Survivor (12 page)

Full of misgivings, Alanna listened as Jules told Nathan of his meeting the night before with Diut. Nathan sat frowning as though he could not quite believe what he was hearing. Finally, Jules questioned him.

"Have you done any research at all on the meklah—found out anything that will help us?"

"Wait," said Nathan. "First, are you assuming that everything that murdering Tehkohn said was true? Our people crossbreeding with… with…" His face was a twisted mask of revulsion. Alanna watched him with growing concern. Jules must have had some reason for trusting him. If that trust was misplaced, Nathan already had enough information to destroy the colony. All he had to do was give it away, deliberately or accidentally, to one of the more hotheaded Missionaries, or to any Garkohn.

"I was going to ask you for your opinion on the interbreeding too," said Jules. "I wondered whether you thought it was possible…"

"I don't!"

"But that's secondary. We have to get out of this valley, away from the Garkohn
and
the Tehkohn if we're to survive as a people. And to do that, at least some of us must break free of the meklah."

"According to the Tehkohn Hao."

"According to Diut," Jules agreed. "And frankly, I believe him."

"He must have been convincing." Nathan did not bother to keep his sarcasm out of his voice.

Jules looked annoyed. "You haven't answered my question, Nathan. The meklah."

Nathan's smugness faded. "I've done some experiments with my rabbits. I don't know what they prove. Maybe nothing. Rabbits aren't people."

"Did you withdraw the rabbits?"

"I tried."

"Well?"

Nathan shrugged. "It would have been simpler to slaughter them outright."

"You lost them? None survived?"

"Of the ones I tried to help, none survived." Nathan massaged his forehead. "I tried tapering them off the meklah slowly. They died. I tried sedating them with drugs that had already proved harmless to them while they were getting enough meklah. They died faster. By then, I knew what they were dying of and I immobilized some of them and began intravenous infusion. These died too."

"Are you sure you knew what you were doing with that last?" asked Jules.

"Frankly, no. I think I did it right. I had books and diagrams to guide me but…" He shrugged again. Jules did not press him.

"You said you knew what the rabbits were dying of," said Neila. "What was it?"

"Thirst," murmured Alanna. "Dehydration." The others looked at her.

"Yes," said Nathan. "You would know something about it, wouldn't you."

"A little," admitted Alanna.

"You should know quite a bit. You watched several Missionaries go through it."

"I watched one Missionary go through it, Nathan. Me. And most of the time I didn't even know what I was doing."

He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. "Does it bother you to talk about it, Alanna? It's awfully soon for you and I don't want to…"

"It doesn't bother me to do anything I have to do to help the people get free of that poison."

He smiled briefly, then looked apologetic. "The others… do you know how long it took them… to die?"

"No. But the Tehkohn left us shut up together for what they told me was five days. By the end of that time, everyone else was dead."

"Only five days?" said Jules.

"I don't think it took me even that long to get through it. But five days is the traditional Tehkohn cleansing period."

"But so little time…"

"You dry up," said Alanna. "You lose water in every way you can and drinking doesn't do any good because you can't keep anything down until it's over—or until you get more meklah. What you feel first though, before the thirst, is hunger, craving." She let herself remember for a moment. "I know what it's like to starve. Back on Earth, before I came to the colony, I got hungry enough to eat some things you'd probably think were pretty disgusting. But I think coming off the meklah is about the worst kind of hunger I've known." She shuddered more with apprehension than from remembering. "But it's the water loss that kills. The Tehkohn said they had seen some Garkohn die of it in only one day. Sometimes it hits them harder than it does us—hits them all at once." She looked at Nathan. "The Tehkohn have made the same experiments you have—except for the intravenous feeding. They made them on volunteers from among their own people who had been addicted by the Garkohn. I would have told you about their results if you hadn't already found out for yourself."

Nathan's calm vanished. "You
saw
Tehkohn animals making experiments?" he demanded. "You saw them using drugs to sedate each other?"

"No," said Alanna. "I heard some of them talking about it and I went to a healer to see whether or not it was true. It turned out to have happened generations ago. The healer read it to me from her grandfather's records."

"Image of God! Now you're saying they read and write as well as practice medicine."

"Yes," said Alanna quietly.

"It's impossible. They couldn't…"

"You have reason to hate them, Nathan. I don't blame you. But can you afford to underestimate them? Can any of us?"

He looked at her strangely and she met his gaze. She spoke softly. "The Tehkohn have a civilization that is hundreds of years old at least. They were once part of an empire that covered more than half of this continent. They work metal and stone and wood. They read and write. They make medicines from herbs and from the body parts of certain animals. And most important, Nathan, they only rarely die in meklah withdrawal."

"Because they have such a strong will to live," said Nathan with heavy sarcasm.

"Are you saying that the will to live isn't important?"

"Of course not. But it isn't the cure-all that your Tehkohn friends think we'll be stupid enough to believe it is. If we followed Diut's advice and depended on nothing more than will power to keep us alive, we'd be committing mass suicide." He looked at Jules. "Sounds convenient, doesn't it? We kill ourselves off, then the Tehkohn only have the Garkohn to deal with."

Nathan's voice had been rising as he spoke. Jules answered him quietly. "If that's so, Nathan, we'll need your help more than ever. We need any answer you can come up with."

Nathan closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to calm himself. Then he looked down at his plate of thin brown meklah pancakes, stared at them grimly. He reached for his cup and took a swallow of hot meklah tea. Finally he spoke, his voice low. "Jules, of the rabbits I withdrew cold, over half died. Now that's better than the figure for Alanna's prison room, but it's still nothing that either of us would like to see happen to the settlement."

"Are you saying there's no way to break free?" asked Jules.

Nathan continued staring at his plate. "No quick way, certainly."

"Shall we wait then?" said Alanna. "Shall we see whether the Garkohn can absorb us faster than the Tehkohn can kill us?"

Nathan raised his head to glare at her but it was Jules who spoke.

"What are you holding back, Lanna?"

She looked at him in surprise.

"I've seen you desperate," he said. "And you aren't now, though you'd have reason to be if things were as bad as they seemed."

She moved uncomfortably in her chair. She didn't like being read so easily. But at least it was only Jules doing the reading. "What I was holding back—in the hope that someone else would come up with it first—was an idea that may not help, but at least it will give us something else to try." She drew a deep breath. Now was her only chance to present what she knew as her own idea rather than as Tehkohn custom. But there was hope for the Missionaries in the success the Tehkohn had had with their custom. A history of success. If only Nathan could be made to see its value and accept it. She had to take the chance.

"It's something Diut didn't tell you about because we're not a Kohn people. He probably didn't think it could be applied to us. It's the returning ceremony that the Tehkohn give one of their own who escapes from the Garkohn. They have it just before the
tehjai
… the…" She stumbled searching for the right English word. "The returnee. They have it just before the returnee is left alone for withdrawal. It's a religious ceremony really."

"A heathen ceremony, you mean," muttered Nathan.

Alanna turned to face him, looked at him silently as though waiting.

Nathan took another swallow of tea, then spoke angrily. "All right, get on with it. What do they worship? The sun? A stone idol? The Tehkohn Hao himself, perhaps?"

Only Alanna's memory of Nathan's loss and of his importance to the colony kept her from exploding at him. "The returnee is not accepted at once," she continued. "He's unclean. No one speaks aloud to him. No one touches him. The only communication with him is through a code of brightening and darkening coloring. Light signals, they call it, because some of the time they're using their natural luminescence.

"The returnee goes to the home of the First Member of his clan and his First Clansman escorts him to one of the prison rooms. Then, no matter what time of the day or night it is, the First Clansman summons the returnee's family, his friends, and Diut. With this group, he returns to the prison room and the group forms a circle around the returnee. They're all seated on the floor. One by one, each person in the circle goes before the returnee to give him some personal message of encouragement in the code. That his wife or mate awaits him, that he has proven his fighting strength by breaking free of the Garkohn, that as he has survived some other difficult struggle, he can survive withdrawal, whatever. The successes of his life are recounted; the failures aren't mentioned. When each message has been delivered, when the returnee has been reassured that his people want him back in spite of the humiliation he has undergone, the whole group begins a kind of prayer—a plea to the returnee's strength, to his power as represented by the blue in his coloring to free him from the poison and restore him to his people. If the plea was verbal, it would be a chant. It's repeated over and over, always ending with the assurance that the returnee is Tehkohn, and therefore, he will prevail.

"It goes on and on until the returnee is caught up in it. Until he is flashing it himself, apparently without realizing what he's doing. Finally, he collapses. When that happens, the ceremony is over and the others leave quietly. I've heard that it's usually several hours before the returnee even moves."

"And then," said Nathan, "because he's had his returning ceremony, he survives. Right?"

Alanna ignored him, spoke to Jules. "It's not only the message that the circle gives, but the light signals themselves—the steady rhythmic flickering. And the circle sways as though to music. I talked my way into one of the ceremonies so that I could watch. Then I sat there bored, watching, feeling superior." She glanced at Nathan. "But after a while it started to get to me. I hadn't learned to read the light signals yet—I did later—but after a while, I couldn't keep my eyes open. I might have collapsed right along with the prisoner if I hadn't started to look away."

"Hypnosis," said Jules softly.

Alanna nodded once. "Exactly." She went on quickly before Nathan could say whatever he had his mouth open to say. "Remember how Dr. Bartholomew used it? Women had babies under it. People had dental work done, even had surgery with no anesthetic but hypnosis."

Jules looked at Nathan and Nathan was at once on the defensive. "Jules, hypnosis is no more a cure-all than having a strong will to live. It can't…"

"You do know how to use hypnosis, don't you, Nathan?" asked Jules bluntly.

"Listen to me," said Nathan. "Yes, hypnosis can ease pain sometimes. But no matter whether a person feels uncomfortable or not while he's dying, he's still dying!"

"You heard how the Tehkohn use it," said Alanna. "It's not just a pain killer. They use it to instill confidence, to give the returnee a goal and positive assurance that he can achieve it."

Jules was frowning. "Nathan, back on Earth, I read quite a bit of pre-Clayark era literature. I know that our ancestors had powerful addictive drugs, and that sometimes people became enslaved by them. What I don't know is whether hypnosis was ever used to ease their withdrawal. Was it?"

Nathan rested his elbow on the table and his head on his hand. "I don't know." He shook his head. "I haven't read anything of its being used. And I've already tried everything I have read about."

"I see." Jules spoke more gently. "Do you know anything about hypnosis, Nathan?"

"Yes. The basics are so simple… it was one of the first things Bart taught me. Then he spent the rest of the short time that was left to him teaching me not to use it as though it was magic. I kept wanting to suppress symptoms without knowing anything about what was really wrong."

"Do you think you could hypnotize our people here?"

"Well, nearly everyone is hypnotizable to some degree, but…"

"Do you think you could hypnotize me?"

Nathan stared at him. "God, Jules, will you slow down? Are you really thinking about risking your own life?"

"This isn't something you can test on animals."

"It's not something I ought to test on the most important man in the settlement either." He appealed to the silent Neila. "Talk to him! Talk him out of this for his own sake."

Neila lookd at Jules. He met her eyes for a moment, then shook his head. "You know I have to do it," he said softly. "And you know why."

"Well I don't," said Nathan. "It makes no sense! Call for volunteers. You could get almost anyone else to do it just by asking."

Jules shook his head. "It has to be me. I'm the one who's going to order the people to walk away from everything they've accomplished on this world, walk away from the drug they've become addicted to, go to an unknown land on the advice of people who've been our enemies until now and who may still be enemies… As long as I'm their leader, that's what I'm going to order them to do because I believe that's their only salvation as a people. Am I still valuable, Nathan?"

Nathan stared at him helplessly.