“I should send a message to see how Lew does,” Regis said, “or go and greet him. Kennard was my friend and foster-father; Lew and I were bredin.”
Hastur said with asperity, “You could surely find yourself a less dangerous friend in these days. That alliance won’t do you any good.”
Regis said angrily, “I don’t choose my friends for their political expediency, sir!”
Hastur shrugged that away. “You’re still young enough for the luxury of friendships. I remained convinced that Kennard was a good friend—perhaps for too long.” As Regis stirred, he said, “No, wait. I need you here. I have sent for Gabriel and Javanne. The question before us is this: what are we going to do about Derik?” As Regis looked blank he said impatiently, “Surely you don’t still think we can have him crowned! The boy’s not much better than a halfwit!”
Regis shrugged. “I don’t see what choice you have, Grandfather. It’s worse than if he were a halfwit; then everyone would agree that he can’t be crowned. The trouble is that Derik has nine-tenths of his wits, and he’s missing only the most important tenth.” He smiled, but knew there was no mirth in the joke.
But Danvan Hastur did not smile, he said, “In some lesser walk of life—even as the ordinary Head of a Domain—it wouldn’t be so important; he’s going to marry Linnell Lindir-Aillard, and she’s no fool. Derik loves her, he’s grown up with the knowledge that the Aillard women are the Heads of Council in their own right, and he would let himself be guided by her. I remember when my father married off one of the less stable Ardais to an Aillard woman; Lady Rohana was the real head of that clan well into Dyan’s time. But—to wear the crown of the Hasturs of Elhalyn—” he shook his head slowly, “and in the days that are coming now? No, I can’t risk it.”
“I don’t know that you have the power to risk it or not risk it, sir,” Regis pointed out. “If you had faced the fact, years ago, that Derik would never be fit for his crown, perhaps when he was twelve or fifteen, and instead had him put under Guardianship and had him set aside—who is the next Heir to Elhalyn?”
Danvan Hastur scowled, lines running down sharply from his jaw to his chin. “I can’t believe you are that naпve, Regis.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Grandfather.”
Danvan Hastur sighed and said heavily, as if he were explaining a thing to a child with the use of colored pictures, “Your mother, Regis, was King Stephen’s sister. His only sister.” Just in case Regis might have missed the implications of that, he added baldly, “You are nearest to the crown—even before the sons of Derik’s sisters. The oldest of those sons is three years old. There is also an infant at the breast.”
“Aldones! Lord of Light!” Regis muttered, and the imprecation was nevertheless a prayer. Words he had said, joking, to Danilo years before, came back to him now. “If you love me, Dani, don’t wish a crown upon me!”
“If I had had him set aside,” his grandfather said, “who would have believed that I was not simply trying to consolidate power in my own hands? Not that it would have been such a bad thing, in these days—but it would have lost me the popular support that I needed to keep order in a crownless realm. I delayed, hoping it would become clear to everyone that Derik was really unfit.”
“And now,” said Regis, “everyone will think that you are trying to depose Derik the first time he makes a decision contrary to yours.”
“The trouble is,” his grandfather said, and he sounded despondent, “this proposed alliance with Aldaran might not be such a bad idea, if we could be absolutely certain that the Aldarans are once and for all out of the Terran camp. What happened during that Sharra business seemed to have broken off the closeness between Terrans and Aldaran. If we could get the Aldarans firmly on our side—” he considered for a moment.
“Grandfather, do you honestly think that the Terrans are going to pack up their spaceport and go away?”
The old man shook his head. “I want us to turn our backs on them completely. I think my father made a very great mistake when he allowed Kennard to be educated on Terra, and I think I compounded that mistake when I recognized Lew for Council. No, of course the Terran Empire won’t go away. But the Terrans might have respected us, if we hadn’t kept looking over the wall. We should never have let the Ridenow go offworld. We should have said to the Terrans, ‘Build your spaceport if you must, but in return for that, let us alone. Leave us with our own way of life, and go about your business without involving us.’”
Regis shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. You can’t ignore a fact, and the Terran Empire is a fact. It’s there. Sooner or later it’s going to affect us one way or the other, no matter how strictly we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. And you can’t ignore the fact that we are Terran colonists, or that we were once—”
“What we were once doesn’t matter,” Danvan Hastur said. “Chickens can’t go back into eggs.”
“The very point I’m trying to make, sir. We were cut off from our roots, and we found a way of life which meant we accepted ourselves as belonging to this world, compelled to live within its restrictions. That worked while we were still isolated, but once we had come back into contact with a—” he stopped, and considered—“with an empire which spans the stars, and takes world-hopping for granted, we can’t pretend to continue as we were.”
“I don’t see why not,” Hastur said. “The Terrans have nothing that we want.”
“Nothing you want, perhaps, sir.” Regis made a point of not staring markedly at the silver coffee service on his grandfather’s table, but the old man saw his look anyhow and said, “I am willing to do without any Terran luxuries, if it will encourage the rest of our people to do likewise.”
“Once again, sir, won’t work. We had to turn to the Terrans during the last epidemic of Trailmen’s fever. There’s some evidence the climate’s changing, too, and we need some technological help there. People will die if they don’t see an alternative, but if we let them die when Terran medicine can help them, are we anything but tyrants? Sir, one thing no one can control is knowledge. We can use it or misuse it— like laran,” he added grimly, remembering that his own laran had brought him such unendurable self-knowledge that, at one time, he would willingly have had it burned forever from his brain. “But we can’t pretend it’s never happened, or that it’s our destiny to stay on this one world as if it was all there would ever be in the universe.”
“Are you trying to say that we must inevitably become part of the Terran Empire?” his grandfather asked, scowling so furiously that Regis wished he had never started this.
“I am saying, sir, that whether we join into it or not, the Terran Empire is now a fact of our existence, and whatever decisions we make, must be made in the full knowledge that the Terrans are there. If we had refused them permission to build their spaceport, at first, they might—I say they might, not that they would—have turned their backs, gone away and built it somewhere else. I doubt it. Most likely they would have used just enough force to stop our open rebellion against it, and built it anyhow. We could have tried to resist—and perhaps, if we still had the weapons of the Ages of Chaos, we might have been able to drive them away. But not without destroying ourselves in the process. You remember what happened in a single night when Beltran turned Sharra against them—” He stopped, shivering. “That is not the worst of the Ages of Chaos weapons, but I pray I will never see a worse one. And we do not, now, have the technology of the Ages of Chaos, so that those weapons, are uncontrollable. And even you, sir, don’t think we can drive away the Terrans with the swords of the Guardsmen—not even with every swordsman on Darkover under arms.”