Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“We call ’em hummers or sometimes humbugs,” the first girl told her, noting the exchange. “They’re always curious but they don’t do nothin’. Nobody’s even sure what half these critters eat, but some of the little ones there, the pinheads, they took to our grain, so we got natural pollinators.”

“You seem very knowledgeable about farming,” Eve told her.

“It’s what we do,” the girl replied matter of factly. “Kinda boring but it beats starvin’, I guess. It’s a little dry here so we grow mostly wheat and maize, with some veggies down by the creek, and we breed some animals and use ’em for different things. The extra we trade with the villages around who grow other stuff, and we get rice and cotton and stuff like that from the wetter parts of the land. It kinda all works out, I guess.”

It was true that they seemed to have hit on a world that was just right for survival, at least on this level. There seemed no sign of sickness; she hadn’t heard so much as a cough. Alien diseases were almost always too alien to pass between interstellar species, and most people had already been genetically protected in decades and centuries past before they were even allowed to go out to the stars.

Still, this was a hard life far from the complex super hospital of The Mountain or many of the more modern colonies, and there were cancers from the sun and from things in the environment you might never have thought of, and lots of lesser but still deadly dangers. She still hadn’t seen anybody that really looked old, just young people who looked far beyond their years.

“Can I ask your names? You know mine but I don’t know yours.”

The first girl shrugged. “I’m Madi, and she’s Ilee.”

She nodded. This was some progress, anyway. “I am very interested in your life and culture here, but I guess you and your people aren’t as curious about me.”

“Curious got nothin’ to do with it,” Madi told her simply. “We don’t believe in askin’ questions ’bout things that’re none of our business.”

“We are still learning your ways,” Eve responded carefully. “We don’t mean to pry, even though we are curious. But if we don’t learn about you we won’t know what is proper or improper in your eyes. We weren’t raised with your ways, so we haven’t any idea what the rules are. Can you understand that?”

That kind of threw them. It simply hadn’t occurred to them that somebody might have to pry just to find out that they shouldn’t pry. When you were a provincial ten-year-old faced with such a conundrum and smart enough to know it, there was only one thing you could do: shift the focus.

“Well, we didn’t ask you to come,” she retorted, as if this was sufficient.

“But we had to come. God guides us to where He wants us to be. We deliver his message to any who want to hear, but nobody has to come hear it. The word is our seed. If it takes and grows, either in a people or even a few individuals, then we rejoice. If it doesn’t, but falls on poor soil and dies out, we know that they heard the word and rejected it, and we feel sad, shake the dust from our feet, and go, never to return.”

“My daddy said he heard a preacher or priest or whatever once,” Ilee noted. “He says the guy never stopped trying to get everybody in the whole universe to believe the same stuff and that he was a real pain and a pest. Your god don’t do that?”

Eve smiled. This was something of a breakthrough, even with a ten-year-old. “No. We think God wants some people to hear and others not, but that it’s a choice. Many, maybe most people have heard the message over thousands of years and either didn’t accept it or didn’t really follow what it meant. We are looking for the few that can.”

“But you was born to believe that stuff,” Ilee pointed out. “You don’t know if it wouldn’t be just crazy stuff if you was us and we was you, right? You never had to choose.”

It was a challenge that she was well aware of. “Well, everyone has doubts from time to time if they’re right. But if we’re right, things have a way of showing it. Many of our people have had real problems after they’ve seen some of the worst things people can do to each other. We’ve come on worlds where raiders have pillaged and destroyed and left only horror behind. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, dead. There are some natural disasters, too. It’s real hard to keep faith alive when you see the torn bodies of dead babies.” She wondered if, considering the setting and the ages of the two girls, she was being too graphic.

“You seen that?”

“I’ve seen the pictures of that, and heard of it from the people who are older than me but who went to those places like I’m here now. Some could not go on and left us and settled on other colonies because they could not maintain their faith. We’re all challenged by something sooner or later that makes us doubt. That’s because there’s evil in the universe, and even in each of us, as well as good. Most folks don’t really believe in evil; they believe that bad things happen by accident or because people go bad from things in their own growing up and the like. But there is evil. Real evil.”

Ilee frowned. “So what kinda god lets babies be killed?” she asked skeptically. “What kinda god lets evil go on? I’m not sure I like your god.”

“Me, neither,” Madi added.

“We think we’re being tested,” Eve told them. “There are big rewards if you pass, but the test is very, very hard and most folks flunk. But it’s got to be real tough or it isn’t a good test. Going back to farming, let’s say God planted all of us, but He only wants to pick the very, very best. If He doesn’t let evil go and keep testing us, then how will He ever know? We wouldn’t be choosing, we’d be like toys who had to do whatever their owner told them.”

The two girls looked out at the field, where some toddlers were giggling as they tried kicking away a crude ball covered in a tough, leathery skin that was almost as big as they were. “Yeah, but babies… ” Ilee muttered, thinking of it.

Eve was afraid she’d used the wrong analogy in her conversation, but what could she do? She had to take whatever wedge this closed-mouthed society gave her. She wondered, though, if maybe she should have tried it with some of the older women. After all, these girls were younger than the age most people began any religious instruction on The Mountain beyond the very simple ideas of good and bad. Dead babies related to their experience, but it was hard to explain to a ten-year-old why God might allow it.

The more she thought about it, the more depressed she got, too. For all the facile responses and quick retorts on the question of a moral universe, she wondered if she could explain that to anybody.

It was tough to explain what you don’t understand yourself.

The big man’s name was Gregnar, it turned out. He might well have had a last name, but family names were not used, or so it seemed. At least, every single person Robey asked for a family name responded “Smith” with something of a grin. The idea that he was being put on didn’t bother him nearly as much as the lurking fear that maybe they really were all named Smith.

As he watched them work in the fields, interacting with one another, joking, occasionally cursing, and particularly after he pitched in on some heavy lifting, he began to form a theory about these people and this world.

For one thing, it was amazing what you could learn from a culture’s curse words. Not just their origins, but references to God or gods or other such entities, pleas, attitudes, you name it. This group had the full panoply of great cussing; while he heard nothing new, he thought that, in one afternoon, he’d managed to hear every variation he’d ever encountered before. While the Doctor would be disappointed—he was a collector of new ways people could cuss—Robey hoped that the monitor team up above had tender ears. This was an earthy group, to say the least. Still, there were some unique exclamations, like “By the twin Rocks of Eban!” and the like that might prove useful. He hoped the computer aboard ship could find a match for one of them, if they weren’t just newer local ones.