Darkover: First Contact (21 page)

Consciously, with an effort, Leicester reminded himself,
she’s pregnant and that’s why they thought for years that women weren’t fit to be scientists—pregnant women get notions.
He watched her making swift notations in the elaborate shorthand of the computer. “Why do you want to know the length of the year?”

What a stupid question,
the girl thought, then remembered he was brought up on a space station, weather is nothing to him. She doubted if he even realized the relationship of weather and climate to crops and survival. She said, explaining gently, “First, we want to estimate the growing season and find out when our harvests can come in. Its simpler than trial and error, and if we’d colonized in the ordinary way, someone would have observed this planet through several year cycles. Also, Fiona and Judy and—and the rest of us would like to know when our children will be born and what the climate’s likely to be like. I’m not making my own baby clothes, but someone’s got to make them—and know how much chill to allow for!”

“You’re planning already?” he asked, curiously. “The odds are only one in two that you’ll carry it to term and the same that it won’t die.”

“I don’t know. Somehow I never doubted that mine would be one of the ones to live. Premonition, maybe; ESP” she said, thinking slowly as she spoke. “I had a feeling Ruth Fontana would miscarry, and she did.”

He shuddered. “Not a pleasant gift to have.”

“No, but I seem to be stuck with it,” she said matter-of-factly, “and it seems to be helping Moray and the others with the crops. Not to mention the well Heather helped them dig. Evidently it’s simply a revival of latent human potential and there’s nothing weird about it. Anyhow, it seems we’ll have to learn to live with it.”

“When I was a student,” Leicester said, “all the facts known positively about ESP were fed into a computer and the answer was that the probability was a thousand to one that there was no such thing . . . that the very few cases not totally and conclusively disproven were due to investigator error, not human ESP.”

Camilla grinned and said, “That just goes to show you that a computer isn’t God.”

Captain Leicester watched the young woman stretch back and ease her cramped body. “Damn these bridge seats, they were never meant for use in full gravity conditions. I hope comfortable furniture gets put on a fair priority; Junior here doesn’t approve of my sitting on hard seats these days.”

Lord, how I love that girl, who’d have believed it at my age!
To remind himself more forcefully of the gap, Leicester said sharply, “Are you planning to marry MacAran, Camilla?”

“I don’t think so,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “We haven’t been thinking in those terms. I love him—we came so close during the first Wind, we’ve shared so much, we’ll always be part of each other. I’m living with him, when he’s here—which isn’t very often—if that’s what you really want to know. Mostly because he wants me so much, and when you’ve been that close to anyone, when you can—” she fumbled for words, “when you can feel how much he wants you, you can’t turn your back on him, you can’t leave him—hungry and unhappy. But whether or not we can make any kind of home together, whether we want to live together for the rest of our lives—I honestly don’t know; I don’t think so. We’re too different.” She gave him a straightforward smile that made the man’s heart turn over and said, “I’d really be happier with you, on a long-term basis. We’re so much more alike. Rafe’s so gentle, so sweet, but you understand me better.”

“You’re carrying his child, and you can say this to me, Camilla?”

“Does it shock you?” she asked, grieved. “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t upset you for the world. Yes, it’s Rafe’s baby, and I’m glad, in a funny way.
He
wants it, and one parent
ought
to want a child; for me—I can’t help it, I was brainwashed—it’s still an accident of biology. If it was yours, for instance—and it could have been, the same kind of accident, just as Fiona’s having
your
child and you hardly know her by sight—you’d have hated it, you’d have wanted me to fight against having it.”

“I’m not so sure. Maybe not. Not now, anyhow,” Harry Leicester said in a low voice. “Saying these things still upsets me, though. Shocks me. I’m too old, maybe.”

She shook her head. “We’ve got to learn not to hide from each other. In a society where our children will grow up knowing that what they feel is an open book, what good is it going to be to keep sets of masks to wear from each other?”

“Frightening.”

“A little. But they’ll probably take it for granted.” She leaned a little against him, easing her back against his chest. She reached back and took his fingers in hers. She said slowly, “Don’t be shocked at this. But—if I live—if we both live—I’d like my next child to be yours.”

He bent and kissed her on the forehead. He was almost too much moved to speak. She tightened her hand on his, then drew it away.

“I told MacAran this,” she said matter-of-factly. “For genetic reasons, it’s going to be a good thing for women to have children by different fathers. But—as I said—my reasons aren’t quite as cold and unemotional as all that.”

Her face took on a distant look—for a moment it seemed to Leicester that she was looking at something invisible through a veil—and for a moment contracted in pain; but to his quick, concerned question, she summoned a smile.

“No, I’m all right. Lets see what we can do about this year-length thing. Who knows, it might turn out to be our first National Holiday!”

 

The windmills were visible several miles from the Base Camp now, huge wooden-sailed constructs which supplied power for grinding flour and grain (nuts, harvested in the forest, made a fine slightly-sweet flour which would serve until the first crops of rye and oats were harvested) and also brought small trickles of electric power into the camp. But such power would always be in short supply on this world, and it was carefully rationed; for lights in the hospital, to operate essential machinery in the small metal shops and the new glass-house. Beyond the camp, with its own firebreak, was what they had begun to call New Camp, although the Hebrides Commune people who worked there called it New Skye; an experimental farm where Lewis MacLeod, and a group of assistants, were checking possibly domesticable animals.

Rafe MacAran, with his own small crew of assistants, paused to look back from the peak of the nearest hill before setting off into the forest. The two camps could both clearly be seen, from here, and around them both was swarming activity, but there was some indefinable difference from any camp he had seen on Earth, and for a moment he could not put his finger on it. Then he knew what it was; it was the quiet. Or was it? There was really plenty of sound. The great windmills creaked and heaved in the strong wind. There were crisp distant sounds of hammerings and sawings where the building crews were constructing winter buildings. The farm had its noises, including the noisy sounds of animals, the bellowings of the antlered mammals, the curious grunts, chirps, squeaks of unfamiliar life forms. And finally Rate put his finger on it. There were no sounds which were not of natural origin. No traffic. No machinery, except the softly whirring potter’s wheels and the clinkings of tools. Each one of these sounds had some immediate human deliberation behind it. There were almost no impersonal sounds. Every sound seemed to have a purpose, and it seemed strange and lonesome to Rafe. All his life he had lived in the great cities of Earth, where even in the mountains, the sounds of all-terrain vehicles, motorized transit, high-tension power lines, and jet planes overhead, provided a comforting background. Here it was quiet, frighteningly quiet because whenever a sound broke the stillness of wind, there was some immediate
meaning
to the sound. You couldn’t tune it out. Whenever there was a sound, you
had
to listen to it. There were no sounds which could be carelessly disregarded because, like jets passing overhead or the drive of the starship, you knew they had nothing to do with you. Every sound in the landscape had some immediate application to the listener, and Rafe felt tense most of the time, listening.

Oh well. He supposed he’d get used to it.

He started instructing his group. “We’ll work along the lower rock-ridges today, and especially in the stream-beds. We want samples of every new-looking kind of earth—oh hell—
soil.
Every time the color of the clay or loam changes, take a sample of it, and locate it on the map—you’re doing the mapping, Janice?” he asked the girl, and she nodded. “I’m working on grid paper. We’ll get a location for every change of terrain.”

The morning’s work was relatively uneventful, except for one discovery near a stream-bed, which Rafe mentioned when they gathered to kindle a fire and make their noon-day meal—nut-flour rolls to be toasted and “tea” of a local leaf which had a pleasant, sweet taste like sassafras. The fire was kindled in a quickly-piled rock fireplace—the colony’s strongest law was never to build a fire on the ground without firebreaks or rock enclosures—and as the quick resinous wood began to burn down to coals, a second small party came down the slope toward them: three men, two women.

“Hello, can we join you for dinner? It’ll save building another fire,” Judy Lovat greeted them.

“Glad to have you,” MacAran agreed, “but what are you doing in the woods, Judy? I thought you were exempt from manual work now.”

The woman gestured. “As a matter of fact, I’m being treated like surplus luggage,” she said. “I’m not allowed to lift a finger, or do any real climbing, but it minimizes bringing samples back to camp if I can do preliminary field-testing on various plants. That’s how we discovered the ropeweed. Ewen says the exercise will do me good, if I’m careful not to get overtired or chilled.” She brought her tea and sat down beside him. “Any luck today?”

He nodded. “About time. For the last three weeks, every day, everything I brought in was just one more version of quartzite or calcite,” he said. “Our last strike was graphite.”

“Graphite? What good is that?”

“Well, among other things, it’s the lead in a pencil,” MacAran said, “and we have plenty of wood for pencils, which will help when supplies run low of other writing instruments. It can also be used to lubricate machinery, which will conserve supplies of animal and vegetable fats for food purposes.”

“It’s funny, you never think of things like that,” Judy said. “The
millions
of little things you need that you always took for granted.”

“Yes,” said one of MacAran’s crew. “I always thought of cosmetics as something extra—something people could do without in an emergency. Marcia Cameron told me the other day that she was working on a high-priority program for face cream, and when I asked why, she reminded me that in a planet with all this much snow and ice, it was an urgent necessity to keep the skin soft and prevent chapping and infections.”

Judy laughed. “Yes, and right now we’re going mad trying to find a substitute for cornstarch to make baby powder with. Adults can use talc, and there’s plenty of that around, but if babies breathe the stuff they can get lung troubles. All the local grains and nuts won’t grind fine enough; the flour is fine to eat but not absorbent enough for delicate little baby bottoms.”

MacAran asked, “Just how urgent is that now, Judy?”

Judy shrugged. “On Earth, I’d have about two-and-a-half months to go. Camilla and I, and Alastair’s girl Alanna, are running about neck-and-neck; the next batch is due about a month after that. Here—well, it’s anybody’s guess.” She added, quietly, “We expect the winter will set in before that. But you were going to tell me about what you found today.”

“Fuller’s earth,” MacAran said, “or something so like it I can’t tell the difference.” At her blank look he elucidated, “It’s used in making cloth. We get small supplies of animal fiber, something like wool, from the rabbit-horns, and they’re plentiful and can be raised in quantity on the farm, but fuller’s earth will make the cloth easier to handle and shrink.”

Janice said, “You never think of asking a geologist for something to make
cloth,
for goodness’ sake.”

Judy said, “When you come down to it, every science is interrelated, although on Earth everything was so specialized we lost sight of it.” She drank the last of her tea. “Are you heading bank to Base Camp, Rafe?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s into the woods for us, probably back in the hills where we went that first time. There may be streams which rise in the far hills and we’re going to check them out. That’s why Dr. Frazer is with us—he wants to find further traces of the people we sighted last trip, get some more accurate idea of their cultural level. We know they build bridges from tree to tree—we haven’t tried to climb in them, they’re evidently a lot lighter than we are and we don’t want to break their artifacts or frighten them.”

Judy nodded. “I wish I were going,” she said, rather wistfully, “but I’m under orders never to be more than a few hours from Base Camp until after the baby is born.” MacAran caught a look of deep longing in her eyes and, with that new ability to pick up emotions, reached out for her and said gently, “Don’t worry, Judy. We won’t trouble anyone we find, whether the little people who build the bridges, or—anyone else. If any of the beings here were hostile to us, we’d have found it out by now. We’ve no intention of bothering them. One of our reasons for going is to make sure we won’t inadvertently infringe on their living space, or disturb anything they need for
their
survival. Once we know where
they’re
settled, we’ll know where we ought
not
to settle.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Rafe,” she said, softly. “That’s good to know. If we’re thinking along those lines, I guess I needn’t worry.”

Shortly after the two groups separated, the food-testing crew working back toward Base Camp, while MacAran’s crew moved further into the deep hills.

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.