“Try to believe us, my child,” Callina said. “You are on Darkover. Have you heard anything of matrix mechanics? We brought you here like that.” It was a grossly inaccurate description, but it calmed her somehow.
“Who are you, then?”
“Callina Aillard. Keeper of the Comyn.”
“I’ve heard about the Keepers,” Kathie said shakily. “Look, you — you can’t take a Terran citizen, and — and pull her halfway across the Galaxy; my father’s going to tear the planet apart looking for me—” Her voice broke and she covered her face with her hands. She was only a child. From the child came the scared wail. “I’m afraid! I — I want to go home!”
Gently, as she might have spoken to Linnell herself, Callina murmured, “Poor child! Don’t be frightened!”
There was something else I had to do. Kathie must keep her immunity, and unawareness, of Darkovan forces. I knew one way to do that. Yet I hated doing it; I must make myself vulnerable. In effect, I meant to put a barrier around her mind; built into the barrier would be a sort of bypass circuit, so that any attempt to make telepathic contact with Kathie, or dominate her mind, would be immediately shunted from her open mind to my guarded one.
There was no sense in explaining to Kathie what I meant to do. While she clung to Callina, I reached out as gently as I could and made contact with her.
It was an instant of screaming pain in every nerve. Then it blanked out, and Kathie was sobbing convulsively. “What did you do? Oh, I felt you — but no, that’s crazy. What are you?”
“Why couldn’t you wait till she understood?” Callina demanded. But I stood looking at them somberly, without answering. I had done what I had to do, and I had done it now, because I wanted Kathie safely barriered before anyone saw her and guessed. And, above all, before Callina confronted her with Linnell. That moment of prevision last night had left me desperately uneasy. Why, of all the patterns in the world, why Linnell?
What happened when a pair of exact duplicates met? I couldn’t remember ever hearing.
It hurt to see her cry; she was so like Linnell, and Linnell’s tears had always upset me. Callina looked up at helplessly, trying to soothe the weeping girl. “You had better go away for now,” she said, and as Kathie’s sobs broke out afresh, “Go away! I’ll handle this!”
I shrugged, suddenly angry. “As you- please,” I said, and turned my back on them. Why couldn’t she trust me?
And that moment, when I left Callina in anger, was the moment when I snapped the trap shut on us all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Once in every journey of Darkover around its sun, the Comyn, city folk, mountain lords, off-world consuls and ambassadors and Terrans from the Trade City, mingled together in carnival with a great outward show of cordiality. Centuries ago, this festival had merely brought Comyn and commoner together. Now it involved everyone of any importance on the planet; and the festival opened with the display of dancing in the great lower halls of the Comyn Castle.
Centuries of tradition made this a masked affair; in compliance with custom, I wore a narrow half-mask, but had made no further attempt at disguise. I stood at one end of the long hall, talking indifferently and listening with half an ear to a couple of youngsters in the Terran space service, and as soon as I decently could, I got away and stood staring out at the four miniature moons that had nearly floated into conjunction over the peak.-
Behind me the great hall blazed with colors and costumes that reflected every corner of Darkover and almost every known form of human or half-human life throughout the Terran Empire. Derik glittered in the golden robes of an Arturian sun-priest; Rafe Scott had assumed the mask, whip and clawed gloves of a kifirgh duelist.
In the corner reserved, by tradition, for young girls, Linnell’s spangled mask was a travesty of disguise, and her eyes were glowing with happy consciousness of all the eyes on her. As comynara, she was known to everyone on Darkover; but she rarely saw anyone outside the narrow circle of her cousins and the few selected companions permitted to a girl of the Comyn hierarchy. Now, masked, she could speak to, or even dance with perfect strangers, and the excitement of it was almost too much for her.
Beside her, also masked, I recognized Kathie. I didn’t know why she was here, but I saw no harm in it. She was safely barricaded by the bypass circuit I had built into her mind; and there was, probably, no better way of proving that she was not a prisoner, but an honored guest. From her resemblance to Linnell, they’d only think her some noblewoman of the Aillard clan.
Linnell laughed up at me as I joined them;
“Lew, I am teaching your cousin from Terra some of our dances! Imagine, she didn’t know them.”
My cousin. I suppose that was Callina’s idea. Anyway, it explained her badly accented Darkovan. Kathie said gently, “I wasn’t taught to dance, Linnell.”
“Not taught to dance? But what did you learn, then?” Linnell asked incredulously. “Don’t they dance on Terra, Lew?”
“Dancing,” I said dryly, “is an integral part of all human cultures. It is a group activity passed down from the group movements of birds and anthropoids, and also a social channeling of mating behavior. Among such quasi-human races as the chieri it becomes an ecstatic behavior pattern akin to drunkenness. Men dance on Terra, on Megaera, on Vainwal, and in fact, from one end of the civilized Galaxy to the other, as far as I know. For further information, lectures on anthropology are given in the city; I’m not in the mood.”
I turned to Kathie in what I hoped was properly cousinly fashion; “Suppose we do it instead?”
I added to Kathie, as we danced, “Of course you wouldn’t know that dancing is a major study with children here. Linnell and 1 both learned as soon as we could walk. I had only the public instruction, but Linnell has been studying ever since.” I glanced affectionately back at Linnell. “I went to a dance or two on Terra. Do you think our Darkovan ones are so different?”
I was studying the Terran girl rather closely. Why would a duplicate of Linnell have the qualities we needed for the work in hand? Kathie, I realized, had guts and brains and tact; it took them, to come here after the shock she had had, and play the part tacitly assigned to her. And Kathie had another rare quality. She seemed unconscious that my left arm, circling her waist, was unlike anyone else’s. I’ve danced with girls on Terra. It’s not common.
With seeming irrelevance, Kathie said, “How sweet Linnell is! It’s as if she were really my twin; I loved her, the minute I saw her. But I’m afraid of Callina. It’s not that she’s unkind — no one could have been kinder! But she doesn’t seem quite human. Please, let’s not dance? On Terra I’m supposed to be a good dancer, but here I feel like a stumbling elephant.”
“You probably weren’t taught as intensively.” That, to me, was the oddest thing about Terra — the casualness with which they regarded this one talent which distinguishes man from four-footed kind. Women who could not dance! How could they have true beauty?
I just happened to be watching the great central curtains when they parted and Callina Aillard entered the hall. And for me, the music stopped.
I have seen the black night of interstellar space flecked by single stars. Callina was like that, in a scrap torn from the midnight sky, her dark hair netted with pale constellations.