Darkover: First Contact (24 page)

Judy woke, feeling the stir of the wind like a breath of cold through her very bones, the waking strangeness in her brain and bones. She felt quickly, as if seeking to reassure herself, where her child stirred with a strange strong life.
Yes. It is well with her, but she too feels the winds of madness.

It was dark in the room where she lay, and she listened to the sounds of distant song.
It is beginning, but this time . . . this time do they know what it is, can they meet it without fear or strangeness?
She herself felt perfect calm, a silence at her center of being. She knew, without surprise, exactly what had brought the madness at first; and knew that for her, at least, madness would not return. There would always, in the season of the winds, be strangeness, and a greater openness and awareness; the latent powers, so long dormant, would always be stronger under the influence of the powerful psychedelic borne on the wind. But she knew, now, how to cope with them, and there would be only the small madness which eases the mind and rests the unquiet brain from stress, leaving it free to cope with further stress another time. She let herself drift on it now, reaching out with her thoughts for a half-felt touch that was like a memory. She felt as if she were spinning, floating on the winds that tossed her thoughts, and briefly her thoughts clasped and linked with the alien (even now she had no name for him, she needed none, they knew each other as a mother knows the face of her child or as twin recognizes twin, they would be together always even if her living eyes never again beheld his face) in a brief, half-ecstatic joining. Brief as the touch was, she needed, desired no more.

She drew out the jewel, his love-gift. It seemed to her to glow in the darkness with its own inner fire, as it had glowed in his hand when he laid it in hers in the forest, echoing the strange silver blue glow of his eyes.
Try to master the jewel.
She focused her eyes and thoughts on it, struggling to know, with that curious inner sight, what was meant.

It was dark in her room, for as the night moved on the moons sank behind the shuttered window and the starlight was dim. The jewel still clasped in her hand, Judy reached for a resin-candle; sleep was far from her. She felt about in the darkness for a light, missed it and heard the small chemical-tipped splinter fall to the floor. She whispered a small irritable imprecation, now she would have to get out of bed and find it. She stared fiercely at the resin-candle, somehow looking
through
the jewel in her hand.

The resin-candle on its carven stick suddenly flared into brilliant flame, untouched. Judy, gasping and feeling her heart pound, quickly snuffed the flame, took her hand away; again centered all her thoughts on the jewel and the flame and saw the light flare out again between her fingers.

This could be dangerous. I will hide it until the proper time comes.
In that moment she knew she had made a discovery which might, one day, step into the gap between the transplanted knowledge of Earth and the old knowledge of this strange world, but she also knew that she would not speak of it for a long time, if ever.
When the time comes and their minds are strong and ready, then—then perhaps they can be trusted with it. If I show them now, half of them will not believe—and the rest will begin to scheme how to use it.
Not now.

 

Since the destruction of the starship and his acceptance that they were marooned on this world (
A lifetime? Forever? Forever for me, at least
) Captain Leicester had had only one hope, a lifework, something to give reason to his existence and some glimmer of optimism to his despair.

Moray could structure a society which would tie them to the soil of this world, rooting like hogs for their daily food. That was Moray’s business; maybe it was necessary for the time being, to evolve a stable society which could insure survival. But survival didn’t matter if it was
only
survival, and he now realized it could be more. It would some day take their children back to the stars. He had the computer; and he had a technically trained crew, and he had a lifetime of knowledge. For the last three months he had systematically, piece by piece, stripped the ship of every bit of equipment, every bit of his own training for a lifetime, and programmed, with the help of Camilla and three other technicians, everything he knew into it. He had read every surviving textbook from the library into it, from astronomy to zoology, from medicine to electronic engineering; he had brought in every surviving crew member, one by one, and helped them to transfer all their knowledge to the computer. Nothing was too small to program into the computer, from how to build and repair a food synthesizer, to the making and repair of zippers on uniforms.

He thought, in triumph; there’s a whole technology here, a whole heritage, preserved entire for our descendants. It won’t be in my lifetime, or Moray’s, or perhaps in my children’s lifetime. But when we grow past the small struggles of day-to-day survival, the knowledge will be there, the heritage. 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.

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?

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.

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;