The young doctor was a woman; I was grateful for that, glad Dio had been spared the indignity of male attendance. Sometimes a strong telepath or empath can transcend the difference of gender, but here among the head-blind, I knew Dio would prefer a doctor of her own sex. The woman looked tired and strained, and I knew that, if she had not empathy, not in the strong sense of the Ridenow gift, she at least had that rudimentary awareness that differentiates the indifferent doctor from the good one.
“Mr. Montray-Lanart? Your wife is well; you can see her in a few minutes,” she said, and I whispered a prayer of thanks to the Mother Avarra, a prayer I had not known I remembered. Then I said, “Our child?”
She bent her head and already I knew—I thought, the worst. “Dead?”
“It was simply too soon,” she said, “and we could do nothing.”
“But,” I protested, like a fool, “the life-support, the artificial wombs—babies born even more prematurely than this have lived…”
She waved that aside. She looked strained. She said, “We did not let your wife see. The minute we knew, we—drugged her. I am sorry, but I felt it the safest way; she was very agitated. She should be coming out of the anesthetic any moment, now, and you should be with her. But first—” she said, and looked at me with what I recognized, uncomfortably, as pity, “you must see. It is the law, so that you cannot accuse us of making away with a healthy child—” and I remembered there was a thriving market in adoptive children, for women who did not want to be bothered bearing their own. I sensed the young doctor’s distress, and somehow it made me remember a dream—I could not remember the details, something about the doctor who had said to me here, a few days ago, that I should be prepared for some degree of deformity… something dreadful, blood, horror…
She took me into a small bare room, with cabinets and closed doors and sinks, and a tray lying covered with a white cloth. She said, “I am sorry,” and uncovered it.
Once I came up through the veils of the drug and saw the horror which had grown at the end of my arm. The messages, deep within the cells, which bid a hand be a hand and not a foot or a hoof or a bird’s wing…
I had screamed my throat raw—
But no sound escaped me this time. I shut my eyes, and felt the young doctor’s compassionate hand on my shoulder. I think she knew I was glad our child lay there, lifeless, for I would surely—I could not have let it live. Not like that. But I was glad it was not my hand which had…
… thrust through Dio’s body and wrenched the child forth bloody, clawed, feathered, a horror past horror…
I drew a long breath and opened my eyes, looking stony-eyed at the dreadfully deformed thing lying lifeless before me. My son. Had Kennard felt like this when he saw what Sharra had left of me? For a moment I wished I could still take refuge in the darkness of insanity. But it was too late for that. I said meaninglessly, “Yes, yes, I see,” and turned away from the thing. So the damage, cell-deep, had gone deeper than I knew, into the very germ plasm of my seed.
No son of mine would ever sit on my shoulder and watch the horses at Armida— turned away, I still seemed to see the horror behind my eyes. Not even human. And yet, monstrously, it had been alive as recently as last night—
The Goddess has shown us mercy…
“Does Dio know?”
“I think she knows it was—too deformed to live,” said the doctor gently, “but she does not know quite how, and if you are wise you will never tell her. Tell her some quite simple lie—she will believe you; women do not want to know, I think, beyond what they must. Tell her a simple truth, that the child’s heart stopped.” She led me out of that room, away from the thing I would see again and again in nightmares. She touched me again compassionately on the shoulder and said, “We could have— re-started the heart. Would you have wanted that? Sometimes a doctor must make such decisions.”
I said, heartfelt, “I am very grateful to you.”
“Let me take you to your wife.”
Dio was lying in the bed where they had brought her, looking stunned and very small, like a child who had cried herself to sleep, with traces of tears still on her face. They had covered her hair with a white cap, and tucked her up warmly under blankets; one of her hands gripped the softness of the blanket like a child clutching a toy. I could smell the sharpness of the drug all around her; her skin smelled of it when I bent to kiss her.
“Preciosa…”
She opened her eyes and started to cry again.
“Our baby’s dead,” she whispered. “Oh, Lew, our baby, it couldn’t live—”
“You’re safe, darling. That’s all that matters to me,” I whispered, gathering her into my arms.
But behind my eyes it was still there, that thing, the horror, not human…She reached in her weakness for the comfort of rapport, she who had always been the stronger of us two, reached for my mind…
I could feel her recoil from what she saw there, see it lying cold and impersonal in that cold bare room on a surgical tray, not human, terrible, nightmare—
She screamed, struggling away from me; she screamed and screamed, as I had screamed when I saw what had taken the place of my hand, screamed and screamed and fought to be free of me when I would have comforted her, struggled away from the horror—
They came and drugged her, afraid she would hurt herself again, and they sent me away from her. And when, having shaved and washed and eaten and made grotesque legal arrangements for the cremation of what should have been our son, I went back, resolved that if she wished to blame me I could bear it… she had lived with me through all of my horrors and nightmares— I could be strong for her now— She was not there.
“Your wife checked out of the hospital hours ago,” the doctor told me, when I made a scene and demanded to know what they had done with my wife. “Her brother came, and took her away.”
“She could be anywhere,” I said, “anywhere in the Empire.”
My father sighed, leaning his head on his thin distorted hand. “She should not have done that to you.”
“I don’t blame her. No man should do that to any woman…” and I clenched my teeth against the flood of self-blame. If I had been able to barricade my thoughts. If I had had myself monitored to be sure there was no such damage to the germ plasm…! could have known; I should have known, seeing that my hand had not grown back as a hand, but as a nightmare—the pain in the arm was nightmarish now, distant, dreadful, welcome, blurring the pain of losing Dio. But I did not blame her. She had borne so much for me already, and then this… no. If I had been Dio I would not have stayed for a tenday, and I had had her presence, her comfort, for a year and a half…
“We could have her found,” my father said. “There are detectives, people who specialize in tracing the lost; and citizens of Darkover do not find it exactly easy to blend into the general citizenry of the Empire—”
But he had spoken diffidently, and I shook my head.
“No. She is free to come and go. She is not my prisoner or my slave.” If the love between us had crashed in the wake of tragedy, was she to blame? Even so I was grateful to her. Two years ago, something like this would have broken me, sent me into a tailspin of agony and despair and suicidal self-pity. Now I felt grief immeasurable, but what Dio had given me could not be destroyed by her absence. I was not healed— I might never heal—but I was alive again, and I could live with whatever happened. What she had given me was a part of me forever.
“She is free to go. Someday, perhaps, she may learn to live with it, and come back to me. If she does, I will be ready. But she is not my prisoner, and if she returns it must be because she wishes to return.”
My father looked a long time at me, perhaps expecting me to break again. But after a time, perhaps, he believed that I meant what I said, and began to talk of something else.
“There is no reason, now, why you should not come with me to Darkover, to settle what remains of the Alton heritage—”
I thought of Armida, ly
ing in a fold of the Kilghard Hills. I had thought of going there with my son on my shoulder, showing him the horses, teaching him what I had been taught, watching him grow up there, do his first fire-watch duty at my side… no. That had been a mad hope. Marius was undamaged; it would be his sons that would carry on the Alton lineage, if there was one. I no longer cared; it no longer had anything to do with me. I was transplanted, cut off from my roots, exiled… and the pain of that was less than the pain of trying to return. I said, “No,” and my father did not try to persuade me. I think he knew I was at the end of endurance, that I had borne enough, had no further strength to struggle.
“You don’t want to go back to the place you shared with Dio, not yet,” he said, and I wondered how he knew. It was too full of memories. Dio, curled in my arms, looking down with me at the lights of the city. Dio, her hair down her back, in her night-dress, gigglingly playing at a domesticity which was new and amusing to us both. Dio—
“Stay here a few days,” he said.
If she comes back, wants me…
“She will know where to find you,” he said. And as he spoke I knew she would not come back.
“Stay here with me a few days. Then I will be taking ship for Darkover… and you can return to your own place, or come and stay here alone. I won’t—” he looked at me with a pity he was too wise to speak aloud, and said, “I won’t— intrude.” For the first time in my life, I felt my father spoke to me as to an equal, to another man, not to his child. I sighed and said, “Thank you, Father. I’d be glad to come.”
I did not think again of the Sharra matrix, wrapped and insulated and packed away in the farthest corner of the farthest closet of the apartment I had shared with Dio at the very outskirts of the city. Nor did either of us speak of it again, in those days, the final ten days we spent in that apartment. He was not on the first of the outbound ships. I think he wanted to spend that remaining time with me, that he would not leave me wholly alone on a planet which had become as strange to me as if I had not lived there for the best part of two years.
There were still five days to go before the second of the ships on which he had tentatively booked passage would depart from the Vainwal spaceport. Not many ships had a final destination at Cottman IV, as the Terrans called Darkover. But many ships touched down there; it was located between the upper and lower spiral arms of the Galaxy, a logical transfer point. Around midday, my father asked me, rather tentatively it is true, if I cared to accompany him to one of the great pleasure palaces of the city, one whose main attraction was a giant bath, modeled after that of some famous old Terran city which had raised bathing to a fine art.
My father had been crippled for years; one of my earliest memories was of the hot springs at Armida, and soaking, after an icy day in the saddle, neck-deep in the boiling water. It was not only the lame or infirm who enjoyed that. But all over the Empire, and more especially on pleasure-worlds where nothing is taboo, bathhouses serve as a gathering place for those whose interest is in something other than hot water and soothing mineral baths. Maybe the atmosphere of relaxed nudity contributes to the breakdown of inhibitions. Many sorts of entertainment are offered there which have little to do with bathing.
My father’s infirmity and his noticeable lameness gave him the most obvious and respectable reasons for being there; also, he found masseurs who could give his aching muscles considerable ease. I seldom visited such places—there had been a time when it was agony to me to be in the midst of such things, and the women who gathered there seeking men whose inhibitions had been loosened by the atmosphere of the baths were not, to put it mildly, the kind of women who attracted me much. But my father seemed more lame than usual, his steps more uneasy. He could have called to summon a masseur who would have accompanied him there, or even someone to carry him in a sedan chair—on Vainwal you can have literally any kind of attention or care, for a price—but in his present condition I would not leave him to hired attendants. I accompanied him to the bathhouse, took him to the door of the hot pools, and went off to the restaurant for a drink. There I sat watching a group of dancers doing the most astonishing things with their anatomy, later waved away the women—and men—who went round afterward trying to find clients sufficiently roused by the display to pay for a more private exhibition. Later I watched another entertainment, this time in hologram, a musical drama telling an ancient legend of the love and revenge of the fire-God; one of his fellow-Gods had had his wife stolen, ravished away by a third, and the fire-God had declared her chaste, though the one who had lost his wife was jealous and would not accept assurances. But the illusion of flames surrounding the actor who mimed the fire-God made me nervous, and I rose and uneasily left the restaurant. I went into one of the bars for another drink, and there my father’s masseur found me.
“You are Lewis-Kennard Lanart—”
Quickly, I was troubled, knowing something was wrong, braced for more tragedy. “My father—what is wrong with my father?”
“He is not in danger now,” the masseur said, fidgeting with the towel in his hands, “but the heat of the steam room was too much for him, and he collapsed. I sent for a medic,” he added defensively. “They wanted to take him to the Terran hospital, but he would not go. He said all he wanted was a few minutes of rest, and for you to come and take him home.”
They had sent for a valet to help him dress, and he was sipping a glass of strong brandy. He looked very pale, thinner than I had noticed. Pain and compunction struck me. I said, “Let me take you home, Father,” and sent for one of the little skycabs which lifted us directly to the roof-platform of our own building.
I had not felt his distress, nor his collapse; I had been watching the stupid dancers!
“It’s all right, Lew,” he said gently. “You’re not my keeper.” And somehow that made me feel raw-edged too, troubled. For once, instead of staying on his feet, he was willing to lie down on a piece of furniture, a soft flotation couch in the apartment, though he would not go to bed.
“Father, you’re not planning, surely, to travel to Darkover in five days? You’ll never be able to endure the trip! And the climate of Thendara—”
“I was born there,” he said tightly. “I can endure it. And I have no choice, unless you choose to go and save me the trouble.”
I said, anger and pity fighting in me, “That’s not fair! You can’t ask it—!”
“I do ask it,” he said. “You’re strong enough, now, to do it. I didn’t ask it of you before you were ready. But now there is no reason you should not—”
I considered it. Or tried to. But everything in me flinched away. Return; walk back on my own two feet into that corner of hell where I had found death and mutilation, rebellion, love and treachery—
No. No. Avarra’s mercy, no…
He sighed, heavily. “You’ll have to face it some day, Lew. And I don’t want to face the Council alone. I can count on only one ally there—”
“Dyan,” I said, “and he’ll do more for you if I’m not there. He hates my guts, Father.”
My father shook his head. “I think you’re mistaken. He promised—” and then he sighed. “Still, be that as it may, you’ll have to go back some day—”
You cannot live like this, Lew. On Darkover there are some experts in matrix technology who might be able to find a way to free you from Sharra—
“They tried,” I said. “You told me they tried before you brought me offworld, and they couldn’t; which is why we had to bring the matrix offworld, you couldn’t separate me from it without killing me—”
“You were weaker then. That was years ago. You could survive it, now.”
A thousand regrets, terrors, agonies flooded me; if it had not been for my ill-fated attempt to monitor her, perhaps Dio would not have gone into premature labor…
And that monstrous horror might have lived, breathed…
But Dio might have understood. Might not have—loathed me. Might not have shrunk in horror from the monster I had
fathered, the monster I had become—
Free of Sharra, might the damage somehow have been reversed? The link with that giant matrix which had somehow damaged my very cells…if I had had the courage to endure it, being freed of Sharra, perhaps the horror would not have reached out and touched our child…at least I could have been monitored, to know enough, beforehand, avoid fathering a child… could have warned Dio, so she need not have suffered that loss—
“I don’t think it would have made any difference. The damage was done before ever I met Dio.” I knew he shared the image in my mind, of that monstrous failure with my hand… but we would never be sure.
“Some day. Some day. Maybe.”
He started to speak; then shut his mouth, and although I could hear the words he did not speak, clearly in his mind… I need you, Lew, I cannot go alone… I was grateful that he did not use that last weapon, his weakness, to persuade me. I felt guilty that I did not offer it, unasked. But I could not, I could not—
He shut his eyes. “I would like to rest.” I went out and left him alone.
I paced the apartment, debating whether or not I should go down into the multiformed world of the pleasure planet below me, get myself blind drunk; too drunk to know or care what horrors pulled at my mind, what guilt and self-blame. My father needed me; he had done, unsparing, whatever I needed when I was sick and helpless, and now I would not, could not force myself to give to him as generously as he had given to me. But I would not leave him alone. I could not do what he wished of me; but I would do what I could.
I do not know how long it was before I heard his voice, that cry of terrible pain, ringing and echoing in my mind and crashing through the rooms. I know, now, that there was no cry, it had been so swift that he could never have uttered a sound, but it was a scream of agony. Even as I ran toward his room, stumbling in haste, his voice crashed through my mind as it had done in that first rapport where he had shocked my laran awake when I was eleven years old; pain like death and the harsh command, inflexible, that I could not shut out.