The Winds of Altair Read online

  "But if we're not allowed to colonize . . ." Amanda started, then hesitated.

  Peterson turned his ice-blue gaze to her. "Then we have to go back to Earth. We've failed."

  CHAPTER 8

  The next morning Jeff sat alone at a table in the dining area, slowly picking his way through soy meat and fruit concentrate. It was late in the morning. Most of the other students were already at their assigned tasks. The dining area was almost empty.

  "Jeff! Why aren't you at the lab?"

  Laura McGrath put down a tray full of eggs, fruit, cereal and milk on the table and slid into the chair beside him. Jeff waited until she said a swift, silent grace before answering.

  "They're having a big meeting in Bishop Foy's office," he said when she looked up again.

  Laura caught the tone of his voice. "What's the matter? Has something gone wrong?"

  Slamming his fork down on the dish with sudden anger, Jeff burst out, "They just don't understand! They want Crown to work for them like a machine. Well, even a machine needs energy, needs fuel, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, of course." Laura's green eyes were wide at the vehemence of Jeff's outburst.

  "They made me take Crown away from his natural habitat, and now they're pissed off because the only thing he can kill and eat are the apes."

  Laura's face reddened slightly at his profanity, but she said nothing.

  "Look," he went on, intently, "is it Crown's fault that they want him to stay in a place where there's nothing else to eat? Is it my fault?"

  "No," Laura murmured. "How could it be?"

  "But I'm the one in trouble . . . or, that is, Crown's in trouble. They're going to kill me. Him, I mean."

  Laura put a hand on Jeff's wrist. Her fingers felt cool on his skin. Calming. "Jeff, slow down. Take it easy. Don't get so excited. You know how harmful that can be. Excitement leads to sin."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know."

  "Have you meditated on this problem?"

  "I didn't sleep all last night, thinking about it."

  "Would you like me to pray with you over it?"

  Jeff hesitated. For the first time in his life, he heard himself say, "What good will prayer do? This is a real problem, Laura. It's life or death."

  Her mouth fell open. "What are you saying, Jeff? Of course prayer will do good. More problems are solved through prayer than through cursing."

  Jeff leaned back in his chair slightly, retreating in the face of her glowing certainty.

  Her grip on his wrist tightened. "You come with me, Jeffrey Holman. It's time you came to chapel."

  He let Laura pull him to his feet and reluctantly went with her to the Chapel of Nirvan.

  It was empty, and dimly lit. Around the chapel's circular walls were all the symbols of the early religions, the precursors of Nirvan: cross and crescent, star and sunburst. A Buddha smiled serenely at them from a three-dimensional picture cube. Christ the Pancreator gazed solemnly into their eyes. A dazzling, shifting geometric display represented the unrealizable form of Allah. The stern Yahweh of the Old Testament, a thoughtful Confucious, a beatific Moroni. And in the center of the circular chapel, hanging in midair suspended only by an invisible vortex of energy, shone the eternal Globe of Nirvan. It glowed feebly, almost as dull as pewter, but Jeff and Laura both knew that at times it could blaze brighter than the Sun.

  Silently they pressed their palms to the identification plate that connected to the chapel's computer. The empty circular pews rotated until the chapel's one aisle swung to their location. The nearly-soundless mechanism stopped, leaving only the faintest trace of a chorus singing a hymn of praise in the background of their awareness.

  The cool air of the chapel was tinged with incense, a fragrance that instantly recalled to Jeff's mind the church back home on Earth, his parents, the world he had left far behind. He allowed Laura to lead him to the frontmost pew. They slid into it and sat on the cushioned bench. She gripped his hand tightly.

  "Pray, Jeff. Pray for guidance and help. Nirvan will hear you, you'll see."

  Jeff bowed his head and closed his eyes. He knew that Laura was doing the same, praying with an earnestness that shamed him. He tried to form words in his mind, but all he could see was Crown—not from inside the beast's mind, but Crown as an outsider would see him: a huge, powerful, six-legged, sleekly maned wolfcat, majestic and magnificent.

  But Crown was hurt, he knew. Far from his own territory, alone in a strange place, in danger from his own kind, forced to do things no wolfcat would naturally do, controlled by an alien presence in his brain.

  Jeff opened his eyes and looked up. The Globe of Nirvan glowed more brightly, a pale yellow light suffused it.

  "You see?" Laura said, smiling excitedly. "Nirvan hears our prayers."

  Jeff knew that the light was simply due to their presence in the chapel. Everyone knew how it worked. The Globe was connected to a heat sensor. The more people there were in the chapel, the brighter it glowed. The same sensor controlled the level of the air conditioning. But to Laura and the truly Faithful, the mechanism for accomplishing the phenomenon was simply a mechanism. It had nothing to do with the religious meaning of the phenomenon.

  Nodding, Jeff whispered back, "Well, let's hope Nirvan does something about them."

  "JEFFREY HOLMAN," a soft female voice spoke from the loudspeakers in the ceiling. "JEFFREY HOLMAN, WANTED IN BISHOP FOY'S CONFERENCE ROOM IMMEDIATELY."

  "There's your answer," Laura said.

  Jeff stared up at the ceiling, at the speaker grills and the Globe. He realized that Nirvan's answer to a prayer did not necessarily have to be an answer that the supplicant liked.

  Even though the table in Bishop Foy's conference room was circular, so that no one could sit at its "head," Foy was clearly in charge of the meeting. He sat facing the door that Jeff came through, ushered into the austere little conference room by the Bishop's secretary—a student from Jeff's own dome.

  Like his office, Bishop Foy's conference room was a monastic little cell, bare of all decorations except a representation of the Globe woven into an otherwise blank tapestry that hung on one wall. A door connected to the anteroom where his secretary worked, another went into his private office.

  No one sat next to Bishop Foy, so that even though the conference table was circular, to Jeff it looked as though the Bishop was on one side of it, and Dr. Carbo, Dr. Peterson, and plump Dr. Ferris sat bunched together across from him, as far away as they could get. Like students who are afraid of the professor, Jeff thought. But he took the chair next to Dr. Carbo, and wished that Amanda was here to help protect him.

  "We have a serious problem on our hands," said Bishop Foy, staring straight at Jeff with his narrow bloodshot eyes. "Dr. Carbo's work has progressed to the point where we must make some hard decisions."

  Jeff felt instantly annoyed. Dr. Carbo's work? I had something to do with it, too!

  "Let's examine what we've actually accomplished to date," Carbo said, shifting nervously in his chair.

  Foy made a sour face, but did not object.

  Hunching over the table's edge, Carbo said, "Our young friend here has made consistent contact with the experimental animal, and has shown a degree of control over the beast that we would all have considered phenomenal, only a few days ago."

  Peterson nodded. Jeff noticed that Dr. Ferris had a finger-sized tape recorder sitting on the table in front of her. Even though Bishop Foy's computer recorded all meetings, she apparently wanted to keep a record of her own.

  "We should now be proceeding along two lines," Carbo continued. "One, getting more students to work as contactors with the experimental animal . . ."

  Let other students contact Crown? Jeff's pulse leaped.

  ". . . And second, we must send a team down to the surface to implant more animals with probes, so that we can control them."

  "Especially the apes," Peterson said. "That's got to be our highest priority. Those creatures may have the beginnings of intelligence . . ."

/>   "If they do," Dr. Ferris interrupted, "we will be forced to close down all attempts to colonize Altair VI."

  "If they are intelligent," Bishop Foy said, stressing the if.

  "I would say they have already shown prime indications of intelligence," answered Dr. Ferris. Turning to Peterson, she asked, "Wouldn't you agree, Harvey?"

  Peterson glanced at Foy before responding. With a hike of his shaggy white eyebrows, he said slowly, "We have one instance of an adult female picking up a length of pipe and making a threatening gesture with it."

  "That's tool-using," Dr. Ferris said, "and tool use is prima facie evidence of intelligence."

  "Is it?" Foy snapped. "Are you certain of that, Dr. Ferris?"

  "Chimpanzees use tools, on Earth," Peterson said, "and they are considered proto-intelligent."

  "But not intelligent. Not like human beings," said Foy.

  "Chimps have also been trained to use language," Dr. Ferris pointed out. "That is certainly a sign of intelligence."

  Foy shook his head from side to side, his deep-sunk eyes glaring at her. "A dog can be trained to walk on its hind legs, too. Does that make it an Olympic sprinter?"

  Peterson put up both his hands. They were surprisingly big, long-fingered.

  He said, "Before we stumble into a very old and very deep argument, let me tell you what official anthropological dogma is: the chimpanzees of Earth are regarded as proto-intelligent. That does not put them in the same class as human beings."

  Foy seized on his statement. "Then if we found a planet that was inhabitated by chimpanzees just like those on Earth, but nothing higher—the government could not object to our colonizing it."

  Peterson leaned back in his chair and considered the question for a moment. "I honestly don't know what the government would do in a case like that. I think they'd be split right down the middle."

  Bishop Foy waggled a bony finger at him. "The law is quite specific. It says that the presence of an intelligent species is the important factor. We are not allowed to colonize a planet already inhabited by an intelligent species."

  "Wait a minute," Carbo said. "Let me ask this: Suppose the human race disappeared from Earth. Simply vanished, overnight. Everything else is left exactly the same, no ecological changes. The Earth as it is today, except that there are no more human beings on it. Would the chimps evolve into a truly intelligent species?"

  "Evolve?" Foy bristled.

  "Develop, change, learn more," Carbo corrected himself.

  "That would be impossible," the Bishop snapped.

  With a trace of a smile at the corners of his lips, Peterson said, "I'm not so sure. In your terms, Bishop Foy, the question is, would God bring about another race of intelligent creatures on Earth . . . perhaps altering the chimpanzees until they are as intelligent as we?"

  Carbo nodded.

  "I know that you secular humanists still believe in heresies such as Darwinian Evolution," Foy said slowly, his voice lowered to a menacing hiss. "But we Believers know that one kind of animal can never change into another kind. Chimpanzees were created chimpanzees and they can never change into anything else."

  "Then the chimps could never become fully intelligent?" Carbo asked, looking skeptical.

  "Never!" Foy answered before Peterson could. "And I don't want to hear anything more on that subject."

  "But wait just a minute," Carbo insisted. "That means that if the apes are not fully intelligent now, today, they never will be. Is that what you believe?"

  "Yes."

  "Then, as far as you're concerned, if we don't have to worry about them becoming more intelligent, more human, then all we have to find out is whether or not they are intelligent right now."

  Foy saw the point he was driving at. "Why, yes . . . that's correct," he said, smiling his ghastly smile.

  "Now wait a minute," Peterson said. "The world government isn't going to stand for that approach. Messina doesn't make scientific judgments on the basis of the Church of Nirvan."

  Carbo turned to Dr. Ferris. "Louisa, do you have a set of criteria that can tell us what we should look for? You've already mentioned tool use and language. Are there more?"

  She looked alarmed. "Why, I suppose there are. There should be. I'll have to scan the references."

  "You represent the world government here," Carbo said. "You'll have to tell us what the guidelines are."

  Dr. Ferris glanced at Bishop Foy, a flash of guilt in her eyes.

  "Whatever the rules tell us," Peterson said, "we should be examining those apes very closely."

  "I agree," Carbo said. "We must send a team down to the surface and implant a few of them with probes."

  Foy's bony face curdled again. "That is extremely dangerous."

  "There's no way around it," Peterson said. "We must have more of the animals to work with."

  "H'mm." Foy drummed his lean fingers on the tabletop, then turned toward Jeff, as if suddenly discovering him.

  "Ah, young Mr. Holman," he said. "You seem to value that wolfcat of yours more highly than my instructions."

  Carbo jumped in, "That wolfcat is the only experimental animal we have, remember."

  "I'm quite aware of that," Foy answered, without taking his smoldering eyes from Jeff. "And you seem to be well aware of it too, Holman. You think you're indispensable, don't you?"

  "No sir," Jeff said. "But Crown is."

  "Crown?"

  "The wolfcat," Carbo explained.

  Foy snorted contemptuously. "Indispensable, eh? Well, he won't be for long. Peterson! Start preparations for landing another team on the surface. We'll implant enough animals to make both that wolfcat and this unruly young man superfluous to our needs."

  CHAPTER 9

  The following morning at the contact lab Jeff arrived before Dr. Carbo. Amanda sat alone in the control room, in front of the blank viewscreens and silent console panels, munching on a muffin. A mug of steaming coffee sat on the console desktop at her elbow.

  "Another day, eh, Jeff?" she said brightly. "Frank's going to be late; big conference with Peterson and Polchek. They're organizing the landing teams."

  Jeff took the chair beside her and nodded glumly.

  "Want some breakfast?"

  "I had mine already, thank you."

  She peered at him. "You look like you lost your best friend."

  "Maybe I have."

  "What do you mean?"

  Fidgeting in the chair, fumbling in his mind to find the right words, Jeff stammered, "Crown . . . they're going to take him away from me. They're going to implant other animals . . . then they won't care what happens to him."

  Amanda's dark eyes showed that she understood. "Then Crown won't be so important, huh?"

  "Right," Jeff agreed. "Then they won't care what happens to him . . . whether he starves or gets killed by other wolfcats or what."

  "Maybe you won't be so important either."

  Jeff looked up sharply at her.

  "Is that what's bothering you, Jeff? You're the most important man in the Village right now, whether Foy admits it or not. But once other animals are implanted and other students are working with them, your importance will diminish."

  "No," he insisted. "I'm worried about Crown."

  "And yourself?" Amanda smiled gently.

  Jeff frowned and looked away from her. But he had to admit it. She was right. He turned his eyes back to her. Amanda was still smiling patiently at him. She knew. And she cared. And she was beautiful.

  "Yes, you're right," he finally confessed. "I am worried about myself."

  "There's nothing wrong with that, Jeff. You'd be a little crazy if you weren't."

  "But—well, look, I know that it's important to implant more animals and get more students to make contact with them. It's vital! I know that. But I don't like it. It's wrong of me; it's sinful. But I still feel this way."

  Amanda rolled her chair to Jeff's, until they were almost touching. She took both his hands in hers and leaned her face so close to h
is that he thought she was going to kiss him.

  "Jeff, you know that I'm not of your faith. I can't tell you anything about sin, or at least, about the way your church deals with sin. But one of my degrees is in psychology, and I know that the emotions you're feeling are completely normal. Anyone in your situation would feel the same way."

  He shook his head, suddenly overcome with sheer misery. "But that doesn't make it right."

  "It's not so terribly wrong, either," she said. "You're not harming anyone."

  "Maybe if I prayed more . . ."

  "Work is a form of prayer, and you're going to have plenty of work to do. No matter how many students we use, you're still the only one we have right now."

  He tried to smile.

  Squeezing his hands tightly, Amanda said, "And you're still a very important man to me."

  Jeff felt his heart stop. For an instant the entire world seemed to halt in its tracks. There was nothing in the whole universe except this beautiful black woman who smiled at him so lovingly.

  I'm in love with her! he realized. I love her more than anyone in the world has ever loved a woman before! But before the first wild shock of joy finished reverberating through his nervous system, Jeff realized that this, too, was wrong and sinful. Not only had he taken the vow of celibacy, but Amanda was not even a member of the Church. It wasn't that she was black; the Church preached racial tolerance. But she wasn't a Believer. He didn't know any blacks who were.

  Jeff's mind spun giddily. Love and the fires of passion battled within him against guilt and strange, cold, sullen fingers of anger that clutched at his heart. Can't I do anything right anymore? he wondered. Why am I feeling so many sinful thoughts?

  "What's going on in here?"

  Jeff jerked around in his chair to see Dr. Carbo striding into the control room, scowling.

  "Dammit, Amanda, I expected you to have him hooked up and ready to go. We don't have any time to lose. Let's get to work."

  Rising to his feet, Jeff noticed for the first time that he was several centimeters taller than Carbo.