Star of Danger

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Star of Danger

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  a darkover novel

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  ELF digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  valid XHTML 1.0 strict

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  Contents

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14

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  ace books

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

  Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y.

  Copyright ©, 1965, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved

  Printed in U.S.A.

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  DEDICATION

  To my son Patrick but for whose help this book would have been written much sooner.

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  I

  ^ »

  IT DIDN’T look at all like an alien planet.

  Larry Montray, standing on the long ramp that led downward from the giant spaceship, felt the cold touch of sharp disillusion and disappointment. Darkover. Hundreds of light-years from Earth, a strange world under a strange sun— and it didn’t look different at all.

  It was night. Below him lay the spaceport, lighted almost to a daytime dazzle by rows of blue-white arclights; an enormous flat expanse of concrete ramps and runways, the blurred outlines of the giant starships dim through the lights; levels and stairways and ramps leading upward to the lines of high streets and the dark shapes of skyscrapers beyond the port. But Larry had seen spaceships and spaceports on Earth. With a father in the service of the Terran Empire, you got used to seeing things like that.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected of the new world— but he hadn’t expected it to look just like any spaceport on Earth!

  He’d expected so much…

  Of course, Larry had always known that he’d go out into space someday. The Terran Empire had spread itself over a thousand worlds surrounding a thousand suns, and no son of Terra ever considered staying there all his life.

  But he’d been resigned to waiting at least a few more years. In the old days, before star travel, a boy of sixteen could ship out as cabin boy on a windjammer, and see the world. And back in the early days of star travel, when the immense interstellar distances meant years and years in the gulfs between the stars, they’d shipped young kids to crew the starships—so they wouldn’t be old men when the voyages ended.

  But those days were gone.. Now, a trip of a hundred light-years could be made in about that many days, and men, not boys, manned the ships and the Trade Cities of the Terran Empire. At sixteen Larry had been resigned to waiting. Not happy about it. Just resigned.

  And then the news had come. Wade Montray, his father, had put in for transfer to the Civil Service on the planet Darkover, far out in the edge of the Milky Way. And Larry— whose mother had died before he was old enough to remember her, and who had no other living relatives—was going with him.

  He’d ransacked his school library, and all the local reading rooms, to find out something about Darkover. He didn’t learn much. It was the fourth planet of a medium-sized dark red star, invisible from Earth’s sky, and so dim that it had a name only in star-catalogues. It was a world smaller than Earth, it had four moons, it was a world at an arrested cultural level without very much technology or science. The major products exported from Darkover were medicinal earths and biological drugs, jewel stones, fine metals for precision tools, and a few luxury goods—silks, furs, wines.

  A brief footnote in the catalogue had excited Larry almost beyond endurance: Although the natives of Darkover are human, there are several intelligent cultures of non-humans present on this planet.

  Nonhumans! You didn’t see them often on Earth. Rarely, near one of the spaceports, you’d see a Jovian trundling by in his portable breathing-tank of methane gas; Earth’s oxygen was just as poisonous to him as the gas to an Earth-man. And now and again, you might catch a curious, exciting glimpse of some tall, winged man-thing from one of the outer worlds. But you never saw them up close. You couldn’t think of them as people, somehow.

  He’d badgered his father with insistent questions until his father said, in exasperation, “How should I know? I’m not an information manual! I know that Darkover has a red sun, a cold climate, and a language supposed to be derived from the old Earth languages! I know it has four moons and that there are nonhumans there—and that’s all I know! So why don’t you wait and find out when you get there?”

  When Dad got that look in his eye, it was better not to ask questions. So Larry kept the rest of them to himself.

  But one evening, as Larry was sorting things in his room, deciding to throw away stacks of outgrown books, toys, odds and ends he’d somehow accumulated in the last few years, his father knocked at his door.

  “Busy, son?”

  “Come in, Dad.”

  Wade Montray came in, nodding at the clutter on the bed. “Good idea. You can’t take more than a few pounds of luggage with you, even these days. I’ve got something for you—picked it up at the Transfer Center.” He handed Larry a flat package; turning it over, Larry saw that it was a set of tapes for his recording machine.

  “Language tapes,” his father said, “since you’re so anxious to learn all about Darkover. You could get along all right in Standard, of course—everyone around the Spaceport and the Trade City speaks it. Most of the people going out to Darkover don’t bother with the language, but I thought you might be interested.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll hook up the tapes tonight.”

  His father nodded. He was a stern-looking man, tall and quiet with dark eyes—Larry suspected that his own red hair and gray eyes came from his unremembered mother— and he hadn’t smiled much lately; but now he smiled at Larry. “It’s a good idea. I’ve found out that it helps to be able to speak to people in their own language, instead of expecting them to speak yours.”

  He moved the tapes aside and sat down on Larry’s bed. The smile slid away and he was grave again.

  “Son, do you really mind leaving Earth? It’s come to me, again and again, that it’s not fair to take you away from your home, out to the edge of nowhere. I almost didn’t put in for that transfer thinking of that. Even now—” he hesitated. “Larry, if you’d rather, you can stay here, and I can send for you in a few years, when you’re through with school and college.”

  Larry felt his throat go suddenly tight.

  “Leave me here? On Earth?”

  “There are good schools and universities, son. Nobody knows what sort of education you’d be getting in quarters on Darkover.”

  Larry stared straight at his father, his mouth set hard to keep it from trembling. “Dad, don’t you want me along? If you—if you want to get rid of me, I won’t make a fuss. But—” he stopped, swallowing hard.

  “Son! Larry!” His father reached for his hands and held them, hard, for a minute. “Don’t say that again, huh? Only I promised your mother you’d get a good education. And here I am dragging you halfway across the universe, off on a crazy adventure, just because I’ve got the itch in my bones and don’t want to stay here like a sensible man. It’s selfish to want to go, and worse to want to take you with me!”

  Larry said, slowly, “I guess I must take after you, then, Dad. Because I don’t want to stay in one spot like what you call a sensible man, either. Dad, I want to go. Couldn’t you figure that out? I’ve never wanted anything so much!”

  Wade Montray drew a long sigh. “I hoped you’d say that—how I hoped you’d say that!” He tossed the tapes into a pile of Larry’s clothes, and stood up.

  “All right, son. Brush up on the language, then. There must be more than one sort of education.”

  Listening to the language tapes, moving his tongue around the stran
ge fluid tones of the Darkovan speech, Larry had felt his excitement grow and grow. There were strange new concepts and thoughts in this language, and hints of things that excited him. One of the proverbs caught at his imagination with a strange, tense glow: It is wrong to keep a dragon chained for roasting your meat.

  Were there dragons on Darkover? Or was it a proverbial phrase based on legend? What did the proverb mean? That if you had a fire-breathing dragon, it was dangerous to make him work for you? Or, did it mean that it was foolish to use something big and important for some small, silly job of work? It seemed to open up a crack into a strange world where he glimpsed unknown ideas, strange animals, new colors and thoughts through a glimmer of the unknown.

  His excitement had grown with every day that passed, until they had taken the shuttle to the enormous spaceport and boarded the ship itself. The starship was huge and strange, like an alien city; but the trip itself had been a let-down. It wasn’t much different than a cruise by ocean liner, except that you couldn’t see any ocean. You had to stay in your cabin most of the time, or in one of the cramped recreation areas. There were shots and immunizations for everything under the sun—under any sun, Larry corrected himself—so that he went around with a sore arm for the first two weeks of the trip.

  The only moment of excitement had come early in the voyage; just after breakway from Earth’s sun, when there had been a guided tour of the ship for everyone who wasn’t still struggling with acceleration sickness. Larry had been fascinated by the crew’s quarters, by the high navigation deck with its rooms full of silent, brooding computers, the robots which handled, behind leaded-glass shields, any needed repairs on the drive units. He’d even seen into the drive rooms themselves, by television. They were, of course, radioactive, and even crew members could enter them only in the gravest emergencies. Most exciting of all had been the single glimpse from the Captain’s bridge—the tiny glass dome with its sudden panorama of a hundred million twinkling stars. Larry, pressing himself for his brief turn against the glass, felt suddenly very lost, very small and alone in this wilderness of giant, blazing suns and worlds spinning forever against the endless dark. When he moved away he was dazed and his eyes blurred.

  But the rest of the trip had been a bore. More and more he had lost himself in daydreams about the new world at the end of the journey. The very name, Darkover, had its curious magic. He envisioned a giant red sun lowering in a lurid sky, four moons in strange colors; his mind invented fantastic and impossible shapes for the mysterious nonhumans who would crowd around the spaceship’s landing. By the time they were sent to their staterooms to strap down for the long deceleration, he was simmering with wild excitement.

  He had watched the landing on TV; their approach to the planet in its veil of swirling sunset-orange clouds that had thinned into the darkness of the night side as they came near; he’d felt the shudder and surge of new gravity, the tingle of strangeness when one of the small iridescent moons swam across the camera field. He wondered which of the moons it was. Probably Kyrrdis, he thought, with its blue-green shimmer, like a peacock’s wing. The names of the moons were a siren song of enchantment; Kyrrdis, Idriel, Liriel, Mormallor. We’re here, he thought, we’re really here.

  He waited, impatient but well-disciplined, for the loudspeaker announcement which permitted passengers to unfasten their straps, collect their belongings and gather in the discharge entrance. His father was silent at his side, and his face gave away nothing; Larry wondered how anyone could be so impassive, but not wanting to seem childishly eager, Larry kept silence too. He kept his eyes on the metal door which would open on the strange world. When the crewman in his black leather began undogging the seals, Larry was almost literally shaking with excitement. A strange pinkish glow filtered around the first crack of the door. The red sun? The strange sky?

  But the door swung open on night, and the pink glow was only the fiery light of welding torches from a pit nearby, where workmen in hoods were working on the metal hull of another great ship. Larry, stepping out on to the ramp, felt the cold touch of disappointment. It was just another spaceport, just like Earth!

  Behind him on the ramp, his father touched his shoulder and said, in a gently rallying tone, “Don’t stand there staring, son; your new planet won’t run away. I know how excited you must be, but let’s move on down.”

  Heaving a deep sigh, Larry began to walk down the ramp. He should have know it would turn out to be a gyp. Things you built up in your mind usually were a let-down.

  Later, he was to remembef his sense of disillusion that morning, and laugh at himself; but at the moment, the flat disappointment was so keen he could almost taste it. The concrete felt hard and strange after weeks of uncertain gravity in the spaceship. He swayed a little to get his balance, watching the small, buzzing cargo dollies that were whirring around the field, the men in black or grayish leather uniforms with the insignia of the Terran Empire, on which the hard blue arcliphts reflected coldly. Beyond the lights was a dark line of tall buildings.

  “The Terran Trade City,” his father pointed them out. “We’ll have rooms in the Quarters buildings. Come on, we’d better get checked through the lines, there’s a lot of red tape.”

  Larry didn’t feel sleepy—it had been daytime on the starship, by the arbitrary time cycle—but he was yawning by the time they got through standing in line, having their passports and credentials checked, picking up their luggage from customs. As they came away from one booth, he looked up, idly, and then his breath caught. The darkness had thinned; the sky overhead, black when he had stepped from the spaceship, was now a strange, luminous grayed-pearl. In the east, great rays of crimson light, like a vast, shimmering Aurora Borealis, began to fan out and dance through the grayness. The lights trembled as if seen through ice. Then a rim of red appeared on the horizon, gradually puffing up into an enormous, impossibly crimson sun. Blood red. Huge. Bloated. It did not look like a sun at all; it looked like a large neon sign. The sky gradually shifted from gray to pink through the spectrum to a curious lilac-blue. In the new light the spaceport looked strange and lurid.

  As the light grew, behind the line of skyscrapers Larry gradually made out a skyline of mountains—high, rough-toothed mountains with cliffs and ice-falls shining red in the sun. A pale-blue crystal of moon still hung on the shoulder of one mountain. Larry blinked, stared, kept turning to look at that impossible sun. It was still very cold; you couldn’t imagine that sun warming the sky as Earth’s sun did. Yet it was a huge red coal, an immense glowing fire, the color of—

  “Blood. Yes, it’s a bloody sun,” said someone in the line behind Larry, “That’s what they call it. Looks it, too.”

  Larry’s father turned and said quietly “Seems gloomy, I know. Well, never mind, in the Trade City there will be the sort of light you’re used to, and sooner or later you’ll get accustomed to it.” Larry started to protest, but his father did not wait for him to speak. “I’ve got one more line to go through. You might as well wait over there. There’s no sense in you standing in line too.”

  Obediently, Larry got out of line and moved away. They had climbed several levels now, in their progress from line to line, and stood far above the level where the starships lay in their pits. About a hundred feet away from Larry there was a huge open archway, and he went curiously toward it, eager to see beyond the spaceport.

  The archway opened on a great square, empty in the red morning light. It was floored with ancient, uneven flagstones; in the center there was a fountain, playing and splashing faintly pink. At the far end of the square, Larry saw, with a little shock of his old excitement, a line of buildings, strangely shaped, with curved stone fronts and windows of a long lozenge shape. The light played oddly on what looked like prisms of colored glass, set into the windows.

  A man crossed the square. He was the first Darkovan Larry had seen; a stooped, gray-haired man wearing loose baggy breeches and a belted overshirt that seemed to be lined with fur. He cast a desultory glance
at the spaceport, not seeing Larry, and slouched on by.

  Two or three more men went by. Probably, Larry thought, workmen on their way to early-morning jobs. A couple of women, wearing long fur-trimmed dresses, came out of one of the buildings; one began to sweep the cobblestone sidewalk with an odd-looking fuzzy broom, while the other started to carry small tables and benches out on the walk from inside. Men lounged by; one of them sat down at a little table, signaled to one of the women, and after a time she brought him two bowls from which white steam sizzled in the frosty air. A strong pleasant smell, rather like bitter chocolate, reminded Larry that he was both cold and hungry; the Darkovan food smelled good, and he found himself wishing that he had some Darkovan money in his pocket. He remembered, experimentally, phrases in the language he had learned. He supposed he’d be able to order something to eat. The man at the table was picking up things that looked like pieces of macaroni, dipping them into the other bowl, and eating them, very tidily, with his fingers and a long pick like one chopstick.

  “What are you staring at?” someone asked, and Larry started, looking up, seeing a boy a little younger than himself standing before him. “Where did you come from, Tallo?”

  Not till the final word did Larry realize that the stranger had spoken to him in the Darkovan language, now so familiar through tapes. Then I can understand it! Tallo—that was the word for copper; he supposed it meant redhead. The strange boy was red-headed too, flaming hair cut square around a thin, handsome, dark-skinned face. He was not quite as tall as Larry. He wore a rust-colored shirt and laced-up leather jerkin, and high leather boots knee-length over close-fitting trousers. But Larry was surprised more by the fact that, at the boy’s waist, in a battered leather sheath, there hung a short steel dagger.