Darkover: First Contact (20 page)

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:

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 ethics 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.”

She said very gently, “If you’re right, we’ll all have to be priests to each other, at least as far as listening to each other and giving what help we can.” One phrase he had spoken seized on her, and she repeated it aloud.
“Our minds were open to one another . . . the most total love and sharing any human beings could know.
That seems to be what this world has done to us. In different degrees, yes—but to all of us in some way or other. That’s what he said”—and slowly, searching for words, she told him about the alien, their first meeting in the wood, how he had sent for her during the Wind, and the strange things he had told her, without speech.

“He told me—our people’s minds were like half-shut doors,” she said. “Yet we understood each other, perhaps more so because there had been that—that total sharing. But no one believes me!” she finished with a cry of despair. “They believe I’m mad, or lying!”

“Does it matter so much what they believe?” the priest asked slowly. “By their disbelief you might even be shielding him. You told me he was afraid of us—of your people—and if his kind are gentle people, I’m not surprised. A telepathic race tuned in to us during the Ghost Wind would probably have decided we were a horrifyingly violent, frightening people, and they wouldn’t have been entirely wrong, although there’s another side to us. But if they once begin believing in your—what is Fiona’s phrase?—your fairy lover, they might seek out his people, and the results might not be very good.” He smiled faintly. “Our race has a bad reputation when we meet other cultures we consider inferior. If you care about your child’s father, Judy, I’d let them go on disbelieving in him.”

“Forever?”

“As long as necessary. This planet is already changing us,” Valentine said, “maybe some day our children and his will find some way of coming together without catastrophe, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

Judy pulled at the chain around her neck and he said, “Didn’t you used to wear a cross on that?”

“Yes, I took it off, forgive me.”

“Why? It doesn’t mean anything here. But what is this?”

It was a blue jewel, blazing, with small silvery patterns moving within. “He said—they used these things for the training of their children; that if I could master the jewel I could reach him—let him know it was well with me and the child.”

“Let me see it,” Valentine said, and reached for it, but she flinched and drew away.

“What—?”

“I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. But when anyone else touches it, now, it—it
hurts,
as if it was part of
me,
” she said fumblingly. “Do you think I’m mad?”

The man shook his head. “What’s madness?” he asked. “A jewel to enhance telepathy—perhaps it has some peculiar properties which resonate to the electrical signals sent off by the brain—telepathy can’t just exist, it must have some natural phenomenal basis. Perhaps the jewel is attuned to whatever it is in your mind that makes you
you.
In any case, it exists, and—have you reached him with it?”

“It seems so sometimes,” said Judy, fumbling for words. “It’s like hearing someone’s voice and knowing whose it is by the sound—no, it’s not quite like that either, but it does happen. I feel—very briefly, but it’s quite real—as if he were standing beside me, touching me, and then it fades again. A moment of reassurance, a moment of—of love, and then it’s gone. And I have the strange feeling that it’s only a beginning, that a day will come when I’ll know other things about it—”

He watched while she tucked the jewel away inside her dress again. At last he said, “If I were you, I’d keep it a secret for a while. You said this planet’s changing us all, but perhaps it isn’t changing us
fast
enough. There are some of the scientists who would want to test this thing, to work at it, perhaps even to take it from you, experiment, destroy it to see how it works. Perhaps even interrogate and test you again and again, to see if you are lying or hallucinating. Keep it secret, Judith. Use it as he told you. A day may come when it will be important to know how it works—the way it is supposed to work, not the way the scientists might want to make it work.”

He rose, shaking the crumbs of his meal off his lap.

“It’s back to the rock pile for me.”

She stood on the tips of her toes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said softly, “you’ve helped me a lot.”

The man touched her face. “I’m glad,” he said. “It’s—a beginning. A long road back, but it’s a beginning. Bless you, Judith.”

He watched her walk away, and a curious near-blasphemous thought touched his mind,
how do I know God isn’t sending a Child . . . a strange child, not quite man . . . here on this strange world?
He dismissed the thought, Thinking
I’m mad,
but another thought made him cringe with mingled memory and dismay,
how do we know the Child I worshipped all these years was not some such strange alliance?

“Ridiculous,” he said aloud, and bent over his self-imposed penance again.

“I never thought I’d find myself praying for bad weather,” Camilla said. She closed the door of the small repaired dome where the computer was housed, joining Harry Leicester inside. “I’ve been thinking. With what data we have about the length of the days, the inclination of the sun, and so forth, couldn’t we find out the exact length of this planet’s year?”

“That’s elementary enough,” Leicester said. “Write up your program and feed it through. Might tell us how long a summer to expect and how long a winter.”

She moved to the console. Her pregnancy was beginning to show now, although she was still light and graceful. He said, “I managed to salvage almost all of the information about the matter-anti-matter drives. Some day—Moray told me the other day that from the steam engine to the stars is less than three hundred years. Some day our descendants will be able to return to Earth, Camilla.”

She said, “That’s assuming they’ll want to,” and sat down at her desk. He looked at her in mild question. “Do you doubt it?”

“I’m not doubting anything, I’m just not presuming to know what my great-great-great-great—oh, hell, what my ninth-generation grandsons will want to be doing. After all, Earthmen lived for generations without even wanting to invent things which could easily have been invented any time after the first smelting of iron was managed. Do you honestly think Earth would have gone into space without population pressure and pollution? There are so many social factors too.”

“And if Moray has his way our descendants will all be barbarians,” Leicester said, “but as long as we have the computer and it’s preserved, the knowledge will be
there
. There for them to use, whenever they feel the need.”

“If
it’s preserved,” she said with a shrug. “After the last few months I’m not sure anything we brought here is going to outlive this generation.”