The World Wreckers (19 page)

Jason drew away the blankets, visibly controlling, a shrinking as he touched them, but this time Missy

lay quiet, looking shocked and half unconscious. Jason bared the slender, rounded upper arm, slid a

needle into the inert flesh. After a tense moment, Missy's eyes closed and she began to breathe in long,

drowsy breaths.

Jason said to the women, "Relax; that will hold her. Thanks; she could probably have killed all three of us." He looked at them in bafflement, the conflict between medical ethics—you don't examine a patient in front of outsiders, if you can help it—and an obvious dislike of being alone with the dangerous

patient, fighting a very clear-cut battle in his face.

David said, "Let them stay, Jason. They know more about telepaths—or aliens—than we do."

He watched, with a curiously detached lack of surprise, as Jason finished undressing Missy. He felt a

strange and frightening pity; no wonder the change had driven her mad; her own body became an alien

and terrifying thing… but he quenched this entirely subjective empathy
(Keral! What had this done to

Keral?)
and tried to examine the changes with a total scientific detachment.

The breasts had definitely altered in size and contour. Not that they had ever been large, of course, not much larger than those of a girl of twelve. But still, the change was perceptible. The skin texture,

although he was not sure, seemed somehow to have altered, lost its luminous quality. He handled it with

some curiosity as he helped Jason cleanse the cuts and abrasions. The genital changes were somewhat

more marked; he had been aware of certain minor structural anomalies before, enough to classify Missy

as a slightly abnormal female; now, on first inspection she would have struck anyone as a male. A

somewhat underdeveloped male, it was true, but nevertheless unquestionably male in gender.
Poor kid,

what a frightening thing to have happen to her!
Her? By habit he was still thinking of Missy as a girl, and when he thought about Conner his face burned with vicarious shock.
Here I am sorry for Missy;

how am I going to explain to Conner that his girl friend isn't even a girl?

"Well, we've certainly opened one hell of a can of worms," Jason said, hours later. Missy still slept, drugged and still. David flickered the pages of the medical report in his hands. Massive hormone

changes, still continuing and probably unstable, shifting back and forth between androgens and female

hormones—no wonder the emotional instability had resulted! "Are all the chieri like that, I wonder?

You're Keral's buddy; maybe you can get him to tell you the whole story. Didn't he say that thousands of

years ago the chieri went into space, looking for some way to save their race and then came home to die?

Evidently Missy is one of them who got lost, somehow or somewhere. Probably never knew what she

was—what the hell, if she was a foundling, as she said, someone decided at first look that she was a girl, and who's going to question the evidence of her own eyes? But are we going to have to cope with

something like that happening to Keral? What was that phrase he used—
the madness of the change?
Oh hell," he burst out, "I can't cope with it. What good is this whole project anyway?"

David, sensing a sudden despair which had nothing to do with his patient, asked quickly, "Jay, what's wrong?"

Jason shook his head. "Personal problems. I've just had word my own people are dying like flies—you

didn't know—I was brought up with nonhumans myself; the trailmen. You don't realize—you haven't

been on Darkover long enough—but there have been forest fires; and the people of the forests are

dying… What's the good of saving a project, or a few people, if this world is going down the drain?"

David felt powerless to comfort him. He said, at last, awkwardly, "I guess we just have to do what we can, Jason. I'll talk to Keral and see what I can do."

He delayed the talk until later, not knowing why it was hard to face the chieri. Night had fallen, and the view of the great spaceport towers was a twinking glow through the rainy darkness, when he returned to

his own quarters and found Keral there, silent, withdrawn and paler than ever. He hardly greeted David,

and it seemed to the young doctor that the whole gestalt of friendships and rapports formed since he had

come to Darkover, the first real human contacts of his life, were falling into fragments around him.

Conner sick with wretchedness over Missy—David had still shirked telling him what was wrong—

Regis, withdrawn and filled with fears; Jason, cracking up with fear for his friends; a world groaning in agony as it split apart, ruined and broken… and his own deep empathy for Keral, now guarded and

afraid. He remembered Missy's white terrified face, and it seemed to him that the echo of that terror and madness was in Keral's pale eyes; and then, with a start, he remembered that morning which now

seemed far away. Had it only been a few weeks ago? He had first seen Keral in the office room

downstairs and now he remembered his own original uncertainty; Keral had seemed to him first a boy,

then a delicate girl, and until he had first examined him the uncertainty had remained.

"How are your hands, Keral?"

"They're well enough. Missy?"

"Still doped. I hope she comes out of it sane. We could probably help with hormones, but I don't know."

"I feel responsible," Keral said slowly. "It was contact with me which touched this off."

"Keral, you were only trying to help her, and if she'd been sane she'd have known it."

"No. I think it was—contact with me—which made her go into the Change."

"I don't understand…"

"Nor I, and I am afraid," Keral said painfully, "because it could have been myself."

David stared in wonderment but dared not interrupt, sensing that Keral's tight reticence had broken; and

after a moment Keral said, still in that hard, controlled voice:

"Understand. All the long seasons of my life, I have known myself the only and last child of my folk.

All the others of our race are old, old past—not past mating, but past bearing. Past—engendering. And I

reared among them, young, young… Now, for the first time, I am among other young people, people

who are, allowing for the differences in the way we experience time, near to my own age. For the first

time in my life I am among—" he stopped and choked over it, and David could only vaguely envision

the tremendous emotional charge of the concept, "among potential mates. And so I know that, at any

time, I may become unstable and change, as Missy did."

And, although David had seen fear in Keral before, now what he saw was terror.

David said quietly, trying to be detached, "Is it that you think it's Missy to whom you'd react?

Biologically, you mean; the very fact that you're in the presence, for the first time, of a nubile member of your own race?" It would be, it occurred to him with a strange, stricken sense, a perfect and simple solution. That these two, last of their alien kind, should be a renewal of their line…

"No," said Keral, and there was a sick sort of revulsion in his voice. "I
could
not. I know this is one of the reasons why our people died away, and yet… our kind was shaped wrong in the beginning of the

world; I know this. I've heard the story often enough; the sexual drives too low, the—the sensitivity too high. I have no right to judge Missy, knowing what her life has been. I pity her. I pity her until it makes me almost sick with it, knowing how terrible it must have been for her, driven to this to survive, to use her gifts only to fascinate and enslave alien men with her body. But she is, she is what she has been in

contact with, and I cannot—I cannot come so close to it."

David, remembering something Regis had said, and with a faint bitter memory of his own early

adolescence, said wryly, "I gather this is common enough among telepaths. It's rare for them to have much to do—sexually—with anyone who can't return that—awareness, in intimacy. I had a hell of a

time, as a result—" he laughed a little, "my own experiences with women have been, let's say, minimal.

A few experiments, and—I more or less swore off. I gather it was even worse with Conner—until he

found Missy. He couldn't stand to be around people at all, and she was the first one who could stand the

touch."

"It must have been hard for you," Keral said, with that immediate awareness of emotion which was so new, and so welcome a thing to David.

"I must admit it's crossed my mind lately; that if there are telepaths on Darkover, there may be women who will be able to—" David flushed slightly. "Not that I've had all that much time to think about it, but seeing Regis with that girl who had his child a little while ago—and now with Linnea, it's so obvious

how very much they're in love—" he laughed a little. "Living among telepaths must demand some

peculiar changes in attitude, I mean sex becomes such an open, aboveboard thing. Keral, does it bother

you to talk about this? God help me, I'm not even sure whether you're a man or a woman!"

Keral met his eyes with a quiet, level gaze. "Like all my people. Either, or both. We—Change, as

occasion warrants. And, as I say, when we—come together—the emotions must be very deeply

involved, or else—I'm still not sure about your language, but I've learned something of your technology

—otherwise, fertilization cannot take place. Oh, we tried all the obvious things, David, our people.

Artificial insemination. Our women, or rather, those of us in female phase, under sedative drugs which

dulled their minds, mating with members of other races, in a desperate hope—"

"And you could not interbreed with other races?"

"Not—deliberately," Keral said, "although there are legends, here on Darkover; yes, the Comyn telepaths are said to be of chieri blood. There is a legend—a woman of our people… you saw Missy…"

"Yes. She changed, but you say it was contact with you. She was in—female phase, you say? And yet

you—"

"I think contact with Conner sparked the change," Keral said. "After all this time with those alien to her, so that they were beasts, animals, the first touch of someone who could reach her mind and her

emotions, roused her out of the phase we call
emmasca
, neuter. In the neuter phase, she could have sexual contact with anyone passively—but Conner reached her emotions and—endocrines? So that the

mating with Conner was a real thing, something which stirred her deeply, more deeply, perhaps, than

any experience of her life."

David said, "I think I understand. But according to computer analysis, her male and female hormones

are almost identical with the human ones. I should think, if it's a question of chemistry, Conner's

maleness would have pushed her further into female phase."

"I don't know," Keral said. "I have only meaningless theories. One is this; that when the change first takes place, it is a—a fluctuating thing, until the hormones stabilize. I had been warned by my elders that if the change came upon me, there is sometimes madness."

"I'm a doctor, Keral. I can be detached if anyone can."

"Can you, David?" Keral smiled faintly. "I told you, we have interbred with other races, now and again… by chance. It happens at times, that one of our people, when the season of change comes, if

there is no other of our kind ready to mate with her, drunken with moonlight and the madness of the

changes in her body and mind, will run mad in the forest and lie down, mindless, with any man who

comes to her arms. It is—it is a thing we do not speak of. Some have killed themselves, after. But a few

bore alien children. It is said that a few such children, cast out from us and fostered among humans, here on Darkover, brought the laran gifts, the telepath powers, into the Comyn line. This is such a terror and a thing of shame among our people that it is spoken only in whispers. And in no other way—in no other

way—" Keral, shaking and white, broke down and began to sob.

David knew that knowledge, scientific detachment, were worse than useless here. Blindly, in the grip of

intense emotion, he reached out for the chieri and drew him close; Keral, in a convulsion of terror,

wrenched free of his arms.

David quickly let him go; and they stood staring at one another, Keral still sobbing, David in a wild and frightened surmise. Keral said at last, through a painful smile, "You see? It's you that I'm afraid to touch."

David tried helplessly to get hold of himself. He reminded himself that Keral, coming from a

hermaphroditic race and totally isolated from ordinary human culture, would know nothing of human

taboos or perversions, or even the very concept. The fact that they were both males would mean nothing

to Keral. Both males, hell! He himself hadn't been sure Keral wasn't a girl, at first. But it still took some getting used to. Finally, mastering his first shock and outrage, he said in a low voice, "Keral, I don't understand. Are you saying that you and I could be—mates?"

"I don't know." Keral sounded, and looked, wretched. "Have I hurt or—or offended against you, David?"

David found himself struggling against a blind impulse to take Keral in his arms again. It wasn't desire, certainly not sexual desire—although, he realized tardily, that was there too, muted and deeply buried

but still there in his consciousness—but it was an overwhelming impulse of closeness, a sudden blind

ache for contact, a sort of desperate merging. He fought to control it and keep his detachment, but the

surge of overpowering emotion went so deep that it was all he could do to be calm. He reached out his

hands to Keral. He had to touch him somehow. He said, in a low voice, "I don't understand what's