Robert Silverberg - Prime Commandment

He stared at the rest of them, and no longer were they his equals round the table, but now merely his disciples, as they had been all the long journey through the stars. “Tomorrow is the Sabbath day by our reckoning, and we shall rest. But on the day following we shall go armed to the village of the idolaters, and strike them down. Is that understood by us all?”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” the Blessed Leonid quoted mildly. But when the time came for the vote, he cast in his lot with the rest, and it was recorded as a unanimous decision. After the day of the Sabbath, the mocking forest people would be eradicated.

But the people of World had laws of their own, and a religion of their own, and they too held a convocation that evening, speaking long and earnestly round the council fire. The priestess Jeen, garbed only in the red paints of death, danced before them, and when Lyle of the Kwitni called for a decision there were no dissenters.

The long night came to an end, and morning broke over World—and the spies returned from the settlement of the strangers, reporting that the strange god still stood in the clearing, and that his followers showed no signs of obeying the command to depart.

“It is death, then,” cried the priestess. And she led them in a dance round the ship their God, and the knives were sharpened, and she and Lyle led them through the forest, Lyle carrying one of the swords that had hung in the cabin of the Captain McCaig aboard the Ship, and Jeen the other.

The strangers were sleeping when the five hundred of the people of World burst in on their encampment. They woke, gradually, in confusion, as the forest slayers moved among them, slicing throats. Dozens died before anyone knew what was taking place.

Curiously the strangers made no attempt to defend themselves. Jeen saw the great bearded man, he who had commanded her to wear clothes and who had eyed her body so strangely, and he stood in the midst of his fellows, shouting in a mighty voice, “It is the Sabbath! Lift no weapon on the Sabbath! Pray, brothers, pray!”

And the strangers fell to their knees and prayed, and because they prayed to a false god they died. It was hardly yet noon when the killing was done with, and the eight hundred members of the Church of the New Resurrection lay weltering in blood, every one of them dead.

Jeen the priestess said strangely, “They did not fight back. They let us kill them.”

“They said it was the Sabbath,” Lyle of the Kwitni remarked. “But of course it was not the Sabbath—the Sabbath is three days hence.”

Jeen shrugged. “We are well rid of them, anyway. They would have blasphemed against God.”

There was more work to do after the bodies were carried to the sea. Fifty great trees were felled and stripped of their branches, and the naked trunks were set aside while the men of the tribe climbed the cliff and caused the great ship in which the strangers had come to topple to the ground.

Then a roadway was made of the fifty great logs, and the men and women of the people of World pushed strainingly, and the great ship rolled with a groaning sound down the side of the hill, as the logs tumbled beneath it, and finally it went plunging toward the sea and dropped beneath the waves, sending up a mighty cascade of water.

They were all gone, then, the eight hundred intruders and their false god, the ship. And the people of World returned to their village and wearily danced out the praise of their Ship, their God.

They were not bloodthirsty people, and they would have wished to welcome the eight hundred strange ones into their midst. But the strange ones were blasphemers, and so had to be killed, and their god destroyed.

Jeen was happy, for her faith in God was renewed, and she danced gladly round the pitted and rusting Ship. For her God had been true, and the god of the strangers false, and God’s bidding had been done. For it had been written in the Book of the Ship, which old Lorresson the priest recited to the people of World centuries ago in the days of the first McCaig and the first Kwitni, that there were certain commandments by which the people were to live.

And one of these commandments was, Thou Shalt Not Kill, and another was, Remember the Sabbath Day, To Keep It Holy. These the people of World harkened to.

But they were godly people, and the Word was most holy. They had acted in concord with the dictates of Lorresson and McCaig and Kwitni and the Ship itself, their God, when they had slain the intruders and destroyed their ship. For, first of all the commandments they revered, it was written, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.