To Save a World (5 page)

"No, I asked for the guard," Regis said, and took a drink from Danilo's hand. "Thanks, this is welcome. What, not going to taste it for poison?"

Danilo looked stricken and grabbed it from Regis' hand with a look of horror. Regis struck his arm down, laughing. "I was joking, pudding brain. Dani, I must laugh at all this or I'd curl up my toes and play dead!"

"It doesn't seem much to laugh at," said a man from the corner of the room, "that you have to treat your captors as honored guests, just to save your miserable life a little longer, Regis."

"Let him alone," Lerrys said, "and a truce to all this, Rannirl. He's had enough trouble, and he's out there on the firing line. Your neck is so worthless no one cares to set a price on it. I'm sorry, Regis, I started all this, and I only meant to ask: is it that bad in Thendara now?"

Danilo answered for him: "It's worse than you can imagine, but it isn't the Terrans doing it."

"But Spaceforce men
here?
In uniform, with shockers?"

"They're not bad people," said Regis wearily. "Think how easy it would be for them, to sit back and let someone murder us all, one by one? And it must take a special kind of heroism. They volunteered, all four, to come here, even though they knew they'd be mocked, insulted and reviled for guarding someone whose life doesn't matter a straw to them, personally. I can admire them sometimes."

"We all know that," Lerrys said, "I can too; I wanted to make compact with Terra years ago, myself. But I thought it was the Hasturs who were against it."

"We were and are," said Regis patiently. "And you know it as well as I do, all of you." He looked around the room: a large old room, hung with draperies in the ancient style of Darkover, paneled with translucent light. He let his eyes move in brief greeting to the half dozen young men, and as many more women, gathered there, most of them red-headed, Darkovan aristocrats of the telepath caste; minor nobles all. "I came at your bidding, but why did you send for me?"

"I did that," said Danvan of Hastur, rising from where he sat and coming toward Regis, who rose and went down on one knee in the old formal gesture. The old man put his hands on his grandson's shoulders, where they lingered a moment in deep affection. He said, "I wouldn't let them make any decision without calling you in, Regis."

Regis met his grandfather's eyes and felt a little shock of dread. The old man looked so tired now, and so frail. He thought:
from childhood I leaned on his strength, we all did; now he is failing day by day and I must be the rock on which my people can lean
—
and I myself stand on quicksand!

"Is it something new, Grandfather?" He rose, and the old man said, "Not very new; the same old thing; I dealt with it myself, with the help of Kennard and a Comyn Council, twenty years ago. The same old thing—a clamor for Terran mining, manufacturing, investments, you name it. The usual people who see only profit and forget the side effects of an industrialized world. But now there is something new, and I swear by Cassilda that I don't know what to say to them. We can deal with greed. But this—we may have no choice but to ask for help from the Empire, Regis."

This from his grandfather, who had been the prime mover in the long struggle to keep Darkover clear of the Terran Empire, struck a surge of ice to the young man's heart. But he tried to speak with calm.

"Let's go down, then, and listen to what they have to say to us."

As the group made their way toward the door leading into the reception hall, a young girl came to Regis' side. She said, with a quiet self-possession, "Lord Regis, you may not remember me."

"I don't," he said, and looked down into the lovely face. The girl was young and had the heart-shaped face and dark russet hair of their caste, and she had an air of calm and self-mastery quite at odds with her youth. He said, "That will be remedied when next we meet,
damisela.
You lend me grace; how may I serve you?"

"I am Linnea of Arilinn," she said, "born in High Windward, and I have worked in the relays here for seven years, Lord."

Regis flushed faintly. "Then must I have touched your mind many times unknowing; forgive me, I have lived long among offworlders and I keep my barriers up without realizing it."

"Nevertheless, I know what is going on in Thendara," she said, "and I know you are looking for telepaths to work in this project with the Terrans."

Regis' eyes rested with a sort of relief on the sweet young face and he thought,
I wish she were going to be with us there. She would understand.
Nevertheless, putting temptation aside, he said, "Child, we have too few Keepers to work the few telepath relays and circles we can command now. You are of more worth at your post in Arilinn, working in the matrix screens."

"I know that, Regis," she said. "I wasn't speaking of myself, and anyway I'm not that good a telepath. I meant—my grandmother was trained as a matrix Keeper when she was a young girl. She gave up her post and married when she was in her early teens, but she would remember the old way they were trained back in the mountains."

"I don't know your family, forgive me. Who was your grandmother?"

"She was Desideria Leynier; she married Storn of Storn, and my mother was their third daughter, Rafaela Storn-Lanart."

Regis shook his head. "She must have been Keeper years and years before I was born," he said. "I seem to have heard the name, but she must be older than—I hadn't believed any of them were still living, that group trained by the Aldarans. Was she—" suddenly his face went white as his hair, "was she one of those who raised Sharra in the hills, seventy years ago? Long before the rebellions, of course—"

"Our family have always honored the forge-goddess," said Linnea quietly, "and we had nothing to do with the abuse of that power later."

"I know that, or you would have died when Sharra's matrix was broken," Regis said. Normal color began to flow back into his face. "Then, if your grandmother is not too old to make the journey from the hills—"

"She is too old, Lord Regis, but she will make it just the same," Linnea said, and her gray eyes glinted with mischief. "You will find her a surprising person, my grandmother."

Acting on sudden impulse, Regis drew the girl's hand through his arm as they went into the lower Council room. Suddenly, he felt less lonely.

As Old Hastur had said, much of what happened in the Council room was more of the same. Regis had been hearing it for seven of his twenty-four years and it had had a familiar sound long before that. There had been, for almost a hundred years, one or another party on Darkover fascinated by Terran technology and the hypothetical benefits of joining their interplanetary civilization. They were in the smallest of minorities and seldom listened to. Once every few years the Council, or such a council as there was in these days, gave them a formal hearing, thanked them for their opinions, solemnly voted to ignore their recommendations and it was all over for a few more years. This was no exception. Regis sat in the seat marked with the insignia of the Hastur, the silver fir on the blue ground and the Hastur slogan,
Permanedó
(Here we remain), and looked around the ancient highseats, filled now with the merest remnant of the old
laran
caste; with minor nobility, younger sons, anyone who could or would take responsibility for one of the Domains.

He could ignore the first delegation, that group of smug businessmen who called themselves the Pan-Darkovan League. They looked sleek and firm. Despite their complaints, they weren't hurting, even though, he was willing to admit, there were fat profits to be had from an expanding civilization and it hurt them to miss out.

But when the delegation from the lower foothills of the Hellers was ushered in, Regis sat up and suddenly began to take notice.

He knew some of the mountain men. He'd climbed with them, in the days when he could manage to get away on such trips. He'd lived at the edge of the mountains all his life. He liked them, in many ways, better than the complacent lowland people of the Domains.

These were mountain men of the old style: booted and wrapped in thick fur shirt-cloaks, swarthy and long-haired, and although some of them were young, their faces were lined with rough weather and their eyes wrinkled with seeing into the far distances. They looked up at Regis with the old kind of respect for the Comyn caste, a direct and simple awareness; but they were wild-eyed with fatigue and grief which had been sustained much longer than men are meant to bear such things. And even though they tried to speak with stoical calm, some hint of this showed.

Their leader was an old man, grayed and grizzled with a profile something like one of the sharp-toothed crags behind the city. He addressed himself to Old Hastur, even though Regis sat in the seat of the head of council. "I am Daniskar of the Darriel Forst," he said briefly. "I swore thirty years ago that I'd starve to death and all my family with me before we crawled down into the lowlands to ask help of the Comyn, let alone the accursed
Terrans.
" He looked about to spit, evidently remembered in time where he was and didn't. "But we're
dying
, Lord. Our children are starving. Dying."

Mine too,
thought Regis,
not starving but dying,
and leaned forward, speaking in the mountain tongue. "
Com
'
ii
, I am to blame that we have heard nothing of crop failure or famine in your hills."

Daniskar shook his head. He said, "You don't get crops back there, Lord, there's no plowed land for crops. We live off the forests. And that's the problem; we're being burned out.
Vai dom
, do you know how many forest fires we've had just this season? You wouldn't more than half believe me if I told you. And nothing we can do stops them. Forest fires are nothing new; I fought them before my beard was grown. I know as much as any man from the Kadarin to the Wall Around the World about forest fires. But these—nothing we can do stops them. It's as if resin fuel had been poured on them. Our beacons fail. I'd say they were being set by human hands, only what living man could be so evil? Men can kill men if they hate them, but to harm a forest so that men who never harmed them would suffer, friend and foe alike?"

Regis listened in shock and horror, seeing his own horror mirrored in other faces around the Council room, and his mind, trained to think on many levels at once, ran counterpoint to Daniskar's words. Darkover is a wooded world, and without our forests we die. No cover for beasts means no meat for those who eat it, no nuts for bread where grains do not grow, no furs for warmth, no fuel where the lack of fire means freezing and death. The death of the forest means no resin or phosphorescents for light, no fruits for wine, it means no soil, for only our forests hold the soil on the mountains with so much rain and snow to wash it down to the lowlands. Without forests, over half of Darkover would quickly become a frozen lump of dust, starving and dying.

"You people talk fine about keeping us free of the Terran Empire," said one of the businessmen, looking up belligerently at the council members and especially, it seemed to Regis, at the two Hasturs. "And you have a right to your own politics, though I notice you're quick enough to take advantage of Terran things when you're rich enough to afford them. Like coming here by plane, under guard, instead of packing over the mountains on horse and by snow sled as I did! I don't even say you're all wrong; anyone who takes a helping hand must turn to his helper's path! But how far are you going to make us go for this thing you call freedom,
vai dom
'
ym?
Must all our mountain men die before you ask the Terrans to pull us out of quicksand? We have given them a spaceport and a crossroad in their Empire. We could be a pivot in that Empire, an important one. Why don't we make them give us more?"

"We don't care about that," Daniskar said. "We don't want the Terrans here half so much as you do, Lords. But we need more help than you can give us. They have flying machines, chemicals, quick communications, they could put a real effort to it."

"Do you want roads, factories, machinery in your world? Do you want another Trade City in the Hellers, Daniskar?" Old Hastur asked.

"Not me, Lord. I saw the edge of a Trade City once and they stink. But it's better than seeing all our people die. We need help from somewhere, and fast—or there won't be enough of us left to care whether we get it or not!"

And the Terrans, Regis knew, would be only too glad to help. World after world had fallen into the Empire in just such a way. A bad season, or an epidemic, or a few too many deaths from famine, and the proudest world, knowing that now there were alternatives to the hard laws of survival of the strongest, were no longer willing to submit themselves to those hard laws.

It's as if the gods themselves were against us.

First the telepaths go. One by one, in fratricidal blood-feud, or sterile from inbreeding, or by assassination and mischance. Our old science goes from lack of telepath minds to make the matrices work.

Now our forests.

Soon we will have no choice.

But why? Who?

It was like the flashing of a light; this was no blow of the gods. It was too deliberate. Darkover was being murdered; not dying of natural causes, being murdered.

But who would possibly want to wreck a world? Who could profit?

When the delegation from the mountains had finished, they all waited expectantly for Regis to speak. Even his grandfather turned his eyes on Regis, to see what he would say.

And what could he say? "You must have help with the fire problem," he said at last, "all the help you can get, whether it comes from the Terran Empire or elsewhere. But I'm not prepared yet to ask them to reclassify our world for Open status, just for this. So far, we can pay for the help we ask for. As far as needed, I can pledge my own private resources for this." He did not need to look at his grandfather for approval of the rather reckless commitment he had made; it was the only thing to do. "We can also make demands of the chiefs in the lowlands, assess a part of the payment from them."