To Save a World (15 page)

The dim light in the room had faded to a dying glow and the dark sun was a drooping red coal in the sky when Missy rose and smoothed her long hair, made herself beautiful with gestures so automatic that she hardly needed to glance in the poor and cracked mirror in the room. She drew her light robe around her and went out into the muddy street, picking her way carefully in her light shoes.

The "Red" sector of the spaceport city was the same on all planets; cheap bars and amusement centers, restaurants and pleasure houses, gambling halls and wineshops, of all kinds and status levels. Missy had known them under a couple of dozen suns. Darkover was a little colder than most, a little more brilliantly lit. She moved from bar to bar, slowly, calculating and assessing each place the moment she stepped inside. Usually she could sum up the clientele, their average salary and the tone of the place within four or five minutes, and in most of them she kept her loose hooded cloak flung over her hair and behaved with modest detachment, so that few noticed her at all; and those who did saw only a small, slight girl, perhaps a spaceman's or port official's young daughter, possibly waiting for someone and quite unaware of her unrespectable surroundings. Even in the others she kept her appeal muted and gently rebuffed all advances until she spotted her desired prey.

He looked prosperous. His uniform told Missy at once that he was the second officer of an Empire-sponsored passenger ship—in short, he had authority and position, as well as wealth.

The officer raised his eyes from his drink to see a young girl, exquisitely pretty, with masses of loose, copper-toned hair falling like a cloud around her slender face, eyeing him with deep and luminous gray eyes. The impact of the eyes was such that afterward he felt confused and could never explain why he moved toward her, like a man under a spell. He was no novice with women—no ship's officer would be, certainly not one who wore on his stripes the seven small jewels indicating service on seven planets—but words almost deserted him; he could only say, like a confused youngster, "Aren't you cold? In that light dress, on a planet like this?"

Missy's smile was gently enigmatic. "I'm never cold," she said, "but I'm sure we could find somewhere warmer than this."

He wondered, afterward, why an approach so obvious had seemed, in the enchantment of glamour that seemed to fall around her, new and strangely fascinating. He had stayed under the spell all during the next hour, of which he remembered very little; he was still under the spell when he followed her through the dimmed and darkening streets to the mean little room. She had asked nothing of him. Long experience had taught her that afterward men were even more eager, more generous. She did not know why; she put it down to the curious glamour she could throw over herself at such times. She had no real doubt that afterward she could persuade him to smuggle her aboard his ship. Not less than ten times before this, a ship's officer or captain had risked his career to do so and then thanked her for the privilege. It was balm and reassurance to feel, within herself, the pressure of his driving need and hunger—after her failure with David (was that Keral's doing?) she had needed that assurance desperately, to ward off the terrible sensation of change, of not knowing herself.

His hands, his touch, his mouth on hers had become desperate, insistent. She lay back, allowing him to undress her. Her eyes were enormous, brilliant, and the ship's officer moved like a man in a dream, fumbling, excited fingers stripping away the light silken garments—

And then his rough hands struck her, knocking Missy half across the room, and his harsh, suddenly enraged voice, sick with disillusion and fury:

"Damned, filthy, stinking pervert! Lousy bastard of an
ombrédin
—I heard Darkover was full of you goddam lice but I never saw one—"

Cold claws of icy terror closed around Missy's heart. In the cracked, blurred mirror she had barely seen her own face, but now with a merciless clarity it gave back the naked body, the unbelievable and insane alterations there. She stared from the naked, raging man, advancing on her with fists upraised, and still unbelieving, cowered away.

This couldn't be happening! This was impossible!
And in a fit of mad illogic:
somehow Keral did this to me
. . . as she stared down, her enormous eyes dilated to blackness, at her own body, as if she were trapped in an insane amusement park mirror which gave back not her own familiar body, but a pale, undeveloped and yet unmistakable reflection of the furious man's own conformations; her breasts still there but shrunken, and below them, unmistakable, small but there, the pink protrusion of a male genital . . . .

Missy screamed, less from the pain of the blow than from panic, horror. She screamed again as the man's fists found her face; fumblingly, she put up her slender hands to shield her face. She did not even understand the mad abuse he was pouring on her. She was beyond hearing, making only the faintest movement to ward off the savage and brutal blows. She felt blood break from her lip, felt a rib crunching under his kick.

And then Missy went mad.

She had always known, in a general way, that she was stronger than any woman. It was part of her physical freakishness; she had never had the faintest fear of physical abuse, and had defended herself with skill and strength from unwanted advances on various occasions in her long and rough life. Here she had been taken off guard; but the smell of her own blood, and general panic, turned her berserk. She came up off the floor like a spitting, enraged tiger. A blow from unbelievably strong arms knocked the man across the room. She
reached
for him, with that inner force which had sent the furniture in David's room spinning, and he howled and clutched his groin, bawling like a wounded bull. A bench rose and flung itself across the room, striking him in the head with a blow that would have felled an ordinary man. But he was no ordinary man, and the sight of flying furniture only sent him further into the berserker fury. Outside in the street, clouds of whirling dust gathered and spun and spat. Rocks hurled themselves against the doors. Missy warded off kicks and blows, but when the officer seized the flying bench in mid-air and struck her on the head ,with it, she collapsed and lay still.

Then there was a hammering at the door and a stern shout, and four men in the black leather of Spaceforce kicked in the lock and took in the scene—the naked man, the unconscious and bleeding thing that looked at first glance like a naked girl—and hauled them both off, with prompt efficiency, to the spaceport prison and hospital.

And there they made discoveries which threw them into the same bewildered panic as the ship's officer.

The face on the visionscreen was bewildered after being passed along from official to official.

"You're Doctor Jason Allison? You're in charge of a special project in Medic, with some outworlders?"

"I'm Allison, yes."

"Well, we have something down here. Are you missing one of your people? We don't know what it is and we can't handle it; will you please come down here and take her or him or it away before it sets the whole goddam spaceport on fire or something?"

Jason said to himself, "Oh, oh," and wished he had a panic button to push.

He knew without asking that they'd found Missy.

My kinfolk . . . .

Keral. Is it well with you among the aliens, Beloved?

It is not well although one among them is dear to me as born blood-kin.
And I have learned much, much of our own people and this world. But I am alone and desolate; I cannot long endure the life within walls. And what shall I do if the Change comes upon me, or the madness of which you warned me? There is so much strangeness that I am always in fear. Already once I have wounded and once I have killed, both times without intention. And there is a strange one here who has put me in fear. I do not want to die. I do not want to die . . . .

JASON HAD brought along a sedative capable of calming down a couple of rogue elephants, but Missy, lying numb and shocked, her face a bleached blob above the blankets wrapped confiningly around her, made not the slightest protest. She neither spoke to him nor opened her eyes as he had her carefully loaded on a stretcher and carried to a waiting ambulance. During the short ride back to the HQ, he sat quietly at her side, not touching her, his face grim as he considered what the spaceport police had told him. He had seen with his own eyes the wreckage of the cell, including the charred patch where blankets had been set ablaze.

"I've seen an almighty damned strange batch of telepaths and psi talents on Darkover," he said to himself, grimly, "but an uncontrolled poltergeist is a new one on me and damned if I know how to handle it. Regis is going to have to help me out on this one. It's his field of competence, after all. I'm a medic, not a warlock."

The change in Missy, even on superficial inspection, appalled him. Although the curious and compelling beauty was still there, the fair skin seemed to have roughened, with a blotched look. Her eyes were lusterless—shock, of course, could account for that—but the most curious change was an intangible. Jason had been far from indifferent to the flaunting, exotic sexuality which Missy seemed to project from every pore—and now that had vanished, without a trace.

Well, shock and a brutal beating could account for that, too. She had evidently been very thoroughly mauled and maltreated; and evidently the doctors in the spaceport jail had been afraid to touch her.
Not that he blamed them
.

Fortunately, Missy had never shown any hostility to him. When he had examined her before, she had cooperated, even been—to a certain limited degree—friendly. It was David and Keral to whom she had reacted with hostility.

He had hoped to bring her into the Medic infirmary unnoticed, but—perhaps this was something he'd just have to get used to, working with telepaths—they were all there, waiting for him. He motioned to the men guiding the stretcher to wait, beckoned to David—at least David was a medical colleague—and said, in a low voice:

"You others will have to wait. She's been very badly hurt; she may have concussion, or internal injuries. David, come with me; and the rest of you, wait here." His eyes moved quickly over their faces; Regis, strained and frightened—why? Conner, gray with anguish and despair, moved him to brief pity, and he laid his hand on the man's shoulder. "I know how you feel," he said, "I'll let you in to see her the minute I can, believe me. She'll need someone who cares about her, after being roughed up like that."

Conner let himself be moved back, but David, tuned to sensitivity, could feel the man's helpless anger and protest:

There's no one else to care about her
. . .
she needs me, to them she's just a case
. . .
as I was in the hospital after the accident in space
. . . .

and his thoughts trailing off into incoherent rage, despair and desire, so entangled that Conner himself did not know which was which. David wondered,
how can he care so much for her?
and closed the door, glad to shut away the dark and far too expressive face.

Missy's face on the pillow was white and bruised-looking, one eye swollen shut with great purple bruises, her fair hair matted and tangled. David felt a choked sense of misery as he looked at her and wondered vaguely if he were sensing the girl's own emotions; or Conner's; or empathizing that strange, elusive and painful sense of resemblance to Keral. There would be scars on that fair and untouched face, that cheek where a fist or some blunt instrument had ripped away skin . . . .

He moved toward her and began to draw away the blankets.

Missy's eyes blinked open, cold and brilliant as steel. "No," she whispered, shaping her bloodied lips painfully, "don't touch me.
Don't touch me!
"

Poor kid, Jason thought, after what she's been through I don't blame her. "It's all right, Missy," he said quietly, "no one is going to hurt you, now. I've got to look at those cuts on your face, and see what other injuries you have. I think we can fix you up without too many scars. Tell me, have you any pain? Let me see—"

He grasped the blanket firmly, trying to pry loose her fingers that huddled it round her.

The next minute, in a shower of flaming sparks, Jason flew through the air, shouting, struck the opposite wall and fell, awkwardly, landing in a collapsed heap. Missy spat out the words:

"
Don't touch me!
"

"Hey, now—" Jason protested, picking himself up in astonished consternation, "I won't hurt you."

But Missy's eyes were blank and unseeing; a metallic, cold glare. David, standing beside her bed, picked up a whirling snowstorm of thoughts, a tornado of terror and shame too frightening to be untangled—

"Wait, Jason," he said, and bent over Missy.

"Child, it's all over; no one will hurt you. It's only the doctor, he wants to see how badly that man hurt you. Please try to tell us; did he rape you? We can't tell you how sorry we are—" David was trying, desperately, for the first time in his medical career, to reach out through that blind barricade of terror and touch the terrified girl within. He was unconscious now of Missy's strangeness; he spoke as he would have spoken to a frightened child. The specifically sexual content of the terror, wordless but clearly identifiable, led David to an entirely wrong conclusion. "Missy, if you're afraid of us would you like to have one of the women here, Doctor Shield perhaps, come and be with you?"

An even more violent explosion of rage, tension and terror, like a palpable storm in the room. Missy's eyes were a glassy glare of panic, and when David tried to touch the blankets she had hauled around her body, his hand jumped back in a numb tingling paralysis like an electric shock.

Jason said, still trying to be reasonable, "Miss Gentry, this is ridiculous. How can we help you, or even dress those wounds of yours—look, your face is still bleeding—unless you let us?"

"It's no good to try and reason with her," David said in a low voice. "I don't think she even hears what we're saying, Jason."

The door opened and Keral said in his low, diffident voice, "Dr. Allison, I think I know what has happened to Missy. Remember, she is one of my own people, one of my race. This is something you cannot understand. Let me try to reach her mind . . . ."

He looked drawn and frightened, and David could sense, like static in the room, his fear that was like Missy's:
it is the madness of the Change
. . .
and if she has been reared on another world, not knowing that this may happen, if it has come upon her unknowing
. . . .

"Hear me," he whispered. "Be with me. Missy, I am not your enemy. I am of your own people . . . ."

She lay back, her eyes still glazed but lax and motionless, her breath coming in a harsh and deathly rattle. David knew that she heard Keral, but the glassy eyes did not flicker. Keral's voice trembled, and David sensed his own rigid self-control, but there was a tenderness in the tones which made both listeners achingly aware of the strange aloneness of the chieri.

"Missy. Open your mind and heart to me. I can help you; you need not fear me, strayed nestling from our world, little sister, little brother, little lost bird . . . ."

Missy's staring eyes flickered with live knowledge, she drew a harsh, sobbing breath—

And then the room exploded. Keral screamed in anguish and beat wildly at the flames that burst out under his hands; a tornado wind whirled wildly in the center of the room, tipping over the medical trolley with its array of bandages and instruments; it fell with a noise of metal, shattering glass. David dodged flying glass fragments; Jason shouted in rage and consternation—

Keral backed away, his face white, gripping his seared hands together in voiceless agony. He whispered, harshly, "I can't reach her, she's insane . . . get Desideria, she can handle Missy . . . ."

In the corridor outside, slamming the door on the chaos of the room, they looked at each other in terror and rising dismay. The others crowded around, with concerned questions; Jason beckoned to Desideria, and said briefly, "How do you handle a crazy poltergeist? Regis, you're the expert; what do you do when your people go berserk?"

"I've never had to handle one before," Regis said. "David, you look after Keral, he's hurt—Desideria, can you quiet her?"

Linnea, standing quietly at the outskirts of the group, said, "If you can't alone, Grandmother, let me try—if two Keepers cannot handle one madwoman, what are we here for?"

Jason stood aside for them to step into the room. David, drawing Keral after them—after all, this was the emergency room and this was the only place he could find bandages and medicines for the burns on Keral's hands—watched with detached curiosity as the two women moved toward Missy. A few steps away, they stopped, close together, clasping hands. Desideria's snow-white crown of hair and Linnea's flaming copper one were close together, and the elusive, strong likeness between the women gave a curious sense of power. Their two pairs of gray eyes, so like Missy's, focused like a visible beam of light . . . .

David bent and picked up the trolley, shoving the scattered instruments out of the way, pushed Keral into a chair and rummaged in a cupboard for burn remedies—
thank God for Universal Medical Labels, I couldn't cope with Darkovan script just now
, he thought at random as his eyes found the familiar flame emblem on a packet of anesthetic spray—and gently uncoiled Keral's fingers, drawing a breath of consternation at the cruelly blistered palms. Behind him he could sense the tension in the room, as Missy struggled wordlessly, trembling, under the focused pressure of the two women . . . .

Desideria said, in a cold voice, "Do what you have to, Jason. She'll be quiet."

Linnea drew a deep, sobbing breath. She said, "Oh, Grandmother, no . . . oh, Evanda have mercy! Poor thing . . . ."

David drew the bandages tight on Keral's hands. He said, wetting his lips, "That will heal in a day or two, Keral. There won't be any permanent harm. Are you all right? Do you feel faint?" The chieri looked deathlike, his mouth trembling. David felt a terrifying rage against Missy, which he controlled with an intense effort, and when Jason said, "David, if you've finished, give me a hand here," he moved toward Missy's inert body, trying for a professional calm to drop over his own fear and rage like a cloak.

Jason drew away the blankets, visibly controlling, a shrinking as he touched them, but this time Missy lay quiet, looking shocked and half unconscious. Jason bared the slender, rounded upper arm, slid a needle into the inert flesh. After a tense moment, Missy's eyes closed and she began to breathe in long, drowsy breaths.

Jason said to the women, "Relax; that will hold her. Thanks; she could probably have killed all three of us." He looked at them in bafflement, the conflict between medical ethics—you don't examine a patient in front of outsiders, if you can help it—and an obvious dislike of being alone with the dangerous patient, fighting a very clear-cut battle in his face.

David said, "Let them stay, Jason. They know more about telepaths—or aliens—than we do."

He watched, with a curiously detached lack of surprise, as Jason finished undressing Missy. He felt a strange and frightening pity; no wonder the change had driven her mad; her own body became an alien and terrifying thing . . . but he quenched this entirely subjective empathy
(Keral! What had this done to Keral?)
and tried to examine the changes with a total scientific detachment.

The breasts had definitely altered in size and contour. Not that they had ever been large, of course, not much larger than those of a girl of twelve. But still, the change was perceptible. The skin texture, although he was not sure, seemed somehow to have altered, lost its luminous quality. He handled it with some curiosity as he helped Jason cleanse the cuts and abrasions. The genital changes were somewhat more marked; he had been aware of certain minor structural anomalies before, enough to classify Missy as a slightly abnormal female; now, on first inspection she would have struck anyone as a male. A somewhat underdeveloped male, it was true, but nevertheless unquestionably male in gender.
Poor kid, what a frightening thing to have happen to her!
Her? By habit he was still thinking of Missy as a girl, and when he thought about Conner his face burned with vicarious shock.
Here I am sorry for Missy; how am I going to explain to Conner that his girl friend isn't even a girl?

"Well, we've certainly opened one hell of a can of worms," Jason said, hours later. Missy still slept, drugged and still. David flickered the pages of the medical report in his hands. Massive hormone changes, still continuing and probably unstable, shifting back and forth between androgens and female hormones—no wonder the emotional instability had resulted! "Are all the chieri like that, I wonder? You're Keral's buddy; maybe you can get him to tell you the whole story. Didn't he say that thousands of years ago the chieri went into space, looking for some way to save their race and then came home to die? Evidently Missy is one of them who got lost, somehow or somewhere. Probably never knew what she was—what the hell, if she was a foundling, as she said, someone decided at first look that she was a girl, and who's going to question the evidence of her own eyes? But are we going to have to cope with something like that happening to Keral? What was that phrase he used—
the madness of the change?
Oh hell," he burst out, "I can't cope with it. What good is this whole project anyway?"

David, sensing a sudden despair which had nothing to do with his patient, asked quickly, "Jay, what's wrong?"

Jason shook his head. "Personal problems. I've just had word my own people are dying like flies—you didn't know—I was brought up with nonhumans myself; the trailmen. You don't realize—you haven't been on Darkover long enough—but there have been forest fires; and the people of the forests are dying . . . . What's the good of saving a project, or a few people, if this world is going down the drain?"