Exile's Song Read online

  Margaret could still remember her utter shock at this revelation, just before she left for University. She had never imagined that her father had been married before. There were so many things she did not know about her own past and her father’s. She started to shudder and stopped herself. She was not the heroine of some trashy romance, with dark secrets lurking in the background. So, why did she have the strong and terrible sense that there were not only things she did not know, but things she did not want to know. Foolishness! She was just tired from the long trip, and ill from space drugs.

  No, it was more than that. She was returning to the planet where she had been born more than twenty-five Terran years before. Margaret had only the vaguest memories of it, and even thinking about it gave her a mild sense of discomfort, a slight headache and the sensation of the air just before a storm. There were so many troubling things about it. Her father was the Senator for Darkover, but he did not live on the planet, and, so far as she knew, he had never set foot on the place since he left over twenty years before. The mother she had known for most of her life was not really her mother, and Dio was adamant in her refusal to reveal more than the barest generalities about her real mother.

  There was a moment of silence, except for the blessedly on-pitch chime of the all-clear. After this came the thumps of a clumsy technician inserting the landing announcement, and the chatter of half the compartment informing one another of the obvious fact of their arrival. It was almost as if they could not believe anything unless they told someone else about it.

  “We have now arrived at Thendara Spaceport on Cottman Four and passengers with this as a final destination are cleared to disembark at their convenience. Our stop here will be brief, so passengers continuing to Wolf—Phi Coronis Four—are advised not to disembark but to remain in your restraints. Passengers for Sagan’s Star, Quital, and Greenwich are requested to disembark here and consult a uniformed Spaceforce Attendant for the transit information to your final destination. Please prepare immediately for disembarkation. A Medic will enter your cabin at once to administer hyperdrome for all continuing and newly boarded passengers. Repeat; we have arrived at Thendara Spaceport; passengers for . . .” The voice went on and on.

  Margaret ignored the mild headache, and her unspoken desire to stuff a rag into the loudspeaker. She ignored the itch of the dermapatches on her left wrist. Instead she started to unbuckle the straps which held her against the couch, eager to be away from the smell and sound of the ship as quickly as possible. Well, not as eager as usual. The sense of dread remained, just at the back of her mind, and she had to force her attention away from it. Once free, she turned to her companion.

  Professor Davidson was fumbling clumsily with his restraints. His eyes were a little glazed from the drugs, and, as usual, he was slightly disoriented. She watched him struggle with one buckle and bit her lip. The first thing she had noticed when she first met him were his hands—beautiful hands, like those of an angel in some old painting. Now they were twisted and bent, hardly able to manage the simple chords on a guitar. It seemed to have happened overnight, but she was sure it had been slower than that. He could play almost any instrument developed for humanoids—and even some fashioned for nonhumans—but he had always been hopeless with simple things like catches and buckles, and he hated it if she reminded him of his clumsiness. Finally he gave her a look of helplessness, defeated by the stupid thing. She sat up—a little dizzily against the brief rush of postural hypotension—and reached over to help him as a steward came into the cabin.

  “What would I ever do without you?” he asked, his seamed nut-brown face wrinkling in the smile that never ceased to delight her, even when she was aggravated with him.

  “Hire another assistant, of course,” she answered dryly. His ever-increasing dependence on her distressed her more than she wanted to admit. It was as if their year-long sojourn on Relegan had drained away the last of his vigor, leaving behind a dried-up husk of a man. She forced herself not to show the sense of helplessness and rage she always felt when she noticed his rapid decline. She owed Ivor Davidson more than she could ever repay. Not in anything so vulgar as credits, but in affection and loyalty. During her first, terrible year at University, while she had floundered in search of some subject she could master without boredom or frustration, she had met Ivor in the library. She had been singing softly, much to the annoyance of some of the nearby students—quite unconscious that she was doing so. He had taken her in hand, tested her with a kind of savage thoroughness, then brought her into his home. Ivor and his wife Ida had nurtured her both as a musician and as a woman, giving her a sense of confidence she had never gotten with Dio and the Old Man. In the end, he had arranged an open fellowship for her, made her first his protegée, then his assistant. It was the sort of position that was highly prized in University circles, and she knew she was very fortunate.

  She shivered a little as she remembered how insecure she had been then. It had taken so much of her energy to escape from her father’s inexplicable combination of distance and over-protectiveness. The pair of them made her welcome, as they had done with generations of students during their lengthy careers. Ida had taught her the manners of University culture, and Ivor had taught her musicology, and his passion for his field. They had both given her an unconditional affection that she had never experienced before, and she had mistrusted it at first. Their persistence had worked, and somewhere along the way she had ceased to be a wild Colonial girl, and become instead a respected scholar. It was not anything like she had imagined when she lived on Thetis, but she liked her job, and she loved the old fellow.

  For more than a decade the Davidsons had been her family, and she felt blessed to have found them. Thetis, her homeworld, she pushed into a back room in her mind, remembered only when she had to fill out the various forms to which the Terran bureaucracy seemed addicted. She worked very hard at erasing all memory of her father, that bitter, silent, one-handed man and even those of her gentle, laughing stepmother who was so ready a foil for the Senator’s moods.

  When she did recall her childhood, she usually remembered the pleasant things. The roar of Thetis’ waters, rushing along the shore of their island home, and the smell of the flowers which bloomed in spring outside their door; the taste of the first-caught delphina of summer; the intense blue color of the azurines, the marriage flowers of Thetis, as they curled in the pale hair of couples. The color of azurines always made her throat grow tight with tears, for no reason she could discern. Margaret had rather a large store of such images, because she had been alone a great deal during her childhood. The Senator and Dio were gone for months at a time, much to her guilty relief. She was always so anxious when he was there. She still had only the vaguest idea what he actually did, and no interest whatever in it. Odd, now she thought about it. The few friends she had made at University all had a lively curiosity about their parents, and a great deal of pride in whatever it was that Daddy or Mommy did.

  “No, I don’t think so, my dear.” Ivor Davidson’s voice broke into her troubled reverie. “I don’t think I could ever accustom myself to having someone new around me. I hope I do not have to. Selfish of me, I know. I should be thinking of you, of your future, not my own. A beautiful young woman like yourself should have a beau or several, should be bearing children instead of bearing with an old man’s crotchets and grumbles. But the truth is I could not get along without you—and I am very glad you are here with me.”

  Margaret looked at him with a start of unease. She realized she had been avoiding seeing how old he had become, had been denying his increasing decrepitude. Old at ninety-five—like some Prehistoric. The last rejuvenation treatment hadn’t taken, hadn’t worked. His hands, his angel hands, were turning to stone and she could hardly bear it. Ivor, please stop getting old. . . .

  “Nonsense!” She spoke briskly, to conceal her emotions. “That filthy hyperdrome always makes you melancholy. Let’s get out of this flying coffin.” This last remark unfort
unately made in her full voice, the trained voice of a singer, earned her a dirty look from one of the continuing passengers. She felt herself blush to the roots of her red hair, and she lowered her voice, before continuing. “You’ll feel better after a drink and a bath,” she said. Cottman IV was described as primitive in the little information she had been able to get her hands on, but Margaret knew perfectly well that this only meant, in Terran bureaucratese, that there were not com booths on every corner, or a vid-deck in every home.

  She had a sudden, very clear memory of a huge vat of a bath in a room that smelled of something she could not name. Through a door on one wall she saw a tall man step into the room. He was slender and his hair was pale, kind of silvery. There was something about him that made her stomach lurch, and she shivered all over.

  Margaret forced herself to shut away the disturbing image and turned her energy to mentally cursing departmental politicking and academic funding for sending them to Darkover. They had only been back from a very tiring year on Relegan a brief month when the command had come from the head of the Music Department to dash off, ill-prepared and still exhausted, to save the department’s bacon. All the work they had done among the Relags had had to be abandoned, or handed over to associates, just because their colleague Murajee had gotten himself involved in a scandal of some sort. The Department Chair, the overly ambitious and politically conniving Dr. Van Dyne, had sent them because there was no one else available with the credentials to do the job. It had been that or lose the funding, and Dr. Van Dyne never lost funding.

  She had been frustrated at every turn, trying to get information about Cottman IV. It was most peculiar, and she had taken it rather personally. She kept finding the notation “Restricted” on files in the University Library, and even trying to use her father’s access codes had not worked. She had sent word to Dio, asking for information, but no answer had arrived before they left.

  It almost seemed to her that the computers were keyed to keep her ignorant. Which was ridiculous, of course. Margaret had managed to get a basic language tape, a disk on customs of the Trade City, and the printout of what she suspected was a piece of fiction, though it had come from the history section. At least My Tour of Several Worlds by Claudean Tont read more like a romance than anything else. She had discovered that Cottman IV was a Protectorate, not a colony per se, and that information about it was largely inaccessable. She almost wished she had paid more attention to the Old Man’s occasional bouts of loquacity.

  She was too tired to fuss over an insoluble problem. Margaret slung her flight bag, and Ivor’s, too, across her right shoulder. Then she grabbed the seemingly skimpy all-weather cloaks—which weren’t—in her hands. The only thing she looked forward to was getting out of her loathed Scholar’s uniform and into whatever the locals wore. University frowned on its scholars “going native,” but she was sufficiently experienced to know that the best way to do research in the field, here collecting samples of native music, was to appear as ordinary as possible. It was the reason she was there, and damn the stuffy rules.

  They went into the green corridor. It spiraled down ahead of them, and her nausea returned in force, so she gripped the cloaks tightly in her hands. After what seemed like an eternity of stairs and slanted ramps, and corridors whose walls changed colors in some manner that had meaning only to the builders of the ship, they arrived at a portal and exited onto a broad expanse of tarmac.

  A sudden blast of icy wind with a few drops of moisture in it stung their eyes, then died away. It cut through the cloth of her uniform, chilling her completely. Margaret stopped, ignoring the mutter of someone behind her, and draped Ivor’s cloak over his shoulders. The impatient passenger who had followed them growled and stepped around them. She watched him stride away, toward the cluster of Imperial buildings across the tarmac, square and foreboding.

  Beyond them lay an eerily familiar horizon. The huge red sun was just at the edge of the sky, but whether rising or setting she could not be certain. Her usually reliable sense of orientation seemed to be on the blink. She wasn’t sure what time it was locally, although they had probably mentioned it during the disembarkation announcement. Stupid. She should have paid more attention!

  The sun made a bloody blot in the sky and etched the nearby buildings in carmine. Margaret squinted at it, and the sense of déjà vu nearly made her stagger. Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them away quickly, pretending to herself it was just the stinging of the wind against her cheeks that made them prickle.

  Why not? I was born here after all. I haven’t been back since I was four or five, but it’s not so strange I should recognize the sun, even if I didn’t expect to react. My father is the Senator from Darkover—how could I not have known this sun! The dull headache which was a leftover from the hyperdrome increased suddenly, so there were stabs of pain behind her eyes. She whispered a fine collection of curses, in the polyglot of tongues she knew, and hurried to catch up with the professor. Each step made the stabbing pain hurt more, and she glanced at the sun over her shoulder. It seemed to her that something within her troubled mind was afraid of that sun, as if it roused memories better left alone.

  They found the Administration Building, and took their place in the line that had formed. “Hurry up and wait” was just as true now as in the dark days when the phrase had been coined. Out of the intermittent wind, and away from the sun, Margaret found her headache subsiding, and decided she must be even more tired than she had thought. A bored clerk stamped their permits and papers, and gave a wave toward yet another corridor, nearly identical to the others they had traversed.

  Eventually she saw a sign that directed them toward the baggage area. Their sparse luggage and the foam crates containing Ivor’s guitar and Margaret’s small harp were sitting on a platform. She broke the seals and hauled out yards and yards of gray biodegradable packing plastic. It was awful stuff, but it was all that was allowed in or out of class-D planets. A few hours beneath even the fading sun of Darkover would reduce it to a few grams of clean-burning waste. She dumped it in the allocated bin, stripped the two drug patches from her wrist, and dropped them in as well. She handed Ivor his cased instrument and slung her harp in its cloth covering across her back. Then she picked up the two bags.

  Ivor shifted his guitar from hand to hand as she made a pack animal of herself. She knew that even the minimal weight of the instrument was painful for him, but he would not give up carrying it. It was almost two hundred years old, made by the hands of a long-dead craftsman, and Ivor cherished it as another man might love a woman.

  They followed corridors and arrows until they finally emerged into a cool dusk. She felt marginally better now that she had an idea of what time it was. Now to solve the problem of finding the place they were to stay in Thendara Old Town, before they rolled up the sidewalks for the night, without the nicety of ground transport. She knew from the tapes she had listened to that skycabs and motored vehicles were nonexistent here.

  Ahead there was a high wall, made of Terran concrete blocks. Through an arched opening, she could see a cobbled area that flickered with torchlight, contrasting sharply with the bright, actinic glare of floodlamps. The two light sources crossed, making huge shadows, and the dread she had managed to force into the back of her mind returned, flooding her with apprehension. On this side of the wall, she knew who she was, but beyond it, Margaret suspected, she did not. She had a powerful sense that once she crossed that boundary, she would be different, and it was not an appealing prospect.

  Then a gust of wind touched her, and she recalled her duties. This was no time to be standing around having the jitters! Margaret swallowed hard as her hair blew around her face. She dropped her burdens and thrust her wind-blown hair viciously into the collar of her uniform, where it tickled her neck. It was a relief to have something to be angry at—her flyaway hair! Then she regathered the bags and marched toward the gate, Ivor trailing beside her wearily.

  2

  Beyond the
gate, Margaret set the bags down again and put on her own cloak. She repositioned Ivor’s again, and tucked it around the guitar as well as she could. She knew it would get much colder as the sun went down, and after the tropical warmth of Relegan, it was close to painful. Ivor looked at her with misery in every line of his face. She had never known him to look so old and tired and ill. She bit her lip and looked away.

  Margaret looked around for some form of conveyance, a cart or pedi-cab, perhaps. This was where the taxi stand was at most spaceports. All she found were a couple of keen-eyed youngsters in tunics and trousers and calf-length cloaks. She found herself staring at them both with interest, and a cautious eye. The boys returned her stare with open curiosity.

  “Hey, lady, you want some help with your stuff?” one shouted in Trade City pidgin, as if he expected that she was ignorant of his language and thought that speaking more loudly would bridge the gap. She managed to make out what he meant, though his accent was broader than on the tapes she had listened to. His companion grabbed him roughly and whispered something urgently, then came forward with an awkward little bow.

  “May I be of service, domna?” This was more like what she had heard, and Margaret felt a little less helpless. The bow bothered her, as did the sudden change in attitude, but she was just too tired to think about it now.