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.
As they came into the main room of the house they shared with half a dozen other families, MacAran threw off his fur jacket and went to the fire. Like most men in the colony who did not wear kilts, he wore leather breeches and a tunic of woven tartan cloth. "Is everyone else out?"
"Ewen is at the hospital; Judy is at the school; Mac went off with the herding drive," she said, "and if you're dying for a look at the children I think they're all in the schoolyard but Alastair. He's with Heather this morning."
MacAran walked to the window, looking at the pitched roof of the school. How quickly they grew tall, he thought, and how lightly fourteen years of childbearing lay on their mother's shoulders. The seven who had survived the terrible famine winter five years ago were growing up. Somehow they had weathered, together, the early storms of this world; and although she had had children by Ewen, by Lewis MacLeod, by another whose name he had never known and he suspected Camilla herself did not know, her two oldest children and her two youngest were his. The last, Mhari, did not live with them; Heather had lost a child three days before Mhari's birth and Camilla, who had never cared to nurse her own children if there was a wet-nurse available, had given her to Heather to nurse; when Heather was unwilling to give her up after she was weaned, Camilla had agreed to let Heather keep her, although she visited her almost every day. Heather was one of the unlucky ones; she had borne seven children but only one had lived more than a month after birth. Ties of fosterage in the community were stronger than blood; a child's mother was only the one who cared for it, its father the one who taught it. MacAran had children by three other women, and cared for them all equally, but he loved best Judy's strange young Lori, taller than Judy at fourteen and yet childlike and peculiar, called a changeling by half the community, her unknown father still a secret to all but a few.
Camilla said, "Now you're back, when are you off again?"
He slid an arm around her. "I'll have a few days at home first, and then--we're off to find the sea. There must be one, somewhere on this world. But first--I have something for you. We explored a cave, a few days ago and found these, in the rock. We don't have much use for jewels, I know, it's really a waste of time to dig them out, but Alastair and I liked the looks of these, so we brought some home to you and the girls. I had a sort of feeling about them."
From his pocket he took a handful of blue stones, pouring them into her hands, looking at the surprise and pleasure in her eyes. Then the children came running in,
and MacAran found himself swamped in childish kisses, hugs, questions, demands.
"Da, can I go to the mountains with you next time? Harry goes and he's only fourteen!"
"Da, Alanna took my cakes, make her give them back!"
"Dada, Dada, look here, look here! See me climb!"
Camilla, as always, ignored the hullabaloo, calmly gesturing them to quiet. "One question at a time-what is it, Lori?"
The silver-haired child with grey eyes picked up one of the blue stones, looking at the starlike patterns coiled within. She said gravely, "My mother has one like this. May I have one, too? I think perhaps I can work it as she does."
MacAran said, "You may have one," and over her head looked at Camilla. Some day, in Lori's own time, they would know exactly what she meant, for their strange fosterling never did anything without reason.
"You know," Camilla said, "I think some day these are going to be very, very important to all of us."
MacAran nodded. Her intuition had been proven right so many times that now he expected it; but he could wait. He walked to the window and looked up at the high, familiar skyline of the mountains, daydreaming beyond them to the plains, the hills, and the unknown seas. A pale blue moon, like the stone into which Lori still. stared, entranced, floated up quietly over the rim of the clouds around the mountain; and very gently, rain began to fall.
"Some day," he said, offhand, "I suppose someone will give those moons--and this world--a name."
"Some day," Camilla said, "but we'll never know."
A century later they named the planet DARKOVER. But Earth knew nothing of them for two thousand years.
Darkover Landfall. V 1.0 Scanned and proofed by JP for own usage.
Some weird spellings were present in the paper copy, and I kept them