To Save a World

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To Save a World Page 14

by Marion Zimmer Bradley


  Missy's face on the pillow was white and bruised-looking, one eye swollen shut with great purple bruises, her fair hair matted and tangled. David felt a choked sense of misery as he looked at her and wondered vaguely if he were sensing the girl's own emotions; or Conner's; or empathizing that strange, elusive and painful sense of resemblance to Keral. There would be scars on that fair and untouched face, that cheek where a fist or some blunt instrument had ripped away skin . . . .

  He moved toward her and began to draw away the blankets.

  Missy's eyes blinked open, cold and brilliant as steel. "No," she whispered, shaping her bloodied lips painfully, "don't touch me. Don't touch me!"

  Poor kid, Jason thought, after what she's been through I don't blame her. "It's all right, Missy," he said quietly, "no one is going to hurt you, now. I've got to look at those cuts on your face, and see what other injuries you have. I think we can fix you up without too many scars. Tell me, have you any pain? Let me see—"

  He grasped the blanket firmly, trying to pry loose her fingers that huddled it round her.

  The next minute, in a shower of flaming sparks, Jason flew through the air, shouting, struck the opposite wall and fell, awkwardly, landing in a collapsed heap. Missy spat out the words:

  "Don't touch me!"

  "Hey, now—" Jason protested, picking himself up in astonished consternation, "I won't hurt you."

  But Missy's eyes were blank and unseeing; a metallic, cold glare. David, standing beside her bed, picked up a whirling snowstorm of thoughts, a tornado of terror and shame too frightening to be untangled—

  "Wait, Jason," he said, and bent over Missy.

  "Child, it's all over; no one will hurt you. It's only the doctor, he wants to see how badly that man hurt you. Please try to tell us; did he rape you? We can't tell you how sorry we are—" David was trying, desperately, for the first time in his medical career, to reach out through that blind barricade of terror and touch the terrified girl within. He was unconscious now of Missy's strangeness; he spoke as he would have spoken to a frightened child. The specifically sexual content of the terror, wordless but clearly identifiable, led David to an entirely wrong conclusion. "Missy, if you're afraid of us would you like to have one of the women here, Doctor Shield perhaps, come and be with you?"

  An even more violent explosion of rage, tension and terror, like a palpable storm in the room. Missy's eyes were a glassy glare of panic, and when David tried to touch the blankets she had hauled around her body, his hand jumped back in a numb tingling paralysis like an electric shock.

  Jason said, still trying to be reasonable, "Miss Gentry, this is ridiculous. How can we help you, or even dress those wounds of yours—look, your face is still bleeding—unless you let us?"

  "It's no good to try and reason with her," David said in a low voice. "I don't think she even hears what we're saying, Jason."

  The door opened and Keral said in his low, diffident voice, "Dr. Allison, I think I know what has happened to Missy. Remember, she is one of my own people, one of my race. This is something you cannot understand. Let me try to reach her mind . . . ."

  He looked drawn and frightened, and David could sense, like static in the room, his fear that was like Missy's: it is the madness of the Change . . . and if she has been reared on another world, not knowing that this may happen, if it has come upon her unknowing . . . .

  "Hear me," he whispered. "Be with me. Missy, I am not your enemy. I am of your own people . . . ."

  She lay back, her eyes still glazed but lax and motionless, her breath coming in a harsh and deathly rattle. David knew that she heard Keral, but the glassy eyes did not flicker. Keral's voice trembled, and David sensed his own rigid self-control, but there was a tenderness in the tones which made both listeners achingly aware of the strange aloneness of the chieri.

  "Missy. Open your mind and heart to me. I can help you; you need not fear me, strayed nestling from our world, little sister, little brother, little lost bird . . . ."

  Missy's staring eyes flickered with live knowledge, she drew a harsh, sobbing breath—

  And then the room exploded. Keral screamed in anguish and beat wildly at the flames that burst out under his hands; a tornado wind whirled wildly in the center of the room, tipping over the medical trolley with its array of bandages and instruments; it fell with a noise of metal, shattering glass. David dodged flying glass fragments; Jason shouted in rage and consternation—

  Keral backed away, his face white, gripping his seared hands together in voiceless agony. He whispered, harshly, "I can't reach her, she's insane . . . get Desideria, she can handle Missy . . . ."

  In the corridor outside, slamming the door on the chaos of the room, they looked at each other in terror and rising dismay. The others crowded around, with concerned questions; Jason beckoned to Desideria, and said briefly, "How do you handle a crazy poltergeist? Regis, you're the expert; what do you do when your people go berserk?"

  "I've never had to handle one before," Regis said. "David, you look after Keral, he's hurt—Desideria, can you quiet her?"

  Linnea, standing quietly at the outskirts of the group, said, "If you can't alone, Grandmother, let me try—if two Keepers cannot handle one madwoman, what are we here for?"

  Jason stood aside for them to step into the room. David, drawing Keral after them—after all, this was the emergency room and this was the only place he could find bandages and medicines for the burns on Keral's hands—watched with detached curiosity as the two women moved toward Missy. A few steps away, they stopped, close together, clasping hands. Desideria's snow-white crown of hair and Linnea's flaming copper one were close together, and the elusive, strong likeness between the women gave a curious sense of power. Their two pairs of gray eyes, so like Missy's, focused like a visible beam of light . . . .

  David bent and picked up the trolley, shoving the scattered instruments out of the way, pushed Keral into a chair and rummaged in a cupboard for burn remedies—thank God for Universal Medical Labels, I couldn't cope with Darkovan script just now, he thought at random as his eyes found the familiar flame emblem on a packet of anesthetic spray—and gently uncoiled Keral's fingers, drawing a breath of consternation at the cruelly blistered palms. Behind him he could sense the tension in the room, as Missy struggled wordlessly, trembling, under the focused pressure of the two women . . . .

  Desideria said, in a cold voice, "Do what you have to, Jason. She'll be quiet."

  Linnea drew a deep, sobbing breath. She said, "Oh, Grandmother, no . . . oh, Evanda have mercy! Poor thing . . . ."

  David drew the bandages tight on Keral's hands. He said, wetting his lips, "That will heal in a day or two, Keral. There won't be any permanent harm. Are you all right? Do you feel faint?" The chieri looked deathlike, his mouth trembling. David felt a terrifying rage against Missy, which he controlled with an intense effort, and when Jason said, "David, if you've finished, give me a hand here," he moved toward Missy's inert body, trying for a professional calm to drop over his own fear and rage like a cloak.

  Jason drew away the blankets, visibly controlling, a shrinking as he touched them, but this time Missy lay quiet, looking shocked and half unconscious. Jason bared the slender, rounded upper arm, slid a needle into the inert flesh. After a tense moment, Missy's eyes closed and she began to breathe in long, drowsy breaths.

  Jason said to the women, "Relax; that will hold her. Thanks; she could probably have killed all three of us." He looked at them in bafflement, the conflict between medical ethics—you don't examine a patient in front of outsiders, if you can help it—and an obvious dislike of being alone with the dangerous patient, fighting a very clear-cut battle in his face.

  David said, "Let them stay, Jason. They know more about telepaths—or aliens—than we do."

  He watched, with a curiously detached lack of surprise, as Jason finished undressing Missy. He felt a strange and frightening pity; no wonder the change had driven her mad; her own body became an alien and terrifying t
hing . . . but he quenched this entirely subjective empathy (Keral! What had this done to Keral?) and tried to examine the changes with a total scientific detachment.

  The breasts had definitely altered in size and contour. Not that they had ever been large, of course, not much larger than those of a girl of twelve. But still, the change was perceptible. The skin texture, although he was not sure, seemed somehow to have altered, lost its luminous quality. He handled it with some curiosity as he helped Jason cleanse the cuts and abrasions. The genital changes were somewhat more marked; he had been aware of certain minor structural anomalies before, enough to classify Missy as a slightly abnormal female; now, on first inspection she would have struck anyone as a male. A somewhat underdeveloped male, it was true, but nevertheless unquestionably male in gender. Poor kid, what a frightening thing to have happen to her! Her? By habit he was still thinking of Missy as a girl, and when he thought about Conner his face burned with vicarious shock. Here I am sorry for Missy; how am I going to explain to Conner that his girl friend isn't even a girl?

  "Well, we've certainly opened one hell of a can of worms," Jason said, hours later. Missy still slept, drugged and still. David flickered the pages of the medical report in his hands. Massive hormone changes, still continuing and probably unstable, shifting back and forth between androgens and female hormones—no wonder the emotional instability had resulted! "Are all the chieri like that, I wonder? You're Keral's buddy; maybe you can get him to tell you the whole story. Didn't he say that thousands of years ago the chieri went into space, looking for some way to save their race and then came home to die? Evidently Missy is one of them who got lost, somehow or somewhere. Probably never knew what she was—what the hell, if she was a foundling, as she said, someone decided at first look that she was a girl, and who's going to question the evidence of her own eyes? But are we going to have to cope with something like that happening to Keral? What was that phrase he used—the madness of the change? Oh hell," he burst out, "I can't cope with it. What good is this whole project anyway?"

  David, sensing a sudden despair which had nothing to do with his patient, asked quickly, "Jay, what's wrong?"

  Jason shook his head. "Personal problems. I've just had word my own people are dying like flies—you didn't know—I was brought up with nonhumans myself; the trailmen. You don't realize—you haven't been on Darkover long enough—but there have been forest fires; and the people of the forests are dying . . . . What's the good of saving a project, or a few people, if this world is going down the drain?"

  David felt powerless to comfort him. He said, at last, awkwardly, "I guess we just have to do what we can, Jason. I'll talk to Keral and see what I can do."

  He delayed the talk until later, not knowing why it was hard to face the chieri. Night had fallen, and the view of the great spaceport towers was a twinking glow through the rainy darkness, when he returned to his own quarters and found Keral there, silent, withdrawn and paler than ever. He hardly greeted David, and it seemed to the young doctor that the whole gestalt of friendships and rapports formed since he had come to Darkover, the first real human contacts of his life, were falling into fragments around him. Conner sick with wretchedness over Missy—David had still shirked telling him what was wrong—Regis, withdrawn and filled with fears; Jason, cracking up with fear for his friends; a world groaning in agony as it split apart, ruined and broken . . . and his own deep empathy for Keral, now guarded and afraid. He remembered Missy's white terrified face, and it seemed to him that the echo of that terror and madness was in Keral's pale eyes; and then, with a start, he remembered that morning which now seemed far away. Had it only been a few weeks ago? He had first seen Keral in the office room downstairs and now he remembered his own original uncertainty; Keral had seemed to him first a boy, then a delicate girl, and until he had first examined him the uncertainty had remained.

  "How are your hands, Keral?"

  "They're well enough. Missy?"

  "Still doped. I hope she comes out of it sane. We could probably help with hormones, but I don't know."

  "I feel responsible," Keral said slowly. "It was contact with me which touched this off."

  "Keral, you were only trying to help her, and if she'd been sane she'd have known it."

  "No. I think it was—contact with me—which made her go into the Change."

  "I don't understand . . . ."

  "Nor I, and I am afraid," Keral said painfully, "because it could have been myself."

  David stared in wonderment but dared not interrupt, sensing that Keral's tight reticence had broken; and after a moment Keral said, still in that hard, controlled voice:

  "Understand. All the long seasons of my life, I have known myself the only and last child of my folk. All the others of our race are old, old past—not past mating, but past bearing. Past—engendering. And I reared among them, young, young . . . . Now, for the first time, I am among other young people, people who are, allowing for the differences in the way we experience time, near to my own age. For the first time in my life I am among—" he stopped and choked over it, and David could only vaguely envision the tremendous emotional charge of the concept, "among potential mates. And so I know that, at any time, I may become unstable and change, as Missy did."

  And, although David had seen fear in Keral before, now what he saw was terror.

  David said quietly, trying to be detached, "Is it that you think it's Missy to whom you'd react? Biologically, you mean; the very fact that you're in the presence, for the first time, of a nubile member of your own race?" It would be, it occurred to him with a strange, stricken sense, a perfect and simple solution. That these two, last of their alien kind, should be a renewal of their line . . . .

  "No," said Keral, and there was a sick sort of revulsion in his voice. "I could not. I know this is one of the reasons why our people died away, and yet . . . our kind was shaped wrong in the beginning of the world; I know this. I've heard the story often enough; the sexual drives too low, the—the sensitivity too high. I have no right to judge Missy, knowing what her life has been. I pity her. I pity her until it makes me almost sick with it, knowing how terrible it must have been for her, driven to this to survive, to use her gifts only to fascinate and enslave alien men with her body. But she is, she is what she has been in contact with, and I cannot—I cannot come so close to it."

  David, remembering something Regis had said, and with a faint bitter memory of his own early adolescence, said wryly, "I gather this is common enough among telepaths. It's rare for them to have much to do—sexually—with anyone who can't return that—awareness, in intimacy. I had a hell of a time, as a result—" he laughed a little, "my own experiences with women have been, let's say, minimal. A few experiments, and—I more or less swore off. I gather it was even worse with Conner—until he found Missy. He couldn't stand to be around people at all, and she was the first one who could stand the touch."

  "It must have been hard for you," Keral said, with that immediate awareness of emotion which was so new, and so welcome a thing to David.

  "I must admit it's crossed my mind lately; that if there are telepaths on Darkover, there may be women who will be able to—" David flushed slightly. "Not that I've had all that much time to think about it, but seeing Regis with that girl who had his child a little while ago—and now with Linnea, it's so obvious how very much they're in love—" he laughed a little. "Living among telepaths must demand some peculiar changes in attitude, I mean sex becomes such an open, aboveboard thing. Keral, does it bother you to talk about this? God help me, I'm not even sure whether you're a man or a woman!"

  Keral met his eyes with a quiet, level gaze. "Like all my people. Either, or both. We—Change, as occasion warrants. And, as I say, when we—come together—the emotions must be very deeply involved, or else—I'm still not sure about your language, but I've learned something of your technology—otherwise, fertilization cannot take place. Oh, we tried all the obvious things, David, our people. Artificial inseminat
ion. Our women, or rather, those of us in female phase, under sedative drugs which dulled their minds, mating with members of other races, in a desperate hope—"

  "And you could not interbreed with other races?"

  "Not—deliberately," Keral said, "although there are legends, here on Darkover; yes, the Comyn telepaths are said to be of chieri blood. There is a legend—a woman of our people . . . you saw Missy. . . ."

  "Yes. She changed, but you say it was contact with you. She was in—female phase, you say? And yet you—"

  "I think contact with Conner sparked the change," Keral said. "After all this time with those alien to her, so that they were beasts, animals, the first touch of someone who could reach her mind and her emotions, roused her out of the phase we call emmasca, neuter. In the neuter phase, she could have sexual contact with anyone passively—but Conner reached her emotions and—endocrines? So that the mating with Conner was a real thing, something which stirred her deeply, more deeply, perhaps, than any experience of her life."

  David said, "I think I understand. But according to computer analysis, her male and female hormones are almost identical with the human ones. I should think, if it's a question of chemistry, Conner's maleness would have pushed her further into female phase."

  "I don't know," Keral said. "I have only meaningless theories. One is this; that when the change first takes place, it is a—a fluctuating thing, until the hormones stabilize. I had been warned by my elders that if the change came upon me, there is sometimes madness."

  "I'm a doctor, Keral. I can be detached if anyone can."

  "Can you, David?" Keral smiled faintly. "I told you, we have interbred with other races, now and again . . . by chance. It happens at times, that one of our people, when the season of change comes, if there is no other of our kind ready to mate with her, drunken with moonlight and the madness of the changes in her body and mind, will run mad in the forest and lie down, mindless, with any man who comes to her arms. It is—it is a thing we do not speak of. Some have killed themselves, after. But a few bore alien children. It is said that a few such children, cast out from us and fostered among humans, here on Darkover, brought the laran gifts, the telepath powers, into the Comyn line. This is such a terror and a thing of shame among our people that it is spoken only in whispers. And in no other way—in no other way—" Keral, shaking and white, broke down and began to sob.

 

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