I swore again, turned on my heel and left him. He came after me, his step uneven, his voice filled with angry urgency.
“Are you going to marry Dio?”
“That’s my business,” I said, slamming down a barrier again. I could do it, now, without going into the black nothingness. He said, tightening his mouth, “I swore I would never force or pressure you to marry. But remember; refusing to decide is also a decision. If you refuse to decide to marry her, you have decided that your son shall be born nedestro, and a time may come when you will regret it bitterly.”
“Then,” I said, my voice hard, “I will regret it.”
“Have you asked Dio how she feels?”
Surely he must know that we had discussed it endlessly, both of us reluctant to marry in the Terran fashion, but even less willing to bring my father, and Die’s brothers, into the kind of property-based discussions and settlements there would have to be before I could marry her di catenas. It had no relevance here on Vainwal, in any case. We had considered ourselves married in what Darkovans called freemate marriage—the sharing of a bed, a meal, a fireside—and desired no more; it would become as legal as any catenas marriage when our child was born. But now I faced that, too; if our son was born nedestro, he could not inherit from me; if I should die Dio would have to turn to her Ridenow kin. Whatever happened, I must provide for her.
When I explained it that way, as a matter of simple and practical logic, Dio was willing enough, and the next day we went to the Empire HQ on Vainwal and registered our marriage there. I settled the legal questions, so that if I died before her, or before our child had grown to maturity, she could legally claim property belonging to me, on Terra or on Darkover, and our son would have similar rights in my estate. I realized, somewhere about halfway through these procedures, that both of us, without any prearrangement, had mutually begun referring to the child as “he.” Father had reminded me that I was part Aldaran, and precognition was one of those gifts. I accepted it as that. And knowing that, I knew all that I needed to know, so why trouble myself with monitoring?
A day or two later, Dio said, out of a clear blue sky, as we sat at breakfast in our high room above the city, “Lew, I lied to you.”
“Lied,preciosa?” I looked at her candid fair face. In general one telepath cannot lie to another but there are levels of truth and deceit. Dio had let her hair grow; now it was long enough to tie at the back of her neck, and her eyes were that color so common in fair-haired women, which can be blue or green or gray, depending on the health, and mood, and what she is wearing. She had on a loose dress of leaf-green—her body was heavy, now—and her eyes glowed like emeralds.
“Lied,” she repeated. “You thought it was an accident— that I had become pregnant by accident or oversight. It was deliberate. I am sorry.”
“But why, Dio?” I was not angry, only perplexed. I had not wanted this to happen, at first, but now I was altogether happy about it.
“Lerrys—had threatened to take me back to Darkover for this Council season,” she said. “A pregnant woman cannot travel in space. It was the only way I could think of to make sure he would not force me to go.”
I said, “I am glad you did.” I could not, now, envision life without Dio.
“And now, I suppose, he will use the knowledge that I am married, and have a son,” I said. It was the first time I had been willing to ask myself what would become of the Alton Domain, with both my father and myself self-exiled. My brother Marius was never accepted by the Council; but if there really was no other Alton Heir, they might make the best of a bad bargain and accept him. Otherwise it would probably go to my cousin Gabriel Lanart; he had married a Hastur, after all, and he had three sons and two daughters by his Hastur wife. They had wanted to give it, and the command of the Guards, to Gabriel in the first place, and my father would have saved a lot of trouble if he had permitted it.
It would all be the same in the end anyhow, for I would never return to Darkover.
Time slid out of focus. I was kneeling in a room in a high tower, and outside the last crimson light of the red sun set across the high peaks of the Venza mountains behind Thendara. I knelt at the bedside of a little girl, five or six years old, with fair hair, and golden eyes… Marjorie’s eyes…I had knelt at Marjorie’s side like this… and we had seen her together, our child, that child… but it had never been, it would never be, Marjorie was dead… dead… a great fire blazed, surged through my brain… and Dio was beside me, her hand on the hilt of a great sword—
Shaken, I surfaced, to see Dio looking at me in shock and dismay.
“Our child, Lew—? And on Darkover—”
I gripped at the back of a chair to steady myself. After a time I said shakily, “I have heard of a laran—I thought it was only in the Ages of Chaos—which could see, not only the future, but many futures, some of which may never come to pass; all of the things which might someday happen. Perhaps—perhaps, somewhere in my Alton or Aldaran heritage there is a trace of that laran, so that I see things which may never be. For I have seen that child once before—with Marjorie—and I thought it was her child.” Dimly I realized that I had spoken Marjorie’s name aloud for the first time since her death. I would always remember her love; but she had receded very far, and I was healed of that, too. “Marjorie,” I said again. “I thought it was our child, our daughter; she had Marjorie’s eyes. But Marjorie died before she could bear me any child, and so what I thought was a true vision of the future never came to be. Yet now I see it again. What does it mean, Dio?”
She said, with a wavering smile, “Now I wish my laran were better trained. I don’t know, Lew. I don’t know what it means.”
Nor did I; but it made me desperately uneasy. We did not talk about it any more, but I think it worked inward, coloring my mood. Later that day she said she had an appointment with one of the medics at the Terran Empire hospital; she could have found any kind of midwife or birth-woman in Vainwal, which spanned a dozen dozen cultures, but since she could not be tended as she would be on Darkover, the cool impersonality of the Terran hospital suited her best.
I went with her. Now, thinking back, it seems to me that she was very quiet, shadowed, perhaps, by some weight of foreknowledge. She came out looking troubled, and the doctor, a slight, preoccupied young man, gestured to me to come and talk with him.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said at once. “Your wife is perfectly well, and the baby’s heartbeat is strong and sound. But there are things I don’t understand. Mr. Montray-Lanart— ” my father and I both used that name on Terra, for Alton is a Domain, a title, rather than a personal name, and Lord Armida meant nothing here—“I notice your hand; is it a congenital deformity? Forgive me for asking—”
“No,” I said curtly. “It was the result of a serious accident.”
“And you did not have it regenerated or regrown?”
“No.” The word was hard and final and this time he understood that I would not talk about it. I understand there are cultures where there are religious taboos against that kind of thing, and it was all right with me if he thought I was that sort of idiot. It was better than trying to talk about it. He looked troubled, but he said, “Are there twins in your family, or other multiple births?”
“Why do you ask?”
“We checked the fetus with radiosound,” he said, “and there seems to be—some anomaly. You must prepare yourself for the fact that there might be some—minor deformity, unless it is twins and our equipment did not pick up exactly what we intended; twins or multiple births lying across one another can create rather odd images.”