Outside, the rain had dissolved into stinging mist. A tall man in a green and black cape, red head held high, brushed past Kerwin and said, “Inside, quick, you’ll be late,” and went on into the Sky Harbor Hotel. It seemed like a curious place for a group of Darkovan aristocrats to hold a family reunion, but what did he know about it? A wild thought darted into his mind that perhaps he ought to crash the party and demand to know if anyone had lost a young relative about thirty years ago. But it was only a wild notion, dismissed as soon as it had arisen.
In the dark street, glazed underfoot now with the icy rain, which froze as it fell, the thick sleet cut off moon or stars. The lights of the HQ gates burned with a yellow glare. Kerwin knew that there he would find warmth and familiar things, shelter, assigned place and even friends. Ellers had probably wakened, found him gone, and returned to the HQ.
But what would he find there if he did return? A set of assigned rooms exactly like those on his last planet, cold and bare with the antiseptic institutional smell; a library of films carefully censored so as not to raise too many unmanageable emotions; meals exactly the same as he would have had on any other Terran Empire planet, so that the workers likely to be transferred at any moment would not have to suffer any digestive discomforts or period of adjustment; and the society of other men like himself, who lived on fantastically alien worlds by turning their backs on them, to live in the same dull familiar world of the Terrans.
They lived on alien worlds under alien suns just as they lived on Terra—unless, that was, they wanted to go out and raise hell; when they sought the worst, not the best, of that alien beauty. Potent drink, women who were willing, if not too appealing, and a place to spend their spare pay. The real worlds lay, would always lie, a million miles out of their reach. As far out of their reach as the red-haired, smiling girl who had smiled and greeted him as com’ii, friend.
He turned, again, away from the gates of the HQ. Outside the circle of spaceport bars, tourist traps, whorehouses, and exhibitions, there must be a real Darkover out there somewhere, the world he had known when he was a boy in the city, the world that had haunted his dreams and jerked him out from his new roots on Terra. But why had he ever had those dreams? Where had they come from? Certainly not from the clean, sterile world of the Spacemen’s Orphanage!
Slowly, as if wading through mud, he walked toward the old town, his fingers knotting the fastenings of the Darkovan cloak about his throat. His Terran-made boots rang hard on the stone. Whatever people took him for, it wouldn’t hurt to go looking around a little. This was his own world. He had been born here. He was no naive Terran spaceman, unsafe outside the spaceport quarter. He knew the city, or had known it once, and knew the language. All right, so Terrans weren’t specially welcome in the Old Town. He wouldn’t go as a Terran! Wasn’t it a Terran who had once said, Give me a child till he is seven years old, and anyone who wants him can have him after that. That grim old saint had the right idea; by that reckoning, Kerwin was Darkovan and always would be, and now he was home again and he wasn’t going to be kept away!
There were not many people in the streets now. A few, in cloaks and furs, moving head-down against the bitter biting wind. A shivering girl, hugging an inadequate fur smock about her, gave Kerwin a hopeful glance and murmured to him in the old tongue of the city, which Kerwin had spoken before he could lisp three words of nursery Terran (how did he know that?). And he hesitated, for she was shy and soft-voiced and wholly different from the hard-eyed girl in the spaceport bar, but then her eyes raised to his red hair and she murmured unintelligibly and fled.
A little dwarfed creature pattered by, giving Kerwin a swift upward glance from green eyes that glowed, catlike, in the dark, but had unmistakable human intelligence behind them; Kerwin moved quickly aside, for the kyrri were strange creatures who fed on electrical energy and could give unwary strangers painful, though not fatal, shocks if they were jostled or crowded.
Kerwin walked on through the market of the Old Town, savoring the unfamiliar sounds and smells. An old woman was selling fried fish in a little stall; she dropped the bundles of fish into a thick batter, then into the bowl of clear green oil. She looked up and with voluble words in a dialect too thick for understanding, handed him the fresh fish. He started to shake his head, but it smelt good and he shrugged and fumbled for coins in his purse, but she looked at him, startled, and the coins dropped on the ground as she backed away. In her babble he caught again the word Comyn, and frowned. The devil! He seemed to have the knack, tonight, of innocently scaring people half to death. Well, with the city full of redheaded men and women on some kind of family reunion,
Kcrwin decided red hair was even unluckier than they’d told him in the orphanage!
Maybe it was this fantastic nobleman’s cloak he was wearing. He’d take it off, but it was too cold for his thin Terran uniform; besides, he surmised that in his Terran clothes he couldn’t be really safe in this part of the city.
He admitted it to himself, now; he had had just this kind of imposture in mind when he bought the cloak. But too many people were staring. He turned, deciding he had better take the fastest route back to the HQ.
He walked swiftly now through dark, deserted streets. He heard a step behind him—a slow, purposeful step; but told himself not to be suspicious; he wasn’t the only man who might have a good reason to be out in the rain tonight! The step kept pace with him, then quickened to overtake him, and Kerwin stepped aside to let the follower pass in the narrow street.
That was a mistake. Kerwin felt a searing pain; then the top of his head exploded and from somewhere he heard a voice crying out strange words:
Say to the son of the barbarian that he shall come no more to the plains of Arilinn! The Forbidden Tower is broken and the Golden Bell is avenged!
That didn’t make sense, Kerwin thought in the split second before his head struck the pavement and he knew no more.
* * *
Chapter Four: The Search
« ^ »
It was dawn, and it was raining hard, and somebody somewhere was talking right in his ear.
“Lie still, vai dom, no one will hurt you! Vandals! What has come to the city, when Comyn can be attacked…”
And another voice, rougher: “Don’t be a donkey; can’t you see the uniform? The man’s Terranan and somebody’s head will roll for this. Go and call the watch, quickly!”
Someone tried to lift his head, and Kerwin decided it was his head that was going to roll, because it exploded and he slid back into unconsciousness again.
Then, after confused noises and pain, a bright white light seemed to shine into the innermost recesses of his brain. He felt someone mauling his head, which hurt like hell, and grunted in pain, and someone took the light out of his eyes.
He was lying in an antiseptic white bed in an antiseptic white room, and a man in a white smock, wearing the caduceus emblem of Medic and Psych, was bending over him.
“All right now?”
Kerwin started to nod, but his head exploded again and he thought better of it. The doctor handed him a small paper cup of red liquid; it burned his mouth and stung all the way down, but his head stopped hurting.
“What happened?” Kerwin asked.
Johnny Ellers put his head around the door; his eyes looked bloodshot. “You ask that? I pass out— but you’re the one gets slugged and rolled! The greenest kid, on his first planetside assignment, ought to know better than that! And why the hell were you wandering around in the native section? Didn’t you study the off-limits map?”
There was a warning in his words. Kerwin said, slowly, “Yeah. I must’ve got lost.”
How much of what he remembered was true? Had he dreamed all the rest—his bizarre wanderings in the Darkovan cloak, all the people who had mistaken him for someone else… Had it all been wishful thinking, based on his desire to belong?
“What day is this?”
“Morning after the night before,” Ellers said.
“Where did it happen? Where did I get knocked out?”
“God knows,” the doctor said. “Evidently someone found you and got scared; dragged you to the edge of the spaceport square and dumped you there about dawn.” The doctor moved out of eye range and Kerwin found that it hurt his head to try and follow him, so he went back to sleep. Ragan, the girl in the wineshop, the redheaded aristocrats and the strange encounter in the Sky Harbor Hotel drifted in his mind as he slipped away. If he’d started by thinking that this return to Darkover was an anticlimax to his dreams, at least he’d had enough adventure now to last him fifty years.
No satirical demon whispered in his ear that he hadn’t started yet.
His head was still bandaged when he reported to the Legate for assignment the next morning, and the Legate regarded him without enthusiasm.
“I need Medics and technicians, mapmakers and linguists, and what do they send me? Communications men! Hell, I know it’s not your fault, they send me what they can get. I hear you actually requested transfer out here, so maybe I can keep you a while; usually what I get are greenies who transfer out as soon as they have enough seniority credits. I hear you got yourself smashed up a little, wandering around alone in the native quarter. Didn’t they tell you that’s not smart, here?”
Kerwin just said, “I got lost, sir.”
“But why the hell were you wandering around outside the spaceport area anyhow? There’s nothing interesting back there.” He scowled. “Why would you want to go exploring on your own?”
Kerwin said doggedly, “I was born here, sir.” If they were going to discriminate against him because of that, he wanted to know it right away. But the Legate only looked thoughtful.
“You may be fortunate,” he said. “Darkover is not a popular assignment; but if it’s home to you, you won’t hate it quite as much. Maybe. I didn’t volunteer, you know; I got in with the wrong political crowd, and I’m serving—you might say—a sentence here. If you actually like the place, you might have quite a career ahead of you; because, as I told you, under normal conditions nobody stays much longer than they have to. So you think you’ll like it here?”
“I don’t know. But I did want to come back.” He added, feeling somehow that he could trust this man, “It was almost a compulsion. What I remembered as a child.”
The Legate nodded. He was not a young man, and his eyes were sad. “God, don’t I know!” he said. “The longing for the smell of your own air, the color of your own sun. I know, lad. I’ve been out for forty years, and I’ve seen Alpha twice in that time, and I hope I die there. What’s the old saying… Though stars like weeds be thickly sown, no world of stars can match your own …” He broke off. “Born here, huh? Who was your mother?”
Kerwin thought of the women in the spaceport café and then tried not to think about them. At least his father had cared enough about his son to get citizenship for him, to leave him in the Spacemen’s Orphanage.
“I don’t know, sir. That’s one of the things I hoped would be recorded here.”
“Kerwin,” the Legate mused. “I seem to have heard the name. I’ve only been here four or five years, local time. But if your father had married here, it would be in Records, downstairs. Or the Orphanage would have records. They’re fairly careful who they take in there; ordinary foundlings get turned over to the Hierarchs of the City. And then, you were sent back to Earth; that’s very rare. Normally you would have been kept here and given work or training by the Department, mapping worker, interpreter, something where it would be an advantage to you to know the language like a native.”
“I’ve thought I was probably Darkovan…”
“I doubt that; your hair. We Terrans have a lot of redheads—hyperadrenal types, we go in for the adventurous life. With certain exceptions, there aren’t many redheaded Darkovans…”
Kerwin started to mention that he’d run into at least four, last night, and then could not speak the words. Literally he could not; it was like a fist rammed at his throat. Instead he listened to the Legate talking about Darkover.
“It’s a funny place,” he said. “We hold scraps of it for trade, Trade Cities here and in Caer Donn up in the Hellers, the spaceport here and the big airfield out at Port Chicago, just as we do elsewhere. You know the routine. We leave governments alone, usually. After the people of the various planets have seen what we have to offer in the way of advanced technology and trade, membership in a galactic civilization, they start to get tired of living under primitive or barbarian conditions and hierarchies and monarchies and autarchies; and they petition to come into the Empire. And we’re here to enforce plebiscites and protect them against entrenched tyrannies. It’s almost a mathematical formula; you can predict the thing. A class-D world like this will hold out maybe a hundred, hundred and ten years. But Darkover isn’t following the pattern, and we don’t quite know why.”
He struck his clenched fist on his acres of desk. “They say we just don’t have a damned thing they want. Oh, they trade with us, sometimes; give us silver, or platinum, or jewels, or small matrix crystals— you know what they are?—for things like cameras and medical supplies and cheap down or synthetic mountain gear, ice axes, that sort of thing. Metal tools, especially; they’re metal-starved. But they don’t have the faintest interest in setting up industrial or technological exchange with us, they haven’t asked for technological experts or advice, they don’t have anything resembling a commercial system…”
Kerwin remembered some of this from his briefing on the ship. “Are you talking about the government or the common people?”
“Both,” the Legate snorted. “The government’s a little hard to locate. At first we thought there wasn’t any. Hell, there might as well not be!”
The Darkovans, according to the Legate, were ruled by a caste who lived in virtual seclusion; they were incorruptible and, especially, unapproachable. A mystery, a riddle.
“One of the few things they do trade for, is horses,” the Legate told him. “Horses. Can you figure that? We offer them planes, surface transit, roadbuilding machinery—and what do they buy? Horses. I gather there are big herds of them, out on the outer steppes, the plains of Valeron and Arilinn, and in the uplands of the Kilghard Hills. They say they don’t want to build roads, and from what I know of the terrain, it wouldn’t be easy, but we’ve offered them all kinds of technical help and they don’t want it. They buy a few planes, now and then. God knows what they do with them. They don’t have airstrips and they don’t buy enough fuel, but they do buy them.” He leaned his chin on his hands.
“It’s a crazy place. I never have figured it out. To tell the truth, I don’t really give a damn. Who knows? Maybe you’ll figure it out some day.”
When he next had free time, late the next day, Kerwin went out through the more respectable section of the Trade City, toward the Spacemen’s Orphanage. He remembered every step of the way. It rose before him, a white cool building, strange and alien as it had always been among the trees, set back at the end of a long walk from the street; the Terran star-and-rocket emblem blazed over the door. The outer hall was empty, but through an open door he saw a small group of boys working industriously around a globe. From behind the building he could hear the high cheery sound of children playing.
In the big office that had been the terror of his childhood, Kerwin waited until a lady dressed respectably in muted Darkovan clothing—loose skirt, furred jacket over all—came out and inquired in a friendly manner what she could do for him.
When he told her of his errand, she held out her hand cordially. “So you were one of our boys? I think you must have been before my time. Your name is—?”
“Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, Junior.”
Her forehead ridged in a polite effort at concentration. “I may possibly have seen the name in Records, I don’t remember offhand. I think you must have been before my time. When did you leave? At thirteen? Oh, that is unusual. Mostly our boys stay until they are nineteen or twenty; then, after testing
, we find them work here.”
“I was sent to my father’s family on Earth.”
“Then we will surely have records on you, Jeff. If your parents are known— ” She hesitated. ”Of course, we try to keep complete records, but it’s possible we may only have one parent’s name; there have been— ” She hesitated, trying to find a courteous way to phrase it. “—unfortunate liaisons—”
“You mean, if my mother was one of the women of the spaceport bars, my father may not have bothered telling you who she was?”
She nodded, looked ruffled at this plain speaking. “It does happen. Or one of our young women may choose to have a child without informing us of the father, though in your case that wouldn’t seem to apply. If you’ll wait a minute.” She went into a little side office. Through the open door he caught a glimpse of office machines and a trim Darkovan girl wearing Terran uniform. After a few minutes the lady came back looking puzzled and a little annoyed, and her voice was curt.
“Well, Mr. Kerwin, it seems there is no record of you in our orphanage. It must have been some other planet.”
Kerwin stared, in amazement. “But that’s impossible,” he said reasonably. “I lived here until I was thirteen years old. I slept in Dormitory Four, the matron’s name was Rosaura. I used to play ball on that field back there.” He pointed.
She shook her head. “Well, we certainly have no records of you, Mr. Kerwin. Is it possible you were registered here under another name?”
He shook his head. “No, I was always called Jeff Kerwin.”
“Furthermore we have no record of any of our boys being sent to Terra in his thirteenth year. That would be very unusual, not our regular procedure at all, and it would certainly have been carefully recorded. Everyone here would certainly remember it.”