Enid shook her head, lips tightly clamped. She said to Genevieve. “I know you must be very sad . . .”
Genevieve erupted in laughter. “Sad? You know that I’m sad? I saw a girl I knew … a girl I loved! I saw her get her throat slit. Her last words were of concern for her child. And you think I’m sad? That’s not quite it. Believe me, Enid, that’s not quite the emotion I’m feeling!”
Their shocked faces brought her to herself. The violence in her own mind and voice frightened her. Anger was an emotion she had avoided all her life, but now she was drowning in it, unable to keep from screaming at them, “You asked if I’d seen. Well I’ve seen one thing quite clearly, and that is that while all this bloodletting and killing has gone on, you’ve stood by and let it happen. No matter what excuses you make, that’s what you’ve done!”
Melanie began to stammer something, but Genevieve could not bear their shocked and angry faces or her own burning rage. She fled past them, pushing them aside, and went back to her own little cell, where she struggled with the sliding door in her attempt to slam it, finally jamming it half closed before she threw herself facedown onto her pillow and wept herself exhaustedly to sleep.
In the night, Genevieve woke to find Melanie sitting beside her bed, eyes closed, hands relaxed in her lap.
Her anger had not left her in the night. She murmured, half-resentfully, “Why are you here, Melanie?”
“I came to be with you. I thought you might be lonely.” ,
She laughed, still angrily. “Oh, Melanie. Yes, I’m lonely, but you don’t fill my empty niches. You’re not husband or baby, so you won’t do. Just go away.”
“I thought we might talk.”
“About what? Religion, Melanie?”
“Didn’t your mother ever talk to you about religion?”
“She did, yes. She said it was important to be seen being pious. She quoted the covenants to me, about purity of soul. Women, she said, were required to be pure of soul.”
“That’s . . . rather what I wanted to talk about.”
Genevieve sat up, not as annoyed as she pretended to be, surprised to find herself slightly curious. “It seems you won’t be satisfied until you do! I’ll listen, but that’s all I’ll guarantee.”
Melanie refolded her hands, took a deep breath, and said, “The difference between our belief and the belief you were reared in is this: We don’t believe people have individual souls. We believe living worlds have souls. We believe that all the species of life that have ever lived on a world are part of the soul of that world.”
“Stephanie’s book said something of that.”
“In the old language we call it te wairua taiao—the world spirit. It starts out small and simple, and it grows and develops and learns as billions of years go by, becoming old and wise. It’s of the world, our teachers say, an inevitable result of a living world, and it doesn’t die when the world dies. It separates itself and goes elsewhere.”
“Stephanie’s book said that,” Genevieve remarked, with something almost like amusement. “I discussed it with a strange little man named Jeorfy Bottoms, and we decided it was a concept one might accept, philosophically.”
Stubbornly, Melanie went on: “The world-soul includes every living creature that has ever been on the planet, every microbe, every animal, every tree, not as individuals, but as races, and at any time upon any planet, some of those races are harbingers . . .”
“Harbingers?”
“Indicators. Signifiers. You know … if you dig in your garden, the soil is full of worms.”
“If it’s good soil.”
“Exactly. If there are lots of worms, you know it’s good soil. The worms are . . . harbingers of the health of the soil. So, on any given planet there are harbingers. If they are alive and healthy, then that planet is also alive and healthy. If the harbingers are dying or dead, then the planet will surely die.”
“Then mankind couldn’t have been a harbinger, for Earth died even though men were many.”