A World Divided (28 page)

“Of course,” he said with heavy irony, “I was hoping it was that amulet that really
would
prove I was the long-lost son and heir of your Lord-High-Something-or-Other. Now all my illusions have been shattered.” He raised the goblet to his lips, calling the Darkovan girl to bring them more of the same.

And as he did so, his eyes fell on the goblet whose stem Ragan had melted. Hell, was he drunker than he’d ever believed?

The goblet stood upright on a solid green stem, unbroken, unsagging. There was nothing whatever wrong with it.

Three drinks later Ragan excused himself, saying he had a commission at the HQ and had to report on it before he could get paid. When he had gone, Kerwin scowled impatiently at Ellers, who had matched Ragan drink for drink. This wasn’t the way he had wanted to spend his first night back on the world whose image he’d carried in his mind since childhood. He didn’t know quite what he
did
want—but it wasn’t to sit in a spaceport bar all night and get drunk!

“Look, Ellers—”

Only a gentle snore answered him; Ellers had slid down in his seat, out cold.

The plump Darkovan bar girl came with refills—Kerwin had lost track of how many—and looked at Ellers with a professional mixture of disappointment and resignation. Then, with a quick glance at Kerwin, he could see her shift her focus of interest; bending to pour, she brushed artfully against Kerwin. Her loose robe was unpinned at the throat so that he could see the valley between her breasts, and the familiar sweet smell of incense clung to her robe and her hair. A thread of awareness plucked a string deep in his gut, as he breathed in the scent of Darkover, of woman; but he looked again and saw that her eyes were hard and shallow, and the music of her voice frayed at the edges when she crooned, “You like what you see, big man?”

She spoke broken Terran Standard, not the musical idiom of the City dialect; that, Kerwin knew afterward, was what had bothered him most. “You like Lomie, big man? You come ’long with me, I nice and warm, you see ...”

There was a flat taste in Kerwin’s mouth that wasn’t just the aftertaste of the wine. Whatever the sky and sun, whatever they called the world, the girls around the Terran Trade City bars were all the same.

“You come? You come—?”

Without knowing quite what he was going to do, Kerwin grabbed the edge of the table and heaved himself up, the bench going over with a crash behind him. He loomed over the girl, glaring through the dim and smoky light, and words in a language long forgotten rushed from his lips:

“
Be gone with you, daughter of a mountain goat, and cover your shame elsewhere, not by lying with men from worlds that despise your own! Where is the pride of the Cahuenga, shameful one?
”

The girl gasped, cowered backward, a convulsive hand clutching her robe about her bared breasts, and bent almost to the ground. She swallowed, but for a moment her mouth only moved, without sound; then she whispered, “
S’dia shaya ... d’sperdo, vai dom alzuo. ...
” and fled, sobbing; the sound of the sob and the scent of her musky hair lingered in the room behind her.

Kerwin clung, swaying, to the edge of the table.
God, how drunk can you get! What was all that stuff I was spouting, anyway?
He was bewildered at himself; where did he get off anyway, scaring the poor girl out of her wits? He was no more virtuous than the next man. What Puritan remnant had prompted him to rise up in wrath and demolish her that way? He’d had his share of the spaceport wenches on more worlds than one.

And what language had he been speaking, anyway? He
knew
it hadn’t been the city dialect, but what
was
it? He could not remember; try as he might, not a syllable remained of the words that had come into his mind; only the form of the emotion remained.

Ellers, fortunately, had snored through the whole thing; he could imagine the ribbing the older man would have given him, if he hadn’t. He thought,
We’d better get out of here while I can still navigate—and before I do something else that’s crazy!

He bent and shook Ellers, but Ellers didn’t even mumble. Kerwin remembered that Ellers had drunk as much as Kerwin and Ragan put together. He did this in every spaceport. Kerwin shrugged, set the bench he’d knocked over back on its legs, lifted Eller’s feet to them, and turned unsteadily toward the door.

Air. Fresh air. That was all he needed. Then he’d better get back inside the Terran Zone; at least, inside the spaceport gates, he knew how to behave. But, he thought confused, I
thought
I knew how to behave here on Darkover. What got into me?

The sun, bleared and angry-looking, lay low over the street. Shadows of deep mauve and indigo folded the huddled houses in a friendly gloom. There were people on the streets now, Darkovans in colorful shirts and breeches, wearing heavy woven capes or the commonplace imported climbing jackets; women muffled to the eyebrows in fur; and once, gliding along, a tall form invisible beneath a hood and mantle of strange cut and color; but the gliding form was not human.

And even as he paused, looking up at the flaming sky, the sun sank with a rush and the swift dark came swooping across the sky, a darkness like great soft wings, folding to blot out the brilliance; the fast-dropping night that gave this world its name. Leaping out in a sudden glare came the crown of vast white stars; and three of the small jeweled moons were in the sky, jade-green, peacock-blue, rose-pearl.

Kerwin stood staring upward, his eyes wet, unashamed of the sudden tears that had started to them. It was not illusion, then, despite the commonplace spaceport bars and the disillusion of the streets. It was real; he was home again; he had seen the falling dark over the sky, the blaze of the crown of stars they called Hastur’s Crown after the legend ... He stood there until, with the sudden cooling of the air, the thick nightly mist gathered and the blaze dimmed, then vanished.

Slowly, he walked on. The first thin misty traces of rain were stirring; the tall beacon of the HQ in the sky gave him his bearings, and he moved, reluctantly, in that direction.

He was thinking of the Darkovan girl in the bar, the one he had rebuffed so unexpectedly—and so strangely. She had been warm and lissome, and she was clean, and what more could a man want for a welcome home? Why had he sent her away—and sent her away like
that
?

He felt strangely restless, at loose ends. Home? A home meant more than a familiar sky and stars overhead. A home meant people. He had had a home on Earth if that was what he wanted. No, he thought soberly; his grandparents had never wanted him, only a second chance to remake his father in their own image. In space? Ellers, perhaps, was the closest friend he had, and what was Johnny Ellers? A bum of the spaceports, a planet-hopper. Kerwin felt the sudden hunger for roots, a home, for a people and a world he had never known. Never been allowed to know. The words he had said, self-deriding, to Ellers, came back to his mind:
I had hoped it was the amulet that would prove I was the long-lost son and heir. . . .

Yes; he knew it now, that was the dream that had lured him back to Darkover, the fantasy that he would find a place where he belonged. Otherwise, why should he have left the last world? He’d liked it there; there had been plenty of fights, plenty of women, plenty of easygoing companionship, plenty of rough and ready adventure. But all the time, driving him, there had been that relentless compulsion to get back to Darkover; it had caused him to turn down what he knew, now, had been a sure route to advancement; and further, to kill off any hope of serious promotion.

And now that he was back, now that he had seen the four moons and the swift dark of his dreams, would all the rest be anticlimax? Would he find that his mother was just such another spaceport wench as the one who had rubbed up against him tonight, eager to take home some of the plentiful spaceport pay? If so, he didn’t admire his father’s taste. His father? He had heard a lot about his father, in those seven years he’d stuck it out with his grandparents, and the picture he’d gotten from them wasn’t quite like that. His father, he assumed, had been a fastidious man. But that was only, perhaps, how he had seemed to his grandmother. ... Well, at least he had cared enough to get Empire citizenship for his son.

Well, he’d do what he’d come here to do. He would try to trace his mother, and decide why his father had abandoned him in the spaceport orphanage and how and where he had died. And then?
What then?
The question nagged him—what would he do then?

I will fly that hawk when his pinions are grown,
Kerwin said to himself, realizing afterward that he had spoken the Darkovan proverb without thinking about it.

The nocturnal mist had condensed now, and a thin cold rain was beginning to fall. It had been so warm during the day that Kerwin had almost forgotten how swiftly daytime warmth, at this season, was blotted out in sleety rain and snow. Already there were little needles of ice in the rain. He shivered and walked faster.

Somehow he had taken a wrong turning; he had expected to come out into the square fronting on the spaceport. He was on an open square, but it was not the right one. Along one edge there was a line of little cafés and cookshops, taverns and restaurants. There were Terrans there, so it was certainly not off limits to spaceport personnel—he knew that some of them were, he had been carefully briefed about that—but horses were tethered outside, so there was a Darkovan clientele also. He walked outside them, picked one that smelled richly of Darkovan food, and walked inside at random. The smell made his mouth water. Food; that was what he needed, good solid food, not the tasteless synthetics of the starship. In the dim lights faces were all a blur, and he didn’t look for any of the men from the
Southern Crown.

He sat down at the corner table and ordered, and when the food came, he sank his teeth into it with pleasure. Not far away a couple of Darkovans, rather better dressed than most, were idling over their food. They wore gaily colored cloaks and high boots, jeweled belts with knives stuck into them. One had a blazing red head of hair, which made Kerwin raise his eyebrows; the city Darkovans were a swarthy lot, and his own red hair had made him an object of curiosity and stares when, as a child, he’d gone out into the city. His father and grandparents, too, had dark hair and eyes, and he had blazed like a beacon among them. In the orphanage they’d called him
Tallo
—copper; half in derision, half, he recognized it now, in a kind of superstitious awe. And the Darkovan nurses and matrons had been at such pains to suppress the nickname that even then it had surprised him. He had collected the notion somehow, though the Darkovan nurses were forbidden to talk local superstitions to the children, that red hair was unlucky, or taboo.

If it was unlucky the redhead certainly didn’t seem to know about it or care.

On Earth, perhaps because red hair was really not all that uncommon, the memory of that superstition had dimmed. But maybe that explained Ragan’s early stare. If red hair was all that uncommon, obviously you would assume, if you saw a red-haired man at a distance, that he was the man you knew, and be surprised when it turned out to be a stranger.

Though, come to think of it, Ragan’s own hair had a rusty dull-red look to it; he might have been redheaded as a child. Kerwin thought again that the little man had looked familiar, and tried again to remember if there had been any redheads, other than himself, in the orphanage. Surely he had known a couple of them when he was very small....

Maybe before I went to the orphanage. Maybe my mother was redheaded, or had some relatives who were....
But try as he might, he could not uncover the blankness of the early years. Only a memory of disturbing dreams ...

A loudspeaker on the wall hiccupped loudly, and a metallic voice remarked, “Your attention please. All spaceport personnel, your attention please.”

Kerwin lifted his eyebrows, staring at the loudspeaker with definite resentment. He’d come in here to get away from things like that. Evidently some of the other patrons of the restaurant felt the same way; there were a couple of derisive noises.

The metallic voice remarked, in Terran Standard, “Your attention please. All HQ personnel with planes on the field report immediately to Division B. All surface transit will be cancelled, repeat, will be cancelled. The
Southern Crown
will skylift on schedule, repeat, on schedule. All surface aircraft on the field must be moved without delay. Repeat, all HQ personnel with private surface aircraft on the field ...”

The redheaded Darkovan Kerwin had noticed before said in an audible and malicious voice—and in the City dialect everyone understood—“How poor these Terrans must be, that they must disturb us all with that squawking box up there instead of paying a few pennies to a flunkey to bring their messages.” The word he used for “flunkey” was a particularly offensive one.

A uniformed spaceport official near the front of the restaurant stared angrily at the speaker, then thought better of it, settled his gold-lace cap on his head and tramped out into the rain. A blast of bitter cold blew into the room—for he had started a small exodus—and the Darkovan nearest Kerwin said to his companion, “
Esa so vhalle Terranan acqualle ...
” and chuckled.

The other replied something even more insulting, his eyes lingering on Kerwin, and Kerwin realized that he was the only Terran left in the room. He felt himself trembling. He had always been childishly sensitive to insults. On Earth he had been an alien, a freak, a Darkovan; here on Darkover, suddenly, he felt himself a Terran; and the events of the day hadn’t been calculated to sweeten his disposition. But he only glared and remarked—to the empty table at his left, “The rain can only drown the mud-rabbit if he hasn’t the wit to keep his mouth shut.”