“No.” She blew the silver whistle around her neck. “They are birds with brains modified so they cannot choose but come to the whistle—see?” She pointed as two distant flecks appeared in the sky, growing larger and larger; spiraling down, then landing on the saddle blocks where they sat patiently, awaiting their hoods. “Their instinct for freedom has been burnt out.”
“They are like some men I know,” said Lew, slipping the hood on his bird. Dio followed suit, but neither of them moved to mount. Dio hesitated, then decided he had probably had far too much of politely averted eyes and pretenses of courteous unawareness.
“Do you need help to mount? Can I help you, or shall I fetch someone who can?”
“Thank you, but I can manage, though it looks awkward.” Again, suddenly, he smiled and his ugly scarred face seemed handsome again to her. “How did you know it would do me good to hear that?”
“I have never been really hurt,” she said, “but one year I had a fever, and lost all my hair, and it did not grow in for half a year; and I felt so ugly you couldn’t imagine. And the one thing that bothered me worst was when everyone would say how nice I looked, tell me how pretty my dress or sash or kerchief looked, and pretended nothing at all was wrong with me. So I felt so bad about how miserable I was, as if I was making a dreadful fuss about nothing at all. So if I was—was really lamed or crippled, I think I would hate it if people made me go on acting as if nothing at all was wrong and there was nothing the matter with me. Please don’t ever think you have to pretend with me.”
He drew a deep breath. “Father flies into a rage if anyone seems to notice him limping, and once or twice when I have tried to offer him my arm, he has nearly knocked me down.”
Yet, Dio thought, Kennard used his lameness, last night, to manipulate me into dancing with Lew. Why? She said, “That is the way he manages his life and his lameness. You are not your father.”
Suddenly he started shaking. He said, “Sometimes—sometimes it is hard to be sure of that,” and she remembered that the Alton gift was forced rapport. Kennard’s intense closeness to his son, his deep ambition for him, was well-known on Darkover; that closeness must become torture sometimes, make it hard for Lew to distinguish his own feelings and emotions. “It must be difficult for you; he is such a powerful telepath—”
“In all fairness,” said Lew, “it must be difficult for him too; to share everything I have lived through in these years, and there was a time when my barriers were not as strong as they are now. It must have been hell for him. But that does not make it less difficult for me.”
And if Kennard will not accept any weakness in Lew . . . but Dio did not pursue that. “I’m not trying to pry. If you don’t want to answer, just say so, but . . . Geremy lost three fingers in a duel. The Terran medics regrew them for him, as good as new. Why did they not try to do that with your hand?”
“They did,” he said. “Twice.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “Then I could bear no more. Somehow, the pattern of the cells—you are not a matrix technician, are you? It would be easier to explain this if you knew something about cell division. I wonder if you can understand—the pattern of the cells, the knowledge in the cells, that makes a hand a hand, and not an eye, or a toenail, or a wing, or a hoof, had been damaged beyond renewing. What grew at the end of my wrist was—” he drew a deep breath and she saw the horror in his eyes. “It was not a hand,” he said flatly, “I am not sure just what it was, and I do not want to know. They made a mistake with the drugs, once, and I woke and saw it. They tell me I screamed my throat raw. I do not remember. My voice has never been right since. For half a year I could not speak above a whisper.” His harsh voice was completely emotionless. “I was not myself for years. I can live with it now, because—because I must. I can face the knowledge that I am—am maimed. What I cannot face,” he said, with sudden violence, “is my father’s need to pretend that I am—am whole!”
Dio felt the surge of violent anger and was not even sure whether it was her own, or that of the man before her. She had never been so wholly aware of her own laran; the Ridenow gift, which was a sharing of emotions, full empathy, even with nonhumans, aliens . . . She had never had much experience with it before. Now it seemed to shake her to the core. Her voice was unsteady. “Never pretend with me, Lew. I can face you as you are—exactly as you are, always, all of you.”
He seized her in a rough grip, dragged her close. It was hardly an embrace. “Girl, do you know what you’re saying? You can’t know.”
She felt as if her own boundaries were dissolving, as if somehow she was melting into the man who stood before her. “If you can endure what you have endured, I can endure to know what it is that you have had to endure. Lew, let me prove it to you.”
In the back of her mind she wondered, why am I doing this? But she knew that when they had come into each other’s arms on the dancing floor last night, even behind the barriers of Lew’s locked defenses, their bodies had somehow made a pact. Barricade themselves from the other as they would, something in each of them had reached out to the other and accepted what the other was, wholly and forever.
She raised her face to him. His arms went round her in grateful surprise, and he murmured, still holding back, “But you are so young, chiya, you can’t know. . . . I should be horsewhipped for this . . . but it has been so long, so long. . . .” and she knew he was not speaking of the most obvious thing. She felt herself dissolve in that total awareness of him, the receding barricades . . . the memory of pain and horror, the starved sexuality, the ordeals which had gone on past human endurance . . . the black encompassing horror of guilt, of a loved one dead, self-knowledge, self-blame, mutilation almost gladly accepted as atonement for living on when she was dead. . . .
In a desperate, hungering embrace she clasped him close, knowing it was this for which he had longed most; someone who knew all this, and could still accept him without pretense, love him nevertheless. Love; was this love, the knowledge that she would gladly take on herself all this suffering, to spare him another moment of suffering or guilt . . . ?
For an instant she saw herself as she was, reflected in his mind, hardly recognizing herself, warm, glowing, woman, and for a moment loved herself for what she had become to him; then the rapport broke and receded like a tide, leaving her awed and shaken, leaving tears and tenderness that could never grow less. Only then did he lower his lips to hers and kiss her; and as she laughed and accepted the kiss, she said in a whisper, “Geremy was right.”
“What, Dio?”
“Nothing, my love,” she said, lighthearted with relief. “Come, Lew, the hawks are restless, we must get them back to the mews. We will have our fee refunded because we have claimed no kill, but I, for one, have had full value for my hunt. I have what I most wanted—”
“And what is that?” he asked, teasing, but she knew he did not need an answer. He was not touching her now, as they mounted, but she knew that somehow they were still touching, still embraced.
He flung up one arm and called, “We may as well have a ride, at least! Which of us will be first at the stables?”
And he was off; Dio dug her heels into her horse’s sides and was off after him, laughing. She knew as well as he did, how and where this day would end.
And it was only the beginning of a long season on Vainwal. It would be a long, beautiful summer.
Even though she knew there was darkness ahead, and that she moved into it, unafraid and willing, she was willing to face it. Beyond the darkness she could see what Lew had been and what he could be again . . . if she could have the strength and courage to bring him through. She raced after him, crying out “Wait for me—Lew, we’ll ride together!” and he slowed his horse a little, smiling, and waited for her.
CHAPTER THREE
Lew Alton’s narrative: Vainwal: sixth year of exile
I thought I had forgotten how to be happy.
And yet, that year on Vainwal, I was happy. The planet is more than the decadent city
of the pleasure world. Perhaps we would have left it altogether—though not, perhaps, to return to Darkover—but my father found the climate beneficial to his lameness, and preferred to stay in the city where he could find hot springs and mineral baths, and sometimes, I suspect, companionship he could tolerate. I’ve wondered, sometimes, about that; but, close as we were, there are some things we could not—quite—share, and that was one area of itchy privacy I tried, hard, to stay away from. I suppose it’s hard enough with ordinary sons and their fathers.
When both father and son are telepaths, it becomes even more difficult. During my years in Arilinn, working in the telepathic relays as a matrix mechanic, I had learned a lot about privacy, and what it has to be when all around you are closer than your own skin. There used to be an old taboo preventing a mother and her grown son from working in the relays at the same time; or a father and his nubile daughter. My father could mask his thoughts better than most. Even so, I described that sort of thing, once, to somebody, as living with your skin off. During these years of exile, we’d been so close that there were times when neither of us was sure which thought belonged to whom. Any two solitary men are going to get on each other’s nerves from time to time. Add to that the fact that one of them is seriously ill and at least (let me not pass too lightly over this) intermittently insane, and it adds another turn of the screw. And we were both extremely powerful telepaths, and there had been long periods of time when I had no control over what I was sending. By the time I was halfway sane again there were long periods of time where there was at least as much hate as there was love. We had been too close, too long.
Not the least of what I had to be grateful to Dio for was this; that she had broken that deadlock, broken into that unhealthy, over-preoccupation with one another’s every thought. If we had been mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, at least there would have been a taboo we could break. For a father and son there was no such dramatic exit from the trap; or so it seemed to us that there was not, though I cannot swear it never entered either of our minds. We were both old enough to make such a decision, we were away from the world which had ingrained such taboos, and we were alone together in an alien universe, among the headblind who would neither know nor care what levels of decadence we might choose to explore. Nevertheless, we let it alone; it was, perhaps, the only thing we never tried to share, and I think it may have been the only way we kept our sanity.
My father was quickly enchanted with Dio, too, and I think he was genuinely grateful to her; not least because she had come between our unhealthy preoccupation with one another. Yet, glad as he was to have some degree of freedom from my constant presence and to be free of fears for my continued sanity (and, though he had shielded them carefully from me, I was always aware of it, and a man watched constantly for signs of insanity will doubt his own sanity the more), the coming of Dio had left him alone. He could not admit his helplessness; Kennard Alton never would. Yet daily I saw him growing worse, and knew that a time would come, even if it had not come yet, when he needed me. He had always been there when I needed him, and I would not leave him alone, a prey to age and infirmity. So Dio and I found a home at the edge of the city, where he could call upon us when he needed us, and in the overflow of our own happiness, it was easy enough to spare him some time for companionship.
Well, we were happy. When I lost Marjorie, in the horror of that last night when Caer Donn had gone up in flames and we had tried, with our two lives thrust into the gap, to close the breach Sharra had made in the fabric of the world, we had both been ready to die. But it hadn’t happened that way; Marjorie died, and I—lived on, but something had been destroyed in me that night. Not cut clean away, but, like my hand, rotting and festering and growing into terrifying inhuman shapes. Dio had gone unflinching into all that horror, and somehow, after that, I had healed clean.
Neither of us thought of marriage. Marriage di catenas, the ritual formalized marriage of the Domains, was a solemn joining of property, a mutual matter concerning two families, two houses, for the raising of children to inheritance and laran. What Dio and I had was so deeply personal that we had no wish or need to bring either family into it. With Marjorie, half my love for her had been a desire to see her as my wife, living with me at Armida, bringing up children we would share in common, the desire for the long quiet years of peace in our beloved home. With Dio it was something different. When Dio found herself pregnant, in the second year we were together, we were not really happy about it. But perhaps our bodies had spoken to what our minds refused to know. It lay deep in both of us, of course, a desire for continuity, something to come after us when we were gone, the deep-rooted desire for the only immortality anyone can ever know.
“I needn’t have the child, if you don’t want it,” she said, curled up at my side in our living room, which was high above the lights of Vainwal, below us; colored lights, strung gaily in ribbons along the streets; there was always some kind of festival here, noise and gaiety and confusion and the seeking of pleasure.
She was close enough to me to feel my instinctual flinching. She said, “You do want it—don’t you, Lew?”
“I don’t know, and that’s the truth, Dio.”
Truth; I resented the intrusion of our idyll by any third party, however beloved; someone who would inevitably destroy the deepest closeness between us; Dio would no longer be altogether preoccupied with my needs and wishes, and in that way, selfishly, I resented the knowledge that she was pregnant.
Truth, equally; I remembered with anguish that night—the very night before her death—when I knew that Marjorie was carrying the child she would not live long enough to bear. I had sensed the tentative life as I now sensed the new and growing seed of life in Dio and my very soul shrank from seeing it extinguished. Maybe it was only squeamishness. But, selfishly, I wished this child to live.
I said, “I want it and I do not. It is you who will have to bear it; you must make the choice. Whatever you decide, I will try to be happy with your decision.”
For a long time she watched the changing play of lights in the city below us. At last she said, “It will change my life in ways I can’t even imagine. I’m a little afraid to change that much. It’s you I want, Lew, not your child,” and she laid her head on my shoulder. Yet I sensed she was as ambivalent as I. “At the same time, it’s something that—that came out of our love. I can’t help wanting—” She stopped and swallowed, and laid her hand, almost protectively, over her belly. “I love you, Lew, and I love your child because it’s yours. And this is something that could be—well, different and stronger than either of us, but part of what we have together. Does that make any sense to you?”
I stroked her hair. At that moment she seemed so infinitely precious to me, more so than she had ever been before; perhaps more than she would ever be again.
“I’m frightened, Lew. It’s too big. I don’t think I have the right to decide something as big as that. Maybe the decision was made by something beyond either of us. I never thought much about God, or the Gods, or whatever there is. I keep feeling that there’s something terrible waiting for us, and I don’t want to lose even a minute of what happiness we could have together.” Again the little gesture, holding her hand over her womb, as if to shield the child there. She said, in a scared whisper, “I’m a Ridenow. It’s not just a thing, Lew, it’s alive, I can feel it alive—oh, not moving, I won’t feel it moving for months yet, but I can sense it there. It’s alive and I think it wants to live. Whether it does or not, I want it to live—I want to feel it living. I’m scared of the changes it will make, but I want to have it, Lew. I want this baby.”
I put my hand over hers, trying to sense it, feeling—maybe it was my imagination—the sense of something living. I remembered the depthless, measureless grief I had felt, knowing Marjorie would not live to bear me her child. Was it only the memory of that grief, or did I really sense deeper sorrow awaiting us? Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully accepted tha
t Marjorie was gone, that death was forever, that there would be no reunion in this world or the next. But under my hand and Dio’s was life, a return of hope, something in the future. We were not only living from day to day, grasping for pleasure wholly our own, but life went on, and there was always more life to live. I kissed her on the forehead and on the lips, then bent to kiss her belly too.
“Whatever comes of it,” I said, “I do too, preciosa. Thank you.”
My father, of course, was delighted; but troubled, too, and he would not tell me why. And now that we were not so close he could shield his thoughts from me. At first Dio was well and blooming, quite free of the minor troubles which some women feel in pregnancy; she said she had never been happier or healthier. I watched the changes in her body with amusement and delight. It was a joyful time; we both waited for the child’s birth, and even began to talk about the possibility—which I had never been willing, before, to acknowledge—that someday we would return to Darkover together, and share the world of our birth with our son or daughter.
Son or daughter. It troubled me, not to know which, Dio had not a great deal of laran and had not been trained to use what little she had. She sensed the presence and the life of the child, but that was all; she could not tell which, and when I could not understand this, she told me with spirit that an unborn child probably had no awareness of its own gender, and therefore, not being aware of its own sex, she could not read its mind. The Terran medics could have taken a blood sample and a chromosome analysis and told us which, but that seemed a sick and heartless way to find out. Perhaps, I thought, Dio would develop the sensitivity to find it out, or if all else failed, I would know when the child was born. Whichever it might be, I would love it. My father wanted a son but I refused to think in those terms.
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