Heritage and Exile (73 page)

My father's infirmity and his noticeable lameness gave him the most obvious and respectable reasons for being there; also, he found masseurs who could give his aching muscles considerable ease. I seldom visited such places—there had been a time when it was agony to me to be in the midst of such things, and the women who gathered there seeking men whose inhibitions had been loosened by the atmosphere of the baths were not, to put it mildly, the kind of women who attracted me much. But my father seemed more lame than usual, his steps more uneasy. He could have called to summon a masseur who could have accompanied him there, or even someone to carry him in a sedan chair—on Vainwal you can have literally any kind of attention or care, for a price—but in his present condition I would not leave him to hired attendants. I accompanied him to the bathhouse, took him to the door of the hot pools, and went off to the restaurant for a drink. There I sat watching a group of dancers doing the most astonishing things with their anatomy, later waved away the women—and men—who went round afterward trying to find clients sufficiently roused by the display to pay for a more private exhibition. Later I watched another entertainment, this time in hologram, a musical drama telling an ancient legend of the love and revenge of the fire-God; one of his fellow-Gods had had his wife stolen, ravished away by a third, and the fire-God had declared her chaste, though the one who had lost his wife was jealous and would not accept assurances. But the illusion of flames surrounding the actor who mimed the fire-God made me nervous, and I rose and uneasily left the restaurant. I went into one of the bars for another drink, and there my father's masseur found me.

“You are Lewis-Kennard Lanart—”

Quickly, I was troubled, knowing something was wrong, braced for more tragedy. “My father—what is wrong with my father?”

“He is not in danger now,” the masseur said, fidgeting with the towel in his hands, “but the heat of the steam room was too much for him, and he collapsed. I sent for a medic,” he added defensively. “They wanted to take him to the Terran hospital, but he would not go. He said all he wanted was a few minutes of rest, and for you to come and take him home.”

They had sent for a valet to help him dress, and he was sipping a glass of strong brandy. He looked very pale, thinner than I had noticed. Pain and compunction struck me. I said, “Let me take you home, Father,” and sent for one of the little skycabs which lifted us directly to the roof-platform of our own building.

I had not felt his distress, nor his collapse; I had been watching the stupid dancers!

“It's all right, Lew,” he said gently. “You're not my keeper.” And somehow that made me feel raw-edged too, troubled. For once, instead of staying on his feet, he was willing to lie down on a piece of furniture, a soft flotation couch in the apartment, though he would not go to bed.

“Father, you're not planning, surely, to travel to Darkover in five days? You'll never be able to endure the trip! And the climate of Thendara—”

“I was born there,” he said tightly. “I can endure it. And I have no choice, unless you choose to go and save me the trouble.”

I said, anger and pity fighting in me, “That's not fair! You can't ask it—!”

“I do ask it,” he said. “You're strong enough, now, to do it. I didn't ask it of you before you were ready. But now there is no reason you should not—”

I considered it. Or tried to. But everything in me flinched away. Return; walk back on my own two feet into that corner of hell where I had found death and mutilation, rebellion, love and treachery. . . .

He sighed, heavily. “You'll have to face it some day, Lew. And I don't want to face the Council alone. I can count on only one ally there—”

“Dyan,” I said, “and he'll do more for you if I'm not there. He hates my guts, Father.”

My father shook his head. “I think you're mistaken. He promised—” and then he sighed. “Still, be that as it may, you'll have to go back some day. . . .”

“They tried,” I said. “You told me they tried before you brought me offworld, and they couldn't; which is why we had to bring the matrix offworld, you couldn't separate me from it without killing me—”

“You were weaker then. That was years ago. You could survive it, now.”

A thousand regrets, terrors, agonies flooded me; if it had not been for my ill-fated attempt to monitor her, perhaps Dio would not have gone into premature labor . . .

But Dio might have understood. Might not have—loathed me. Might not have shrunk in horror from the monster I had fathered, the monster I had become. . . .

“I don't think it would have made any difference. The damage was done before ever I met Dio.” I knew he shared the image in my mind, of that monstrous failure with my hand . . . but we would never be sure.

“Some day. Some day. Maybe.”

He started to speak; then shut his mouth, and although I could hear the words he did not speak, clearly in his mind . . .
I need you, Lew, I cannot go alone
. . . I was grateful that he did not use that last weapon, his weakness, to persuade me. I felt guilty that I did not offer it, unasked. But I could not,
I could not. . . .

He shut his eyes. “I would like to rest.” I went out and left him alone.

I paced the apartment, debating whether or not I should go down into the multiformed world of the pleasure planet below me, get myself blind drunk; too drunk to know or care what horrors pulled at my mind, what guilt and self-blame. My father needed me; he had done, unsparing, whatever I needed when I was sick and helpless, and now

I would not, could not force myself to give to him as generously as he had given to me. But I would not leave him alone. I could not do what he wished of me; but I would do what I could.

I do not know how long it was before I heard his voice, that cry of terrible pain, ringing and echoing in my mind and crashing through the rooms. I know, now, that there was no cry, it had been so swift that he could never have uttered a sound, but it was a scream of agony. Even as I ran toward his room, stumbling in haste, his voice crashed through my mind as it had done in that first rapport where he had shocked my
laran
awake when I was eleven years old; pain like death and the harsh command, inflexible, that

I could not shut out.

LEW! YOU MUST GO, I CANNOT—YOU MUST GO BACK TO DARKOVER, FIGHT FOR YOUR BROTHER 'S RIGHTS AND FOR THE HONOR OF ALTON AND THE DOMAIN—YOU MUST GO BACK AND FREE YOURSELF FROM SHARRA—LEW, I COMMAND YOU. IT IS MY DYING WISH, THE LAST WISH—

And then a flood of love and tenderness and a moment of pure joy.

“Elaine,” he cried out in my mind.
Yllana. Beloved.

Then I broke into his room, and he lay there, quite dead. But on his face was a tender smile of happiness.

There was someone at the door. Regis Hastur struggled up through confused dreams and found himself in his own rooms in Comyn Castle, his body-servant arguing in dogged whispers with someone who stood at the door, insisting. Regis threw a furred bedgown about his shoulders and went to see what it was.

“Via dom,
this—this
person
is insisting on seeing you, even at this godforgotten hour. . . .”

“Well, I'm awake now anyhow,” he said, blinking. For a moment he did not recognize the sturdy, dark-eyed youngster who stood there, and the youngster's wry smile told Regis that he knew it.

“We haven't met many times and I don't think we've ever been formally introduced,” he said. “Not since I was eight or nine years old, anyhow. My name is Marius, and I won't argue about the rest of it when I'm here to ask a favor of you.”

Now Regis recognized Kennard's younger son. He had seen him, briefly, somewhere in Thendara, about three years ago; perhaps in the company of Lerrys Ridenow? He said, “Of course I remember you, kinsman.” And when he had spoken that word,
kinsman,
a formal recognition as to an equal, he thought, tardily, how vexed his grandfather would have been. The Council, after all, had gone to considerable lengths to avoid extending that formal recognition to Kennard's younger son.

Yet they had placed Regis himself in Kennard's hands for fostering between the ages of nine and twelve. Regis and Lew had been
bredin,
sworn brothers. How could he now refuse that recognition to Kennard's son and Lew's brother, who, by all standards of honor and decency, was Regis's foster-brother too. But he had neglected that obligation. Even now, his body-servant was staring at Marius as if the youngster were something with a hundred legs which the man had found in his porridge-bowl.

Regis said, “Come in, Marius; what can I do for you?”

“It's not me,” Marius said, “but for my friend. I have been living, this season, in my father's town house in Thendara. I haven't been made to feel exactly welcome in Comyn Castle.”

“I know, and I'm sorry, Marius. What can I say? I don't make Council decisions, but that doesn't mean I agree with them, either. Come in, won't you? Don't stand here in the hallway. A drink? Erril, take his cloak.”

Marius shook his head. “There's no time for that, I'm afraid. My friend—you know him; he told me, once, you were prisoners together at Aldaran, and you know something of—” Marius fidgeted, lowered his voice as if he spoke a gutter obscenity—
“of Sharra.”

Now Regis remembered his dream, the monstrous fire-form flaring and ravaging in his nightmare, ships bursting in flame. . . . “I remember,” he said, “all too well. Your friend—Rafe Scott, isn't it?” He remembered, too, that he had seen them together in Thendara. Yes; in the company of Lerrys Ridenow, who liked the society of Terrans. “What's happened, Marius?”

And yet his mind was running quick counterpoint,
this can't happen, all these years I have not even dreamed of Sharra, and now . . . this is more than coincidence.

“He was my guest,” Marius said, “and the servants heard him crying out and came and wakened me; but when I went to him he didn't know me, just kept crying out, raving about Sharra. . . . I couldn't make him hear me. Could you—could you come?”

“What you want is a healer,” Regis said. “I don't have any skill at that kind of thing . . .” and he found himself wondering if Danilo, who had been prisoner with him during those weeks at Aldaran, who also had been touched by the fire-form, had wakened in terrifying nightmares of Sharra. And what did it mean?

“Lord Regis,” said the body-servant in outrage, “you're not thinking of going out with this—at this hour of night, at the beck and call of just anybody?”

Regis had been thinking of refusal. What Marius needed was a healer or a licensed matrix technician. Regis had spent a season in a Tower, learning to manage to own
laran
so that it would not make him ill or drive him mad, but he had none of the advanced skills for matrix healing of mind or body, and what he knew of Sharra was very little. Only that for all that time his own matrix had been overshadowed, so that he could not touch it without seeing that ravaging form of fire. . . . but the servant's words made him angry again.

“I don't know if I can help you very much, Marius, and I don't know the Scott youngster at all. I haven't seen him since then, not to speak to. But I'll come as a friend,” he said, disregarding his servant's look of outrage. “Get me my clothes, Erril, and my boots. If you'll excuse me while I get dressed—”

Hurrying into his clothes, he thought that he was perhaps the only telepath still in the Domains who had had even that much indirect experience with Sharra. What little he knew of it did not tempt him to learn more.

He splashed his face with icy water, hoping to clear his confusion. And then he realized what could have happened . . .

It flashed through his mind, relived in an instant as it had happened. It had been a score of tendays ago; and he had, as Heir to Hastur, been privy to a decision made by the
cortes,
the ruling body of Thendara. He was in honor bound not to discuss their decisions with any outsider;
but what to do when honor conflicts with honor?
And in the end he had gone to the one man on Darkover who might have a stake in reversing this decision.

Dyan Ardais had heard him out, a faint smile playing ironically over his lips, as if he could sense how Regis hated this . . . the necessity that he, Regis, should come as a suppliant, begging favors of Dyan. Regis had concluded, angrily, “Do you want to see them do this to Kennard?”