Watson, Ian - SSC (18 page)

 
          
“What
you want?” bellowed Woltjer. “I know you, Frensch, what you doing here?”

 
          
The
bearded man handed the cross and flag to the African behind him, who gripped
it.
with
fierce determination and rammed it into the
soil.

 
          
Most
of his followers squatted down exhausted. Stephen Ambola and Frensch
approached.

           
“Put those damn guns away. Who do
you want to kill? We’re not going to attack you.”

 
          
“Bantu
shouldn’t be on this land.
Government Experimental Farm.
Can’t risk trampling the crops with their dirty feet.
Get them off, Frensch.” “What does it matter?” cried Ambola.
“Old
feuds!
Forget them. We have the News. Don’t we?” He turned to Frensch.

           
“As though it
wasn’t staring us right in the face!”
Frensch raked over a human skull
with his boot,
then
gestured vaguely and derisively at
the veils of color flickering above the scudding clouds.

 
          
“News?
What news?” Anxiety gripped Simeon. He could be
tipped any way in his beliefs, out in this vale of bones, in the face of this
r'aggy anachronistic band of people.
Fanatics.
Yes
indeed. But had they thought out any better explanation than
himself
? Or than the Pope, whom the bulk of masonry over the
Vatican
’s vaults had sheltered with his College of
Cardinals and a mass of faithful, from the roentgen storm?

 
          
The
Papal Encyclical
In Hoc Tempore Mortis
,
issued three months afterwards, had been a temporizing rather than a
mortifying document. It injected placid placebos into an implacable situation.
Pious wishes for the success of the Food and Agriculture Organization and other
world agencies. It was a programme for survival—while the whole theological
dilemma remained unsolved: the why and wherefore of God’s permitting only one
tenth of His flock, principally the one tenth that was white and rich, to survive,
when nine tenths of the meek and humble perished. The why and wherefore of His
refashioning the Eye of the Needle so that the rich merchants could pass
through, replete with bag and baggage, leaving the starving hordes to perish
outside the city walls.

 
          
This
skinny African in torn shirt and broken plastic flipflop sandals, with burning
intelligent eyes, stared into Simeon’s face.

 
          
“I
bring news for those smug in their survival!” he sang. “They did not survive.
They’ve been damned by God.
Same as you, same as us.
Every man, woman and child alive on Earth today are the damned souls. God took
the blessed and left the damned behind. He was merciful: He saved so
many.
All that He
could save.
But He couldn’t save all and still be the Just God. Those
who live today are those he couldn’t redeem in any way.
Any
way at all.”

 
          
“Shut
your mouth, Ambola,” Woltjer snapped. But Ambola would not and did not.

 
          
“Who
are you Damned Souls?”

 
          
Andrea
Diversley’s voice begged:

 
          
“We’re
a team from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.”

 
          
“So
South
Africa
’s in the UN these days? Don’t miracles just happen?
All
the miracles of Hell!”

           
“We’re botanists, we’re plant
geneticists. The irradiated seeds . . .”

           
“Ha!
Cultivating
the plains of Hell.
Wasting your time, pretty woman.”

 
          
Woltjer
struck out wildly at Ambola with his gun, but Ambola had already skipped out of
the way.

 
          
“Apologies,
baas. I forgot Hell still has its policemen.”

 
          
“I
became aware of the News, you see, Damned People,” Frensch interrupted.
“Blessed souls in the skies
—look at them.
You see them even in daylight.” His finger jerked up, pointing beyond the
cottonball clouds at those fearful veils of glory.

 
          
“Yes,”
Simeon whispered, horrified. “I do see now.”

 
          
“Simeon!
What are you saying?”

 
          
“But
I do see, Gunnar. The Pope was wrong.
In Hoc
Tempore Mortis
—so inadequate.
Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death ...”

 
          
“Don’t
you see, Damned Man, we walk through the valley of the shadow of life!
That life of souls up there.
Blessed life casts the shadow
of its glory on us here below.”

 
          
“So
charged particles are souls, are they?” The Swede laughed scornfully. “Now I’ve
heard everything. You could expect messianic cults to spring up like weeds in
these circumstances, Simeon—but my
friend,
we’ve got a
big job to do.”

 
          
Frensch
faced the Swede squarely. “This is no Messiah cult, Damned Man. For there never
will be any Messiah. The Messiah, He has come and chosen and gone.
Left us behind Him.
Yet the authority of His church still
stands—there’s no reason to doubt our faith. Only, our faith is not now in
salvation but damnation.
A Church of the Abandonment.
The bleached skull flying from the cross.
So we must go
forth to waken people—so smug in their survifal, when they have already been
weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

           
“A Church of the Abandonment—yes,
that fits,” murmured Simeon. “Otherwise, God would have acted illogically. He
would be unjust. And that can’t be.”

 
          
Frensch
stepped forward and grasped Simeon by the shoulder.

 
          
“Welcome
to Damnation, Damned Friend. Help spread this news. We must move on to the
towns and other lands now—to tell the Damned of their Damnation.”

 
          
“Simeon!”
the Swede begged. “This is more ridiculous than any of the guilty contortions
Andrea performs.”

 
          
The
Englishwoman darted him a poison glance, moving closer to the Indian geneticist
till her body was brushing his.

 
          
“It
was just a natural disaster, don’t you see?” soothed Gunnar.
“As
has happened before.
As happened to the dinosaurs. Yet we can
understand and mold our fate, unlike the great reptiles! That is our
humanity.”

 
          
Shaking
his head, Simeon refused to understand.

 
          
These
petty scratchings in the earth’s devastation that the new plantings were . . .
in a vale of dry bones, while the wretched and the meek had all been taken away
into Heaven—to become those dancing ghostly veils of beauty high above the
clouds. That symbol of Damnation planted in the crumbling soil: the gilded
wooden cross with the breeze fluttering out from it, the white skull against
the red of Hell’s spiritual fires which burn but consume not. . . And oh, the
ragged, fervent survivors—these Crusaders!

 
          
It
was the last crusade of all: a crusade of total faith and total despair.

 
          
Woltjer
shook his head stupidly as though his ears were full of water. He brandished
his rifle; he blustered. No one paid much attention.

 
          
Andrea
twined her arms round the Indian’s neck, kissing him furiously before the gaze
of Africans and Afrikaners.

 
          
Gunnar
Marholm had retreated into a cold northern fastness of the mind, blankly gazing
across the African soil at the glint of white bones.

 
          
Above the clouds, danced a rainbow joy of colors.

 
          
There
was such silence, but for the faint sigh of wind. No birds or beasts anywhere.

 
          
“
Did not ought
to have been Sirius,” blustered Major Woltjer,
squinting round him, useless rifle at the ready, where no threat loomed. The
silence gulped his words down as a cow a fly.

 
          
The
Church of the Abandonment squatted silently, eating or resting.

 
          
Frensch
and Ambola went back to their standard and rested by it.

 
          
After
a while Simeon walked over too, and sat under it.

 
          
There
was the wind.

           
And the wild veils aflame in the
sky, violet and green and rose.

 
          
And the emptiness of the earth.

 
          
Disconcertingly,
only one small township was visible on the entire planet’s surface, though
forty years had passed since we first set down the colonists. Even this we had
to hunt for by heat-scan for quite a long time before we could locate it
optically, because—even more disconcertingly—it was situated defensively at
the very heart of the largest continent, almost as though they expected
ravenous beasts to crawl out of the sea, sending long tentacles squirming far
inland.

 
          
When
the colony had been founded forty years earlier—eight years by our ship’s
calendar—it had been set on the shore of a bland and fruitful ocean. We
expected to find a thriving port and harbor on our return, with sea links
through the chains of islands to the minor continents, and a rather slower
opening up of the vast empty interior—sending out feelers around the
indigenous primitives without disrupting them. Instead of which, the colony
had crawled inland—as far inland as it could get . . .

 
          
Yet
it could hardly be tidal waves they feared, as the world was particularly
unseismic: unmountain, unrifted, a world of gentle prairie where the merest
pimple of a butte was a major landmark; nor tides either, as there were only
two diminutive moons, each barely larger than our own starship.

 
          
“Crawled
is the word,” I remarked to Commander Marinetti, as we at last watched a
telescope blow-up of the only town—while Resnick vainly tried to raise some
kind of radio response from the colonists. “They must have dragged it here by
hand!”

 
          
There
was the peculiar crawling over itself of the finished product, too. Various
mini-suburbs seemed to be trying to arrive at the same central downtown spot,
whilst still hugging the ground as closely as possible, rejecting the skyscraper
or pyramid form as a solution. Low, flat buildings were plugged together (out
of the original clip- together prefabricated modules of the once-neat harber
township, apparently) in higgledy-piggledy “sheets” like a round plateful of
jostling, overlapping sandwiches. The concentric chaos bore no relation
whatever to the neat formal grid and broad avenues of the coastal town we’d
helped them build.

 
          
“I
suppose it is a human town?” Marinetti hazarded. “The primitives couldn’t have
supplanted our colonists, I don’t suppose?”

 
          
Hardly.
The primitives had been a
shy,
and shying lot.
Melting away into the merest dip of the
prairies, behind a blade of grass almost, when we tried to contact them.
We never saw much of them, no matter how long we flittered about the interior.
Only traces, tracks, occasional fleeting ghosts in the corner of your eye, gone
by the time you turned to stare. Difficult to describe them!

 
          
Fey ghosts.
Flitting fairies.
Puckish “human” dragonflies.
Any of these.
All of these.
They seemed insectoid with their
(apparently) multifaceted eyes, flightless gossamer-winged thin arms,
wasp-waists, thin banded furry legs—a provisional taxonomy pieced together with
enough difficulty, almost entirely out of the corner of one's eye! Trip cameras
invariably flashed their photos, and wasted them, just as the subject was
stepping into view; just the moment before He/She/It appeared before the lens.

 
          
The
natives seemed closer to nature than culture; still at a level of
pre-understanding. They made fire (somehow). We found the char marks. They
cooked small game and birds that they (somehow) caught. We found the bones,
sucked clean, though no traps or nets, unless some pieces of string wound from
grass qualified. No arrows, darts or spears, certainly, though a few thorns
stuck into pieces of stick. But on balance we felt they weren’t really advanced
enough for us to disturb their fleeting, evasive way of life inside their
continent, any more than a man camping on the edge of a huge field influences
the moths and butterflies in it; unless he sprays them with insecticide, of
course—and that certainly wasn’t the intention! So, for a plus, there would be
no pathetic, broken aboriginals begging for crumbs from the technologically
rich man’s table; no ruined native culture
whose
Gods
had arrived and stolen their dreams away. For a minus, of course, they were
simply uninteresting. We’d left it to the colonists themselves to find out
more, eventually. It wasn’t a priority—then. We expected better things—more
amazing, more assertive beings elsewhere.

 
          
“A
disease hit our people, and the natives inherited our bits and pieces?”

 
          
‘‘They
couldn’t even lift the bits, never mind plug them together,” I pointed out.

 
          
‘‘Well,
why’s it there, in the dead center of nothing? Instead of, oh, harbors, docks,
islandhopping townships . . . ! They were going to leave the interior free.
Just in case, for the natives. But that’s exactly where they expanded to! Only
they haven’t even expanded, they’ve contracted there.”

 
          
‘‘Something unexpected in the sea?
From
the sea?”

 
          
‘‘Oh,
come. You’d hardly need to put a thousand kilometers of land between yourself
and it, whatever it was!”

 
          
‘‘Maybe
the sea itself is alive, in some strange way, with algae as its nerve cells?
Maybe after a while it realized and radiated hostility at the human intruders?”
I romanced—almost hopefully.

 
          
Marinetti
laughed.

 
          
‘‘Like
you, I’d love to meet the utterly exotic for once! I have the same hunger for
it, my friend. But it was a fairly normal ocean—just somewhat saltier and
distinctly richer in fishes than any ocean we’ve seen since.” A note of
bitterness crept in.

 
          
True,
alas. In all our years of flight the stars had turned out to be rather
ordinary; so far we were the most surprising feature. Of the five “live” worlds
suitable for colonies, only this one, the first, bore anything at all complex:
the Fairy Aboriginals.

 
          
The
other live worlds were at an early Paleozoic stage: ranging from a serene
extreme to a wild, convulsive volcanic extreme. In one way this was delightful,
for it meant we had the whole worlds to ourselves, with atmospheres and water,
albeit somewhat deficient in humus and vegetation. (But that could be dealt
with.) Each could be developed—uniquely, wonderfully.

 
          
In
another way, this became increasingly depressing as the years went by, while
colonists slept and we stayed awake, exploring, exploring. We found nothing,
except what we had been sent out to discover: fresh worlds for human colonies.
Nothing astounding, nothing special.
Here we were, returning
to Earth via the first world we had settled, with absolutely the dullest,
emptiest landscape of all—-though it did have its birds and small beasts and
“Fairies”, at any rate!—returning to see what humanity had brought in forty
years activity; and perhaps, just perhaps, to find that something interesting
had been gleaned—just a little would do—about those natives we had dismissed
(though not derisively or destructively) as butterflies and moths, while we
pressed on to greater things. Humanity would thrive and expand because of our
efforts; but we were disappointed men and women.

 
          
And
now, what price our colonizing effort even—and Earth’s huge outlay—if forty
years had only served to produce this puny settlement in the middle of
undeveloped nowhere?

 
          
“Maybe the boredom of the landscape . . . unstimulating?”

 
          
“Maybe the absence of tides—?”
Marinetti and I had the same
idea at once. Different ends of the same idea.

 
          
“A
bad prognosis for the other worlds?” he hinted.

 
          
“Those
volcanos on
Hekla
should keep our people on their toes,” said
Resnick brightly. We’d named our newfound worlds
Cambria
,
Hekla
,
Livingstone and Zoe. The one now below us was called Haven, betokening the hope
of a sea-borne culture, as well as our first port of call. Properly we should
have called some world “New Earth”. It was expected; we knew that. However, it
had turned out that the only world we could honestly have used the name for was
Haven; and by then we had passed up the chance, as Haven seemed altogether too monotonous
and blank for such an honor. So now we were taking the name back with us,
unused. And our colonists, likewise had hardly used their Haven at all; but
only taken refuge deep inside it.
Against no visible storm
whatever.

 
          
The
next day we detached the smaller survey craft from the bedstead-like assemblage
of
Starseeder
(progressively
dismantled and disencumbered of its luggage sufficient to furnish five worlds,
till it was a mere stargoing gridwork returning home) and dropped down towards
the town, Laura Philipson piloting, to land a hundred meters from its outskirts
(crawling over its inner skirts rather like flattened tortoises attempting
glacial copulation).

 
          
It
was indeed built from exactly the same per- maplastic modules which had once
been set out so neatly by the shore. Some embarrassingly primative mud and
wattle additions had been made round the extremities. Very little indeed
achieved, beyond the huge ridiculous endeavor of hauling the whole settlement a
thousand kilometers inland . . .

 
          
Fields
of Earth vegetables grew around the town. There were irrigation ponds and
ditches. All looked well enough tended outside the town perimeter. On the other
hand, otherwise they would have starved. Puny agriculture, though!
Puny.

 
          
Maybe
you couldn’t give a proper head start to a colony on an alien world if it was
ever really to be
their own
world? Maybe a colony had
to sink down to the lowest cultural level before it could start to climb, of
its own accord, to “civilization”?
Some unknown social law?
Was this what had moved them to haul everything as far away from their starting
point as possible?

 
          
Fairies
were flitting in the fields.
Now-you-
see-them-now-you-don’ts.

 
          
However,
there were humans too. Twenty dr thirty people appeared from a narrow alleyway
between the modules.

 
          
They
hardly swarmed out to mob us. They just stood waiting patiently by the
buildings. And so we walked between a field of cabbages and a field of beet, to
greet them instead. (While a fairy appeared and disappeared behind a monstrous,
healthy cabbage.)

 
          
I
recognized the original leader of the settlement, considerably aged, not
surprisingly. A man named . . . Greenberg, yes. Greenberg had been a tough
stallion once; now he looked a tired workhorse . . . My God, what had happened
to their
animals?
Their
horses, sheep and cattle?
That original stock of embryos, brought
starward frozen in rabbits' wombs, should have multiplied a hundredfold by
now; where were they?

 
          
And their children?

 
          
Where
were
their children?
I saw two or three
men and women in their early forties who must have been born during the first
year or so of settlement. No one any younger though.
And a
huge age gap between these few “youngsters" and all the other oldsters.

 
          
Bad.
Dreadful.
The
worst.

 
          
Their
fertility had been blocked.
And the fertility of their
animals.
What by?
By the sea breeze?
By some
undetected chemical which took several years to reach a critical level . . .

 
          
“No
children or animals."

 
          
Marinetti
nodded. To the small reception party, he announced: