The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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 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 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?”

  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 soberer 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!”

  * * * *

  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, un-used 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 travelled 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 animals. 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 ‘any of 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 than 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 pre-occupied than usual, but after a time he came to me and told me that the message had gone through. Sometime later he relayed an answer; that airlift would be waiting for us, not at Carthon, but 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-colors gave shape to my dreams. Once more, as in the trail city 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. I must go back—”

  “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 stubbornness. 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.

  * * * *

  Coming through the outskirts of the small village the next afternoon, the village where the airlift would meet us, we noted that the poorer quarter was almost abandoned. Regis said bleakly, “It’s begun,” and dropped out of line to stand in the doorway of a silent dwelling. After a minute he beckoned to me, and I looked inside.

  I wished I hadn’t. The sight would haunt me while I lived. An old man, two young women and half a dozen children between four and fifteen years old lay inside. The old man, one of the children, and one of the young women were laid out neatly in clean death, shrouded, their faces covered with green branches after the Darkovan custom for the dead. The other young woman lay huddled near the fireplace, her coarse dress splattered with the filthy stuff she had vomited, dying. The children—but even now I can’t think of the children without retching. One, very small, had been in the woman’s arms when she collapsed; it had squirmed free—for a little while. The others were in an indescribable condition and the worst of it was that one of them was still moving, feebly, long past help. Regis turned blindly from the door and leaned against the wall, his shoulders heaving. Not, as I first thought, in disgust, but in grief. Tears ran over his hands and spilled down, and when I took him by the arm to lead him away, he reeled and fell against me.

  He said in a broken, blurred, choking voice, “Oh, Lord, Jason, those children, those children—if you ever had any doubts about what you’re doing, any doubts about what you’ve done, think about that, think that you’ve saved a whole world from that, think that you’ve done something even the Hasturs couldn’t do!”

  My own throat tightened with something more than embarrassment. “Better wait till we know for sure whether the Terrans can carry through with it, and you’d better get to hell away from this doorway. I’m immune, but damn it, you’re not.” But I had to take him and lead him away, like a child, from that house. He looked up into my face and said with burning sincerity, “I wonder if you believe I’d give my life, a dozen times over, to have done that?”

  It was a curious, austere reward. But vaguely it comforted me. And then, as we rode into the village itself, I lost myself, or tried to lose myse
lf, in reassuring the frightened trailmen who had never seen a city on the ground, never seen or heard of an airplane. I avoided Kyla. I didn’t want a final word, a farewell. We had had our farewells already.

  * * * *

  Forth had done a marvelous job of having quarters ready for the trailmen, and after they were comfortably installed and reassured, I went down wearily and dressed in Jay Allison’s clothing. I looked out the window at the distant mountains and a line from the book on mountaineering, which I had bought as a youngster in an alien world, and Jay had kept as a stray fragment of personality, ran in violent conflict through my mind:

  Something hidden—go and find it…

  Something lost beyond the ranges…

  * * * *

  I had just begun to live. Surely I deserved better than this, to vanish when I had just discovered life. Did the man who did not know how to live, deserve to live at all? Jay Allison—that cold man who had never looked beyond any ranges—why should I be lost in him?

  Something lost beyond the ranges…nothing would be lost but myself. I was beginning to loathe the overflown sense of duty which had brought me back here. Now, when it was too late, I was bitterly regretting…Kyla had offered me life. Surely I would never see Kyla again.

  Could I regret what I would never remember? I walked into Forth’s office as if I were going to my doom. I was…

  Forth greeted me warmly.

  “Sit down and tell me all about it…” he insisted. I would rather not speak. Instead, compulsively, I made it a full report…and curious flickers came in and out of my consciousness as I spoke. By the time I realized I was reacting to a post-hypnotic suggestion, that in fact I was going under hypnosis again, it was too late and I could only think that this was worse than death because in a way I would be alive…

  * * * *

  Jay Allison sat up and meticulously straightened his cuff before tightening his mouth in what was meant for a smile. “I assume, then, that the experiment was a success?”