To Save a World (4 page)

He had no measure of time. He had no means of knowing up from down, no means of orientation. He had nothing to look at but distant flaming points of stars that spun and wheeled round him in his tiny days of rotation on his own center.

Five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, back in the prehistory of psychology, had sent men insane.

Conner spent the first ten days or so—he later figured—in a desperate hope, clinging to sanity and the hope of rescue.

Then, in his own endlessly prisoning universe, he went insane. Contemplating his own center, he spun like a god and emerged knowing there was no protection or death, even in madness. There was not even hunger upon which to orient himself.

There was only his own mind, and the universe. And so he began spinning, ranging through the universe, his body left behind, his mind wholly free. He visited a thousand, thousand worlds, touched a thousand, thousand minds, never knowing dream from reality.

They picked him up—chance, the merest fluke—-some four months after the crash. And Conner was insane, but in a strange way. His brain, left alone with itself too long, had learned to reach beyond, and now he was something he could not name, or others guess. Fixed firmly in a body chained to hunger, thirst, gravity and stress, he could not leave himself behind again; nor could he endure the life he had resigned himself to lose.

"Mr. Conner," a voice interrupted his thoughts, "you have a visitor."

He heard the man, incurious, wishing he would go away until he heard the name of Darkover, and then he didn't believe it.

He accepted only to escape any further contact with the hospital whose shelter had become a blind alley, a mousetrap for his soul. And because, on a world of telepaths, there might be some who could help him to handle this thing, to turn off the nightmare he had become without desiring it and without knowing why.

And, perhaps, a little, to find the voice in his dream . . .

David Hamilton wiped the sweat from his face as he came blindly through the door, leaning briefly against the light paneled wall.

He'd made it this time, but God! The blind terror when the anesthetic began to blot out light—

No, it was going to be too much. He'd have to quit. Around him the hospital, crammed with humans and nonhumans, breathed and sweated pain and misery at every crack in the walls; and although David, from years of practice, could shut most of it out, his defenses were lowered from the strain of the operation just past and it began to wear in on him again from every direction.

Is the whole world groaning in pain?
His sharpened nerves gave him an absurd and frightening visual commentary, a planet splitting like a fractured skull, a globe of a world with a bandage round its equator; he started to giggle and cut it off just that fraction before it became hysteria.

No good. I'll have to quit.

I'm not insane. The doctors went all over that when I was nineteen and just beginning Medic training.

I made it through Medical school on nerve and guts; and whatever else it did or didn't do, it gave me an uncanny knack for diagnosis. But here in the hospital it's too much. Too many symptoms, too many people in fear and terror. Too much pain, and I have to feel it all. I can't help them by sharing it.

Dr. Lakshman, dark and grave, his eyes full of compassion beneath the white surgical plastic cap, put a brief hand on David's shoulder as he passed through the hall. David, fresh from horror, shrank from the touch as he had learned to do, then relaxed; Lakshman, as always, was clean sympathy and all kindness, a restful spot in a world grown full of horror. He said: "Pretty bad, Hamilton? Is it getting worse?"

David managed a smile, wrung out like a used mop, and said, "With all of medical science these days you'd think they'd manage a cure for my particular type of lunacy."

"Not lunacy," said Lakshman, "but unfortunately no cure. Not here. You happen to be a freak of a very rare kind, David, and I've watched it killing you for over a year now. But maybe there is an answer."

"You didn't—" David shrank; Lakshman of all people to violate his confidence? Who could he trust? The older man seemed to follow his thought; "No, I haven't discussed this with anyone, but when they sent out the message I thought of you right away. David, do you know where Cottman's Star is?"

"Not a clue," David said, "or care."

"There's a planet—Darkover they call it," Lakshman said. "There are telepaths there and they're looking for—no, listen," he added firmly, feeling David tense under his hands. "Maybe they can help you find out about this thing. Control it. If you try to go on here at the hospital—well, they can't let you go on much more, David. Sooner or later it will distract you at a crucial moment. Your work is all right, so far. But you'd better look into this; or else forget all about medicine and find a job in the forest service on some uninhabited world.
Very
uninhabited."

David sighed. He had known this was coming, and if nine years of study and work was to be thrown away, it didn't much matter where he went.

"Where is Darkover?" he asked. " Do they have a good medical service there?"

THEY SAW the guards lockstepped around him as he came through the crowd to the airstrip. It was icy, cold, near evening, only a few red clouds lingering where the red sun had been, and a bitter wind eating down from the sharp-toothed crags behind Thendara. Normally there would have been very few people on the streets at this hour; Darkovan night sets in early and is as cold as their own legendary ninth hell, and most people seek the comfort of heated rooms and light, leaving the streets to the snow and the occasional unlucky Terran from the Trade City.

But this was something new, and Darkovans in the streets put off minding their own business to watch it; to follow and murmur that singular and ugly murmur which is, perhaps, the first thing a Terran on a hostile world learns to identify.

One of the four Terran guards, hearing the movement, tensed and moved his hand closer to his weapon. It wasn't a threatening movement, just an automatic one, just close enough that he felt reassured that the weapon was there if he needed it. But the prisoner said, "No." The Terran shrugged and said, "Your neck, sir," and let his hand fall.

Walking at the center of the close drawn guard, Regis listened to the muttering and knew it was directed as much at him as at the Terrans guarding him. He thought wryly, do these people think I like this? Do they think I enjoy it? I've made myself virtually a prisoner in my own house just to avoid this kind of display, the shame of our world; a Hastur of Hastur no longer dares to walk free in his own streets. It's
my
life I'm giving up,
my
freedom, not theirs. It's my children, not theirs, growing up with Terran armed guards standing around their nurseries. I am so constantly reminded that a bullet, a knife, a silk cord or a single poison berry in their supper can mean the end of the Hastur line forever.

And what will they say when they hear that Melora, bearing my child, is being sent to the Terran Medical for her confinement? I can hear it now. I've tried to keep it secret, but I had enough trouble persuading her family, and these things leak out. Even if there had been much between us, this would have ended it. Melora wouldn't even speak to me when I visited her last, and the trouble is, I don't blame her. She just stared coldly over my head and told me that she and all her family were obedient as always to the will of Hastur. And I knew that such little love or kindness as there had been between us, for a few months, was gone forever.

It would be so easy to damn all women, but I must remember that the ones who love me are under an infernal strain—and that's been true of the women unlucky enough to love a Hastur, all the way back to the legend of the Blessed Cassilda herself, my hundred times great-grandmother—or so the story says.

And not the least of the strain they're under is this damned self-pity!

He sighed and tried to grin and said to Danilo, walking beside him, "Well, now we know how the freak at Festival Fair must feel."

"Except that we don't get our porridge and meat from having to listen," Danilo muttered.

The crowd was parting to let them through. As they stepped toward the special transit plane, Regis felt, deep inside the crowd, someone with a hand raised. A stone thrown? At him, at his Terran guard? He could hear the angry thoughts:

"Our lord, a Hastur, prisoner of the Terrans?"

"Has he asked them to cut him off from his people this way?"

"Slave!"

"Prisoner!"

"Hastur!"

It was a tumult in his mind. The stone flew. He groaned and covered his face with his hands. The stone burst into flame in midair and disappeared in a shower of sparks. There was a little despairing "Ahhh!" of horror and wonder from the crowd. In its backlash and before it could die away, Regis let his bodyguard hustle him up the steps of the special transit plane, dropped into a seat inside and remarked to nobody in particular, "Damn it, I could sit down and howl."

But he knew it would be repeated all over again: guards, mutterings, crowds, resentments, maybe even thrown stones on the airstrip at Arilinn.

And there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

Far to the east of Trade cities and Terrans, the Kilghard Hills rise high, and beyond them the Hyades and the Hellers; layer on layer of mountain ridges, where men and nonmen live in the deep wooded slopes. A man afoot could travel for months or live a lifetime, and never come to the end of the woods or the ranges.

A gray and rainy dawn was breaking over a morning of disaster as a group of men, wrapped in tattered, cut and smoke-scorched furs, dragged themselves downhill toward the ruins of a village. The walls of a stone house still stood, rain-drenched and stark white, the blackened remnants of a dozen flattened wooden houses around it. Toward this still-standing shelter they made their way.

Behind them, three miles of forest lay, a blackened horror with wisps of smoke still rising in the rain and sleet. As they came under the roof, sighing and staggering, with exhaustion, one of the men lowered the half-burnt carcass of a deer to the floor. He motioned with his head and a worn-looking woman in a smoke-damaged fur smock and cape came to heft it. He said wearily, "Better cook what's left of it before it spoils. Little enough meat we'll taste this winter now."

The woman nodded. She looked too tired to speak. On the floor at the far end of the stone-walled room, a dozen young children were sleeping on furs and an odd assortment of cushions and old clothes. Some of them raised their heads curiously as the men came in and carefully shut out the drafts, but none of them cried out. They had all seen too much in the past two weeks.

The woman asked, "Was anything saved?"

"Half a dozen houses at the edge of Greyleaf Town. We'll be living four families to the house, but we won't freeze. There isn't a roof standing in the Naderling Forest, though."

The woman shut her eyes spasmodically and turned away. One of the men said to another, "Our grandsire is dead, Marilla. No, he wasn't caught by fire; he
would
take a pick with the rest on the fire lines, even though I begged him not; said I'd do his share and mine. But his heart gave out and he fell dead as he ate his supper."

The woman, hardly more than a girl, began to cry quietly. She went and picked up one of the smallest children and automatically put it to her breast, her silent tears dropping on the small fuzzy head.

An older woman, long gray hair straggling in wisps around her face, looking as if she had been roused from sleep three days ago and had not had a moment since to wash or comb her hair, as was in fact the case, came and took a long spoon from a rack by the fireplace. She began ladling a rough nut porridge into wooden bowls and handing it to the men, who dropped down and began to eat quietly. There was no sound in the room except the sobs of the young woman and the sighs of exhausted men. A child whimpered, sleeping, and murmured for its mother. Outside the sleet battered the wooden shutters with an incessant hissing sound.

It was like an explosion in the quiet room when someone began to hammer on the door, with blows like gunfire, and shouting outside. Two of the smallest children woke and began to wail with terror.

One of the men, older than the rest and with an indefinite air of command, went to the door and flung it part way open. He demanded, "In the name of all the gods, what is this racket? After eight days of fire fighting, haven't we earned a breakfast's worth of rest?"

"You'll be glad to leave your breakfast when you hear what we have here," said the man rattling the door. His face was grim and smoke stained, eyebrows burnt away and one hand in a bandage. He jerked a head over his shoulder. "Bring the
bre'suin
here."

Two men behind him thrust forward a struggling man in nondescript clothing, much burnt, cut, scratched and bleeding from a dozen wounds that looked like thorn scratches. The man holding the door open glanced quickly back at the women and children inside and thrust the door shut, but some of the men eating breakfast put down their bowls and came crowding out. They were mostly silent, waiting grimly to know what this was all about.

One, of the men holding the stranger said, "Father, we caught him setting light to a pile of resin-branches at the edge of Greyleaf Forest, not four miles away. He had piled the thing like a beacon, to blaze and catch living wood. We had an hour's work to put it out, but we stopped it—and brought
this
here to you!"

"But in the name of Sharra and all the gods at once," said the older man, staring in disbelief and horror at their prisoner, "Is the man mad? Is he crackbrained? You—what's your name?"

The prisoner did not answer, simply increased his struggles. One of his captors said roughly, "You hold still or I'll kick your ribs clear through your backbone," but he seemed not to understand, and went on madly struggling until the two men holding him kicked him quietly and methodically into unconsciousness.

The Darkovans stared at the man on the ground, almost without believing what they had seen and heard. In the mountains of Darkover, the only threat which will unite the fiercely anarchistic little tribes and families, riddled with blood-feud and independence, is the universal threat of forest fire. The man who breaks the fire-truce is outlawed even from his own fireside and his mother's table. The story of Narsin, who a hundred years ago in the Kilghard Hills met his father's blood-foe on the fire line and slew him, and was in turn hacked apart by his own brothers for breaking the fire-truce, exists in a dozen ballad versions. The idea that a man would deliberately set a living tree ablaze was as inconceivable as the thought of serving a festival feast of children's flesh. They stared at him and some of them made surreptitious signs against ill-luck or madness.

The older man, an elder in the burnt out village, said in an undertone, "The women mustn't see this. They've been through enough. Somebody get a rope."

Someone asked, "Shouldn't we try to ask him a few questions; find out why he did this?"

"Asking questions of a madman—what for? Ask the river why it floods, or the snow why it hides the sun," one of them said; and another, "A man mad enough to set a blaze would be too mad to tell us why."

The village elder said quietly, "Any chance this is a Terran? I've heard that they do mad things."

One of the young men, one who had told the girl Marilla of their grandfather's death, said, "I've been in the Trade City, Father, and seen the Terrans when they were on Alton lands, years ago. Mad they may be, but not like that. They have given us farseeing eye lenses, and news of new things,
chemicals
," he used the Terran Empire word, "to smother fires. They would not set a forest to burn."

"That's true," murmured one; and, "Yes. Remember when the lower Carrial Ridge burned and men came from the Trade City to help us put it out, flew here in an airship to help us."

"Not the Terrans, then," the older man said. He repeated, "Get a rope—and don't say a word to the women."

By the time the sun broke over the lower ridge, red and dripping with cloud and fog like a weeping cyclops' eye, the man had ceased to struggle and hung limp like a black flag above the dead forest.

The villagers, breathing easier and thinking that now, perhaps, the rash of terrifying fires would cease, had no way of knowing, in the widely scattered and wild mountains, that in the thousands of miles of forests this scene, or something very like it, had been repeated at least a dozen times in the last year.

No one knew that except the woman who called herself Andrea Closson.

"Darkover. It's a damned funny place, you know. We hold scraps of it, by compact, for trade, just as we do with planets all over the galaxy. You know the routine. We leave the governments alone. Usually, after the people of the various worlds have seen our technologies, they start to get tired of living under hierarchies or monarchies and demand to come into the Empire of their own accord. It's almost a mathematical formula. You can predict the thing. But Darkover doesn't. We don't quite know why, but they say we just don't have a thing they want . . ."

Disgruntled Terran Empire Legate, repeating a common complaint of politicians on Darkover.

"You are to house and feed them with the best and treat them well," Danilo Syrtis repeated to the small crowd of swart mountain Darkovans. He indicated the four Terrans, uniformed with the dress of Spaceforce. He ignored the protest he could sense and added, "It is the will of Hastur, and—" he made a ritualistic gesture, seizing the handle of his small dagger, and said, "I am authorized to say to you: an insult to one of these men will be avenged as an insult to Regis Hastur's own self."

"
Vai dom,
Syrtis; need we see the Compact outraged at our own firesides?" asked one man, and Danilo flushed and said, "No." He told the Terrans, "You won't need your weapons. Better give them to me."

One after another, reluctantly, the men surrendered their regulation shockers and Danilo turned them over to a green and black Darkovan City Guard official, saying, "Keep them in bond until we return."

He walked, head lowered, back toward the Arilinn Tower which rose at the edge of the small airstrip. Regis was waiting for him there, with their cousin, Lerrys Ridenow—tall, red-headed, saturnine, a man in his early forties, long-faced and looking cynical. Lerrys gave Danilo a casual cousinly greeting, kissed Regis on the cheek, and said, "So you made it here. I thought you'd stay in your snug nest in the Terran Zone, like a worm in a bale of silk."

"More like a rabbit trapped by a weasel in his own hole," Regis said, and followed Lerrys into the Tower. He thought he had never felt such relief in his life. Inside here, at least, nothing could touch him, and he need not fear what would happen to his world or his family if an assassin's knife or bullet found his heart. Lerrys asked, "Is it true, then? That they hold you prisoner in the Terran Zone? We heard that rumor and I told them even the Terrans could not keep you, even by force, against your own will. Have they some new weapon against you, then?"