“But a time’s coming when we’ll all be Terrans,” Lerrys said, “and I don’t want her tied to you then.”
It was like struggling under water; I could not reach his mind, his thoughts were blank to me. Zandru’s hells, was this what it was like to be without laran, blind, deaf, mutilated, with nothing left but ordinary sight and hearing? “Is this what Dio wants? Why doesn’t she tell me so herself, then?”
Now there was blind rage exploding in Lerrys’s face; it needed no laran to see that. His face tightened, his fists clenched; for a moment I braced myself, thinking he would strike me, wondering how I could manage, with one hand, to defend myself if he did.
“Damn you, can’t you see that’s what I want to spare her?” he demanded, his voice rising to hysteria. “Haven’t you put her through enough? How much do you think she can stand, you—you—you damned—” His voice failed him. After a time he got control of it again.
“I don’t want her to have to see you again, damn you. I don’t want her left with any memory of what she had to go through!” he said, raging. “Go to the Terran HQ and dissolve your marriage there—and if you don’t, I swear to you, Lew, I’ll call challenge on you and feed your other hand to the kyorebni!”
Through the drugs I was too dulled to feel sorrow. I said heavily, “All right, Lerrys. If that’s what Dio wants, I won’t bother her again.”
He turned and slammed out of the house; Marius stood staring after him. He said, “What, in the name of all the Gods, was that all about?”
I couldn’t talk about it. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” and, blindly, struggled up the stairs to my father’s room. Andres came, but I paid no attention to him; I flung myself down on my father’s bed and slept like the dead.
But I dreamed of Dio, crying and calling my name as they took her away from me in the hospital.
When I woke my head was clear; and I seemed, again, to be in possession of it alone. It had assumed the character of any family reunion; Marius came and sat on my bed and talked to me as if he were the young boy I’d known, and I gave him the gifts I’d remembered to bring from Vainwal, Terran lensed goods: binoculars, a camera.
He thanked me, but I suspected he thought them gifts for a child; he referred to them once as “toys.” I wondered what would have been a proper gift for a man? Contraband blasters, perhaps, in defiance of the Compact? After all, Marius had had a Terran education. Was he one of those who considered the Compact a foolish anachronism, the childish ethic of a world stuck in barbarism? I suspected, too, that he felt little grief for our father. I didn’t blame him; father had abandoned Marius a long time ago.
I told them I had business at the Terran HQ, without telling them much about it.
“You’ve got seven days, after all,” Jeff pointed out to me after breakfast. “They deferred the formal transfer of the Domain until ritual mourning for Kennard was completed. And now it’s only a formality—they accepted you as his Heir when you were fifteen.”
There was the question as to whether they would accept Marius.
“Stupid bigots,” Andres grumbled, “to decide a man’s worth on the color of his eyes!”
Or the color of his hair; I could feel Jeff thinking that, remembering a time when, in Arilinn, most Comyn had had hair of the true Comyn red. I said, only half facetiously, “Maybe I should dye mine—and Marius’s—so we’ll look more like Comyn—”
“I couldn’t change my eyes,” Marius said dryly, and I thought, with a pang, of the changeable sea-colors in Dio’s eyes. But Dio hated me now, and that was all past; and who could blame her?
“They’ll challenge me,” I said. “And if they do—hell, I can’t fight them with one hand.”
“Stupid anachronism in this day and age,” Marius said predictably, “to settle anything as important as the Heirship of a Domain with a sword.”
Andres—we had demanded he sit with us at table; coridom or no, he had been guardian and foster-father much of our lives—asked, with equal dryness, “Would it make more sense to fight it out with blasters or invade each other’s Domains and fight a war over it?”
Jeff was leaning back in his chair, a half-empty cup in front of him. “I remember hearing, in the Tower, why it was that the formal challenge with swords was instituted. There was a time when a formal challenge for the rulership of a Domain was made with the Gift of that Domain—and the one whose laran was the stronger won it. There was a day when the Domains bred men and women like cattle for these Gifts—and the Alton Gift, full strength, can kill. I doubt Gabriel wants to try that kind of duel against you.”
“I’m not so sure, after last night, that I could win it if he did,” I said. “I had forgotten where Comyn immunity came from.” At Arilinn, matrix mechanics and technicians in training sometimes fought mock battles with laran, but I had been taught control since I was into my teens; real battles with laran were forbidden.
The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the older laran weapons which were as dreadful as anything the Terran empire could produce…
“I don’t think Gabriel will challenge you,” Andres said. “But they’ll ask why, at your age, you’re not married, and whether you have a legitimate child for an Heir.”
I felt the scars at my mouth pull as I grimaced. “Married, yes, but not for long; that was what Lerrys came here about,” I said. “And no children, nor likely to have.”
Marius started to ask questions; Jeff stared him down. He knew what I was talking about. “We were afraid, at Arilinn, that would happen, but the technique of cell-monitoring at that level was lost sometime in the Ages of Chaos. Some of us are working to master it again—it’s quicker and safer than some of the DNA work they do in the Empire. I don’t suppose you fathered any bastards before you went offworld?”
There had been adventures in my youth, but if I had fathered a child—I put it bluntly to myself—the girl involved would have been proud to tell me so. And Marjorie had died, her child unborn.
“They’d accept Marius if I tested him for the Alton Gift, perhaps,” I said. “They might have no choice. Comyn law says there must be an Heir named, a succession insured. By letting Kennard take me offworld, they gave tacit consent for Marius as presumptive Heir, I’d think. The law is clear enough.” I didn’t want to test Marius for the Alton Gift—not by the shock tactics my father had used on me, and I knew no others. Not now. And with my matrix in the shape it was in… about all I could do would be to give a demonstration of the powers of Sharra!
It wanted me, the fires sought to call me back…
But there were other things to think about now.
“Marius should be tested before the formal challenge,” I said. “You’re First at Arilinn; you can do that, can’t you?”
“Certainly,” Jeff said. “Why not? I suspect he has some laran, perhaps Ridenow gift—there’s Ridenow in the Alton lineage, and Ardais, too; Kennard’s mother was Ardais and I always suspected he had a touch of catalyst telepathy.”
Marius had been tearing a buttered roll to pieces. He said now, without looking up, “What I have, I think, is—is the Aldaran Gift. I can see—ahead. Not far, not very clearly; but the Aldaran Gift is precognition, and I—I have that.”