When she had gone away with a slip for the hospital, looking dazed and shocked, MacAran took her place before the cluttered desk, and Moray grimaced up at him. “I take it you heard that. How’d you like my job–scaring the hell out of young pregnant girls?”
“Not much.” MacAran was thinking of Camilla, also carrying a child. So she was not sterile. But one chance in two that she would miscarry–and then a fifty-fifty chance that her child would die. Grim statistics, and they sent a clutch of horror through him. Had she been advised of this? Did she know? Was she co-operating? He didn’t know; she had been locked up with the Captain, hovering over the computer, for half the last tenday.
Moray said, frowning slightly, “Come out of the clouds. You’re one of the lucky ones, MacAran–you’re not technologically unemployed.”
“Huh?”
“You’re a geologist and we need you doing what you were trained for. You heard me tell Alanna that one of the first industries we need, in a hurry, at that, is pottery. For pottery, you need china clay, or a good substitute for it. We also need reliable building stone–we need concrete or cement of some sort–we need limestone, or something with the same properties; and we need silicates for glass, various ores… in fact, what we need is a geological assay of this part of the planet, and we need it before the winter sets in. You aren’t priority one, Mac–but you’re in category two or three. Can you draw up a plan for an assay and exploration in the next day or two, and tell me roughly how many men you’ll need for sampling and testing?”
“Yes, I can do that easy enough. But I thought you said we couldn’t go in for a technological civilization…”
“We can’t,” Moray told him, “not as Engineer Patrick uses the word. No heavy industry. No mechanized transport. But there’s no such thing as a non-technological civilization. Even the cave men had technology–they manufactured flints, or didn’t you ever see one of their factory sites? Man is a tool-user–a technician. I never had any notion of starting us out as savages. The question is, which technologies can we manage, especially during the first three or four generations?”
“You plan that far ahead?”
“I have to.”
“You said my job wasn’t priority one. What’s priority one?”
“Food,” Moray said realistically. “Again, we’re lucky. The soil’s arable here–although I suspect marginally, so we’re going to have to use fertilizers and composts–and agriculture is possible. I’ve known planets where the food-securing priority would have taken up so much time that even minimal crafts might have to be postponed for two or three generations. Earth doesn’t colonize them, but we could have been marooned on one. There may even be domesticable animals here; MacLeod’s on that now. Priority two is shelter–and by the way, when you make that ‘survey, check some lower slopes for caves. They may be warmer than anything we can build, at least during the winter. After food and shelter come simple crafts–the amenities of life; weaving, pottery, fuel and lights, clothing, music, garden tools, furniture. You get the idea. Go draw up your survey, MacAran, and I’ll assign you enough men to carry it out.” He gave another of those grim smiles.
“Like I say; you’re one of the lucky ones. This morning I’ve got to tell a deep–space communications expert with absolutely no other skills, that his job is completely obsolete for at least ten generations, and offer him a choice of agriculture, carpentry, or blacksmithing!”
As MacAran left the office, his thoughts flew again, compulsively, to Camilla. Was this what lay in store for her? No, certainly not, any civilized group of people must have some use for a computer library of information! But would Moray, with his grim priorities, see it that way?
He walked through the midday sunlight, pale violet shadows, the sun hanging high and red like an inflamed and bloodshot eye, toward the hospital. In the distance a solitary figure was toiling over rocks, building a low fence, and MacAran looked at Father Valentine, doing his solitary penance. MacAran accepted, in principle, the theory that the colony could spare no single pair of hands; that Father Valentine could atone for his crimes by useful work more easily than by hanging by the neck until dead; and MacAran, with the memory of his own madness lying heavy on him (how easily he could have killed the Captain, in his rage of jealousy!) could not even find it in his heart to shun the priest or feel horror at him. Captain Leicester’s judgment would have done justice to King Solomon; Father Valentine had been commanded to bury the dead, those he had killed, and the others, to create a graveyard, and enclose it with a fence against wild beasts or desecration, and to build a suitable memorial to the mass grave of those who had died in the crash. MacAran was not certain what useful purpose a graveyard would serve, except perhaps to remind the Earthmen of how near death lay to life, and how near madness lay to sanity. But this work would keep the Father away from the other crewmen and colonists, who might not have the same awareness of how near they might have come to repeating his crime, until the memory had mercifully died down a little; and would provide enough hard work and penance to satisfy even the despairing man’s need for punishment.