Exile's Song (2 page)

As long as she kept her eyes closed, she had the illusion of privacy and was a little less aware of the eleven other people who shared the cramped quarters with her. The presence of other people nearby, people as anxious as herself, made the terrible, grinding nausea she was trying to ignore even worse. It had always been this way, ever since that first voyage away from the place to which she was now returning. She had only a few, vague memories of her childhood, but that first trip was more vivid and powerful than the others. The smells and sounds of a space vessel, and of a belly which felt as if demons were dancing in it, were associated with something dreadful that she could not remember clearly. She never actually became ill, but hovering at the edge of nausea for endless hours was just as bad, or perhaps even worse.

Few people would believe that a Federation Senator’s daughter would travel third class. They tended to think that such people lived glamorous lives of parties and diplomatic soirees. But she was a Scholar of University, and academicians rarely traveled any other way. She was a seasoned traveler now, ten trips and more than a hundred jumps, yet her body still refused to adjust to the drugs, and she had resigned herself to the discomfort. At least she was not forced to endure the agonies of steerage again—as she had on her first solo trip, from Thetis to Coronis in a sixteen-jump nightmare. And traveling first class, as she had once, was not much better—the air still stank and the drugs made her mouth dry.

She began to play the Game. She and her stepmother, Dio, had invented it on that half-remembered first voyage, when she was very small. It consisted of naming every goddess and god she could think of. When Dio had taught it to her, she had only known a few—Zandru and Aldones, Evanda and Avarra. By the time they had reached their destination, she could name more than a hundred, and knew some of their stories. The list had grown as she had gotten older and learned more, until it included names of deities that dated back to the days when Terra had really been an Empire. She had added the names of deities learned from fellow students, names from planets she had visited and places she had never been. Sometimes she looked for rhymes in the names, or tried to put them in alphabetical order—anything to distract her from the rebellions of the flesh. She had never run out of names, but she was not sure whether this was through repetition or not. The exercise gave her something to focus on, rather than listening to the sound of the great ship around her and smelling the acrid scent of her fellow travelers.

The stomach-turning surge of the ship itself began to slacken. The machinery sounded different, the whine of something ceasing. The noise always made her tense because it meant they were leaving the void between the stars and entering the gravitational pull of some world. The steady boom of the planetfall engines kicked in—a slightly-out-of-tune A flat—that made her shiver.

The professor gave a sputtering snort on the couch beside her, coughed, and stirred. He was awake. Years of enforced intimacy with the old man had familiarized her with his every grunt and gesture. She did not need to open her eyes to know he was flexing his fingers over an imaginary keyboard.

How accustomed we have become to one another,
she thought.
He likely knows all my little habits, too.
It was rather comforting to feel the easy familiarity of her companionship with Ivor Davidson, her mentor and practically her foster-father. His wife, Ida, had been like a mother to her, and she decided that in spite of the vile feeling in her middle, she was really very blessed. She was doing the work she loved in the company of a dear friend she respected. Who would dare to ask for more?

The loudspeaker above her couch whined and hummed, and Margaret winced. Damn her extra-sensitive ears! They made possible her studies, her scholarship, and her career as a musicologist. But damn—and double damn—the sloppy communications officer—who was probably tone deaf—who had made the last three landfalls pure agony. After some tinny clicking and a sharp squeal that made her shiver with discomfort, a nasal recording, in the heavy accent of some backwoods planet, began to drone. It was old and needed replacement. She had to force herself to listen and not just tune out the noisy thing.

Then the recording switched off, and something resembling a human voice, speaking in Terran Standard with a fearsome accent which drawled the words, started.

“We are now on final approach to Cottman Four, called Darkover by the inhabitants.” There was something almost disdainful about that word, as if the speaker imagined Darkovans to be naked savages or some such. Typical Terran arrogance. “Passengers are reminded not to unfasten restraints until the all-clear has sounded. For those passengers in steerage and third class in need of assistance, a steward will be ready to assist you soon after landfall.” After the voice had given the instructions to the passengers in Standard, it began to repeat them in half a dozen other languages, those she was able to recognize rather obviously mangled.

Darkover! Their destination at last. The planet of her birth. But the sound of the word in her mind triggered the strange apprehension she had felt ever since she had found out she was going there. It was something akin to dread, and it was completely illogical! She had been to other planets with Ivor during their work, and never had she felt such crawling unease.

Margaret took several deep breaths and made herself relax. The muscles in her shoulders were tense, and they loosened reluctantly. But her relaxation exercise worked, slowly, and she gave a little sigh of relief and stopped listening. Her attention wandered. She was accustomed to being told everything a dozen times. As a Colonial, she had a healthy contempt for the regimented and closely-governed ways of the Terran Federation. While valuing its technological achievements, which allowed her to study music on a dozen worlds in a single lifetime, she bore with Terran arrogance for the sake of her scholarship and the freedom it afforded her. But she did not like it at all, and she thought she probably never would.

Her father would have been happy to send her to any of several Colonial colleges, but the University on Coronis had not numbered among his choices. She remembered the row which had exploded when she first suggested it. To say her father hadn’t approved was a masterpiece of understatement, and worse, he would never explain why. Dio, her stepmother, had intervened as she always did, keeping the peace between father and daughter as well as she was able, but she had endured what felt like weeks, though it was only days, of anxiety and brooding silences before the Senator had given his consent. She wished she understood him better—or at least understood his strange mixture of distance towards her and fierce protection of her. The Old Man (as she thought of him) and Dio were absent a great deal, being forced to attend Senate functions and do the business of the Federation. With his own allergy to hyperdrome, the Senator didn’t come back to Thetis very often, and when he did, he avoided her as much as possible. It was almost as if he loved her and hated her at the same time.

For no reason she could discern, thinking of those dreadful days waiting for the Senator to give her permission to go to University, Margaret was suddenly reminded of another time, when she had been much younger, thirteen or fourteen. Dio had found her sitting on the shore of the Thetan Sea of Wine, weeping. She couldn’t quite recall what she had been crying over, but the words she had said suddenly came back. “I’m ugly,” she sobbed, as the older woman tried to comfort her. “Father never hugs me, or lets me go anywhere, and I know it is because I am ugly. Why can’t I have pretty hair, like you. Why do I have skin that gets spotty in the sun? And you and Father are gone so much, and when you are home, he never touches me, or talks to me, or anything! What’s wrong with me?”

The memory made her shiver all over as the ship gave out a huge roar. Then it made a sort of metallic sigh, almost as if it were tired, and she thanked the Goddess she was no longer thirteen, and subject to the horrors of adolescence. All those years when she had been convinced that the Old Man’s attitude toward her was due to something she had done wrong, or failed to do, even though Dio told her it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with the Senator himself. Dio did her best to comfort her, and said that Margaret was
not
ugly. The Senator
did
love her in his brooding way, Dio insisted. But she had somehow never gotten around to explaining why he was so distant, nor why she looked so unlike both of them. It wasn’t until a long time later that she learned she was not Dio’s child at all, but the Old Man’s by his first marriage.

Margaret could still remember her utter shock at this revelation, just before she left for University. She had never imagined that her father had been married before. There were so many things she did not know about her own past and her father’s. She started to shudder and stopped herself. She was not the heroine of some trashy romance, with dark secrets lurking in the background. So, why did she have the strong and terrible sense that there were not only things she did not know, but things she did not
want
to know. Foolishness! She was just tired from the long trip, and ill from space drugs.

No, it
was
more than that. She was returning to the planet where she had been born more than twenty-five Terran years before. Margaret had only the vaguest memories of it, and even thinking about it gave her a mild sense of discomfort, a slight headache and the sensation of the air just before a storm. There were so many troubling things about it. Her father was the Senator for Darkover, but he did not live on the planet, and, so far as she knew, he had never set foot on the place since he left over twenty years before. The mother she had known for most of her life was not really her mother, and Dio was adamant in her refusal to reveal more than the barest generalities about her real mother.

There was a moment of silence, except for the blessedly on-pitch chime of the all-clear. After this came the thumps of a clumsy technician inserting the landing announcement, and the chatter of half the compartment informing one another of the obvious fact of their arrival. It was almost as if they could not believe anything unless they told someone else about it.

“We have now arrived at Thendara Spaceport on Cottman Four and passengers with this as a final destination are cleared to disembark at their convenience. Our stop here will be brief, so passengers continuing to Wolf—Phi Coronis Four—are advised not to disembark but to remain in your restraints. Passengers for Sagan’s Star, Quital, and Greenwich are requested to disembark here and consult a uniformed Spaceforce Attendant for the transit information to your final destination. Please prepare immediately for disembarkation. A Medic will enter your cabin at once to administer hyperdrome for all continuing and newly boarded passengers. Repeat; we have arrived at Thendara Spaceport; passengers for . . .” The voice went on and on.

Margaret ignored the mild headache, and her unspoken desire to stuff a rag into the loudspeaker. She ignored the itch of the dermapatches on her left wrist. Instead she started to unbuckle the straps which held her against the couch, eager to be away from the smell and sound of the ship as quickly as possible. Well, not as eager as usual. The sense of dread remained, just at the back of her mind, and she had to force her attention away from it. Once free, she turned to her companion.

Professor Davidson was fumbling clumsily with his restraints. His eyes were a little glazed from the drugs, and, as usual, he was slightly disoriented. She watched him struggle with one buckle and bit her lip. The first thing she had noticed when she first met him were his hands—beautiful hands, like those of an angel in some old painting. Now they were twisted and bent, hardly able to manage the simple chords on a guitar. It seemed to have happened overnight, but she was sure it had been slower than that. He could play almost any instrument developed for humanoids—and even some fashioned for nonhumans—but he had always been hopeless with simple things like catches and buckles, and he hated it if she reminded him of his clumsiness. Finally he gave her a look of helplessness, defeated by the stupid thing. She sat up—a little dizzily against the brief rush of postural hypotension—and reached over to help him as a steward came into the cabin.

“What would I ever do without you?” he asked, his seamed nut-brown face wrinkling in the smile that never ceased to delight her, even when she was aggravated with him.

“Hire another assistant, of course,” she answered dryly. His ever-increasing dependence on her distressed her more than she wanted to admit. It was as if their year-long sojourn on Relegan had drained away the last of his vigor, leaving behind a dried-up husk of a man. She forced herself not to show the sense of helplessness and rage she always felt when she noticed his rapid decline. She owed Ivor Davidson more than she could ever repay. Not in anything so vulgar as credits, but in affection and loyalty. During her first, terrible year at University, while she had floundered in search of some subject she could master without boredom or frustration, she had met Ivor in the library. She had been singing softly, much to the annoyance of some of the nearby students—quite unconscious that she was doing so. He had taken her in hand, tested her with a kind of savage thoroughness, then brought her into his home. Ivor and his wife Ida had nurtured her both as a musician and as a woman, giving her a sense of confidence she had never gotten with Dio and the Old Man. In the end, he had arranged an open fellowship for her, made her first his protegée, then his assistant. It was the sort of position that was highly prized in University circles, and she knew she was very fortunate.