I reached for the controls, feeling curiously out of place in just my wet shorts.
Maria lurched towards me. ‘I had a dream about Kanlin! I dreamed he was coming back to me. He was standing by the bunk in the hut, and all his friends were there. It was beautiful...’ —
‘Strap in,’ I snapped. ‘We’re taking off ...’
“No, Jim, we can’t go! If Kanlin didn’t die, then I must find him ...’
‘But he is dead!’ I shouted. ‘Can’t you understand? He was taking over your mind. I had to destroy him—him and all the others. I had to stop them from destroying you!’
She recoiled as if I had struck her. At last it was getting through. At last she realised what terrible thing I’d done. ‘You killed-?’
I leapt from the seat and grabbed her arm. ‘Get in that couch!’
‘No!’ Sobbing, she squirmed away from me.
‘Listen to me!’ I yelled. ‘These people are incredibly different from us. We have so much to learn about them before we can even begin to teach them anything! The reports didn’t get all of it. It was assumed that the Lanaian men stayed away from the villages and the women only visited them when they wanted children. But it wasn’t that way at all! You heard what Kordalia said: there are no men! And it was there all the time, there in the Scroll of Priests: “The sons of life, having sprung from seed shall be seed
But Maria wasn’t listening. She was still struggling, weeping hysterically as I dragged her across to the take-off couch. I wanted to scream it at her: scream that the males of this planet were flowers, flowers that probably grew only in the optimum climatic conditions of the Valley of Crimson. Does it sound so impossible—one sex vegetable, one mammal ? But it was there. And it was all laid out before us in the Scroll of Priests, if only we’d understood. “And 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...”
‘Don’t you see what it means?’ I yelled. ‘How totally alien these people are? How in God’s name must they copulate ... ? And the women, carrying the seeds back to the village, most of them giving birth to daughters, and a few to sexless things—the Chosen Ones. No wonder I misunderstood for so long. It’s all in the translation of their language. How could these concepts possibly be translated from Lanaian to Earthian? And they misunderstood too: our word for “boy” confused with their word for “Chosen One”.’ I shook my head. ‘How could we fail to misunderstand...’
‘No!’ Maria stared at me. ‘No ...’ Crying, she pulled away and threw herself against the port. In the distance the lights of the village glowed dully against the darkness. There were no Lanaians in sight.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe it...’
I gripped her shoulders, tugging her again over to the take-off couch. ‘But it’s true, Maria. There’s no other possibility. Can’t you grasp it?’
‘Kanlin!’ A cold savage light came into her eyes. Suddenly she was fighting against me. ‘You killed Kanlin!’
I slapped her hard across the face and pushed her down into the couch. Before she could react I’d locked the straps into place. I leapt into my own seat and locked myself in. Ignoring her shouts, I pressed the contacts and waited for the power to build up. Then I hit the button.
* * * *
Nine
All the way up I tried to think how I could explain it to her. What words could I use when I could only just grasp it myself—only just grasp how the Chosen Ones were buried in the Pool of Transference where they took root, metamorphosing almost into vegetables, becoming almost like their ‘fathers’, their awarenesses fusing into one, powerful enough to link telepathically with each of their mothers’ minds, as Kordalia had said. And their mothers going through a metamorphosis of their own, becoming Priest Chiefs, go-betweens for mammal and vegetable, leaders of the race. And the female children, growing up, going to the Valley of Crimson to receive the seed, to begin the whole crazy fantastic cycle again ...
Four hundred miles out from Lanaia I released her from the couch. For the next hour her eyes avoided mine. She sat with her back to me, staring through the port.
‘I saved you,’ I told her. ‘I threw away everything to save you.’
She turned to look at me, her eyes circled and dark. Now she was past even tears.
‘Jim,’ she said quietly. ‘The trouble with you is that you have no confidence in yourself. You just drift along on the line of least resistance, convinced that whatever you’re doing you’re doing because you believe in it. You never kick back until you feel threatened—and then you really kick! You hit out in all directions to restore your own personal status-quo and you expect everyone to love you for it. But I’ve got news for you—it’s just not so.’
Horrified, I stared at her. ‘Maria ...’
But she shook her head.
‘I’m committed, Jim. I’m committed and I will be for the rest of my life to the saving of men’s souls—men meaning all sentient beings. But you—you could never be committed to anything other than your own over-inflated ego!’
She gazed at me sadly; but it was a gaze completely without pity. Slowly she turned away. I’d thought I was a true Christian; but I had been able to sacrifice nothing to that faith. In the end I had turned against everything so that I could have the one thing that really mattered to me.
Now I had lost her too.
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New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology] Page 18