Tobias closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of his chair. “It seems to have done what it was intended to do.”
“True. But old Tillson must have done quite a mambo before he died. His neck isn’t broken, Tobias. He danced. He danced for a long time.”
“I guess Tillson just wasn’t much of a hangman.”
Forrest snorted out a laugh. “He wasn’t much of a chaplain, either. He just wasn’t much of anything.”
There were sounds coming from behind Forrest. He turned and Cage pushed past him and came to a halt as the body came into his view. “For God’s sake.” Cage looked first at Forrest and then at Tobias seated in the chair. “For God’s sake, cut him down!” He moved toward the body.
Forrest studied Tillson’s still form. “Wouldn’t it be amusing to leave him there for Lady Name? We’d all be eating our rations as though nothing were out of the ordinary, and in she’d come. What would she do?”
Cage finished righting the overturned chair next to the hanging corpse. “Give me a hand, someone.”
Tobias pushed himself to his feet and headed toward the door. He paused next to Forrest. “Help him. Help him you sonofabitch, or I’ll kill you.”
A breath of amusement passed over Forrest’s face as he walked over to Cage and began helping him take down the body.
Outside, walking rapidly away from the camp, Tobias felt the angry sickness forcing its way through his wall of control. He began running into the dark.
“why must I die”
“ask this thing”
“i asked this thing and no answer”
“ways of this thing are mysterious—die”
The second Earthday into the new sunrise. Tobias stood on Graveyard Hill next to Tillson’s grave marker, staring at the long shadows cast by the rocks below. One of the shadows moved. His gaze traced along the shadow to its source. It was Forrest moving among the rocks.
Tobias squatted, leaned his forearms upon his knees, and clasped his hands together. Curious that no one had questioned whether Tillson’s suicide was in fact a suicide. The body had been taken down, planted, and never mentioned again.
Tillson’s mind had gone, no question about that. His shelter had been littered with incoherent scribblings. Mostly theological squirrel droppings, a rambling eternal justification of the author’s existence. There were occasional moments of apparent lucidity. Relative lucidity. All things being relative.
Most of Tillson’s lucid moments were crowded with the pain and anguish of a man who knows he is losing his mind. Fragments still teased Tobias’s mind.
“Forrest explained that each rock is a small community of the creatures. A community of individuals bound by their physical nature and shared nervous systems to act for the community’s welfare, much like the cells of a human body. Each rock, then, can be treated as an individual. The rock color is a genetic thing and has no other significance. The rocks cannot perceive anything that doesn’t stay still for at least the equivalent of nine Earth days.
“He dispenses pain and death to the rocks according to whether the rocks have acted in accordance with the signs he has made. It must be terrifying to the creatures. Signs suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Signs that, if they are disobeyed, instantly reap horrible consequences. The creatures must believe themselves to be in the grip of spirits—terrible gods.
“Forrest is teaching them good and evil. Doing what Forrest signs is the good; disobeying Forrest is the evil. Before Forrest these creatures had no conception of good and evil. The horrors of moral commandments whose reasons for existence must be taken on blind faith. I wonder if the rocks will survive morality as long as humans have.
“A few moments ago Forrest showed me something. It was a green pebble the size of a blueberry. It seems that several of the rocks, acting in concert, prepared a platform and placed this pebble upon it. Then they left the platform. It must have taken many weeks. But there it is. The faithful tithing to their god. They prepared an altar and placed one of their members upon it. A gift. A virgin thrown into the volcano. A lamb pumping out its blood in the temple. The rocks have learned how to sacrifice.
“I am an obscenity.”
There was no possible way of knowing how long after writing those words that the chaplain had hanged himself. Or had been murdered.
“I am an obscenity.”
Tobias looked down at Tillson’s grave marker. “This is a hell of a place to try and judge an entire life, Howard.”
A whoop of joy came from below. Tobias turned his head to see Forrest running among the rocks. And the rocks he was running among were of only two colors, green and red. Everywhere else there was a fairly even mix of white, green, gray, and black, as well as dead red ones. But in Forrest’s little community the only ones left living were green. The green rocks, in accordance with their god’s wish, had killed those who were not green. There had indeed been a war.
Tobias reached down and picked up a small white rock. The terror, the passion that must exist in those very slow creatures. The pain of those who sacrificed one of their own number to Forrest. It wouldn’t be a sacrifice without the pain of loss. And the pain couldn’t exist without some form of love.
What about that little green pebble? The article of sacrifice? If the others had time enough to move away from the platform, so did the pebble. It had been green. Alive. It had faced the horror of the unknowable. And it had stood there, waiting for Forrest.
Courage?
He suddenly felt guilty about holding the white rock and tried to replace it exactly from where it had come. But he couldn’t remember which side had been up. He stood, wondering how he would feel if the next instant he found himself standing on his head. He headed for the ship, being careful where he placed his feet.
“the green kills ours—why”
“the gray must kill the green—how”
“this thing serves the green”
“this thing will serve the gray if the gray obeys this thing”
Tobias sat in the commo couch and watched Lady Name alternately punch buttons and refer to the notes that she kept on slips of paper in her right breast pocket. The sensors he had installed above the cockpit seemed to be working, whatever it was that they did.
“There.” She pointed at the incomprehensible scramble of numbers on the display. “That’s the key. We’ll be able to talk to them in a bit.”
“Forrest can already do that.”
“Our way will be much faster. We won’t have to fuck them over and wait for them to deduce the message. Direct communication.” She faced Tobias. “Did you find the portable units?”
He nodded toward the rear of the cockpit, where two heavy-looking, brown metal cases stood. “What do we need those for?”
She turned back to the display. “As soon as Forrest figures out what we’re doing in here he’ll turn this computer into rubble. Once I have the data milked and processed through this thing, we won’t need it anymore. I’ll enter the translation codes into the portable units, and we can use them. I hope they’re still working.”
“They don’t look damaged.” Tobias looked back at the units as he felt himself squirm in his chair. Lady Name’s use of the pronoun we made Tobias more than a bit uncomfortable. After all, she was crazy. “Why don’t we just kill Forrest and be done with it?”
“We aren’t murderers, Tobias. We are the good guys.” Tobias glanced at the knife resting on her lap and raised an eyebrow. She nodded and reached for the keyboard. “Hide the soft suits and portable units while I try it out and see what happens.”