But nerves were tense during those three days. Aliens unloaded and inspected the foodstuffs intended for the men on the black ship. Men transshipped the foodstuffs the aliens would need to return to their home. There were endless details, from the exchange of lighting equipment to suit the eyesight of the exchanging crews, to a final check-up of apparatus. A joint inspection party of both races verified that all detector devices had been smashed but not removed, so that they could not be used for trailing and had not been smuggled away. And of course, the aliens were anxious not to leave any useful weapon on the black ship, nor the men upon the Lianvabon. It was a curious fact that each crew was best qualified to take exactly the measures which made an evasion of the agreement impossible.
There was a final conference before the two ships parted, back in the communication room of the Lianvabon.
“Tell the little runt,” rumbled the Lianvabon‘s former skipper, “that he’s got a good ship and he’d better treat her right.”
The message frame flicked word-cards into position. “I believe,” it said on the alien skipper’s behalf, “that your ship is just as good. I hope to meet you here when the double star has turned one turn.”
The last man left the Lianvabon. It moved away into the misty nebula before they had returned to the black ship. The vision plates in that vessel had been altered for human eyes, and human crewmen watched jealously for any trace of their former ship as their new craft took a crazy, evading course to a remote part of the nebula. It came to a crevasse of nothingness, leading to the stars. It rose swiftly to clear space. There was the instant of breathlessness which the overdrive field produces as it goes on, and then the black ship whipped away into the void at many times the speed of light.
Many days later, the skipper saw Tommy Dort poring over one of the strange objects which were the equivalent of books. It was, fascinating to puzzle over. The skipper was pleased with himself. The technicians of the Llanvabon’s former crew were finding out desirable things about the ship almost momently. Doubtless the aliens were as pleased with their discoveries in the Llanvabon. But the black ship would be enormously worthwhile and the solution that had been found was by any standard much superior even to combat in which the Earthmen had been overwhelmingly victorious.
“Hm-m-m. Mr. Dort,” said the skipper profoundly. “You’ve no equipment to make another photographic record on the way back. It was left on the Lianvabon. But fortunately, we have your record taken on the way out, and I shall report most favorably on your suggestion and your assistance in carrying it out. I think very well of you, sir.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Tommy.
He waited. The~ skipper cleared his throat.
“You…ah…first realized the close similarity of mental processes between the aliens and ourselves,” he observed. “What do you think of the prospects of a friendly arrangement if we keep a rendezvous with them at the nebula as agreed?”
“Oh, we’ll get along all right, sir,” said Tommy. “We’ve got a good start toward friendship. After all, since they see by infrared, the planets they’d want to make use of wouldn’t suit us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t get along. We’re almost alike in psychology.”
“Hm-m-m. Now just what do you mean by that?” demanded the skipper.
“Why, they’re just like us, sir!” said Tommy. “Of course they breathe through gills and they see by heat waves, and their blood has a copper base instead of iron and a few little details like that. But otherwise we’re just alike! There were only men in their crew, sir, but they have two sexes as we have and they have families, and er…their sense of humor- In fact-” Tommy hesitated.
“Go on, sir,” said the skipper.
“Well…There was the one I call Buck, sir, because he hasn’t any name that goes into sound waves,” said Tommy. “We got along very well. I’d really call him my friend, sir. And we were together for a couple of hours just before the two ships separated and we’d nothing in particular to do. So I became convinced that humans and aliens are bound to be good friends if they have only half a chance. You see, sir, we spent those two hours telling dirty jokes.”
“…thus Yd wills, thus Yd commands, thus let it be.”
The hymn ended. Young Green-Eyed She, Wink to her friends, slowly let her long- held violet note fade. No priestess or soloist, the merest novice, she nonetheless took pride in her ability to emit the precise frequency of God in the holy refrain, and to maintain it with never a waver; she found a satisfaction in the skill with which she disappeared into the anonymity of the chorus. Red-Footed He was not the only friend who tuned from her spectrum, when Choirmaster wasn’t looking.
A sparkling and twinkling erupted in the night, from the shadowed lawn below the City of God—the populace praising the singers, and adding their devout “amens.” Wink’s eyestalks stretched yearningly toward the Holy Water, peering out over that place, barely discernible in the gathering dusk, where bulked what might have been a small island. But if God had seen the hymn, Yd gave no sign.
Choirmaster dimmed until he radiated only in the infrared, but for a dull, gray- yellow pulse that rippled across his abdomen: a disappointed sigh. He quickly blanked it, and blinked a curt dismissal at his young protégés.
Matins over, they scattered to begin the long night’s activities, claws clattering over limestone, blipping and glimmering idle chatter. Wink found Red at her shoulder.
“Have you seen the latest rumor?” His eyestalks extended suggestively.
“No, nor do I wish to, lazy hatchling,” she replied virtuously, in disapproving blues and grays. “Have you nothing better to do than to spy upon peripheral reflections?”—That is, unreliable communications.
“Not a thing!” Red twinkled cheerfully, his habitual good humor unruffled. “Watch: there’s to be a shake-up in the Servants’ Corps.” ‘
She flashed him a disgusted greenish-yellow smudge.
“Feh?…Always there are such rumors! Your brain must be even smaller than I have always suspected it to be. The rumors grow to brilliance, the novices waste their time jostling one another when they could be studying, and then the rumor fades away into the sensible darkness of nightly life, leaving only frustrations and broken friendships for its beacon. And why any novice ever expects the theoretical vacancies to be filled from our ranks, rather than from the Fishers, whom God knows have earned it, is beyond me.”
“Well, naturally everyone dreams of avoiding the hazards of Fishing, and wants to skip right up to Servant status. Hope springs eternal in the mortal thorax, however irrational,” he admitted in a sheepish sine wave down his middle. “Still, I saw this from a good authority: Sweetscales saw it direct from The Gimp, who happened to glimpse two Elders talking about it.”
“Dim your nonsense, naming people!” she sparked tightly. “An Elder may be watching us even now!”
He reduced his intensity but slightly, an indifferent concession. “So? Let him, her, or Yd watch. Want to see something else?”
“No.”
“Gimp also says—” he began.
She rolled her eyes—a complex gesture, with eyestalks—then shrugged her carapace and laughed, staccato orange and silver rays fountaining outward from her braincase to disappear around behind her.
“Oh well! I can perceive that you won’t be happy until you’ve shown me everything you know about anything, so go on; I have a few moments.”
He snapped an impudent claw beneath her jaws, but returned to his gossip with relish. “The Gimp says that this time they really are going to throw out some Servants, maybe as many as seven or eight. And there really is a possibility that they won’t replace them with Fishers, at least not all of them. Yd says that God’s long absence from our songs and ceremonies has so alarmed the priests and Elders that they are beginning to wonder whether the current Servants have offended Ydjn some way, or even whether perhaps the entire system needs a change. There were hints of an experiment. And look, everyone knows that something
happens to the Fishers, out there in the wilderness. Only some of them are elevated by the experience, or unchanged. Many return…altered, unfit to resume life in the City of God, unfit for anything but Fishing, in fact. So why couldn’t that rumored experiment be that the Elders intend to try putting novices in as Servants?”
“Your path of logic crosses deep chasms of wishful thinking, Red,” she chuckled. “As for me, I look forward to my tour of duty as a Fisher.”
“Yah, even if it makes you a savage?” he challenged, fringing affectionate magenta spiral patterns with jeering yellow filaments.
“What could be more devout and blessed than to spend one’s life feeding God?” Wink rejoined, in pious purples and greens.
“To spend it serving Yd in comfort, right here in the City of God!”
Wink only laughed, and kept her reservations private.
But, three nights later, it was Wink herself whom a Servant of God stopped, as she creaked down the muddy path to the Lake to make a small votive offering.
“Are you Green-Eyed She?” flashed the Servant.
“Yes, honored one,” Wink glimmered, almost invisibly.
“Follow me. And turn up your brights; I am getting old and can no longer see certain frequencies as well as once I could,” he brusquely ordered, and turned to scuttle up a branching path with a celerity that belied his age.
Wink said, faintly, “Yes, sir! I mean, YES, SIR!”
“You needn’t light up the City, hatchling, I’m not that blind yet!…Not yet too blind to talk, not yet so blind as to throw myself into Holy Water for God to eat, no, by God, not yet!” Wink realized he was glimmering to himself, and wisely kept dark.
For the first time in her life, she found herself inside the great stone temple that incorporated the original pier built by the Founders in ancient days. The blank, empty thoracic shells of long-ago Supreme Hierophants lined the walls leading to this most holy of sacrificial altars, standing sentinel over the ages. But the elderly Servant ushered her off into a side chamber and through a maze of passageways ending in—Wink gave one swift green blink of surprise, hastily mantled—the High Priest’s office.
“This is the she,” said her guide, who turned and clittered back the way they’d come.
The venerable priest looked her over for some moments in lightlessness, stalks twitching meditatively.
“Well, you are Green-Eyed She, called, I believe, Wink,” he began, finally. “Choirmaster speaks well of you, praising the purity and clarity of your spectrum. He has ventured the opinion that with accelerated training, you could achieve a certain virtuosity in very fine discrimination of wavelengths.—Well, and what have you to say to that?”
“That—that I am honored by the Choirmaster, and hope to earn his words.” Wink was completely taken aback by this unprecedented interview.
“I also see from your broodfoster Longstalks that you seemed to have a true and early vocation to the Service; and everyone to whom I have spoken assures me that you are not, unlike so many others, in it for the cushy berths that may be had if one survives the risks of Fishing. Eh? Are you a gambler? Do you like to see and reflect rumors about novices skipping up directly into Service? Eh?”
Wink went deep burnt sienna from embarrassment. Obviously someone had observed and reported the conversation with Red. “No, honored one. I saw such an idea once, true, but paid it no thought. And I certainly didn’t reflect it on! I do not seek to avoid my duty as a Fisher. Rather, I conceive it to be an honor. One knows that all Servants of God have truly earned the privileges they enjoy, for they have all been Fishers. If a novice were to become a Servant without having first been a Fisher, the respect for the entire Service would soon decline.”
The old he chuckled, little silvery sparks shivering over his carapace. “Your words look very much like ones I saw yesternight, in a very long, actinic argument. Well, we shall leave that, for the moment.
“Now I shall put you through your catechism.
“Who is God?”
The sudden switch nearly caught Wink off guard.
“God is Yd Who created world and sky, both the stars that sing and the sun that chastises, and Who fashioned mortals out of the mud and reeds of the shore of Holy Water; eternal, all wise, all powerful, all good.”
“What is the purpose of life?”
“To serve God.”
“Where do we go when we die?”
“Into the mud and water of Holy Lake, whence we came, for the greater glory of God, who hungers for our sake.”
“If God knows no gender as mortals know it, why do we call God Yd?”
“Because Yd nurtures us, Yd’s mortal hatchlings.”
“Who is the Evil One?”
“The Enemy of all life, who in the beginning of time sent devil slaves against the Favored People of God; but God strengthened them and aided their counsels, and wrestled with the demons, and vanquished the Evil One.”
“That’s enough. All very correct. Now, what if I were to tell you that all of those things are false, that Yd created neither world nor sky, nor fashioned mortals out of mud or anything else, nor is eternal, all-wise, all-powerful, all-good; and the purpose of life is merely to live and grow and change; and while we do indeed go into Holy Lake to be consumed by God when we die, it is more to ease the burden on the Corps of Fishers than for anyone’s glory; and Yd had made only one offspring in Yd’s life, and that one died; and though God may once have tricked a few of the Evil One’s underlings, Yd certainly never vanquished the Evil One, who is not the enemy of any land-locked life.”
Wind had gone black with shock. “But who would dare blaspheme so—?”
“God dares.”
It was nearly dawn before she lurched from the temple, dazed and quivering. Nor did she hurry to reach the cool safety of her broodhome, but trudged slowly, ruminating. Even when the eastern sky began to whiten and blaze, still she remained more absorbed in the equally blasting illumination within. Only when a fearful, sickly-green alarm blared in her eyes did she realize how late it was. Her broodfoster had come out searching for her, and now Yd hustled her along, rattling with anxiety, and blinking and scolding all the way. They kept their eyes curled down below their ventral flanges, hunched against the rising sun.
After reaching the thick rock shelter of the warren, and after escaping her foster’s worried lecture, she fled deep into the convoluted passageways, to her own solitary little niche—granted her upon her acceptance into the novitiate. Here she could know peace….
No. Nor ever again.
For how could she have peace when the High Priest had destroyed the foundations of her universe, even as his own had been destroyed—by God Ydself—some night before?
. For God’s recent indifference to us had been a matter of grave concern for some time,” old Mottling Quickly Changing had told her, when she had partially recuperated from her first shock and bewilderment. “And the highest among us went to the altar and called out to Yd. But Yd saw us not, or refused to see. Then I ordered out the vessel, and taking two others with me to bear witness—and to row—I went in search of God, far out onto the dark waters of the Lake. Then God arose, and I quailed before Yd’s vast majesty, and Yd said, ‘What would you of me, little hatchling?’ And I gathered my wits, and said, ‘Your children desire to know by what cause you are wroth with them, and what it is they must do to regain your grace.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I am not wroth, but deep in thought, for the time approaches for many changes and great events.’ Then Yd put me through my catechism, as I did you; and Yd told me—Yd showed me—wonders—terrors—and—and we rowed back, my priests and I, that black, starless night, blinded by the light.”
“What did Yd tell you—?” she had dared to ask.
“I think I will let Yd tell you all about it, Ydself.”
She, she was to see God, to speak to Yd, to watch Yd’s slow, divine words with her own eyes! She, Wink!
“—Why me?” she had shimmered desperately.
“It is God’s will that one go who is young, healthy, strong—that rules out most of the Servants—skilled in communication, skilled in song, whole, sound of mind—that rules out an unfortunately large percentage of Fishers and former Fishers, Servants or not—and especially one who is patient, openminded, not overly inculcated with the truisms of our society, intuitive, imaginative, and exceedingly intelligent. That rules out most of the general populace; besides, we deem it advisable to keep these new ideas within the Service, for the time being. We also add our own requirements that the candidate have a good citizenship record and a firm understanding of the concept of duty. I made inquiries among the Corps of Priests and the Corps of Broodmasters, seeking names; yours appeared most often.
“As for your entering the ranks of the Servants, it is well known that only a Servant of God may speak and understand the special words of God, is it not? You will take up your new duties as soon as you can complete the special training.”
“…Let it be as you will it, honored one,” she glimmered softly. “But am I then never to become a Fisher?”
“You had truly anticipated that?”
“I had awaited it, not with pleasure, perhaps, but with…curiosity.”
He contemplated her a moment. “The ascetic in you, no doubt. This will be an adventure far greater.”
God spoke not as mortals spoke. Who could guess how the divine might meditate within itself upon the universe, or might—staggering thought—commune with other entities of its own kind? For the puny understanding of mortals, however, God had created a light-emitting organ of Yd’s own holy flesh, not one that worked as mortals’ did, but one large, and slow, and simple, and stilted in its expression, as befitted the stately dignity of a God.
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