy as we, after fourteen months in the transport vessel, washing only with gritty drysoap and handheld ionizers, perfumed only by the food-pastes smeared or spilled. Odors were among the least of our burdens, anyway. Old bruises from tests of our pacifism, administered by the ship's brutal crew bored between duties, kept some of us moving stiffly.
Also, at least one of our women was probably pregnant from a rape I'd unknowingly witnessed one sleep-period, when, in utter silence, the blanketed bunk-pallet beside mine had erupted into thrashing. Only when the crewman rose up from his victim had I realized what had occurred, and my shame and fury were such that I barely spoke for a week as I sought harmony with the event.
Now I shivered as I watched the others jump down from the hatch.
One of the men in a rowboat, still holding the rope by which the shuttle had been winched to shore after splashdown, called out lewd suggestions to our women and girls. I saw at least one of our men grow somber. His eyes grew hard and his mouth set sternly, for one of the prettiest women was his daughter, but none of us broke the peace as we sought to harmonize with the strains of Haven.
I stood with Reverend Castell to one side as he supervised both the advent of his flock upon Haven and the unloading of our supplies. "Each of us must do our part," he said once, bending to lift a parcel that a contemptuous crewmember had dropped. Smiling, Reverend Castell carried it to the stack of goods growing on the splintery bare-plank wharf. Although our supplies had all fit into the same shuttle that had brought us down from the orbiting transport vessel, they were sufficient to keep us going for as many as three years, even if Haven granted us nothing.
A shudder rippled through me as I avoided thinking past those three years. I bent to lift a sack of seeds, but a brother acolyte stopped me. "Let our beasts of burden do the heavy work," he said, gesturing at the laboring, infidel crewmembers.
Glancing at the joker, Reverend Castell said, "Take that man's place, and give him a rest." He pointed to a particularly loudmouthed space-faring lout, who had berated us worse with every load he carried.
Keeping my gaze on the hem of my robe, I balanced my conflicting humors and thought I understood the reverend's actions. "An aspect of respect is the ability to know another's lot in life," now made more sense to me. It was no longer just a tenet from the Writings.
A crane and several hoists helped complete our unloading, but it was past first, or Byers' dusk by the time we finished. By then we acolytes had done as much as anyone else, and the Kennicott crew was largely loafing or drinking in the one-room, rickety shebeen the wharf's ratty skeleton crew had slapped together a few yards from shore.
Faces showed fatigue, but a few showed more. Some openly grumbled, others gaped at the bleak landscape surrounding them as if trapped, and all of us shivered in our robes. My own hood I kept up, but many seemed to enjoy having their ears turn blue. Rubbing the tip of my nose helped, but only for a few seconds.
Aside from the cold was the air itself, which seemed somehow hard to breathe, unsatisfying to the lungs. A ringing in my ears and a dizziness assailed me, too, but I ignored such trifles in my earnest desire to be worthy of the reverend's respect and trust. Being acolyte to such a man is no small thing, and no small things can be allowed to interfere.
As the Shangr? — La Valley was turned away from Byers' for a while, Cat's Eye peered down in quarter phase, its horizontal pupil balefully dark as the rest cast dim light over us. Jagged mountains tore at the bottom of the sky in menacing silhouette, while the lake itself glittered with phosphorescent blue-green flashes and orange Eyeshine. I think I saw Hecate, or Ayesha, or Brynhild, one of Haven's companion moons, but it may have been something else, or nothing outside my overloaded mind.
"Our balbriggens don't suffice," Reverend Castell said to me, having noticed my shivers. His use of Gaelic words
meant he was in a good mood, I knew. "We must layer." He tapped the satchel I carried for him and I put it on the ground. He knelt and tugged out another robe, as plain and pocketless as the one he wore. "Pass the word," he said, a grimace of meaning on his face.
Sibilance behind us was the only hint that the Chosen had heard and obeyed. It struck me that some of us had been waiting only for an example, because no sooner was the Reverend Castell layered in the rough cotton cloth than many of the Chosen were pulling on their second or third garments. Surely they'd had them out ahead of time.
Such thoughts are best not voiced, however, so I donned my second robe and bowed my head, awaiting further commands. Patience is the lot of followers, who, if they know well their place and abilities, can be of far greater use than any number of discordant individuals howling on their own behalf, for in harmony is strength. So we teach.
"I must speak with the captain of our blessed transport vessel," Reverend Castell then said to me, as head acolyte. "Stay here and contemplate the start of our great salvation.
As he walked away I chanted the fugue called "Patience Is the Art of Elegant Timing," shivering only a little now, and worried more about my stomach, which rumbled and growled enough to pain me.
"Sixty-four and three quarters hours," one of the other acolytes said, in a tone of disgust. "That means when Eyeclipse comes, it'll be only light from the other moons for the next twenty hours or so." He sarcastically waved his hand in front of his face, as if blind in the dimmness of Cat's Eye. "No suntans here, eh? It's windtan or nothing, unless the frostbite gets you."
None laughed and the jester fell silent.
Haven's night interested me. Reportedly it would never get fully dark, but I thought I'd rather wait and see for myself, experience it. Those CoDo maps and lists and descriptions of habitable worlds tend to change after settlement, I knew. They changed especially drastically with the marginal worlds, like Haven.
Would the other two moons offer at least some light? I wished for a moment that I understood celestial mechanics better, then grinned and rolled my eyes. Fat chance of learning such things now. But, as for seeing one's hand always before one's face, surely, that would be a boon, affording endless chances for good works. The right would always know what the left hand was doing.
With a shrug, I went back to concentrating upon my empty belly, and how best to ignore it, or at least nullify its demands. My eyes kept seeing, however, and my ears kept hearing, and curiosity flared in me like lashes of plasma from a furious star.
My senses tempted me into the new world, so I studied it a little. The orange-red tinge of Eyelight allowed sight, but with a diminished sharpness of image, as if details had been carefully erased to allow the world a greater freedom of generality. That idea shuddered through me, as I wondered what this place might show us if, or when, it decided to get specific with us.
My heart thumped and thudded. My limbs felt alternatively heavy and light, never normal. My eyes watered and I blinked away the tears. Cold seeped inward, confident of final victory on this bleak soulscape.
After the ennui, the torture, the oppression of the transport ship, however, that cold ground in the dim light beside our small hillock of stacked supplies was at the very least an edge of paradise to us, and few complained aloud. Mothers sang to children, while fathers hummed along. Children chattered and laughed, playing timeless games. Bodies shifted weight and the chill air cleaned us of one another's scents even as a few hardy souls visited the lake's edge for baths of an icier kind.
It was a moment of peace, and I was astute enough to savor it, even in my hunger, or perhaps because of it. Hunger imparts a meditative calm at times. At any rate, our peace was short-lived.
". . must be kidding," a harsh voice shouted from the shack where the ship's captain and his groundside crew drank and gamed. "It's your world, mister almighty Chucked-Out Charlie Castell, and my people aren't draft animals, and personally I couldn't give less a damn about how you'll move your supplies if they invented atomic damn-splitting."
It was the ship's captain, a cashiered CoDo NCO, whose voice roared forth. He bellowed at Reverend Castell, berating him, mocking his plan of colonization and mimicking his perception of our principles in a drunken tirade that would've spawned riot on any other world at any other time with any other audience.
The two leaders came out of the shack. The captain's fists came within inches of the reverend's face, but our leader neither blinked nor winced. Raising his hands to chest level, Reverend Castell said something in a firm but modulated voice, and that's when the other drunks roiled out of the shebeen, which actually rocked back and forth as shoulders pushed on the sides of the doorframe.
The captain yelled, "You can jolly well wait until your animals grow out of embryo, for all I care, but there's not enough money in the known systems to make me ask my men to do another lick of work for your bunch. Christ on a flapjack, you've got the arrogance of Lucifer himself, I swear."
Laughter and hoots of derision erupted in the mob outside the drinking shack. Our people, the Chosen, stood watching Reverend Castell as intently as audiences watch tightrope walkers, anxiety plain on our faces. I know many thought as I did, that to lose him now would fate us all to meaningless failure.
Several voices among our people said, "I told you he was crazy," or "Now do you see?" or even "Damn him, making them angry like that," but I held out faith in Castell because he'd never failed us yet. Saying as much to my brother acolytes, I got them to circulate amidst the Chosen, spreading harmony and calm as best they could.
The captain and the reverend stood nose to nose as the opposite crowds studied them, some eager for blood, others seeking only peace. An electricity charged the scene, holding everyone static.
And then the violence in the air evaporated as Reverend Castell said something that made the infidels laugh and disperse. He came to us while they gurgled back down the drain, into their iniquitous sink of sins.
"They'll be gone in twelve hours," Reverend Castell told us. As usual, I was standing near enough to him to be able to study his features, and I swear I saw the traces of a satisfied smile there, as if he'd accomplished something difficult with less trouble than anticipated. He slapped me on the shoulder and smiled. "We're too excited to sleep anyway, don't you think, Kev?" he asked. Then, before I could respond in any way, he dashed toward our supplies and began climbing them.
His shipslippers let his toes grip the ropes and canvas on the crates, and soon he stood high above us. So high, in fact, that when he spoke we found that very few of us could see him at all.
His voice, a baritone coaxed and trained, modulated and resonant, fell upon us like manna. We fed upon the sound of that voice as much as on the messages it conveyed. It was a sermon like none before, rousing us to efforts none of us would have conceived.
We bent and lifted. We carried until our legs quivered. All the while, Reverend Castell stayed atop the diminishing pile of goods we'd brought.
Rocks twisted ankles, divots stole footing, and the light failed gradually but certainly as we moved our precious supplies away from the lake. There were trees, mostly sparse-set evergreens, but we stayed back from them, not knowing what might lurk in their shadows, under their deceptively familiar boughs.
A relatively flat area with harsh grasses that tore at exposed flesh with serrated stalks and sticky leaves that seemed to seal each wound proved the best place to create our first redoubt.
Directing the placing of crates and drums and barrels and sacks, we created a small fortlike square. Our supplies surrounded us, providing shelter as well as other necessities. Slit-trenches were dug by a few of our people who understood such matters, one of whom had been a CoDo marine until he lost his hand in a nameless battle, another of whom had been a mountain survivalist until swept into a city by defoilants and other government plagues. Deadfall was gathered and fires lit, and soon savory broths and other delicious if meatless sustenance sent out whisps of mouth-wate
ring invitation.
Revererd Castell carried the very last crate by himself. He took it to the center of the cleared area and let it drop with a grunt. Such crates weigh more than forty kilos, I knew.
Hopping upon it, he said, "Chosen ones, hear me. This spot shall be our settlement, and from this spot shall we construct a place worthy of true and universal harmony. Here shall we found a place free of secular intrusions, free of the compromises so many of the churches have adopted of late on old, decaying Earth.
"As the silence at the heart of the note supports all aspects of the song, so shall this spot remain empty, a town square from whence shall radiate peace and chords of joy even as our settlement grows to fulfill all promises."
We hummed a chord and held it, and the single multiplex tone droned from and through us, raising our inner selves to new heights of strength and determination. No one shivered during that nine-minute chord, no stomachs growled, and no babies squawled. It was peace, it was truth, it was harmony.
The rest of that, I guess I must call it evening, Castell passed among us, squatting to chat here, pausing to give assistance there, spreading calm and confidence everywhere. His confidence radiated like a warmth more sustaining than the heat of fire.
After eating a tortilla rolled around celery with ten-bean sauce, I followed him on his rounds. My admiration for him may well have grown, if such was possible. He knew the right things to say to everyone, and knew all their names, all nine hundred of them. He even knew the names of the babes, not yet counted as Chosen, but certainly blessed by the harmonics of their parents.
When we returned to the center of the small square, Castell's crate was still there. I noticed that it was labeled with a Xeno-Biology warning symbol, a red triangle in a green square, with the legend HYBRID GRAINS.
Gesturing for me and the eight other acolytes to be seated, he treated us to a story about his father, Garner "Bill" Castell, adventurer, founder of our church, and our spiritual patriarch. As he wove aural spells of incident, plot, and character, I let my memory stray back to my only glimpse of Garner "Bill" Castell, lying in state in that old Victorian style mansion on the hill.
Revolt on War World c-3 Page 6
