Darkover: First Contact (19 page)

 

Moray had finished work assignments for most of the colonists and crew by the time Chief Engineer Laurence Patrick found himself, with Captain Leicester, consulting the Colony Representative.

Patrick said, “You know, Moray, long before I became a M-AM drive expert I was a specialist in small all-terrain craft. There’s enough metal in the ship, salvaged, to create several such craft, and they could be powered with small converted drive units. It would be a tremendous help to you in locating and structuring the resources of the planet, and I’m willing to handle the building. How soon can I get to it?”

Moray said, “Sorry, Patrick, not in your lifetime or mine.”

“I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it help a great deal in exploring, and in maximizing use of resources? Are you
trying
to create as savage and barbarian an environment as you can possibly manage?” Patrick demanded angrily. “Lord help us, has the Earth Expeditionary become nothing but a nest of anti-technocrats and neo-ruralists?”

Moray shook his head, unruffled. “Not at all,” he said. “My first colony assignment was on a planet where I designed a highly technical civilization based on maximal use of electric power and I’m extremely proud of it—in fact, I’m intending, or in view of our mutual catastrophe I should say I
had
been intending, to go back there at the end of my days and retire. My assignment to the Coronis colony meant I was designing technological cultures. But as things turned out—”

“It’s still possible,” said Captain Leicester. “We can pass down our technological heritage to our children and grandchildren, Moray, and some day, even if we’re marooned here for life, our grandchildren will go back. Don’t you know your history, Moray? From the invention of the steamboat to man’s landing on the Moon was less than two hundred years. From there to the M-AM drives which landed us on Alpha Centauri, less than a hundred. We may all die on this Godforsaken lump of rock, we probably
will.
But if we can preserve our technology intact, enough to take our grandchildren back into the mainstream of human civilization, we won’t be dying for nothing.”

Moray looked at him with a deep pity. “Is it possible that you still don’t understand? Let me spell it out for you, Captain, and you, Patrick. This planet will not support
any
advanced technology. Instead of a nickel-iron core, the major metals are low-density non-conductors, which explains why the gravity is so low. The rock, as far as we can tell without sophisticated equipment we don’t have and can’t build, is high in silicates but low in metallic ores. Metals are always going to be rare here—terrifyingly rare. The planet I spoke about, with enormous use of electric power, had huge fossil-fuel deposits
and
huge amounts of mountain streams to convert energy . . .
and
a very tough ecological system. This planet appears to be only marginally agricultural land, at least here. The forest cover is all that keeps it from massive erosion, so we must harvest timber with the greatest care, and preserve the forests as a lifeline. Added to that, we simply can’t spare enough manual labor to build the vehicles you want, to service and maintain them, or to build such small roadways as they would need. I can give you exact facts and figures if you like, but in brief, if you insist on a mechanized technology you’re handing down a death sentence—if not for all of us, at least for our grandchildren; we might make it through three generations, because with such small numbers we could move on to a new part of the planet when we’d burned out one area. But no more.”

Patrick said with deep bitterness, “Is it worth while surviving, or even
having
grandchildren, if they’re going to live this way?”

Moray shrugged. “I can’t make you have grandchildren,” he said. “But I have a responsibility to the ones already on the way, and there are colonies without advanced technology which have just as long a waiting list as the one planned around massive use of electricity. Our lifeline isn’t you people, I’m sorry to say; you are—to put it bluntly, Chief—just so much dead weight. The people we need on this world are the ones in the New Hebrides Commune—and I suspect if we survive at all, it’s going to be their doing.”

“Well,” Captain Leicester said, “I guess that tells us where we stand.” He thought it over a minute. “What’s ahead for us, then, Moray?”

Moray looked at the records, and said, “I note on your personnel printout that your hobby at the academy was building musical instruments. That isn’t very high priority, but this winter we can use plenty of people who know something about it. Meanwhile, do you know anything about glass blowing, practical nursing, dietetics, or elementary teaching?”

“I joined the service as a Medical Corpsman,” Patrick said surprisingly, “before I went into Officer’s Training.”

“Go talk to Di Asturien in the hospital, then. For the time being I’ll mark you down as assistant orderly, subject to drafts of all able-bodied men in the building program. An engineer should be able to handle architectural work and designing. As for you, Captain—”

Leicester said irritably, “It’s idiotic to call me
Captain.
Captain of
what,
for God’s sake, man!”

“Harry, then,” Moray said, with a small wry grin. “I suspect titles and things will just quietly disappear within three or four years, but I’m not going to deprive anyone of one, if he wants to keep it.”

“Well, consider I’ve phased mine out,” Leicester said. “Going to draft me to hoe in the garden? Once I’m out as a spaceship captain, it’s all I’m good for.”

“No,” Moray said bluntly. “I’m going to need whatever it was in you that made you a Captain—leadership, maybe.”

“Any law against salvaging what technological know-how we have? Programming it into the computer, maybe, for those hypothetical grandchildren of ours?”

“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.

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.”