MIRAMANEE (Sabrina Scharf), in The Paradise Syndrome , was Temple Priestess of The People (called the Neo-Beringians in the annals of the Federation). Hers is the most tragic of the events surrounding the visit of Kirok to the unnamed world to which the Wise Ones of old carried a colony of Beringians from a planet known variously as Earth or Sol III in many languages spoken beyond the skies.The office of Temple Priestess is a hereditary one, and in those days the eldest daughter of the Chief held that position. By tradition, the Temple Priestess would marry the Medicine Chief, and their eldest son would become Medicine Chief in his turn. The Medicine Chiefs were the keepers of the secret of the bright, shiny Temple, with the strange markings all over it. That Temple played a vital role in the lives of The People. The Wise Ones built it when they settled The People on their new world. (The Wise Ones also planted pine, honeysuckle, and many more familiar plants, and seeded the world with horses, buffalo, wolves, coyotes (a variety of wolf that the Beringians had already bred by then), and several members of the Cervid family: moose, wapiti, and white-tailed deer, to name three.)The World lay in a dangerous part of the beyond-skies. So dangerous was it that the skies of The World would often darken, with terrible thunderstorms that no true Thunderbird ever made. The Wise Ones invested the Temple with a Blue-flame Spirit that would launch its Blue Flame, straight and true, into the sky, and make the sky calm again. The Medicine Chiefs kept the secret of the Temple, and passed it on from father to son. And because the daughter of the Tribal Chief married the Medicine Chief, in this way Tribal and Medicine Chiefs shared power.Only the father of Salish, the Medicine Chief at the time, grew wary of his son. Not willing to share his power, he did not tell him the secret of the Temple at a time in Salish' life when his own father had told him. Not long afterward, the old Medicine Chief died. Salish inherited the badge of the Medicine Chief but not the all-important secret.The Wise Ones had told them (or so the legend went) that they would occasionally send one of their number to make sure the Temple would work as it should. Surely the Wise Ones would come to awaken the Temple Spirit when the time came!Came another period of sky-darkening. Salish did not know how to enter the Temple to awaken its Spirit. And Miramanee, it is widely believed, grew disenchanted with him even then.And then one day, she and her handmaiden were bringing a grain offering to the Temple, when the great slab that served it for a door slid aside.And out stepped a being, in the form of a man, wearing the strangest clothes any of them had ever seen. These clothes were not of the familiar buckskin that The People used to make their clothes, or of the wapiti skins of their conical tents (tipis. These clothes derived from plants, or perhaps from some magic that The People never learned. The being before Miramanee wore black trousers and a green-gold seemless jerkin that covered both his arms. The sleeves of this garment bore two wavy gold stripes with an interrupted stripe between them. Over his heart he wore a strange device indeed: a stylized drawing of a Flaming Star (called comet in standard English) with a lopsided star set in the middle.Miramanee naturally accepted him as a god, for he came out of the Temple. But he seemed to have no memory of who or what he was, or how he came to be in the Temple. Nevertheless, Miramanee and her handmaid brought him to the camp, and into the wigwam of the Tribal Chief, or Elder.The Elder questioned this being closely--and Salish, of course, denied that this being or anyone else could save them. Just then, another woman brought in the seemingly lifeless body of a boy who had gotten tangled in some fishing nets and drowned in the river. Salish looked at the boy and sadly pronounced him dead. But this being in the strange garments bid everyone hold for a moment--and then he pinched the boy's nostrils shut and blew the very breath of life into his mouth. And the boy revived.Only a god could do such a thing. So the Tribal Chief ordered Salish to remove his Medicine Badge and give it to this being. The Chief then asked this man/god how he wished to be called. And, with a struggle, he gave his name: Kirok.Miramanee gladly accepted the duty of ministering to Kirok--to the chagrin of Salish. She also realized that she no longer loved Salish, and hand not loved him for many moons. And now she loved Kirok.In due course, they were married, according to ceremonies that dated from the time of the Wise Ones. For this occasion, Kirok discarded his strange garb and adopted the ornamented buckskin of The People. Two moons later, Miramanee fell pregnant with the child of Kirok.That child would never be born.For in the third moon, the sky darkened again. And Kirok then faced a horrible truth: he could not enter the Temple either.Salish watched him futilely try to enter the Temple ( I am Kirok! I have come! Open to me! ) and made an angry speech to the general camp. With the result that the people stormed the Temple and began to stone Kirok. Miramanee tried to stop them, and then declared that she belonged to him. Go! snarled Salish. Die with your false god! So she joined Kirok on the Temple ledge, and the stones flew and struck them both, one cruel blow after another.And then a high-pitched whine drowned out the strange thunder.The People left off throwing their stones and scattered.Miramanee collapsed to the slab.She was barely conscious of two, and then three beings, dressed in that same kind of garb that Kirok had worn (except that their tunics were blue as the sky, and their Flaming Star devices bore stylized eyes, not the lopsided star of Kirok's original tunic) working on her. She took no notice of the conversation that Kirok, who now seemed to have come into his own, had with his three companions. That is until she felt the hum under her back as the Temple Spirit at last awakened and shot its Blue Flame into the sky. And the sky grew calm at last.The kind-hearted companions carried her into the wapiti-skin tent she had shared with Kirok. There Kirok came to see her, and gave her one last kiss before she died.The People remember Miramanee to this day. And they also remember that Kirok, while not one of the original Wise Ones, was himself the leader of a great war party that roamed the Beyond-Skies, looking out for hazards like the ones that periodically darkened their skies. Kirok, with some difficulty, made amends with Salish and told him the Temple secret, which he and his sub-chief Spock had discerned from their own reading of the Temple script. And the lines of Tribal and Medicine Chiefs continue to this day--for the New Wise Ones have bound themselves with a solemn oath, inscribed on buckskin sheets that each Tribal Chief hand down from father to son, never to interfere with The People, or with the institutions that the original Wise Ones created. Show less «