Even to Linnell I didn’t want to talk about it. “Not much,” I said, “but I have a mechanical hand I wear when I don’t want to be noticed. I’ll wear it when I dance with you on Festival Night, shall I?”
“Only if you want to,” she said seriously. “I don’t care what you look like, Lew. You’re always the same to me.”
I hugged her close, warmed as much by her accepting smile as by the words. I suppose Linnell was a beautiful woman; I have never been able to see her as anything but the little foster-sister with whom I’d raced breakneck over the hills; I’d spanked her for breaking my toys or borrowing them without leave, comforted her when she was crying with toothache. I said, “You were playing the rryl… play for me, won’t you?”
She took up the instrument again and began to play the ballad of Hastur and Cassilda:
The stars were mirrored on the shore,
Dark was the lone immortal moor,
Silent were rocks and trees and stone—
Robardin’s daughter walked alone,
A web of gold between her hands
On shining spindle burning bright…
I had heard Dio singing it, though Dio had no singing voice to speak of—I wondered, where was Callina? I should speak with her—
Linnell gestured, and I saw, in a niche beyond the fireplace, Callina and Regis Hastur, seated on a soft divan and so absorbed in what they were saying that neither had heard me come into the room. I felt a momentary flare of jealousy— they looked so comfortable, so much at peace with each other—then Callina looked up at me and smiled, and I knew I had nothing to fear.
She came forward; I wanted to take her in my arms, into that embrace which was so much more than the embrace I would have given a kinswoman; instead she reached out and touched my wrist, the feather touch with which a working Keeper would have greeted me, and with that automatic gesture, frustration slipped between us like an unsheathed sword.
A Keeper. Never to be touched, never to be desired, even by a defiling thought… angry frustration, and at the same time, reassurance; this is how she would have greeted me if we were both back in Arilinn, where I had been happy… even had we been acknowledged lovers for years, she would no more have touched me than this.
But our eyes met, and she said gravely, “Ashara will see you, Lew. It is the first time, I think, in more than a generation, that she has agreed to speak with anyone from outside. When I spoke to her of the Sharra matrix, she said I might bring you.”
Regis said, “I would like to speak with her, too. It may be that she would know something of the Hastur Gift…” but, he broke off at Callina’s cold frown.
“She has not asked for you. Even I cannot bring anyone into her presence unless she wishes it.”
Regis subsided as if she had struck him. I blinked, staring aghast at this new Callina, the impassive mask of her face, the eyes and voice of a cold, stony stranger. Only a moment, and she was again the Callina I knew, but I had seen, and I was puzzled and dismayed. I would have said something more, even to reassure Regis that we would ask the ancient leronisto grant him an audience, but Linnell claimed me again.
“Are you going to take him away at once? When we have not seen each other for so many years? Lew, you must tell me about Terra, about the worlds in the Empire!”
“There will be time enough for that, certainly,” I said, smiling, looking at the fading light. “It is not yet nightfall… but there’s nothing good to tell of Terra, chiya;I have no good memories. Mostly I was in hospitals…” and as I said the word I remembered another hospital in which not I, but Dio had been the patient, and a certain darkhaired, sweet-faced young nurse. “Did you know, Linnie-—no, of course, you couldn’t know; you have a perfect double on Vainwal; so like you that at first I called her by your name, thought it was you yourself!”
“Really? What was she like?”
“Oh, efficient, competent—even her voice was like yours,” I said. And then I stopped, remembering the horror of that night, the shockingly deformed, monstrous form that should have been my son… I was strongly barriered, but Linnell saw the twitching of my face and put up her hand to stroke my scarred cheek.
“Foster-brother,” she said, giving the word the intimate inflection that made it a term of endearment, “don’t talk about hospitals and sickness and pain. It’s all over now, you’re here at home with us. Don’t think about it.”
“And there are enough troubles here on Darkover to make you forget whatever troubles you may have had in the Empire,” said Regis, with a troubled smile, joining us at the window, where the sun had faded, blurred by the evening clouds. “Council was not properly adjourned; I doubt we’ve heard the last of that. Certainly not the last of Beltran…” and Callina, hearing the name, shuddered. She said, looking impatiently at the clouds, “Come, we must not keep Ashara waiting.”
A servant folded her into a wrap that was like a gray shadow. We went out and down the stairs, but at the first turning, something prompted me to turn back; Linnell stood there, framed in the light of the doorway, copper highlights caught in her brown hair, her face serious and smiling; and for a moment, that out-of-phase time sense that haunts the Alton gift, a touch perhaps of the precognition I had inherited from the Aldaran part of my blood, made me stare, unfocused, as past, present, future all collapsed upon themselves, and I saw a shadow falling on Linnell, and a dreadful conviction—
Linnell was doomed… the same shadow that had darkened my life would fall on Linnell and cover her and swallow her—
“Lew, what’s the matter?”
I blinked, turning to Callina at my side. Already the certainty, that sick moment when my mind had slid off the time track, was fading like a dream in daylight. The confusion, the sense of tragedy, remained; I wanted to rush up the stairs, snatch Linnell into my arms as if I could guard her from tragedy… but when I looked up again the door was closed and Linnell was gone.
We went out through the archway and into a courtyard. The light rain of early summer was falling, and though at this season it would not turn to snow, there were little slashes of sleet in it. Already the lights were fading in the Old City, or could not come through the fog; but beyond that, across the valley, the brilliant neon of the Trade City cast garish red and orange shadows on the low clouds. I went to the railed balcony that looked down on the valley, and stood there, disregarding the rain in my face. Two worlds lying before me; yet I belonged to neither. Was there any world in all the star-spanning Empire where I would feel at home?
“I would like to be down there tonight,” I said wearily, “or anywhere away from this Hell’s castle—”
“Even in the Terran Zone?”
“Even in the Terran Zone.”
“Why aren’t you, then? There is nothing keeping you here,” Callina said, and at the words I turned to her. Her cobweb cloak spun out on the wind like a fine mist as I pulled her into my arms. For a moment, frightened, she was taut and resisting in my arms; then she softened and clung to me. But her lips were closed and unresponsive as a child’s under my demanding kiss, and it brought me to my senses, with the shock of déjà vu…somewhere, sometime, in a dream or reality, this had happened before, even the slashes of rain across our faces…She sensed it too, and put up her hands between us, gently withdrawing. But then she let her head drop on my shoulder.
“What now, Lew? Merciful Avarra—what now?”
I didn’t know. Finally I gestured toward the crimson smear of garish neon that was the Trade City.
“Forget Beltran. Marry me—now—tonight, in the Terran Zone. Confront the Council with an accomplished fact and let them chew on it and swallow it—let them solve their own problems, not hide behind a woman’s skirts and think they can solve them with marriages!”
“If I dared—” she whispered, and through the impassive voice of a trained Keeper, I felt the tears she had learned not to shed. But she sighed, putting me reluctantly away again. She said, “You may forget Beltran, but he will not go away because we are not there. He has an army at the gates of Thendara, armed with Terran weapons. And beyond that— she hesitated, reluctant, and said, “Can we so easily forget— Sharra?”