She didn’t dream that night, but she barely slept either. Every time she dozed off, the fear of the dream startled her awake. She spent the night remembering her life, seeing herself as Dr. Helm’s promising student, then as Mr. Helm’s gifted graduate student, then as Raymond Helm’s assistant, and now as Ray’s wife. She had not slept with him until after his divorce from Joanna. He was Nora’s first husband.
In another shed in the compound, Bill Stafford would be asleep. This is terrible, Nora told herself. I must get over this. I must sleep. Toward morning, she did.
“I’m just here to do the stuff on the ground,” Bill Stafford was explaining to her. “Confirm or deny the technology’s guesses.”
“Does technology guess?” Nora asked, following him. She had volunteered at breakfast to go with him to see if the mounds he’d described did contain buried structures. Perspiration ran down behind her ears, between her breasts.
“It’s all step by step.” Stafford told her. “We’ve got satellite pictures to map the terrain, aerial survey using infrared. SLAR scanning. Now we have to walk the groun—”
“What kind of scanning? Help here, will you?”
They were crossing a gully. He held his hand back for her. His teeth glistened when he smiled. Sweat made gray islands on his shirt. He said, “SLAR — for Side-Looking Airborne Radar.”
“Sounds very suggestive,” she said, laughing, and released his hand. Then she had to clasp his arm to keep from slipping backward on a muddy stone.
His hand pressed to the small of her back. “Careful.”
Not careful. “You’re all wet,” she said, showing her tongue, tracing with her fingertip a line of perspiration that ran from his throat down his chest and under the shirt.
Behind the glasses his eyes looked surprised, but when she kissed him he knew what it meant.
Before dinner, she used the primitive bucket-and-cistern-in-a-tree shower, the sun-warmed water splashing over her heated body. She lifted her right breast and, yes, his watchband had left a scratch. She smiled at it.
I wasn’t wrong, she thought late that night, slipping silently through the sleeping camp, away from Bill’s room, back toward her own cot. I was right in college, right to follow my own needs and grow at my own pace. I wouldn’t have been ready then for this. But now Pm right again!
She was brand-new, tingling with rebirth. The dream had rescued her before she withered, using her Mayans as the symbol. Her stone passion had pointed the way to a richer, truer passion of the flesh.
Not that she would run off with Bill, nor leave Ray. There was no need to throw away the life she already had, the work she’d already accomplished. She would still admire Ray just as much, esteem and help him, serve him and the Mayans and the work, absorbed and satisfied; but now there would be more. A lifetime of Bill Stafford’s smiled in her mind, all young, all loving and giving, all a kind of delicious dessert. And no one need ever know, no one need ever be hurt. She could have it all.
Ray’s breathing was long and regular. Nora slid between the cool, damp sheets.
The same cell. She stared, unbelieving. The same cell, the same rough thatch ceiling, square stone walls, tall imperious priest in all his finery, grasping the same rough-edged knife. “Now,” he said, “what we do with adulteresses…”
1983
Heaven Help Us
O great juju-kuxtil, take this sacrifice and give us a sign!
From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.
Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young arid struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.
The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Stanndforth commanding, was at once dispatched to reestablish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.
On the command deck of Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Lieutenant Billy Shelby watched the image of Heaven grow larger on the view screen. “We’re coming in,” he said. “Pam? All secure?”
Astrogator Pam Stokes, beautiful arid brainy and blind to passion, paused in her contemplation of her antique slide rule to check the webbing that held her to the pod. “All set.”
“What an exciting moment,” Billy said. A handsome young idealist, he was the Hopeful’s second-in-command and probably the person aboard who believed most fervently in the ship’s mission. “I wish the captain were up here.”
Captain Gregory Standforth himself wandered onto the command deck at that moment, holding a stuffed bird mounted on a black-plastic-onyx pedestal. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked and held up this unlovely creature that in death, as in life, was blessed with a big belly, a pink tuft on top of its orange head and a lot of bright scarlet feathers on its behind. The captain had bagged it on their last planet fall, Niobe IV, a.k.a. Casino. “I just finished stuffing her,” he explained. Taxidermy was all he cared for in this life, and only the long, glorious traditions of the Standforth family had forced him into the Galactic Patrol. Conversely, only those traditions had forced the patrol to accept him.
“Heaven ahead, sir,” Billy said. “Secure yourself.”
The captain studied his trousers for open zippers. “Secure myself?”
“Take a pod, Captain, sir,” Billy explained. “Landing procedure.”
“Ah.” Settling himself into a pod, the captain slid his bird onto a handy flat surface, thereby inadvertently pushing a lever. A red light flashed on all the control consoles, and there came a sudden, brief whoosh. “Oh, dear,” the captain said. “Did I do something?”
Billy studied his console. “Well, Captain,” he said, “I’m sorry, sir, but you just ejected the laundry.”
A long, long time ago, it had been a church; but now it was a roofless pagan temple, dominated by the tall, roughhewn wooden statue of a fat god figure with a blurred face. The altar was made of consumer materials, rusted and ancient and broken: TV sets, washing machines, a truck tire. A religious ceremony was under way, complete with nearly naked virgin ready for sacrifice, supine on the altar, resigned to her fate. The worshipers below were dressed in animal skins or rough cloth. Beside the altar stood Achum, the priest, holding a stone knife high, its point aimed at the virgin’s breast. This particular virgin was Achum’s own youngest daughter, Malya, but he would not hesitate in his priestly duty. He intoned:
“O great Juju-Kuxtil. Oh, take, we beseech you, this sacrifice of our youngest, our purest, our finest daughter. Find this sacrifice worthy of your mighty eyes and defend us from the yellow rain. If this sacrifice be good in your eyes, give us a sign.”
Achum bowed his head in unbroken silence. He prayed, “If she should be spared, who is my own daughter Malya of only sixteen summers, O great Juju-Kuxtil, give us a sign.”