Darkover: First Contact (25 page)

With steady hands he lighted a resin-candle and, deliberately, set a light to the long fuse.

 

Camilla and MacAran heard the explosion and ran toward the dome, just in time to see it erupt skyward in a shower of debris, and rising flame.

 

Fumbling with the padlock, Harry Leicester began to realize that he wasn’t going to get out. This time he wasn’t going to make it. Staggering from the blow and concussion, but coldly, gladly sane, he looked at the wreckage.
I’ve given you a clean start,
he thought confusedly, maybe I am God after all, the one who drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and stopped telling them all the answers, letting them find their own way, and grow . . . no lifelines, no cushions, let them find their own way, live or die. . . .

He hardly knew it when they forced the door open and took him up gently, but he felt Camilla’s gentle touch on his dying mind and opened his eyes into the gray compassionate stare.

He whispered in confusion,
“I am a very foolish fond old man. . . .”

Her tears fell on his face. “Don’t try to talk. I know why you did it. We began to do it together, last time, and then . . . oh, Captain, Captain. . . .”

He closed his eyes. “Captain of
what?”
he whispered. And then, at his last breath, “You can’t retire a Captain. You have to shoot him . . . and I shot him. . . .”

And then the red sun went out, forever, and blazed into luminous galaxies of light.

Even the struts of the starship were gone, carried away to the hoarded stores of metal; mining would always be slow on this world, and metals scarce for many, many generations. Camilla, from habit, gave the place a glance, but no more, as she went across the valley. She walked lightly, a tall woman, her hair lightly touched with frost, as she followed a half-heard awareness. Beyond the range of vision she saw the tall stone memorial to the crash victims, the graveyard where all the dead of the first terrible winter were buried beside the dead from the first summer and the winds of madness. She drew her fur cloak around her, looking with a regret so long past that it was no longer even sadness, at one of the green mounds.

MacAran, coming down the valley from the mountain road, saw her, wrapped in her furs and her tartan skirt, and raised his hand in greeting. His heart still quickened at the sight of her, after so many years; and when he reached her, he took both her hands for a moment and held them before he spoke.

She said, “The children are well—I visited Mhari this morning. And you, I can tell without asking that you had a good trip.” Letting her hand rest in his, they turned back together through the streets of New Skye. Their household was at the very end of the street, where they could see the tall East Peak, beyond which the red sun rose every morning in cloud; at one end, the small building which was the weather station; Camilla’s special responsibility.

As they came into the main room of the house they shared with half a dozen other families, MacAran threw off his fur jacket and went to the fire. Like most men in the colony who did not wear kilts, he wore leather breeches and a tunic of woven tartan cloth. “Is everyone else out?”

“Ewen is at the hospital; Judy is at the school; Mac went off with the herding drive,” she said, “and if you’re dying for a look at the children I think they’re all in the schoolyard but Alastair. He’s with Heather this morning.”

MacAran walked to the window, looking at the pitched roof of the school. How quickly they grew tall, he thought, and how lightly fourteen years of childbearing lay on their mother’s shoulders. The seven who had survived the terrible famine winter five years ago were growing up. Somehow they had weathered, together, the early storms of this world; and although she had had children by Ewen, by Lewis MacLeod, by another whose name he had never known and he suspected Camilla herself did not know, her two oldest children and her two youngest were his. The last, Mhari, did not live with them; Heather had lost a child three days before Mhari’s birth and Camilla, who had never cared to nurse her own children if there was a wet-nurse available, had given her to Heather to nurse; when Heather was unwilling to give her up after she was weaned, Camilla had agreed to let Heather keep her, although she visited her almost every day. Heather was one of the unlucky ones; she had borne seven children but only one had lived more than a month after birth. Ties of fosterage in the community were stronger than blood; a child’s mother was only the one who cared for it, its father the one who taught it. MacAran had children by three other women, and cared for them all equally, but he loved best Judy’s strange young Lori, taller than Judy at fourteen and yet childlike and peculiar, called a changeling by half the community, her unknown father still a secret to all but a few.

Camilla said, “Now you’re back, when are you off again?”

He slid an arm around her. “I’ll have a few days at home first, and then—we’re off to find the sea. There must be one, somewhere on this world. But first—I have something for you. We explored a cave, a few days ago—and found these, in the rock. We don’t have much use for jewels, I know, it’s really a waste of time to dig them out, but Alastair and I liked the looks of these, so we brought some home to you and the girls. I had a sort of feeling about them.”

From his pocket he took a handful of blue stones, pouring them into her hands, looking at the surprise and pleasure in her eyes. Then the children came running in, and MacAran found himself swamped in childish kisses, hugs, questions, demands.

“Da, can I go to the mountains with you next time? Harry goes and he’s only fourteen!”

“Da, Alanna took my cakes, make her give them back!”

“Dada, Dada, look here, look here! See me climb!”

Camilla, as always, ignored the hullabaloo, calmly gesturing them to quiet. “One question at a time—what is it, Lori?”

The silver-haired child with grey eyes picked up one of the blue stones, looking at the starlike patterns coiled within. She said gravely, “My mother has one like this. May I have one, too? I think perhaps I can work it as she does.”

MacAran said, “You may have one,” and over her head looked at Camilla. Some day, in Lori’s own time, they would know exactly what she meant, for their strange fosterling never did anything without reason.

“You know,” Camilla said, “I think some day these are going to be very, very important to all of us.”

MacAran nodded. Her intuition had been proven right so many times that now he expected it; but he could wait. He walked to the window and looked up at the high, familiar skyline of the mountains, daydreaming beyond them to the plains, the hills, and the unknown seas. A pale blue moon, like the stone into which Lori still stared, entranced, floated up quietly over the rim of the clouds around the mountain; and very gently, rain began to fall.

“Some day,” he said, offhand, “I suppose someone will give those moons—and this world—a name.”

“Some day,” Camilla said, “but we’ll never know.”

 

A century later they named the planet DARKOVER. But Earth knew nothing of them for two thousand years.

Paul Harrell woke, blurred and semi-conscious, with a sense of having survived nightmares for a long time. Every muscle in his body ached like a separate toothache, and his head felt as if he had a truly monumental hangover. Blurred memories, vague, a man with his face, his own voice asking,
Who the hell are you, you’re not the devil, by any chance?
Not that he believed in the devil, or hell, or any of those things invented to try to force men to do what other people thought they should do instead of what they wanted to do.

He moved his head, and the pain in it made him wince.
Whew! I really must have tied one on last night!

He stretched, trying to turn over, and found that he was lying, his legs flung out at ease, comfortably stretched out. That brought him wide awake, in shock.

He could move, stretch;
he wasn’t in the stasis box!

Had it all been a nightmare, then? The flight from the Alpha police, the rebellion he had led in the colony, the final confrontation, with his men shot down around him, the capture and the trial, and finally the horror of the stasis box closing around him forever.

Forever. That had been his last thought. Forever.

Painless, of course. Even pleasant, like going to sleep when you were completely exhausted. But he had struggled and fought for that last instant of consciousness, knowing that it
would
be the last; he would never waken.

Humane governments had abolished the death penalty long ago. Too often, new evidence, a few years after the prisoner was executed, had proved him innocent. Death made the mistake irrevocable, and embarrassed the whole judicial system. The stasis box kept the prisoner safely removed from society. . . but he could always be reprieved and recalled to life. And no prisons, no traumatic memories of association with hardened criminals, no prison riots, no need for counseling, recreation, rehabilitation. Just stick them away in a stasis box and let them age there, naturally, and finally die, unconscious, lifeless. . . unless they were proved innocent. Then you could take them out.

But, Paul Harrell thought, they couldn’t prove him innocent. He was guilty as hell, and furthermore, he’d admitted it, and tried as hard as he could to be shot down before capture. What was more, he made sure he took about ten of the damn cops with him, so they couldn’t legally grant him the option of Rehab.

The rest of his men, the ones they didn’t shoot down, went meekly down to Rehabilitation like so many sheep, to be made over into the conformist nothings which are all they want in this stupid world. Pussycats. Gutless wonders. And right up to the end, he could see that the judge and all his legal advisers were hoping he’d break down and beg for executive clemency—a chance for Rehab, so they could tinker with his brain, with drugs and re-education and brainwashing, so they could make him over into a nobody, to march along in lockstep just like everybody else through what they call life.
But not me, thanks. I wouldn’t play their damned game. When I finished my run, I was ready to go, and I went.

And it had been a good life while it lasted, he thought. He’d made hash of their stupid laws because for years they couldn’t even imagine that anyone would break laws except through accident or ignorance! He’d had all the women he wanted, and all the high living.

Especially women. He didn’t play the stupid games women tried to make men play. He was a man, and if they wanted a man instead of a sheep, they learned right away that Paul Harrell didn’t play by their conformist, ball-less rules.

Her mother had probably taught her that you had to make noises about rape, unless the man got down on his knees and pretended to be a capon, a gutless wonder who’d let a woman lead him around by the nose and never touch her unless she
said
she wanted it! Hell, he knew better than that. That was what women wanted and they loved it, when you gave it to them and didn’t take no for an answer! Well, she found out; he didn’t play their games, even with the stasis box hanging over him! She probably thought he’d go and whine for a chance at Rehab, and they’d make him over into a pussycat she could lead around by the balls!

And when he had gotten this far in his memories Paul Harrell sat up and stared. He wasn’t in the stasis box, but he wasn’t anywhere else he could remember being, either. Had it all been a nightmare, then, the girl, the rebellion, the shoot-out with the police, the judge, trial, the stasis box. . . .

Had he ever been there at all, had any of it ever happened?

And if so, what had gotten him out?

He was lying on a soft mattress, covered with clean coarse linens, and over them, thick wool blankets and quilts and a fur cover. All around him was a very faint, dim, reddish light. He reached out and found that the light was coming through heavy bed-curtains; that he was in a high curtained bed such as he’d seen somewhere once in a museum, and that curtains around the bed were closing out the light. Red curtains.

He thrust them aside. He was in a room he had never seen before. Not only had he never seen the room before, he had never seen anything remotely like it before.

One thing was for damn sure. He wasn’t in the stasis box, unless part of the punishment was a series of bizarre dreams. Nor was he anywhere in the Rehab center. In fact, he thought, glancing out the high arched window at a huge red sun beyond, he wasn’t on Alpha at all, nor on Terra, nor on any of the planets of the Confederated Worlds that he had ever visited before.