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 onto 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 remember 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 arclights 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 gray-ness. 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 flag-stones; 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 the 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.
Larry said at last, hesitantly in Darkovan, “Are you speaking to me?”
“Who else?” The strange boy’s hands, encased in thick dark gloves, strayed to the handle of his knife, as if absentmindedly. “What are you staring at?”
“I was just looking at the spaceport.”
“And where did you get those ridiculous clothes?”
“Now look here,” Larry said, taken aback at the rude tone in which the boy spoke, “why are you asking me all these questions? I’m wearing clothes I have—and for that matter, I don’t think much of yours,” he added belligerently. “What is it to you, anyhow?”
The strange boy looked startled. He blinked. “But have I made a mistake? I never saw—who are you?”
“My name is Larry Montray.”
The boy with the knife frowned. “I can’t take it in. Do you—forgive me, but by some chance do you belong to the spaceport? No offense is intended, but—”
“I just came in on the ship Pantomime,” Larry said.
The stranger frowned. He said, slowly, “That explains it, I suppose. But you speak the language so well, and you look like—you must excuse my mistake, it was natural.” He stood staring at Larry for another minute. Then, suddenly, as if breaking the dam: “I’ve never spoken before to an off-worlder! What is it like to travel in space? Is it true that there are many suns like this one? What are the other worlds like?”
But before Larry could answer, he heard his father’s voice, raised sharply. “Larry! Where have you gotten to?”
“I’m here,” he called, turning around, realizing that where he stood, he was hidden in the shadow of the archway. “Just a minute—” he turned back to the strange boy, but to his surprise and exasperation, the Darkovan boy had turned his back and was walking rapidly away. He disappeared into the dark mouth of a narrow street across the square. Larry stood frowning, looking after him.
His father came quickly toward him.
“What were you doing? Just watching the square? I suppose there’s no harm, but—” He sounded agitated. “Who were you talking to ? One of the natives?”
“Just a kid about my age,” Larry said. “Dad, he thought—”
“Never mind now.” His father cut him off, rather sharply. “We have to find our quarters and get settled. You’ll learn soon enough. Come along.”
Larry followed, puzzled and exasperated at his father’s curtness. This wasn’t like Dad. But his first disappointment at the ordinariness of Darkover had suddenly disappeared.
That kid thought I was Darkovan. Even with the clothes I was wearing. From hearing me speak the language, he couldn’t tell the difference.
He looked back, almost wistfully, at the vanishing panorama of Darkover beyond the forbidden gateway. They were passing now into a street of houses and buildings that were just like Earth ones, and Larry’s father sighed—with relief?
“Just like home. At least you won’t be too homesick here,” he said, checked the numbers on a card he held, and pushed open a door. “Our rooms are in this building.”
Inside, the lights had been set so that the light was that of Earth at noon, and the apartment—five rooms on the fourth floor—might have been the one they had left on Earth. All the while they were unpacking, dialing food from the dispensers, exploring the rooms, Larry’s thoughts ran a new and strange pattern.
What was the point of living on a strange world if you did your best to make your house, the furniture, the very light, look exactly like the old one? Why not stay on Earth if you felt like that?
Okay, if they wanted it this way. That was okay with him. But he was going to see more of Darkover than this.
He was going to see what lay beyond that gate. The new world was beautiful, and strange—and he could hardly wait to explore it.
Homesick? What did Dad think he was?
CHAPTER TWO
Larry pushed back the heavy steel door of Quarters B building, and emerged into the thin cold cutting wind of the courtyard between buildings. He stood there shivering, looking at the sky; the huge red sun hung low, slowly dropping toward the horizon, where thin ice-clouds massed in mountains of crimson and scarlet and purple.
Behind him Rick Stewart shivered audibly, pulling his coat tight. “Brrr, I wish they had a passageway between buildings! And I can’t see a thing in this light. Let’s get inside, Larry.” He waited a minute, impatiently. “What are you staring at?”
“Nothing.” Larry shrugged and followed the other lad into Quarters A, where their rooms were located. How could he say that this brief daily passage between Quarters B—where the school for spaceport youngsters, from kindergarten to pre-university, was located—and Quarters A, was his only chance to look at Darkover?
Inside, in the cool yellow Earthlike light, Rick relaxed. “You’re an odd one,” he said, as they took the elevator to their floor. “I’d think the light out there would hurt your eyes.”
“No, I like it. I wish we could get out and explore.”
“Well, shall we go down to the spaceport?” Rick chuckled. “There’s nothing to see there but starships, and they’re an old story to me, but I suppose to you they’re still exciting.”
Larry felt exasperated at the patronizing amusement in Rick’s voice. Rick had been on Darkover three years—and frankly admitted that he had never been beyond the spaceport. “Not that,” he said, “I’d like to get into the town—see what it’s like.” His pent-up annoyance suddenly escaped. “I’ve been on Darkover three weeks, and I might as well be back on Earth! Even here in the school, I’m studying the same things I was studying at home! History of Terra, early Space Exploration, Standard Literature, mathematics—”
“You bet,” Rick said. “You don’t think any Terran citizens would stay here, if their kids couldn’t get a decent education, do you? Requirements for any Empire university.”
“I know that. But after all, living on this planet, we should know a little something about it, shouldn’t we?”
Rick shrugged again. “I can’t imagine why.” They came into the rooms Larry shared with his father, and dumped their school books and paraphernalia. Larry went to the food dispenser—from which food prepared in central kitchens was delivered by pueumatic tube and charged to their account—and dialed himself a drink and a snack, asking Rick what he wanted. The boys stretched out on the furniture, eating hungrily.
“You are an odd one,” Rick repeated. “Why do you care about this planet? We’re not going to stay here all our lives. What good would it do to learn everything about it? What we get in the Terran Empire schools will be valid on any Empire planet where they send us. As for me, I’m going into the Space Academy when I’m eighteen—and goodness knows, that’s reason enough to hit the books on navigation and math!”
Larry munched a cracker. “It just seems funny,” he repeated with stubborn emphasis, “to live on a world like this and not know more about it. Why not stay on Earth, if their culture is the only one you care about?”
Rick’s chuckle was tolerant. “This is your first planet out from Earth? Oh, well, that explains it. After you’ve seen a couple, you’ll realize that there’s nothing out there but a lot of barbarians and outworlders. Unless you’re going in for archaeology or history as a career, why clutter up your mind with the details?”
Larry couldn’t answer. He didn’t try. He finished his cracker and opened his book on navigation. “Was this the problem that was bothering you?”
But while they put their h
eads together, figuring out interstellar orbits and plotting collision curves, Larry was still thinking with frustrated eagerness of the world outside—the world, it seemed now, he’d never know.
Rick didn’t seem to care. None of the youngsters he’d met here in the Trade City seemed to care. They were Earthmen, and anything outside the Terran Zone was alien—and they couldn’t have cared less. They lived the same life they’d have lived on any Empire planet, and that was the way they wanted it.
They’d even been surprised—no, thunder struck—to hear that he’d learned the Darkovan speech. They couldn’t imagine why. One of the teachers had been faintly sympathetic; he’d shown Larry how to make the complicated letters of the Darkovan alphabet, and even loaned him a few books written in Darkovan. But there wasn’t much time for that. Mostly he got the same schooling he’d have had on Earth. Darkover, even the light of Darkover’s red sun, was barriered out by walls and yellow earth-type lights; and the closed minds of the Terran Zone personnel were even more of a barrier.
When Rick had gone, Larry put his books away and sat scowling, thinking it over, until his father came in.
“How’s it going, Dad?”
He was fascinated by his father’s work, but Wade Montray wouldn’t talk about it much. Larry knew that his father worked in the customs office, and that his work was, in a general way, to see that no contraband was smuggled from Darkover to the Terran Zone, or vice versa. It sounded interesting to Larry, though his father kept insisting it was not much different from the work he’d done on Earth.
But today he seemed somewhat more communicative.
A World Divided Page 2
