“My friends,” I assured him, “and we come to beg the Old One for an audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will receive us.”
He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the trunk and took the basket. The trailman said, “I am Carrho. Perhaps it would be better if I guided you to your foster-parents, so you will not be challenged.”
I breathed more freely. I did not personally recognize Carrho, but he looked pleasantly familiar. Guided by him, we climbed one by one up the dark stairway inside the trunk, and emerged into the bright square, shaded by the topmost leaves into a delicate green twilight. I felt weary and successful.
Kendricks stepped gingerly on the swaying, jiggling floor of the square. It gave slightly at every step, and Kendricks swore morosely in a language that fortunately only Rafe and I understood. Curious trailmen flocked to the street and twittered welcome and surprise.
* * * *
Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my foster-parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened to see it; their fur graying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby…they had insisted that I, of course, must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had to stay with me.
“Couldn’t we camp on the ground instead?” Kendricks asked, eying the flimsy shelter with distaste.
“It would offend our hosts,” I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it. Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight and seemed comfortable to me.
The first thing to be done was to despatch a messenger to the Old One, begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my foster-brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and birds eggs! It tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appetite and Regis Hastur with interested curiosity.
* * * *
After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster-parents asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained at the Royal Nest of the Old One.
There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me aside:
“I don’t much like leaving the rest of you—”
“You’ll be safe enough.”
“It’s not that I’m worried about, Dr. Allison.”
“Call me Jason,” I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little tightening of his mouth, “That’s it. You’ll have to be Dr. Allison tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to be the Jason he knows, too.”
“So—?”
“I wish I needn’t leave here. I wish you were—going to stay with the men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone—or only with Kyla.”
There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he—a Hastur—be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of me? It had never occurred to me that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pass it off lightly:
“Kyla might divert me.”
Regis said without emphasis, “Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once before.” Then, surprisingly, he laughed. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe Kyla will—scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up.”
* * * *
The coals of the dying fire laid strange tints of color on Kyla’s face and shoulders and the wispy waves of her dark hair. Now that we were alone, I felt constrained.
“Can’t you sleep, Jason?”
I shook my head. “Better sleep while you can.” I felt that this night of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but—habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors—dirty and unsanitary as any beast’s den.
Kyla said broodingly, “You’re a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are you—in Terra’s world?”
I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the whole truth:
“Kyla, the man you know as me doesn’t exist. I was created for this one specific task. Once it’s finished, so am I.”
She started, her eyes widening. “I’ve heard tales of—of the Terrans and their sciences—that they make men who aren’t real, men of metal—not bone and flesh—”
Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. “Is this metal? No, no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason—I won’t be him, I’ll be someone different—” How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when I didn’t understand it myself?
She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, “I saw—someone else—looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost.”
I shook my head savagely. “To the Terrans, I’m the ghost!”
“Poor ghost,” she whispered.
Her pity stung. I didn’t want it.
“What I don’t remember I can’t regret. Probably I won’t even remember you.” But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else, unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl, that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light—only a few coals in the brazier. She had removed her sexless outer clothing, and wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child’s smock and curiously appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar. Visible to whom?
She reached out an appealing hand. “Jason! Jason—?”
* * * *
My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling, under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison’s mind, and that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla’s image flickered in and out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then—as if seen at the wrong end of a telescope—far away and sharply incised and as remote and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.
Her hands closed on my shoulders. I put out a groping hand to push her away.
“Jason,” she implored, “don’t—go away from me like that! Talk to me, tell me!”
But her words reached me through emptiness.… I knew important things might hang on tomorrow’s meeting, Jason alone could come through that meeting, where the Terrans for some reason put him through this hell and damnation and torture…oh, yes…the trailmen’s fever.
Jay Allison pushed the girl’s hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they—not even human—could have a sense of duty!
With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan—where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn’t want to reveal that he wasn’t quite sure of what he was saying or doing, or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.
He started to ask, “Where did the Hastur kid go?” before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen’s language, that it had slipped from his thoughts completely.
“You—” he fished desperately for the girl’s name, “Kyla. You don’t speak the
trailmen’s language, do you?”
“A few words. No more. Why?” She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room—still not far from him—and he wondered remotely what his damned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile.
“Sit down, child. You needn’t be frightened.”
“I’m—I’m trying to understand—” the girl touched him again, evidently trying to conquer her terror. “It isn’t easy—when you turn into someone else under my eyes—” Jay saw that she was shaking in real fright.
He said wearily, “I’m not going to—to turn into a bat and fly away. I’m just a poor devil of a doctor who’s gotten himself into one unholy mess.” There was no reason, he was thinking, to take out his own misery and despair by shouting at this poor kid. God knew what she’d been through with his irresponsible other self—Forth had admitted that that damned “Jason” personality was a blend of all the undesirable traits he’d fought to smother all his life. By an effort of will he kept himself from pulling away from her hand on his shoulder.
“Jason, don’t—slip away like that! Think! Try to keep hold on yourself!”
Jay propped his head in his hands, trying to make sense of that. Certainly in the dim light she could not be too conscious of subtle changes of expression. She evidently thought she was talking to Jason. She didn’t seem to be overly intelligent.
“Think about tomorrow, Jason. What are you going to say to him? Think about your parents—”
Jay Allison wondered what they would think when they found a stranger here. He felt like a stranger. Yet he must have come, tonight, into this house and spoken—he rummaged desperately in his mind for some fragments of the trailmen’s language. He had spoken it as a child. He must recall enough to speak to the woman who had been a kind foster-mother to her alien son. He tried to form his lips to the unfamiliar shapes of words…
Jay covered his face with his hands again. Jason was the part of himself that remembered the trailmen. That was what he had to remember—Jason was not a hostile stranger, not an alien intruder in his body. Jason was a lost part of himself and at the moment a damn necessary part. If there were only some way to get back the Jason memories, skills, without losing himself…he said to the girl, “Let me think. Let me—” to his surprise and horror his voice broke into an alien tongue, “Let me alone, will you?”
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. A feeling of knowing one’s own place, a dignity that didn’t demand recognition because it had never lacked for 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 take 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 kind 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 travelled 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 suppliants. 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 tim
es 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 men 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 the 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?”
The Marion Zimmer Bradley Science Fiction Page 15
