But Sharra had reached out for us all, and taken us into the fire…
“Enough!” My father spoke with the particular force of an Alton, forcing his mind on mine, wresting the image away. Grateful darkness descended behind my eyes; then I could see the moon again, see something other than flames.
He said quietly, as I rested my eyes, covering them with my good hand, “You don’t believe it now, but it is better, Lew. It comes when you let your guard down, yes. But there are long periods when you can break the domination of the Sharra matrix—”
“When I don’t talk about it, you mean,” I interrupted angrily.
“No,” he said, “when it isn’t there. I’ve been monitoring you. It’s not nearly as bad as it was that first year. In the hospital, for instance… I couldn’t get you out of it for more than a few hours at a time. Now there are days, even weeks—”
Yet I would never be free. When we went offworld, from Darkover, hoping to save the hand burned in Sharra’s fires, I had taken the Sharra matrix, hidden in its elaborate sword; not because I wished to take it, but because after what had happened, I could no more be separated from it than parted from my own matrix. My own matrix hung around my neck; it had hung there since my twelfth year, and I could not remove it without pain and probably brain damage. Once it had been taken from me—a kind of deliberate torture—and I had come nearer to death than I like to think. Probably if it had been kept from me another day, I would have died, of heart failure or cerebral accident.
But the Sharra matrix… somehow it had overpowered my own. I need not wear it hanging round my neck, or be in physical contact with it, but I could not go beyond a certain critical distance, or the pain would begin, and the fire images surge in my brain, like static blurring out all else. My father was a competent technician, but he could do nothing; the technicians in the Arilinn Tower, where they had tried to save my hand, could do nothing. Finally they had taken me offworld, in a vain hope that Terran science could do more. It was illegal for the Warden of the Alton Domain, my father, Kennard Alton, to leave Darkover at the same time as his Heir. He had done it anyway, and for that I knew that I should have been grateful to him. But all I felt was weariness, rage, resentment.
You should have let me die.
My father stepped out into the light of the dim moon and stars. I could only barely see his outline; tall, once heavy and imposing; now stooped with the bone disease which had crippled him for many years; but still powerful, dominating. I was never sure whether I saw my father’s physical presence or the mental, commanding force which had overpowered my life since, at eleven, he had forced my mind open to the telepathic Alton Gift—the gift of forced rapport even with non-telepaths, which characterizes the Alton Domain. He had done it because there was no other way to prove to the Comyn Council that I was worthy to be the Alton Heir. But I had had to live with it—and with his domination—ever since.
My hand throbbed where I had slammed down what was left of the arm. Peculiar, that ache; I could feel it in my fourth and sixth fingers…as if I had burned off a nail. And yet there was nothing there, nothing but the empty scar… they had explained it to me; phantom pain, nerves remaining in the rest of the arm. Damned real for a phantom. At least the Terran medics, and even my father, now realized there was nothing more to be done for the hand, and they had done what they should have done at first, and taken it off. Nothing to be done, even with their (rightly) fabled medical science. My mind still flinched away from the memory of the twisted, terrifying thing which had crowned their latest, experimental technique at regeneration. Whatever it is in the cells of the body which bids a hand be a hand, with palm and fingers and nails, and not a claw or a feather or an eye, had been burned away by Sharra, and once, through the drugs, I had seen what my hand had become—
Force my mind away from that too… was there anything safe to think about? I stared into the quiet sky from which the last lingering trace of crimson had faded.
He said quietly “It’s worse at twilight, I think. I wasn’t even full-grown yet when I came first to Terra; I used to come here at sunset so that my cousins and foster-brothers wouldn’t see. You get so tired—” His back was to me, and in any case it was too dark to see anything but the dark loom of his presence, but still, somewhere in my mind, I could see the wry deprecating half-smile, “of the same old moon. And my Terran cousins thought it shameful for anyone my age to cry. So I made sure, after the first time, that they wouldn’t see it.”
There is a saying on Darkover; only men laugh, only men dance, only men weep.
But it had been different for my father, I thought in fierce envy. He had come here of his free will, and for a purpose; to build a bridge between our peoples, Terran and Darkovan. Larry Montray, his Terran friend, remaining on Darkover to be fostered in the Alton Domain: Kennard Alton coming here for a Terran education in the sciences of this world.
But I?
I had come here an exile, broken, maimed, my beloved Marjorie dead because I, like my father before me, had tried to build a bridge between Terran Empire and Darkover. And I had better reason: I was a son of both worlds, because Kennard, all Comyn, had married Montray’s half-sister, Elaine. So I tried; but I had chosen the wrong instrument—the Sharra matrix—and failed, and lived on, with everything that made life real for me dead or abandoned on a world half a Galaxy away. Even the hope which had persuaded my father to bring me here—that my hand, burned in the fires of Sharra, might somehow be salvaged or regenerated—had proved worse than a mirage; even after all I had endured, that was gone too. And I was here on a hated world, alien and familiar at once.
My eyes were growing used to the darkness; I could see my father now, a man in late middle age, stooped and lame, his once-blazing hair all gray; his face was deeply lined with pain and conflict.
“Lew, do you want to go back? Would it be easier? I was here for a reason; I was an exchange student, on a formal mission. It was a matter of honor. But nothing binds you here. You can take ship and return to Darkover whenever you will. Shall we go home, Lew?” He did not glance at my hand; he didn’t need to. That had failed, there was no reason to stay here hoping for a miracle.
(But I could still feel that dull pain like a torn-off nail around the thumb. And the sixth finger ached as if I had pinched it in a vise, or burnt it. Strange. Haunted by the ghost of a hand that wasn’t there.)
“Lew, shall we go home?” I knew he wanted it; this alien land was killing him, too. But then he said the wrong thing.
“The Council wants me back. They know, now, I will father no other sons. And you are acknowledged Heir to Alton; when I went away, they said it was unlawful for the lord of Alton Domain and his Heir to leave the Domains at the same time. If you returned, the Council would be forced to acknowledge—”
“Damn the Council!” I said, so loudly that my father flinched. The same damned old political maneuvering. He had never stopped trying to get the Council to acknowledge me—it had made a nightmare of my childhood, forced him into the painful and dangerous step he had taken, forcing premature awakening of my laran gift. Later it had driven me to my Aldaran kinsfolk, and the ill-fated attempt to raise power through Sharra, and Marjorie…I slammed the door shut in my mind, a closed place, black, blank. I would not think about that, I would not— I wanted no part of their damned Council, nor of the Comyn, nor Darkover— I turned my back and walked away toward the lake cabin, feeling him behind me, close, too close—