David knew that knowledge, scientific detachment, were worse than useless here. Blindly, in the grip of intense emotion, he reached out for the chieri and drew him close; Keral, in a convulsion of terror, wrenched free of his arms.
David quickly let him go; and they stood staring at one another, Keral still sobbing, David in a wild and frightened surmise. Keral said at last, through a painful smile, "You see? It's you that I'm afraid to touch."
David tried helplessly to get hold of himself. He reminded himself that Keral, coming from a hermaphroditic race and totally isolated from ordinary human culture, would know nothing of human taboos or perversions, or even the very concept. The fact that they were both males would mean nothing to Keral. Both males, hell! He himself hadn't been sure Keral wasn't a girl, at first. But it still took some getting used to. Finally, mastering his first shock and outrage, he said in a low voice, "Keral, I don't understand. Are you saying that you and I could be—mates?"
"I don't know." Keral sounded, and looked, wretched. "Have I hurt or—or offended against you, David?"
David found himself struggling against a blind impulse to take Keral in his arms again. It wasn't desire, certainly not sexual desire—although, he realized tardily, that was there too, muted and deeply buried but still there in his consciousness—but it was an overwhelming impulse of closeness, a sudden blind ache for contact, a sort of desperate merging. He fought to control it and keep his detachment, but the surge of overpowering emotion went so deep that it was all he could do to be calm. He reached out his hands to Keral. He had to touch him somehow. He said, in a low voice, "I don't understand what's happened, Keral. I'm frightened, too. But—Keral—" he raised his eyes and as he met the level gray gaze of the chieri, a great and blind happiness surged over him. "I don't care what it is. I love you, you know I do. I'd do anything for you, you know that, but don't be afraid of me. I won't touch you, unless you want me to. And if you do—" he said at last, very simply, "we're friends. And friends can be lovers, too."
Keral did not move. His slender bandaged fingers closed slightly on David's, but he remained very still. His face moved, convulsively, and at last he said, "I am afraid. It's like being a stranger to myself. And I can't help wondering if my people sent me here for this. I don't have to tell you what it could mean to our race, life rather than death . . . and yet. I wonder, simply, if I have gone mad."
David dared not laugh. He said, still holding Keral's hand, "We must wait and be sure. We must find out—"
"Don't tell anyone," Keral begged suddenly.
"I won't, but I wouldn't give much for our chances of keeping it a secret. Remember Conner and Missy? But before anything else, Keral, before we take any chances, let us find out—" his voice collapsed. Suddenly he could not help incongruous laughter. "I'm not laughing at you, Keral, but—-it is funny—oh, God, suppose you had a child by me—"
Keral's beautiful eyes met David's with unflinching honesty. "Like any of my people, I would risk anything for that," he said. "Even madness. Even my own death, several times over. But I trust you, David, and I love you. And I think it is possible."
And then, through the gravity, a flicker of mad merriment broke forth:
"Oh, what fools we both are, David, to be together and so grave and sad and somber; I can read your thoughts so clearly sometimes, a cold-blooded experiment! How much of this have you understood? I thought I made it clear—that unless my own emotions were so very much involved—what are you afraid of?"
They stood clinging together, laughing into each other's eyes like children, and then Keral gently pushed him away.
"You're right," he said almost in a whisper, still laughing. "We have all the time we need. And we must find out everything we can about each other; and first of all, we must find out about Missy. I—" he laughed, and it sounded rueful, self-directed:
"I want to find out what might be in store for me! But David, it's a promise."
Their clasped hands clung together; and suddenly David realized that, more deeply than any spoken pledge of love, it was a promise and a commitment.
It was for this that he had come to Darkover.
It could well have been for this that he was born.
CHAPTER TEN
THE HARD, BITTER Darkovan winter had settled down over the hills of Thendara. The spaceport lay buried under snow six feet deep, just barely kept in control on the landing areas by constant working crews with all the resources of Terran Empire machinery. The days were short and bitter, the red sun grayed with storm clouds or snow.
The woman who called herself Andrea, knowing her work completed, had intended to take ship and leave Darkover as soon as possible. With the mountains lying deep in snow, nothing further was possible; the torrential spring thaws and rains on barren soil would complete the process beyond repair, unless certain highly technical and drastic steps were taken, demanding enormous financial and engineering resources.
It wasn't that these resources were unavailable on Darkover, even now, Andrea thought. It was that no one now living here could spot the ongoing entropy and apply them in the right places with the right kind of concentrated effort.
She knew she should book her passage on one of the big ships, and go.
Go where? she thought, with a sort of fierce, worn weariness.
Anywhere. Anywhere in the galaxy. You have everything you could desire, or the means to purchase it.
Yet she lingered, delaying, slowly realizing that there was nothing in a thousand worlds which could tempt her to move on. I am old, too old to care. So that she lingered on from day to day, letting each departing ship leave without her, not even clearly aware that she was reluctant to leave the dim red sun, the high, jagged and achingly familiar skyline which she could see, when the snow cleared, from the window of her room. If I do not go soon I will die here, she told herself; for she had seen others of her kind die, simply because there was no longer anything to hold them to life.
Cast out, abandoned, forgotten by everyone. As I cast out and abandoned my poor changeling . . . .
The memory, hundreds of years sealed, burst through, a nightmare peeping through a dark curtain, and was instantly covered over again under layers of other memories. Shame, terror, anguish, the compelling memory of madness, buried under deliberate mind-sealing; hardness; rage against those spawning races who lived and would die. Even guilt and shame a hundred years forgotten.
I do not deserve to die beneath my own sun . . . .
She had dismissed her assistants, paying them off and paying them well to get lost and stay lost in distant parts of the galaxy. One of the high technical perfections of the trade of worldwrecking, which she had brought to a fine art, was that by the time the damage could be assessed and identified, all of the hands which had done it were scattered on a hundred planets across uncountable light-years and could never be traced or identified or made to testify. Well, they were gone and no one but herself could identify the damage; and there was no way to connect her with it. The one link, the Free Amazons who had seen her burying the sterilization virus, she dismissed with contempt. Simple women who knew nothing!
So she lingered on from day to day and week to week, telling herself that when the spring thaw came, she would go. The old love for her own sun, her own sky, on a ruined world, could not tempt her to stay and see the planet die.
Don't be sentimental. It won't die; it will enter a new period of life as a flourishing Empire marketplace. Just another planet with nothing unusual about it.
It had become a deep-rooted habit with her to find, and pay well, spies wherever she went. About three weeks into the winter snow, one of them came to her with vaguely disquieting news.
"There's little travel at this season," he told her, "but there's movement, all through the mountains, of caravans. And each of them holds two, three, five of the telepath caste. They seem to be converging on Thendara, on the old Comyn Castle which has been abandoned since the old Comyn Council broke up, five or ten yea
rs ago. I don't know what it means, or why, but you asked to know everything concerning the telepath caste."
Andrea paused to consider this. Elsewhere she had heard another rumor, that the Terran HQ had sent out a call for functioning telepaths, all over the galaxy. She had even toyed with the cynical thought of going and offering herself for their study. They'd get some surprises, she told herself, that they never expected. But the deep-rooted habit, so deep as to be instinct, to keep their race's very existence secret from other beings, had made this idea the briefest, most surface, mental game. In any case, all others of her kind were long dead, long vanished; why tantalize them?
However, if anyone could find out what was being done to Darkover it would be these telepaths. She thought with a curious, almost personal rage of Regis Hastur. How had this young man managed to evade fourteen assassins in a row? Was it possible she had underestimated Comyn telepaths?
Well, one thing was certain. If they were all gathering together in one location, for whatever reason, they would be a convenient target.
She might as well make a good job of it; wait until they were all assembled, and with one final stroke, free Darkover of the last barrier from becoming another planet in the chain of Empire.
Even with all the resources of Worldwreckers, Incorporated, at her fingertips, a mass murder on this scale would take time and planning. Well, she had all the long and bitter Darkovan winter to plan it.
Hour after hour she sat at her window watching the snowstorms and the distant mountains. And beyond those mountains, more mountains, and more forests, and in those forests . . . .
Nothing. No one. Death and ruin. Not one left alive. Except only I, and that not for long.
The isolation sign was still on Missy's room, and the guarding nurses and hospital personnel had grown tired of repeating to Conner: "I'm sorry. No visitors for this patient."
Conner was at his wit's end. On the seventh day, he bullied his way through to Jason and David, demanding: "Why are you keeping her drugged and isolated? You promised I could see her! You've told me she was recovering, and no matter how badly she was hurt, she must be healing up by now! She'll be wanting me. I've got to see her!"
"Conner," Jason said gently, "don't you realize, she won't be wanting anyone. She isn't responding to people at all—she just isn't in contact. Missy is insane."
"So am I, according to Terran Empire official directives," Conner said. "Or didn't you read my record? Maybe it takes one lunatic to help another."
Jason put out his hand. "Sit down, man—don't stand over me like that! I'm on your side. But don't you realize? This—this creature nearly killed Keral; his hands are just now healing. She tore up a spaceforce jail and our emergency room."
"Yes," David said, "and she nearly killed you, Jason; if your head had struck the doorjamb instead of the wall, it would have smashed like an eggshell. It was all Desideria and Linnea, together, could do to hold her long enough to get her under drugs. Quite frankly, we don't dare let her regain consciousness."
Conner said stubbornly, "She won't hurt me. She needs me. And I love her."
David felt the shock and upheaval of his own deep ambivalence, like a disrupting blow. Conner was wide open to him, with all the misery of a desperately lonely man who has at long last found something and had it snatched away again. Between pity and dismay, David burst out, "Conner—we've been trying to keep this from you just because you do love her, but haven't we told you what happened to—to Missy? She's changed; she's not even a woman now!"
"I don't understand—"
David said, "I'll spare you the technical report. I knew how you reacted to Missy; we all knew, remember? But how about some nice, sexy nude photos." Pity and rage made him ruthless of how he hurt the older man. He took the pictures of Missy, lying in drugged sleep, from a folder and handed them over.
"Here's your—girl friend. Love? Look, Conner, she couldn't even react to you as a woman—"
Conner took the pictures. His face drained slowly of color, turning the grayish green sick tint of a black skin gone pale. He wet his lips, swallowing hard, and laid them down. Then he said, his voice strained and harsh, "I don't know how this happened. Maybe you can help her. But—with this happening—she'll need me more than ever. She'll need me to care for her."
"You don't understand," David almost shouted, "you still speak of her, she isn't a girl, she isn't a—or maybe you have a secret yen for men?"
Conner's face congested with rage and for a moment, as they faced each other, David felt it like a tangible, beating thing which would reach out, strike and kill. He faced Conner, not flinching, and then Conner drew a deep breath, controlling his fury.
"Listen, you bastard," he said evenly, "it's Missy I love, care about, need. Not the fact that she has a body I happened to enjoy going to bed with. I don't discount that, but I could get that almost anywhere, if I needed it that much. I happen to love Missy—love her. Or him. Or it, if you prefer. Which means that I care what happens to her, whether I can bang her or not. Which is something you evidently have never felt for anyone, and I'm sorry for you, you bastard. But if you keep me away from her any longer, damn you, the wingding she threw is going to look like a little girl crying for her doll, compared to the one I'll throw!"
The words echoed in the room, tangible, vibrating, as if they had been written in lines of fire in the air. David said, and had the sense that it was an enormous and somehow personal capitulation, "Dave. I didn't understand. I'm—I'm sorry. Forgive me. Jason—" he turned to the other doctor, "I think we'll have to let Missy see him. If he can get through to her, if he can make her understand this, maybe we won't have any more trouble with her."
"It's a risk we've got to take. But suppose she kills you before you can get through?"
"That's a risk I'll take," Conner said. "You don't realize. Missy brought me up alive out of hell; and do you think I'm going to stop at trying to bring her out of her own hell, whatever it may be?"
The room was white with the reflected light from the falling snow beyond the windows. Missy lay huddled beneath a sheet, pale and motionless, her colorless hair spread on the pillow. Her face seemed narrow, pale, and inhuman, features bony and protruding.
No, Conner thought with a curious pang, she was no longer beautiful. Had she ever been beautiful or was it only the strange glamour she cast about him?
Jason had told him that the drugs were being allowed to wear off; that she would waken naturally soon. Conner went quietly to her side and sat down to wait. She slept still, breathing quietly and moaning a little under her breath, and even through her disturbed dreams Conner sensed grief, shock and a frightening shame. He reached for her limp white hand and took it between his own. The skin felt rough and harsh, faintly discolored. Conner had the sketchy medical training given to all ship's officers who may have to be responsible for passengers and crew in the absence of trained men, and he could follow, to some slight extent, the briefing Jason had given him. Extreme hormone imbalance; recession of female hormones and overbalance of androgens, pituitary and thyroid imbalance out of control; this created the skin troubles. Recession of breast tissue, partial atrophy of female genital structures, all accelerated . . . .
"The instability is hormone induced, of course," Jason had said, "but the emotional shock is considerable, too; I gather she wasn't aware this could happen."
Conner could reach her frightened mind, feel her fear and shock at the failure of the one stable thing in her world, her fascination over anyone she sought to fascinate. (Had her failure to attract David touched off the first uncertainty?) Conner set himself to reach out, in the old way he had learned . . . .
. . . spinning in space, a point of nothingness, he left his body behind, reaching out with the inner self which had nothing to do with his body:
Missy, Missy. I am here. I am with you. Bodies are little to us: we can use them or leave them, enjoy them or forget them; but we are more together than we would be, locked in love, when w
e can reach one another this way . . . .
He came back slowly to awareness. Missy had opened her great gray eyes and lay staring up at him.
"Dave?" she said, in an accepting whisper, and smiled. His dark hand clasped hard on her pallid one. There was no need for words, but he whispered them anyway, his face bending over hers:
"I don't care what you are, Missy. I love you, and I need you. Maybe they can help you, but whether or not they can, we belong together and we'll come through this together, one way or the other. Now we've found someone to belong to, nothing else matters."
She was too weak to move, but she turned her face and pressed her lips to his palm. Then she fell asleep, her hand still clasped in Conner's.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DAY BY DAY, they streamed into the city, in caravans and alone, red-headed Darkovan telepaths: Comyn and commoner, city dweller and rustic, noble and peasant, with only one thing in common; the flaming red hair which had been, from time immemorial on Darkover, linked indissolubly with the telepath genes and the laran powers of the ancient world.
No; more than one thing in common. Each one, as he came, through snow-clogged passes or dust-choked dry plains, had another story to tell of a world lying in ruin, near death.
"For the fall plowing, the earth has turned to black choking dust," said a quiet bitter man from the lowlands. "Even the weeds will not grow. The soil is barren as a woman of ninety years."
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