“That isn’t how you’ve kept it up in Settlement One,” she snapped. “There were no such reports from Settlement One until recently. Settlement One has virtually no deaths, and those they do have result from unmanageable illnesses. As a matter of fact, when I took this job, I noted the variation from norm and made a trip out to Settlement One to see if perhaps the Topman or the Team Leaders weren’t fudging their reports. They were not. The mortality and morbidity rates have always been vanishing low at Settlement One. People simply didn’t get belligerent out there.”
Dern looked at Sam, raising his eyebrows.
“She’s right,” said Sam, trying not to give further evidence of Settlement One hostilities. “We never used to have people getting angry with one another.”
Dern cleared his throat. Three heads swiveled in his direction. “I don’t recall your ever mentioning that, Jamice, or you, Sam,” said Dern. There was iron under the velvet of his voice.
Sam frowned and snapped, “What was there to mention? We don’t report negatives.”
Jamice leapt in. “There was nothing to report, Dern. It was simply an anomaly. I’ve always assumed the higher production was due to the lower conflict rate. Which seems to be the case. At least, the two seem to fluctuate together.”
“Are you attributing a causal factor to one or the other?” he asked gently, looking first at Jamice, then at Sam, then back to Jamice.
Horgy didn’t give Jamice time to answer. “The production levels were high because they have the best leadership of any of the settlements, that’s all. All five of the leaders out there are absolute gems. Africa Wilm should be used as a paradigm.”
“She is that,” said Sam with relief, glad to be off the hostility topic but wondering why he was attending this meeting. They all seemed to be getting along fine without him. They all knew everything he knew.
Dern gave Horgy a polite you’re-out-of-order look and returned to Jamice. “A causal factor?” he demanded.
Jamice flushed once more. “I can’t go that far. It’s a bird-and-egg question, Dern. When you only have one incident, you’d be a fool to predict on the basis of it. The fact is they fluctuated together. Production down, hostilities up. Or in reverse order. But it’s only happened once.”
“Has anything else happened? Anything noteworthy?”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried Zilia angrily, going off all at once in a clatter of wings, like a ground bird startled from its nest. “Of course something happened. Their God died.” She glared at Sam as though he’d personally committed deicide and then stared, red-faced, into her lap once more.
“Bondru Dharm,” murmured Tandle, fishing the proper references up on the stages. “Perhaps we should not go so far as to call it ‘their God.’ ”
“The Departed God that was there when you people settled,” amended Horgy with a nod to Sam. “You settlers probably have your own religion or religions, don’t you? Most of the Settlement One people are from Phansure, aren’t they, Sam? Phansure has lots of religions.”
“They probably do,” Spiggy interjected in a gloomy voice. “Last thing they’d want would be a God who was actually present. Last thing anybody’d want would be a God who actually worked.”
“Worked?” asked Jamice, sneering. “A God who worked? What do you mean, Spig?”
Sam, seeing Spiggy drifting away again, said hastily, “Our people come from a number of backgrounds, but all of us had this thing, this so-called grief reaction, which lasted about ten days. We just blanked out. I hadn’t seriously considered it as the main factor in the production drop, but I suppose it could be the cause.”
“If production dropped, and if your people out there had always taken pride in being number one,” Dern said, “could their chagrin and disappointment lead to annoyance? To hostility?”
Sam shrugged, not pleased with the thrust of the conversation, but not able to refute it.
Spiggy murmured, “You know it could.”
“So?” Dern asked. “It could be causative?”
“I suppose,” Sam admitted. “I suppose it could.”
“It wasn’t,” Zilia murmured. “I know it wasn’t. It’s because they killed their God. Guilt, that’s what it was.”
Silence. Against the wall, the blonde whispered to the brunette, and the two of them covered their mouths, either in laughter or in shock. The third girl stared at Zilia, as though she could not believe what she had heard.
Dern said, “Zilia, that would be upsetting, if indeed, any such thing occurred. What makes you think it did?”
“Because of the way they acted afterward. I don’t believe they grieved over the God. I’ve been out there. Nine-tenths of the people didn’t pay any attention to it at all. No, it’s something else. I think they killed it.”
“How did we do that?” Sam asked in a dangerous voice.
“Starved it, poisoned it, I don’t know.”
“And who do you think did it? My sister? Maybe my mother?” Sam felt fury flooding upward from some central reservoir, felt himself becoming flushed, every muscle tightening. “Me?”
“I don’t know who. You all had reasons.”
“What reasons,” Sam thundered, infuriated by the holier-than-thou expression on Zilia’s face.
“The God got in the way, it took up personnel, it …”
“Shit,” said Jamice. “Do we have to put up with this utter, damnable nonsense from this silly woman!”
Damn all paranoids, Tandle thought. Oh, somebody treat this damned Native Matters person or get her off our necks.
The lights in the room seemed to pulse. Dern took a deep breath, rather more interested than otherwise. At least the current discussion was something new. “We’ve had no evidence of any such hostility, Zilia. Indeed, from everything we’ve ever heard, Settlement One took good care of its God. Right, Sam? I scarcely think that after thirty, almost thirty-five, years they would do any such thing.”
He shook his head at Sam, apologetically, sighed in fatherly fashion,
