My father looked a long time at me, perhaps expecting me to break again. But after a time, perhaps, he believed that I meant what I said, and began to talk of something else.
“There is no reason, now, why you should not come with me to Darkover, to settle what remains of the Alton heritage—”
I thought of Armida, lying in a fold of the Kilghard Hills. I had thought of going there with my son on my shoulder, showing him the horses, teaching him what I had been taught, watching him grow up there, do his first fire-watch duty at my side… no. That had been a mad hope. Marius was undamaged; it would be his sons that would carry on the Alton lineage, if there was one. I no longer cared; it no longer had anything to do with me. I was transplanted, cut off from my roots, exiled… and the pain of that was less than the pain of trying to return. I said, “No,” and my father did not try to persuade me. I think he knew I was at the end of endurance, that I had borne enough, had no further strength to struggle.
“You don’t want to go back to the place you shared with Dio, not yet,” he said, and I wondered how he knew. It was too full of memories. Dio, curled in my arms, looking down with me at the lights of the city. Dio, her hair down her back, in her night-dress, gigglingly playing at a domesticity which was new and amusing to us both. Dio—
“Stay here a few days,” he said.
If she comes back, wants me…
“She will know where to find you,” he said. And as he spoke I knew she would not come back.
“Stay here with me a few days. Then I will be taking ship for Darkover… and you can return to your own place, or come and stay here alone. I won’t—” he looked at me with a pity he was too wise to speak aloud, and said, “I won’t— intrude.” For the first time in my life, I felt my father spoke to me as to an equal, to another man, not to his child. I sighed and said, “Thank you, Father. I’d be glad to come.”
I did not think again of the Sharra matrix, wrapped and insulated and packed away in the farthest corner of the farthest closet of the apartment I had shared with Dio at the very outskirts of the city. Nor did either of us speak of it again, in those days, the final ten days we spent in that apartment. He was not on the first of the outbound ships. I think he wanted to spend that remaining time with me, that he would not leave me wholly alone on a planet which had become as strange to me as if I had not lived there for the best part of two years.
There were still five days to go before the second of the ships on which he had tentatively booked passage would depart from the Vainwal spaceport. Not many ships had a final destination at Cottman IV, as the Terrans called Darkover. But many ships touched down there; it was located between the upper and lower spiral arms of the Galaxy, a logical transfer point. Around midday, my father asked me, rather tentatively it is true, if I cared to accompany him to one of the great pleasure palaces of the city, one whose main attraction was a giant bath, modeled after that of some famous old Terran city which had raised bathing to a fine art.
My father had been crippled for years; one of my earliest memories was of the hot springs at Armida, and soaking, after an icy day in the saddle, neck-deep in the boiling water. It was not only the lame or infirm who enjoyed that. But all over the Empire, and more especially on pleasure-worlds where nothing is taboo, bathhouses serve as a gathering place for those whose interest is in something other than hot water and soothing mineral baths. Maybe the atmosphere of relaxed nudity contributes to the breakdown of inhibitions. Many sorts of entertainment are offered there which have little to do with bathing.
My father’s infirmity and his noticeable lameness gave him the most obvious and respectable reasons for being there; also, he found masseurs who could give his aching muscles considerable ease. I seldom visited such places—there had been a time when it was agony to me to be in the midst of such things, and the women who gathered there seeking men whose inhibitions had been loosened by the atmosphere of the baths were not, to put it mildly, the kind of women who attracted me much. But my father seemed more lame than usual, his steps more uneasy. He could have called to summon a masseur who would have accompanied him there, or even someone to carry him in a sedan chair—on Vainwal you can have literally any kind of attention or care, for a price—but in his present condition I would not leave him to hired attendants. I accompanied him to the bathhouse, took him to the door of the hot pools, and went off to the restaurant for a drink. There I sat watching a group of dancers doing the most astonishing things with their anatomy, later waved away the women—and men—who went round afterward trying to find clients sufficiently roused by the display to pay for a more private exhibition. Later I watched another entertainment, this time in hologram, a musical drama telling an ancient legend of the love and revenge of the fire-God; one of his fellow-Gods had had his wife stolen, ravished away by a third, and the fire-God had declared her chaste, though the one who had lost his wife was jealous and would not accept assurances. But the illusion of flames surrounding the actor who mimed the fire-God made me nervous, and I rose and uneasily left the restaurant. I went into one of the bars for another drink, and there my father’s masseur found me.
“You are Lewis-Kennard Lanart—”
Quickly, I was troubled, knowing something was wrong, braced for more tragedy. “My father—what is wrong with my father?”
“He is not in danger now,” the masseur said, fidgeting with the towel in his hands, “but the heat of the steam room was too much for him, and he collapsed. I sent for a medic,” he added defensively. “They wanted to take him to the Terran hospital, but he would not go. He said all he wanted was a few minutes of rest, and for you to come and take him home.”
They had sent for a valet to help him dress, and he was sipping a glass of strong brandy. He looked very pale, thinner than I had noticed. Pain and compunction struck me. I said, “Let me take you home, Father,” and sent for one of the little skycabs which lifted us directly to the roof-platform of our own building.
I had not felt his distress, nor his collapse; I had been watching the stupid dancers!
“It’s all right, Lew,” he said gently. “You’re not my keeper.” And somehow that made me feel raw-edged too, troubled. For once, instead of staying on his feet, he was willing to lie down on a piece of furniture, a soft flotation couch in the apartment, though he would not go to bed.
“Father, you’re not planning, surely, to travel to Darkover in five days? You’ll never be able to endure the trip! And the climate of Thendara—”
“I was born there,” he said tightly. “I can endure it. And I have no choice, unless you choose to go and save me the trouble.”
I said, anger and pity fighting in me, “That’s not fair! You can’t ask it—!”
“I do ask it,” he said. “You’re strong enough, now, to do it. I didn’t ask it of you before you were ready. But now there is no reason you should not—”
I considered it. Or tried to. But everything in me flinched away. Return; walk back on my own two feet into that corner of hell where I had found death and mutilation, rebellion, love and treachery—
No. No. Avarra’s mercy, no…
He sighed, heavily. “You’ll have to face it some day, Lew. And I don’t want to face the Council alone. I can count on only one ally there—”
“Dyan,” I said, “and he’ll do more for you if I’m not there. He hates my guts, Father.”
My father shook his head. “I think you’re mistaken. He promised—” and then he sighed. “Still, be that as it may, you’ll have to go back some day—”