none (3 page)

sciences need not perish for lack of Towers to work them.”

Cleindori stood beside him, her hand lightly on his shoulder. She said, “Father, I honor you for this. Butyour work is too slow, for they still call you outcaste and renegade and worse things. And that is why it isso much more important that young people like I, and like my half-sister Cassilde, and Kennard—”

Damon said, shocked, “Is Cassilde, too, going into Arilinn? It will kill Callista!” For Cassilde was

Callista’s own daughter, four or five years older than Cleindori.

“She is too old to need consent,” Cleindori said. “Father, it is necessary that the Towers shall not die until the time has come, even if the day must come when they are no longer needed. And I feel it laid

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upon my conscience to be Keeper of Arilinn.” She held out her hand to him. “No, Father, listen to me. I know
you
 
are not ambitious; you flung away the chance to command the City Guard; you could have been the most powerful man in Thendara; but you threw it away. I am not like that. If my
 
laran
 
is as powerful as the Lady of Arilinn told me, I want to be Keeper in a way that will let me
 
do
 
something useful with it; more than ministering to the peasants and teaching the village children! Father, I want to be Keeper of Arilinn!”

“You would put yourself into that prison from which we freed Callista at such great price! ” Damon said,

and his voice was unspeakably bitter.

“That was
 
her
 
life,” Cleindori flared, “this is
mine
 
! But listen to me, Father,” she said, kneeling beside him again. The anger was gone from her voice and a great seriousness had taken its place. “You have told me, and I have seen, that Arilinn declares the laws by which
 
laran
 
is used in this land, save for you few here who defy Arilinn.”

“They may be doing things otherwise in the Hellers or at Aldaran and beyond,” Damon qualified. “I

know little of that.”

“Then— ” Cleindori looked up at him, her round face very serious. “If I go to Arilinn and learn to be Keeper, by their own rules the most orthodox of the ways by which
 
laran
 
can be used—if I am Keeper by the Way of Arilinn, then I can change those laws, can I not? If the Keeper of Arilinn makes the rules for all the Towers, then, Father, I can change them, I can declare the truth; that the Way of Arilinn is cruel and inhuman—and because I have succeeded at it, they cannot say I am simply a failure or an outcaste attacking what I myself cannot do. I can change these terrible laws and cast down the Way of Arilinn. And when the Towers no longer give men and women over to a living death, then the young men and women of our world will flock to them, and the old matrix sciences of Darkover will be reborn. But these laws will never be changed—not until a Keeper of Arilinn can change them!”

Damon looked at his daugher, shaken. It was indeed the only way in which Arilinn’s cruel laws could bechanged; that a Keeper of Arilinn should herself declare a new decree that should be binding on all the Towers. He had tried his best, but he was renegade, outcaste; he could do nothing from outside the wallsof Arilinn. He had accomplished little—no one knew better than he how little he had accomplished.

“Father, it is fated,” Cleindori said, and her young voice trembled. “After all Callista suffered, after all you suffered, perhaps it was all for this, that I should go back and free those others. Now that you have proven that they can be freed.”

“You are right,” Damon admitted, slowly. “The Way of Arilinn will never be thrown down until the Keeper of Arilinn herself shall throw it down. But— oh, Cleindori, not you!” Agonized, despairing, he clasped his daughter to him. “Not you, darling!”

Gently she freed herself from his embrace, and for a moment it seemed to Damon that she was alreadytall, impressive, aloof, touched with the alien strength of the Keeper, clothed in the crimson majesty of Arilinn. She said, “Father, dear Father, you cannot forbid me to do this; I am responsible only to my ownconscience. How often have you said to all of us, beginning with my foster-father Valdir, who never tiresof repeating it to me, that conscience is the only responsibility? Let me do this; let me finish the work youhave begun in the Forbidden Tower. Otherwise, when you die, it will all die with you, a little band ofrenegades and their heresies perishing unseen and good riddance. But I can bring it to Arilinn, and then allover the Domains; for the Keeper of Arilinn makes the laws for all the Towers and all the Domains. Father, I tell you, it is fated. I
 
must
 
go to Arilinn.”

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Damon bowed his head, still reluctant, but unable to speak against her young and innocent sureness. Itseemed to him that already the walls of Arilinn were closing around her. And so they parted, not to meetagain until the hour of her death.

Chapter One: The Terran

«^»

Forty Years Later

This is the way it was.

You were an orphan of space. For all you knew, you might have been born on one of the Big Ships; theships of Terra; the starships that made the long runs between stars doing the business of the Empire. Younever knew where you had been born, or who your parents had been; the first home you knew was the Spacemen’s Orphanage, almost within sight of the Port of Thendara, where you learned loneliness. Before that somewhere there had been strange colors and lights and confused images of people andplaces that sank into oblivion when you tried to focus on them, nightmares that sometimes made you situp and shriek out in terror before you got yourself all the way awake and saw the clean quiet dormitoryaround you.

The other children were the abandoned flotsam of the arrogant and mobile race of Earth, and you wereone of them, with one of their names. But outside lay the darkly beautiful world you had seen, that youstill saw, sometimes, in your dreams. You knew, somehow, that you were different; you belonged to thatworld outside, that sky, that sun; not the clean, white, sterile world of the Terran Trade City.

You would have known it even if they hadn’t told you; but they told you, often enough. Oh, not inwords; in a hundred small subtle ways. And anyway you were different, a difference you could feel all theway down to your bones. And then there were the dreams.

But the dreams faded; first to memories of dreams, and then to memories of memories. You only knewthat
 
once
 
you had remembered something other than this.

You learned not to ask about your parents, but you guessed. Oh, yes, you guessed. And as soon as youwere old enough to endure the thrust of a spaceship kicking away from a planet under interstellar drives,they stuck your arm full of needles and they carried you, like a piece of sacked luggage, aboard one ofthe Big Ships.

Going home
, the other boys said, half envious and half afraid. Only you had known better; you weregoing into exile. And when you woke up, with a fuzzy sick headache, and the feeling that somebody hadsliced a big hunk out of your life, the ship was making planetfall for a world called Terra, and there wasan elderly couple waiting for the grandson they had never seen.

They said you were twelve or so. They called you Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, Junior. That was whatthey’d called you in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, so you didn’t argue. Their skin was darker than yoursand their eyes dark, the eyes you’d learned to call animal eyes from your Darkovan nurses; but they’dgrown up under a different sun and you already knew about the quality of light; you’d seen the brightlights inside the Terran Zone and remembered how they hurt your eyes. So you were willing to believe it,that these strange dark old people could have been your father’s parents. They showed you a picture ofa Jefferson Andrew Kerwin when he was about your age, thirteen, a few years before he’d run away as

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cargo boy on one of the Big Ships, years and years ago. They gave you his room to sleep in, and sent you to his school. They were kind to you, and not more than twice a week did they remind you, by word or look, that you were not the son they had lost, the son who had abandoned them for the stars.

And they never answered questions about your mother, either. They couldn’t; they didn’t know and theydidn’t want to know, and what was more, they didn’t care. You were Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, of Earth, and that was all they wanted of you.

If it had come when you were younger, it might have been enough. You were hungry to belongsomewhere, and the yearning love of these old people, who needed you to be their lost son, might haveclaimed you for Earth.

But the sky of Earth was a cold burning blue, and the hills a cold unfriendly green; the pale blazing sunhurt your eyes, even behind dark glasses, and the glasses made people think you were trying to hide fromthem. You spoke the language perfectly— they’d seen to
 
that
 
in the orphanage, of course. You couldpass. You missed the cold, and the winds that swept down from the pass behind the city, and the distantoutline of the high, splintered teeth of the mountains; you missed the dusty dimness of the sky, and thelowered, crimson, blazing eye of the sun. Your grandparents didn’t want you to think about Darkover ortalk about Darkover and once when you saved up your pocket money and bought a set of views takenout in the Rim planets, one of them with a sun like your home sun of Darkover, they took the picturesaway from you. You belonged right here on Earth, or so they told you.

But you knew better than that. And as soon as you were old enough, you left. You knew that you werebreaking their hearts all over again, and in a way it wasn’t fair because they had been kind to you, as kindas they knew how to be. But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the
first
 
Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’tbeen that boy either, and that was why
 
he
 
had left. They loved something they had made up forthemselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and noreal boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.

First there was a civilian’s job in the Space Service on Earth, and you worked hard and kept yourtongue between your teeth when the arrogant
 
Terranan
 
stared at your height or made subtle jokes aboutthe accent you’d never—quite—lost. And then there was the day when you boarded one of the Big Ships, awake this time, and willingly, and warranted in the Civil Service of the Empire, skylifting for starsthat were names in the roll call of your dreams. And you watched the hated sun of Earth dwindle to a dimstar, and lose itself in the immensity of the big dark, and you were outward bound on the first installmentof your dream.

Not Darkover. Not yet. But a world with a red sun that didn’t hurt your eyes, for a subordinate’s job ona world of stinks and electric storms, where albino women were cloistered behind high walls and younever saw a child. And after a year there, there was a good job on a world where men carried knivesand the women wore bells in their ears, chiming a wicked allure as they walked. You had liked it there. You had had plenty of fights, and plenty of women. Behind the quiet civil clerk there was a roughneckburied; and on that world he got loose now and then. You’d had good times. It was on that world thatyou started carrying a knife. Somehow it seemed right to you; you felt a sense of completion when youstrapped it on, as if somehow, until now, you had been going around half dressed. You talked this overwith the company Psych, and listened to his conjectures about hidden fears of sexual adequacy andcompensation with phallic symbols and power compulsions; listened quietly and without comment, anddismissed them, because you knew better than that. He did ask one telling question.

“You were brought up on Cottman Four, weren’t you, Kerwin?”

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“In the Spacemen’s Orphanage there.”

“Isn’t that one of the worlds where grown men wear swords at all times? Granted, I’m no comparative

anthropologist, but if you saw men going around wearing them, all the time…”

You agreed that probably that was it, and didn’t say any more, but you kept on wearing the knife, atleast when you were off duty, and once or twice you’d had a chance to use it, and proved quietly and toyour own satisfaction that you could handle yourself in a fight if you had to.