The Sword of Aldones d-2 Read online

“I have a pair of Earth-made binoculars, a Terran camera, and half a bottle of Vainwal firi (sp?),” I told him. “Let’s see them.”

  He opened the cases, and I tensed. This was the moment I had been dreading.

  I should have tried to bribe him. But that would have meant — if he happened to be honest — a fine and blacklisting. I couldn’t risk that.

  He glanced at the camera and binoculars. Terran lenses are a luxury item and usually highly taxed. “Ten reis duty,” he said, and pushed the folds of clothing aside. “If the firi is less than ten ounces, there’s no tax. What is this?”

  I thought I’d bite through my tongue when his hand gripped it. It felt like a fist squeezing my heart. I said through a contracted throat, “Let it alone!”

  “What in the—” he dragged it out. It was like a nail raking along a nerve. He started to unwrap the cloth. “Contraband weapon, huh? You — hell, it’s a sword!”

  I couldn’t breathe. The blue crystals in the hilt winked up at me, and his hand gripping it was too vast an agony to be borne.

  “It’s a — an heirloom in my family.”

  He looked at me queerly. “Well, I’m not hurting it any. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a contraband blaster, or something.” He shoved the folds of silk around it again, and I remembered how to breathe. He picked up the half-empty bottle of the expensive Vainwal cordial and measured it with his eyes. “About seven ounces. Sign a statement that you’re bringing it in for personal consumption and not for resale, and it’s duty free.”

  I signed. He snapped the lock on the case, and I moved, with faltering steps, away from the customs barrier.

  One hurdle past. And I’d managed to live through it — this time.

  I rejoined Marius and went to hail a skycar.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Sky Harbor Hotel was tawdry and expensive, and I didn’t much like the place; but I wasn’t apt to run into other Comyn there, and that was the main thing. So they showed us up to two of the square cubicles which Terrans call rooms.

  I’ve gotten used to them on Terra and Vainwal, and they didn’t bother me. But as I fastened the doors, I turned to Marius in sudden dismay;

  “Zandru’s hells, I’d forgotten! Does this bother you?” I knew how doors, and walls, and locks, could affect a Darkovan. I’d known that terrible, suffocating claustrophobia all during my first years on Earth. More than anything else it sets Darkovan apart from Terran; Darkovan rooms had translucent walls, divided by thin panels or curtains or solid light barriers.

  But Marius seemed quite at ease, sprawling idly on a piece of furniture so modernistic I couldn’t tell whether it was a bed or a chair. I shrugged; I’d learned to tolerate claustrophobia, probably he had too.

  I bathed, shaved, and wadded up, carelessly, most of the Terran clothing I’d worn on the starship. The things were comfortable, but I couldn’t turn up in Comyn Council wearing them. I dressed in suede-leather breeches, low ankle-boots, and laced up the crimson jerkin deftly, making a little extra display of my one-handed skill because I was still too damned sensitive about it. The short cloak in the Alton colors concealed the hand that wasn’t there. I felt as if I’d changed my skin.

  Marius was roaming restlessly about the room. He still didn’t feel familiar. I vaguely recognized his voice and manner, but there wasn’t that sense of closeness usual between telepaths in a Comyn family. I wondered if he sensed it, too. Maybe it was the drugs.

  I stretched out, shut my eyes and tried to doze, but even the quiet bothered me; after eight days in space, the thrumming of the drives an omnipresent nuisance under the veils of drug. Finally I sat up and hauled my smaller piece of luggage toward me.

  “Do me a favor, Marius?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m still doped — can’t concentrate. Can you open a matrix lock?”

  “If it’s a simple one.”

  It was; any nontelepath could have attuned his mind to the simple psychokinetic pattern broadcast by the matrix crystal which held the lock shut. “It’s simple, but it’s keyed to me. Touch my mind and I’ll give it to you.”

  The request was not an uncommon one, within a telepath family. But the boy stared at me in something like panic. I looked back, amazed, then relaxed and grinned. After all,

  Marius hardly knew me. He’d been a small boy when I left, and I supposed, to him, I was the next thing to a complete stranger. “Oh, all right. Lock, and I’ll touch you.”

  I made a light telepathic contact with the surface of his thoughts, visualizing the pattern of the matrix lock. His mind was so totally barriered that he might have been a stranger, even a nontelepath. It embarrassed me; I felt naked and intrusive.

  After all, I wasn’t sure Marius was a telepath. Children don’t show that talent to any extent before adolescence, and he’d been a child when I went away. In all else he had inherited Terran traits, why should he have this one Darkovan talent?

  He laid the case, opened, on the bed. I lifted out a small square box and handed it to him.

  “Not much of a present,” I said, “but at least I remembered.”

  He opened the box, hesitantly, and looked at the binoculars that lay, shiny and alien, inside. But he handled them with a strange embarrassment, then laid them back in the box without comment. I felt mildly annoyed. I hadn’t expected gratitude, especially, but he might have thanked me. He hadn’t asked about father, either.

  “The Terrans can’t be beaten for lensed goods,” he said, after a minute.

  “They can grind lenses. And build spaceships. As far as I can tell, it’s all they can do.”

  “And fight wars,” he said, but I didn’t take that up. “I’ll show you the camera, too. I won’t tell you what I paid for it, though — you’d think I was crazy.”

  I went through the cases, and Marius sat beside me, looking at things and asking diffident questions. He was obviously interested, but for some reason he seemed to be trying to conceal it. Why?

  At last I drew out the long shape of the sword. And as I touched it, I felt the familiar mixture of revulsion and pleasure…

  All the time I’d been off Darkover, it had been dead. Dormant. Hidden between blade and hilt of the heirloom sword, the proximity of the strong matrix made me tremble. Off-world it was an inert crystal. Now it was alive, with a strange, living warmth.

  Most matrices are harmless. Bits of metal, or crystal, car stone, which respond to the psychokinetic wave lengths of thought, transforming them into energy. In the ordinary matrix mechanic — and in spite of what the Terrans think, matrix mechanics is just a science, which anybody can learn — this psychokinetic ability is developed independent of telepathy. Though telepaths are better at it, especially on the higher levels.

  But the Sharra matrix was keyed into the telepathic centers, and into the whole nervous system; body and brain.

  It was dangerous to handle. Matrices of this kind were traditionally concealed in a weapon of some sort. Sharra’s matrix was the most fearful weapon ever devised. It was reasonable to hide it in a sword. A lithium bomb would have been better. Preferably one that would explode and destroy matrix and all… and me with it.

  Marius was gazing down at me, with a set, horror-stricken face. He was shaking.

  “Sharra’s matrix!” he whispered between stiff lips. “Why, Lew? Why?”

  I turned on him, and demanded hoarsely, “How do you know—”

  He had never been told. Our father had agreed to keep it from him. I got up, suspicion surging over me, but before I could complete the question, a burp from the intercom interrupted. Marius reached past me to grab it; listened, then held out the receiver and vacated his seat for me. “Official, Lew,” he said in an undertone.

  “Department three,” said a crisp, bored voice, when I identified myself.

  “Zandru!” I muttered. “Already? No — excuse me — go ahead.”

  “Official notification,” said the bored voice. “A statement of intention to murder, in fair fight,
has been filed with this office against Lewis Alton-Kennard-Montray-Alton. Declared murderer is identified as Robert Raymon Kadarin, address unregistered. Notification has been legally given; kindly accept and acknowledge the notice, or file a legally acceptable reason for refusal.”

  I swallowed hard. “Acknowledged,” I said at last, and put down the receiver, sweating. The boy came and sat beside me. “What’s wrong, Lew?”

  My head hurt, and I rubbed it with my good hand.

  “I just got an intent-to-murder.”

  “Hell,” said Marius, “already? Who from?”

  “Nobody you know.” My scar twitched. Kadarin — leader of the rebels of Sharra; once my friend, now my sworn, implacable foe. He hadn’t lost any time in inviting me to settle our old quarrel. I wondered if he even knew I’d lost my hand. Tardily it occurred to me — as if it were something happening to someone else — that this would have been a legally admissible reason for refusing. I tried to reassure the staring boy.

  “Take it easy, Marius. I’m not afraid of Kadarin, in fair fight. He never was any good with a sword. He—”

  “Kadarin!” he stammered. “But, but Bob promised—”

  “Bob!” Abruptly my fingers bit his arm. “How do you know Kadarin?”

  “I want to explain, Lew. I’m not—”

  “You’ll do a lot of explaining,. brother,” I said curtly. And then someone started to hammer purposefully on the door.

  “Don’t open it!” said Marius urgently.

  But I crossed the room and threw back the bolt, and Dio Ridenow ran into the room.

  Since I’d seen her on the spaceport she had changed into men’s riding clothes, a little too big for her, and she looked like a belligerent child. She stopped, a step or two inside, and stood staring at the boy behind me.

  “You know my brother,” I said impatiently.

  But Dio stood frozen. “Your brother?” she gasped, at last,

  “Are you out of your mind? That’s no more Marius than — than I am!” I drew back incredulously, and Dio stamped her foot in annoyance. “His eyes! Lew, you idiot, look at his eyes!”

  My supposed brother made a quick lunge, taking me off balance. He threw his whole weight against us. Dio reeled, and I went down on one knee, fighting for balance. Eyes. Marius — now I remembered — had had the eyes of our Terran mother. Dark brown. No Darkovan has brown or black eyes. And this — this imposter who was not Marius looked at me with eyes of a stranger, gold-flecked amber. Only twice had I seen eyes like that. Marjorie. And—

  “Rafe Scott!”

  Marjorie’s brother! No wonder he had known me, no wonder I had sensed his presence as familiar. I remembered him, too, only as a small boy!

  He tried to push past me; I grabbed at him and we swayed, struggling, in a bone-breaking clinch. “Where’s my brother?” I yelled. I twisted my foot behind his ankle, and we crashed to the floor together.

  He’d never said he was Marius, it flashed across my mind in a split second. He just hadn’t denied it when I thought so…

  I got my knee across his chest and held him pinned down. “What’s the idea, Rafe? Talk!”

  “Let me up, damn you! I can explain!”

  I didn’t doubt that a bit. How cleverly he had discovered that I was unarmed. But I should have known. I should have trusted my instinct; he didn’t feel like my brother. He hadn’t asked about father. He’d been embarrassed when I brought him a gift.

  Dio said, “Lew, perhaps—” but before I could answer, Rafe gave an unexpected twist and sent me sprawling. Before I could scramble up, he thrust Dio unceremoniously aside, and the door slammed behind him.

  I got up, my breath coming hard, and Dio came to me. “Are you hurt? Aren’t you going to try and catch him?”

  “No, to both questions.” Until I found out why Rafe had tried, this clumsy and daring imposture, there would be no point in finding him. And meanwhile, where was Marius?

  “The situation,” I remarked, not necessarily to Dio, “gets crazier every minute. Where do you come into it?”

  She sat down on the bed and glared at me.

  “Where do you think?”

  For once I regretted that I could not read her mind. There was a reason why I couldn’t — but I won’t go into that now.

  But Dio was trouble, in a pretty, small, blonde package. I was here on Darkover; I had to stay at least a while.

  The social codes of Vainwal — where Dio, under the lax protection of her brother Lerrys, had spent the last two seasons — are considerably less rigid than the strict codes of Darkovan propriety. Her brother had had sense enough not to interfere.

  But here on Darkover, Dio was comynara, and held laran rights in the vast Ridenow estates. And what was I? A half-caste of the hated Terrans — entanglement with Dio would bring all the Ridenow down on my head, and there were a lot of them.

  I would be grateful to Dio all my life. When Marjorie was torn from me, in the horror of that last night when Sharra had ravened in the hills across the river, something had been cut from me. Not clean like my hand, but rotting and festering inside. There had been no other women, no other love, nothing but a bleak black horror, until Dio. She had flung herself into my life, a pretty, passionate, willful girl, and she had gone unflinching into that horror, and somehow, after that, I had healed clean.

  Love? Not as I knew the word. But understanding, and implicit trust. I would have trusted her with my reputation, my fortune, my sanity — my life.

  But I trusted her brothers about as far as I could see through the hull of the Southern Cross. And I couldn’t quarrel with them — not yet. I tried to make this clear to Dio without hurting her feelings, but it wasn’t easy. She sat sulking and swinging her feet while I paced up and down like a trapped animal. Just having her here in my rooms could be dangerous if her family got wind of it — however innocent. And I knew if we were together very much it wouldn’t be innocent. Dio’s murmured, “I understand,” made me angry because I knew she did not really understand at all.

  Her restless glance fell on the camouflage sword, lying across the bed. She frowned and picked it up.

  Not pain, exactly, but a tension gripping me, a fist squeezing my nerves. I cried out, wordlessly, and Dio dropped it as if it burned her, staring open-mouthed. “What’s the matter?”

  “I — can’t explain.” I stood regarding the thing for some minutes. “Before anything else, I’d better fix it so it’s safe to handle. For the one who handles it and for me.”

  I rummaged my luggage for my matrix technician’s kit. I had only a few lengths left of the special insulating cloth, but now I was back on Darkover, I could have more made for me. I wrapped the stuff around and over the juncture of hilt and blade until I could no longer feel the warmth and tingle of the matrix; frowned and held it away. I wasn’t even sure if ordinary safeguards would work with this matrix.

  I handed it to Dio. She bit her lip, but took it. It hurt, but manageably; a small nagging tension, no more. That much I could stand.

  “Why ever did you leave a high-level matrix uninsulated?” Dio demanded, “and why did you let yourself be keyed into it that way?”

  It was a very good question, especially the last. But I ignored that one. “I didn’t dare bring it through customs under insulation,” I said soberly. “Earthmen know, now, what to look for. As long as it was just a sword, no one would look twice at it.”

  “Lew, I don’t understand,” she said helplessly.

  “Don’t try, darling,” I said. “The less you know, tie better for you. This isn’t Vainwal, and I’m — not the man you knew there.”

  Her soft mouth was trembling, and in another minute I would have taken her in my arms; but at that moment someone banged on the door again.

  And I had thought I’d have privacy here!

  I stepped away from Dio. “That’s probably your brothers,” I said bitterly, “and I’ll have another intent-to-murder filed on me.”

  I stepped toward the doo
r. She caught my arm. “Wait,” she said, urgently. “Take this.”

  I stared without comprehension at the thing she held out to me. It was a small propulsion pistol; one of the Terran-made powder weapons which do unbelievable havoc for their size and simplicity. I drew back my hand in refusal, but Dio thrust it into my pocket. “You don’t have to use it,” she said, “just carry it. Please, Lew.”

  The knock on the door was repeated, but Dio held me, saying, “Please,” again, until at last, impatiently, I nodded. I went and opened the door a crack, standing in the opening so the girl could not be seen.

  The boy in the hallway was stocky and dark, with heavy sullen features and amused dark eyes. He said, “Well, Lew?”

  And then the presence of him was tangible to me. I can’t explain exactly how, but I knew. All at once it was unbelievable that Rafe could have fooled me for a minute. Proof, if needed, that I’d been operating at minus capacity when I landed. I said huskily, “Marius,” and drew him inside.

  He didn’t say much, but his awkward grip of my hand was hard and intense. “Lew — father?”

  “On Vainwal,” I said. “There is a law. It is forbidden to transport bodies in space.”

  He swallowed and bent his head. “Under a sun I’ve never seen—” he whispered. I put my good arm round him, and after a minute he said thickly “At least you’re here. You did come. They told me you wouldn’t.”

  Touched, a little ashamed, I let him go. It had taken a command to bring me back, and I wasn’t proud of that, now. I looked around, but Dio had gone. Evidently she had slipped out of the room by the other door. I was relieved; it saved explanations.

  But in a way I was annoyed, too. Entirely too many people had been turning up and vanishing again. All the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. Dyan Ardais — picking my mind on the skyliner. The girl on the spaceport, who looked like Linnell and wasn’t. Rafe, passing himself off as my brother when he wasn’t. Dio, turning up for no good reason, and disappearing again. And now Marius himself had turned up! Coincidence? Maybe, but confusing.

  “Are you ready to leave?” Marius asked. “I’ve made all the arrangements, unless you’ve some reason for staying here.”