Darkover: First Contact

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Not so hypothetical in your case,” Moray said, “Fiona MacMorair—she’s over in the hospital as ‘possible early pregnancy’—gave us your name as the probable father.”

  “Who the hell, pardoning the expression, who on this hell-fired world is Fiona Macwhatsis?” Leicester scowled. “I never heard of the damn girl.”

  Moray chuckled. “Does that matter? I happened to spend most of this wind making love to cabbage sprouts and baby bean plants, or at least listening to them telling me their troubles, but most of us spent it a little less—seriously, shall we say. Dr. Di Asturien’s going to ask you the names of any possible female contacts.”

  Leicester said, “The only one I remember, I had to fight for, and I lost.” He rubbed the fading bruise on his chin. “Oh, wait—is this a redheaded girl, one of the Commune group?”

  Moray said, “I don’t know the girl by sight. But about three-fourths of the New Hebrides people are red-haired—they’re mostly Scots, and a few Irish. I’d say the chances were better than average that unless the girl miscarries, you’ll have a redheaded son or daughter come nine-ten months from now. So you see, Leicester, you have a stake in this world.”

  Leicester flushed, a slow angry blush. He said, “I don’t want my descendants to live in caves and scratch the ground for a living. I want them to know what kind of world we came from.”

  Moray did not answer for a moment. Finally he said, “I ask you seriously—don’t answer. I’m not the keeper of your conscience, but think it over—might it not be best to let our descendants evolve a technology indigenous to this world? Rather than tantalizing them with the knowledge of one that could destroy this planet?”

  “I’m counting on my descendants having good sense,” Leicester said.

  “Go ahead and program the stuff into the computer, then, if you want to,” Moray said with the same small shrug, “maybe they’ll have too much good sense to use it.”

  Leicester turned to go. “Can I have my assistant back? Or has Camilla Del Rey been assigned to something important, like cooking or making curtains for the hospital?”

  Moray shook his head. “You can have her back when she’s out of the hospital,” he said, “although I’ve got her listed as pregnant, for assignment to light work only, and I thought we’d ask her to write some elementary mathematics texts. But the computer isn’t very strenuous; if she wants to go back to it, I’ve no objection.”

  He looked pointedly at the work charts cluttering his desk, and Harry Leicester, ex-captain of the starship, realized that he had been, for all practical purposes, dismissed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ewen Ross hesitated over the genetic charts and looked up at Judith Lovat. “Believe me, Judy. I’m not trying to make trouble for you, but it’s going to make our records a lot simpler. Who was the father?”

  “You didn’t believe me when I told you before,” Judy said flatly, “so if you know the answer better than I do, say whatever you like.”

  “I hardly know how to answer you,” Ewen said. “I don’t remember being with you, but if you say I was—”

  She shook her head stubbornly, and he sighed. “The same story of an alien. Can’t you see how fantastic that is? How completely unbelievable? Are you trying to postulate that the aborigines of this world are human enough to crossbreed with our women?” He hesitated. “You aren’t by any chance being funny, Judy?”

  “I’m not postulating anything, Ewen. I’m not a geneticist, I’m simply an expert in dietetics. I’m simply telling you what happened.”

  “During a time when you were insane. Two times.”

  Heather touched his arm gently. “Ewen,” she said, “Judy’s not lying. She’s telling the truth—or what she believes to be the truth. Take it easy.”

  “But damn it, her beliefs aren’t evidence.” Ewen sighed and shrugged. “All right, Judy, have it your way. But it must have been MacLeod—or Zabal. Or me. Whatever you think you remember, it must have been.”

  “If you say so, of course it must have been,” Judy said, quietly stood up and walked away, knowing without needing to look that what Ewen had written down was father unknown; possible: MacLeod, Lewis; Zabal, Marco; Ross, Ewen.

  Heather said quietly behind the closing door, “Darling, you were a little rough on her.”

  “I happen not to think we have room for fantasy on a world as rough as this. Damn it, Heather, I was trained to save life at all costs—all costs. And I’ve already had to see people die . . . I’ve let them die—when we’re sane, we’ve got to be supersane to compensate!” the young doctor said wildly.

  Heather thought about that for a minute and finally said, “Ewen, how do you judge? Maybe what seems sanity on Earth might be foolishness here. For instance, you know the Chief is training groups of the women for prenatal care and midwifery—in case, he says, we lose too many people this winter for the Medical staff to cope. He also said that he himself hadn’t delivered a baby since he was an intern—you don’t in the Space Service of course. Well, one of the first things he told us was; if a woman’s going to miscarry, don’t take any extraordinary measures to prevent it. If having the mother rest and keep warm won’t save the child, nothing else; no hormones, no fetal-support drugs, nothing.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Ewen said, “it’s almost criminal!”

  “That’s what Dr. Di Asturien said,” Heather told him. “On Earth, it would be criminal. But here, he said, first of all, a threatened miscarriage may be one way of nature discarding an embryo which can’t adapt to the environment here—gravity, and so forth. Better to let the woman miscarry early and start over, instead of wasting six months carrying a child who will die, or grow up defective. Also, on Earth, we could afford to save defective children—lethal genes, mental retardates, congenital deformities, fetal insults and so forth. We had elaborate machinery and medical structure for such things as exchange transfusions, growth-hormone transplants, rehabilitation and training if the child grew up defective. But here, unless some day we want to take the harsh step of exposing defective infants or killing them, we’d better keep them down to an absolute minimum—and about half the defective children born on Earth—maybe ninety percent, nobody knows, it’s such routine now on Earth to prevent a miscarriage at any cost—are the result of preventing children who really should have died, nature’s mistakes, from being selected out. On a world like this, it’s absolute survival for our race; we can’t let lethal genes and defects get into our gene pool. See what I mean? Insanity on Earth—harsh facts for survival here. Natural selection has to take its course—and this means no heroic methods to prevent miscarriages, no extreme methods to save moribund or birth-damaged babies.”

  “And what’s all this got to do with Judy’s wild story about an alien being fathering her child?” Ewen demanded.

  “Only this,” Heather said, “we’ve got to learn to think in new ways—and not to reject things out of hand because they sound fantastic.”

  “You believe some nonhuman alien—oh, come, Heather! For God’s sake!”

  “What God?” Heather asked. “All the Gods I ever heard of belong to Earth. I don’t know who fathered Judy’s baby. I wasn’t there. But she was, and in the absence of proof about it, I’d take her word. She’s not a fanciful woman, and if she says that some alien came along and made love to her, and that she found herself pregnant, damn it, I’ll believe it until it’s proved otherwise. At least until I see the baby. If it’s the living image of you, or Zabal, or MacLeod, maybe I’ll believe Judy had a brainstorm. But during this second Wind, you behaved rationally, up to a point. MacAran behaved rationally, up to a point. Evidently after the first exposure, a little control remains on subsequent exposures to the drug, or pollen. She gave a rational account of what she did this time, and it was consistent with what happened the first time. So why not give her the benefit of the doubt?”

  Slowly, Ewen crossed out the names, leaving only “Father; unknown.”

  “That’s all we
can say for sure,” he said at last, “I’ll leave it at that.”

  In the large building which still served as refectory, kitchen and recreation hall—although a separate group-kitchen was going up, built of the heavy pale translucent native stone—a group of women from the New Hebrides Commune, in their tartan skirts and the warm uniform coats they wore with them now, were preparing dinner. One of them, a girl with long red hair, was singing in a light soprano voice:When the day wears away,

  Sad I wander by the water,

  Where a man, born of sun,

  Wooed the fairy’s daughter,

  Why should I sit and sigh,

  Pulling bracken, pulling bracken

  All alone and weary?

  She broke off as Judy came in:

  “Dr. Lovat, everything’s ready, I told them you were over at the hospital. So we went ahead without you.”

  “Thank you, Fiona. Tell me, what was that you were singing?”

  “Oh, one of our island songs,” Fiona said. “You don’t speak Gaelic? I thought not—well, it’s called the “Fairy’s Love Song”—about a fairy who fell in love with a mortal man, and wanders the hills of Skye forever, still looking for him, wondering why he never came back to her. It’s prettier in Gaelic.”

  “Sing it in Gaelic, then,” Judy said, “it would be fearfully dull if only one language survived here! Fiona, tell me, the Father doesn’t come to meals in the common room, does he?”

  “No, someone takes it out to him.”

  “Can I take it out today? I’d like to talk to him,” Judy said, and Fiona checked a rough work-schedule posted on the wall. “I wonder if we’ll ever get permanent work-assignments until we know who’s pregnant and who isn’t? All right, I’ll tell Elsie you’ve got it. It’s one of those sacks over there.”

  She found Father Valentine toiling away in the graveyard, surrounded by the great stones he was heaving into place in the monument. He took the food from her and unwrapped it, laying it out on a flat stone. She sat down beside him and said quietly, “Father, I need your help. I don’t suppose you’d hear my confession?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m not a priest any more, Dr. Lovat. How in the name of anything holy can I have the insolence to pass judgment in the name of God on someone else’s sins?” He smiled faintly. He was a small slight man, no older than thirty, but now he looked haggard and old. “In any case, I’ve had a lot of time to think, heaving rocks out here. How can I honestly preach or teach the Gospel of Christ on a world where He never set foot? If God wants this world saved he’ll have to send someone to save it . . . whatever that means.” He put a spoon into the bowl of meat and grain. “You brought your own lunch? Good. In theory I accept isolation. In practice I find I crave the company of my fellow man much more than I ever thought I would.”

  His words dismissed the question of religion, but Judy, in her inner turmoil, could not let it drop so easily. “Then you’re just leaving us without pastoral help of any sort, Father?”

  “I don’t think I ever did much in that line,” Father Valentine said. “I wonder if any priest ever did? It goes without saying that anything I can do for anyone as a friend, I’ll do—it’s the least I can do; if I spent my life at it, it wouldn’t begin to balance out what I did, but it’s better than sitting around in sackcloth and ashes mouthing penitential prayers.”

  The woman said, “I can understand that, I suppose. But do you really mean there’s no room for faith, or religion, Father?”

  He made a dismissing gesture. “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘father.’ Brother, if you want to. We’ve all got to be brothers and sisters in misfortune here. No, I didn’t say that, Doctor Lovat—I don’t know your Christian name—Judith? I didn’t say that, Judith. Every human being needs belief in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don’t think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that’s only a memory, and won’t even be that to our children and our children’s children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes. Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity—yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we’re in now.”

  “Yet you would have worked in the Church structure at the Coronis colony?”

  “I suppose so. I hadn’t really thought about it. I belong to the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it—not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on my rock pile I’ve had a lot of time to think.” He smiled faintly. “No wonder they used to put criminals to breaking rocks, back on Earth. It keeps your hands busy and gives you all your time for thought.”

  Judy said slowly, “So you don’t think behavioral ethics are absolute, then? There’s nothing definite or divinely ordained about them here?”

  “How can there be? Judith, you know what I did. If I hadn’t been brought up with the idea that certain things were in themselves, and of their very nature, enough to send me straight to hell, then when I woke up after the Wind, I could have lived with it. I might have been ashamed, or upset, or even sick at my stomach, but I wouldn’t have had the conviction, deep down in my mind, that none of us deserved to live after it. In the seminary there were no shades of right and wrong, just virtue and sin, and nothing in between. The murders didn’t trouble me, in my madness, because I was taught in seminary that lewdness was a mortal sin for which I could go to hell, so how could murder be any worse? You can go to hell only once, and I was already damned. A rational ethic would have told me that whatever those poor crewmen, God rest them, and I, had done during that night of madness, it had harmed only our dignity and our sense of decency, if that mattered. It was miles away, galaxies away, from murder.”

  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 h
ad 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 anyone else touches it, now, it—it hurts, as if it was part of me,” she said fumblingly. “Do you think I’m mad?”