Darkover: First Contact

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  It was Harry Leicester—she still secretly thought of him as Captain Leicester—who put it most clearly for her, and when she was with him she could see it almost as he did.

  “Hold on to what you know, Camilla. That’s all you can do; it’s known as intellectual integrity. If a thing is impossible, it’s impossible.”

  “And if the impossible happens? Like ESP?”

  “Then,” he said hardily, “you have somehow misinterpreted your facts, or are making guesses based on subliminal cues. Don’t go overboard on this because of your will to believe. Wait for facts.”

  She asked him quietly, “Just what would you consider evidence?”

  He shook his head. “Quite frankly, there is nothing I would consider evidence. If it happened to me, I should simply certify myself as insane and the experience of my senses therefore worthless.”

  She thought then, what about the will to disbelieve? And how can you have intellectual integrity when you throw out one whole set of facts as impossible before you even test them? But she loved the Captain and the old habits held. Some day, perhaps, there would be a showdown, but she hoped, with a quiet desperation, that it would not come soon.

  The nightly rain continued, and there were no more of the frightening winds of madness, but the tragic statistics which Ewen Ross had foreseen went on, with a fearful inevitability. Of one hundred and fourteen women, some eighty or ninety should, within five months, have become pregnant; forty-eight actually did so, and of these, twenty-two miscarried within two months. Camilla knew she was going to be one of the lucky ones, and she was; her pregnancy went on so uneventfully that there were times when she completely forgot about it. Judy, too, had an uneventful pregnancy; but the girl from the Hebrides Commune, Alanna, went into labor in the sixth month and gave birth to premature twins who died within seconds of delivery. Camilla had little contact with the girls of the Commune—most of them were working at New Skye, except for the pregnant ones in the hospital—but when she heard that, something went through her that was like pain, and she sought out MacAran that night and stayed with him a long time, clinging to him in a wordless agony she could neither explain nor understand. At last she said, “Rafe, do you know a girl named Fiona?”

  “Yes, fairly well; a beautiful redhead in New Skye. But you needn’t be jealous, darling, as a matter of fact, I think she’s living with Lewis MacLeod just now. Why?”

  “You know a lot of people in New Skye. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve been there a lot lately, why? I thought you had them down for disgusting savages,” Rafe said, a little defensively, “but they’re nice people and I like their way of life. I’m not asking you to join them. I know you wouldn’t, and they won’t let me in without a woman of my own—they try to keep the sexes balanced, though they don’t marry—but they treat me like one of them.”

  She said with unusual gentleness, “I’m very glad, and I’m certainly not jealous. But I’d like to see Fiona, and I can’t explain why. Could you take me to one of their meetings?”

  “You don’t have to explain,” he said, “They’re having a concert—oh, informal, but that’s what it is—tonight, and anyone who wants to come is welcome. You could even join in, if you felt like singing, I do sometimes. You know some old Spanish songs, don’t you? There’s a sort of informal project to preserve as much music as we can remember.”

  “Some other time, I’ll be glad to; I’m too short of breath to do much singing now,” she said. “Maybe after the baby’s born.” She clasped his hand, and MacAran felt a wild pang of jealousy. She knows Fiona’s carrying the Captain’s child, and she wants to see her. And that’s why she isn’t jealous, she couldn’t care less. . . .

  I’m jealous. But would I want her to lie to me? She does love me, she’s having my child, what more do I want?

  They heard the music beginning before they reached the new Community Hall at the New Skye farm, and Camilla looked at MacAran in startled dismay. “Good Lord, what’s that unholy racket!”

  “I forgot you weren’t a Scot, darling, don’t you like the bagpipes? Moray and Domenick and a couple of others play them, but you don’t have to go in until they’re finished unless you like,” he laughed.

  “It sounds worse than a banshee on the loose,” Camilla said firmly. “The music isn’t all like that, I hope?”

  “No, there are harps, guitars, lutes, you name it, they’ve got it. And building new ones.” He squeezed her fingers as the pipes died, and they walked toward the hall. “It’s a tradition, That’s all. The pipes. And the Highland regalia—the kilts and swords.”

  Camilla felt, surprisingly, a brief pang almost of envy as they came into the hall, brightly lit with candles and torches; the girls in their brilliant tartan skirts and plaids, the men resplendent in kilts, swords, buckled plaids swaggering over their shoulders. So many of them were bright-haired red-heads. A colorful tradition. They pass it on, and our traditions—die. Oh, come, damn it, what traditions? The annual parade of the Space Academy? Theirs fit, at least, into this strange world.

  Two men. Moray and the tall, redheaded Alastair, were doing a sword dance, leaping nimbly across the gleaming blades to the sound of the piper. For an instant Camilla had a strange vision of gleaming swords, not used in games, but deadly serious, then it flickered out again and she joined in the applause for the dancers.

  There were other dances and songs, mostly unfamiliar to Camilla, with a strange, melancholy lilt and a rhythm that made her think of the sea. And the sea, too, ran through many of the words. It was dark in the hall, even by the torchlight, and she did not anywhere see the coppery-haired girl she sought, and after a time she forgot the urgency that had brought her there, listening to the mournful songs of a vanished world of islands and seas;O Mhari Oh, Mhari my girl

  Thy sea-blue eyes with witchery

  Draw me to thee, off Mull’s wild shore

  My heart is sore, for love of thee. . . .

  MacAran’s arm tightened around her and she let herself lean against him.

  She whispered, “How strange, that on a world without seas, so many sea-songs should be kept alive. . . .”

  He murmured, “Give us time. We’ll find some seas to sing about—” and broke off, for the song had died, and someone called, “Fiona! Fiona, you sing for us!” Others took up the cry, and after a time the slight red-haired girl, wearing a full green-and-blue skirt which accentuated, almost flaunting, her pregnancy, came through the crowd. She said, in her light sweet voice, “I can’t do much singing, I’m short of breath these days. What would you like to hear?”

  Someone called out in Gaelic; she smiled and shook her head, then took from another girl a small harp and sat on a wooden bench. Her fingers moved in soft arpeggios for a moment, and then she sang:The wind from the island brings songs of our sorrow

  The cry of the gulls and the sighing of streams;

  In all of my dreaming, I’m hearing the waters

  That flow from the hills in the land of our dreams.

  Her voice was low and soft, and as she sang Camilla caught the picture of green, low hills, familiar outlines of childhood, memories of an Earth few of them could remember, kept alive only in songs such as this; memories of a time when the hills of Earth were green beneath a golden-yellow sun, and sea-blue skies. . . .Blow westward, O sea-wind, and bring us some murmur

  Adrift from our homeland of honor and truth;

  In waking and sleeping, I’m hearing the waters

  That flow from the hills in the land of our youth.

  Camilla’s throat tightened with half a sob. The lost land, the forgotten . . . for the first time, she made a clear effort to open the eyes of her mind to the special awareness she had known since the first wind. She fixed her eyes and her mind, almost fiercely, with a surge almost of passionate love, on the singing girl; and then she saw, and relaxed.

  She won’t die. Her child will live.

  I couldn’t have borne it, for him to be wiped out as if he’
d never been . . .

  What’s wrong with me? He’s only a few years older than Moray, there’s no reason he shouldn’t outlive most of us . . . but the anguish was there, and the intense relief, as Fiona’s song swelled into a close;We sing in this far land the songs of our exile,

  The pipes and the harps are as fair as before;

  But never shall music run sweet as the waters

  That flow in that land we shall never see more.

  Camilla discovered that she was weeping; but she was not alone. All around her, in the darkened room, the exiles were mourning their lost world; unable to bear it, Camilla rose and blindly made her way toward the door, groping through the crowds. When they saw that she was pregnant they courteously cleared a way for her. MacAran followed, but she took no notice of him; only when they were outside, she turned to him and stood, clinging to him, weeping wildly. But when at last she began to hear his concerned questions, she turned them aside. She did not know how to answer.

  Rafe tried to comfort her, but somehow he picked up her disquiet, and for some time he did not know why, until abruptly it came to him.

  Overhead the night was clear, with no cloud or sign of rain. Two great moons, lime-green, peacock blue, hung low in the darkening violet sky. And the winds were rising.

  Inside the Hall of the New Hebrides Commune, music passed imperceptibly into an almost ecstatic group dance, the growing sense of togetherness, of love and communion binding them together into bonds of closeness which were never to be forgotten or broken. Once, late in the night when the torches were flaring and guttering low, two of the men sprang up, facing one another in a flare-up of violent wrath, swords flickering from their flamboyant Highland regalia, crossing in a clash of steel. Moray, Alastair and Lewis MacLeod, acting like the fingers of a single hand, dived at the two angry men and brought them sprawling down, knocking the swords out of their hands, and sat on them—literally—until the gleam of wolfish anger died in the two. Then, gently freeing them they poured whisky down their throats (Scots will somehow manage to make whisky at the far ends of the Universe, Moray thought, no matter what else they go without) until the two fighting men embraced one another drunkenly and pledged eternal friendship and the love-feast went on, until the red sun rose, clear and cloudless in the sky.

  Judy woke, feeling the stir of the wind like a breath of cold through her very bones, the waking strangeness in her brain and bones. She felt quickly, as if seeking to reassure herself, where her child stirred with a strange strong life. Yes. It is well with her, but she too feels the winds of madness.

  It was dark in the room where she lay, and she listened to the sounds of distant song. It is beginning, but this time . . . this time do they know what it is, can they meet it without fear or strangeness? She herself felt perfect calm, a silence at her center of being. She knew, without surprise, exactly what had brought the madness at first; and knew that for her, at least, madness would not return. There would always, in the season of the winds, be strangeness, and a greater openness and awareness; the latent powers, so long dormant, would always be stronger under the influence of the powerful psychedelic borne on the wind. But she knew, now, how to cope with them, and there would be only the small madness which eases the mind and rests the unquiet brain from stress, leaving it free to cope with further stress another time. She let herself drift on it now, reaching out with her thoughts for a half-felt touch that was like a memory. She felt as if she were spinning, floating on the winds that tossed her thoughts, and briefly her thoughts clasped and linked with the alien (even now she had no name for him, she needed none, they knew each other as a mother knows the face of her child or as twin recognizes twin, they would be together always even if her living eyes never again beheld his face) in a brief, half-ecstatic joining. Brief as the touch was, she needed, desired no more.

  She drew out the jewel, his love-gift. It seemed to her to glow in the darkness with its own inner fire, as it had glowed in his hand when he laid it in hers in the forest, echoing the strange silver blue glow of his eyes. Try to master the jewel. She focused her eyes and thoughts on it, struggling to know, with that curious inner sight, what was meant.

  It was dark in her room, for as the night moved on the moons sank behind the shuttered window and the starlight was dim. The jewel still clasped in her hand, Judy reached for a resin-candle; sleep was far from her. She felt about in the darkness for a light, missed it and heard the small chemical-tipped splinter fall to the floor. She whispered a small irritable imprecation, now she would have to get out of bed and find it. She stared fiercely at the resin-candle, somehow looking through the jewel in her hand.

  Light, damn you.

  The resin-candle on its carven stick suddenly flared into brilliant flame, untouched. Judy, gasping and feeling her heart pound, quickly snuffed the flame, took her hand away; again centered all her thoughts on the jewel and the flame and saw the light flare out again between her fingers.

  So this is what they were. . . .

  This could be dangerous. I will hide it until the proper time comes. In that moment she knew she had made a discovery which might, one day, step into the gap between the transplanted knowledge of Earth and the old knowledge of this strange world, but she also knew that she would not speak of it for a long time, if ever. When the time comes and their minds are strong and ready, then—then perhaps they can be trusted with it. If I show them now, half of them will not believe—and the rest will begin to scheme how to use it. Not now.

  Since the destruction of the starship and his acceptance that they were marooned on this world (A lifetime? Forever? Forever for me, at least) Captain Leicester had had only one hope, a lifework, something to give reason to his existence and some glimmer of optimism to his despair.

  Moray could structure a society which would tie them to the soil of this world, rooting like hogs for their daily food. That was Moray’s business; maybe it was necessary for the time being, to evolve a stable society which could insure survival. But survival didn’t matter if it was only survival, and he now realized it could be more. It would some day take their children back to the stars. He had the computer; and he had a technically trained crew, and he had a lifetime of knowledge. For the last three months he had systematically, piece by piece, stripped the ship of every bit of equipment, every bit of his own training for a lifetime, and programmed, with the help of Camilla and three other technicians, everything he knew into it. He had read every surviving textbook from the library into it, from astronomy to zoology, from medicine to electronic engineering; he had brought in every surviving crew member, one by one, and helped them to transfer all their knowledge to the computer. Nothing was too small to program into the computer, from how to build and repair a food synthesizer, to the making and repair of zippers on uniforms.

  He thought, in triumph; there’s a whole technology here, a whole heritage, preserved entire for our descendants. It won’t be in my lifetime, or Moray’s, or perhaps in my children’s lifetime. But when we grow past the small struggles of day-to-day survival, the knowledge will be there, the heritage. It will be here for now, whether the knowledge for the hospital of how to cure a brain tumor or glaze a cooking-pot for the kitchen; and when Moray runs up against problems in his structured society, as he inevitably will, the answers will be here. The whole history of the world we came from; we can pass by all the blind alleys of society, and go straight to a technology which will take us back to the stars one day—to rejoin the greater community of civilized man, not crawling around on one planet, but spreading like a great branching tree from star to star, universe upon universe.

  We can all die, but the thing which made us human will survive—entire—and some day we will go back. Some day we will reclaim it.

  He lay and listened to the distant sound of singing from the New Skye hall, in the dome which had become his whole life. Vaguely it occurred to him that he should get up; dress; go over to them, join them. They had something to preserve too. He thought of
the lovely copper-haired girl he had known so briefly; who, amazingly, bore his child.

  She would be glad to see him, and surely he had some responsibility, even though he had fathered the child half-knowing, maddened like a beast in rut—he flinched at the thought. Still she had been gentle and understanding, and he owed her something, some kindness for having used and forgotten her. What was her strange and lovely name? Fiona? Gaelic, surely. He rose from his bed, searching quickly for some garments, then hesitated, standing at the door of the dome and looking out at the clear bright sky. The moons had set and the pale false dawn was beginning to glow far to the east, a rainbow light like an aurora, which he supposed was reflected from the faraway glacier he had never seen; would never see; never cared to see.

  He sniffed the wind and as he drew it into his lungs a strange, angry suspicion came over him. Last time they had destroyed the ship; this time they would destroy him, and his work. He slammed the dome and locked it; double-locked it with the padlock he had demanded from Moray. This time no one would approach the computer, not even those he trusted most. Not even Patrick. Not even Camilla.