Eve was afraid she’d used the wrong analogy in her conversation, but what could she do? She had to take whatever wedge this closed-mouthed society gave her. She wondered, though, if maybe she should have tried it with some of the older women. After all, these girls were younger than the age most people began any religious instruction on The Mountain beyond the very simple ideas of good and bad. Dead babies related to their experience, but it was hard to explain to a ten-year-old why God might allow it.
The more she thought about it, the more depressed she got, too. For all the facile responses and quick retorts on the question of a moral universe, she wondered if she could explain that to anybody.
It was tough to explain what you don’t understand yourself.
The big man’s name was Gregnar, it turned out. He might well have had a last name, but family names were not used, or so it seemed. At least, every single person Robey asked for a family name responded “Smith” with something of a grin. The idea that he was being put on didn’t bother him nearly as much as the lurking fear that maybe they really were all named Smith.
As he watched them work in the fields, interacting with one another, joking, occasionally cursing, and particularly after he pitched in on some heavy lifting, he began to form a theory about these people and this world.
For one thing, it was amazing what you could learn from a culture’s curse words. Not just their origins, but references to God or gods or other such entities, pleas, attitudes, you name it. This group had the full panoply of great cussing; while he heard nothing new, he thought that, in one afternoon, he’d managed to hear every variation he’d ever encountered before. While the Doctor would be disappointed—he was a collector of new ways people could cuss—Robey hoped that the monitor team up above had tender ears. This was an earthy group, to say the least. Still, there were some unique exclamations, like “By the twin Rocks of Eban!” and the like that might prove useful. He hoped the computer aboard ship could find a match for one of them, if they weren’t just newer local ones.
Putting the cursing together with the attitudes towards outsiders and the reaction that was so dramatic at lunch—“Found!”—these people had to be fugitives, or, rather, the descendants of fugitives. That was why this place was off the old commercial charts and had no other references. The genhole gate, of course, was charted, but it was one of tens of thousands and there wasn’t any indication that it wasn’t just the latest in an exploratory chain that had not yet been developed.
They had certainly come from more than one world and one culture. The curses and the variety in names coupled with the apparent universal use of a form of English showed that they’d had wide exposure to different cultures and attitudes and that they’d had to settle on a language that was probably not native to any of their ancestors but was practical to know simply because it eliminated that divide when setting up a new colony.
What had they been running from that had thrown them together like this? And what were they still scared of?
The dark skins and generally similar features didn’t really mean much; there would be a lot of intermarriage in just the early stages and there was no way to check every village and make sure that there weren’t more dramatic differences. Still, it looked like there was one dominant group and it pretty well was absorbing the others.
All of this was deduction; even though they quickly got used to him and even joked about his “getting dirty with the peasants,” they volunteered just about nothing. Whatever their immediate ancestors had run from, it was something they didn’t want to bring up.
He wasn’t in the same physical condition they were, but they seemed impressed that he could hold his own. Preachers weren’t supposed to have muscles or work with their hands; the fact that a lot of it was good physical conditioning via daily workouts aboard ship and the lesser gravity of this world he’d still not learned the name of, he decided not to explain.
He walked back with them just before sunset. They were a tired group, but they had done a fair day’s work and they were ready to eat and relax. And now Gregnar was willing to talk to him about what came next.
“So you want to preach to us, is that it?”
Robey shook his head. “No, not me. Our leader is a great teacher and scholar and he’s the one we want you to hear. You and as many others from villages in the region as can be reached. If we plant well, then some like me will remain to teach and train. If not, well, you will not see us again. It is our way.”
“But you will spread the news that we exist,” the big man pointed out.
Robey wasn’t sure if he was being threatened or merely sounded out. “No, we don’t work that way. In fact, we’re right now repairing and upgrading the defense system from the old days that should have been a real challenge for us but wasn’t. Anybody else who comes here will have a much harder time. We can’t guarantee security—who can but God?—but we can make it as good as we can.”
Gregnar seemed interested, and as he invited both John and Eve to eat with them, he became more open and friendly. It didn’t take a genius to notice, though, that this openness was strictly one way.
“You have no home but your ship? You have no world that sends you?”
“No. A great many of the faithful built and modified our ship on several different worlds where spaceships could still be built or fixed. It was a freighter, but after the Great Silence broke things down, it was used as the basis for building our community. ‘Home’ to us is Heaven, when we will be reborn in new bodies in the presence of God. Until then, we bring His truths to those who will hear.”
“So how will you do this here?”
“We have many people in the villages around here by this point, so we’ll pick a place that everyone can get to and we’ll put down and set up. Then we’ll move, until we’ve managed to teach everyone.”
“Sounds like it will take you years here.”
“If we had to do it by walking and riding distance, probably, but we have ways to show everything to villages over a wide area if they are too far to get to us and back in time. We have been at this a long time. We will not disturb things for long that do not wish to be disturbed.”
“So where and when will your great leader put down first?”
“Not far from here,” Robey told him. “That is, unless there is an objection from you or others as to where. We had planned on doing it perhaps on the hard flat rocky region about nine kilometers south of here. It is a good location for getting people from many villages in and back, and it will support our ship.”
That seemed to really interest him. “Your ship will land near here?”
“Our interplanetary module will, yes. The starship part was never designed to land and will not.”
“Inter—?”
“Interplanetary. A part of our larger ship that’s a ship in and of itself. It is designed to land on planets and can go between them if need be, but it can not go between stars. It docks with the starship most of the time, and undocks to bring our platform so that people may come. It is impressive to see land, in fact.”
“I would like to see that, yes. I don’t think there will be any problems on the flats. Just don’t come down on or near crops or rivers and creeks or flooded areas. We will need those.”
“Don’t worry,” Robey assured him. “We know what we’re doing.”
Eve, later, wasn’t so sure. As the group cleaned up from dinner and finished off tankard-sized gourds full of dark, heavy beer brewed by the village itself in preparation for going to sleep, she got her companion to one side and switched off filtration. This wouldn’t keep a local from overhearing, but it would make it about as hard for them to understand the talk as they’d had initially understanding the villagers.