The Blessed Myron shrugged. “It makes little difference. Perhaps they are descendants of a Terran colonial mission—a ship bound for a more distant world, that crashed here and sent no word to Earth.” He stared heavenward for a moment, at the dark and moonless sky, and muttered a brief prayer. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will visit these people and speak with them. Now let us build our camp.”
The morning dawned fresh and clear, the sun rising early and growing warm rapidly, and shortly after morning prayer a picked band of eleven Resurrectionist men made their way through the heavily wooded area that separated their camp from that of the savages. The women of the Church knelt in the clearing and prayed, while the remaining men went about their daily chores.
The Blessed Myron Brown led the party, and with him were his son Enoch and nine others. They strode without speaking through the woods. The Blessed Myron experienced a certain discomfort as the great yellow sun grew higher in the sky and the forest warmed; he was perspiring heavily beneath his thick gray woolen clothes. But this was merely a physical discomfort, and those he could bear with ease.
This other torment, though, that of finding people on this new world—that hurt him. He wanted to see these people with his own eyes, and look upon them.
Near noon the village of the natives came in sight; the Blessed Myron was first to see it. He saw a huddle of crude low huts built around a medium-sized hill, atop which rose the snout of a corroded spaceship that had crashed into the hillside years, perhaps centuries earlier. The Blessed Myron pointed, and they went forward.
And several of the natives advanced from the village to meet them.
There was a girl, young and fair, and a man, and all the man wore was a scanty white cloth around his waist, and all the girl wore was the breechcloth and an additional binding around her breasts. The rest of their bodies—lean, tanned—were bare. The Blessed Myron offered a prayer that he would be kept from sin.
The girl stepped forward and said, “I’m the priestess Jeen of the McCaig. This is Lyle of Kwitni, who is in charge. Who are you?”
“You—you speak English?” the Blessed Myron asked.
“We do. Who are you, and what are you doing on World? Where did you come from? What do you want here?”
The girl was openly impudent; and the sight of her sleek thighs made the muscles tighten along the Blessed Myron’s jaws. Coldly he said, “We have come here from Earth. We will settle here.”
“Earth? Where is that?”
The Blessed Myron smiled knowingly and glanced at his son and at the others. He noticed in some disapproval that Enoch was staring with perhaps too much curiosity at the lithe girl. “Earth is the planet from beyond the sky where you originally came from,” he said. “Long ago—before you declined into savagery.”
“You came from the place we came from?” The girl frowned. “We are not savages, though.”
“You run naked and perform strange ceremonies by night. This is savagery. But all this must change. We will help you regain your stature as Earthmen again; we will show you how to build houses instead of shabby huts. And you must learn to wear clothing again.”
“But surely we need no more clothing than this,” Jeen said in surprise. She reached out and plucked a section of the Blessed Myron’s gray woolen vestments between two of her fingers. “Your clothes are wet with the heat. How can you bear such silly things?”
“Nakedness is sinful,” the Blessed Myron thundered.
Suddenly the man Lyle spoke. “Who are you to tell us these things? Why have you come to World?”
“To worship God freely.”
The pair of natives exchanged looks. Jeen pointed at the half-buried spaceship that gleamed in the noonday sun. “To worship with us?”
“Of course not! You worship a ship, a piece of metal. You have fallen into decadent ways.”
“We worship that which has brought us to World, for it is holy,” Jeen snapped hotly. “And you?”
“We, too, worship That which has brought us to the world. But we shall teach you. We—”
The Blessed Myron stopped. He no longer had an audience. Jeen and Lyle had whirled suddenly and both of them sprinted away, back toward the village.
The churchmen waited for more than half an hour. Finally the Blessed Myron said, “They will not come back. They are afraid of us. Let us return to our settlement and decide what is to be done.”
They heard laughing and giggling coming from above. The Blessed Myron stared upward.
The trees were thick with the naked people; they had stealthily surrounded them. The Blessed Myron saw the impish face of the girl Jeen.
She called down to him: “Go back to your God and leave us alone, silly men! Leave World by tomorrow morning or we’ll kill you!”
Enraged, the Blessed Myron shook his fist at the trees. “You chattering monkeys, we’ll make human beings of you again!”
“And make us wear thick ugly clothes and worship a false god? You’d have to kill us first—if you could!”
“Come,” the Blessed Myron said. “Back to the settlement. We cannot stay here longer.”
That evening, in the crude church building that had been erected during the day, the elders of the Church of the New Resurrection met in solemn convocation, to discuss the problem of the people of the forest.
“They are obviously descendants of a wrecked colony ship,” said the Blessed Myron. “But they make of sin a virtue. They have become as animals. In time they will merely corrupt us to their ways.”
The Elder Solomon Kane—an ascetic-featured, dour man with the cold, austere mind of a master mathematician or a master theologian—called for the floor. “As I see it, brother, there are three choices facing us: we can return to Earth and apply for a new planet; or we can attempt to convert these people to our ways; or we can destroy them to the last man, woman and child.”
The Blessed Dominic Agnello objected: “Return to Earth is impossible. We have not the fuel.”
“And,” offered the Blessed Myron, “I testify that these creatures are incorrigible and beyond aid. They are none of them among the Blessed. We do not want to inflict slavery upon them, nor can we welcome them into our numbers.”
“The alternative,” said the Blessed Solomon Kane, “is clearly our only path. We must root them out as if they were a noxious pestilence. How great are their numbers?”
“Three or four hundred. Perhaps as many as five hundred, no more. We certainly outnumber them.”
“And we have weapons. We can lay them low like weeds in the field.”
A light appeared in the eyes of the Blessed Myron Brown. “We shall perform an act of purification. We will blot the heathens from our new world. The slate must be fresh, for here we will build the New Jerusalem.”
The Blessed Leonid Markell, a slim mystic with flowing golden hair, smiled gently and said, “We are told, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ Brother Myron.”
The Blessed Myron whirled on him. “The commandments are given to us, but they need interpretation. Would you say, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ as the butcher raises his knife over a cow? Would you say—”
“The doctrine refers only to human life,” said the Blessed Leonid softly, “But—”
“I choose to construe it differently,” the Blessed Myron said. His voice was deep and commanding, now; it was the voice of the prophet speaking, of the lawgiver. “Here on this world only those who worship God may be considered human. Fleeing from the bitter scorn of our neighbors, we have come here to build a New Jerusalem in this wilderness—and we must remove every obstacle in our way. The Devil has placed these creatures here, to tempt us with their nakedness and laughter and sinful ways.”