Darkover: First Contact

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Twice in the next ten-day period they saw minor traces of the small furred aliens with the big eyes; once, over a mountain watercourse, a bridge constructed of long linked and woven loops of reed, carefully twined together and fastened with rope ladders leading up toward it from the lower levels of the trees. Without touching it, Dr. Frazer examined the vines of which it was constructed, saying that the need for fiber, rope and heavy twines were likely to be greater than the small supplies of what they called ropeweed could provide. Almost a hundred miles further into the hills, they found what looked like a ring of trees planted in a perfect circle, with more of the rope ladders leading up into the trees; but the place looked deserted and the platform which seemed to have been built between the trees, of something like wickerwork, was dilapidated and the sky could be seen through wormholes in the bottom.

  Frazer looked covetously upward. “I’d give five years off my life to get a look up there. Do they use furniture? Is it a house, a temple, who knows what? But I can’t climb those trees and the rope ladders probably wouldn’t even hold Janice’s weight, let alone mine. As I remember, none of them was much bigger than a ten-year-old child.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” MacAran said. “The place is deserted, we can come back some day with ladders and explore to your heart’s content. Personally I think it’s a farm.”

  “A farm?”

  MacAran pointed. On the regularly spaced tree trunks were extraordinarily straight lines; the delicious gray fungus which MacLeod had discovered before the first of the Winds was growing there in rows as neatly spaced as if they had been drawn on with a ruler. “They could hardly grow as neatly as this,” MacAran said, “they must have been planted here. Maybe they come back every few months to harvest their crop, and the platform up there could be anything—a resthouse, a storage granary, an overnight camp. Or of course this could be a farm they abandoned years ago.”

  “It’s nice to know the stuff can be cultivated,” Frazer said, and began carefully making notes in his notebook about the exact kind of tree on which it was growing, the spacing and height of the rows. “Look at this! It looks for all the world like a simple irrigation system, to divert water away from where the fungus is growing and directly to the roots of the tree!”

  As they went on into the hills, the location of the alien “farm” firmly fixed on Janice’s map, MacAran found himself thinking about the aliens. Primitive, yes, but what other type of society was seriously possible on this world? Their intelligence level must be comparable to that of many men, judging by the sophistication of their devices.

  The Captain talks about a return to savagery. But I suspect we couldn’t return if we tried. In the first place we’re a selected group, half of us educated at the upper levels, the rest having been through the screening process for the Colonies. We come with knowledge acquired over millions of years of evolution and a few hundred years of forced technology pressured by an overpopulated, polluted world. We may not be able to transplant our culture whole, this planet wouldn’t survive it, and it would probably be suicide to try. But he doesn’t have to worry about dropping back to a primitive level. Whatever we finally do with this world, the end result, 1 suspect, won’t at least be below what we had on Earth, in terms of the human mind making the best use of what it finds. It will be different . . . probably in a few generations even I couldn’t relate it to Earth culture. But humans can’t be less than human, and intelligence doesn’t function below its own level.

  These small aliens had developed according to the needs of this world; a forest people, wearing fur (MacAran, shivering in the icy rain of a summer night, wished he had it) and living in symbiosis with the forests. But as nearly as he could judge their constructs were indicative of a high level of elegance and adaptiveness.

  What had Judy called them? The little brothers who are not wise. And what about the other aliens? This planet had evidently brought forth two wholly sapient races, and they must co-exist to some degree. It was a good sign for humanity and the others. But Judy’s alien—it was the only name he had and even now he found himself doubting the very existence of the others—must be near enough to human to father a child on an Earthwoman, and the thought was strangely disturbing.

  On the fourteenth day of their journey they reached the lower slopes of the great glacier which Camilla had christened The Wall Around the World. It soared above them cutting off half the sky, and MacAran knew that even at this oxygen level it was unclimbable. There was nothing beyond these slopes except bare ice and rock, buffeted by the eternal icy winds, and nothing was to be gained by going on. But even as MacAran’s party turned their back on the enormous mountain mass, his mind rejected that unclimbable. He thought, no, nothing is impossible. We can’t climb it now. Perhaps not in my lifetime; certainly not for ten, twenty years. But, it’s not in human nature to accept limits like this. Some day either I’ll come back and climb it, or my children will. Or their children.

  “So that’s as far as we go in one direction,” Dr. Frazer said. “Next expedition had better go in the other direction. This way it’s all forest, and more forest.”

  “Well, we can make use of the forests,” MacAran said. “Maybe the other direction there’s a desert. Or an ocean. Or for all we know, fertile valleys and even cities. Only time will tell.”

  He checked the maps they had been making, looking with satisfaction on the filled-in parts, but realizing that there was a lifetime to go. They camped that night at the very foot of the glacier, and MacAran woke up before dawn, perhaps wakened by the cessation of the soft thick nightly snow. He went out and looked at the dark sky and the unfamiliar stars, three of the four moons hanging like jewelled pendants below the high ridge of the mountain above, then his eyes and thoughts went back to the valley. His people were there, and Camilla, carrying his child. Far to the east was a dim glow where the great red sun would rise. MacAran was suddenly overcome with a great and unspeakable content.

  He had never been happy on Earth. The Colony would have been better, but even there, he would have fitted into a world designed by other men, and not all his kind of men. Here he could have a share in the original design of things, carve out and create what he wanted for himself and his children to come and their children’s children. Tragedy and catastrophe had brought them here, madness and death had ravaged them, and yet MacAran knew that he was one of the lucky ones. He had found his own place, and it was good.

  It took them much of that day and the next to retrace their steps from the foot of the glacier, through sullen grey weather and heavy gathering cloud, and MacAran, who had begun to mistrust fine weather on this planet, nevertheless felt the now-familiar prickle of disquiet. Toward evening of the second day the snow began, heavy and harder than anything he had yet seen on this world. Even in their warm clothes the Earthmen were freezing, and their sense of direction was quickly lost in the world which had turned to a white whirling insanity without color, form or place. They dared not stop and yet it soon became obvious that they could not go on much longer through the deepening layers of soft powdery snow, through which they floundered, clinging to one another. They could only keep going down. Other directions no longer had meaning. Under the trees it was a little better, but the howling wind from the heights above them, the creaking and heaving of branch after branch like wind in the gigantic rigging of some sailing ship immense beyond imagining, filled the twilight with uncanny voices. Once, trying to shelter beneath a tree, they attempted to set up their tent, but the gale made it flap wildly and twice it was lost and they had to chase the blowing fabric through the snow until it became entangled around a tree and they could, after a fashion, reclaim it. But it was useless to them as shelter, and they grew colder and colder, their coats keeping them dry indeed, but doing almost nothing against the piercing cold.

  Frazer muttered with chattering teeth, as they held on to one another in the lee of a larger tree than usual, “If it’s like this in the summer, what the hell kind of stor
ms are we going to have in the winter?”

  MacAran said grimly, “I suspect, in the winter, none of us had better set foot outside the Base Camp.” He thought of the storm after the first of the Winds, when he had searched for Camilla through the light snow. It had seemed like a blizzard to him then. How little he had known this world! He was overcome with poignant fear and a sense of regret. Camilla. She’s safe in the settlement, but will we ever get back there, will any of us? He thought with a painful twinge of self-pity that he would never see his child’s face, then angrily dismissed the thought. They needn’t give up and lie down to die yet, but there had to be some shelter somewhere. Otherwise they wouldn’t outlast the night. The tent was no more good to them than a piece of paper, but there had to be a way.

  Think. You were boasting to yourself about what a selected, intelligent group we were. Use it, or you might as well be an Australian bushman.

  You might better. Survival is something they’re damn good at. But you’ve been pampered all your life.

  Survive, damn you.

  He gripped Janice by one arm, Dr. Frazer by the other; reached past him to young Domenick, the boy from the Commune who had been studying geology for work in the Colony. He drew them all close together, and spoke over the howling of the storm.

  “Can anyone see where the trees are thickest? Since there’s not likely to be a cave here, or any shelter, we’ve got to do the best we can with underbrush, or anything to break the wind and keep dry.”

  Janice said, her small voice almost inaudible, “It’s hard to see, but I had the impression there’s something dark over there. If it isn’t solid, the trees must be so thick I can’t see through them. Is that what you mean?”

  MacAran had had the same impression himself; now, with it confirmed, he decided to trust it. He’d been led straight to Camilla, that other time.

  Psychic? Maybe so. What did he have to lose?

  “Everyone hold hands,” he directed, more in gesture than words, “If we lose each other we’ll never find each other again.” Gripping one another tightly, they began to struggle toward the place that was only a darker darkness against the trees.

  Dr. Frazer’s grip tightened hard on his arm. He put his face close to MacAran’s and shouted, “Maybe I’m losing my mind, but I saw a light.”

  MacAran had thought it was afterimages spinning behind his wind-buffeted eyes. What he thought he saw beyond it was even more unlikely; the figure of a man? Tall and palely shining and naked even in the storm—no, it was gone, it had been only a vision, but he thought the creature had beckoned from the dark loom . . . they struggled toward it. Janice muttered, “Did you see it?”

  “Thought I did.”

  Afterward, when they were in the shelter of the thickly laced trees, they compared notes. No two of them had seen the same thing. Dr. Frazer had seen only the light. MacAran had seen a naked man, beckoning. Janice had seen only a face with a curious light around it, as if the face—she said—were really inside her own head, vanishing like the Cheshire cat when she narrowed her eyes to see it better; and to Domenick it had been a figure, tall and shining—“Like an angel,” he said, “or a woman—a woman with long shining hair.” But, stumbling after it, they had come against trees so thickly grown that they could hardly force their way between them; MacAran dropped to the ground and wriggled through, dragging them after.

  Inside the clump of thickly growing trees the snow was only a light spray, and the howling wind could not reach them. They huddled together, wrapped in blankets from their packs and sharing body warmth, nibbling at rations cold from their dinner. Later, MacAran struck a light, and saw, against the bole of the tree, carefully fastened flat pieces of wood. A ladder, against the side of the tree, leading upwards. . . .

  Even before they began climbing he guessed that this was not one of the houses of the small furred folk. The rungs were far enough apart to give even MacAran some trouble, and Janice, who was small, had to be pulled up them. Dr. Frazer demurred, but MacAran never hesitated.

  “If we all saw something different,” he said, “we were led here. Something spoke directly to our minds. You might say we were invited. If the creature was naked—and two of us saw him, or it, that way—evidently the weather doesn’t bother them, whatever they are, but it knows that we’re in danger from it. I suggest we accept the invitation, with a proper respect.”

  They had to wriggle through a loosely tied door up through on to a platform, but then they found themselves inside a tightly-built wooden house. MacAran started to strike his light carefully again, and discovered that it was not necessary, for there was indeed a dim light inside, coming from some kind of softly glowing, phosphorescent stuff against the walls. Outside the wind wailed and the boughs of the great trees creaked and swayed, so that the soft floor of the dwelling had a slight motion, not unpleasant but a little disquieting. There was a single large room; the floor was covered with something soft and spongy, as if moss or some soft winter grass grew there of itself. The exhausted, chilled travellers stretched out gratefully, relaxing in the comparative warmth, dryness, shelter, and slept.

  Before MacAran slept it seemed to him that in the distance he heard a high sweet sound, like singing, through the storm. Singing? Nothing could live out there, in this blizzard! Yet the impression persisted, and at the very edge of sleep, words and pictures persisted in his mind.

  Far below in the hills, astray and maddened after his first exposure to the Ghost Wind, coming back to sanity to discover the tent carefully set up and their packs and scientific equipment neatly piled inside. Camilla thought he had done it. He had thought she had done it.

  Someone’s been watching us. Guarding us.

  Judy was telling the truth.

  For an instant a calm beautiful face, neither male nor female, swam in his mind. “Yes. We know you are here. We mean you no harm, but our ways lie apart. Nevertheless we will help you as we can, even though we can only reach you a little, through the closed doors of your minds. It is better if we do not come too close; but sleep tonight in safety and depart in peace. . . .”

  In his mind there was a light around the beautiful features, the silver eyes, and neither then nor ever did MacAran ever know whether he had seen the eyes of the alien or the lighted features, or whether his mind had received them and formed a picture made up of childhood dreams of angels, of fairy-folk, of haloed saints. But to the sound of the faraway singing, and the lulling noise of the wind, he slept.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “. . . and that was really all there was to it. We stayed inside for about thirty-six hours, until the snow ended and the wind quieted, then we went away again. We never had a glimpse of whoever lived there; I suspect he carefully kept away until we were gone. It wasn’t there that he took you, Judy?”

  “Oh, no. Not so far. Not nearly. And it wasn’t to any home of his own people. It was, I think, one of the cities of the little people, the men of the tree-roads, he called them, but I couldn’t find the place again, I wouldn’t want to,” she said.

  “But they have good will toward us, I’m sure of that,” MacAran said, “I suppose—it wasn’t the same one you knew?”

  “How can I possibly know? But they’re evidently a telepathic race; I suspect anything known to one of them is known to others—at least to his intimates, his family—if they have families.”

  MacAran said. “Perhaps, some day, they’ll know we mean them no harm.”

  Judy smiled faintly and said, “I’m sure they know that you—and I—mean them no harm; but there are some of us they don’t know, and I suspect that perhaps time doesn’t matter to them as much as it does to us. That’s not even so alien, except to us Western Europeans—Orientals even on Earth often made plans and thought in terms of generations instead of months or even years. Possibly he thinks there’s time to get to know us any century now.”

  MacAran chuckled. “Well, we’re not going anyplace. I guess there’s time enough. Dr. Frazer is in seventh heave
n, he’s got anthropological notes enough to provide him with a spare-time job for three years. He must have written down everything he saw in the house—I hope they’re not offended by his looking at everything. And of course he made notes of everything used as food—if we’re anywhere near the same species, anything they can eat we can evidently eat,” MacAran added. “We didn’t touch his supplies, of course, but Frazer made notes of everything he had. I say he for convenience, Domenick was sure it was a woman who had led us there. Also the one piece of furniture—major furniture—was what looked like a loom, with a web strung on it. There were pods of some sort of vegetable fiber—it looked something like milkweed on Earth—soaking, evidently to prepare them for spinning into thread; we found some pods like it on the way back and turned them over to MacLeod on the farm, they seem to make a very fine cloth.”

  Judy said, as he rose to go, “You realize there are still plenty of people in the camp who don’t even believe there are any alien peoples on this planet.”

  MacAran met her lost eyes and said very gently, “Does it matter, Judy? We know. Maybe we’ll just have to wait, and start thinking in terms of generations, too. Maybe our children will all know.”

  On the world of the red sun, the summer moved on. The sun climbed daily a little higher in the sky, a solstice was passed, and it began to angle a little lower; Camilla, who had set herself a task of keeping calendar charts, noted that the daily changes in sun and sky indicated that the days, lengthening for their first four months on this world, were shortening again toward the unimaginable winter. The computer, given all the information they had, had predicted days of darkness, mean temperatures in the level of zero centigrade, and virtually constant glacial storms. But she reminded herself that this was only a mathematical projection of probabilities. It had nothing to do with actualities.

  There were times, during that second third of her pregnancy, when she wondered at herself. Never before this had it occurred to her to doubt that the severe discipline of mathematics and science, her world since childhood, had any lacunae; or that she would ever come up against any problem, except for strictly personal ones, which these disciplines could not solve. As far as she could tell, the old disciplines still held good for her crewmates. Even the growing evidence of her own increasing ability to read the minds of others, and to look uncannily into the future and make unsettlingly accurate guesses based only on quick flashes of what she had to call “hunch”—even this was laughed at, shrugged aside. Yet she knew that some of the others experienced much the same thing.