The Marion Zimmer Bradley Science Fiction

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Girl, get hold of yourself! Fight it! Fight it! The more scared you are, the worse it’s going to be!”

  She was rigid, trembling, in a trance of terror.

  “You rotten little coward,” he yelled at her, “snap out of it! Or are all you Mentorians so gutless that you believe any half-baked folk tale the Lhari pass off on you? You and your fine talk about earning the star-drive! What would you do with it after you got it—if you die of fear when you try?”

  “Oh! You—!” She flung her head back, her eyes blazing with rage. “Anything you can do, I can do, too!” He saw life flowing back into her face, and the trembling now was with fury, not fear; she was fighting the pain, the crawling itch in her nerve ends, the terrible sense of draining disorganization.

  Bart felt his hold on himself breaking. He whispered hoarsely, “That’s the girl—don’t be scared if I—black out for a minute.” He held on to consciousness with his last courage, afraid if he fainted, the girl would collapse again.

  She reached for him, and Bart, starved for some human touch, drew her into his arms. They clung together, and he felt her wet face against his own, the softness of her trembling hands. She was still crying a little. Then the blackness closed on him, as if endless, and the gray blur of warp-drive peak blotted his brain into nothingness.

  He came out of it to feel her cheek soft against his, her head trustfully on his shoulder. He said huskily, “All right, Meta?”

  “I’m fine,” she murmured, shakily. He tightened his hands a little, realizing that for the first time in months he had physically forgotten his Lhari disguise, that Meta had given him this priceless reassurance that he was human. But, as if suddenly aware of it again, she looked up at him and drew hesitantly away.

  “Don’t—Meta, am I so horrible to you then? So—repulsive?”

  “No, it’s only—” she bit her lip—“it’s just that the Lhari are—I can’t quite explain it.”

  “Different,” Bart finished for her. “At first I was repelled—physically repelled by myself, and by them. It was like living among weird animals, and being one of the animals. And then, one day, Ringg was just another kid. He had gray skin and long claws and white hair, just the way I once had pinkish skin and short fingernails and reddish hair, but the difference wasn’t that I was human inside and he wasn’t. If you skinned Ringg, and skinned me, we’d be almost identical. And all of a sudden then, Ringg and Vorongil and all the rest were men to me. Just people. I thought you Mentorians, after living with the Lhari all these years, would feel that.”

  She said in slow wonder, “We’ve lived and worked side by side with them all these years, yet kept so apart! I’ve defended the Lhari to you, yet it took you to explain them to me!”

  His arm was still round her, her head still lying on his shoulder. Bart was just beginning to wonder if he might kiss her when the infirmary door opened and Ringg stood in the doorway, staring at them with surprise, shock and revulsion. Bart realized, suddenly, how it must look to Ringg—who certainly shared Meta’s prejudice—but even as he comprehended it, Ringg’s face altered. Meta slipped from Bart’s arms and rose, but Ringg came slowly a step into the room.

  “I—remembered you had a bad reaction, to warp-drive,” he said. “I came to see if you were all right. I would never have believed—but I’m beginning to guess. There was always something about you, Bartol.” He shut the door behind him and stood against it. His voice lowered almost to a whisper, he said, “You’re not Lhari, are you?”

  “Vorongil knows,” Bart said.

  Ringg nodded. “That day on Lharillis. The crew was talking, but only one or two of them really know what happened. There are a dozen rumors. I wanted to see you. They said you were sick with radiation burns—”

  “I was.”

  Ringg raised his hand, absently, to the still-puckered mark on his cheek, saw Bart watching him and smiled.

  “You’re not worrying about that fight? Forget it, friend. If anything, I admire someone who can use his claws—especially if, as I begin to suspect, they’re not his.” He leaned over, his hand lightly on Bart’s shoulder. “I don’t forget so easily. You saved my life, remember? And you’re a hero on the ship for warning us all. Are you really human? Why not get rid of the disguise?”

  Bart laughed wryly. “It won’t come off,” he said, and explained.

  Ringg raised his hands to his own face curiously. “I wonder what sort of human I’d make?” He looked at Meta’s small fingers. “Not that I’d ever have the nerve. But then, it’s no surprise to anyone that you have courage, Bartol.”

  “You seem to accept it—”

  “It’s a shock,” said Ringg honestly, “it scares me a little. But I’m remembering the friendship. That was real. As far as I’m concerned, it still is real.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ringg was still bending over Meta’s hand when Vorongil came into the cabin. He started to speak, then noticed Ringg. “I might have known,” he growled, “if there was anything to find out, you’d find it.”

  “Shall I go, rieko mori?”

  “No, stay. You’ll find it out some way or other, you might as well get it right the first time. But first of all—are you all right, Meta?”

  Her chin went up, defiantly. “Yes. And why have you lied to us all these years—all of you?”

  Vorongil looked mildly startled. “It wasn’t exactly a lie. Nine out of ten Lhari captains believe it with all their heart—that humans die in warp-drive. I wasn’t sure myself until I heard the debates in Council City, last year.”

  “But why?”

  Vorongil sighed. His eyes rested disconcertingly on Bart. “I presume you know human history,” he said, “better than I do. The Lhari have never had a war, in all written history. Quite frankly, you terrified us. It was decided, on the highest summit levels, that we wouldn’t give humans too many chances to find out things we preferred to keep to ourselves. The first few ships to carry Mentorians had carried them without cold-sleep, but people forget easily. The truth is buried in the records of those early voyages.

  “As the Mentorians grew more important to us, we began to regret the policy, but by that time the Mentorians themselves believed it so firmly that when we tried the experiment of carrying them through the shift into warp-drive, they died of fear—pure suggestion. I tried it with you, Meta, because I knew Bart’s presence would reassure you. The others were given an inert sedative they believed to be the cold-sleep drug. How are you feeling, Bart?”

  “Fine—but wondering what’s going to happen.”

  “You won’t be hurt,” Vorongil said, quickly. Then: “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I don’t, sir. David Briscoe did what I did, and he’s dead. So are three other men.”

  “Men do strange things from fear—men and Lhari. Your people, as I said before, have a strange history. It scares us. Can you guarantee that some, at least, of your people wouldn’t try to come and take the star-drive by force? We left a man on Lharillis who thought nothing of killing twenty-four of us. I suppose the captain of the Multiphase, knowing he had gravely violated Lhari laws, knowing that Briscoe’s report might touch off an intergalactic war between men and Lhari—well, I suppose he felt that half a dozen deaths were better than half a million. I’m not defending him. Just explaining, maybe, why he did what he did.”

  Bart lowered his eyes. He had no answer to that.

  “No, you won’t be killed. But that’s all I can guarantee. My personal feelings have nothing to do with it. You’ll have to go to Council Planet with us, and you’ll have to be psych-checked there. That is Lhari law—and by treaty with your Federation, it is human law, too. If you know anything dangerous to us, we have a legal right to eliminate those memories before you can be released.”

  Meta smiled at him, encouragingly, but Bart shivered. That was almost worse than the thought of death.

  And the fear grew more oppressive as the ship forged onward toward the home world of the Lh
ari. And it did not lessen when, after they touched down, he was taken from the ship under guard.

  He had only a glimpse, through dark glasses, of the terrible brilliance of the Lhari sun dazzling on crystal towers, before he was hustled into a closed surface car. It whisked him away to a building he did not see from the outside; he was taken up by private elevator to a suite of rooms which might—for all he could tell—have been a suite in a luxury hotel or a lunatic asylum. The walls were translucent, the furniture oddly colored, and so carefully padded that even a homicidal or suicidal person could not have hurt himself or anyone else on it or with it.

  Food reached him often enough so that he never got hungry, but not often enough to keep him from being bored between meals, or from brooding. Two enormous Lhari came in to look at him every hour or so, but either they were deaf and dumb, did not understand his dialect of Lhari, or were under orders not to speak to him. It was the most frustrating time of his entire voyage.

  One day it ended. A Lhari and a Mentorian came for him and took him down elevators and up stairs, and into a quiet, neutral room where four Lhari were gathered. They sat him in a comfortable chair, and the Mentorian interpreter said gently, with apology:

  “Bart Steele, I have been asked to say to you that you will not be physically harmed in any way. This will be much simpler, and will have much less injurious effect on your mind if you cooperate with us. At the same time, I have been asked to remind you that resistance is absolutely useless, and if you attempt it, you will only be treated with force rather than with courtesy.”

  Bart sat facing them, shaking with humiliation. The thought of resistance flashed through his mind. Maybe he should make them fight for what they got! At least they’d see that all humans weren’t like the Mentorians, to sit quietly and let themselves be brainwashed without a word of protest.

  He started to spring up, and the hands of his guards tightened, swift and strong, even before his muscles had fully tightened. Bart’s head dropped. Cold common sense doused over his brave thoughts. He was uncountable millions of light-years from his own people. He was absolutely alone. Bravery would mean nothing; submission would mean nothing. Would he be more of a man, somehow, if he let his mind be wrecked?

  “All right,” he muttered, “I won’t fight.”

  “You show your good sense,” the Mentorian said quietly. “Give me your left arm, please—or, if you are left-handed, your right. As you prefer.”

  Deftly, almost painlessly, a needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. Ringg, Vorongil, Meta, his father....

  Consciousness slid away.

  Years later—he never knew whether it was memory or imagination—it seemed to him that he could reach into that patch of gray and dreamless time and fish out questions and answers whole, the faces of Lhari swelling up suddenly in his eyes and shrinking back into interstellar distance, the sting-smell of drugs, the sound of unexpected voices, odd reflex pains, cobwebs of patchy memories that fitted nowhere else into his life so that he supposed they must go here.

  He only knew that there was a time he did not remember and then a time when he began to think there was such a thing as memory, and then a time when he floated without a body, and then another time when the path of every separate nerve in his body seemed to be outlined, a shimmering web in the gray murk. There was a mirror and a face. There were blotchy worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of Antares.

  Then the peak-point faded, his mind began to decelerate and angle slowly down and down into the field of awareness, and he became fuzzily aware that he was lying full length on a sort of couch. He shook his head groggily. It hurt. He sat up. That hurt, too. A hand closed gently around his elbow and he felt the cold edge of a cup against his sore mouth.

  “Take a sip of this.”

  The liquid felt cool on his tongue, evaporating almost before he could swallow; the fumes seemed to mount inside the root of his nose, expanding tremendously inside his head and brain. Abruptly his head was clear, the last traces of gray fuzz gone.

  “When you feel able,” the Mentorian said courteously, “the High Council will see you.”

  Bart blinked. As if exploring a sore tooth with his tongue, his mind sought for memories, but they all seemed clear, marshaled in line. The details, clear and unblurred, of his voyage here. His humiliation and resentment against the Lhari. They could have changed my thinking, my attitudes. They could have made me admire or be loyal to the Lhari. They didn’t. I’m still me.

  “I’m ready now.” He got up, reeled and had to lean on the Mentorian; his feet did not seem to touch the ground in quite the right way. After a minute he could walk steadily, and followed the Mentorian along a corridor. The Mentorian said into a small grille, “The Vegan Bartol, alias Bart Steele,” and after a moment a doorway opened.

  Inside a room rose, high, domed, vaulted above his head, whitish opalescent, washed with green. For a moment, while his eyes adjusted to the light, he wondered how the Lhari saw it.

  Beyond an expanse of black, glassy floor, he saw a low semicircular table, behind which sat eight Lhari. All wore pale robes with high collars that rose stiffly behind their domed heads; all were old, their faces lined with many wrinkles, and seven of the eight were as bald as the hull of the Swiftwing. Under their eyes he hesitated; then, unexpectedly, pride stiffened his back.

  They should have done a better job of brainwashing, if they expected him to skulk in like a scared rabbit! He held his head high and moved across the floor step by steady step, trying not to limp or display that he felt tired or sore.

  You’re human! Act proud of it!

  No one moved until he stood before the semicircle of ancients. Then the youngest, the only one of the eight with some trace of feathery crest on his high gray head, said “Captain Vorongil, you identify this person?”

  “I do,” Vorongil said, and Bart saw him seated before the high Council. To Bart, the Lhari captain seemed a familiar, almost a friendly face.

  “Well, Bart Steele, alias Bartol son of Berihun,” said one old Lhari, “what have you to say for yourself?”

  Bart stood silent, not moving. What could he say that would not reveal how desperately alone, how young and foolish and frightened he felt? All his brave resolutions seemed to drain away before their old, gnomish faces. Here he’d been thinking of himself as a brave spy, a gallant fighter in humanity’s cause and what not. Now he saw himself for what he was; a reckless boy, meddling in affairs too big for him. He lowered his eyes.

  “We have read the transcript of your knowledge,” said the old Lhari. “There is little in it that we do not know. We are not, of course, concerned with human conspiracies unless they endanger Lhari lives. The Antares authorities will deal with the man Montano for an unauthorized landing on Lharillis, in violation of Federation treaty.”

  He smiled, his gnome’s face breaking into a million tiny cracks like a piece of gray-glazed pottery. “Bartol, or whatever you call yourself, you are a brave young man. I suppose you are afraid we will block your memories, or your ability to speak of them?”

  Bart nodded, gulping. Did the old Lhari read his mind?

  “A year ago we might have done so. Captain Vorongil, you will be interested to know that we have discussed this in Council, and your recommendations have been taken. The secret that humans can endure star-drive has outlived its usefulness. For good or ill, it is secret no longer. We cannot possibly eliminate all the old records, or the enterprising people who hunt them out.

  “The captain who had David Briscoe killed, under the mistaken notion that this would excuse his own negligence in letting Briscoe stow away on his ship, is undergoing psychotherapy and may eventually recover.

  “As for the rest—Bart Steele, you know nothing that is a danger to us. You do not know the coordinates of our world
, or even in which galaxy it is located. You do not know where we secure the catalyst your people seek. In fact, you know nothing that is not soon to become common knowledge. In view of that, we have decided not to interfere with your memories.”

  “Talk as much as you like,” added another of the ancients, “and may your memories of this voyage help in understanding between the Lhari and other human races. Good fortune to you.” And he was smiling.

  “There is another side to this,” said a third, more sternly and gravely. “You have broken a treaty between Lhari and man. We have dealt with you as the laws required; now your own people must do so. You must return with the Swiftwing to the planet where the violation originated—” he consulted a memorandum—“Procyon Alpha. There you and the man Raynor Three will face charges of unlawful conspiracy to board a Lhari ship, in violation of Intergalactic Trade treaties. Captain Vorongil, will you be responsible for him?”

  So I’ve lost, Bart thought drearily. I didn’t even learn anything important enough for them to suppress. There was a strange wounded pride in this; after all his trouble, he was being treated like a little boy who has used a great deal of enterprise and intelligence to rob a cookie cupboard, and for his pains is sent home with the stolen cookie in his hand.

  Vorongil touched his arm. “Come, Bartol,” he said gently, “I’m taking you back to the Swiftwing. I don’t have to treat you like a prisoner, do I?”

  Numbly, Bart gave what the old Lhari asked, his word of honor not to attempt escape (Escape? Where to?) or to attempt to enter the drive chamber of the Swiftwing while they were still among the Lhari worlds.

  As they left the council hall, Bart, in a gesture of despair, covered his face with his hands. As he brought them down, he found himself staring at them, transfixed.

  The fingers looked longer and thinner than he remembered them, but they were his own hands again. The nails seemed faintly thick and ridged, and there was still a faint grayish tinge through the pale flesh color, but they were human hands. Unmistakably. He felt of his nose and ears, with fumbling fingers; raised his hand and touched the very short, crisp hair growing on his newly shaven skull.