The Shadow Matrix Read online

  the rest of the Alton clan—Aunt Javanne and Uncle Gabriel, their older sons, Gabe and Rafael, and Liriel's twin, Ariel. Almost. Ariel still made Margaret cringe, with her constant fussing and worrying. The woman was halfway through her pregnancy now, with a sixth child conceived about the time Margaret had arrived on Darkover, the daughter she had longed for.

  The smile faded. Every time she thought about that yet unborn child, Margaret got a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach, a sense of danger. That girl was going to be trouble. What a terrible thing to think about a child not yet born! It was the sort of premonition that made her curse the fact that she had some of the Aldaran Gift of foretelling, and hope, against all her feelings, that she was totally wrong.

  Then, in between one breath and the next, Margaret experienced a bleakness, a sharp pang of loss. She jerked the reins m her surprise, and Dorilys whinnied in complaint. She drew to a halt, and Martin rode up beside her, looking concerned.

  "What is it, domna?"

  "I don't know. I felt as if a shadow had crossed the sun. I think we should go back now." She sighed. It was such a beautiful day, and she had been enjoying herself. She did not want to go back to Arilinn. More than anything, she wanted to ride west, to follow Mikhail, to let the Domain and her studies go hang. But dutifully she reined the horse around, and they headed back in the direction of the Tower, just visible above the trees.

  The stableyard seemed just as they had left it, and nothing appeared amiss. Margaret dismounted, gave the reins to Martin, and patted Dorilys quickly but perfunctorily on the neck. "Another day, my pretty. Another day we will have a good run." The horse nickered in response, and looked at her with great dark eyes, as if she understood every word.

  Then she hurried to the Tower, her heart pounding a little. Her booted feet sped over the paved walkway, and she passed the bakery and the scriptorium where she had planned to spend the afternoon. She did not pause at her little house, because the closer she got to the Tower, the greater was her sense of urgency.

  Something had happened, something bad, and her mind began to manufacture all sorts of things. Dio had gotten out of stasis, or Ariel had gone into premature labor, or Mikhail had . . . No! Margaret slackened her pace a little and forced herself to stop theorizing! She was an academic, not a hysterical female who went off the deep end! She was a Fellow of the University, dammit!

  Liriel?

  Yes, Marguerida. There was something sad and guarded in the answer.

  What's happened?

  Domenic . . .

  Oh, .no! Margaret came to a complete halt on the walkway. She felt her body turn to ice, to stone. But he was getting better! That was not entirely true. Her own quick actions had saved the boy's life immediately after his accident, but his neck had been broken, and he would never be able to use his arms or legs again. The Healers had done their best—and she now knew that their best was, in some ways, as good as any offered by Terran medical technology—but the real damage was irreparable. How?

  He choked. It happened so quickly that no one could do anything.

  Margaret felt her anger rise, and held it back with a great effort. Poor Ariel! If the child had been taken to a Terran medical center, she knew, they would have put a breathing tube in his throat, because the greatest danger with a neck broken in the third cervical vertebra was what had just happened. She had not known that when he had been injured, but in the ensuing months she had made it her busi-· ness to discover as much as she was able about such injuries, so that she could do as much as she could to prevent the very death she had foreseen at Armida months before. If only Ariel had not been so stubbornly insistent on keeping the child at Arilinn.

  Now it was too late, and the boy was gone. She felt tears begin to trickle down her cheeks, and the vast grief for Ivor that she thought was past returned in full force. But Ivor had been old, had lived a long and meaningful life. Domenic had been a child of nine; he had hardly started to live!

  Despite the reasons her rational mind offered her, Mar-

  garet still felt that if she had just been more persuasive in her arguments, more insistent, this tragedy might have been avoided. If only, she thought, she had not had the premonition at Armida, or managed to conceal it better, if Ariel had not gone off half-cocked, taking a clumsy carriage out in the start of a summer storm. If, if ... it was all hindsight, and she knew it.

  She felt sad, but even more she felt guilty, as if somehow the death of the little boy were her fault. Margaret felt as if she were some sort of jinx. Ivor had died, and Dio was dying! She shook herself all over and scolded herself for being a morbid idiot. It was no one's fault—but she wanted someone to blame, and the best candidate was always herself. It was not even Ariel's fault. She suspected, however, that her cousin was in much the same state as she was, looking for a scapegoat.

  How is Ariel taking it?

  Quite well, under the circumstances. But I would not let her see you right now.

  No, that would be pushing my luck. I'll go back to my house for the present.

  Margaret turned back on the pathway, and retraced her steps toward the little house that had been her home for four months. It was made of stone, the inner walls paneled in polished wood. There were five rooms: two bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, and kitchen. It was cozy and civilized, and she liked that, after years of enduring sometimes primitive conditions with Ivor.

  When she entered, she could hear her servant, Katrin, a , soft-spoken woman in her fifties, rattling around the kitchen, banging pots and pans. A nice smell floated in the air—rabbithorn stew, she thought. Margaret's appetite was gone, but she knew it would return. Sometimes her need for food seemed like the only constant in her daily life.

  The tears-had continued, and now her nose was starting to get stuffy. She found a handkerchief, a large square of linen embroidered with pretty flowers, and mopped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she sat down in a large chair beside the small fireplace in the parlor and let herself grieve silently, her chest heaving with sobs, and tears obliterating sight. She did not want Katrin to hear her, to try to comfort

  her. She wanted to let herself release all the sorrow that seemed to fill her slender body.

  The light in the room began to fade, as the bloody sun sank below the horizon. The handkerchief was now a sodden, disgusting rag, and she didn't seem to have the strength to get up and find another. Her face hurt from crying, and her nose was red from repeated blowings. There was a wire around her chest, cutting into her breasts, and the pleasant smell of horse on her riding skirt was nauseating to her.

  Margaret wanted to stop crying, to stop feeling sad, or sorry for herself. She should be thinking of Ariel, of Piedro Alar, Ariel's patient and long-suffering husband, of the little boy she had hardly known before he was injured. All she could think of was Dio, and Ivor.

  Then the tears began to slacken, and she started to feel restless and useless, sitting there in the growing dusk. She wanted to be comforted, but there was no comfort. Except the music. That never died, or went away to remote places, or said unkind things. My, what a morbid mood I am in, she thought, finding something quite comforting in feeling wretched. With a great effort, she stood up, went into the bedroom, and fetched her little harp from where it stood in the corner of the room. She found another hanky, too, because she suspected she was not really finished with her crying.

  Returning to the living room, she removed the cloth case from her instrument and started tuning it. Margaret realized she hadn't taken it out in a couple of weeks, that she had neglected her music in the press of her studies at the Tower. She hadn't recorded any new music for Dio in almost a month! Not that her sleeping beauty of a stepmother was going to complain, but if she could hear the music, she must be getting tired of it by now.

  Margaret warmed up with a few simple scales, readjusted the tuning, and started to play randomly. The cascade of notes was sweet to her ears. After several minutes she found herself picking out one of her favo
rite pieces, Montaine's Third Etude. It had originally been intended for the piano, and she had adapted it to the harp as part of her honors program at the University. It was complex enough

  to engage her attention, but sufficiently familiar to offer her no real challenge.

  Still, after two playings, she started to do some variations, as if the exercise demanded it. Margaret noticed what she was doing in a distant, abstract way, noting that she had just turned one of the themes on its head in a way she had never done before. It was just the sort of play that went on in Ivor and Ida Davidson's house in the evenings. They always had several students living in the large house just outside the confines of the Music School. She did not think of the house often, for when she remembered University, she almost always thought of the .dormitories where she had spent her first rather miserable year, before Ivor had heard her singing in the library and helped her find something that gave her life a direction and meaning. It brought back a simpler time, a happier time for her, when there had been no complications, no death, no uncertainties about her life.

  As she played, Margaret found herself remembering Ivor's funeral in Thendara, and how many of the members of the Musicians Guild, who had never even met him, had carried his coffin to the graveyard and offered their songs. She had sung that day, but now her voice seemed stilled, as if her grief could not be vocalized. Ivor was old and Domenic had been young. That was the difference.

  Her fingers played across the strings, and she found the dirge she had sung for Ivor that day emerge from the harp. It was a fine piece of music, twenty-eighth century Centauri. It was a sad thing, but there was a feeling in it of hope that began to ease her pain a bit.

  Barely aware of what she was doing, Margaret stopped playing the dirge and began to pluck another tune from her harp. After several minutes, she realized that she did not know the piece at all, that she was making it up as she went along, thinking of the little boy taken untimely, of all the things he would never experience. It was a strong song, a piece that moved her even as she was creating it. And it was her own, not borrowed from another! Her mind, so well disciplined for years, observed the composition and found it good. Margaret rarely created original work, and she allowed herself to rejoice in the music that flowed from her fingers, uncritically for once. It had, she noticed, some-

  thing of the sound of the river as she had ridden beside it a few hours before, something of the rushes waving in the breeze, and the call of some songbird she had heard without really noticing.

  Margaret was so deep in the music that she did not hear the front door open, and was unaware she had a visitor until she came to a halt and heard the soft sound of a throat clearing behind her. She turned abruptly to find Lew Alton standing in the entrance to the parlor, a light cloak draped over his arm. He wore a rather shabby riding tunic, and his silvered hair was tousled.

  "Father! How long have you been standing here?" She searched his face, suddenly tense, trying to discern his mood as she had when she was a child. Then Margaret realized that she no longer had to do that, that this Lew Alton was quite a different man from the one she remembered. He no longer drank himself into despair, nor raged like a beast. But the habits were long-standing, and it was hard to completely trust the man she had begun to know in the past few months.

  "I have no idea. I was so entranced by your music that I lost track of time. What is it?" Lew smiled slowly, as if the movement was strange, new to him, and his eyes gleamed with interest.

  "I don't know—I just made it up." '"Well, I certainly hope you can remember it, for it is quite splendid."

  "Oh, yes. I was scoring it as I went along."

  "You make it sound so simple," Lew said, setting his cloak aside. "I am always rather awed that you can remember so much music, but you never told me you could compose." He sat down across from her, searching her tear-stained face.

  "I don't, much. Not like Jheffy Chang, or Amethyst."

  "Who?"

  "People I knew at University. Jheffy composed all the time, and he and Am used to have a kind of ongoing contest when I lived at Ivor's house. It was terrific, because they were completely unself-conscious about it. Music, new music, just seemed to leak out of their bodies, all the time. I never had that ability, which is a good thing, because if

  I had, I would never have ended up becoming Ivor's assistant."

  "Why not?"

  "Father, you don't ask a racehorse to pull a plow, do you? Or expect a drayhorse to run a race?"

  "Are you calling yourself a plowhorse, daughter?" He sounded stern, yet playful at the same time.

  "Musically, yes, I am. I am good enough to imitate others, to interpret, but I am not particularly original or creative. Or, at least, I wasn't when I was studying at University. And I don't really regret it a bit, because the demands of being an original composer are enormous. Jheffy was something of a prodigy, and he was very vain and had the social skills of a marmot. Am was better, because she came from a long line of musicians, and her family hadn't spoiled her as Jheffy's did him. Not that she was a pleasant person—she wasn't one bit—but she didn't have to prove herself the best every second of the day."

  "I am sorry that my work in the Federation Senate prevented me from watching you learn your music, chiya. It sounds much more interesting than I ever imagined. I feel that I have missed so much of your life. I was not there when you had your first love, or ..."

  "But, you were, Father! Mikhail is my first love. And there will never be another, no matter what happens." She blushed. "Did I say that I was glad to see you?"

  "No, but I knew it from the way your face lit up when you realized I was here. It is very heartening to see that look in your eyes. I5 cannot imagine why I didn't mind missing it for so many years."

  "Well, if I had seen you-before, after I went to University, my eyes would not have sparkled, but glared. And there are still a few times when I remember how impossible you were on Thetis, when you refused to tell me my history and were hoping I would grow out of my mental block, the overshadowing that she did to me, that I still want to box your ears and call you names!"

  "And quite rightly. I am sure I deserve any number of ear boxings, and I am pleased that you have chosen to forgo the experience."

  "Have you come to see Dio?"

  "Of course. But when I arrived, I found out that young

  Domenic had just died and decided that seeing you was mare immediate. I confess I hardly expected to find you playing your harp by the fire."

  "Well, I was crying earlier, and feeling as if everything were my fault. But I remembered something Aunt Javanne told me about you, about how you always assumed you were the author of anything that went wrong, and how I was very much like you—too much sensibility for my own good, or something like that. So it was as natural as breathing to turn to music."

  Thyra was like that, about music. I never thought I would have anything to remember about her that was good. He quirked an eyebrow at her. "Why?"

  "Because music is something that I have always been able to trust. It never gets angry at you, or runs away, or dies. It only is. Maybe if you are a composer, it is different. Now that I think about it, there was something about Jheffy that seemed a little desperate at times, as if he were afraid he would wake up one morning and discover the music had left for Aldebaran with another composer. But if you are mostly a performer, it is very dependable and trustworthy. Not to mention comforting. I can say things by playing music that I never can say in words."

  "I see. There is a great deal more to this music business than I ever imagined." He nodded,, then smiled slightly. "How are you?"

  "Sad, of course, but a little angry, too."

  "Angry?"

  "Well, Domenic did not have to die, did he? I mean, if he could have received the services of a Terran medical facility, he wouldn't have choked to death. I have a lot of respect for matrix science now, but I still think that putting total dependence on it is just as stupid as believing that t
echnology is the answer to everything. There needs to be some compromise, some middle ground, and it seems to me that no one is even trying to work it out."

  "If you study human history, I think you will find that people are so emotionally invested in doing things in their customary manner that they prefer to resist change, even when it is in their own interest."

  "I know that, but I still don't like it!"

  "Of course you don't, daughter. And, yes, Domenic

  might have lived. But the healers were unable to mend the injury, so he would have been entirely helpless for the rest of his years. Even Terran nanotechnology might not have been able to reverse things. I don't know, and the matter is out of our hands now."

  "I know, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept. And I am concerned about Ariel, too, even though I do not like her. She is still a few months away from birthing, and I have learned enough here in Arilinn to realize that the impact of her distress on the mind of her daughter is likely to be terrible." "Is this why the glimpse I saw of Alanna Alar in my vision is of such an angry woman? Maybe it is my fault, because I foresaw that Domenic would never reach adulthood, and then he got hurt when the carriage overturned and—

  "Marguerida—you cannot change the past, and you cannot prevent the future."

  "No, but that won't stop me wanting to!" She set the harp aside and began to pleat the bottom of her tunic with nervous fingers. After a minute of silence, she said hoarsely, "I hate it here."