SALISH, in The Paradise Syndrome, was Medicine Chief of The People in the fateful period that The People remember as Kirok's Moon. It was Salish who had the most tragic misunderstanding with Kirok. The experience left him much humbled--but then helped him become the greatest Medicine Chief that The People had known since The Wise Ones first settled The People on their World so many seasons ago.The office of Medicine Chief was hereditary. The Wise Ones chose the first Medicine Chief from among a group of Beringian peoples (Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware, according to Spock, Kirok's sub-chief) they settled on The World. The Wise Ones did more than settle The People. They planted this new World with pine, huneysuckle, and many other familiar plants, and stocked it with Chinook salmon, trout, horse, buffalo, wolves, coyotes, panthers, moose, wapiti, white-tailed deer, and a host of other animals that The People's ancestors were familiar with. They also built a shiny metal Temple, and told the first Medicine Chief how to enter it and awaken its Spirit. They explained that the Beyond-sky held a special hazard that, at random intervals, would darken their skies and threaten to destroy them all if the Medicine Chief did not awaken the Temple Spirit in time.By tradition, the Medicine Chiefs passed on their office, and their secret, from father to son in an unbroken string. By tradition also, each Medicine Chief would marry the daughter of the Tribal Chief, who also served as Temple Priestess.But Salish's own father grew wary of his son. We are not told why; perhaps the father considered Salish wayward. In any event, Salish's father was reluctant to pass along the Temple Secret. And then his father died, and Salish inherited the office and the badge of the Medicine Chief (a disk with a model of the central Temple spire on it) but not the Secret. His was an empty office, and he knew it, and the whole camp knew it. And so, perhaps, did Miramanee, the Temple Priestess at the time.And then came Kirok.Miramanee first greeted this Kirok when, as she told the story, he came out of the Temple. But Kirok, from the start, protested having no memory of who he was or how he came to be in the Temple. Salish protested his presence. But when a desperate woman brought in her son who had drowned in the river while tending to the salmon nets, Salish could not save him. But Kirok could, using a technique that looked deceptively simple: blowing into the boy's mouth while pinching his nostrils shut. Only a god can breathe life into the dead, said the Tribal Chief. And so Salish lost his office, and his badge, and the hand of Miramanee.Naturally he grew jealous. So when Kirok, now wearing the traditional buckskin of The People, took his walk from the Temple to the wigwam, Salish challenged him. He lost that fight, but not before he actually drew blood. You bleed, Kirok! Behold a god who bleeds! cried Salish--to no avail.Salish, never satisfied, kept watch on Kirok. And so, when the sky darkened once again, and Kirok could not gain entry into the Temple despite all his boasts, Salish was watching.He told this to The People, who responded as he knew they would: they gathered stones and stormed the Temple. Miramanee then declared she belonged to him, and Salish angrily told her, Go, then! Die with your false god! So she joined Kirok, and The People kept throwing their stones......and then an ear-splitting whine filled the air, and beings like Kirok took shape before them!Salish and the others ran. And they did not return until they beheld the Blue Flame of the Temple Spirit, now fully awake, lancing into the sky. Not long after that, the sky calmed again.Salish, now thoroughly broken, walked out of camp to console himself. And that is where Kirok, and his sub-chief Spock, found him.How that meeting went is sharply disputed. Some say Salish and Kirok fought another hand-to-hand battle until they were two exhausted to continue. The more common account is that these two men, united in grief, reconciled themselves to one another for the good of The People.And now Kirok explained himself. He was not a god--that much Salish knew already--but was himself the leader of a great war party that roamed the Beyond-skies, looking for hazards like those that occasionally darkened the skies of The World. He had spoken to his own Big Chief, and on his orders, did three things:1. He taught Salish the secret of the Temple, which he and Spock had discerned in time to awaken its Spirit.2. He also taught Salish the technique of mouth to mouth revival he had practiced on the boy who had nearly drowned in the fish nets. It does not take a god to do that. Any person, having the breath of live, can give it back to another, he said. He further taught Salish how to handle the other hurry case he might encounter as Medicine Chief: the arterial bleed, the result of an unusually severe wound. (He explained that Salish already knew how to handle the third Hurry Case, that of internal poisoning, from all the poisons anyone might accidentally take on this World--and suggested that The People would be wisest not to rely on anything that could cause an accident of this sort with which Medicine Chiefs could not cope.)3. Last of all, he entrusted to Salish, and to the Tribal Chief, two buckskin sheets, each bearing a pictorial legend. That legend was a solemn oath, from one Big Chief to another, that the New Wise Ones would never touch The World, nor let anyone else touch it, save only to make sure the Temple Secret would always pass on from father to son in the line of Medicine Chiefs for ever.With these things done, Kirok gave Salish back his Medicine Badge and charged him to guard it wisely. Then Kirok and Spock walked far out of camp, and beyond the Temple. Salish never saw them again. He only assumed that the two rejoined their great band beyond the sky, but did not want to do so in front of him or any other member of The People.Salish returned to the camp and told his tale. The Tribal Chief accepted him as Medicine Chief once again, but had to choose another Priestess to replace Miramanee, who had died. Happily, Miramanee had a younger sister, who now gladly accepted the much-changed Salish for a husband.Salish taught this mouth-to-mouth revival technique to a select group of warriors. And in many ways he showed himself a most wise and disinterested Medicine Chief--disinterested in a personal sense, that it. He did not jealously guard the power of his office, as his father had done. He taught parts of The Secret to different members of this select group, so The Secret would never die. And he encouraged those around him to inquire further into how The World worked, and how The People could better work with it. For Salish had remembered one part of that first interrogation of Kirok: when the Tribal Chief had wondered whether the Wise Ones might be displeased with The People for not developing as far as The Wise Ones might have wished.So that Salish's grandson later learned that The Temple could do more than shoot out a Blue Flame. It could also talk to other beings beyond the sky. So this Medicine Chief sent out another message, inquiring after Kirok.Word eventually came--in the person of Spock, who now carried the title of Ambassador. Kirok, Spock informed them, was now dead, having met his death in a glorious battle. But Spock arranged the first meeting between The People and their long-lost cousins from the world of Kirok's birth. And so they met the Principal Chiefs of the Navajo, the Mohicans, and the Delawares, who were The People's original ancestors. The stories they told--especially of the part the Navajo had, as the Wind Talkers, in a climactic war on the original Earth, and of Kirok's meeting with Kukulkan, who predated the Wise Ones by thousands of years--inspired the bards of The People for many moons. After which The People entered into a Great Conclave with their new-found cousins, with the blessings of the Chief of Chiefs of the Federation of Worlds that had sent Kirok to The World, so many seasons ago.Today, the Great Rocks that once darkened the skies of The World, do so no longer. The isolation of The People is now broken. The World is now a thriving place, where warriors come regularly to learn the woodland ways of The People. But no one will ever forget how a climactic rivalry between two strong-willed men could have ended in disaster for The World--though The People now have a few tenuous clues to the identity of the Wise Ones who had settled them on The World, centuries before. Show less «