Alanna said nothing.
Neila shook her head. “Well, for once, I agree with you. The people who now live in Forsyth began altering themselves slowly by selective breeding thousands of years ago. Their founder is supposed to have gotten the idea from the way the people of his ancient time bred animals. He guided his people to breed themselves as carefully as the rest of us breed our best animals. But through it all, they’ve retained the Sacred Image. They never meant to change it. It was their minds that they were struggling to reshape. And they worked only with people who were already slightly different. They began with small mutations and bred themselves to the power they have now. Now they can hear and see and heal and kill and more, all with their minds. And they still have all their physical senses. The power of their minds is extra.
“About fifty years ago, when the plague began to get out of hand, the people of Forsyth stopped pretending to be less than they were, and…”
“They pretended? They were in hiding in spite of all their power?”
Neila hesitated. “Yes. But not out of fear. They hid to keep their privacy and to live in their own way. Anyway, they stopped hiding. They brought scientists and technicians from all over the world and put them to work on more ships like the Clay’s Ark—or larger and better than the Ark. The people of Forsyth already knew something about starships. Some of them had secretly had a hand in the building of the Ark. But now, they wanted the best possible ships. They wanted to find a world of their own and leave Earth to the Clayarks. But the first load of them to leave died before they were much beyond the orbit of the moon. Those back here could feel them dying, but couldn’t help them. The distance was too great. After that, those here did some careful experimenting. They found that the telepathic adults—and most of the adults are telepathic—weren’t able to break free of the mental ties they had with those they left here on Earth.
“For a while, there was talk of everyone leaving at once in several ships, but one unanswered question prevented them from doing that: What would happen if even one of their ships was disabled or destroyed? What would the mass destruction of that ship’s occupants do to the people in nearby ships? The distant dying of the people on that first ship had been agonizing for the Earthbound observers. What would it be like to experience that agony at closer range? Could one ship drag the others down in a spiral of madness and death? They didn’t want to find out. And they didn’t want to risk the whole existence of their kind to only one huge ship, even though such a ship could have been built.
“So they go on building ships for us. And sometimes, they send groups of their children with us. The mental abilities of the children don’t mature until sometime after puberty so the children tolerate space travel as easily as we do.”
“And will they do that with us?” asked Alanna. “Send a group of their children?”
“No!” said Neila with sudden vehemence. “Not with us. Thank God, the leaders of Forsyth have promised us that much. Those children, Lanna…” She groped for words. “Those children are like the eggs some wasps lay inside the bodies of living caterpillars. They’re not evil, any more than any other parasite, but when they grew up, when their mental abilities matured, they would quietly, slowly, enslave us. Our Mission would be over, even forgotten, perhaps. They would become our gods.”
“They need not,” said Alanna. “They could be stopped.”
“But, I tell you, their power…”
“Need never mature. Missionaries are not helpless caterpillars. They can kill the children before the children mature.”
Neila stared down at her sadly. “Children, Alanna…?”
“Why not?” Alanna touched her side where the Missionary guard had shot her. “At least those children are really dangerous.”
“Yes… And I’m sure any Missionaries who knew about them would kill them if they could. But it’s not that simple. You see, the people of Forsyth are not only able to read minds, but to change them, condition them. Host Missionaries are programmed to be the best possible parents before they even see the children. They’re programmed to defend those children with their own lives.”
Alanna thought about that for a while, then said, “Now I see why our people here are afraid.”
“No. They don’t know most of what I’ve told you. It’s best that they not know.”
“Jules knows?”
“Yes. Jules and I.”
“How?”
“Jules and I were born in Forsyth, Lanna. We’ve already served our time of slavery.” She paused, stared straight ahead at nothing. “Twenty-five years ago we were freed and allowed to organize a group of newly arrived refugees into a Mission colony. Now, finally, I think we’re being rewarded for our earlier years of service.”
As it turned out, the reward was a second Earth. The Verrick Colony Mission Ship sought out a blue world of islands and island continents—a world that was not only habitable, but comfortable. A world so Earthlike that it made the Missionaries feel at first as though they had only moved to a different part of their homeworld. A clean new part.
Their ship, whose technology they had never understood, died right on schedule as soon as they touched down. Died, as they soon learned, was exactly the right word.
One of the first things they did upon landing was break into the sealed compartments that they had been warned not to touch while their ship was in space. Within, they found the engines, the Dana Drive, huge and incomprehensible, and they found a corpse.
The corpse frightened most of the people because they did not know who it had been or why it was there, freshly dead, in their ship. Also, the corpse was deformed.
It was the body of a young man, dressed in the bright-colored style of the city of Forsyth. His body was short and squat and his head large. His forehead bulged strangely on one side and seemed almost sunken on the other. His mouth was slack and half open, drooling. Jules looked down at him and wept the only tears Alanna had ever seen him shed. Then he ordered a pair of the younger men to dig a grave. He himself carried the corpse out to be buried, and when the people questioned him, he would tell them nothing. To Neila and Alanna, he said, “There are all kinds of slaves.” He looked at Neila. “You know, don’t you?”
She nodded. “They used to just destroy the defectives that they couldn’t… repair. I didn’t realize they’d stopped.”
“They’ve found a use for them. That one must have been one of their own kind gone wrong.”
“But what was he for, locked in there by himself?”
“Unless there’s equipment—a computer or something—aboard that we haven’t found, I’m going to assume that somehow, that man was our guidance system.”
“But how could he…?”
“He could be programmed to do whatever they wanted him to do. You know that. Programmed to control the drive, and propel the ship to wherever his ability and his implanted knowledge told him there might be a habitable world. Then, when his job was finished, programmed to die. He couldn’t have been a telepath or he would have died long ago, but he had useful abilities just the same.”
“We should give him a funeral,” said Neila. “At least.”
They gave him a funeral.
Then, with nothing more than the tools and supplies and knowledge they had brought with them, they began learning to live on their new world.
They named the world Canaan, and prayed that it would live up to its name. The long yellow-green valley in which they had landed was like an answer to their prayer. It was on the equator, but high above the level of the local seas—plateau land stretched between two ranges of mountains. It was well watered by rivers that flowed down from the mountains and the ship’s doctor pronounced the water safe. The weather was warm and mild, and the land apparently fertile. It was literally covered with yellow-green trees and their thick vinelike roots, but the Missionaries saw no aggressive animal life. In fact, they saw almost no animal life at all, though they realized later that this was only because they did not know how to look for it. In time, they cleared a place and corralled their larger animals outside the ship. It was then that they learned why the portion of the valley in which they had landed seemed so lush and peaceful. They had landed in the middle of the Garkohn gamelands.