A barbarian world with the computer worshipped as a God.
A God. A God. A God.
And he was creating that God.
God! Am I insane?
And the answer came, clear and cold. No. I have been insane since the ship crashed, but now I am sane. Moray was right all along. The answers of another world are not the answers we can use here. The technology, the science, are only a technology and a science for Earth, and if we try to transfer them here, whole, we will destroy this planet. Some day, not as soon as I would wish, but in their own good time, they will evolve a technology rooted in the soil, the stones, the sun, the resources of this world. Perhaps it will take them to the stars, if they want to go. Perhaps it will take them into time or the inner spaces of their own hearts. But it will be theirs, not mine. I am not a God. I cannot make a world in my own image.
He had brought all the supplies of the ship from the bridge to this dome. Now, quietly, he turned and began to fashion what he sought, old words from another world ringing in his mind;
Endless the world’s turn, endless the sun’s spinning
Endless the quest;
I turn again, back to my own beginning,
And here, find rest.
With steady hands he lighted a resin-candle and, deliberately, set a light to the long fuse.
Camilla and MacAran heard the explosion and ran toward the dome, just in time to see it erupt skyward in a shower of debris, and rising flame.
Fumbling with the padlock, Harry Leicester began to realize that he wasn’t going to get out. This time he wasn’t going to make it. Staggering from the blow and concussion, but coldly, gladly sane, he looked at the wreckage. I’ve given you a clean start, he thought confusedly, maybe I am God after all, the one who drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and stopped telling them all the answers, letting them find their own way, and grow
… no lifelines, no cushions, let them find their own way, live or die…
He hardly knew it when they forced the door open and took him up gently, but he felt Camilla’s gentle touch on his dying mind and opened his eyes into the blue compassionate stare.
He whispered in confusion, “I am a very foolish fond old man…”
Her tears fell on his face. “Don’t try to talk. I know why you did it. We began to do it together, last time, and then… oh, Captain, Captain…”
He closed his eyes. “Captain of what?” he whispered. And then, at his last breath, “You can’t retire a Captain. You have to shoot him… and I shot him…”
And then the red sun went out, forever, and blazed into luminous galaxies of light.
Epilogue
Even the struts of the starship were gone, carried away to the hoarded stores of metal; mining would always be slow on this world, and metals scarce for many, many generations. Camilla, from habit, gave the place a glance, but no more, as she went across the valley. She walked lightly, a tall woman, her hair lightly touched with frost, as she followed a half-heard awareness. Beyond the range of vision she saw the tall stone memorial to the crash victims, the graveyard where all the dead of the first terrible winter were buried beside the dead from the first summer and the winds of madness. She drew her fur cloak around her, looking with a regret so long past that it was no longer even sadness, at one of the green mounds.
MacAran, coming down the valley from the mountain road, saw her, wrapped in her furs and her tartan skirt, and raised his hand in greeting. His heart still quickened at the sight of her, after so many years; and when he reached her, he took both her hands for a moment and held them before he spoke.
She said, “The children are well–I visited Mhari this morning. And you, I can tell without asking that you had a good trip.” Letting her hand rest in his, they turned back together through the streets of New Skye. Their household was at the very end of the street, where they could see the tall East Peak, beyond which the red sun rose every morning in cloud; at one end, the small budding which was the weather station; Camilla’s special responsibility.