But Parker wasn’t going to do anything like that. His ruddy face had gone greenly pale. ‘Sunday?’ he echoed weakly. ‘My flask ... the culture ... I dropped and broke it... Saturday afternoon. All I had left...’
‘How? Where?’
‘There, in the sink. I flushed it away down the drain, of course.’
‘Drain?’ Collier was struck by a terrible thought. “You’ve run it into the burn, you bloody idiot. The Lea. The river! Everyone in the village uses it, they always have. It’s the sweetest water in a hundred miles!’
‘God!’ Parker struck himself on the brow. ‘How the hell was I supposed to know that? I’m used to working in civilised terms, with drains and sewage. This place was a laboratory, before. Surely they didn’t shoot their washings into the burn?’
‘That’s a point!’ Collier wheeled and ran outside, sharp right and on down to the water’s edge, Parker pounding at his heels. ‘There’s your answer,’ he pointed. ‘There was a pipe-line there to carry it along to the far side of the bridge, but it’s rusted away, long ago, see?’
‘Why the far side of the bridge?’
‘Because that’s where the mine effluent comes out. Mucky yellow stuff, full of sulphur and iron oxides, what we used to call “cankery water” when I was a kid.’
Parker was staring now, away along the purling water to the bridge. ‘Is there any effluent still running from the mine, d’you know? What’s the ‘pH’ of it, if any?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ Collier demanded; but he spoke to Parker’s back, as the doctor went haring back into the lab, almost bowling Mary Ellen over in his haste. Seconds later he was out again, still on the run, with a couple of test-tubes in one hand and a small wadge of coloured paper in the other. Collier ran after him along the river bank.
‘What are you up to now?’ he cried.
‘Check that effluent. Pray that it’s acid ... else that damned culture could be all over the lower valley by now. Three days!’
Mary Ellen ran too, spurning the ground with no apparent effort. ‘They aren’t dead, after all?’
‘Not yet anyway. Just going around in circles. Mary Ellen!’ Collier was so surprised that he almost missed his footing. ‘Did you understand all that we were saying?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, and he returned his attention forward; but to himself he said: ‘The devil you did. And I thought you were simple!’
On ahead, Parker ran straight into the water under the bridge, heedless of shoes and trousers legs. Collier was content to halt and crouch and peer. The big open-ended pipe still ran scummy yellow, although considerably reduced in quantity from what he remembered. After a minute or two Parker came squishily back, breathing hard but looking relieved.
‘That’s all right,’ he panted. ‘Acid as hell. The culture never got past this point, at any rate.’ He dropped to squat on the grass, and Collier settled beside him, still anxious.
‘Now what?’ he wondered. ‘Do you have an antidote?’
‘Spoken like a true layman!’ Parker snorted. ‘Antidote? Man, I don’t know what the stuff is, yet. That’s partly what I came here to find out. Still, it’s not too serious. All my test animals have eliminated the stuff totally in around seventy-two hours.’
‘That’s something,’ Collier said. ‘But these people are going to need help, assistance against after-effects, shock, whatever. They are all old folk, remember, it could upset them quite a bit.’
‘Right.’ Parker agreed sadly. ‘You’re quite right. I shall have to report this to my superiors, lay on help, expert assistance and plenty of it. And there could be a devil of a stink ... or what you’d call a scoop!’
‘I am a reporter. But there are ways ... and ways ... of writing up a story. It could be the account of a small and minor epidemic in a tiny village, with the prompt and intelligent intervention of a doctor who just happened to be there and knew what to do, thus averting what might have been a big tragedy. Something like that. Why would I want to interfere with what you are trying to do, so long as you remember me, if and when you make your big discovery? Point is now, is there anything I can do to help?’
‘Not really. I’ve my car. It won’t take long to nip down to Danchester and sound the alarm, discreetly. I’m known there. I’d better get on with that.’ He offered his hand. ‘See you again sometime, Collier, when I’ve something more positive to show. I’m glad you came by.’ He nodded briefly to Mary Ellen and strode off along the river-bank, leaving a trail of wet shoe-prints.
Collier sighed, turned to Mary Ellen, and realised he had another and different kind of problem. What was he to do about her? Quite suddenly she had become important to him. He couldn’t just leave her here. But ... his Aunt Maud was all the kin he had in all the world. Elderly, liking to give the impression of being a dragon, she was really a very nice, sweet old lady underneath, but he could just imagine her reaction if he presented Mary Ellen to her just as she was at this moment. He chuckled inwardly. Mary Ellen laughed, put her hand on his arm.
‘Bath,’ she said. ‘Warm water and soap. Clean dress, brush my hair ... you can show me all these things. Then ... Aunt Maud ... will like me?’
It was like being plunged bodily into a hot bath. The blood pounded in his ears and he had to strain for a steady breath as he stared into her merry blue eyes, and understood. The answer was so obvious, so right, that it seemed to hit him from all directions at once. This was how she had known about the village people and the rats. She had his talent. Years ago he had given up all hope of meeting someone like himself, and now here she was. No wonder she was ‘odd’ and alone, and wild. He had only to recall his own torment and fear When he discovered all minds were open to him to listen to; but not one to whom he could speak. It must have been a thousand times Worse for her, all alone.
‘Not all alone now,’ she said, gently, and her fingers found their way into his grasp, to be held tightly.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Nor me, not any more!’
<
* * * *
THE GREEN FUSE
Martin I. Ricketts
Martin Ricketts, whose first story for New Writings in SF, NEW CANUTE, appearing in Volume 24, presented a memorable approach to the theme of time displacement, writes of his new story herewith that it deals with difficulties of communication between different species of sentient beings, the place of religion in the future, the bounds of biological possibility, of selfishness and self-sacrifice, and adds: ‘But when it comes right down to it, this is mainly about three people, two humans and an alien.’ THE GREEN FUSE also contains a line of dialogue which at the time of my writing this introduction is of agonising consequence, but which, I hope and trust, by the time of publication will be merely history.
* * * *
One
As the coffin hit the water Maria began to cry. I put my arm around her but could think of nothing to say that I hadn’t said already. Her moist eyes looked at me, silently appreciating my lame attempt to give her some sort of comfort.
The little wooden box swung out into the current and sank in a swirl of bubbles. The ripples were carried away and the water became smooth once more, the reflection of the orange sky across its surface making it shine like a river of molten brass.
This water burial, of course, was only a ceremony. Later, after the coffin had been swept downstream to the Pool of Transference, the Priest Chiefs would send someone to dive in after it and break it open so that Kanlin’s body could sink into the mud at the bottom of the pool.
We watched the place where the coffin had vanished, then turned and walked back towards the village. Kordalia, the head Priest Chief, watched us uncertainly.
‘I am sorry,’ he said as we approached. “Mrs. Haines was very close to the young Kanlin. My sympathy is unbound-less.’ He danced in front of us as if in agitation, the five coloured ribbons of rank that were looped around his neck flying with the movement like the tattered remnants of an old harlequin costume.
Hardly more than five feet tall, Kordalia was pink-skinned and bald. His double-elbowed arms hung from sagging shoulders and almost touched the ground, the fingers of each of his hands fanning out like prehensile needles. Despite my sadness I still felt vaguely amused by the constant grammatical errors of his speech. The first human visitors to this world—the anthro-ecologists—had learned the Lanaian language and in return had taught many of the Lanaian leaders Earthian. But there were many subtleties, many differences of meaning between our two tongues for which there were no literal translations, and it would take years before we could speak their language properly, or they ours. Kordalia, though, had proved himself adept at picking up the language of man, and despite the manifold difficulties involved in teaching an alien our tongue, his Earthian was becoming increasingly fluent and errorless day by day.
‘Thank you, Kordalia,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm as he danced awkwardly before us, an unintentionally macabre clown. He threw his arms in the air in the Lanaian gesture of sympathy. Bravely Maria forced a smile for him. Satisfied, he turned and began to waddle rapidly along the path that led back to the village.
At the edge of the village, against a background of squat wooden huts, a circle of Lanaian women watched us in sympathetic silence. To one side another circle of women danced the Dance of Transference, jumping and twisting in the dust, and waving colourful leaves like flat swords around their thin bobbing heads.
We nodded our acknowledgement, then entered our own hut. Here, in the relative quiet, Maria broke down again. She collapsed on to the bed, tears streaming down her beautiful face. I sat beside her and let her lean against me, my fingers stroking her ash-blonde hair. There was nothing I could do. Helplessly I looked out of the window and watched the evening sunlight strike across the low rooftops of the village in flashes of turquoise and gold.
* * * *
Two
We had first arrived on Lanaia three years earlier. Two strangers sent by the government of Earth. Two strangers, from a culture that had swung wildly away from the church and then, just as wildly, had swung back again. Earth: a deeply religious world since the beginning of the twenty-second century. A planet with a church-oriented government. A planet in control of a vast sector of the galaxy. And in that sector, hundreds of planets with backward cultures, cultures that had never heard the word of God, cultures that had to be taught the meaning of Christianity. And here we came, a missionary and his wife, to learn all we could of the Lanaian customs and superstitions. x
We were the second phase in the Earthisation of these people. Whenever a new inhabited world is discovered the anthro-ecologists are the first humans to land and make contact with the dominant sentient species. Their job is to establish friendly relations with the natives and to gather as much data as possible. Also, if possible, they are to teach a number of the natives our language, or failing that, learn theirs. Then they are to leave the planet altogether.
Phase two begins with the Interplanetary Christian Mission : a missionary couple is sent to live among the natives. Here on Lanaia, needless to say, that couple was Maria and myself. Later, after we had completed our tour here. Phase three would be implemented, which would entail church-building and preaching on a relatively large scale. In theory these secondary phases sounded easy; but in fact it often took years of banging one’s head against a brick wall before there even began to be any results at all. Frequently, one had to deal with violence in many forms. But here on Lanaia we were lucky: the natives were an amazingly peaceful race who did not quarrel among them-shelves.
When we first arrived, Maria and I were little more than curiosities: thin, frail, pale-skinned creatures from an incredibly far-away place. Gradually the Lanaians came to accept us, and eventually even came to regard us as their friends. The knowledge we brought was new to them too, and they seemed surprisingly eager to learn of the nature of space and of all the other worlds that were spread like motes across the sprawling empire of Earth.
Although our job was not to preach religion to these people, we did make Christianity known to them. We laid down its principles plainly before those who cared to listen, and we exemplified it as much as possible in our daily routines. In fact we were cutting the ice for the third phase which would begin within two or three years. Eventually, to our surprise, even some of the old dogmatic Priest Chiefs came to listen to what we had to say.
And we, in turn, studied their religion with interest.
It was simple enough. The leaders of the village were very old men who did not preach to their fellows, but merely advised and gave council whenever it was required of them. Despite the apparent looseness of this relationship, there seemed to be an odd indivisible bond between the Priest Chiefs and the rest of the village, a sort of mutual need and interdependence. I knew Maria sensed it as well as I, yet neither of us mentioned it, for it was as inexplicably alien as it was unmistakable. The Priest Chiefs one tangible duty, as far as we could see, was to safeguard the ancient ‘Scroll of Priests’ which was kept housed in a large building at the edge of the village. The priests all lived together in this one hut, and never at any time was the scroll left unguarded.
We had been on Lanaia a little more than a year before we were eventually allowed to see the scroll. Kordalia took us into the gloom of the priest-hut immediately after listening to our discussion of the Ten Commandments.
‘The Scroll of Priests is very ancient,’ he told us. ‘Possibly there was a Lanaian equivalent of your Moses, and perhaps it was delivered to him in a similar manner as the tablets, but that I cannot say; its origin is lost in our history. It is, however, still read and committed to memory by every one of our people. Once learned, it is never forgotten.’
He leaned forward between a pair of crude wooden bunks and lifted a curtain from a curious crib-like table. The scroll nestled inside. It was a thin slice of wood, yellowed and worn, and obviously very old. But the peculiar Lanaian script was surprisingly clear. Together Maria and I read it through, translating with difficulty:
‘And at the height of the season of warm the women shall journey to the Valley of Crimson, there to receive the seed and conceive of offspring. Daughters of plenty shall be born from all, sons of life from but a few. The sons of life, having sprung from seed shall be seed. They shall consume each other and all the senses of the soil, of water, and of the atmosphere. They shall consume the ones who bore them and these shall be sacred. The daughters of plenty shall thrive until the time of womanhood. Thus shall life renew itself and existence remain constant.’
We stood there and said nothing. After a moment I read it through again, then looked at Maria. Her expression told me she didn’t understand it either. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Kordalia must have sensed how we felt, for he smiled at us then, his large nigrescent eyes shining, and led us from the building.
It wasn’t until much later that I came to realise that it was only the nuances, the slight untranslatable differences between our two tongues that made these writings so cryptic and puzzling; in fact the scroll gave us our first clue of what was later to happen. Though, of course, there could never have been any warning for the parts Maria and I were to play in subsequent events.
* * * *
Three
We had been on Lanaia a little under two years when Maria first voiced her uneasiness.
‘Have you noticed, Jim,’ she said across the flat trunk of wood on which we took our meals, ‘how the male children don’t seem to grow?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Take Kanlin, for instance. He was one year old when we first arrived and now, two years later, he’s no bigger than he was then. And he’s still being suckled by his mother ...’
I shook my head. ‘Maria, this planet’s yearly cycle is equal to five of Earth’s. How do you know these people haven’t got a life-cycle correspondingly longer than ours. Don’t forget they’re alien, totally different from-’
She cut me off. ‘Jim! The anthro-ecologi
sts’ report told us everything we needed to know about these people—or so we thought. We know that only females, children and very old men live here in the village, that the majority of the males stay throughout their lives in a place some way south of here called the Valley of Crimson—a place that no human has yet been allowed to visit. We know that each generation of females has to travel to this valley before they can conceive. We know the routine of their lives: how they breathe, what they eat, what makes them laugh or cry. But nowhere in the report does it say what happens when the children get older, about how fast they mature ...’
New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology] Page 15