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Star of Danger

Marion Zimmer Bradley

a darkover novel

ELF digital back-up edition 1.0
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ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

Avenue of theAmericasNew York,N.Y.

Copyright ©, 1965, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Printed inU.S.A.

DEDICATION

To my son Patrick but for whose help this book would have been written much sooner.

I

^»

IT DIDN’T look at all like an alien planet.

Page 1

Larry Montray, standing on the long ramp that led downward from the giant spaceship, felt the coldtouch of sharp disillusion and disappointment. Darkover. Hundreds of light-years from Earth, a strangeworld under a strange sun— and it didn’t look different at all.

It was night. Below him lay the spaceport, lighted almost to a daytime dazzle by rows of blue-whitearclights; an enormous flat expanse of concrete ramps and runways, the blurred outlines of the giantstarships dim through the lights; levels and stairways and ramps leading upward to the lines of high streetsand the dark shapes of skyscrapers beyond the port. But Larry had seen spaceships and spaceports on Earth. With a father in the service of the Terran Empire, you got used to seeing things like that.

He didn’t know what he’d expected of the new world— but he hadn’t expected it to look just like anyspaceport on Earth!

He’d expected so much…

Of course, Larry had always known that he’d go out into space someday. The Terran Empire hadspread itself over a thousand worlds surrounding a thousand suns, and no son of Terra ever consideredstaying there all his life.

But he’d been resigned to waiting at least a few more years. In the old days, before star travel, a boy ofsixteen could ship out as cabin boy on a windjammer, and see the world. And back in the early days ofstar travel, when the immense interstellar distances meant years and years in the gulfs between the stars,they’d shipped young kids to crew the starships—so they wouldn’t be old men when the voyages ended.

But those days were gone.. Now, a trip of a hundred light-years could be made in about that many days,and men, not boys, manned the ships and the Trade Cities of the Terran Empire. At sixteen Larry hadbeen resigned to waiting. Not happy about it. Just resigned.

And then the news had come. Wade Montray, his father, had put in for transfer to the Civil Service onthe planet Darkover, far out in the edge of the Milky Way. And Larry— whose mother had died beforehe was old enough to remember her, and who had no other living relatives—was going with him.

He’d ransacked his school library, and all the local reading rooms, to find out something about

Darkover. He didn’t learn much. It was the fourth planet of a medium-sized dark red star, invisible from

Earth’s sky, and so dim that it had a name only in star-catalogues. It was a world smaller than Earth, ithad four moons, it was a world at an arrested cultural level without very much technology or science. Themajor products exported from Darkover were medicinal earths and biological drugs, jewel stones, finemetals for precision tools, and a few luxury goods—silks, furs, wines.

A brief footnote in the catalogue had excited Larry almost beyond endurance:
 
Although the natives of Darkover are human, there are several intelligent cultures of non-humans present on this planet
 
.

Nonhumans! You didn’t see them often on Earth. Rarely, near one of the spaceports, you’d see a Joviantrundling by in his portable breathing-tank of methane gas; Earth’s oxygen was just as poisonous to himas the gas to an Earth-man. And now and again, you might catch a curious, exciting glimpse of some tall,winged man-thing from one of the outer worlds. But you never saw them up close. You couldn’t think ofthem as
people
 
, somehow.

He’d badgered his father with insistent questions until his father said, in exasperation, “How should Iknow? I’m not an information manual! I know that Darkover has a red sun, a cold climate, and a

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language supposed to be derived from the old Earth languages! I know it has four moons and that there are nonhumans there—and that’s all I know! So why don’t you wait and find out when you get there?”

When Dad got that look in his eye, it was better not to ask questions. So Larry kept the rest of them tohimself.

But one evening, as Larry was sorting things in his room, deciding to throw away stacks of outgrownbooks, toys, odds and ends he’d somehow accumulated in the last few years, his father knocked at hisdoor.

“Busy, son?”

“Come in, Dad.”

Wade Montray came in, nodding at the clutter on the bed. “Good idea. You can’t take more than a fewpounds of luggage with you, even these days. I’ve got something for you—picked it up attheTransferCenter .” He handed Larry a flat package; turning it over, Larry saw that it was a set of tapesfor his recording machine.

“Language tapes,” his father said, “since you’re so anxious to learn all about Darkover. You could get along all right in Standard, of course—everyone around the Spaceport and theTradeCity speaks it. Most of the people going out to Darkover don’t bother with the language, but I thought you might be interested.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ll hook up the tapes tonight.”

His father nodded. He was a stern-looking man, tall and quiet with dark eyes—Larry suspected that hisown red hair and gray eyes came from his unremembered mother— and he hadn’t smiled much lately;but now he smiled at Larry. “It’s a good idea. I’ve found out that it helps to be able to speak to people intheir own language, instead of expecting them to speak yours.”

He moved the tapes aside and sat down on Larry’s bed. The smile slid away and he was grave again.

“Son, do you really mind leaving Earth? It’s come to me, again and again, that it’s not fair to take you away from your home, out to the edge of nowhere. I almost didn’t put in for that transfer thinking of that. Even now—” he hesitated. “Larry, if you’d rather, you can stay here, and I can send for you in a few years, when you’re through with school and college.”

Larry felt his throat go suddenly tight.

“Leave me here? On Earth?”

“There are good schools and universities, son. Nobody knows what sort of education you’d be getting

in quarters on Darkover.”

Larry stared straight at his father, his mouth set hard to keep it from trembling. “Dad, don’t you want mealong? If you—if you want to get rid of me, I won’t make a fuss. But—” he stopped, swallowing hard.

“Son! Larry!” His father reached for his hands and held them, hard, for a minute. “Don’t say that again, huh? Only I promised your mother you’d get a good education. And here I am dragging you halfway across the universe, off on a crazy adventure, just because I’ve got the itch in my bones and don’t want

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to stay here like a sensible man. It’s selfish to want to go, and worse to want to take you with me!”