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 any one 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 of 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.
Chapter
FOURTEEN
"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."
Consciously, with an effort, Leicester remind
ed himself, she's pregnant and that's why they thought for years that women weren't fit to be scientists--pregnant women get notions. He watched her making swift notations in the elaborate shorthand of the computer. "Why do you want to know the length of the year?"
What a stupid question, the girl thought, then remembered he was brought up on a space station, weather is nothing to him. She doubted if he even realized the relationship of weather and climate to crops and survival. She said, explaining gently, "First, we want to estimate the growing season and find out when our harvests can come in. It's simpler than trial and error, and if we'd colonized in the ordinary way, someone would have observed this planet through several year cycles. Also, Fiona and Judy and--and the rest of us would like to know when our children will be born and what the climate's likely to be like. I'm not making my own baby clothes, but someone's got to make them--and know how much chill to allow for!"
"You're planning already?" he asked, curiously. "The odds are only one in two that you'll carry it to term and the same that it won't die."
"I don't know. Somehow I never doubted that mine would be one of the ones to live. Premonition, maybe; ESP," she said, thinking slowly as she spoke. "I had a feeling Ruth Fontana would miscarry, and she did."
He shuddered. "Not a pleasant gift to have."
"No, but I seem to be stuck with it," she said matter-of-factly, "and it seems to be helping Moray and the others with the crops. Not to mention the well Heather helped them dig. Evidently it's simply a revival of latent human potential and there's nothing weird about it. Anyhow, it seems we'll have to learn to live with it."
"When I was a student," Leicester said, "all the facts known positively about ESP were fed into a computer and the answer was that the probability was a thousand to one that there was no such thing… that the very few cases not totally and conclusively disproven were due to investigator error, not human ESP."
Camilla grinned and said, "That just goes to show you that a computer isn't God."
Captain Leicester watched the young woman stretch back and ease her cramped body. "Damn these bridge seats, they were never meant for use in full gravity conditions. I hope comfortable furniture gets put on a fair priority; Junior here doesn't approve of my sitting on hard seats these days."
Lord, how I love that girl, who'd have believed it at my age! To remind himself more forcefully of the gap, Leicester said sharply, "Are you planning to marry MacAran, Camilla?"
"I don't think so," she said with the ghost of a smile. "We haven't been thinking in those terms. I love him--we came so close during the first Wind,
we've shared so much, we'll always be part of each other. I'm living with him, when he's here--which isn't very often--if that's what you really want to know. Mostly because he wants me so much, and when you've been that close to anyone, when you can--" she fumbled for words, "when you can feel how much he wants you, you can't turn your back on him, you can't leave him--hungry and unhappy. But whether or not we can make any kind of home together, whether we want to live together for the rest of our lives--I honestly don't know; I don't think so. We're too different." She gave him a straightforward smile that made the man's heart turn over and said, "I'd really be happier with you, on a long-term basis. We're so much more alike. Rafe's so gentle, so sweet, but you understand me better."
"You're carrying his child, and you can say this to me, Camilla ?"
"Does it shock you?" she asked, grieved, "I'm sorry, I wouldn't upset you for the world. Yes, it's Rafe's baby, and I'm glad, in a funny way. He wants it, and one parent ought to want a child; for me--I can't help it, I was brainwashed--it's still an accident of biology. If it was yours, for instance--and it could have been, the same kind of accident, just as Fiona's having your child and you hardly know her by sight--you'd have hated it, you'd have wanted me to fight against having it."
"I'm not so sure. Maybe not. Not now, anyhow," Harry Leicester said in a low voice. "Saying these things still upsets me, though. Shocks me. I'm too old, maybe."
She shook her head. "We've got to learn not to hide from each other. In a society where our children will grow up knowing that what they feel is an open book, what good is it going to be to keep sets of masks to wear from each other?"
"Frightening."
"A little. But they'll probably take it for granted." She leaned a little against him, easing her back against his chest. She reached back and took his fingers in hers. She said slowly, "Don't be shocked at this. But-if I live-if we both live-I'd like my next child to be yours."
He bent and kissed her on the forehead. He was almost too much moved to speak. She tightened her hand on his, then drew it away.
"I told MacAran this," she said matter-of-factly. "For genetic reasons, it's going to be a good thing for women to have children by different fathers. But--as I said--my reasons aren't quite as cold and unemotional as all that."
Her face took on a distant look--for a moment it seemed to Leicester that she was looking at something invisible through a veil--and for a moment contracted in pain; but to his quick, concerned question, she summoned a smile.
"No, I'm all right. Let's see what we can do about this year-length thing. Who knows, it might turn out to be our first National Holiday!"
The windmills were visible several miles from the Base Camp now, huge wooden-sailed constructs which supplied power for grinding flour and grain (nuts, harvested in the forest, made a fine slightly-sweet flour which would serve until the first crops of rye and oats were harvested) and also brought small trickles of electric power into the camp. But such power would always be in short supply on this world, and it was carefully rationed; for lights in the hospital, to operate essential machinery in the small metal shops and the new glass-house. Beyond the camp, with its own firebreak, was what they had begun to call New Camp, although the Hebrides Commune people who worked there called it New Skye; an experimental farm where Lewis MacLeod, and a group of assistants, were checking possibly domesticable animals.
Rafe MacAran, with his own small crew of assistants, paused to look back from the peak of the nearest hill before setting off into the forest The two camps could both clearly be seen, from here, and around them both was swarming activity, but there was some indefinable difference from any camp he had seen on Earth, and for a moment he could not put his finger on it. Then he knew what it was; it was the quiet. Or was it? There was really plenty of sound. The great windmills creaked and heaved in the strong wind. There were crisp distant sounds of hammering and sawing where the building crews were constructing winter buildings. The farm had its noises, including the noisy sounds of animals, the bellowings of the antlered mammals, the curious grunts, chirps, squeaks of unfamiliar life forms. And finally Rafe put his finger on it. There were no sounds which were not of natural origin. No traffic. No machinery, except the softly whirring potter's wheels and the clinkings of tools. Each one of these sounds had some immediate human deliberation behind it. There were almost no impersonal sounds. Every sound seemed to have a purpose, and it seemed strange and lonesome to Rafe. All his life he had lived in the great cities of Earth, where even in the mountains, the sounds of all-terrain vehicles, motorized transit, high-tension power lines, and jet planes overhead, provided a comforting background. Here it was quiet, frighteningly quiet because whenever a sound broke the stillness of wind, there was some immediate meaning to the sound. You couldn't tune it out. Whenever there was a sound, you had to listen to it. There were no sounds which could be carelessly disregarded because, like jets passing overhead or the drive of the starship, you knew they had nothing to do with you. Every sound in the landscape had some immediate application to the listener, and Rafe felt tense most of the time, listening.
Oh well. He supposed he'd get used to it.
He started instructing his group. "We'll work along the lower rock-ridges today, and especially in the streambeds. We want samples of every new-looking kind of earth--oh hell--soil. Every time the color of the c
lay or loam changes, take a sample of it, and locate it on the map--you're doing the mapping, Janice?" he asked the girl, and she nodded. "I'm working on grid paper. We'll get a location for every change of terrain."
The morning's work was relatively uneventful, except for one discovery near a stream-bed, which Rafe mentioned when they gathered to kindle a fire and make their noonday meal--nut-flour rolls to be toasted and "tea" of a local leaf which had a pleasant, sweet taste like sassafras. The fire was kindled in a quickly-piled rock fireplace--the colony's strongest law was never to build a fire on the ground without firebreaks or rock enclosures--and as the quick resinous wood began to burm down to coals, a second small party came down the slope toward them: three men, two women.
"Hello, can we join you for dinner? It'll save building another fire," Judy Lovat greeted them.
"Glad to have you," MacAran agreed, "but what are you doing in the woods, Judy? I thought you were exempt from manual work now."
The woman gestured. "As a matter of fact, I'm being treated like surplus luggage;" she said. "I'm not allowed to lift a finger, or do any real climbing, but it minimizes bringing samples back to camp if I can do preliminary field-testing on various plants. That's how we discovered the ropeweed. Ewen says the exercise will do me good, if I'm careful not to get overtired or chilled." She brought her tea and sat down beside him. "Any luck today?"
He nodded. "About time. For the last three weeks, every day, everything I brought in was just one more version of quartzite or calcite," he said. "Our last strike was graphite."