Balshazzar's Serpent

II: ORPHANS OF THE SILENCE

There were an infinite number of ways to approach a new world of which you knew nothing, including the full frontal assault, as it were, where you just landed as yourself and had faith that the locals would be more curious than hostile. In this case, with so little known but such a primitive layout below, it was decided that they’d send down two young but experienced Arms of Gideon looking as innocent and fresh-faced and nonthreatening as possible, one male, one female.

John Robey was twenty-four standard years old, about a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, with a strong but ruggedly handsome face, short-cropped sandy brown hair and brown eyes. His companion was Eve Toloway, twenty-two, about a hundred and sixty centimeters, with a near angelic face, olive complexion, and big green eyes. She and John had worked together now and then, but this would be their first away team experience together, and her first at any time in her life. They were selected by computer and approved by the Doctor as appropriate for this mission.

Both of them had been born and raised within The Mountain and knew no other life or ways. Both were sincere, dedicated, and well trained. They both wore white robes with hoods made out of a material that was far more than it seemed, and would help protect them from the potentially harsh and possibly unknown dangers of a planetary climate. Consistent with the Doctor’s beliefs in his interstellar religious commune, John would be in charge down there, but that didn’t imply inferiority on the part of Eve but rather a chain of command of sorts. In fact, their leader often joked that he thought women were superior to men, which is why the Bible set up things with the weaker sex in charge. Otherwise, he said, only half joking, men would soon be obsolete.

The small scout cars were precious to a ship like The Mountain; although incapable of interstellar flight, they could land just about anywhere, take off straight up faster than most people could see, and were silent and secure. Once they’d contained complex self-aware computers as backups; they were designed for such things. Now it was strictly a basic system, though, not because of any paranoia or fear on the part of The Mountain or the Doctor, but basically because those things had required first-class specialized maintenance and by the time The Mountain had acquired its current scouts the old computers had either become too unreliable to use or had been removed. It didn’t really matter because of the way they were now used anyway; The Mountain actually flew them remotely from an area between the bridge and gunnery control, and in a pinch the passengers could take over and fly them manually.

They would both be on a leash, but everyone on the big ship and the scout understood that, once down, they were pretty much on their own.

Robey settled into the right-hand chair, Toloway the left. They buckled up, then went through the flight checklist like experienced pilots, and finally the last seals hissed into place and Robey said, “Angel One to Father—ready when you are.”

“Very well, Angel One. Stand by. Counting down.”

In front of them a digital clock started backing down from sixty seconds. When it reached zero, there was a sudden lurch and a feeling of falling as the solidity of the big ship fell away and they were in space.

Robey looked over at his companion. “You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m excited. I’ve never been on a real planet except in the simulators before.”

“Well, I hope you’re prepared for it. It’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Stand by. Angel One to Father.”

“Go ahead.”

“Let’s go on in, assuming we’re not fired on. I think we’ll start where they did, and see what’s left of the first colony.”

“Very well. Agreed. Check and insure that your watches are in synch with the scout and us. You’ll be coming in about an hour after sunup, and at that latitude you’ll have about eleven hours of daylight from right now. I’ll bring you in near the donut-shaped central administrative structure. Planetfall in… seventeen minutes.”

They could feel the craft twist and turn and adjust, but inside there was only silence and the sudden sight of the planet in their forward screen. It was night below, but the terminator was fast approaching.

“No lights at all below,” Robey noted. “I have a feeling that what’s left of this colony is entirely around where we’re headed. I sure pray that they’re better off than they seemed.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Well, if they’re on the decline and dying out and we can’t stabilize things, then it’s going to be a real dead world down there. We could never absorb a fraction of a population that big.”

She hadn’t thought of that, but there was only one way to approach it and stay sane. “God’s will,” she breathed.

The terrain was a bit more diverse than it had seemed from the pictures aboard the ship; the central continent was quite green, with dense trees, lots of rivers and creeks, and it had a kind of rolling topography, flattening out to a great plain only around the original landing spot.

Every time anybody saw colonial buildings they wondered what in the world people were thinking of when they built them. Although most were quite massive, they looked like giant clay or dough structures extruded from gigantic toothpaste or paint tubes and then built up one pasty layer at a time. In fact, they were the products of pragmatism; it would have been far too expensive to take such buildings with a colony; that bulk and weight was best utilized for carrying seed and core machinery and initial survival supplies and equipment. From the earliest days of space exploration, though, it was recognized that worlds where people could set themselves up were made of the same stuff, basically, as all the worlds they’d come from. Several building machines were developed that actually could grind up and transform rocks and silicates into a substance that could be used to literally form buildings to need. Those machines were a lot easier to bring to a new colony and a lot less bulky than prefabricated dwellings. They also had computerized models preprogrammed in case nobody was really architecturally inclined, and most had used them.

The effect was a sameness of puffy-looking structures from world to world and culture to culture, just like the ones here. The thing was, though, that the stuff did wear well; although obviously not in regular use, and probably abandoned if the power was gone, these looked in remarkably good shape.

The scout put down in what would have been the central “square” of the initial colonial headquarters after checking and finding nobody obviously very close to the landing site. That didn’t mean that natives weren’t around, but they certainly didn’t seem to be in evidence.

The buildings all had the typical rough, rounded, unfinished exterior look to them, and as they took much of their color from the materials they’d transformed, this batch was a collection of dull pinks and sickly moss greens.

The hatch hissed, and then swung up and away, and then Robey, followed by his smaller companion, emerged, hoods up over their heads to protect against the unfamiliar hot sun. The hatch automatically closed behind them when they cleared the landing site, and the small scout continued to vibrate, ready to take off at a moment’s threat or to protect the two passengers.

It was hot, certainly over thirty, perhaps thirty-five, and surprisingly humid for being so far from an ocean. The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, and the air was still, almost leaden, and smelled of decay.

Robey gestured to his companion, and they started walking to opposite sides of the square, then around it, taking a look at anything they could see.

There were signs of the original project. Pieces of the initial setup machines lay strewn all over the square, and there were parts of one thing or another here and there. Many of them looked dismantled or cannibalized, but some of them just sat there, as they probably had for a century and a half or more, since the power ran down.

The power wasn’t supposed to run down for a century or two, though, which only confirmed their first impression. Nothing they saw had been brought here new; most of it was as much the product of junkyard reconstruction as a lot of the technology in The Mountain. It was almost as if this place hadn’t been cut off by the Great Silence but rather established after it occurred.

They crossed back to the center near the scout and compared notes.

“What do you think, Brother John? A pirate den that didn’t work out?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “I doubt it, Sister, but this is definitely not anybody’s grand design. Refugees, maybe, from other places. That would explain the crindin and some of the insects I’ve seen here, which are definitely not native to any one planet. Let’s take a look inside the main building over there. It had to be Administration.”

The door had long since vanished, but it was a dark hole inside, and he reached into a pocket in his robe and pulled out a strong directional flashlight. With that, they both entered, stepping over all sorts of rubble.

It didn’t take long to know that they were going to learn little from inside the place. What had been useful to others had been carried away, even if it had to have been dug out of the walls and floor. Areas where there would have been computer screens and command consoles looked wrecked as well; even if they couldn’t run computers remotely, somebody thought that the interface chairs probably would be comfortable, or that the screens might make good temporary walls.

“There is something to be said for writing things down on hard copy,” Eve commented. “There’s absolutely nothing here, not even a logo, to indicate who they were.”

“That’s why we don’t let the machines take over back home,” he responded, meaning The Mountain for “home.” “Civilization was already almost totally illiterate when they moved out here. They didn’t have to read any more. It was only the abstract scholars like theologians who thought it was important. That’s why we know our origins and our history and the various versions and interpretations of the words of God, but these people probably don’t even remember that there’s another planet someplace, let alone a lot of them.”

She sighed and nodded. “Well, Brother, somebody taught them to use domesticated animals and how to build and plow and sow and reap without machines, so they have some skills you wouldn’t expect.”

He grinned. “Let’s go see and ask them.”

She nodded. “I’m kind of curious to see those big animals close up, too.”

Even though they could have flown to the nearest people in the fields or even the next town in short order, there was never any thought of doing it. Instead, they would walk, unaccustomed as they were to the difference in gravitation over The Mountain’s artificial but totally stable one gee, and the natural atmosphere that seemed a bit richer if also smellier than that in the ship. Gravity here was, in fact, a bit lighter, although not dramatically so. It wasn’t enough for grand gestures and feats, but it did make things seem a bit easier, a bit less stressful, to do.

They walked through the courtyard between two of the old buildings and out onto the plain beyond. There was a lot more junk lying around all over here, but it was consistent with what they’d seen in the square. They’d come, they’d set up what they could with what they had, and they’d finally, and apparently within a fairly short time, run out of power to keep a modern town center and colonial headquarters going.

“I wonder where their ship is?” she mused.

“Huh? Oh, not here, that’s for sure. They were off-loaded, the defense system was set up, probably also using units from other places, and then whoever brought them all left. Well, we’ll see what these folks know, if, at least, we can get anybody to talk to us. I’ve never been on a recidivist world before, but the records show that half the time the people tend to run like hell when they see strangers or sometimes try to attack them.”

She looked around and mentally gave a prayerful plea to God. “Thanks a lot, Brother,” she said sourly.

Having no particular knowledge of the locals, they picked what looked like a decently worn path and started off, oblivious of the direction. If settlement had been radial from this point, one direction was as good as the other.

The road showed signs of wear; it had once been well traveled, an ad hoc paved path perhaps three meters across, but clearly no highway. Wind and rain had battered into it taking the wear and tear from earlier times and widening and worsening those effects. It was obviously a well-traveled road no longer, but one cracked, pitted, smoothed, and rutted like some exposed rocky outcrop in active weather. The people might still farm the areas near the old landing site, but they didn’t go there any more and hadn’t for quite some time.

They walked along rather casually, taking in what sights they could and speaking only now and again. Both were aware that they were probably being observed, and they wanted no sense of threat or intimidation to emanate from their manner, nor any sense of fear, either. They did stop after an hour or so at the bank of a small stream and, after taking samples and checking with a pocket analyzer, determined that the water was in fact just that, and they drank. It was warmer than they would have liked, kind of appropriate for hand washing rather than drinking, and it had other oddities, but it quenched thirsts and their analyzer assured them it would cause no ill effects.

“What’s that odd aftertaste?” Eve asked him, making a slight face. “Tastes like plumbing or something.”

John laughed. “That’s minerals dissolved in the water. It’s perfectly normal and the way things work on real worlds. You’ve just never had to drink any water that wasn’t purified and distilled.”

“Water shouldn’t have a taste,” she insisted.

He shrugged. “I admit to some hesitation, but not on taste. The trouble with this sort of natural spring water is that you never know where it’s been.”

She almost spit it out, but managed not to. Either she’d have to stand the stuff or she wasn’t ready for this kind of work, and she definitely wanted to be ready for this kind of work. Still, his somewhat teasing comment bothered her because, while said mostly to get her goat, the fact was, it was also the truth. She was in the first stages of realizing what living in a primitive or natural environment really meant.

They were fast walkers and in good shape on a lower than standard gravity world, though, so they made very good time, and within three hours they came to the outskirts of the closest village on the road.

It was the smell that got them first. The stench of human and animal waste, and the effect on it and anything else organic in a hot, wet climate was almost overpowering. The insects, perhaps drawn by this, were also quite heavy and some of them bit, and there were the sounds of animals all around, including, unexpectedly, the barking of dogs.

There weren’t any pets as such allowed on The Mountain, but there was an entire animal wing, a zoological department as it were, where a number of animals were kept and bred for various purposes and where, just as important, large stores of fertilized animal embryos and a comprehensive DNA record of just about every animal known plus representative stem cells to grow them if need be were kept. Every child born and raised on the big ship had been introduced to the smaller, less threatening animals, small friendly dogs and affection-starved cats in particular, because they were part of the experience the Doctor thought important in growing up so long as they didn’t have the run of the ship.

“Don’t expect these dogs to be friendly,” John warned her. “Just because ours are doesn’t mean that they weren’t also bred as watchdogs and guardians. Stay away from them if you can while here; you simply can’t be certain which are playful and which might be killers.”

Still, that might be easier said than done, she realized. While some of the bigger, noisier dogs seemed to be restrained by leashes affixed to poles in the ground, others did wander around. Fortunately, the barkers were mostly tied, while the wanderers barely acknowledged their existence or approached, sniffed around, then went on when they were not fully appreciated.

There were some cats, too, mostly asleep under things and in shady spots. They looked big and fat, which meant that they were well fed at least. On what wasn’t so clear, but colonies tended to introduce cats when they had a small varmint population to control.

The houses looked a bit less ramshackle on the ground than they had from the air, but they certainly didn’t seem like places either of the spacefarers would have felt comfortable in. The walls appeared to be local adobe-type mud, with thick tan walls and narrow doors of wood that seemed to be covered with some sort of incongruous mesh screening that certainly couldn’t have been locally produced. “That’s salvaged stuff,” Robey commented. “It’s weathered quite well. I suspect everybody got some here, but I can’t imagine it being common the farther out we go. Some of the pipes doing drainage here look slick and well machined, too, but the patches at the junctions are crude and jury-rigged.”

Eve looked around. “I doubt if they do more than sleep in those places,” she noted. “No chimneys, roofs are salvaged slates, pitched thatch, or similar. The bigger buildings near the town center would have to be common barns, and I suspect that the area over there with the big covered pit and the stone slab tables and benches is the common kitchen.”

She was about to deduce more when several figures emerged from some of the houses and one of the large barnlike structures, carrying sacks over their shoulders or large jars on their heads, all heading towards the “common kitchen.” They all looked young and strong, wearing thin gray cotton one-piece dresses and little else, and they were all women and girls. They all had coal-black hair trailing down and reddish-brown skin and there was a definite racial kinship in the features, possibly due to close intermarriage.

Sexual division of labor, Eve noted mentally. She also noted that while some of the youngest girls looked no more than five or six, there were no babies or really small children in evidence and none of the teenagers appeared pregnant.

The young women caught sight of the strangers almost immediately and stopped, staring. They didn’t seem scared, more like people who have seen something they had never seen before and had not expected ever to see.

“Try calling to them,” Robey whispered to Eve, thinking that maybe woman to woman would be a better introduction.

“Hello!” Eve called to them. “Do any of you speak my language? Or what language do you speak?” The educated of most colonies had a working knowledge of some form of English, which had grown to majority usage way back on Old Earth as an international standard, even though the accents and local variations could be atrocious. Many of the ordinary folk, though, like these, tended to speak a local language or dialect. Eve had some working knowledge of seventeen Earth-derived languages, and John twelve, with only four overlapping, but beyond the primary set of English, Hindi, Spanish, and Mandarin the possibilities were endless. These people looked like what the old records gave as the Hindi speaking people, but you never knew. Certainly when they continued to gape at her she repeated her query in Hindi, but got no farther.

As the standoff continued in the increasingly hot midday sun, there came suddenly the far-off sound of what might have been a trumpet or similar horn, and then another on the other side of the village an equal distance away. They seemed to jolt the young women into some kind of furious action, in which they simply ignored the two strangers and began scurrying around, working hard, stoking up the fire pit, dumping out the food, starting the evident preparation of lunch. They did call, even shout to one another, but at first it sounded like gibberish.

“Mooka gan pickup brunin die!” one called to a small girl, who whirled and ran back off into the barn, giving the dumbfounded strangers a furtive glance as she went near.

“Not exactly filling them with awe and wonder,” Eve noted sourly as young women worked feverishly at their tasks.

“Well, they know we’re here, and I guess they figure we’re not going to attack them and they’ll have a whole town to feed pretty soon who’ll need to be fed regardless and they might get mighty pissed off at the lack of a meal and they will still be here tomorrow.”

“Did you catch any of the language?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s English, or a dialect of it, probably well removed long before these people’s ancestors got plopped down here and moving much further since.”

“You have any ideas? I certainly don’t want the town mad at us because we loused up the lunch routine.”

He nodded. “I think we sit over there in the shade, where there’s something of a breeze to take the stench away, and we let the anthropologists and computers up top figure out the language if they can. We’ll get noticed soon enough when the rest of the town gets here.”

She nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

John took a small transmission rod from his equipment belt under his robe, put it on maximum and directional, and pointed it at the increasingly busy group of now fifteen or twenty people who were preparing the meal.

After a few minutes, the general channel opened and the receivers implanted in their ears returned data.

“Fairly basic English, not easily traceable as dialect although centuries before, the base was probably Cockney, as were half the English dialects of the world.”

“Can you give us a filter?” Robey asked them in a soft voice, not wanting to attract any more attention right now.

“Basic, yes. There’s a lot of words and terms that are certainly too localized, so until you can match them to things or actions they’ll still come out garbled, but we can get a basic pidgin for this group. You’ll have to pick it up yourself for speaking purposes.”

“Okay, send, both of us.”

All that would do was to use the receiver implants to reformat the language they were hearing into something more understandable. It simply helped figure out the sense of the sounds by making them a bit more familiar, correcting for speed and mispronunciations, and from that both the monitoring linguistic computer and their own skills would allow them to learn it well enough for conversation. This had been a part of training and simulation, since this sort of problem was quite common, but neither of them had ever actually had to use it before.

Some results were dramatic.

“Gala, hon, you be foot wash so dance the dough pit,” one woman’s instruction to a girl of eight or nine came through. Soon it was clear that there was a great deal of dough being prepared in a fixed stone-lined trough and the way it got kneaded was for Gala and several of her friends, after washing their feet, to simply jump in and start jumping up and down and kneading with their feet.

“ ‘Dance the dough pit.’ I kind of like that,” Eve commented. “It has a kind of lyrical charm.”

“I’m just happy they wash their feet first,” Robey responded, less impressed.

Soon the whole stoneworks was chugging along and the heat was building up on an already hot day, while the smoke wafted into the air. There were stone ovens along the sides that clearly were designed to keep different temperatures for baking, large open pots for simmering stews and the like on the sides of the central pit, and all sorts of oils and herbs put on fruits and vegetables that were mixed and heated and turned on the larger grates. It was quite impressive, and worked like clockwork, everybody knowing their part and doing it. When one of the younger ones would balk or slip, somebody else would be right there to make things right and then get everything back on track and schedule.

The fact was, the heat and smoke weren’t pleasant but when the wind did send them briefly their way, the two outsiders found the uglier smells of the village replaced with very good, sweet-smelling and even exotic-smelling odors.

“Think they will invite us to lunch, Brother John?” Eve asked him.

“I’m not sure if they’ll even acknowledge us,” he replied. “I have to admit, I was somewhat prepared for a hostile appearance, or the awestruck bit, or the fear of outsiders, but it never once occurred to me that we’d be almost completely ignored. No curiosity, no worries we’ll make off with the family jewels, nothing.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I doubt if they have anything even they would consider worth stealing other than maybe themselves and their kids, and that doesn’t look like anything you’d do here. And I think they’re curious, all right. It just isn’t their place to open up to us. Nobody wants to take the responsibility, particularly that group. Look at how very young they all are! Kids!”

“Kids are among the most curious of creatures, or haven’t you noticed?” he responded. “No, I think that it’s a little hard living here. Those ‘kids’ are an integral part of the whole and are as essential to survival as the bigger, older folks. They had to grow up almost immediately, and they know their place.”

About twenty minutes along, the distant trumpets sounded again, only this time both seemed much closer. The crews were clearly coming in, and if anything, the frantic pace the girls were setting increased.

Eve frowned and shook her head in puzzlement. “I’m not sure what’s what here, but maybe we’re missing something.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Could you make flour, cultivate and protect yeast, and make bread for a hundred? Seriously. I couldn’t, not without the computer in my ear telling me just what to do step by step, and even then, I’d need all the ingredients set out before me. These people, to put it bluntly, know too much about how to do it themselves.”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve seen this sort of thing in the records before, when automation slowly failed and they had time to learn or be taught how to do it before the power ran out. Still, there’s no evidence that they ever had much automation here, and it’s for certain none of them are looking at cookbooks. Well, if we can get one of them, or the ones who are coming in to eat, to talk to us then maybe we can get a few answers.”

“I thought when we got down here and met our first people we were supposed to get answers,” she noted sourly.

It wasn’t long before the rest of the village came in, with dogs leaping about and barking and lots of talking amongst themselves at such a babbling rate that even the filters didn’t help.

Sounds of much larger animals also abounded, but if they brought in the elephantine crindin they didn’t bring them anywhere near the communal kitchen and dining area.

One thing that immediately stood out was that there were few old people, or at least few who looked old. Not that there wasn’t some gray, but it seemed premature, the results of a hard life rather than a long one. The men seemed to a one to be in excellent condition; there were muscles over tight bodies and nothing in the way of fat. There were plenty of scars on their reddish-brown skins, scars which stood out for that contrast, and even some missing digits or limbs here and there, but none of the injuries appeared to be the result of any sort of combat. These were subsistence farmers and herdsmen and they showed the inevitable price of long days of primitive manual labor.

Male dress tended to be a pair of cotton pants in one of a half-dozen faded colors, well worn and ragged. Some wore faded cotton shirts of the same condition, others were bare from the waist up. Most also wore something on their heads as protection from the sun, but it varied wildly, from turban-like cloth wrappings to burnooses to hats with broad starched brims. Many had big, droopy mustaches, some had beards, all had pretty long hair, but in just about every case the hair was neatly trimmed, a point of pride, obviously.

One huge man with arms thicker than John Robey’s thighs and a huge drooping mustache seemed to be something of a leader, although there wasn’t much sign of orders being given or any sort of direction. He just seemed to be the center of attention, and they tended to listen to what he said and laughed when he smiled and so on. Their training told them that this reaction was less fear than respect; this man was leader because they wanted him to be. What interested the onlookers the most was that he quieted down the group, they bowed their heads, and then they chanted what had to be a meal blessing of some kind even though it was next to impossible to make out. Then they began grabbing for the food and drink and the roar started up again.

At first the crowd, numbering perhaps twenty-five or thirty people, mostly but not entirely men, hadn’t even noticed the strangers sitting off to one side, but they were quickly made aware of this by the women doing the cooking and serving as soon as the grace had been said. The others immediately quieted down once again but not to the prayerful silence of the blessing and took furtive if rather comical note of the newcomers while pretending not to. Still, they continued eating, apparently waiting for the big man to make a move.

The big man was munching on a leg of something or other—Eve said a silent prayer that it wasn’t dog—but both his big black eyes were intent on them. Finally, with much of the meat inside him and a stiff flagon of whatever they were drinking downed like a champion, he got up and slowly walked over to them as everybody else held their breath while pretending hard not to notice.

“Heyu! Name what village comin’ you from? Nevah seen dressin’ like you wear. Got you mo’ tradin’ cloth?”

They got up and faced him, trying to look nonthreatening as the training guides always cautioned. Considering that the guy they faced was about the same bulk as the two of them combined, that advice seemed like a sick joke at this point.

Praying that the filter would work, John responded, “Sir, we are from The Mountain. We have much to bring to you if you want it.”

The big, bushy eyebrows went up. “Mountain? Mountains here flat!” He laughed. “Mountain never heard of in dis place.”

Robey gave him a returned grin. “Not there,” he pointed towards the man, “or there,” pointing forty-five degrees off, “or there, either,” pointing in back, “or even there,” pointing to the last cardinal direction. “Our mountain is there.” He pointed straight up.

There was a sudden gasp from the villagers, and for the first time the pair of strangers felt fear and hostility. There were whispers of “Found! Us dey found!”

It was clear that these people had some sense of their origins and weren’t, at least in some degree, as ignorant of the reality of the cosmos as they might have appeared.

“We are not raiders,” John assured them. “We are not here to take anything nor harm anyone in any way. If we were, would we come like this? We have seen what the raiders have done other places. They don’t come to talk and make friends. They come in and simply take.”

The big man looked none too trusting for that, but he approached them boldly and reached out and fingered the sleeve of Robey’s garment. His hand was still greasy from the leg he’d just eaten, but he noted that the grease simply wouldn’t stick to the off-white robe. With a blackened fingernail he flicked it off as if it were simply a bug on the robe and not a grease smear. “Make you dese?”

“Our people make them, yes.”

“Make on your world?”

“On our spaceship. We have no home world. We are always traveling from world to world.”

“You look for home, can’t go?”

“No, we live on the ship. We were born there. Our task is not to have a home like your people. The ship is home. We are servants of the living God. We bring His word to whoever God may lead us, and we try and live by example the kind of life His servants should, although it is a hard way.”

The village chief stifled a laugh. “Huh! Yes. Must hard be to live with dat ’stead of groundlings like us. No smellin’ de shit dere, huh?”

“That’s not the kind of hard I meant. When everything fell apart, long ago, a man of God was out here and he had a few followers and many who had been brought to God on some of the worlds out here. With their help, God did the impossible and led us to the building of a great ship that would do His will.”

“How you know God and not luck? Or maybe Devil Angels?”

“Because of the work we have done, the miracles that continue for us, not the least of which is that our leader is the third man of God now to take this message out and so twice God has lifted up another man to be His Arm.”

As the man spoke, the filter kept refining itself. It was as if, as they spoke, the big, rough man with the nearly indecipherable off-English tongue was learning their way of speaking. Only the fact that his lips no longer quite matched what they heard betrayed the technology in the way.

“Nice talk. So you go around in your fancy ship and you find us poor cut off peasants trying to live from day to day and you preach and then you go back to your fancy ship feeling like you done somethin’ holy and you go away.”

“Not exactly,” Robey replied, although the big man was a bit closer to the mark than comfort allowed. These people looked like something out of ancient history but they weren’t to be underestimated. They weren’t nearly as ignorant as they appeared, and even if they had been there was always the cardinal rule of all contacts: “Never, never, never confuse ignorance with stupidity.”

“What then?”

“We wish to preach, or, more properly, teach, that is true. We do not believe that all need to come, or anybody for that matter, but we will bring God’s message. If it is received, we will be joyous, and we will leave learned, ordained people with you to live and die here and nurture the faith as a farmer nurtures his crops. If it is not received, we will shake off the dust and go on, and not return again. We believe that God chose His people before the universe was formed and that only those He wishes to hear will hear. In any event, so long as we are here our resources are at your service. We will joyfully give you any knowledge, whatever technology we can, all sorts of things that perhaps can make life easier. We will repair things, including your ancient defenses that were no match for us and would be even less so for a raider or rogue military ship. In any event, you will be better off when we leave than when we arrived.”

The big man thought about it. “So,” he said at last with a sigh, “what makes you think God is not already here?”

“We believe he is,” Robey replied. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We know nothing about you, your origins, your customs, or your own religious beliefs. We will gladly learn yours if you will listen to ours. We have no fears in that regard.”

The big man thought a bit more. “We must go back to work now. Not much time for this talk. Priest, you come with me, we will talk while I work. The nun can stay with the village women.”

Robey laughed. “I’m not a priest. I am ordained a minister, but we have no priests—or nuns.”

“You’re not—what is the word? No sex?”

“Celibate? No. That is not a part of our faith.”

He grinned. “Then you will definitely come with us to the fields! And, after we eat the last meal, then we will take this before all the village. I may not buy what you are selling, but we may listen.”

And that was fair enough, they thought. Breakthrough at last. Now they’d have a chance to hear the Doctor and see him descend in Mount Olivet.

That always wowed the crowd.