Darkover: First Contact (23 page)

“. . . and that was really all there was to it. We stayed inside for about thirty-six hours, until the snow ended and the wind quieted, then we went away again. We never had a glimpse of whoever lived there; I suspect he carefully kept away until we were gone. It wasn’t there that he took you, Judy?”

“Oh, no. Not so far. Not nearly. And it wasn’t to any home of his own people. It was, I think, one of the cities of the little people, the men of the tree-roads, he called them, but I couldn’t find the place again, I wouldn’t want to,” she said.

“But they have good will toward us, I’m sure of that,” MacAran said, “I suppose—it wasn’t the same one you knew?”

“How can I possibly know? But they’re evidently a telepathic race; I suspect anything known to one of them is known to others—at least to his intimates, his family—if they have families.”

MacAran said. “Perhaps, some day, they’ll know we mean them no harm.”

Judy smiled faintly and said, “I’m sure they know that you—and I—mean them no harm; but there are some of us they don’t know, and I suspect that perhaps time doesn’t matter to them as much as it does to us. That’s not even so alien, except to us Western Europeans—Orientals even on Earth often made plans and thought in terms of generations instead of months or even years. Possibly he thinks there’s time to get to know us any century now.”

MacAran chuckled. “Well, we’re not going anyplace. I guess there’s time enough. Dr. Frazer is in seventh heaven, he’s got anthropological notes enough to provide him with a spare-time job for three years. He must have written down everything he saw in the house—I hope they’re not offended by his looking at everything. And of course he made notes of everything used as food—if we’re anywhere near the same species, anything they can eat we can evidently eat,” MacAran added. “We didn’t touch his supplies, of course, but Frazer made notes of everything he had. I say he for convenience, Domenick was sure it was a woman who had led us there. Also the one piece of furniture—major furniture—was what looked like a loom, with a web strung on it. There were pods of some sort of vegetable fiber—it looked something like milkweed on Earth—soaking, evidently to prepare them for spinning into thread; we found some pods like it on the way back and turned them over to MacLeod on the farm, they seem to make a very fine cloth.”

Judy said, as he rose to go, “You realize there are still plenty of people in the camp who don’t even believe there are any alien peoples on this planet.”

MacAran met her lost eyes and said very gently, “Does it matter, Judy? We know. Maybe we’ll just have to wait, and start thinking in terms of generations, too. Maybe our children will all know.”

 

On the world of the red sun, the summer moved on. The sun climbed daily a little higher in the sky, a solstice was passed, and it began to angle a little lower; Camilla, who had set herself a task of keeping calendar charts, noted that the daily changes in sun and sky indicated that the days, lengthening for their first four months on this world, were shortening again toward the unimaginable winter. The computer, given all the information they had, had predicted days of darkness, mean temperatures in the level of zero centigrade, and virtually constant glacial storms. But she reminded herself that this was only a mathematical projection of probabilities. It had nothing to do with actualities.

There were times, during that second third of her pregnancy, when she wondered at herself. Never before this had it occurred to her to doubt that the severe discipline of mathematics and science, her world since childhood, had any lacunae; or that she would ever come up against any problem, except for strictly personal ones, which these disciplines could not solve. As far as she could tell, the old disciplines still held good for her crewmates. Even the growing evidence of her own increasing ability to read the minds of others, and to look uncannily into the future and make unsettlingly accurate guesses based only on quick flashes of what she had to call “hunch”—even this was laughed at, shrugged aside. Yet she knew that some of the others experienced much the same thing.

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. . . .

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;

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:

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. . . .

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.

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;

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.