To Save a World (21 page)

And then, unmistakable, it was Rondo who yelled—or were there words?—a great cry of outrage and anguish:

No! I told you their plans because I wanted to get free of this world, but they have never harmed me, and I want no part in murder
—

And a running figure which suddenly froze and rose upward, upward, physically upward through the thickening air, like a flying demon, surrounded with a glare of growing light. He seized something with a strange twisting gesture, in mid-air, and body and glowing thing rocketed upward, upward . . . .

In mid-air, thousands of feet above the castle, it burst like a great shower of fireworks; there was a silent scream of unbelievable pain and dying anguish and there was a ripped out silence, a great gaping toothache hole in the world where Rondo's thoughts and voice and mind had been. And then came the sound of the explosion, muffled by distance, far out in space and harmless, but still it rocked the castle, reverberated—and died away.

And then, in the midst of the chieri and surrounded by their light, stood a woman, wearing drab Empire clothes, struggling against the invisible force that had thrust her out of concealment and into the light; the look of sated and triumphant rage on her face giving way to fear, amazement, and disbelief.

I thought you were all dead. I did not know any of you had survived to return to this world, even to die.

"No." The voice of the eldest of the chieri, a tall and beautiful woman, ageless and beyond everything in man, was like a reverberation in the world. "We live, although not for long. But we cannot give death for death; we must give life for death—"

"Her name is Andrea," said the young, red-haired Free Amazon, rising from the garden darkness, "and I knew she would have destroyed us if she could, but I did not know—"

"No," said the old chieri again, with infinite grief and gentleness, speaking directly to Andrea. "We know you, even over these many, many turns of the years, Narzainye kui, child of the Yellow Forest, who abandoned us in despair during the years of our search. We mourned you as one long, long dead, beloved . . . ."

The face of the woman was drawn with agony and grief. "And I bore a child on one of the outer worlds, to a stranger whose name I never knew, or face I never saw—a child conceived in madness and thrown out to die, in madness, thinking you all dead and gone—"

"The long, long years of madness," Keral whispered, and took Andrea's face between his hands in infinite tenderness. She opened her spasmodically closed eyes and looked up at him, seeing the glow of heightened beauty, the infinite power which lay within Keral, the height of potential life. Keral said quietly:

"All is not ended. I live—and you see what has happened to me. Perhaps even the child you bore lives somewhere; we are hard to kill—" and his eyes briefly sought for Missy in the crowd, in speculation which could be read on the clear features. "But our race lives, Andrea, in these people; I knew even as a babe that our blood survived in them. And as you see—"

Keral's unearthly beauty seemed to shimmer, and for the first (and only) time, David perceived Keral for an instant as the exquisite girl he had at first thought Keral and in instantaneous recognition knew the truth; that the chieri showed the height of the Change, and full feminine awareness (Missy had only mimicked it) in pregnancy. And now he understood Keral's madness of joy, which had swept them all away—and saved them all; and probably saved a world as well.

And then, with trained medical awareness, forgetting that he was still half-naked, he leaped forward, catching Andrea in his arms as the aging chieri woman crumpled senseless to the ground.

THE WOMAN WHO for centuries had called herself Andrea Closson sat on a high balcony in the Comyn Castle at Thendara, looking out over green and faraway hills. The point of no return had been very nearly reached; and yet, as she told herself before, the world could be saved, but it had demanded resources which were not available on Darkover:

Except for herself.

She had not spared herself. Every scrap of talent which she had used, for two hundred years, in learning how to wreck worlds, had been thrown into the struggle to save one; and every cent of the enormous fortune it had made her had been placed at the disposal of those who were struggling on every front to return Darkover to itself. This world was her own, and had been miraculously returned to her when she knew that a handful of her people survived and that their blood survived in the very Darkovan telepaths she had despised. And now, as they awaited the birth of Keral's child, she knew it would remain, even though not a pure line.

The chieri might not survive. This alone could not return her race to strength and survival. They had, indeed, reached the point of no return. It was certain that Missy would never bear a child; she had been too deeply damaged and blunted in the hundreds of years of struggle for survival, abandoned. Andrea faced her own guilt, but it was as if it had happened to someone else; what is done in madness cannot be remembered in sanity without worse madness. Still, Keral lived, and Keral's child would live, bringing new vigor and new powers to the telepath race.

"And that's not all," said David, coming out on the balcony. He had a strange ability to follow Andrea's thoughts, and she had grown to love him in her own strange and hidden way. Jason, Regis and Linnea were with him, and David said, "The telepaths here, at least, will not die out. Do you realize that—how many is it, Jason?"

"One hundred and one," Jason said, "that's women of the Telepath Council—pregnant. And at least nineteen of them with twins and three with triplets. That at least ensures a flourishing younger generation." He looked at Linnea, who laughed and took Regis' hand. She was very near her own time now, heavily pregnant but as beautiful as ever.

"We are going to work with the Empire," Regis said; "It was decided in council; Darkovans cannot cut themselves entirely off from a galactic civilization. We will train telepaths for spaceship communication. We know, now, that contact with telepaths will arouse latent telepathy in those who don't seem to have it. I expect, from Darkover, it will spread out all through the known galaxy. And those who are born with it won't go insane, so that in a few more generations there will be a sizable leaven of telepaths on all planets; and we will bring them here, and train them to use their powers in sanity and happiness. And in return for this we have a pledge that Darkover will remain always the world we know, and love, and need for our continuing sanity and nourishment; never just another world in a chain of identical worlds."

David listened a moment, as if to an invisible voice; went away. Linnea, seeming to listen also, smiled and pressed Regis' hand. "It won't be long for me, either, now," she said.

Regis came and sat beside Andrea. She had aged greatly in the long months of struggle in the woods and mountains, working with close directions to save the ruined world; explicit instructions on how to restore soil to life, which trees to plant for the swiftest ground cover against erosion, what to do in every niche of the complex ecology. But her lined face was peaceful and gentle, and again she looked like a chieri, inspiring the old awe and love. He said: "What will you do now—" He hesitated, then called her by her chieri name, and she smiled:

"I await only the birth of Keral's child; then I will return to my own forest with my people, for the few last
cuere
allotted to me. But I will lay down my years content, knowing that if my own leaves fall, there will be new buds in the spring I will never see."

Regis reached out to touch her hand, and she clasped it, quietly. They sat there, looking out over the mists on the hills.

Linnea said, "You have given so much—"

Andrea smiled. "I do not need a fortune now."

"I wish you had come back before," Regis said, wrung with honest grief.

"Perhaps it would have been too soon," Andrea's calm voice was speculative. "In any case, I knew no longer where my own world lay . . . ."

"Those who hired you—what will they do? When Darkover does not fall ripe to their hands—"

"What can they do? To trap me, or even to claim my bond, they would have to admit, they hired me, and worldwrecking is illegal. I think they will just admit their defeat. But now the Terran Empire knows exactly how they work; they will have a harder time wrecking other worlds."

There was a stir behind them, and Keral, pale and lovely, with David just behind, came out on the balcony. They came straight to Andrea, and Keral turned, took a small squirming thing from David's arms, and laid it in Andrea's.

Keral murmured, "Not for love, but because it means more to you than any other; look here and see a world reborn."

Andrea reached out and touched Keral's soft hair. "Yes," she said in a whisper, "for love."

David drew Keral away, and they stood clasped close, looking into the green world. They were both still bemused, not needing to look to see: still, the tiny, infinitely strange and beautiful scrap of a baby, with red-headed fuzz; the first of a second chain of telepaths with chieri blood. And it was their own stake in a newborn world. This had begun with a child in Keral's arms, the complex train of emotions and experiences, and David thought they would always have a debt to Melora and her child. Over Keral's shoulder he met Regis' eyes and smiled.

Andrea lay back, closing her eyes and yet seeing, without sight, a green and growing world, with life springing up from the soil, leaves falling from the trees and returning in endless cycle, rivers, valleys, mountains, surging with life, and beyond them the endless life of the silent forests of Darkover under the moon. Far away, like a distant song, she heard the music of her people in the forests of falling leaves, where they awaited her coming. Time would pass over them, and they would not return, but fall like leaves; but while Darkover lived they would never wholly die, and after them the very Empire would be seasoned with their memory, with their beauty and the eternal gift of bridging the gap between man and mankind; the gift that was love.

She smiled with her eyes closed, feeling the strong life and already budding sensitivity of the child in her arms; hearing the distant music, which rose and fell like wind in the leaves, and faded quietly into silence, like a falling breeze in the forest.

Not until Keral's child began to stir and fret and kick in her cold arms did any of the others realize that Andrea Closson, chieri, child of the Yellow Forest, worldwrecker and redeemer, had come home only to die.

BY THE TIME I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows, alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the glass-brick.

Habit and memory fitted names to all these. The bare office, the orange flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man before.

He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the Terran Trade City.

I didn’t stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man. But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here.

“Could I trouble you to tell me your name?”

That was reasonable enough. If I found somebody making himself at home in my office—if I had an office—I’d ask him his name, too. I started to swing my legs to the floor, and had to stop and steady myself with one hand while the room drifted in giddy circles around me.

“I wouldn’t try to sit up just yet,” he remarked, while the floor calmed down again. Then he repeated, politely but insistently, “Your name?”

“Oh, yes. My name.” It was—I fumbled through layers of what felt like gray fuzz, trying to lay my tongue on the most familiar of all sounds, my own name. It was—why, it was—I said, on a high rising note, “This is damn silly,” and swallowed. And swallowed again. Hard.

“Calm down,” the chubby man said soothingly. That was easier said than done. I stared at him in growing panic and demanded, “But, but, have I had amnesia or something?”

“Or something.”

“What’s my name?”

“Now, now, take it easy! I’m sure you’ll remember it soon enough. You can answer other questions, I’m sure. How old are you?”

I answered eagerly and quickly “Twenty-two.”

The chubby man scribbled something on a card. “Interesting. In-ter-est-ing. Do you know where we are?”

I looked around the office. “In the Terran Headquarters. From your uniform, I’d say we were on Floor 8—Medical.”

He nodded and scribbled again, pursing his lips. “Can you—uh—tell me what planet we are on?”

I had to laugh. “Darkover,” I chuckled, “I hope! And if you want the names of the moons, or the date of the founding of the Trade City, or something—”

He gave in, laughing with me. “Remember where you were born?”

“On Samarra. I came here when I was three years old—my father was in Mapping and Exploring—” I stopped short, in shock. “He’s dead!”

“Can you tell me your father’s name?”

“Same as mine. Jay—Jason—” the flash of memory closed down in the middle of a word. It had been a good try, but it hadn’t quite worked. The doctor said soothingly, “We’re doing very well.”

“You haven’t told me anything,” I accused. “Who are you? Why are you asking me all these questions?”

He pointed to a sign on his desk. I scowled and spelled out the letters. “Randall—Forth—Director—Department—” and Dr. Forth made a note. I said aloud, “It is Doctor Forth, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you know?”

I looked down at myself, and shook my head. “Maybe I’m Doctor Forth,” I said, noticing for the first time that I was also wearing a white coat with the caduceus emblem of Medical. But it had the wrong feel, as if I were dressed in somebody else’s clothes. I was no doctor, was I? I pushed back one sleeve slightly, exposing a long, triangular scar under the cuff. Dr. Forth—by now I was sure he was Dr. Forth—followed the direction of my eyes.

“Where did you get the scar?”

“Knife fight. One of the bands of those-who-may-not-enter-cities caught us on the slopes, and we—” the memory thinned out again, and I said despairingly, “It’s all confused! What’s the matter? Why am I up on Medical? Have I had an accident? Amnesia?”

“Not exactly. I’ll explain.”

I got up and walked to the window, unsteadily because my feet wanted to walk slowly while I felt like bursting through some invisible net and striding there at one bound. Once I got to the window the room stayed put while I gulped down great breaths of warm sweetish air. I said, “I could use a drink.”

“Good idea. Though I don’t usually recommend it.” Forth reached into a drawer for a flat bottle; poured tea-colored liquid into a throwaway cup. After a minute he poured more for himself. “Here. And sit down, man. You make me nervous, hovering like that.”

I didn’t sit down. I strode to the door and flung it open. Forth’s voice was low and unhurried.

“What’s the matter? You can go out, if you want to, but won’t you sit down and talk to me for a minute? Anyway, where do you want to go?”

The question made me uncomfortable. I took a couple of long breaths and came back into the room. Forth said, “Drink this,” and I poured it down. He refilled the cup unasked, and I swallowed that too and felt the hard lump in my middle began to loosen up and dissolve.

Forth said, “Claustrophobia too. Typical,” and scribbled on the card some more. I was getting tired of that performance. I turned on him to tell him so, then suddenly felt amused—or maybe it was the liquor working in me. He seemed such a funny little man, shutting himself up inside an office like this and talking about claustrophobia and watching me as if I were a big bug. I tossed the cup into a disposall.

“Isn’t it about time for a few of those explanations?”

“If you think you can take it. How do you feel now?”

“Fine.” I sat down on the couch again, leaning back and stretching out my long legs comfortably. “What did you put in that drink?”

He chuckled. “Trade secret. Now, the easiest way to explain would be to let you watch a film we made yesterday.”

“To watch—” I stopped. “It’s your time we’re wasting.”

He punched a button on the desk, spoke into a mouthpiece. “Surveillance? Give us a monitor on—” he spoke a string of incomprehensible numbers, while I lounged at ease on the couch. Forth waited for an answer, then touched another button and steel louvers closed noiselessly over the windows, blacking them out. The darkness felt oddly more normal than the light, and I leaned back and watched the flickers clear as one wall of the office became a large vision-screen. Forth came and sat beside me on the leather couch, but in the picture Forth was there, sitting at his desk, watching another man, a stranger, walk into the office.

Like Forth, the newcomer wore a white coat with the caduceus emblems. I disliked the man on sight. He was tall and lean and composed, with a dour face set in thin lines. I guessed that he was somewhere in his thirties. Dr. Forth-in-the-film said, “Sit down, doctor,” and I drew a long breath, overwhelmed by a curious sensation.

I have been here before. I have seen this happen before.

(And curiously formless I felt. I sat and watched, and I knew I was watching, and sitting. But it was in that dreamlike fashion, where the dreamer at once watches his visions and participates in them…)

“Sit down, doctor,” Forth said. “Did you bring in the reports?”

Jay Allison carefully took the indicated seat, poised nervously on the edge of the chair. He sat very straight, leaning forward only a little to hand a thick folder of papers across the desk. Forth took it, but didn’t open it. “What do you think, Dr. Allison?”

“There is no possible room for doubt.” Jay Allison spoke precisely, in a rather high-pitched and emphatic tone. “It follows the statistical pattern for all recorded attacks of 48-year fever—by the way, sir, haven’t we any better name than that for this particular disease? The term ‘48-year fever’ connotes a fever of 48 years’ duration, rather than a pandemic recurring every 48 years.”

“A fever that lasted 48 years would be quite a fever,” Dr. Forth said with a grim smile. “Nevertheless that’s the only name we have so far. Name it and you can have it. Allison’s disease?”

Jay Allison greeted this pleasantry with a repressive frown. “As I understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years’ conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don’t know anything about that part, I’m quoting Dr. Moore. If there’s an animal vector to the disease, we’ve never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd cases all over this part of the planet. Then it skips exactly three months without increase. The next upswing puts the number of the reported cases in the thousands, and three months after that, it reaches real pandemic proportions and decimates the entire human population of Darkover.”

“That’s about it,” Forth admitted. They bent together over the folder, Jay Allison drawing back slightly to avoid touching the other man.

Forth said, “We Terrans have a Trade compact on Darkover for a hundred and fifty-two years. The first outbreak of this 48-year fever killed all but a dozen men out of three hundred. The Darkovans were worse off than we were. The last outbreak wasn’t as bad, but it was bad enough, I’ve heard. It had an eighty-seven percent mortality—for humans, that is. I understand the Trailmen don’t die of it.”

“The Darkovans call it the Trailmen’s fever, Dr. Forth, because the Trailmen are virtually immune to it. It remains in their midst as a mild ailment taken by children. When it breaks put into a virulent form every 48 years, most of the Trailmen are already immune. I took the disease myself as a child —maybe you heard?”

Forth nodded. “You may be the only Terran ever to contract the disease and survive.”

“The Trailmen incubate the disease,” Jay Allison said. “I should think the logical thing would be to drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on the trail cities —and wipe it out for good and all.”

(Sitting on the sofa in Forth’s dark office, I stiffened with such fury that he shook my shoulder and muttered “Easy, there, man!”)

Dr. Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a grimace of distaste, “I didn’t mean that literally. But the Trailmen are not human. It wouldn’t be genocide, just an exterminator’s job. A public health measure.” Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what he was saying. He said, “Galactic Center would have to rule on whether they’re dumb animals or intelligent nonhumans, and whether they’re entitled to the status of a civilization. All precedent on Darkover is toward recognizing them as men—and good God, Jay, you’d probably be called as a witness for the defense! How can you say they’re not human after your experience with them? Anyway, by the time their status was finally decided, half of the recognizable humans on Darkover would be dead. We need a better solution than that.”

He pushed his chair back and looked out the window.

“I won’t go into this political situation,” he said, “You aren’t interested in Terran Empire politics, and I’m no expert either. But you’d have to be deaf, dumb and bund not to know that Darkover’s been playing the immovable object to the irresistible force. The Darkovans are more advanced in some of the non-causative sciences than we are and, until now, they wouldn’t admit that Terra had a thing to contribute. However—and this is the big however —they do know, and they’re willing to admit, that our medical sciences are better than theirs.”

“Theirs being practically nonexistent.”

“Exactly—and this could be the first crack in the barrier. You may not realize the significance of this, but the Legate received an offer from the Hasturs themselves.” Jay Allison murmured, “I’m to be impressed?”

“On Darkover you’d damn well better be impressed when the Hasturs sit up and take notice.”

“I understand they’re telepaths or something—”

“Telepaths, psychokinetics, parapsychs, just about anything else. For all practical purposes they’re the Gods of Darkover. And one of the Hasturs—a rather young and unimportant one, I’ll admit, the old man’s grandson—came to the Legate’s office, in person, mind you. He offered, if the Terran Medical would help Darkover lick the Trailmen’s fever, to coach selected Terran men in matrix mechanics.”

“Good God,” Jay said. It was a concession beyond Terra’s wildest dreams; for a hundred years they had tried to beg, buy or steal some knowledge of the mysterious science of matrix mechanics—that curious discipline which could turn matter into raw energy, and vice versa, without any intermediate stages and without fission by-products. Matrix mechanics had made the Darkovans virtually immune to the lure of Terra’s advanced technologies.

Jay said, “Personally I think Darkovan science is overrated. But I can see the propaganda angle—”

“Not to mention the humanitarian angle of healing.”

Jay Allison gave one of his cold shrugs. “The real angle seems to be this: can we cure the 48-year fever?”

“Not yet. But we have a lead. During the last epidemic, a Terran scientist discovered a blood fraction containing antibodies against the fever—in the Trailmen. Isolated to a serum, it might reduce the virulent 48-year epidemic form to the mild form again. Unfortunately, he died himself in the epidemic, without finishing his work, and his notebooks were overlooked until this year. We have 18,000 men, and their families, on Darkover now, Jay. Frankly, if we lose too many of them, we’re going to have to pull out of Darkover—the big brass on Terra will write off the loss of a garrison of professional traders, but not of a whole Trade City colony. That’s not even mentioning the prestige we’ll lose if our much-vaunted Terran medical sciences can’t save Darkover from an epidemic. We’ve got exactly five months. We can’t synthesize a serum in that time. We’ve got to appeal to the Trailmen. And that’s why I called you up here. You know more about the Trailmen than any living Terran. You ought to. You spent eight years in a Nest.”