by Speer, Flora
“Everything we had heard about the Empty Sector proved true. We had many remarkable adventures during which we lost too many of our number. We searched more than a hundred planets before agreeing to settle on this one. By then there were only sixty-four of us left. We were weary of endless space travel, and this world’s gravity and atmosphere were acceptable to all of us. We explored the planet completely, mapped all of it, and chose the location of our settlement with great care. Then we removed from the ship all materials and equipment we could possibly use, including the two computer-communicators that we had brought with us. We set the self-destruct mechanism and sent our ship out of its orbit around this world, heading toward the very center of the Empty Sector. We believe it did explode on schedule, for we saw brilliant flashes of light across the sky for three nights afterward.
“We cleared land and built our settlement. We farmed the rich soil, and for the most part lived in harmony with each other. We had endured so much together during our long journey that unbreakable bonds had been forged that transcended individual or Racial differences. After a few years some of us wanted a quieter place where we could retreat into privacy or solitude from time to time, and so this building was created, half a world away from the main settlement.
“I should speak about the flora and fauna of our planet. Some of us were botanists, and they brought with them familiar plants. Others brought beneficial insects, or small mammals as pets, not knowing where we would settle, but wanting some part of their old lives to survive in the new. Most of these species flourished, adding to the lushness of the plant and animal life we found here. There are no large predators, but there is one species of extremely poisonous snake. I urge you to avoid it. Most other fauna are small and harmless, and usually friendly.
“I come now to the birds. We call them the Chon, for their repeating cries. If you have seen them, you know of their large size. They are blue or green, native to this planet, and they are semi-intelligent. They have the ability to communicate by a primitive kind of image transference, which is just short of actual telepathy. Because of our own telepathic abilities, we have been able to train them to help and protect us. They appear to pass learned information on to the next generation, so each generation is more intelligent, and therefore more useful to us, than the last.
No coercion was used in this process of learning. The birds themselves instigated it. They are curious and friendly, and since they can fly and we cannot, they are able to gather certain kinds of information more easily than we can.
“Children were born to some of us. I recovered from my broken heart and took a mate, and we had a son and a daughter. For one hundred of this planet ‘s years we flourished in peace.
“That is not quite one hundred Official Years, which is to say, time as it is kept at the Capital of the Jurisdiction and which is by decree used on all Service spaceships, whether it be the natural time of the spaceships’ crews or not. Once we had landed here, we made our own calendars in keeping with the rhythms of this world, and ours is a shorter year with a slightly longer day.
“All the same, we lived more than a human‘s normal life span, and it was the same for the other Races among us. We believed it was something in the soil or the water. It scarcely mattered which. We were happy, most of us, and certain we were entirely safe.
“After one hundred of our years, we were found by a Cetan ship that had gone off course. They came to rape and pillage and loot, and we were defenseless against their savagery. They took much of material value, and all that was priceless - our young men and women. The old and the very young they killed. Twelve of us, old folk all, survived by hiding, and later made our way to this island, which the Cetans had not found. We watched on the computer screen as the Cetans left our world, and we saw their ship explode before it left orbit. We had received a telepathic message from a young man aboard it. Our sons and daughters, though captive, had found a way to sabotage the ship and had chosen to blow it up and die rather than live in slavery. Thus perished a people who wanted only to live in peace.
“We twelve survivors lived on here. We had no heart to return to the main settlement, and our friends the birds were nearby. They make their homes in the cliffs next to the island. Many of them were killed by the Cetans for cruel sport and for their glorious plumage, or when they tried to protect us. Their numbers are now badly diminished, but they will recover in time and reproduce again.
“We on the island were not so fortunate. We were all too old to produce young ones. I am the last of our group, and when I die, we will be extinct. The non-humans among us went first, six of them, and then my dear mate and two more within a day of each other. We remaining three lived on, adding the sum of our individual knowledge to the computer’s memory banks. At last there were only two of us. Ten days ago my dear friend Tula died, who stood by me through heartache and joy for so many years, and I dug the last grave in the burial plot on the side of the island nearest the cliffs. The birds will watch over all of them.
“For myself there will be no grave, unless the one who reads this when I am gone will inter my remains. All is in order here on the island. I have finished with the computer. Its memory banks were filled with information about the planet and our lives here. But I have never trusted machinery. I much prefer the mind, human or other, and so I have turned off the power and have handwritten this very brief account of our history. I do not know if anyone will ever find it, but still I hope.
“I grow tired. I will rest a while, and for safety’s sake, I will lock the notebook and the key for the computer into a drawer. The couch looks most inviting.”
Tarik closed the book, his face solemn.
“And so,” he said softly, “Dulan locked up the book and the key, and went across the room to rest. And very likely never rose again.”
“How lonely it must have been,” Narisa whispered, “to be the last, with such memories and nothing to do but wait for death. Tarik, we still don’t know if the writer was a man or a woman.”
“I suppose,” he said reluctantly, “that information is somewhere in the computer. Or there might be medical information that would help us analyze the bones. I know men and women have different pelvic bones, and there are other skeletal differences. But I don’t think I want to disturb Dulan except to bury the remains with proper respect. Does it really matter so much? That person on the couch, of whatever gender, was a victim of the Jurisdiction.”
“No, of the Cetans.” Narisa’s eyes narrowed, her lips curled with the contempt and disgust she felt. “Always the Cetans, those vile creatures.”
“The Cetans have been blamed for entirely too much. The people who died on this planet would not have been found here, totally unprotected, if the Assembly had not banished them from the Jurisdiction,” Tarik said flatly. “They were only a few of the millions who died needlessly from one cause or other, not all of them having to do with the Cetans. Don’t try to defend the Act of Banishment, or the Assembly that passed it, to me.”
Narisa believed he was still angry with her for her earlier rejection of him, and that was why he spoke so sharply now. Perhaps, also, he had been as affected as she by Dulan’s story and wanted to hide his feelings.
She had always been taught that telepaths were an immoral, wicked group, but faced with this tragic story, she could feel only sympathy for Dulan and the other settlers.
Surely, in all the wide galaxy, there ought to be room to accommodate those who were different from Jurisdiction norms.
She decided to overlook Tarik’s remarks, as she had tried to thrust out of her mind other things he had said about the Jurisdiction and the Assembly that ruled it. She kept silent, not wanting to irritate him further, and not wanting to admit aloud her own sudden qualms about an important Jurisdiction law. The unsettled feeling she had experienced since landing on this planet had intensified as she listened to Dulan’s story. The possibility that the laws the Assembly made were sometimes wrong or even unnecessarily cruel had oc
curred to her before and had been rejected. She could not reject that possibility now. And if one law was wrong, others could be, too. She frowned, feeling that such ideas were disloyal to all her training.
Tarik’s slightly raised voice broke into her troubled thoughts. She realized he had been speaking to her for a while and had apparently taken her lengthening silence tor indifference.
“Have you no curiosity, Narisa? Wouldn’t you like to see the main settlement Dulan’s people built?”
“Yes, I would,” she admitted, glad to discuss a neutral subject. “I admire their courage, Tarik. They could not help being born telepaths, and I don’t doubt they suffered terribly for their talents. They must have built a remarkable settlement, but wouldn’t it have been destroyed to its foundations by the Cetans? It’s probably covered with forest after so many centuries. Why don’t we investigate the information stored in the computer before we start exploring? Dulan said the main settlement was half the planet away from here.” The thought of setting out on foot for another long journey through thick forest or across dry, stony desert was too much for her to deal with after the last few days. She had not realized just how worn out she was. She couldn’t help drooping in her chair.
Tarik noticed. “We both need a rest before doing any more traveling,’ he conceded. “This is the best place to do that. You are right about searching the computer’s memory banks. However, I think the first thing we should do is bury Dulan, as he, or she, wanted. He glanced upward toward the round window in the high dome. “It has stopped raining. I’ll go look for the burial ground.”
“I’m going with you,” Narisa said.
“As you wish. But sit where you are and eat that wafer while I try to find whatever Dulan used to dig the other graves.”
Narisa was content to do just that. She even put her feet up on the second chair, and was half asleep when Tarik came out of one of the storerooms with a shovel in his hand.
“Isn’t it interesting,” he remarked, “that there are some things that don’t change? In spite of all our technological advances, Dulan’s shovel is basically the same as the ones we use today, and it is probably not so different from the shovels used a million years ago. Every Race with hands has something similar.”
“You look remarkably happy for a man who’s about to dig a grave,” she noted.
“I prefer this to sending ashes into space the way we do, and we know a grave here on the island is what Dulan wanted,” he replied.
They had trouble finding the ancient grave site. The island was larger than they had thought, and Dulan had written only that it was on the side nearest the cliffs.
“What we need,” Narisa remarked after they had tramped back and forth for a while, unsuccessful in their efforts, “is a bird with a long memory to help us.”
“Call one.” Tarik was testing the ground around an oddly shaped stone that he thought might have been used as a marker for the graveyard, and thus he answered her absently.
“I don’t know how.” Narisa wondered whether Dulan had called aloud or had some instrument to bring the birds when they were needed.
Dulan used the powers of the mind. That long-dead person had been telepathic, after all. Narisa, lacking that power, could not summon them. She wished she could. How lovely it would be simply to think of a bird, the blue one with the scratched beak for instance, and have it come. She could imagine it, blue wings spread, gliding in to land beside her.
“Chon. Chon-chon. Chon.”
Narisa spun around. The blue bird folded its wings and stood watching her. Behind her, Tarik laughed aloud.
“Did you call it?” he asked.
“No, I only thought how nice it would be if it came to help us. I’m not a telepath, Tarik,” she added defensively.
“You are not, but the bird is. Why don’t we both think about Dulan, and digging a grave near the other ones, and see what happens?”
Only a day before, Narisa would have protested that what Tarik had just suggested was against Jurisdiction law. But Dulan’s story had changed her thought patterns until she could not believe there had been any evil, or any danger to the Jurisdiction from the settlers who had come to this planet. She thought about Dulan, about the eleven telepaths who lay somewhere near, of Tula, the only other one whose name she knew, and of Dulan’s mate who had gone before. Dulan deserved to be buried with them. She scarcely noticed that Tarik, standing behind her, had put his two hands on her shoulders. The bird watched them both.
After a few minutes the blue wings opened. The bird flew to a low hill covered with bushes, and perched on top of it, looking back at them.
“Of course,” Tarik exclaimed. “High enough to be out of reach of the waves in a bad storm.” He moved toward the bird, his hands still on Narisa’s shoulders, pushing her along before him. The bird flitted to one side as they drew near. Tarik hugged Narisa.
“This is the place, I’m certain of it,” he cried.
“But I didn’t do anything,” Narisa said, confused. “All I did was think.”
“That’s all we needed to do. The bird did the rest. Look.” He was on his knees, pulling up a layer of weeds and turf. “There’s a stone here with a word carved on it. Let me get the dirt off and see if I can read it. Tula. This is it, Narisa. We’ve found it, the three of us together.”
She saw in his excited expression that he had forgotten his earlier anger with her. For the moment at least they were functioning together in complete harmony. Tarik paced out an approximate size for Tula’s grave, based on Dulan’s height. Narisa marked the boundaries with broken twigs she stuck into the damp ground. They could find no sign of another grave next to Tula’s, and the bird made no move to stop them, so they cleared away a small bush, and Tarik began to dig a hole of similar size.
“We will put the two friends side by side,” he said.
The rain had stopped, and the sun was shining again, but the air was still very humid and growing hotter. It was not long before Tarik was drenched in perspiration and nearly covered with mud. When he paused for breath, Narisa took the shovel and continued the digging.
“That’s deep enough,” Tarik said at last. “It’s time to get Dulan.”
They returned to the grave site a little later, carrying between them Dulan’s bones, which they had gently wrapped in the coverlet from one of the beds. The bird was still standing near the grave, but when it saw them, it flew away.
“We should have checked the computer to see if there is a burial ritual,” Narisa said.
“If we find one later, we can come back then and say the correct words,” Tarik told her. “For now, this is the best we can do.”
They laid Dulan in the grave they had dug. Tarik had picked up the shovel to begin replacing the soil over the remains when there was a rustle of wings and the bird reappeared. In its beak was a flower, one of the yellow, cup-shaped ones Tarik had noticed growing on a vine in the forest. The bird dropped the flower on top of the wrappings covering Dulan.
Narisa began to cry. She could not help it; the tears simply came, pouring down her cheeks. She, who never wept, who believed tears were a sign of weakness, sagged against Tarik, feeling his strong arms holding her upright while she sobbed uncontrollably. It was not only for Dulan’s lonely end that she wept, but for her own family and friends also, for whose deaths she had not allowed herself to shed a tear lest she never stop crying.
When Tarik lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the white stone building, she put her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder, and wept like some small, lost child. Tarik laid her on a bed in one of the personal rooms, pulled off her muddy boots and uniform, and covered her warmly, for she was shivering in spite of the heat. She was sobbing still, her face streaked with tears and dirt, her hair hanging in limp strands. Tarik sat on the edge of the bed, holding one of her mud-streaked hands in his.
“I’m sorry,” she wept. “I can’t seem to stop.”
“Cry all you want and don�
��t be ashamed.” He squeezed her hand. “Perhaps it was time for you to weep.” He stayed where he was, keeping her hand in his until her sobs finally stopped and she drifted into sleep. After a while, certain she would not waken soon, he went back to the open grave and finished burying Dulan.
Narisa woke later to a dim room illuminated only by the light shining through the partially open door. Realizing she was wearing only her undergarments, she sat up to look for her uniform. Not finding it, she went to the door and gazed into the main room.
Tarik stood beside the computer-communicator. She had to look twice to be certain it really was Tarik. She had never seen anyone so dirty. It was hard to tell he was wearing a Service uniform. He was encrusted from head to foot with mud and leaves. A few twigs, along with other more mysterious debris, clung to his untidy hair. His face was smeared with dirt. Even his beard was filthy.
“What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Making repairs.” He diverted his attention from the computer screen to grin proudly at her. “I have fixed the plumbing. Some animal had made a nest in one of the cold water pipes and blocked it. I cleaned it out. Then I found the heat source and turned it on, so the bathing room-is now ready for use, with a choice of hot or cold water.”
“You need it,” she murmured, but not unkindly. He was so enthusiastic about his accomplishments, she could not help smiling at him. She gestured toward the computer-communicator. “Have you got that working, too?”
“Just a little while ago. It controls the ventilation and heating systems for the building, as well as the lights.”