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Chapter Seven: Homecoming

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Kerwin stood blinking against the warmth and light of the spacious hallway. He mopped snow from hisface again, and for a moment all he could hear was the wind and snow outside, slapping against theclosed door. Then a bright tinkle of laughter broke the silence.

“Elorie has won,” said a light, girlish voice, somehow familiar to him. “I told you so.”

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A thick velvet curtain parted, just before him, and a girl stood there; a slender young woman with redhair in a green dress with a high collar, and a pixie-pretty face. She was laughing at him. Behind her twomen came through the curtains, and Kerwin wondered if he had somehow wandered into a daydream —or nightmare. For they were the three redheads from the Sky Harbor Hotel; the pretty woman was Taniquel, and behind her, the feline and arrogant Auster, the thickset, urbane man who had introducedhimself as Kennard. It was Kennard who spoke now.

“Did you doubt it, Tani?”

“The
 
Terranan
 
! ” Auster stood glowering; Kennard gently moved Taniquel out of his way, and came toward Kerwin, who stood bewildered, wondering if he ought to apologize for this intrusion. Kennard stopped a step or two from Kerwin and said, “Welcome home, my boy.”

Auster said something sarcastic, curling his lip in an ironic smile.

Kerwin said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“Tell me,” Kennard countered, “how did you find this place?”

Kerwin said, too baffled for anything but the truth, “I don’t know. I just came. Hunch, I guess.”

“No,” Kennard said gravely, “it was a test; and you passed it.”

“A
 
test
 
?” Suddenly Kerwin was both angry and apprehensive. Ever since he landed on Darkover, somebody had been pushing him around; and now, when he made what he thought was an independent move to break away, he found himself led here.

“I suppose I ought to be grateful. Right now all I want is an explanation! Test? What for? Who
 
are
you people? What do you want with me? Are you still mistaking me for someone else? Who do you think I am?”

“Not who,” said Taniquel, “what.” And at the same time Kennard said, “No, we knew
 
who
 
you were all along. What we had to find out— ” And the two of them stopped, looked at each other and laughed. Then the girl said, “You tell him, Ken. He’s
your
kinsman.”

Kerwin jerked up his head and stared at them, and Kennard said, “We are all your kinsmen, if it comesto that; but I knew who you were, or at least I guessed, from the beginning. And if I had not known, yourmatrix would have told me, because I have seen it before and worked with it before. But we had to testyou, to see if you had inherited
 
laran
 
, if you were genuinely one of us.”

Kerwin frowned and said, “What do you mean? I am a Terran.”

Kennard shook his head and said, “That’s as may be. Among us the child takes the rank and privilege ofthe parent of higher caste. And your mother was a woman of the Comyn; my foster-sister, Cleindori Aillard.”

There was a sudden silence, while Kerwin heard the word
 
Comyn
 
echo and re-echo in the room.

“Remember,” Kennard said at last, “that we mistook you for one of ourselves, that night in the Sky

Harbor Hotel. We were not so wrong as we thought —not so wrong as you told us we were.”

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Auster interrupted again with something unintelligible. It was strange how clearly he could understand

Kennard and Taniquel, and hardly a word of Auster’s speech.

“Your foster-sister?” Kerwin asked. “Who are you?”

“Kennard-Gwynn Lanart-Alton, Heir to Armida,” the older man said. “Your mother and I were fostered together; we are blood kin as well, though the relationship is—complicated. When Cleindori—died—you were taken away; by night and by stealth. We tried to trace her child; but there was, at that time, a— ” Again he hesitated. “I’m not trying to be secretive, I give you my word; it’s only that I can’t imagine how to make it clear to you without giving you a long history of the political complications of forty-odd years ago in the Domains. There were—problems, and when we knew where you were, we decided to leave you there for a time; at least you were safe there. By the time we could try and reclaim you, they had already sent you to Terra, and all we could do was wait. I was reasonably sure of who you were, that night in the hotel. And then your matrix turned up on one of the monitor screens…”

“What?”

“I can’t explain just now. Any more than I can explain Auster’s stupidity when he met you in the bar,

except that he’d been drinking. Of course, you weren’t exactly cooperative, either.”

Again Auster exploded into unintelligible speech, and Kennard motioned him to silence. “Save yourbreath, Auster, he’s not getting a word of it. Anyway, you passed the first test; you have rudimentary
laran
 
. And because of who you are, and—and certain other things—we’re going to find out if you haveenough of it to be useful to us. I gather you want to stay on Darkover; we offer you a chance at that.”

Dazed, still off balance, and feeling somewhere inside himself that Kennard’s explanations were onlyconfusing the issue further, Kerwin could do nothing but stare.

Well, he had followed his hunch; and if it had led him from the trap to the cookpot, he had only himselfto thank.

Well, here I am
, he thought.
 
The only trouble is, I haven’t the foggiest notion of where “here” is
 
!

“What is this place?” he asked. “Is it— ” He repeated the word he had heard Kennard say: “Armida?”

Kennard shook his head, laughing. “Armida is the Great House of the Alton Domain,” he said. “It’s inthe Kilghard Hills, more than a day’s ride from here. This is the town house belonging to my family. Therational thing would have been to bring you to Comyn Castle; but there were some of the Comyn whodidn’t want anything to do with this— ” he hesitated—“this experiment until they knew what was going tohappen, one way or another. And it was better that we shouldn’t let too many people in on what washappening.”

Kerwin looked around at the rich draperies, the walls hung with panels of curtain. The place seemedfamiliar, somehow, familiar and strange, out of those long-ago, half-forgotten dreams. Kennard answeredhis unspoken thought:

“You may possibly have been here once or twice. As a very young child. I doubt if you would remember, though. Anyhow— ” He glanced at Taniquel and Auster. “We should go, as soon as we can. I want to leave the city as quickly as possible. And Elorie is waiting.” His face was suddenly somber. “I don’t have to tell you that there are—some people— who will take a very dim view of all this, and we want to present them with something already accomplished.” His eyes seemed to go right through Kerwin

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as he said, “You’ve already been attacked once, haven’t you?”

Kerwin didn’t waste time wondering how Kennard knew that. He said, “Yes,” and Kennard lookedgrim. He said, “I thought, at first, that Auster was behind it. But he swore to me that he wasn’t. I hadhoped—those old hates, superstitions, fears—I had hoped a generation would quiet them down.” Hesighed, turned to Taniquel.

“Let me just say goodnight to the children. Then I’ll be ready to go with you.”

A little airship, buffeted by the treacherous winds and currents of flowing atmosphere above the cragsand ridges of the mountains, flew through the reddening dawn. They had left the storm behind; but therough terrain, a dizzy distance below, was softened by layers of mist.

Kerwin sat with legs folded up uncomfortably beneath him, watching Auster manipulate the unseencontrols. He would not have chosen to share the small forward pilot-cabin with Auster, but there wasbarely room for Kennard and Taniquel in the small rear cabin, and he had not been consulted about hispreference. He was still baffled by the speed with which events had moved; almost at once they hadhurried him to a small private landing field at the far edge of the city, and put him aboard this plane. Atleast, he thought wryly, he now knew more than the Terran Legate, who couldn’t imagine what use the Darkovans had for aircraft.

Kerwin still didn’t know what they wanted with him; but he wasn’t frightened. They weren’t exactlyfriendly; but they somehow—well, they
 
accepted
 
him, much as his grandparents had done; it had nothingto do with his character and personality, or whether they liked him—and Auster, at least, definitely
 
didn’t
 
—they accepted him, like family. Yes, that was it; like family. Even when Kennard had brusquely cut offhis flood of questions with “Later, later!” there had been no offense.

The ship had no visible instruments except for some small calibrator dials. One of these Auster hadadjusted when they boarded, apologizing curtly for the discomfort—an unpleasant vibration that made Kerwin’s ears and teeth ache. It was necessary, Auster told him in a few grudging words, to compensatefor the presence of an undeveloped telepath inside the aircraft.

Since then Auster had barely leaned forward, now and then, from his folded-up kneeling posture, stirringa hand languidly as if signaling some unseen watcher. Or, thought Kerwin, as if he were shooing awayflies. He had asked, once, what powered the ship. “Matrix crystal,” Auster said briefly.

This made Kerwin purse his lips in a soundless whistle. He had not even remotely guessed that thepower of these thought-sensitive crystals could be so enormous. It wasn’t psi power alone. He was sureof that. Kerwin had guessed, from what Ragan had told him and what little he had seen, that matrixtechnology was one of those sciences that Terrans lumped together under the general name of
non-causative sciences;
 
cyrillics, electromentry, psychokinetics; and Kerwin knew very little of these. They were usually found on nonhuman worlds.

Kerwin was, despite all his fascination, plainly and unequivocally scared. And yet—he had never thoughtof himself as Terran except by accident of birth. Darkover was the only home he had ever known, andnow he knew that he really belonged here, that he was somehow related to their highest nobility, to the Comyn.

The Comyn. He knew very little about them; just what every Terran assigned to Cottman Four knew,

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which wasn’t much. They were a hereditary caste who chose to have as little as possible to do with the Terrans, though they had ceded the spaceport lease and allowed the building of the Trade Cities. They were not kings, autocrats, priesthood, or government; he knew more about what they were
 
not
 
than what they were. But he had had a taste of the fanatical reverence with which they were treated, these red-haired noblemen.

He tried cautiously to unkink his legs without kicking out a bulkhead. “How much further is this city ofyours?” he asked Auster.

Auster did not deign to look at him. He was very thin, with a suggestion of the feline in his shoulders andthe curl of his arrogant mouth; but he looked familiar somehow, too, in a way Kerwin couldn’t quiteidentify. Well, they were all related somehow; Kennard had said they were all his kinsmen. Maybe Auster looked like Kennard.

“We do not speak the Cahuenga here,” Auster said tersely, “and I cannot understand you, or you me,

with the telepathic damper adjusted.” He made a small gesture toward the calibrator.

“What’s wrong with Cahuenga? You can speak it all right—I heard you.”

“We are capable of learning any known human tongue,” said Auster, with that unconscious arrogance that irritated Kerwin so much, “but the concepts of our world are expressible only in the nexus of our own semantic symbology, and I have no desire to converse in crocodile with a half-breed on trivial matters.”

Kerwin fought an impulse to hit him. He was thoroughly tired of his offhand statement about lizard-men,and tireder of having Auster throw it back at him every time he opened his mouth. He’d never known aman quite so easy to dislike as Auster, and if the man was his kinsman, he decided blood relationshipsdidn’t mean as much as they were supposed to mean. He found himself wondering just how closely theywere related. Not too closely, he hoped.

The sun was just touching the rim of the mountains when Auster stirred slightly, his satirical face relaxinga little, and pointed between twin mountain peaks.

“It lies there,” he said, “the plains of Arilinn, and the City, and the Arilinn Tower.”

Kerwin moved his cramped shoulders, looking downward at the city of his forefathers. From this altitudeit looked like any other city, a pattern of lights, buildings, cleared spaces. The little craft slanteddownward in response to one of those shoo-fly motions of Auster’s hands; Kerwin lost his balance,made a wild grab to recover it, and involuntarily fell against Auster’s side.

He was wholly unprepared for Auster’s reaction. The man forgot the operation of the ship and with agreat sweep of his arm, jerked backward, his elbow thrusting out to knock Kerwin away from him, hard. His forearm struck Kerwin a hard blow across the mouth; the aircraft lurched, swerved, and behindthem, in the cabin, Taniquel screamed. Auster, recovering himself, made swift controlling movements.