“Yes… And I’m sure any Missionaries who knew about them would kill them if they could. But it’s not that simple. You see, the people of Forsyth are not only able to read minds, but to change them, condition them. Host Missionaries are programmed to be the best possible parents before they even see the children. They’re programmed to defend those children with their own lives.”
Alanna thought about that for a while, then said, “Now I see why our people here are afraid.”
“No. They don’t know most of what I’ve told you. It’s best that they not know.”
“Jules knows?”
“Yes. Jules and I.”
“How?”
“Jules and I were born in Forsyth, Lanna. We’ve already served our time of slavery.” She paused, stared straight ahead at nothing. “Twenty-five years ago we were freed and allowed to organize a group of newly arrived refugees into a Mission colony. Now, finally, I think we’re being rewarded for our earlier years of service.”
As it turned out, the reward was a second Earth. The Verrick Colony Mission Ship sought out a blue world of islands and island continents—a world that was not only habitable, but comfortable. A world so Earthlike that it made the Missionaries feel at first as though they had only moved to a different part of their homeworld. A clean new part.
Their ship, whose technology they had never understood, died right on schedule as soon as they touched down. Died, as they soon learned, was exactly the right word.
One of the first things they did upon landing was break into the sealed compartments that they had been warned not to touch while their ship was in space. Within, they found the engines, the Dana Drive, huge and incomprehensible, and they found a corpse.
The corpse frightened most of the people because they did not know who it had been or why it was there, freshly dead, in their ship. Also, the corpse was deformed.
It was the body of a young man, dressed in the bright-colored style of the city of Forsyth. His body was short and squat and his head large. His forehead bulged strangely on one side and seemed almost sunken on the other. His mouth was slack and half open, drooling. Jules looked down at him and wept the only tears Alanna had ever seen him shed. Then he ordered a pair of the younger men to dig a grave. He himself carried the corpse out to be buried, and when the people questioned him, he would tell them nothing. To Neila and Alanna, he said, “There are all kinds of slaves.” He looked at Neila. “You know, don’t you?”
She nodded. “They used to just destroy the defectives that they couldn’t… repair. I didn’t realize they’d stopped.”
“They’ve found a use for them. That one must have been one of their own kind gone wrong.”
“But what was he for, locked in there by himself?”
“Unless there’s equipment—a computer or something—aboard that we haven’t found, I’m going to assume that somehow, that man was our guidance system.”
“But how could he…?”
“He could be programmed to do whatever they wanted him to do. You know that. Programmed to control the drive, and propel the ship to wherever his ability and his implanted knowledge told him there might be a habitable world. Then, when his job was finished, programmed to die. He couldn’t have been a telepath or he would have died long ago, but he had useful abilities just the same.”
“We should give him a funeral,” said Neila. “At least.”
They gave him a funeral.
Then, with nothing more than the tools and supplies and knowledge they had brought with them, they began learning to live on their new world.
They named the world Canaan, and prayed that it would live up to its name. The long yellow-green valley in which they had landed was like an answer to their prayer. It was on the equator, but high above the level of the local seas—plateau land stretched between two ranges of mountains. It was well watered by rivers that flowed down from the mountains and the ship’s doctor pronounced the water safe. The weather was warm and mild, and the land apparently fertile. It was literally covered with yellow-green trees and their thick vinelike roots, but the Missionaries saw no aggressive animal life. In fact, they saw almost no animal life at all, though they realized later that this was only because they did not know how to look for it. In time, they cleared a place and corralled their larger animals outside the ship. It was then that they learned why the portion of the valley in which they had landed seemed so lush and peaceful. They had landed in the middle of the Garkohn gamelands.
Garkohn adolescents, young hunters still working toward their first substantial kill of native game, slaughtered the Missionary herd in a single night. And at that, the Missionaries were fortunate. The tragedy would have been far greater had the youngsters failed to recognize the furless, strangely colored invaders as people—had they seen them as merely another kind of helpless animal.
The Missionaries did not learn exactly what had killed their livestock until several days later when Garkohn adults came openly into the Mission settlement bringing gifts of meat, meklah, and other things—apparently in payment for what their children had done. Of course, no payment would have been enough. The horses and cattle were irreplaceable. But they were gone. Nothing could bring them back, and trouble with the natives could well make their loss seem trivial.
Jules managed to hold the Missionaries in check, prevent any act of rashness. Under his leadership, the Missionaries formed what they came to consider a friendship with the Garkohn. It seemed as though they had salvaged a fair beginning after all. They permitted themselves to be lulled.
And now, three years later, they were still lulled. It was time for Alanna to awaken them.
Alanna rose wearily from her bed and went out into the cabin’s main room. Jules came in through the front door at the same time, looking grayer and older than the Jules Alanna had just brought alive in her memory. He was fifty-three now. Not old, surely. He was tired but he would be able to handle the trouble that was coming. He went to his chair and collapsed into it.
Alanna went to the heavy meklah-wood dining table and took two meklah fruits from the bowl there. She ate
