I said, “The others? Kadarin and Thyra? I don’t know; I don’t know what happened to them, or where they were when—when everything went up.”
She persisted. “If you couldn’t leave the matrix behind, wouldn’t they have died when the matrix went offworld?”
Again I grimaced when I tried to smile. I said, “I hope so,” and even as I spoke, knew it was not true. Kadarin. We had been friends, brothers, kinsmen, united in a shared dream which would bring Darkover and Terra close together, heal our shattered heritage… at least, that had been what we shared at first. Without knowing I was doing it, I fingered the scars on my face. He had given me those scars. And Thyra. Marjorie’s half-sister; Kadarin’s woman. I had loved her, hated her, desired her… I could not think that she was dead. Somewhere, somehow, I knew she lived, and that Kadarin lived. I could not explain it; but I knew.
Reason beyond all reasons, the thousandth reason I could never return to Darkover…
After Dio was asleep I sat long in the outer room of the apartment, looking down at the lights of the city below me, the lights which were never extinguished, far into the night. On Vainwal the pursuit of pleasure goes on, deepening and growing more frantic as the day’s rhythms subside, when other people are sleeping. Down there, perhaps, I could find some kind of forgetfulness. Wasn’t that, after all, why I had come to Vainwal, to forget duty and responsibility? But now I had a wife and a child, and I owed them something. Die’s little finger meant more to me than all the unexplored pleasures of Vainwal.
And my son…I had been angry when my father said it.
But it was true. He should be born at Armida; when he was five years old I would take him out, as my father had taken me riding on his shoulder, to see the great river of wild horses flowing down through the valley…
No; that was gone, renounced. There would be other worlds for my son. Dozens, hundreds of them, an Empire of them, and beyond. I went and laid myself down beside my sleeping wife and slept. But even through my sleep, uneasy dreams moved, I saw my hand again, the horror that had grown there… and it reached out, reached into Dio’s body, clawing at the child, pulling it forth bloody, dripping, dying… I woke with my own shriek in my ears, and Dio staring at me in shock. I covered her carefully, kissed her and went to sleep in the other room where my nightmares would not disturb her dreams.
This time I slept peacefully without nightmares; it was Dio who woke me in the graying dawn, saying hesitantly “Lew, I feel so strange—I think the baby’s coming. It’s early—but I think I should go and be certain.”
It was far too early; but the Terrans have made something of a specialty of this, artificial wombs for babes cast from their mothers too young, and most of them, in that artificial life-support, do quite well, though they are beyond the thoughts and tenderness of their mothers; I have wondered, sometimes, if this is why so many Terrans are headblind, without any traceable laran, the distance from that most intimate of contacts, where the mother teaches the little heart to beat, and all things in the unborn body to function as they should… the body can grow, artificially supported and nourished, but what of the mind and laran?
Well, if this should damage the unborn child’s laran, so be it, if it saved his life… my own laran had done me little good. And surely it would not hurt this child to be away from our troubled thoughts and fears, and such torment as it had certainly overheard during my ill-fated attempt to monitor. That attempt had certainly brought on this premature labor, and Dio must have known it, but she did not reproach me, and once, when I spoke of it, she hushed me, saying, “I wanted it, too.”
So I was cheerful as we made our way through the streets, from which all but a hardy few pleasure-seekers had vanished in these last gray hours before sunrise. The Terran hospital was pale and austere in the growing light, and Dio flinched as fast elevators swooped us upward to the highest floors, where they kept maternity cases; high above the sound and clamor of the noisy pleasure-world. I told them who I was and what was happening, and some functionary assured Dio that a technician would be there in a few moments to take her to a room.
We sat on characterless, comfortless furniture, waiting. After a time, a young woman entered the room. She was wearing Medic clothing, bearing the curious staff-and-serpents of Terran medical services; I had been told that it was an antique religious symbol, but the medics seemed to know no more than I about what it meant. But there was something in the voice that made me look up and cry out with pleasure.
“Linnell!”
For the girl in uniform was my own foster-sister. Avarra alone knew what she was doing on Darkover, or in that curious uniform, but I hurried to her, took her hands, repeating her name. I could have kissed her, and I nearly did, but the young nurse drew back in outrage.
“What—I don’t understand!” she exclaimed, indignant, and I blinked, realizing I had made an insane blunder. But even now, staring, I could only shake my head and say, “It’s amazing—it’s more than just a resemblance! You are Linnell!”
“But I’m not, of course,” she said, with a puzzled, chilly smile. Dio laughed. She said, “It’s true, of course, you are very like my husband’s foster-sister. Very, very like. And how strange to meet a double of a close relative, here on Vainwal, of all places! But of course Linnell would never have come here, Lew; she’s too conventional. Can you imagine Linnell wearing that kind of outfit?”
And of course I couldn’t; I thought of Linnell, in her heavy tartan skirt and embroidered over-tunic, her hair hanging in shining brown braids down her neck. This woman was wearing a white tunic and close-fitting trousers… a Darkovan in such costume would have feared incipient lung-fever, and Linnell would have died of outraged modesty. There was a little patch with a name written on it. I could read the Terran letters now, after a fashion, not well, but better than Dio. I spelled them out, slowly.
“K-a-t-h—”
“Kathie Marshall,” she said, with a friendly smile. She even had the little dimple near the right corner of her mouth, and the small scar on her chin which she’d gotten when we’d gone riding in a forbidden canyon on Armida land and our horses had stumbled and fallen under us. I asked her, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me where you got that scar?”
“Why, I’ve had it since I was ten,” she said. “I think it was an accident with an air-sled; I had four stitches.”
I shook my head, baffled. “My foster-sister has one just like it, in the same place.” But Dio made a sharp movement, as of pain, and instantly the woman, familiar-strange, Linnell-Kathie, was all professional solicitude.
“Have you timed the contractions? Good. Here, I’ll take you and get you into bed—” and as Dio turned to me, grabbing at my hand in sudden panic, she reassured, “Don’t worry about it; your husband can come and stay with you, as soon as the doctor’s had a look at you and seen what’s going on. Don’t worry,” she said to me, and the expression on her face was exactly like Linnell’s, sober and sweet and gentle. “She’s very healthy, and we can do a lot, even if the baby is born too soon. Don’t worry about your wife, or the baby either.”
And within the hour they called me into her room. Dio was lying in bed in a sterile hospital gown, but the surroundings were pleasant enough in the Vainwal fashion, green plants everywhere, patterns of shimmering rainbows beyond the windows; laser holograms, I supposed, but pleasant to watch, distracting the mind of the prospective mother from what was going on.