Darkover: First Contact

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Well, I can only repeat that I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did,” Moray said. “Look for someone on your crew with the technical know-how.” He gave a dry, unamused laugh. “And someone who could keep their head long enough. Have the Medics figured out what hit us?”

  Leicester shrugged. “The best guess I’ve heard so far is an airborne dust containing some violent hallucinogen. Still unidentified, and probably will be until things settle down at the hospital.”

  Moray shook his head. He knew the Captain believed him now, and to tell the truth he was not entirely happy about the destruction of the computer. As long as Leicester’s whole efforts were taken up in attempting to manage the ship repairs he was unlikely to interfere with what Moray was doing to assure the Colony’s survival. Now, a Captain without a ship, he was likely to get seriously in the way of their assault on a strange world. For the first time Moray understood the old joke about the Space fleet:

  “You can’t retire a starship Captain. You have to shoot him.”

  The thought stirred dangerous fears in him. Moray was not a violent man, but during the thirty-six hours of the strange wind, he had discovered painful and unsuspected depths in himself. Maybe someone else will think of that, next time—what makes me so sure there will be a next time? Or maybe I will, can I ever be sure now?

  Turning away from the unwelcome thought, he said, “Have you a report on damages yet?”

  “Nineteen dead—no medical reports, but at least four hospital patients died of neglect,” Leicester said shortly. “Two suicides. One girl cut herself and bled to death on broken glass, but probably accident rather than suicide. And—I suppose you heard about Father Valentine.”

  Moray shut his eyes. “I heard about the murders. I don’t know all the details.”

  Leicester said, “I doubt if anyone alive does. He doesn’t himself, and probably won’t unless Chief Di Asturien wants to give him narcosynthesis or something. All I know is somehow he got mixed up with a gang of the crewmen who were doing some messing around—sexual messing around—down by the edge of the river. Things got fairly wild. When the first wave subsided a little he realized what he’d been doing, and I gather he couldn’t face it, and started cutting throats.”

  “I take it, then, that he was one of the suicides?”

  Leicester shook his head. “No. I gather he came out of it just in time to realize that suicide, too, was a mortal sin. Funny. I guess I’m just getting hardened to horrors on this wonderful paradise planet of yours—all I can think about now is how much trouble he’d have saved if he’d gone ahead with it. Now I’ve got to try him for murder, and then decide, or make the people decide, whether or not we have capital punishment here.”

  Moray smiled bleakly. “Why bother?” he said. “What verdict could you possibly get except temporary insanity?”

  “My God, you’re right!” Leicester passed his hand over his forehead.

  “In all seriousness, Captain. We may have to cope with this again, and again, and again. At least until we know the cause. I suggest that you immediately disarm your Security crew; the first sign happened when a Security man shot first a girl, then a fellow officer. I suggest that if we ever again have a rainless night, that all lethal weapons, kitchen knives, surgical instruments, and the like, be locked up. It probably won’t prevent all the trouble, we can’t lock up every rock and hunk of stove-wood on the planet, and to look at you, somebody evidently forgot who you were and took a swing at you.”

  Leicester rubbed his chin. “Would you believe a fight over a girl, at my age?”

  For the first time the two men grinned at one another with the beginnings of a brief mutual human liking, then it receded. Leicester said, “I’ll think about it. It won’t be easy.”

  Moray said grimly, “Nothing here’s going to be easy, Captain. But I have a feeling that unless we start up a serious campaign for an ethic of nonviolence—one that will hold even under stress like the mass freakout—none of us will live through the summer.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The days of the Wind had spared the garden, MacAran thought. Perhaps some deep survival-instinct had told the maddened colonists that this was their lifeline. Repairs to the hospital were underway, and work crews drafted for manual labor were doing salvage work on the ship—Moray had made it bitterly clear that for many years this would be their only stock of metal for tools and implements. Bit by bit, the interior fabric of the great starship was being cannibalized; furniture from the living quarters and recreation areas was being brought out and converted for use in the dormitory and community buildings, tools from the repair shops, kitchen areas and even the bridge decks were being inventoried by groups of clerical workers. MacAran knew that Camilla was busy checking the computer, trying to discover what programs had been salvaged. Down to the smallest implement, ballpoint pens and women’s cosmetics in the canteen supplies, everything was being inventoried and rationed. When the supplies of a technologically oriented Earth culture ran out, there would be no more, and Moray made it clear that replacements were already being devised for an orderly transition.

  The clearing presented a curious blend, he thought; the small domes constructed with plastic and fiber, damaged in the blizzard and repaired with tougher local woods; the mixed piles of complex machinery, tended and guarded by uniformed crewmen with Chief Engineer Patrick in charge; the people from the New Hebrides Commune working—by their own choice, MacAran understood—in the garden and woods.

  He held in his hand two slips of paper—the old habit of posting memoranda still held; he imagined that eventually dwindling paper supplies would phase it out. What would they substitute? Systems of bells coded to each person, as was done in some large department stores to attract the attention of a particular person? Word of mouth messages? Or would they manage to discover some way to make paper of local products and continue their centuries-long reliance on written memoranda? One of the slips he held told him to check in at the hospital for what was called routine examination; the other asked him to report to Moray’s office for work analysis and assignment.

  By and large, the announcement that the computer was useless and the ship perforce abandoned had been greeted without much outcry. One or two crewmen had been heard to mutter that whoever did it should be lynched, but there was at the moment no way of discovering either who had wiped the Navigation tapes from the computer, nor of finding out who had dynamited one of the inner drive chambers with an improvised bomb. Suspicion for the latter fell by default on a crewmember who had recently asked admission into the New Hebrides Commune and whose mangled body had been found inside the ship near the explosion site; and everyone was content to let it stay there.

  MacAran suspected that the quiet was temporary, the result of shock, and that sooner or later there would be fresh storms, but for the moment everyone had simply accepted the urgent necessity to join together to repair damages and assure survival against the unguessed harshness of the unknown winter. MacAran himself was not sure how he felt about it, but he had in any case been ready for a colony, and secretly it seemed to him that it might be more interesting to colonize a “wild” planet than one extensively terraformed and worked over by Earth Expeditionary. But he hadn’t been prepared to be cut off from the mainstream of Earth—no starships, no contact or communication with the rest of the Galaxy, perhaps for generations, perhaps forever. That hurt. He hadn’t accepted it yet; he knew he might never accept it.

  He went into the building where Moray’s office was located, read the sign on the door (DON’T KNOCK, COME IN) and went in to find Moray talking to an unknown girl who must be, from her dress, one of the New Hebrides people.

  “Yes, yes, dear, I know you want a work assignment to the garden, but your history shows you worked in art and ceramics and we’re going to need you there. Do you realize that the first craft developed in almost every civilization is pottery? In any case, didn’t I see a report that you were pregnant?”

  “Ye
s, the Annunciation Ceremony for me was yesterday. But our kind of people always work right up to delivery.”

  Moray smiled faintly. “I’m glad you feel well enough to go on working. But women in colonies are never permitted to do manual work.”

  “Article four—”

  “Article four,” said Moray, and his face was grim, “was developed for Earth, Earth conditions. Get wise to the facts of life on planets with alien gravity, light and oxygen content, Alanna. This planet is one of the lucky ones; oxygen on the high side, light gravity, no anoxic or crush-syndrome babies. But even on the best planets, just the change does it, and it’s a grim statistic for a population as low as ours. Half the women are sterile for five to ten years, half the fertile women miscarry for five to ten years. And half the live births die before they’re a month old for five to ten years. Colony women have to be pampered, Alanna. Co-operate, or you’ll be sedated and hospitalized. If you want to be one of the lucky ones with a live baby instead of a messed-up dead one, co-operate, and start doing it now.”

  When she had gone away with a slip for the hospital, looking dazed and shocked, MacAran took her place before the cluttered desk, and Moray grimaced up at him, “I take it you heard that. How’d you like my job—scaring the hell out of young pregnant girls?”

  “Not much.” MacAran was thinking of Camilla, also carrying a child. So she was not sterile. But one chance in two that she would miscarry—and then a fifty-fifty chance that her child would die. Grim statistics, and they sent a clutch of horror through him. Had she been advised of this? Did she know? Was she co-operating? He didn’t know; she had been locked up with the Captain, hovering over the computer, for half the last tenday.

  Moray said, frowning slightly, “Come out of the clouds. You’re one of the lucky ones, MacAran—you’re not technologically unemployed.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a geologist and we need you doing what you were trained for. You heard me tell Alanna that one of the first industries we need, in a hurry, at that, is pottery. For pottery, you need china clay, or a good substitute for it. We also need reliable building stone—we need concrete or cement of some sort—we need limestone, or something with the same properties; and we need silicates for glass, various ores . . . in fact, what we need is a geological assay of this part of the planet, and we need it before the winter sets in. You aren’t priority one, Mac—but you’re in category two or three. Can you draw up a plan for an assay and exploration in the next day or two, and tell me roughly how many men you’ll need for sampling and testing?”

  “Yes, I can do that easy enough. But I thought you said we couldn’t go in for a technological civilization. . . .”

  “We can’t,” Moray told him, “not as Engineer Patrick uses the word. No heavy industry. No mechanized transport. But there’s no such thing as a non-technological civilization. Even the cave men had technology—they manufactured flints, or didn’t you ever see one of their factory sites? Man is a tooluser—a technician. I never had any notion of starting us out as savages. The question is, which technologies can we manage, especially during the first three or four generations?”

  “You plan that far ahead?”

  “I have to.”

  “You said my job wasn’t priority one. What’s priority one?”

  “Food,” Moray said realistically. “Again, we’re lucky. The soil’s arable here—although I suspect marginally, so we’re going to have to use fertilizers and composts—and agriculture is possible. I’ve known planets where the food-securing priority would have taken up so much time that even minimal crafts might have to be postponed for two or three generations. Earth doesn’t colonize them, but we could have been marooned on one. There may even be domesticable animals here; MacLeod’s on that now. Priority two is shelter—and by the way, when you make that survey, check some lower slopes for caves. They may be warmer than anything we can build, at least during the winter. After food and shelter come simple crafts—the amenities of life; weaving, pottery, fuel and lights, clothing, music, garden tools, furniture. You get the idea. Go draw up your survey, MacAran, and I’ll assign you enough men to carry it out.” He gave another of those grim smiles. “Like I say; you’re one of the lucky ones. This morning I’ve got to tell a deep-space communications expert with absolutely no other skills, that his job is completely obsolete for at least ten generations, and offer him a choice of agriculture, carpentry or blacksmithing!”

  As MacAran left the office, his thoughts flew again, compulsively, to Camilla. Was this what lay in store for her? No, certainly not, any civilized group of people must have some use for a computer library of information! But would Moray, with his grim priorities, see it that way?

  He walked through the midday sunlight, pale violet shadows, the sun hanging high and red like an inflamed and bloodshot eye, toward the hospital. In the distance a solitary figure was toiling over rocks, building a low fence, and MacAran looked at Father Valentine, doing his solitary penance. MacAran accepted, in principle, the theory that the colony could spare no single pair of hands; that Father Valentine could atone for his crimes by useful work more easily than by hanging by the neck until dead; and MacAran, with the memory of his own madness lying heavy on him (how easily he could have killed the Captain, in his rage of jealousy!) could not even find it in his heart to shun the priest or feel horror at him. Captain Leicester’s judgment would have done justice to King Solomon; Father Valentine had been commanded to bury the dead, those he had killed, and the others, to create a graveyard, and enclose it with a fence against wild beasts or desecration, and to build a suitable memorial to the mass grave of those who had died in the crash. MacAran was not certain what useful purpose a graveyard would serve, except perhaps to remind the Earthmen of how near death lay to life, and how near madness lay to sanity. But this work would keep the Father away from the other crewmen and colonists, who might not have the same awareness of how near they might have come to repeating his crime, until the memory had mercifully died down a little; and would provide enough hard work and penance to satisfy even the despairing man’s need for punishment.

  Somehow the sight of the lonely, bent figure put him out of the mood to keep his other appointment in the hospital. He walked away toward the woods, passing the garden area where New Hebrideans were tending long rows of green sprouting plants. Alastair, on his knees, was transplanting small green shoots from a flat screened pan; he returned MacAran’s wave with a smile. They were happy at the outcome of this, this life would suit them perfectly. Alastair spoke a word to the boy holding the box of plants, got up and loped toward MacAran.

  “The padrón—Moray—told me you were going to do geological work. What’s the chances of finding materials for glassmaking?”

  “Can’t say. Why?”

  “Climate like this, we need greenhouses,” Alastair said, “concentrated sunlight. Something to protect young plants against blizzards. I’m doing what I can with plastic sheets, foil reflectors and ultraviolet, but that’s a temporary makeshift. Check natural fertilizers and nitrates, too. The soil here isn’t too rich.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” MacAran promised. “Were you a farmer by trade on Earth?”

  “Lord, no. Auto mechanic—transit specialist,” Alastair grimaced. “The Captain was talking about converting me to a machinist. I’m going to be sittin’ up nights praying for whoever it was blew up the damn ship.”

  “Well, I’ll try to find your silicates,” MacAran promised, wondering how high, on Moray’s austere priorities, the art of glassmaking would come. And what about musical instruments? Fairly high, he’d imagine. Even savages had music and he couldn’t imagine life without them, nor, he’d guess, could these members of a singing folk.

  If the winter’s as bad as it probably will be, music just might keep us all sane, and I’ll bet that Moray—cagey bastard that he is—has that already figured out.

  As if in answer to his thought, one of the girls working in the field raised
her voice in low, mournful song. Her voice, deep and husky, had a superficial resemblance to Camilla’s, and the words of the song rang out, in question and sadness, an old sad melody of the Hebrides:My Caristiona,

  Wilt answer my cry?

  No answering tonight?

  My grief, ah me . . .

  My Caristiona . . .

  Camilla, why do you not come to me, why do you not answer me? Wilt answer my cry . . . my grief, ah me . . .

  Deep my heart is grieving, grieving,

  And my eyes are streaming, streaming . . .

  My Caristiona . . . wilt answer my cry?

  I know you are unhappy, Camilla, but why, why do you not come to me . . . ?

  Camilla came into the hospital slowly and rebelliously, clutching the examination slip. It was a comforting hangover from ship routine, but when, instead of the familiar face of Medic Chief Di Asturien (at least he speaks Spanish!) she was confronted with young Ewen Ross, she frowned with irritation.

  “Where’s the Chief? You haven’t the authority to do examinations for Ship personnel!”

  “The Chief’s operating on that man who was shot in the kneecap during the Ghost Wind; anyway I’m in charge of routine examinations, Camilla. What’s the matter?” His round young face was ingratiating, “won’t I do? I assure you my credentials are wonderful. Anyhow, I thought we were friends—fellow victims from the first of the Winds! Don’t damage my self-esteem!”

  Against her will she laughed. “Ewen, you rascal, you’re impossible. Yes, I guess this is routine. The Chief announced the contraceptive failure a couple of months ago, and I seem to have been one of the victims. It’s just a case of putting in for an abortion.”

  Ewen whistled softly. “Sorry, Camilla,” he said gently; “can’t be done.”

  “But I’m pregnant!”