Raising The Stones (15 page)

Spiggy pulled himself together, barely, took a small, battered memorizer from one pocket, leaned across the table until he was half-lying on it, and said in a half-moan, “Settlement One had a thirty percent shortfall on projections.”

Sam felt blood rising in his neck.

Dern said, “That much?”

Spiggy sighed. “Oh, all in all, it doesn’t make that big a difference.” He tapped the memorizer, frowning at the figures which floated to its surface. “It only makes a two or three percent difference overall, somewhere in there. Two point four, I think …” His voice trailed off, then began again, as he began a recital of production statistics and what it meant to the transport crews on the recipient planets.

Dern fought down a yawn. Sam looked at his hands, annoyed, wondering why he’d been asked to come here when Spiggy was doing all the talking.

“Quit going on about the transport crews,” demanded Jamice in a nasty voice. “They’re not the problem. The problem is the actual shortfall. That and a breakdown in morale.”

“What do you mean, breakdown in morale?” Horgy had been leaning back, alternately smiling with enormous forbearance at his colleagues and throwing knowing little glances toward the girls along the wall, but now he came suddenly alert, glaring at Jamice. “What breakdown in morale?”

“Personnel matters,” Jamice said crisply. “I’ve had reports of interteam hostilities at Settlement One.”

Sam felt his neck get even hotter. He did not like meetings. He particularly didn’t like meetings where his settlement was being discussed in this way.

Horgy leaned back, relaxed, smiling, the brows raised once again as though to say, well, is that all. “Jamice, sweetheart, for a minute there, I thought there was a problem. Now, don’t tell me there’s a week goes by you don’t have reports of interteam hostilities, or rivalries, or whatever. Of course you do, dear. Rivalry is one way to keep production up.” He shrugged at his sycophants along the wall, as though to say, “You see what foolishness I have to put up with.”

“That isn’t how you’ve kept it up in Settlement One,” she snapped. “There were no such reports from Settlement One until recently. Settlement One has virtually no deaths, and those they do have result from unmanageable illnesses. As a matter of fact, when I took this job, I noted the variation from norm and made a trip out to Settlement One to see if perhaps the Topman or the Team Leaders weren’t fudging their reports. They were not. The mortality and morbidity rates have always been vanishing low at Settlement One. People simply didn’t get belligerent out there.”

Dern looked at Sam, raising his eyebrows.

“She’s right,” said Sam, trying not to give further evidence of Settlement One hostilities. “We never used to have people getting angry with one another.”

Dern cleared his throat. Three heads swiveled in his direction. “I don’t recall your ever mentioning that, Jamice, or you, Sam,” said Dern. There was iron under the velvet of his voice.

Sam frowned and snapped, “What was there to mention? We don’t report negatives.”

Jamice leapt in. “There was nothing to report, Dern. It was simply an anomaly. I’ve always assumed the higher production was due to the lower conflict rate. Which seems to be the case. At least, the two seem to fluctuate together.”

“Are you attributing a causal factor to one or the other?” he asked gently, looking first at Jamice, then at Sam, then back to Jamice.

Horgy didn’t give Jamice time to answer. “The production levels were high because they have the best leadership of any of the settlements, that’s all. All five of the leaders out there are absolute gems. Africa Wilm should be used as a paradigm.”

“She is that,” said Sam with relief, glad to be off the hostility topic but wondering why he was attending this meeting. They all seemed to be getting along fine without him. They all knew everything he knew.

Dern gave Horgy a polite you’re-out-of-order look and returned to Jamice. “A causal factor?” he demanded.

Jamice flushed once more. “I can’t go that far. It’s a bird-and-egg question, Dern. When you only have one incident, you’d be a fool to predict on the basis of it. The fact is they fluctuated together. Production down, hostilities up. Or in reverse order. But it’s only happened once.”

“Has anything else happened? Anything noteworthy?”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Zilia angrily, going off all at once in a clatter of wings, like a ground bird startled from its nest. “Of course something happened. Their God died.” She glared at Sam as though he’d personally committed deicide and then stared, red-faced, into her lap once more.

“Bondru Dharm,” murmured Tandle, fishing the proper references up on the stages. “Perhaps we should not go so far as to call it ‘their God.’ ”

“The Departed God that was there when you people settled,” amended Horgy with a nod to Sam. “You settlers probably have your own religion or religions, don’t you? Most of the Settlement One people are from Phansure, aren’t they, Sam? Phansure has lots of religions.”

“They probably do,” Spiggy interjected in a gloomy voice. “Last thing they’d want would be a God who was actually present. Last thing anybody’d want would be a God who actually worked.”

“Worked?” asked Jamice, sneering. “A God who worked? What do you mean, Spig?”

Sam, seeing Spiggy drifting away again, said hastily, “Our people come from a number of backgrounds, but all of us had this thing, this so-called grief reaction, which lasted about ten days. We just blanked out. I hadn’t seriously considered it as the main factor in the production drop, but I suppose it could be the cause.”

“If production dropped, and if your people out there had always taken pride in being number one,” Dern said, “could their chagrin and disappointment lead to annoyance? To hostility?”

Sam shrugged, not pleased with the thrust of the conversation, but not able to refute it.

Spiggy murmured, “You know it could.”

“So?” Dern asked. “It could be causative?”

“I suppose,” Sam admitted. “I suppose it could.”

“It wasn’t,” Zilia murmured. “I know it wasn’t. It’s because they killed their God. Guilt, that’s what it was.”

Silence. Against the wall, the blonde whispered to the brunette, and the two of them covered their mouths, either in laughter or in shock. The third girl stared at Zilia, as though she could not believe what she had heard.

Dern said, “Zilia, that would be upsetting, if indeed, any such thing occurred. What makes you think it did?”

“Because of the way they acted afterward. I don’t believe they grieved over the God. I’ve been out there. Nine-tenths of the people didn’t pay any attention to it at all. No, it’s something else. I think they killed it.”

“How did we do that?” Sam asked in a dangerous voice.

“Starved it, poisoned it, I don’t know.”

“And who do you think did it? My sister? Maybe my mother?” Sam felt fury flooding upward from some central reservoir, felt himself becoming flushed, every muscle tightening. “Me?”

“I don’t know who. You all had reasons.”

“What reasons,” Sam thundered, infuriated by the holier-than-thou expression on Zilia’s face.

“The God got in the way, it took up personnel, it …”

“Shit,” said Jamice. “Do we have to put up with this utter, damnable nonsense from this silly woman!”

Damn all paranoids, Tandle thought. Oh, somebody treat this damned Native Matters person or get her off our necks.

The lights in the room seemed to pulse. Dern took a deep breath, rather more interested than otherwise. At least the current discussion was something new. “We’ve had no evidence of any such hostility, Zilia. Indeed, from everything we’ve ever heard, Settlement One took good care of its God. Right, Sam? I scarcely think that after thirty, almost thirty-five, years they would do any such thing.”

He shook his head at Sam, apologetically, sighed in fatherly fashion, and went on, “Suppose you and Horgy and Jamice put your heads together, my boy, and see whether we need to take any action at Settlement One. Horgy and Jamice can fly out there and take a look.” Which would get them out of his hair for a few days, at any rate. Horgy had a good head and was reliably discreet. Dern could ask him to check around, see what people were saying about Sam. Though he had to admit, Sam looked fine. That’s really why Dern had had him come in, to look him over, see how he behaved around people. Nothing abnormal, so far as Dern could see. A little hostility, but then Zilia could do that to anyone.

“I’ll go with them,” said Zilia. “I must.”

“If you wish,” said Dern, annoyed. “All of you go, if you like. Make it a holiday.”

“If that’s all you wanted me for …” murmured Sam, rising to his feet, longing for escape.

Dern nodded, irritated at them all, without exception. “Sorry to have interrupted your work schedule, Sam. Give my best to your family,” and then when Sam had gone, “Zilia, that was really quite outrageous, even for you. Horgy, tell your girlies to go study the previous ten years’ production schedules. I don’t want them at another staff meeting until they know what’s going on. Jamice, stop fiddling with those things in your hair. It’s annoying. Now, Spiggy, if we’ve aggravated ourselves sufficiently over the crop shortfall, may we get on to the budget reports? What is this ridiculous set of figures listed under ‘Miscellaneous’?”

At lunch, Tandle sat next to Spiggy and tried to keep him from vanishing under his own weight of woe. “What did you mean when you said the last thing anyone would want was a God who worked?” she asked, just to get him talking.

He focused on her with difficulty. “Well, it is,” he said. “Early on, of course, it was assumed there were lots of gods who caused various things, and one needed access to them to propitiate them or ask them to undo what some other god had done or, in rarer cases, to say thank you. Since there were lots of them, one always had a god to go to if some other one was acting up. Not a bad state of affairs, really, very much the system Phansure has today. Of course, it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because some of the priests that rose up around the man-gods got carried away with their own greed or need for power.

“So, some of them became prophets, each of them claiming his particular god—or some new one he’d thought up—was the biggest or the best or the only. Sometimes they said God was all-good or all-powerful or all-something-or-other or even, God knows, all-every-thing, which inevitably created dualism, because if God was all-everything, why did these contrary things keep happening? This required that man postulate some other force responsible for contrariness, either a sub-god or a bad angel or man himself, just being sinful, and that placed man squarely in the middle of this cosmic battlefield, always being told it was his fault when things went wrong.

“And as long as man was in the middle, nothing could happen but a kind of tug-of-war. Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized, and later on just before the Dispersion he was still doing it, making war like crazy, while praying for peace the whole time, of course.

“Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy’s god to fight some other guy’s god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant, of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between different people’s ideas of god, depending on who’d won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle.

“This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let’s kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren’t any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.”

Tandle was deeply regretting she had ever asked the question, but by this time Spiggy was in full spate and couldn’t be stopped.

“For example, during the middle years of the Dispersion, the three largest of the surviving tribal-retribution religions left Manhome, to unite and eventually become Voorstod. Nobody ever accused them of having a god that worked. And so far as I know, nobody has accused any human society of having a god that works!” Spiggy took a mouthful of stewed poultry-bird and dumplings and chewed, sadly, grieving over the state of mankind. “The ones on Phansure are among the best. They don’t do anything, but there’s always one of them around to blame.”

Tandle, who had until now always believed herself to be quite respectful of religion in general, could think of no response to this and moved quickly to another topic of conversation.

•
While Preu Flan dry
and his fellow conspirators had agreed to fulfill the desire of the prophets by luring Maire Manone back to Voorstod and possibly back to her husband and house, they had not yet agreed on the best way to accomplish this end. They believed it best not to mention the matter to Phaed Girat, not yet. Phaed might be dedicated to the Cause, but he had a streak of contrariness in him likewise. Better wait until Maire was back before telling old Phaed.

Openly forcing the woman to return would be counterproductive. A forced return would be worse than no return at all. She must seem to return of her own free will, without any Voorstoders along, coming out of longing for her homeland and its people. “Have you heard?” they would ask in the taverns. “Maire Manone has returned to Scaery. She sang there just the other night.”