“He told me–our people’s minds were like half-shut doors,” she said. “Yet we understood each other, perhaps more so because there had been that that total sharing. But no one believes Me!” she finished with a cry of despair. “They believe I’m mad, or lying!”
“Does it matter so much what they believe?” the priest asked slowly. “By their disbelief you might even be shielding him. You told me he was afraid of us–of your people–and if his kind are gentle people, I’m not surprised. A telepathic race tuned in to us during the Ghost Wind would probably have decided we were a horrifyingly violent, frightening people, and they wouldn’t have been entirely wrong, although there’s another side to us. But if they once begin believing in your–what is Fiona’s phrase?–your fairy lover, they might seek out his people, and the results might not be very good.” He smiled faintly. “Our race has a bad reputation when we meet other cultures we consider inferior. If you care about your child’s father, Judy, I’d let them go on disbelieving in him.”
“Forever?”
“As long as necessary. This planet is already changing us,” Valentine said, “maybe some day our children and his will find some way of coming together without catastrophe, but we’ll have to wait and see.”
Judy pulled at the chain around her neck and he said, “Didn’t you used to wear a cross on that?”
“Yes, I took it off, forgive me.”
“Why? It doesn’t mean anything here. But what is this?”
It was a blue jewel, blazing, with small silvery patterns moving within. “He said–they used these things for the training of their children; that if I could master the jewel I could reach him–let him know it was well with me and the child.”
“Let me see it,” Valentine said, and reached for it, but she flinched and drew away.
“What–?”
“I can’t explain it I don’t understand it. But when any one else touches it, now, it–it hurts, as if it was part of me,” she said fumblingly. “Do you think I’m mad?”
The man shook his head. “What’s madness?” he asked. “A jewel to enhance telepathy–perhaps it has some peculiar properties which resonate to the electrical signals sent of by the brain–telepathy can’t just exist, it must have some natural phenomenal basis. Perhaps the jewel is attuned to whatever it is in your mind that makes you–you. In any case, it exists, and–have you reached him with it?”
“It seems so sometimes,” said Judy, fumbling for words. “It’s like hearing someone’s voice and knowing whose it is by the sound–no, it’s not quite like that either, but it does happen. I feel–very briefly, but it’s quite real–as if he were standing beside me, touching me, and then it fades again. A moment of reassurance, a moment of–of love, and then it’s gone. And I have the strange feeling that it’s only a beginning, that a day will come when I’ll know other things about it–”
He watched while she tucked the jewel away inside her dress again. At last he said, “If I were you, I’d keep it a secret for a while. You said this planet’s changing us all, but perhaps it isn’t changing us fast enough. There are some of the scientists who would want to test this thing, to work at it, perhaps even to take it from you, experiment, destroy it to see how it works. Perhaps even interrogate and test you again and again, to see if you are lying or hallucinating. Keep it secret, Judith. Use it as he told you. A day may come when it will be important to know how it works–the way it is supposed to work, not the way the scientists might want to make it work.”
He rose, shaking the crumbs of his meal off his lap.
“It’s back to the rock pile for me.”
She stood on the tips of her toes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said softly, “you’ve helped me a lot.”
The man touched her face. “I’m glad,” he said. “It’s–a beginning. A long road back, but it’s a beginning. Bless You, Judith.”
He watched her walk away, and a curious near-blasphemous thought touched his mind, how do I know God isn’t sending a Child… a strange child, not quite man… here on this strange world? He dismissed the thought, thinking I’m mad, but another thought made him cringe with mingled memory and dismay, how do we know the Child I worshipped all these years was not some such strange alliance?