Traitor's Sun Read online

  Traitor's Sun

  (A book in the Darkover series)

  (1999 )

  A novel by

  Marion Zimmer Bradley and Adrienne Martine-Barnes

  Traitor's Sun continues the epic saga of Darkover, the award-winning series by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Her most brilliant and popular creation, the Darkover books take readers to a planet torn by rebellion--and struggling for freedom... "Darkover is the essence, the quitessence, my most personal and best-loved work."-- Marion Zimmer Bradley

  MZB Darkover

  Traitor's Sun

  PROLOGUE

  Herm Aldaran snapped awake, his heart pounding and sweat streaming down his

  chest. He gasped for air and struggled to push aside the bedclothes, his head

  throbbing. He sat there, blinking in the faint light that came from the common

  room of the small apartment, and swallowed hard. His dry mouth tasted like iron

  filings and his feet felt alien and disconnected from his body. Though his

  nightrobe was almost drenched around his broad chest, part of the sleeve was

  still dry enough to use to wipe the moisture off his face. As Herm stood up, the

  room spun, and he nearly sat down again.

  At last his body stopped shaking, and his heart slowed to a more normal rhythm.

  He glanced at Katherine, his wife of more than a decade, still undisturbed by

  his movements. In the dim light Herm could see her dark hair spread across the

  pillow, and the sweep of her brow below it, the curve of her mouth beneath the

  strong nose. Not for the first time he wondered why such a beautiful woman had

  consented to marry a plain fellow like himself. It was a puzzle, but he knew it

  was not because he was wealthy-he was not-or had the ambiguous honor of being

  the Senator from Cottman IV, as the Terran Federation designated Darkover, the

  world of his birth. He gazed at her, letting his mind wander a bit, and felt

  himself settle into relative calm.

  Herm realized he would not be able to go back to sleep anytime soon, so he rose

  and left the bedroom as quietly as possible, careful not to rouse Katherine. He

  peeped around the thin partition that separated their sleeping quarters from

  those of their two children and found them undisturbed. Then he padded across

  the dingy tiles in the small food preparation station and opened the cool

  cabinet. The carafe of juice was cold in his fingers, and he had a desire to

  drink right out of the lip of it. Until he held it, he had not realized he was

  still trembling slightly. He forced himself to find a glass, and poured some of

  the yellow liquid into it. Then he gulped down half the glass, letting the tart

  flavor of the juice wash away the nasty taste on his tongue. The cold liquid hit

  his belly like a blow, and for a moment he felt as if he had swallowed acid.

  Then the dreadful sensation vanished, although his stomach continued to protest

  for several seconds. He knew it was only an illusion, but he had the feeling

  that he could sense the sugar in the juice entering his bloodstream. His

  breathing deepened, and he shivered all over, chilled where he had been burning

  only a few moments earlier.

  Herm sank down onto one of the stools that stood beside the long counter which

  served as the eating area, put the glass down before he dropped it, and forced

  himself to empty his mind. A sense of utter wrongness played along his nerves,

  fretting like the discordant notes of some classic industrial symphony. That

  style of music had enjoyed a resurgence during his first years in the Chamber of

  Deputies of the Federation legislature, and he had been dragged to a few

  concerts. It had stuck in his mind, much to his disgust, for it was not music as

  he had thought of it, but more like noise, and rather unpleasant noise at that.

  He hated it, as he hated the stool, the smallness of the room in which he sat,

  and the cramped quarters assigned him as Darkover's Federation Senator.

  When Lew Alton had still been Senator, he had had somewhat larger quarters, and

  a home on Thetis as well. But those days were gone now, and few if any members

  of the legislature had off-world places unless they were inherited ones. The

  Office of Finance had imposed strict travel limitations a few years earlier,

  which restricted the movements of the members. They could go to their home

  worlds for elections every five Terran years, but Herm never had returned to

  Darkover. He had not been elected, but instead had been appointed by Regis

  Hastur, a man he had never actually met, twenty-three years before. He had

  worked for eight years in the Chamber of Deputies, and when Lew Alton had

  vacated the Senate seat, he had taken his place.

  Policy changes imposed by the Office of Finance, and numerous other dictates

  over the years, had ultimately left the legislature prisoner to the whims of

  Premier Sandra Nagy and her Expansionist cronies. Despite its name, the

  Expansionists were an austere bunch of autocrats, and each year had seen more

  and more restrictions imposed on everyone except the most favored members of the

  Party. As he had told his wife once, on a rare occasion when he was moderately

  certain there were no listening devices nearby, "The Expansionists say there are

  limited resources in the Federation-and all of them are the rightful property of

  the Expansionists!" She had not even laughed.

  The three-room apartment was a better domicile than most ordinary Terrans

  possessed, but Herm had grown up in Aldaran Castle, with stone walls around him,

  and great, roaring hearths sending out gusts of scent-laden sooty, heated air.

  An odd thing to miss, after more than two decades. But the scentless, stifling

  atmosphere of the apartment, which was warm all the year round because of the

  central controls of the building, still made him feel like a trapped animal.

  There were eight billion people on the planet, and more every year. He had a

  great longing for space, for stretches of conifers and the smell of mountain

  balsam, for the cry of the Hellers' hawks, their russet plumage bright against a

  sky illuminated by a ruddy sun.

  It was not simply a nostalgia for unsullied expanses of gleaming snow that

  stirred him. Even after two decades, he remained uncomfortable with his

  situation-felt alien. Herm had never felt entirely clean after using a sonic

  shower, although it removed all the dead skin and oil from his body. Water, like

  everything else, was rationed and taxed, and he had a deep longing for a great

  wallow in a tub of steaming water, scented with oil of lavender. A thick towel

  of Dry Town cotton to dry with, and a robe of felted wool over his body

  completed the pleasant fantasy. No clammy synthetic on his skin . . .

  It made his heart ache to think of those things, and he wondered at himself. He

  had spent almost half his life off Darkover, and felt he should have accustomed

  himself to it by now. But if anything, his homesickness grew worse and worse.

  For a moment he remembered his younger self, a yokel by Federation standards,

  arriving to represent his world in the lower chamber. He had
been awed by the

  huge buildings, the hives and skyscrapers, the presence of technologies

  unimaginable on his far-distant world. Despite having grown up with various

  Terrans who were welcomed at Aldaran Castle, and having a mother who claimed

  Terra as the planet of her birth, he had quickly realized he was incredibly

  ignorant. He did not remember much about his mother, for she had died when he

  was three. And certainly nothing he remembered her saying prepared him for the

  reality he experienced during his first year in the Chamber of Deputies. She had

  granted him a strange, unDarkovan name which he understood now was ancient and

  unusual even by Terran standards, a predisposition toward baldness, and beyond

  that only distant fragmented memories. Dom Damon Aldaran's wives, all three of

  them, had perished-his father had been tragically unlucky.

  It had been fortunate that Lew was there to help him through those first few

  years. He had learned how to use the technology, how to access newsfeeds on a

  computer and communicate with people almost instantly. More importantly, Lew

  Alton had set him to studying the literature and philosophy of a hundred

  planets, and the complex history of the Federation itself. At first he had been

  unsure of the purpose of these efforts, and had only read the texts in order to

  please the older man. But slowly he had come to understand how uneducated he was

  for the task he had been chosen to perform. With great difficulty he had started

  to understand the thinking of the Federation, how it was founded on ancient

  ideas that had never taken root on Darkover-some of them very good ideas.

  But now he knew that these ideals were being abandoned, and that the Federation

  was moving into an area of military dominance and oppression. It had happened

  before, in the history of humans, but he wished it was not occurring during his

  own lifetime. And it was not something he could discuss openly, as had been

  possible when he first came from Darkover. Like every other person on the

  planet, he was subject to constant observation. And there was nothing he could

  do about it, since disabling the spy eyes that watched and listened was a

  serious offense. He wondered what the average person thought about it or if they

  thought at all. Likely they did not, hypnotized as they were with mediafeeds and

  vidrams.

  But Herm knew that the situation was bad and getting worse all the time.

  Trillions of credits were disbursed every year to create new technologies. At

  the same time, very little was spent on the day-to-day existence of ordinary

  people, whose lives became ever more difficult. He had tried to understand this

  phenomenon, but it still made no sense to him, and, like most of his fellow

  legislators, he was virtually powerless to change it.

  He was being morbid. It must just be the strain of recent days. Regis Hastur had

  never filled his original place in the Chamber of Deputies after Herm had

  vacated it, and he had not encountered another native of his planet in sixteen

  years. This rarely weighed on him, but he was so tired now that it seemed a

  heavy burden.

  Of late, sleep had become a rare commodity, as the meetings, both public and

  private, in the two chambers of the Federation legislature had gone far into

  what passed for night in this dreadful place. Any of Zandru's frozen hells

  seemed preferable at that moment. The Senate, his labor of almost sixteen years

  now, was a hornet's nest stirred with an Expansionist stick, and the Chamber of

  Deputies was little better. But he had dealt with political crises before

  without waking up in the middle of the night with his heart trying to hammer its

  way through his chest.

  As much as Herm hated living in the Federation, he actually enjoyed the constant

  turmoil of political life. Or he had until a few months before, when the

  Expansionist party had finally achieved a slim majority in both houses, and

  begun to implement policies he opposed. New taxes had been passed for all member

  planets of the Federation, to build a fleet of dreadnaughts, great fighting

  ships, when there was no foe to defend against. Some worlds had protested, and

  even tried to rebel, and combat troops had been sent in to "keep order." It had

  gone from being a game at which he excelled, with his natural talent for verbal

  interplay, and the cunning which had always been his mainstay, to a daily

  nightmare from which he feared he would never awaken.

  Recently the flow of events had disturbed a few of the more moderate Senators in

  the Expansionist Party itself. With what Herm regarded as enormous courage,

  these men and women had voted against their own majority on a critical defense

  bill, effectively destroying it, and bringing both the Senate and the Chamber to

  an impasse. Pressure had been brought, persuasion had been used, but to no

  avail. Except for endless conferences, meetings, and some lengthy speeches on

  the floor, no actual business had been conducted for nearly six weeks now, and

  it did not appear that any would be in the near future. The leaders of the

  Expansionists were becoming more and more desperate, and the only good that had

  come out of the mess was that no more new taxes had been passed in the interim.

  But no benefit could ultimately come from a paralyzed parliament. A government

  unable to act could inadvertently do more harm than good.

  Herm tried to shake away the dour mood that enveloped his mind, and found

  himself remembering one of the last conversations he had had with Lew Alton,

  just before Lew had resigned his office and returned to Darkover. Lucky man. He

  wasn't balancing his bottom on a stingy stool, trying to make sense out of a

  hysteria that had grown and grown over the past decade. What had he said? Ah,

  yes. "There may come a time when the Federation loses its collective mind,

  Hermes, and when that happens, if it does, I cannot really advise you what to

  do. But when that day arrives, you will know it in your bones. And then you must

  decide whether to stay and fight, or run from the fracas. Believe me, it will be

  evident to your intelligence. Trust your instincts then, young man."

  Good advice, and still sound. But things were different now than when Lew had

  still been Darkover's Senator. Then Herm had not been married-what a singularly

  foolish thing to have done, to wed a widow from Renney with a small son, Amaury.

  But he had been hopelessly in love! Now they had their own child, his daughter

  Terese, a delightful girl of nearly ten. They were the light of his life, and he

  knew that without the anchor of Kate and the children he would have been even

  more miserable than he was. He realized he had not thought the matter through

  thoroughly when he met her, fell totally in love, and married her a month

  afterward. Certainly he had not considered the problems of a half-Darkovan child

  reaching an age where threshold sickness and the onset of laran were real

  concerns. And he had never told Katherine about the peculiar inbred paranormal

  talents of his people, although he had always intended to . . . someday. The

  moment just had never seemed right. And what, after all, would he say? "Oh, by

  the way, Kate, I've been meaning to tell y
ou that I can read the minds of other

  people."

  Herm shuddered at the imagined scene that would certainly follow. No, he had not

  told her the truth, not clever Herm. He had just gone on, wheeling and dealing,

  keeping Darkover safe from Federation predators, and put the matter off until

  another day. A wave of regret and guilt swept through him, and his stomach felt

  full of angry insects.

  After his mother's death, he had became a private child and had grown into a

  secretive adult, a habit which had stood him in good stead during his years in

  the Federation. The very walls had ears and eyes, even those in this miserable

  excuse for a kitchen-the so called FP Station. Well, two counters, a tiny sink,

  a cool box and heating compartment were nothing like a vast stone chamber with a

  beehive-shaped oven in one corner, one or two large fireplaces, and a long table

  where the servants could sit and eat and gossip. The old cook at Aldaran

  Castle-she was probably dead now-had had a way of fixing water fowl with

  vegetables that was wonderful, and his mouth watered at the thought of it. He

  had not tasted fresh meat since he and Katherine had gone to Renney nine years

  before. Vat-grown protein had no flavor, even if it did nourish his body.

  He forced the delightful vision of a plump fowl running with fat and pinkish

  juices out of his mind and tried to focus on his abrupt arousal. What had

  brought him out of his desperately needed rest? He had no sense of a dream, so

  it must have been something else. Herm shivered all over, in spite of the warmth

  of the room, and watched the flesh crinkle along his forearms. He had not been

  dreaming at all. No, it was almost certainly an occurrence of the Aldaran Gift,

  a foresight he would probably wish to avoid, once he remembered what it was. His

  laran was decent, good enough to catch the occasional thoughts of the men and

  women he dealt with every day, an advantage he was careful not to display or

  abuse. He relied much more on his native cunning than on his telepathy-it was a

  more dependable talent, and less ethically dubious.

  Besides, he was a diplomat, not a spy, and just because the Federation kept a

  watchful eye and ear on his every movement did not seem sufficient reason to

  imitate them. But he did wonder what the unseen auditors made of his love trysts