by C. Gockel
He sighed and then leaned close to kiss her forehead. Shaken, she moved close, into his embrace. “This reminds me,” he said into her hair. “I wanted to say good-bye in relative privacy. This is as good a chance as any, eh?”
“It won’t be forever. Quarantine’s over, and there will be coming and going.”
“Will you miss me when I’m gone?” he asked.
On impulse, she kissed him. Feeling warm for the first time in hours, she wrapped herself as close to him as clothing would allow, and wished she could have been closer still.
“Hot damn!”
Catharin whirled to see Alvin leaning on the nearest corner, grinning wickedly. She remembered what Becca had said about Alvin’s odds-making activities, and her voice came out hard as cold-soaked metal. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
Alvin actually took a step back. “I am. Sam and Eddy sent me to look for you two.”
“Then go tell them you found us and we’re coming. I emphasize, go!”
Thanks to Alvin, the passionate and vulnerable moment had evaporated. Catharin told Joe, “We better go our separate ways before they send that hobgoblin after us again.”
It was very late, nearly Green-midnight, at Camp Darwin, where the river ran flat and tranquil under the dark night sky. Half of the women from Unity Base, plus Kay Montana, wandered around Camp Darwin looking at the stars or the river while waiting for Sam to return with the last jeep-load of attendees. Off to one side, Becca sat by the water alone.
Catharin went toward Becca and knelt in front of her. “I’m sorry I snapped at you after the meal. I did need to talk to Joe. You were completely right.”
Becca patted the rock she was sitting on.
Catharin accepted the invitation and sat. “Furthermore, I am profoundly sorry that I made a fool of myself.”
“In a weird way, it all fit together. Even your arguing with Joe. Did you make peace?”
“Yes.” She was relieved that so much of what had come loose last night was mended now. Feeling the weariness that she had been fending off all day, Catharin would have been glad to sit here indefinitely.
“I told Domino I’m going up to the Ship. And why. That’s why he was so ill-tempered with Joe.”
“Can he accept what’s happened?”
“He’ll come around,” Becca said. “It’ll do us good to be apart for a while so the upset on both sides can cool off. But I’m probably going to feel sick as a dog on the shuttle. I don’t look forward to it.”
“Morning sickness never killed anybody. It has a purpose—to keep you from ingesting toxins. I was wondering how to signal you not to drink the beer.”
Becca nodded. “I only took a symbolic sip.”
They heard a vehicle motor, increasingly loud on the quiet air. “Here they come!” Tezi announced. “Everybody look religious.”
With the last jeep-load of women trailing behind her, Sam strode into Camp Darwin. “Let’s take off our shoes, sisters.”
Catharin complied. This felt sillier than Aaron’s feast, which had been a dignified if odd affair. On the Ship, it was Srivastava and Lary attempting to cooperate in some kind of Hindu/Unitarian ritual, complete with incense: Part Two of Joel’s folly, Upstairs edition.
“Thisaway, sisters,” Sam called. “A short walk to the main river.”
“In bare feet?” Maya objected.
“The ground is mossy and soft.”
“And presumably nontoxic,” Catharin murmured.
Single file, the women wound their way between the trees at the edge of the fern forest beside the water. The moss underfoot felt so fuzzy that it almost tickled Catharin’s bare feet.
Where the canopy thinned, the stars threw down just enough light to see everyone else as shining shapes. “We walk in moonlight and starlight—” Sam intoned.
From Becca came, “Yipe! I stepped on a zucchini slug!”
The line of women reshuffled into a circle around the slug.
“I hope I didn’t hurt it!”
Sam bent over the slug. “It’s fine.”
“That’s one of the slug things?” asked Kay. “They have shiny dots on their hides?”
The slug moved with a shivering motion across the moss toward the water. “What’d it feel like?” asked Tezi, jumping out of the slug’s way. “Nasty?”
“Like suede,” said Becca. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”
The slug vanished into a stand of swampcress beside the water. Continuing, the women came to a peninsula between tributary and river. A crescent Blue shone over the river, blurred by cloud. The rest of the sky blazed with stars, and the water gleamed blue and silver.
Maya asked, “Are we going to have a ritual?”
Sam answered, “Not the way I think you mean. No bell, book, and candle. Ritual is when the magic goes away. To begin with, let’s just listen to the night.”
Catharin soon realized that she had never experienced a silence like this. Even in Earth’s cities sparrows and crickets could be heard. This land was silent as a library.
Sam finally said, “Let’s all sit down in a circle. Let’s introduce ourselves. We have names here that mean something important, names from women’s history.”
Catharin nodded to herself, a private guess confirmed: Sam practiced a womanist flavor of paganism.
“For example, Samantha is an old English and New England name. Several of the witches executed in Salem were named Samantha.”
The group rustled.
“Go around the circle counterclockwise; leave out surnames—which are male inventions.”
“Well—I’m Maya.”
“The power of the Hindu gods for illusion and dream. As powers go, that’s a high feminine one.”
Maya trilled, “So many girls are named Maya—I never thought of it that way!”
“I’m Sheryn, which doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means you,” Sam answered. “The heroine of your own story.”
“I’m Tezandra Matsuko,” said Tezi. “Grandma Tezandra was a community organizer. Grandmother Matsuko was a dentist.”
Sam approved. “Strong foremothers.”
“Kay. Arthurian hero. Male.” Kay sounded unapologetic.
“It’s good to steal the thunder of their names,” said Sam.
“Catharin, a saint, spelled differently,” Catharin murmured.
“I think we should call you by another name here. A circle name.”
“Well, my middle name is Firenze, the city Florence. Flowers.”
“How nice,” said Maya.
Sam said, “I mean Medicine Woman.”
Catharin objected. “I do not pretend to cure people with herbs and chants.”
“Medicine people put people in harmony with the powers of life and death. You might try it some day.” Sam gestured at Becca.
“Rebecca is from the Bible, and so is my middle name, Marie, it’s a form of Mary.”
“Now, that’s quite a name,” said Sam. “By some lights, Mary was the ultimate male-dominated woman, pious, barefoot, and pregnant.”
Becca curled into a little ball.
Sam continued, “Yet she was the Mother of God. And in Mexico, she became the Virgin of Guadalupe—the dark-skinned Maria standing on a crescent moon; a new image of an old Moon Goddess.”
Catharin felt an urgent need for the topic to be changed. “Are you going to introduce us to a moon goddess here, Sam?”
“No. Kay is.”
Becca caught Catharin’s eye. In the bright darkness, Catharin could read her body language. Does Sam know?Catharin shrugged, a tense motion to telegraph back, I don’t know how she could.
Kay produced a glass vial that gleamed in the moon- and starlight.
“If we were all pagans, she’d be Woman Who Drew Down the Moon,” said Sam, her voice capitalizing the phrase.
Kay snorted.
“Pass it around.”
Catharin’s night vision had improved. She could see the vial passing from
hand to hand. Her night hearing had improved too, detecting purls from the river, and the audible breathing of Kay and Becca on each side of her. Then there was a muffled giggle from Becca. Maya asked, “Whatever is funny?”
“I had a really irreverent idea. I should keep it to myself.”
“Don’t bother. I don’t stand on reverence,” said Sam.
“I just imagined the people up on the Ship having a religious procession and carrying Tango Twenty-One on a pillow. The spider that brought the sample back. With its little eyestalks looking around—”
Laughter overflowed from the circle as Catharin received the vial from Becca, who, though still giggling, carefully placed it in her hand. Catharin felt the contents slide from one end of the vial to the other. The vial held half of a pebble.
Blue rode in the sky over the plateau to the west. Framed by a sapphire crescent, its dark side glimmered with ceaseless storms.
The human race once more for the first time beheld a bright, changeable globe in the night sky. And reacted with fascination. And fear. And worship. Have we crossed the stars just to fall back to superstitious square one? Catharin handed the moon vial back to Kay abruptly, like a hot potato.
“It was planeformed, so what do you do with that?” Kay asked Sam. “That moon doesn’t seem like a goddess to me.”
“I do hope you realize that Wiccans and New Pagans didn’t make pilgrimages to Earth’s Moon,” Sam said dryly. “It was scientists and museum curators who made shrines for Moon rocks. The Moon was holy because it was a mirror of our lives. It showed us the reality of change, by its phases, and imperfection, by its cratered appearance.” Catharin caught an overtone of lecture. Sam had, after all, been a university professor on Earth, and old work habits die hard. “Medieval thinkers made it the lowest sphere of heaven—downgraded it on the same grounds that pagans worshipped it. It changes.”
“And so does Blue,” said Catharin, anticipating where Sam was going.
“But it’s decorated,” said Maya.
“Those islands aren’t painted on. They’re the peaks of undersea mountain ranges. That world was changed!”
A muffled sniffle was audible in the silent night.
“Sheryn?” Sam said.
“I miss Luna. I was born there. I’m sorry I left.”
“Luna is hundreds of light-years away, but her influence is woven throughout our evolution, our bodies,” said Sam. “We women are joined to the powers of life and change and birth. Birth scares the men. That’s why we scare them. But change doesn’t have to scare us. It’s the power of the Goddess.”
Maya said, “I’ve never thought of that. But it feels true somehow.”
“The ultimate change is death,” Sam went on. “Joe is right. It’s a part of life.”
It did not feel true to Catharin. Death is my enemy and I’m so afraid it won. We were too close to death for too long.
Sam saw her shaking her head. “Don’t you agree, Medicine Woman?”
Catharin crossed her arms, refusing to answer to that name.
Maya said, “Oh, no, the moon’s gone!”
“Set behind the plateau,” said Tezi.
“So is this the end of the show?” asked Kay.
“There’s magic here,” said Sam. “Sometimes I can feel it when I’m out here in the field.”
“How?” asked Maya.
“Turn around. Each of you pretend to be alone here.”
It was not the cloud-shrouded moon that Catharin faced, but rather the mountain. The mountain was a molehill on this green world from space. But from here it stood as a huge shape against the stars. A wind blew. The fern trees on the lower slopes of the mountain quivered like the fur of a great beast. It wore its name lightly—Unity Mountain, a tag applied only a year ago, a minute of the mountain’s ancient life, ago.
Becca edged closer until she bumped into Catharin. The mountain’s presence was so monumental, and so nameless, that Catharin intuitively knew how Becca felt: daunted and, because of the fragile embryo within her, vulnerable. Instinctively Catharin put her arms around the smaller woman, as if to protect her from the mountain’s nameless and un-human presence. With a relieved gasp, Becca clung like a small child.
Sam made her way around the circle whispering. Catharin froze, wondering if Sam was going to scold both of them for not playing her game correctly.
Sam had to reach around Catharin to put her hands on Becca’s shoulder. “Blessing to you and the child within,” she breathed, almost too softly to hear. Becca quivered.
Then the hands moved to Catharin’s shoulder. Sam whispered into her ear. “Healer—if you don’t like being called Medicine Woman—for you my blessing is a question. Are you against death, or for life?”
Going out into the night with the other men, Joe felt like he was coming down with something drastic. He ached, he felt dizzy, he had a chill that shivered into hot fever and back again. Maybe he would get sick. Maybe Catharin would take care of him.
Eddy and Wimm led the procession of men away from the dome. They held hands, which evidently bothered Domino, who muttered loudly enough for most of the group to hear, “I don’t know why I’m going along with this.”
“I do,” said Joe. “Becca asked you to.”
Domino turned with an expression of dislike clearly visible in the dim light of the dome. Alvin sniggered.
At the edge of the bare mountaintop near the furry pines, Eddy chirped, “Didn’t we all used to flop down on the ground and look at the sky when we were kids? Spread your blankets—in a circle—and let’s look up at the stars.”
Joe was glad enough to lie down. He felt terrible. Wing neatly unfurled a blanket beside Joe’s.
“You don’t mind doing a pagan thing?” Alvin asked Wing.
“God is one,” Wing replied.
“Have you thought about the Goddess?” Eddy asked brightly.
“The Goddess Kuan-Lin was worshipped by my ancestors in China, and my heart has not abandoned that face of God.”
Domino jerked on his blanket, which rasped against the lichen on the ground. “I thought you were a priest!”
“I am.”
“Don’t argue. Let’s free-associate,” said Eddy. “What does the sky make everyone think about?”
Aaron responded, “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe.”
“Hail Mary, Queen of Heaven,” said Domino. It came out sounding like a rejoinder to Aaron.
“Speaking of goddesses.” Wimm sounded pleasant.
“Mary is not a goddess!” Domino sat up, indignant.
“This is fun,” said Alvin.
“It might be religious, if some of the religious types would get over their differences,” said Wimm, sounding testy.
Lazlo Tulsa, the shuttle pilot, said, “I’m not a religious man. My granddad was a backyard astronomer who showed me the stars from the time I learned to walk. And that’s what led me here.” The stars were brilliant and legion, diamond dust strewn across the sky.
Joe fidgeted. “The stars don’t make me think of gods or goddesses or granddads. There are galaxies of galaxies of them, and black holes that we can’t see. How the hell can anybody be happy with that?”
“God created it,” Aaron said.
“But we’re less than nothing in this cosmos. Not even just insignificant and temporary, less than that.” And this is what I ran to when I left Earth! The stars that he so carelessly aimed himself toward burned his soul with their incalculable immensity and indifference. Joe’s heart thudded. He wondered if he was going to have a heart attack.
Eddy seemed at a loss for a quick answer. Wing offered, “Before the thought of God, the Creator of this universe, can delight me, I have to meet the Christ or the Goddess or some other manifestation of God in a form close to me in kind and form. Otherwise the love of God is not real to me, and I am stricken by the magnitude of the universe and by my smallness and mortality.”
Domino contradicted him. “There’s only one Christ.
”
Wing persisted pleasantly, “One Jesus, but more than one compassionate human face of God. Mary, for example. And Buddha. And Kuan-Lin.”
“You’re a polytheist!” Domino sounded aghast. “Next you’ll say Christ is anybody!”
“Sometimes,” Wing agreed.
“I think we Jews found God’s close and compassionate face in our history,” said Aaron, sounding meditative.
“For pagans it’s nature,” said Wimm. “Especially trees.”
“Is the nature of DNA more close and comforting to you than the stars?” Wing asked Joe softy.
Joe knew what he would have said a year or a star flight ago. Yes, when I move genes and bring new life into being.
But Catharin wanted him to take up the challenge of a blasted human genome. And that was too much like these stars: a remote and implacable cosmos of possibility, in which the hidden black holes of critical damage were many and incalculable. Joe’s throat constricted. Allergic reaction? What the hell was wrong with him tonight? He managed to whisper to Wing, “Not anymore. I’ve realized it can be as terrible as it is fascinating.”
“Ah, Joe, you have the soul of an unconverted saint,” said Wing. “Your ancestors said that God is the mystery that terrifies and fascinates.”
“But I can’t stand it!” Joe rasped through his tight throat.
“Of course not—not until you recognize your Christ or Goddess and take comfort in her.”
Joe tried to swallow, and found he couldn’t. Wing was wrong. He wasn’t having a religious crisis. He was sick. And it had come on as fast as any of Earth’s savage viruses. Maybe he would be dead by morning.
“Look at Blue,” said Eddy, sounding excited.
The crescent moon stood just above the horizon. Beneath it, a silvery-blue radiance covered the plateau that lay to the west of Unity Mountain.
“There’s fog on the plateau, and the moon’s illuminated it,” said Wimm.
“It looks like blue silk,” Aaron murmured.
Joe discovered a new symptom in himself. A ringing in his ears. It reminded him of how his ears rang the day Catharin brought him out of stasis. Inner-ear nerve damage—audible evidence of more extensive damage to his nervous system? Was stumbling into things, stepping on Catharin’s foot that night, just stasis-muddled coordination, or would it be more like Gehrig’s disease?