"No," David said, "I'm no astronomer but I'll bet someone can pinpoint it in time." He felt stunned. Are you trying to tell me you're maybe hundreds of years old? Legends of immortal races! "And yet, long-lived as your people are, you say your people are dying? I don't want to give you pain, Keral. But we must know."
"We have been dying since many centuries before the Terrans came to Darkover for the first time," said the chieri. His voice was quiet and positive. "We were never a plentiful or prolific race—is this the right word?—and although during our high years we grew and multiplied as with a tree in bud, all things run down and perish. As time meant less and less to us, we did not realize. Perhaps some change, the cooling of the sun, made this change in our innermost cells. The times when we can bear children are spaced apart—many, many sun-circlings apart. I think as the sun cooled they grew further apart. It often happened that when one of our people was ripened for mating, there would be none other ready to mate with her. And although we did not die of ourselves, we could be killed by accident, beasts, weather or mischance. More died than were born. This process was slow, so slow that even we did not know, until our elders saw that no children at all had been born, until some of the youngest were past mating at all; and inevitably, some day, not soon but not in the unforeseen times either, we must die and be gone." His voice was flat, unemotional and clinical. "We sought many remedies; as you learn to understand our words I will tell you what I have heard from my elders—of the shifts we sought to preserve our people. Yet there was no help and we will vanish and be as if we had never been, like the leaves of the last springtime."
The very quietness of Keral's words tugged at David's heart with their bleak, forlorn acceptance. He could not bear that quiet; he could not bear to see the luminous brilliance he had first touched in Keral extinguished in this misery; yet what could he do?
"Well, my people have a proverb: never say die," he said. "Regis believes that the Darkovan telepaths are all dying out, but he's doing something about it, not singing sad songs of sorrow. Maybe it's not as late as you think, Keral; and even if it's true, we are going to do our damnedest to learn everything we can and be grateful for the chance to get it from you."
Keral's luminous smile lit up again. "It does me good to hear this; as I told you, my people have sat too long in our forests singing songs of sorrow and waiting for the leaves to cover us up. So that—here I am."
David took up the folders he had been studying at supper. He said, "You are convinced there is no other race like you?"
Keral's silent affirmative.
David dropped his bombshell, gently, almost without emphasis: "Did you know that Missy is a chieri?"
He was not prepared for Keral's surge of violent revulsion, disgust and shock.
"Impossible! That—female animal? No, David; believe me, my friend, our people are not like that. David, I touched her; as I touched you a few moments ago. Do you honestly believe I could be mistaken?"
"Not by your own standards," David said, puzzled but prepared to defend the findings of his own science until Keral could give better grounds than physical revulsion. "In that case there is a race like enough to yours to be twin. Let me show you what I mean."
He spread out the physiological data. Keral betrayed more knowledge of anatomy than David would have believed; evidently, the language barrier once surmounted, he had a very good grasp of these things. David had to explain the instrument readings and diagrams to him; but once Keral grasped them, he examined them with a frown and a growing disquiet.
"David, I cannot understand it but my instinct tells me you are wrong, while my intelligence tells me you must be right! How shall we resolve this?"
"Missy lied to every question we asked her. Every question, without exception; compulsively. If she is a wide-open telepath, and she is—we both know that from what happened with Conner—why did she do it? How did she believe she could get away with it?" Almost too late he remembered that a touch on the question of sexuality had made Keral freeze and draw away, earlier. Yet Keral had spoken clearly and clinically, though regretfully, just now, about his own people and their declining reproductive powers. A puzzle . . . .
Keral said: "I know of only one way to be sure, and it could even be dangerous, but let us take it. Can we bring Missy here without alarming her, David? I might know of a way to question and find out her truths. Why does any being lie? Only out of fear or a wish for profit, and what profit could she have in lying? Perhaps we can find the fear behind her lies and soothe it."
"I'll try," David said, and went off down the hospital corridor, having left Keral (curled on David's bed, curiously nibbling the fruit-and-nut candy) to wait. He remembered that all of them except the Darkovans had been quartered in rooms in this wing; he felt briefly embarrassed. Suppose he interrupted Conner and Missy in bed again? Oh, hell, who cares? At home on Earth if I found two acquaintances in bed, I'd excuse myself and ask them to come along when they were finished. It's the damned voyeur taboo and after all, telepaths would have to get used to that, I guess. It didn't seem to bother Regis, he was just afraid it would disrupt the rest of us who didn't expect to be overhearing such things.
Yet if Missy's not human, but can and does have sex freely and openly with humans, can the chieri be said to be nonhuman at all? And if they do interbreed with humans, why are they dying out? Hell, here I am looking for answers even before I have the right questions. I'd better get some facts.
Missy opened the door of her room and he saw that she was alone.
David? What does he want? I felt him coming.
It's idiotic to go through all these motions when we can pick up each other's minds and emotions. I guess none of us is used to it yet.
Aloud, to ease off the odd disquiet both in himself and her, he said, "Missy, if you're not busy, would you come down to my room for a little while? We'd like to ask you a couple of questions."
Curiosity flickered in her pale gray eyes. She said, "Why not?" and came along. He noted again the slender height and grace, not as outré as Keral's odd beauty, but still enough to mark her anywhere on any world. She reacted with mild surprise to the sight of Keral, but made no comment. David felt a strange wariness in her as she accepted some of the candies he had brought from downstairs, curled up on a corner of his bed beside Keral.
Habits of movement, speech, all are culture bound. Missy walks and acts like a lovely woman, sure of her own desirability, confident in it—
Or does the confidence go so deep? There's something forlorn about her. She looks lost, that's it; she's not like anyone else . . . .
He tried to make it an ordinary social occasion. "Sorry I've nothing to offer you; when we've been here longer it may be more organized. There must be a place to get something to drink somewhere around here. At least if there isn't it will be the first Empire planet I've heard about where there wasn't. Missy, I've forgotten; what world did they find you on?"
—wariness. wariness. A blur of fear like a small animal scooting to ground in its hole.
. . . there have been so many . . .
"It's one of those with an unpronounceable name," she said.
Keral raised his pale eyes to hers. A faint spark flew. "I'm good at languages," he said lightly. "Try me."
Panic. Retreat. Terror. She jerked her hands violently away.
She did not. She did not move. "I was born on Lanach, so I suppose you'd call me a Lanchy."
David did not get the warning flicker of earlier lies, and sensed she was telling the truth, or believed she was. He said: "I've seen Lanach on star maps, but I believed it had been colonized mostly by the darker races and ethnic groups."
"It was," Missy said, "I always felt a bit of a freak." She drew a shaky. breath. "That's why I left it and I've never been back."
"Were you a foundling?"
wariness, wariness . . . careful . . . what do they want . . . .
She said, "I suppose so, although I'm not sure. I don't remember my parent
s." Again she lifted her eyes to Keral's; again the curious, puzzled spark flew between them, and then Keral quickly turned his face away. David could feel his unease, his revulsion like an almost tangible thing, and the sense of undercover pressure built up again. Damn it, how could a girl who looked fifteen put him at a loss? And was it simply the awareness of her earlier sexual exploits which had upset Keral? That was evidently an area where all of them might have to be careful with the chieri—an odd sexual code? Declining racial fertility meaning sexual hangups and taboos . . . .
Keral commanded himself. He said, in a flat quiet voice, "Why did you lie to us, Missy? How old are you?"
Panic. Violence . . . break/run/disappear/flight/a twisting trapped thing gnawing desperately . . . .
That image blurred. Other waves of magnetic awareness damped it out. Missy moved with a soft little seductive wriggle on the bed, stretching out with her hands behind her head. David wondered why it was he had thought she looked immature. Her smile was slow and luminous. She said softly, "It's a girl's privilege to keep her age to herself. But I'm over the age of consent."
She did not move, but for a blurred instant it seemed to David that she stretched out her arms, that there was a deep movement in his groin, that in another instant he must reach for her—
Keral made a strangled sound of disgust and revulsion.
One of ours? And like this? Madness, and yet I feel . . . it is true, yet how . . . a foundling? Yet maddened, a bitch ravening . . . all manner of men on all worlds . . . .
David, brought to quick sanity by Keral's recoil, drew back from Missy. He said coldly, "You worked that trick on Conner, but it won't work on us, Missy, not now anyway. You're overwhelmingly beautiful, but that isn't what we came here for. All we want from you is the truth, Missy. Why lie to us? What harm could the truth do you? Where did you come from? How old are you?"
Panic. Fear. Disquiet and an agonizing, shattering loss of self-sureness; if they won't want me what am I good for, how shall I hide . . . hide, hide . . . .
Without warning the room exploded. David's brushes, lying on the top of the built-in counter, flew across the room and into the mirror. Missy, like a madly spinning cat, whirled within a vortex which picked up chairs, wastebasket, pens on the desk, flinging them madly about; Keral flinched and covered his face, but the blankets crawled up snakelike and wrapped with strangling force around him. A flicker of fire crawled up the wall . . . .
David heard screams of rage and terror, and yet at another level the room was wholly silent, in a sort of cushioned, timeless instant of dead silence.
Abruptly, Missy froze as if suddenly turned to stone. She writhed and struggled in an invisible grip, without actually moving, caught as if held in strong hands.
Behave yourself. It was like an actual voice, cold, imperative and angry, and it held the very note of Desideria's presence. I know you have neither manners nor training, but it is time you learned control. A natural gift like yours left to run wild is dangerous, my girl, and the sooner you learn it the better.
Missy fell to the floor as if the invisible grip had physically dropped her. Around her the flying, spinning furniture slowly settled down. The sense of Desideria's presence withdrew, like an ironic flick of apology. Keral and David gasped and stared at each other.
Missy, breathing heavily and sobbing, scrambled to her feet and fled.
David let his breath go in a long, "Whew! What in ninety galaxies brought that on?"
"We scared her," Keral said without irony. "I asked the wrong question; how old she was."
David saw abruptly, without words, the picture in Keral's mind, contrasted with Keral's own quiet, unaging timelessness:
. . . . fleeing from world to world when they saw she never changed, never aged; instantly seeking a new protector; deserting him as he grew old and died; a new world always rising to be conquered, to be hidden from; at the lowest level, her gift good only to seek out and conquer, put a man under her instant spell with bondage to her body . . . .
Keral said shakily, "I am sorry. I felt sick, that is all. That one of our race—oh, yes, she is, she must be, although I still do not know how. We, our people cannot, that is all. The—the change must be a thing of deep involvement; no, I know you do not understand." He seemed frightened, wild as he had been at their first meeting, in a half-maddened retreat.
"Keral, Keral—don't—" David reached for his hands again, hoping to quiet him as he had done before, but Keral shrank again in a spasmodic rejection.
Don't touch me!
But as David drew back, distressed and hurt, Keral forced himself to calm. He said, "There is so much to tell, and I cannot tell it all. My elders must know about this. But we have failed with Missy, and this much I can tell you. Earlier I told you our race has been dying since before your people came first to this world you call Darkover. We were not always a forest people. We had cities, worlds, ships which could tread the stars, and when we knew we were dying we left this world and for many, many years we ranged among the other worlds of all kinds of men, seeking a remedy, trying to find a way to live and not to die . . . and there was no remedy; and at last we returned here and left our ships to rust into the bottom of time and our cities to fall into the very dust of eternity; and we withdrew into the unending forests, waiting to die and be no more . . . .
"But on some of those worlds some of our people must have remained. Unknown. Unguessed. Warped out of knowledge by what they had been through with other races who could not know them or understand.
"I guess that Missy is one of these, but I do not know . . . ."
He dropped his face into his hands and fell silent. He said faintly, "I am weary. Let me sleep."
The hospital quarters rooms were arranged so that extra beds could be pulled out from the furniture; David, realizing that Keral was at the end of his endurance, silently drew one out for him and watched the chieri fall swiftly into a stunned, unconscious sleep that was like trance. He, himself, sat staring at his notes for hours, his mind in turmoil with all he had discovered.
The next morning they found that Missy had disappeared.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LINNEA, KEEPER AND leronis of the Arilinn Tower, had few hours of leisure and when they came she tried to keep them inviolate. The work of a Keeper, a worker in the matrix screens which provided such small technology as was accessible on Darkover, was arduous and brain grating. Trained since early childhood in difficult telepathic work, like all the Keepers she shrouded herself from all casual contacts with those who were not telepaths, conserving her energies with every means at her command.
So that when one of the few servants in the Tower brought her word that two Free Amazons from the mountains sought to see her, she was both incredulous and offended.
"I do not see guests or travelers. I am not a freak to be seen by paying a penny. Send them on their way." A few Years ago. she thought, no one would have dared to suggest such an insolence.
The servant seemed almost equally embarrassed: "Do you think I did not tell them that, vai leronis? Yet when I said as mush, and rudely too, the one said that she was from your own village, one of your own, and that now your grandmother had gone from the mountains there was no soul within a thousand miles who could help her. She claimed that she would wait all night and all day for an hour of your convenience."
Linnea said, startled, "Then I suppose I must see them." But what is a woman of my hills doing in Arilinn, so far from the Kilghards, so far from the mountains of Storn . . . .
She went down the long stairs slowly, rather than exert her wearied body and brain to control the elevator shaft. Passing through the blue force field that shielded the Keepers at work from intrusive outside thoughts, she braced herself for an interview with outsiders, nontelepaths. It was so incredibly difficult, after months and weeks of seeing only those who could blend into your inner moods and senses, to mingle with and touch outsiders; minds and bodies cold, barricaded, alien . . . .
&nbs
p; She touched rudimentary sensitivity at once from the tall Free Amazon with braided red hair (a telepath? neutered? Linnea, celibate by harsh necessity like all Keepers, felt the faint shock of revulsion for the sexless being) and it made her voice cold:
"What urgent necessity brings you here to the world's end, my countrywoman?"
It was the younger woman who looked up and spoke, a quietly pretty, plumpish girl wrapped in the furs of the hill people. She said, "Lady Linnea, I knew you as a child at High Windward, I am Menella of the Naderling Forst. This is my freemate Darilyn, and we are here because—" shyness overcame her, and she looked up in open appeal at the taller, red-haired Amazon. Darilyn said in a flat, abrupt, cold voice, "We should not have disturbed you, leronis, but there was no other person who would understand or believe us. You know what I am." She raised her gray eyes briefly, almost in defiance, to Linnea's, and the quickly-barricaded touch of recognition passed between them.
Like you, I live shielded, Sorceress. Because of what I am, guarded against man's touch: vulnerable, like all our fast-fading kind.
Linnea lowered her eyes; the condemnation in them was gone. Linnea had been born into a noble family; had she chosen not to work in the Towers as a telepath Keeper, she could have been given in marriage to a man of her own kind; one who could equal her own sensitivity, a fellow telepath. Darilyn, born into a village, growing up surrounded (a freak; a throwback) by those who could neither understand nor respect what she was, had chosen to have her womanhood destroyed by the neutering operation rather than subject it to a man who would be, to her, only a dumb beast.
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