Meklah dreams came to people who allowed themselves to reach the second stage of meklah withdrawal—the stage of remembering. The first stage was hunger, uncomplicated, but intense, and distinctly, hunger for one of the many meklah products of the valley. Another ripe sweet meklah fruit or tea made from the leaves of the meklah tree or bread made from the unripe fruit dried and ground to flour or . But the list was endless. Meklah was the staple of the valley. Even meat and fish were seasoned with it. The Garkohn fermented it to make a kind of wine. No one had trouble getting enough of it. The tree was an evergreen that grew wild all over the valley. People were not even conscious of being addicted unless they left the valley—went into the mountains where the tree did not grow. Or unless they simply chose not to eat.
Fine sweat appeared on Alanna’s forehead. She felt almost sick with hunger. The meklah was demanding. She was tempted to try to eat something that did not contain the meklah just to relieve her hunger a little. But she knew better. Eating anything other than meklah now would start her vomiting and bring her into full withdrawal. The time for her to risk that would come, certainly, but it had not come yet. Best to wait now and let the memories come as she knew they would.
She closed her eyes, let her thoughts drift into the past. It was not so much remembering as reliving. Only time was distorted so that she could experience the events of days, of months, in only minutes. In her mind, she returned to Earth.
There, she met a woman, small and slender with hair that was long and very black like Alanna’s hair, and with eyes as narrow as Kohn eyes. And there was a man, as lean and tall as Alanna was now. His coloring was dark brown, almost black, contrasting strangely with the very fair skin of the woman. Alanna stood between them, her eyes only slightly narrowed, her skin a smooth medium brown.
They protected each other, these two, and together, they protected the child they had created. Even in the end when the Clayarks came to loot and kill, the man and woman held them off long enough for the child to escape.
Alanna had been eight years old then. And she was on her own. She had grown thin, hard, and feral stealing and foraging for herself. She had lived in the streets of the nearly deserted city of her birth, sometimes venturing out to the open land and to the walled Missionary town. By her fifteenth year when the Missionaries caught her stealing from their cornfield, she was an animal.
A Missionary guard shot her as she fled with an armload of corn. He was doing his job. Verrick Colony had lost too much in crops and in lives to disease-spreading thieves.
The shot only wounded her. The guard was stepping in close to finish her when Jules arrived. As she learned later, Jules had just lost his third and last child to the plague of Clay’s Ark. No doubt that was why he reacted so emotionally to a scene that had become all too familiar at the colony.
He knocked the rifle from the hands of her would-be executioner before the man could fire. Then he lifted Alanna into his arms and carried her back to his home. If she had had the plague, his unwary handling of her could have cost him his life. Alanna, wild with tear and pain, struggled, tried to bite him. Fortunately, she was too weak to succeed.
She recuperated from her wound in his house and he and his wife Neila began to teach her to be human again. She did not realize until later how difficult she must have made this for them. She bore them no love during those early days, and little gratitude. She obeyed them, when she understood enough to obey, because they were strong and wealthy beyond belief as she understood wealth. They had huge amounts of food and safe dry shelter—and they shared these things with her willingly. She obeyed them hoping to bribe them to continue their extravagance.
She had to learn Mission doctrine and unlearn many of the words and habits she had used in the wilds. Her habits were “dirty,” her speech “obscene.” She must change.
She listened and remembered and changed with a speed that startled the Verricks. Pleased, they began to teach her from the Bible and from a book called The Missionaries of Humanity, which interpreted the parts of the Bible that held special meaning for Missionaries. From this last book came the pledge that Alanna had to recite in the church before all the people of Verrick Colony: “I accept the Lord God who made man in His own image and gave him dominion over the universe. I accept Jesus Christ, the Son of God and of a human woman, as living proof of the kinship between God and humankind. The purpose of my life from this day forward will be to fulfill my role in our holy Mission—to preserve and to spread the sacred God-image of humankind.”
Alanna said the words, even understood them. The Missionaries believed that their shape was sacred while the Clayark beast-shape—that of the four-legged mutant children born to plague survivors—was a work of Satan. So many words. Alanna simply recited the pledge so that Jules and Neila would be pleased and stop bothering her about it.
Not until she began to hear other Missionaries talk about exiling her back to the wilds, or at least sending her to another colony, did she begin to realize what valuable allies she had in the Verricks.
The colonists had never really accepted her. She represented the wild outsiders, diseased and healthy, who had preyed on them for years. Most Missionary adults were content to express their displeasure by complaining to each other. But their children were more direct. Alanna was sometimes followed by a jeering crowd of Missionary children. She first ignored them, then regarded them with silent contempt—children who had never known hunger, soft children who would not have lasted a day in the wilds. Several of them were adolescents, as old as she was or older. Old enough to know better.
Alanna made no move against them until they attacked her. Then she put her back against the wall of the nearest house and fought them as though she had never left the wilds. She brought down four of them—one with her fist, one with a newly shod foot, and two with a stone she snatched up. The rest fled screaming back to their parents.
And their parents were outraged.
So the wild human had gone berserk. Just what everyone had been afraid of. After all, what could you expect from a creature more animal than human.
Jules came to Alanna’s defense at once. He met with the people in the church and told them they had been lucky. Alanna had been attacked by at least ten people, he said, and yet she had not killed even one—though surely with her experience, she could have. Was that the behavior of a savage wild human? Which Missionary, attacked by ten people, would control himself as carefully?
When the meeting was over and the people had gone away grumbling more quietly, Jules went home and asked Alanna whether she actually had held back.
“You mean, could I have killed?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I could have.”
He looked at a particularly large bruise on one side of her face. She had not come through the righting unbloodied. “Why didn’t you?” he asked.
“It’s a sin among the people here. Your Bible said it was a sin.”
“‘Thou shalt not kill,’” quoted Jules.
“Not that,” she said. “It was one of the other verses that came to me. ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.’”
Jules looked away from her for a moment, said nothing.
“If I had killed, wouldn’t the people here have killed me?”
For a time she thought Jules would not answer her. Then, “Yes. They probably would have, regardless of the circumstances. And I don’t think I would have been able to stop them.”