Maybe, Jay thought, I could stay myself if I could remember the rest. Dr. Forth said Jason would remember the Trailmen with kindness, not dislike.
Jay searched his memory and found nothing but familiar frustration: years spent in an alien land, apart from a human heritage, stranded and abandoned. My father left me. He crashed the plane and I never saw him again and I hate him for leaving me…
But his father had not abandoned him. He had crashed the plane trying to save them both. It was no one’s fault—
Except my father’s. For trying to fly over the Hellers into a country where no man belongs…
He hadn’t belonged. And yet the Trailmen, whom he considered little better than roaming beasts, had taken the alien child into their city, their homes, their hearts. They had loved him. And he…
“And I loved them,” I found myself saying half aloud, then realized that Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook my head rather groggily. “What’s the matter?”
“You frightened me,” she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison. He couldn’t even give me the splinter of life I’d won for myself, but had to come sneaking out of my mind. How he must hate me! Not half as much as I hated him, damn him! Along with everything else, he’d scared Kyla half to death!
She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking down into hell again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold world he’d made his life. Kyla’s face was lifted, soft and intent and pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed her, hard.
“Could a ghost do this?” I demanded, “or this?”
She whispered, “No—oh, no,” and her arms went up to lock around my neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and disappear.
Regis had been right. It had been the only way.
The Old One was not old at all; the title was purely ceremonial. This one was young—not much older than I—but he had poise and dignity and the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur. It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in spreading from star to star—feeling of knowing one’s own place, a dignity that didn’t demand recognition because it had never lacked it.
Like all Trailmen he had the chinless face and lobeless ears, the heavy-haired body which looked slightly less than human. He spoke very low—the Trailmen have very acute hearing—and I had to strain my ears to listen, and remember to keep my own voice down.
He stretched his hand to me, and I lowered my head over it and murmured, “I make submission, Old One.”
“Never mind that,” he said in his gentle twittering voice. “Sit down, my son. You are welcome here, but I feel you have abused our trust in you. We dismissed you to your own land because we felt you would be happier so. Did we show you anything but kindness, that after so many years you return with armed men?”
The reproof in his red eyes was hardly an auspicious beginning; I said helplessly, “Old One, the men with me are not armed. A band of those-who-may-not-enter-cities attacked us, and we defended ourselves. I traveled with so many men only because I feared to travel the passes alone.”
“But does that explain why you have returned at all?” The reason and reproach in his voice made sense.
Finally I said, “Old One, we come as supplicants. My people appeal to your people in the hope that you will be—” I started to say, as human, stopped and amended “—that you will deal as kindly with them as with me.”
His face betrayed nothing. “What do you ask?” I explained. I told it badly, stumbling, not knowing the technical terms, knowing they had no equivalents anyway in the Trailmen’s language. He listened, asking a penetrating question now and again. When I mentioned the Terran Legate’s offer to recognize the Trailmen as a separate and independent government, he frowned and rebuked me:
“We of the Sky People have no dealings with the Terrans, and care nothing for their recognition—or its lack.”
For that I had no answer, and the Old One continued, kindly but indifferently, “We do not like to think that the fever which is a children’s little sickness with us shall kill so many of your kind. But you cannot in all honesty blame us. You cannot say that we spread the disease; we never go beyond the mountains. Are we to blame that the winds change or the moons come together in the sky? When the time has come for men to die, they die.” He stretched his hand in dismissal. “I will give your men safe-conduct to the river, Jason. Do not return.”
Regis Hastur rose suddenly and faced him. “Will you hear me, Father?” He used the ceremonial title without hesitation, and the Old One said in distress, “The son of Hastur need never speak as a suppliant to the Sky People!”
“Nevertheless, hear me as a suppliant, Father,” Regis said quietly. “It is not the strangers and aliens of Terra who are pleading. We have learned one thing from the strangers of Terra, which you have not yet learned. I am young and it is not fitting that I should teach you, but you have said: ‘Are we to blame that the moons come together in the sky?’ No. But we have learned from the Terrans not to blame the moons in the sky for our own ignorance of the ways of the Gods—by which I mean the ways of sickness or poverty or misery.”
“These are strange words for a Hastur,” said the Old One, displeased.
“These are strange times for a Hastur,” said Regis loudly. The Old One winced, and Regis moderated his tone, but continued vehemently, “You blame the moons in the sky. I say the moons are not to blame, nor the winds, nor the Gods. The Gods send these things to man to test their wits and to find if they have the will to master them!”
The Old One’s forehead ridged vertically and he said with stinging contempt, “Is this the breed of king which men call Hastur now?”
“Man or God or Hastur, I am not too proud to plead for my people,” retorted Regis, flushing with anger. “Never in all the history of Darkover has a Hastur stood before one of you and begged—”
“—for the men from another world.”
“—for all men on our world! Old One, I could sit and keep state in the House of Hasturs, and even death could not touch me until I grew weary of living! But I preferred to learn new lives from new men. The Terrans have something to teach even the Hasturs, and they can learn a remedy against the Trailmen’s fever.” He looked round at me, turning the discussion over to me again, and I said:
“I am no alien from another world, Old One. I have been a son in your house. Perhaps I was sent to teach you to fight destiny. I cannot believe you are indifferent to death.”
Suddenly, hardly knowing what I was going to do until I found myself on my knees, I knelt and looked up into the quiet, stern, remote face of the nonhuman.
“My father,” I said, “you took a dying man and a dying child from a burning plane. Even those of their own kind might have stripped their corpses and left them to die. You saved the child, fostered him and treated him as a son. When he reached an age to be unhappy with you, you let a dozen of your people risk their lives to take him to his own. You cannot ask me to believe that you are indifferent to the death of a million of my people, when the fate of one could stir your pity!”
There was a moment’s silence. Finally the Old One said, “Indifferent—no. But helpless. My people die when they leave the mountains. The air is too rich for them. The food is wrong. The light blinds and tortures them. Can I send them to suffer and die, those people who call me father?”
And a memory, buried all my life, suddenly surfaced. I said urgently, “Father, listen. In the world I live in now, I am called a wise man. You need not believe me, but listen; I know your people, they are my people. I remember when I left you, more than a dozen of my foster parents’ friends offered, knowing they risked death, to go with me. I was a child; I did
not realize the sacrifice they made. But I watched them suffer, as we went lower in the mountains, and I resolved—I resolved…” I spoke with difficulty, forcing the words through a reluctant barricade, “… that since others had suffered so for me… I would spend my life in curing the sufferings of others. Father, the Terrans call me a wise doctor, a man of healing. Among the Terrans I can see that my people, if they will come to us and help us, have air they can breathe and food which will suit them and that they are guarded from the light. I don’t ask you to send anyone, father. I ask only —tell your sons what I have told you. If I know your people—who are my people forever—hundreds of them will offer to return with me. And you may witness what your foster son has sworn here; if one of your sons dies, your alien son will answer for it with his own life.
The words had poured from me in a flood, They were not all mine; some unconscious thing had recalled in me that Jay Allison had power to make these promises. For the first time I began to see what force, what guilt, what dedication working in Jay Allison had turned him aside from me. I remained at the Old One’s feet, kneeling, overcome, ashamed of the thing I had become. Jay Allison was worth ten of me. Irresponsible, Forth had said. Lacking purpose, lacking balance. What right had I to despise my sober self?
At last I felt the Old One touch my head lightly.
“Get up, my son,” he said, “I will answer for my people. And forgive me for my doubts and my delays.”
Neither Regis nor I spoke for a minute after we left the audience room; then, almost as one, we turned to each other. Regis spoke first, soberly.
“It was a fine thing you did, Jason. I didn’t believe he’d agree to it.”
“It was your speech that did it,” I denied. The sober mood, the unaccustomed surge of emotion, was still on me,—but it was giving way to a sudden upswing of exaltation. Damn it, I’d done it! Let Jay Allison try to match that.
Regis still looked grave. “He’d have refused, but you appealed to him as one of themselves. And yet it wasn’t quite that—it was something more—” Regis put a quick embarrassed arm around my shoulders and suddenly blurted out, “I think the Terran Medical played hell with your life, Jason! And even if it saves a million lives—it’s hard to forgive them for that!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LATE THE NEXT DAY the Old One called us in again, and told us that a hundred men had volunteered to return with us and act as blood donors and experimental subjects for research into the Trailmen’s disease.
The trip over the mountains, so painfully accomplished, was easier in return. Our escort of a hundred Trailmen guaranteed us against attack, and they could choose the easiest paths.
Only as we undertook the long climb downward through the foothills did the Trailmen, unused to ground travel at any time, and suffering from the unaccustomed low altitude, begin to weaken. As we grew stronger, more and more of them faltered, and we traveled more and more slowly. Not even Kendricks could be callous about “inhuman animals” by the time we reached the point where we had left the pack horses. And it was Rafe Scott who came to me and said desperately, “Jason, these poor fellows will never make it to Carthon. Lerrys and I know this country. Let us go ahead, as fast as we can travel alone, and arrange at Carthon for transit—maybe we can get pressurized aircraft to fly them from here. We can send a message from Carthon, too, about accommodations for them at the Terran HQ.”
I was surprised and a little guilty that I had not thought of this myself. I covered it with a mocking, “I thought you didn’t give a damn about ‘my friends’.”
Rafe said doggedly, “I guess I was wrong about that. They’re going through this out of a sense of duty, so they must be pretty different from the way I thought they were.”
Regis, who had overheard Rafe’s plan, now broke in quietly, “There’s no need for you to travel ahead, Rafe. I can send a quicker message.”
I had forgotten that Regis was a trained telepath. He added, “There are some space and distance limitations to such messages, but there is a regular relay net all over Darkover, and one of the relays is a girl who lives at the very edge of the Terran Zone. If you’ll tell me what will give her access to the Terran HQ—” he flushed slightly and explained, “From what I know of the Terrans, she would not be very fortunate relaying the message if she merely walked to the gate and said she had a relayed telepathic message for someone, would she?”
I had to smile at the picture that conjured up in my mind. “I’m afraid not,” I admitted. “Tell her to go to Dr. Forth, and give the message from Dr. Jason Allison.”
Regis looked at me curiously—it was the first time I had spoken my own name in the hearing of the others. But he nodded, without comment. For the next hour or two he seemed somewhat more preoccupied than usual, but after a time he came to me and told me that the message had gone through. Some time later he relayed an answer; that airlift would be waiting for us, not at Carthon, but at a small village near the ford of the Kadarin where we had left our trucks.
When we camped that night there were a dozen practical problems needing attention: the time and exact place of crossing the ford, the reassurance to be given to terrified Trailmen who could face leaving their forests but not crossing the final barricade of the river, the small help in our power to be given the sick ones. But after everything had been done that I could do, and after the whole camp had quieted down, I sat before the low-burning fire and stared into it, deep in painful lassitude. Tomorrow we would cross the river and a few hours later we would be back in the Terran HQ. And then…
And then—and then nothing. I would vanish, I would utterly cease to exist anywhere, except as a vagrant ghost troubling Jay Allison’s unquiet dreams. As he moved through the cold round of his days, I would be no more than a spent wind, a burst bubble, a thinned cloud.
The rose and saffron of the dying fire gave shape to my dreams. Once more, as in the Trailcity that night, Kyla slipped through firelight to my side, and I looked up at her and suddenly I knew I could not bear it. I pulled her to me and muttered, “Oh Kyla —Kyla, I won’t even remember you!”
She pushed my hands away, kneeling upright, and said urgently, “Jason, listen. We are close to Carthon, the others can lead them the rest of the way. Why go back to them at all? Slip away now and never go back! We can—” she stopped, coloring fiercely, that sudden and terrifying shyness overcoming her again, and at last she said in a whisper, “Darkover is a wide world, Jason. Big enough for us to hide in. I don’t believe they would search very far.”
They wouldn’t. I could leave word with Kendricks—not with Regis, the telepath would see through me immediately—that I had ridden ahead to Carthon, with Kyla. By the time they realized that I had fled, they would be too concerned with getting the Trailmen safely to the Terran Zone to spend much time looking for a runaway. As Kyla said, the world was wide. And it was my world. And I would not be alone in it.
“Kyla, Kyla,” I said helplessly, and crushed her against me, kissing her. She closed her eyes and I took a long, long look at her face. Not beautiful, no. But womanly and brave and all the other beautiful things. It was a farewell look, and I knew it, if she didn’t.
After the briefest time, she pulled a little away, and her flat voice was gentler and more breathless than usual. “We’d better leave before the others waken.” She saw that I did not move. “Jason—”
I could not look at her. Muffled behind my hands, I said, “No, Kyla. I—I promised the Old One to look after my people in the Terran World.”
“You won’t be there to look after them! You won’t be you!”
I said bleakly, “I’ll write a letter to remind myself. Jay Allison has a very strong sense of duty. He’ll look after them for me. He won’t like it, but he’ll do it, with his last breath. He’s a better man than I am, Kyla. You’d better forget about me,” I said, wearily. “I never existed.”
That wasn’t the end. Not nearly. She—begged, and I don’t know why I put myself through the hell of s
tubborn refusal. But in the end she ran away, crying, and I threw myself down by the fire, cursing Forth, cursing my own folly, but most of all cursing Jay Allison, hating my other self with a blistering, sickening rage.
But before dawn I stirred in the light of the dying fire and Kyla’s arms were around my neck in the darkness, her body pressed to mine, racked with convulsive crying.
“I can’t convince you,” she wept, “and I can’t change you—and I wouldn’t if I could. But while I can—while I can—I’ll have you while you’re you.”
I crushed her to me. And for the moment my fear of tomorrow, my hate and bitterness against the men who had played with my life, were swept away in the sweetness of her mouth, warm and yielding, under mine. There in the light of the fading fire, desperate, knowing I would forget, I took her to me.
Whatever I might be tomorrow, tonight I was hers.
And I knew then how men feel when they love in the shadow of death—worse than death because I would live, a cold ghost of myself, through cold days and colder nights. It was fierce and savage and desperate; we were both trying to crowd a lifetime we could never have into a few stolen hours. But as I looked down at Kyla’s wet face in the fading dawn, my bitterness had gone.
I might be swept away forever, a ghost, a nothing, blown away in the winds of one man’s memory.
But to that last fading spark of memory, I would be forever grateful, and in my limbo I would be grateful, if ghosts know gratitude, to those who had called me from my nowhere to know this: these days of struggle and the love of comrades, the clean wind of the mountains in my face again, a last adventure, the warm lips of a woman in my arms.
I had lived more, in my scant week of life, than Jay Allison would live in all his white and sterile years. I had had my lifetime. I didn’t grudge him his, any more.
To Save a World Page 27
