The Bloody Sun Read online

  “Kinsman! ” Kennard protested swiftly, and made a quick sign against evil. “Do not say such things!”

  “It is not pleasant hearing,” Damon said, “but it is true. Every year there are fewer and fewer of our sons and daughters with the power or the will to endure the old training and give themselves over to the Towers. Leonie once complained to me that she had trained six young girls and of them all, only one could complete the training to be Keeper; this was the leronis Hilary, and she sickened and would have died if they had not sent her from Arilinn. Three of the Towers—Janine would not tell you this, Cleindori, but I who am Arilinn-trained know it well— three of the Towers are working with a mechanic’s circle because they have no Keeper, and their foolish laws will not allow them to take a Keeper to their circles unless she is willing to be a cloistered symbol of virginity. They say her strength and her laran powers are less important than that she should be a virgin goddess, sequestered and held in superstitious awe. There are, at a guess, a hundred women or more in the Domains who could do the work of a Keeper, but they see no reason to undergo a training that will make them, not women, but machines for the transmission of power! And I do not blame them! The Towers will go. They must go. And when they are gone, standing bare as ruined monuments to the pride and the madness of the Comyn, then laran power, and the matrix stones that help us to use it, can be used as they were meant to be used; science, not sorcery! Sanity, not madness! I have worked for this all my life, Cleindori.”

  “Not to overthrow the Towers, Uncle!” Kennard sounded shocked.

  “No. Never that. But to be there when they have been abandoned or forsaken, so that our laran sciences need not perish for lack of Towers to work them.”

  Cleindori stood beside him, her hand lightly on his shoulder. She said, “Father, I honor you for this. But your work is too slow, for they still call you outcaste and renegade and worse things. And that is why it is so much more important that young people like I, and like my half-sister Cassilde, and Kennard—”

  Damon said, shocked, “Is Cassilde, too, going into Arilinn? It will kill Callista!” For Cassilde was Callista’s own daughter, four or five years older than Cleindori.

  “She is too old to need consent,” Cleindori said. “Father, it is necessary that the Towers shall not die until the time has come, even if the day must come when they are no longer needed. And I feel it laid upon my conscience to be Keeper of Arilinn.” She held out her hand to him. “No, Father, listen to me. I know you are not ambitious; you flung away the chance to command the City Guard; you could have been the most powerful man in Thendara; but you threw it away. I am not like that. If my laran is as powerful as the Lady of Arilinn told me, I want to be Keeper in a way that will let me do something useful with it; more than ministering to the peasants and teaching the village children! Father, I want to be Keeper of Arilinn!”

  “You would put yourself into that prison from which we freed Callista at such great price! ” Damon said, and his voice was unspeakably bitter.

  “That was her life,” Cleindori flared, “this is mine! But listen to me, Father,” she said, kneeling beside him again. The anger was gone from her voice and a great seriousness had taken its place. “You have told me, and I have seen, that Arilinn declares the laws by which laran is used in this land, save for you few here who defy Arilinn.”

  “They may be doing things otherwise in the Hellers or at Aldaran and beyond,” Damon qualified. “I know little of that.”

  “Then— ” Cleindori looked up at him, her round face very serious. “If I go to Arilinn and learn to be Keeper, by their own rules the most orthodox of the ways by which laran can be used—if I am Keeper by the Way of Arilinn, then I can change those laws, can I not? If the Keeper of Arilinn makes the rules for all the Towers, then, Father, I can change them, I can declare the truth; that the Way of Arilinn is cruel and inhuman—and because I have succeeded at it, they cannot say I am simply a failure or an outcaste attacking what I myself cannot do. I can change these terrible laws and cast down the Way of Arilinn. And when the Towers no longer give men and women over to a living death, then the young men and women of our world will flock to them, and the old matrix sciences of Darkover will be reborn. But these laws will never be changed—not until a Keeper of Arilinn can change them!”

  Damon looked at his daugher, shaken. It was indeed the only way in which Arilinn’s cruel laws could be changed; that a Keeper of Arilinn should herself declare a new decree that should be binding on all the Towers. He had tried his best, but he was renegade, outcaste; he could do nothing from outside the walls of Arilinn. He had accomplished little—no one knew better than he how little he had accomplished.

  “Father, it is fated,” Cleindori said, and her young voice trembled. “After all Callista suffered, after all you suffered, perhaps it was all for this, that I should go back and free those others. Now that you have proven that they can be freed.”

  “You are right,” Damon admitted, slowly. “The Way of Arilinn will never be thrown down until the Keeper of Arilinn herself shall throw it down. But— oh, Cleindori, not you!” Agonized, despairing, he clasped his daughter to him. “Not you, darling!”

  Gently she freed herself from his embrace, and for a moment it seemed to Damon that she was already tall, impressive, aloof, touched with the alien strength of the Keeper, clothed in the crimson majesty of Arilinn. She said, “Father, dear Father, you cannot forbid me to do this; I am responsible only to my own conscience. How often have you said to all of us, beginning with my foster-father Valdir, who never tires of repeating it to me, that conscience is the only responsibility? Let me do this; let me finish the work you have begun in the Forbidden Tower. Otherwise, when you die, it will all die with you, a little band of renegades and their heresies perishing unseen and good riddance. But I can bring it to Arilinn, and then all over the Domains; for the Keeper of Arilinn makes the laws for all the Towers and all the Domains. Father, I tell you, it is fated. I must go to Arilinn.”

  Damon bowed his head, still reluctant, but unable to speak against her young and innocent sureness. It seemed to him that already the walls of Arilinn were closing around her. And so they parted, not to meet again until the hour of her death.

  * * *

  Chapter One: The Terran

  « ^ »

  Forty Years Later

  This is the way it was.

  You were an orphan of space. For all you knew, you might have been born on one of the Big Ships; the ships of Terra; the starships that made the long runs between stars doing the business of the Empire. You never knew where you had been born, or who your parents had been; the first home you knew was the Spacemen’s Orphanage, almost within sight of the Port of Thendara, where you learned loneliness. Before that somewhere there had been strange colors and lights and confused images of people and places that sank into oblivion when you tried to focus on them, nightmares that sometimes made you sit up and shriek out in terror before you got yourself all the way awake and saw the clean quiet dormitory around you.

  The other children were the abandoned flotsam of the arrogant and mobile race of Earth, and you were one of them, with one of their names. But outside lay the darkly beautiful world you had seen, that you still saw, sometimes, in your dreams. You knew, somehow, that you were different; you belonged to that world outside, that sky, that sun; not the clean, white, sterile world of the Terran Trade City.

  You would have known it even if they hadn’t told you; but they told you, often enough. Oh, not in words; in a hundred small subtle ways. And anyway you were different, a difference you could feel all the way down to your bones. And then there were the dreams.

  But the dreams faded; first to memories of dreams, and then to memories of memories. You only knew that once you had remembered something other than this.

  You learned not to ask about your parents, but you guessed. Oh, yes, you guessed. And as soon as you were old enough to endure the thrust of a spaceship kicking away from
a planet under interstellar drives, they stuck your arm full of needles and they carried you, like a piece of sacked luggage, aboard one of the Big Ships.

  Going home, the other boys said, half envious and half afraid. Only you had known better; you were going into exile. And when you woke up, with a fuzzy sick headache, and the feeling that somebody had sliced a big hunk out of your life, the ship was making planetfall for a world called Terra, and there was an elderly couple waiting for the grandson they had never seen.

  They said you were twelve or so. They called you Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, Junior. That was what they’d called you in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, so you didn’t argue. Their skin was darker than yours and their eyes dark, the eyes you’d learned to call animal eyes from your Darkovan nurses; but they’d grown up under a different sun and you already knew about the quality of light; you’d seen the bright lights inside the Terran Zone and remembered how they hurt your eyes. So you were willing to believe it, that these strange dark old people could have been your father’s parents. They showed you a picture of a Jefferson Andrew Kerwin when he was about your age, thirteen, a few years before he’d run away as cargo boy on one of the Big Ships, years and years ago. They gave you his room to sleep in, and sent you to his school. They were kind to you, and not more than twice a week did they remind you, by word or look, that you were not the son they had lost, the son who had abandoned them for the stars.

  And they never answered questions about your mother, either. They couldn’t; they didn’t know and they didn’t want to know, and what was more, they didn’t care. You were Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, of Earth, and that was all they wanted of you.

  If it had come when you were younger, it might have been enough. You were hungry to belong somewhere, and the yearning love of these old people, who needed you to be their lost son, might have claimed you for Earth.

  But the sky of Earth was a cold burning blue, and the hills a cold unfriendly green; the pale blazing sun hurt your eyes, even behind dark glasses, and the glasses made people think you were trying to hide from them. You spoke the language perfectly— they’d seen to that in the orphanage, of course. You could pass. You missed the cold, and the winds that swept down from the pass behind the city, and the distant outline of the high, splintered teeth of the mountains; you missed the dusty dimness of the sky, and the lowered, crimson, blazing eye of the sun. Your grandparents didn’t want you to think about Darkover or talk about Darkover and once when you saved up your pocket money and bought a set of views taken out in the Rim planets, one of them with a sun like your home sun of Darkover, they took the pictures away from you. You belonged right here on Earth, or so they told you.

  But you knew better than that. And as soon as you were old enough, you left. You knew that you were breaking their hearts all over again, and in a way it wasn’t fair because they had been kind to you, as kind as they knew how to be. But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the first Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’t been that boy either, and that was why he had left. They loved something they had made up for themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.

  First there was a civilian’s job in the Space Service on Earth, and you worked hard and kept your tongue between your teeth when the arrogant Terranan stared at your height or made subtle jokes about the accent you’d never—quite—lost. And then there was the day when you boarded one of the Big Ships, awake this time, and willingly, and warranted in the Civil Service of the Empire, skylifting for stars that were names in the roll call of your dreams. And you watched the hated sun of Earth dwindle to a dim star, and lose itself in the immensity of the big dark, and you were outward bound on the first installment of your dream.

  Not Darkover. Not yet. But a world with a red sun that didn’t hurt your eyes, for a subordinate’s job on a world of stinks and electric storms, where albino women were cloistered behind high walls and you never saw a child. And after a year there, there was a good job on a world where men carried knives and the women wore bells in their ears, chiming a wicked allure as they walked. You had liked it there. You had had plenty of fights, and plenty of women. Behind the quiet civil clerk there was a roughneck buried; and on that world he got loose now and then. You’d had good times. It was on that world that you started carrying a knife. Somehow it seemed right to you; you felt a sense of completion when you strapped it on, as if somehow, until now, you had been going around half dressed. You talked this over with the company Psych, and listened to his conjectures about hidden fears of sexual adequacy and compensation with phallic symbols and power compulsions; listened quietly and without comment, and dismissed them, because you knew better than that. He did ask one telling question.

  “You were brought up on Cottman Four, weren’t you, Kerwin?”

  “In the Spacemen’s Orphanage there.”

  “Isn’t that one of the worlds where grown men wear swords at all times? Granted, I’m no comparative anthropologist, but if you saw men going around wearing them, all the time…”

  You agreed that probably that was it, and didn’t say any more, but you kept on wearing the knife, at least when you were off duty, and once or twice you’d had a chance to use it, and proved quietly and to your own satisfaction that you could handle yourself in a fight if you had to.

  You had good times there. You could have stayed there and been happy. But there was still a compulsion driving you, a restlessness, and when the Legate died and the new one wanted to bring in his own men, you were ready to leave.

  And by now the apprentice years were over. Until now you’d gone where they told you. Now they asked you, within reason, where you wanted to go. And you never hesitated.

  “Darkover.” And then you amended: “Cottman Four.”

  The man in Personnel had stared awhile. “God in heaven, why would anyone want to go there?”

  “No vacancies?” By now you were half resigned to letting the dream die.

  “Oh, hell, yes. We can never get volunteers to go there. Do you know what the place is like? Cold as sin, among other things, and barbaric—big sections of it barred off to Earthmen, and you won’t be safe a step outside the Trade City. I’ve never been there myself, but the place, from what I hear, is always in an uproar. Added to which, there’s practically no trade with the Darkovans.”

  “No? Thendara Spaceport is one of the biggest in the Service, I heard.”

  “True.” The man explained gloomily, “It’s located between the upper and lower spiral arms of the Galaxy, so we have to recruit enough personnel to staff a major re-routing station. Thendara’s one of the main stops and transfer points for passengers and cargo. But it’s a hell of a place; if you go there, you might be stuck for years before they could locate a replacement for you, once you get tired of it. Look,” he added persuasively, “you’re getting on too well to throw yourself away out there. Rigel 9 is crying out for good men, and you could really get ahead there— maybe work up to Consul or even Legate, if you wanted to get into the Diplomatic branch. Why waste yourself on a half-frozen lump of rock way out at the edge of nowhere?”

  You should have known better; but you thought, for once, maybe he really wanted to know; so you told him.

  “I was born on Darkover.”

  “Oh. One of those. I see.” You saw his face change, and you wanted to smash that smirk off his pink face. But you didn’t do it; you only stood there and watched him stamp your transfer application, and you knew that if you had ever had any intention of transfer to the Diplomatic Branch, or any hopes of working up to Legate, whatever he had stamped on your card had just killed them off; but you didn’t care. And then there was another of the Big Ships, and a growing excitement that gnawed at you so that you haunted the observation dome, searching for a red coal in the sky that grew at last to a blaze haunting you
r dreams. And then, after a time that seemed endless, the ship dropped lazily toward a great crimson planet that wore a necklace of four tiny moons, jewels set in the pendant of a carmine sky.

  And you were home again.

  * * *

  Chapter Two: The Matrix

  « ^ »

  The Southern Crown made planet-fall at high noon on dayside. Jeff Kerwin, swinging efficiently down the narrow steel rungs of the ladder from the airlock, dropped to the ground and took a deep breath. It had seemed that the very air should hold something rich and different and familiar and strange.

  But it was just air. It smelled good, but after weeks of the canned air inside the spaceship, any air would smell good. He inhaled it again, searching for some hint of his elusive memory in the fragrance. It was cold and bracing, with a hint of pollen and dust; but mostly it held the impersonal chemical stinks of any spaceport. Hot tar. Concrete dust. The stinging ozone of liquid oxygen vaporizing from bleeder valves.

  Might as well be back Earthside! Just another spaceport!

  Well, what the hell? He told himself roughly to come off it. The way you built it up in your mind, getting back to Darkover, you made it such a big deal that if the whole city came out to meet you with parades and fanfares, it would still fall flat!

  He stepped back, out of the way of a group of Spaceforce men—tall in black leather, booted, blasters concealing their menace behind snug holsters—with stars blazing on their sleeves. The sun was just a fraction off the meridian—huge, red-orange, with little ragged fiery clouds hanging high in the thin sky. The saw-toothed mountains behind the spaceport cast their shadows over the Trade City, but the peaks lay bathed in the sullen light. Memory searched for landmarks along the peaks. Kerwin’s eyes fixed on the horizon, he stumbled over a cargo bale, and a good-natured voice said, “Star-gazing, Redhead?”