To Save a World (7 page)

Regis called a servant and asked him to have the plane made ready at once. His brain was spinning.

It has not been more than a few months since the project to study telepath powers had been set up by the Terran Empire's medical facility. Not more than a scant half-dozen Darkovans had been willing to give themselves to this project. And now a chieri, oldest and least known of the nonhuman races of Darkover, traditionally most alien to mankind, (despite old stories, never more than legends, of chieri and mortal) had come unasked and unsought to them, volunteering—when they had hidden for centuries even from the Comyn, except for legends as impalpable as leaves blown on the wind.

How had this happened, and what would come of it?

He suddenly realized that he could not even decide adequately whether this strange being out of the woods were male or female. In its positiveness and strength and in the prompt manner it had reassured Danilo, it seemed like a man; yet the delicate voice and hands, the flowing hair and light garments, the timidity and the way in which, as they passed the doors, it clung to Regis' hand in a renewal of panic, was altogether feminine.
Do they have gender at all, anyhow?
There was an old joke about the nonhuman
cralmacs
which had become a proverb on Darkover:
the sex of a cralmac is of interest to nobody but another cralmac.
He supposed the apparent sexlessness of the chieri was some such thing.

I'll have to remember that Keral isn't human. From the minute it went into rapport with me, it seemed that Keral was all too human, one of my own kind, more than most of the people I'd known . . . .

Small wonder the legends speak of men who died of love, having seen a chieri in the woods . . . and pined away for a voice, a beauty more than mortal
. . . . Regis was shocked, startled at the turn his own thoughts were taking. He said to Keral, not looking at the chieri, "We will go soon," and went to take leave of his grandfather.

A HOSPITAL was a hospital, even at the far end of the galaxy. Waking early and not yet sure where he was, before opening his eyes David felt the familiar ambiance around him, the years-long texture of the life which had become second nature: the preoccupation of busy doctors, the subliminal feel of pain kept under and at a distance, the hurried pace of healing.

Then he opened his eyes and remembered that he was on Darkover, uncounted light-years away from his own home, and that if they had quartered him in a hospital it was not because of the M.D. that he could still write after his name but because of the generally medical nature of this project.

Freaks and telepaths
—
and I'm going to be one of them! What kind of a planet have they landed me on?

All he remembered of disembarking last night—spaceports were all alike—was a glimpse of a great, luminous, pale purple moon, and another, smaller and crescent, floating low in a strangely colored night sky.

The light in here was Earth-normal yellow, but when he went to the window he saw high, craggy, dark mountains and a great, inflamed, red sun, already high in the sky. He'd come in late; they'd let him sleep, but probably someone would be coming for him sooner or later. Try as he would—and he had tried on the ship that brought him here—he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the project. Hell, he didn't want to know more about the freak talent that had swept away his chosen career; he wanted to be rid of it!

Oh, well, he thought, turning away from the strange sun and mountains and going toward the bathroom, maybe this will help, and if not maybe it will help somebody else. Treat it like research—a chance to research a rare and freakish disease. Like Madame Curie studying her own radiation burns, or Lanach on Vega Nine doing work on
space rot
when he was literally rotting away with it.

Anyhow, there was no point to a long face. If his fellow members on the project were telepaths, a cheerful one wouldn't fool them, but it might raise his own morale. By the time he had finished his bath and dressed, he was singing under his breath. He was young and, against his own will, curious.

The hospital cafeteria, where they had told him last night to go for meals, was crowded at this hour. David hated crowds, always had—it took too much work to shut out the sense of people jostling him even when they weren't—but at least it was a familiar crowd, even though there were racial and ethnic types he'd never seen before. Doctors and nurses, mostly in the caduceus-adorned uniform of Terran Empire Medical, but they all had the unmistakable stamp of the profession. Many of the younger ones were a single unfamiliar type he supposed must be Darkovan, swan-skinned with dark crisp-curling hair, ridged foreheads, short broad six-fingered hands, and gray eyes.

He was finishing his breakfast when a young man, not in medical uniform but in green tunic and high, soft leather boots with short-cut red hair, came up to him and said, "Doctor Hamilton? I recognized you at once. Will you come and join us, please? My name is Danilo. I hope the food is to your liking; that is one thing we can never predict. I know that here in the Terran HQ building they can adjust the lights and even the gravity to the planet of your origin, but cultural preferences about what is and what isn't good to eat—" he shrugged. "All they can do here, I guess, is offer a sort of inoffensive lowest common denominator and hope it won't offend anyone too much."

David chuckled. "In hospitals that's standard, I guess. As a matter of fact, I've gotten used to eating whatever they put in front of me and hoping I'll have time to finish it before somebody yells for me. If you were to ask me what I just ate, I probably couldn't tell you under oath." He looked curiously at Danilo. "Are you on the hospital staff?" The kid didn't look old enough to be a doctor but you never could tell with some planetary types.

Danilo, however, offered no explanation of his status beyond a negative gesture. "Come along and meet the others on the project."

"Are—they—all here already?"

"Most of them. The Darkovan ones are lodged in the city, but at least at first, they felt that the facilities here might be more helpful. Jason—" Danilo raised his voice and a young doctor, hurrying past through the halls, came toward them. He was sturdy and dark-haired. David liked his looks at once. He said, "Dr. Hamilton? How was the trip? I've never been off Darkover myself—born here. I'm Jason Allison." He offered his hand and David shook it, realizing suddenly that this was what had been lacking in Danilo's greeting. Darkovan custom? "I see Danilo's introduced himself. I'm a liaison man between Darkovan medical staff and trainees and Empire medical people. Incidentally, I'm a doctor myself, though I don't have time to practice much."

He led the way along the corridor, Danilo easily keeping pace. Now that the meeting with the others on the project was imminent, David's unease became palpable again.
A crew
of
freaks
—
and he was one of them.

"Dr. Allison—"

Jason Allison grinned. "Jason will do. And I'll call you David, if you don't mind. Darkovans don't use honorifics unless they're way up at the top of the caste hierarchy; any title below
Lord
simply doesn't exist. No misters, ma'ams, doctor, this or that. It simplifies things, anyhow."

Swept away. Even that gone.
"David's okay," he said listlessly. "I—I've never met another telepath—"

Danilo laughed. "Now you have," he said, and grinned. "We don't bite. Or go around casually reading minds. And you aren't a telepath anyhow as far as I can tell. You're an empath and probably have some other psi talents."

David stared at the kid and shook his head slightly, abruptly revising a lot of preconceived notions. Danilo said, "I'm sorry. I was brought up around Darkovans with
laran
and I spot it automatically. I take you for granted because I feel comfortable around you, that's all; you feel like one of us."

David felt bewildered. Jason said, "Slow down, Dani. David, believe it or not, I know how you feel; remind me to tell you sometime about my first clash—and it was really a clash—with the Hasturs. Here we are."

It was a long room, filled with light and hung about with translucent draperies in pale and lightly varying rainbow colors. David took it in at a glance, the talent he had never recognized because he took it so much for granted that he believed everyone had it and didn't consider it worth mentioning:

—impact of fear/ brilliance/ fear from a tall girl at the far end, tall gird/no, boy/no, girl, with masses of long, loose, fair hair, slender, sexless figure—human?

—slight, authoritative young man with white hair and young gray eyes—wizened small man in his forties, Earth-type, tanned, shifty-looking: dark-skinned nonentity, trembling, spaceman's uniform

—tall, commanding old woman, old to decrepitude but with the same air of command and dominance as if she were young and queenly

—slight, sensual-looking, sullen girl slouched in a deep chair with her eyes moving, in little quick glances like a mouse's, all round the room and among the men

—and yet again: fear/brilliance/fear from the tall girl/boy with the light hair, in the long tunic . . . .

Is this all?

"You are David Hamilton," said the slight young man with the hair which David somehow knew to be prematurely white. "I am Regis Hastur. I'm very glad you are with us, Dr. Hamilton. Nothing of this sort's been done before; ordinary medical men may be all at sea. The people who know about telepaths don't seem to develop medical sciences; for all I know, don't need them. We didn't, especially. And the Terran medics aren't even sure we exist. They've had to admit it but they don't like it—present company excepted," he added, with a friendly look at Jason Allison.

"I'm being brought here as a doctor?"

"Oh, yes. Once you get this thing, this talent of yours, in hand, it should make you an especially good one, you know," Regis said; "and it won't take you long to learn how to shut out contacts you don't want; every Comyn teenager manages to learn it within a few weeks. You will too, being around other telepaths. That was your problem, you know; no one to help you handle it. Lucky we found you young enough. A lot of isolated telepaths in non-telepath cultures go psychotic and are no use to anyone. We found that out when the HQ was hunting for them for this project. So, as you can see, having one who's also a well-qualified doctor—well, we were ready to fall on your neck and hug you!"

It was like the sudden lifting of a black cloud. David never wondered how Regis had known of his deep encompassing fear. He didn't even try to hide the smile of wondering delight that replaced his strain and fear. It may have been this which made him, for the first time in his life, relax and accept the flow of sensations which came now, unstressed, across the level of his heightened perception as Jason said, "Didn't they tell you this, David? Come on; meet the rest of us; you're the last from offworld in this group; there may be another shipment later but this was the sum of what the Empire could find in nonpsychotic telepaths, Rondo—"

The small, weathered-looking man met David's eyes with a flash of steel blue stare, then almost visibly shrugged.
He's a straight one; no interest.
David, without experience in Rondo's type of underworld, was baffled by the hostile indifference.

The man in spaceman's uniform seemed sunk in apathy, but he got up politely enough and offered David a hand. "A pleasure, Dr. Hamilton. My name is David Conner."

"Then we're namesakes," David said with a smile. His thought, quickly guarded:
nonpsychotic? What's the matter with him?
Conner's type was at least familiar; he was tall, thin, slightly balding, skin between brown and black, dark, gleaming eyes, now dulled with apathy and the barest pretense of civility. He wasn't hostile, but David felt, with a crawling of his skin, that if all of them dropped dead Conner wouldn't even blink. He would shrug and envy them.

Jason led him on. "Keral."

The tall boy/girl, almost two or three inches taller than David himself, turned with a swift grace. David met a fluid impact of clear eyes, deep as running water, and a light, lovely, girlish voice which murmured in a soft unaccented tone: "You have done us a kindness to come here, David Hamilton."

Who and what
—
!

Jason murmured in his ear, "A chieri; a Darkovan tribe; most of us didn't believe they existed until he came and asked to join us."

"He—?"

Jason caught his confusion. Then and later David was to wonder, never to know or prove but to suspect, whether Jason Allison, perhaps without knowing it himself, was near enough a telepath to pick up thoughts. "He or she, you mean? I don't know either; you can't exactly ask an I.B.—pardon me; Empire Medic slang for
Intelligent Being,
sapient nonhuman—what sex he, she or it is. Not when you're unsure how they'll react. Maybe Regis knows."

David's eyes went back to the chieri, and Keral looked up again and for the first time smiled, a lovely thing that transfigured the fair, frightened face. It was a gleam of brightness which made the chieri like a light in the room and David wondered how the others could take their eyes off her—him?
Damn!

Conner looked up and came after them. He chuckled low-voiced in David's ear, "After you've been on a dozen planets and seen a dozen cultures you get used to that. You haven't lived until you've made attempts to pick up what you thought was a charming girl and had a nasty surprise or two when you found the delightful creature was one of the local swordsmen. Cultures are peculiar things."

David shared the laughter and felt a little relieved. Conner's psychotic apathy wasn't a constant thing then, for at this moment the spaceman seemed normal and good natured.

Conner went on, still in that friendly intimate tone, "Never made a mistake about this one, though. Missy—?"

The sullen-faced girl looked up at David with deliberate and practiced charm. She had thick, light hair, gathered into an elaborate coiffure, and David thought her dress, for anyone who had been warned of the icy and stormy Darkovan climate, was courting death from exposure; but as Conner had said, cultures on different planets set impregnable standards for feminine behavior, and there was evidently some reason for this one to flaunt her femaleness in this exact way. She smiled with that quick-eyed radiance and murmured, "Hello, David."

"Which David?" Conner demanded; and David Hamilton thought swiftly,
he's jealous,
as the girl Missy murmured, "Why, both of you, of course." She held David's hand an extra moment, but the hand was cool and soft and belied the look of sensuous beguilement the girl turned on them both. She said in her lovely murmur, "I'm a little bewildered here."
A lie
, something in David said, cold and precise. "I thought it would be exciting to meet all of you. An adventure."
Another lie. What does she want?

Jason urged him on and Conner sank into the seat beside Missy. That was evidently what he had wanted.

"Leaving me till last, as usual," said a sprightly voice. It was the old woman, and she was even older than David had thought: wrinkled, her face shrunken, but erect and slender as ever in a long graceful robe of thick, dark blue woven wool, over it a slight shawl of knitted fur. Her hands, knotted and gnarled with age, were still graceful in motion, and the voice clear and light. Her eyes rested on Missy, not with the condemnation of age for youth but with an echo of David's own curiosity. Then she came back to David. "You must be weary of running this gauntlet. I am Desideria of Storn, and if I am rude, forgive me; I have never met Terrans in this number. But no one, as they say in the mountains, is so young he cannot teach or so old he cannot learn. So let us see what we have to learn from one another, all of us. It's likely to be more than any of us expect. I am too old to waste time in preliminaries. Jason?"

Dr. Allison said, "Regis, you're the expert. You take charge."

"But that's exactly what I am not," Regis Hastur said.