Darkover: First Contact (16 page)

Fragments spun in his mind, half real like a long dream. Gunfire, and a fight of some sort; the sweet face of a redheaded girl, and a sharp unmistakable memory of her body, naked and welcoming—had that been real or a wild fantasy? An explosion that had rocked the clearing—the ship? His mind was still too fuzzed with dream and nightmare to know what he had done or where he had gone after that, but he remembered coming back here to find Camilla alone,
of course she would protect the computer, like a mother hen her one chick,
and a vague memory of a long time with Camilla, holding her hand while some curious, deep-rooted communion went on, intense and complete, achingly close, yet somehow not sexual, although there had been that too—
or was that illusion, confused memory of the redheaded girl whose name he did not know
—the strange songs she had sung—and another surge of fear and protectiveness, an explosion in his mind, and then black darkness and sleep.

Sanity returned, a slow rise, a receding of the nightmare. What had been happening to the ship, to the crew, to the others, in this time of madness? He didn’t know. He’d better find out. He vaguely remembered that someone had been shot, before he freaked out—or was that, too, part of the long madness? He pressed the button by which he summoned the ship’s Security men, but there was no response and then he realized that the lights were not working, either. So someone had gotten to the power sources, in madness. What other damage? He’d better go and find out. Meanwhile, where was Camilla?

(At this moment she slipped reluctantly away from Rafe, saying gently, “I must go and see what damage has been done in the ship,
querido.
The Captain, too; remember I am still part of the crew. Our time is over—at least for now. There’s going to be plenty for all of us to do. I must go to him—yes, I know, but I love him too, not as I do you, but I’m learning a lot about love, my darling, and he may have been hurt.”)

She walked across the clearing, through the blowing rain which was beginning to be mixed with heavy wet snow.
I hope someone finds some kind of fur-bearing animals,
she thought,
the clothes made for Earth won’t face a winter here.
It was a quiet routine thought at the back of her mind as she went into the darkened dome.

“Where have you been, Lieutenant?” the Captain said thickly. “I have a queer feeling I owe you some kind of apology, but I can’t remember much.”

She looked around the dome, quickly assessing damage. “It’s foolish to call me Lieutenant here, you’ve called me Camilla before this—before we ever landed here.”

“Where is everybody, Camilla? I suppose it’s the same thing that hit you in the mountains?”

“I suppose so. I imagine before long we’ll be up to our ears in the aftermath,” she said with a sharp shudder. “I’m frightened, Captain—” she broke off with an odd little smile. “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Harry,” Captain Leicester said absent-mindedly, but his eyes were fixed on the computer and with a sudden, sharp exclamation Camilla went toward it. She found one of the resin-candles issued for lights and lit it, holding it up to examine the console.

The main banks of storage information were protected by plates from dust, damage, accidental erasure or tampering. She caught up a tool and began to unfasten the plates, working with feverish haste. The Captain came, caught up by her air of urgency, and said, “I’ll hold the light.” Once he had taken it, she moved faster, saying between her teeth, “Someone’s been at the plates, Captain, I don’t like this—”

The protective plate came away in her hands, and she stared, her face slowly whitening, her hands dropping to her sides in horror and dismay.

“You know what’s happened,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat. “It’s the computer. At least half the programs—maybe more—have been erased. Wiped. And without the computer—”

“Without the computer,” Captain Leicester said slowly, “the ship is nothing but a few thousand tons of scrap metal and junk. We’re finished, Camilla. Stranded.”

High above the forest, in a close-woven shelter of wickerwork and leaves, the rain beating softly outside, Judy rested on a sort of dais covered with soft woven fabric and took in, not with words entirely, what the beautiful alien with the silver eyes was trying to tell her.

A feather’s-touch upon her hand, no more, but Judy felt she had never known anything as tender as the sad eyes of the alien.
“Now, with no madness in my blood, I feel only deep grief for you, little one. No one of our own would be allowed to bear a child in loneliness, and yet you must return to your own people, we could not care for you. You could not even bear the cold of our dwelling-places in high summer, in winter you would surely die, my child.”

All of Judy’s being was one great cry of anguish,
will I never see you again?

I can reach you so clearly only at these times,
the answer flowed,
although your mind is more open to me than before, the minds of your people are like half-shut doors at other times. It would be wisest for me to let you go now, for you never to look back to the time of madness, and yet
—long silence, and a great sigh.
I cannot, I cannot, how can I let you go from me and never know . . .

The strange alien reached out, touching the jewel which hung about her neck on a fine chain, and drew it forth.
We use these—sometimes—for the training of our children. Mature, we do not need them. It was a love-gift to you; an act of madness, perhaps, perhaps unwise, my elders would certainly say so. Yet perhaps, if your mind is opened enough to master the jewel, perhaps I can reach you at times, and know that all is well with you and the child.

She looked at the jewel, which was blue, like a star-sapphire, with small inner flecks of fire, only a moment; then raised her eyes to look again with grief on the alien being. Taller than mortal, with great pale-gray eyes, almost silver, fair-skinned and delicate of feature, with long slender fingers and bare feet even in the bitter chill, and with long almost colorless hair floating like weightless silk about the shoulders; strange and bizarre and yet beautiful, with a beauty that struck at the woman like pain. With infinite tenderness and sadness, the alien reached for her and folded her very briefly against the delicate body, and she sensed that this was a rare thing, a strange thing, a concession to her despair and loneliness.
Of course. A telepathic race would have little use for demonstrative displays.

Judy stood looking up at the stranger, her own grief at parting blurring in the perception of the other’s fear and anguish. “I understand,” she whispered aloud, and the other’s drawn face relaxed a little.

There are so many chances, both for good and evil, child. Only time knows, I dare not promise you.
With a gentle touch, he folded her in the fur-lined cloak in which, earlier, he had wrapped her. She nodded, trying to hold back her tears; only when he had disappeared into the forest did she break down and follow, weeping, the small furred alien who came to lead her down the strange paths.

“You are the logical suspect,” Captain Leicester said harshly. “You have never made any secret of the fact that you don’t want to leave this planet, and the sabotage of the computer means that you will get your way, and that we will never be able to leave here.”

“No, Captain, you’re quite wrong,” Moray looked him in the face without flinching. “I have known all along that we would never leave this planet. It did occur to me, during the—what the hell shall we call it? During the mass freakout? Yes; it occurred to me during the mass freakout that maybe it would be a good thing if the computer was nonfunctional, it would force you to stop pretending we could fix the ship—”

“I was not
pretending,
” said the Captain icily.

Moray shrugged. “Words don’t matter that much. Okay, force you to stop kidding yourself about it, and get down to the serious business of survival. But I didn’t do it. To be honest, I might have if it had ever occurred to me, but I don’t know one end of a computer from the other—I wouldn’t know how to go about putting it out of action. I suppose I
could
have blown it up—I know I heard the explosion—but as it happens, when I heard the explosion I was lying in the garden having—” suddenly he laughed, embarrassed, “having the time of my life talking to a cabbage sprout, or something like that.”

Leicester frowned at him. He said, “Nobody blew the computer up, or even put it out of action. The programs have simply been erased. Any literate person could do that.”

“Any literate person familiar with a starship, maybe,” Moray said. “Captain, I don’t know how to convince you, but I’m an ecologist, not a technician. I can’t even make up a computer program. But if it’s not out of commission, what’s all the fuss about? Can’t you re-program it, or whatever the word is? Are the tapes, or whatever they are, so irreplaceable?”

Leicester was abruptly convinced. Moray didn’t
know.
He said dryly, “For your information, the computer contained about half of the sum total of human knowledge about physics and astronomy. Even if my crew contained four dozen Fellows of the Royal College of Astronomy of Edinburgh, it would take them thirty years to re-program just the navigational data. That’s not even counting the medical programs—we haven’t checked those yet—or any of the material from the ship’s Library. All things considered, the sabotage of the computer is a worse piece of human vandalism than the burning of the Library at Alexandria.”

“Well, I can only repeat that I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did,” Moray said. “Look for someone on your crew with the technical know-how.” He gave a dry, unamused laugh. “And someone who could keep their head long enough. Have the Medics figured out what hit us?”

Leicester shrugged. “The best guess I’ve heard so far is an airborne dust containing some violent hallucinogen. Still unidentified, and probably will be until things settle down at the hospital.”

Moray shook his head. He knew the Captain believed him now, and to tell the truth he was not entirely happy about the destruction of the computer. As long as Leicester’s whole efforts were taken up in attempting to manage the ship repairs he was unlikely to interfere with what Moray was doing to assure the Colony’s survival. Now, a Captain without a ship, he was likely to get seriously in the way of their assault on a strange world. For the first time Moray understood the old joke about the Space fleet:

“You can’t retire a starship Captain. You have to shoot him.”

The thought stirred dangerous fears in him. Moray was not a violent man, but during the thirty-six hours of the strange wind, he had discovered painful and unsuspected depths in himself.
Maybe someone else will think of that, next time—what makes me so sure there will be a next time? Or maybe I will, can I ever be sure now?

Turning away from the unwelcome thought, he said, “Have you a report on damages yet?”

“Nineteen dead—no medical reports, but at least four hospital patients died of neglect,” Leicester said shortly. “Two suicides. One girl cut herself and bled to death on broken glass, but probably accident rather than suicide. And—I suppose you heard about Father Valentine.”

Moray shut his eyes. “I heard about the murders. I don’t know all the details.”

Leicester said, “I doubt if anyone alive does. He doesn’t himself, and probably won’t unless Chief Di Asturien wants to give him narcosynthesis or something. All I know is somehow he got mixed up with a gang of the crewmen who were doing some messing around—sexual messing around—down by the edge of the river. Things got fairly wild. When the first wave subsided a little he realized what he’d been doing, and I gather he couldn’t face it, and started cutting throats.”

“I take it, then, that he was one of the suicides?”

Leicester shook his head. “No. I gather he came out of it just in time to realize that suicide, too, was a mortal sin. Funny. I guess I’m just getting hardened to horrors on this wonderful paradise planet of yours—all I can think about now is how much trouble he’d have saved if he’d gone ahead with it. Now I’ve got to try him for murder, and then decide, or make the people decide, whether or not we have capital punishment here.”