Sharra's Exile d-21 Read online

  “And what is that?” he asked, teasing, but she knew he did not need an answer. He was not touching her now, as they mounted, but she knew that somehow they were still touching, still embraced.

  He flung up one arm and called, “We may as well have a ride, at least! Which of us will be first at the stables?”

  And he was off; Dio dug her heels into her horse’s sides and was off after him, laughing. She knew as well as he did, how and where this day would end.

  And it was only the beginning of a long season on Vainwal. It would be a long, beautiful summer.

  Even though she knew there was darkness ahead, and that she moved into it, unafraid and willing, she was willing to face it. Beyond the darkness she could see what Lew had been and what he could be again… if she could have the strength and courage to bring him through. She raced after him, crying out “Wait for me—Lew, we’ll ride together!” and he slowed his horse a little, smiling, and waited for her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  « ^ »

  Lew Alton’s narrative:

  Vainwal: sixth year of exile

  I thought I had forgotten how to be happy.

  And yet, that year on Vainwal, I was happy. The planet is more than the decadent city of the pleasure world. Perhaps we would have left it altogether—though not, perhaps, to return to Darkover—but my father found the climate beneficial to his lameness, and preferred to stay in the city where he could find hot springs and mineral baths, and sometimes, I suspect, companionship he could tolerate. I’ve wondered, sometimes, about that; but, close as we were, there are some things we could not—quite—share, and that was one area of itchy privacy I tried, hard, to stay away from. I suppose it’s hard enough with ordinary sons and their fathers.

  When both father and son are telepaths, it becomes even more difficult. During my years in Arilinn, working in the telepathic relays as a matrix mechanic, I had learned a lot about privacy, and what it has to be when all around you are closer than your own skin. There used to be an old taboo preventing a mother and her grown son from working in the relays at the same time; or a father and his nubile daughter. My father could mask his thoughts better than most. Even so, I described that sort of thing, once, to somebody, as living with your skin off. During these years of exile, we’d been so close that there were times when neither of us was sure which thought belonged to whom. Any two solitary men are going to get on each other’s nerves from time to time. Add to that the fact that one of them is seriously ill and at least (let me not pass too lightly over this) intermittently insane, and it adds another turn of the screw. And we were both extremely powerful telepaths, and there had been long periods of time when I had no control over what I was sending. By the time I was even halfway sane again there were long periods of time where there was at least as much hate as there was love. We had been too close, too long.

  Not the least of what I had to be grateful to Dio for was this; that she had broken that deadlock, broken into that unhealthy over-preoccupation with one another’s every thought. If we had been mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, at least there would have been a taboo we could break. For a father and son there was no such dramatic exit from the trap; or it seemed to us that there was not, though I cannot swear it never entered either of our minds. We were both old enough to make such a decision, we were away from the world which had ingrained such taboos, and we were alone together in an alien universe, among the head-blind who would neither know nor care what levels of decadence we might choose to explore. Nevertheless, we let it alone; it was, perhaps, the only thing we never tried to share, and I think it may have been the only way we kept our sanity.

  My father was quickly enchanted with Dio, too, and I think he was genuinely grateful to her; not least because she had come between our unhealthy preoccupation with one another. Yet, glad as he was to have some degree of freedom from my constant presence and to be free of fears for my continued sanity (and, though he had shielded them carefully from me, I was always aware of it, and a man watched constantly for signs of insanity will doubt his own sanity the more), the coming of Dio had left him alone. He could not admit his helplessness; Kennard Alton never would. Yet daily I saw him growing worse, and knew that a time would come, even if it had not come yet, when he needed me. He had always been there when I needed him, and I would not leave him alone, a prey to age and infirmity. So Dio and I found a home at the edge of the city, where he could call upon us when he needed us, and in the overflow of our own happiness, it was easy enough to spare him some time for companionship.

  Well, we were happy. When I lost Marjorie, in the horror of that last night when Caer Donn had gone up in flames and we had tried, with our two lives thrust into the gap, to close the breach Sharra had made in the fabric of the world, we had both been ready to die. But it hadn’t happened that way; Majorie died, and I—lived on, but something had been destroyed in me that night. Not cut clean away, but, like my hand, rotting and festering and growing into terrifying in-human shapes. Dio had gone unflinching into all that horror, and somehow, after that, I had healed clean.

  Neither of us thought of marriage. Marriage di catenas, the ritual formalized marriage of the Domains, was a solemn joining of property, a mutual matter concerning two families, two houses, for the raising of children to inheritance and laran. What Dio and I had was so deeply personal that we had no wish or need to bring either family into it. With Marjorie, half my love for her had been a desire to see her as my wife, living with me at Armida, bringing up children we would share in common, the desire for the long quiet years of peace in our beloved home. With Dio it was something different. When Dio found herself pregnant, in the second year we were together, we were not really happy about it. But perhaps our bodies had spoken to what our minds refused to know. It lay deep in both of us, of course, a desire for continuity, something to come after us when we were gone, the deep-rooted desire for the only immortality anyone can ever know.

  “I needn’t have the child, if you don’t want it,” she said, curled up at my side in our living room, which was high above the lights of Vainwal, below us; colored lights, strung gaily in ribbons along the streets; there was always some kind of festival here, noise and gaiety and confusion and the seeking of pleasure.

  She was close enough to me to feel my instinctual flinching. She said “You do want it—don’t you, Lew?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s the truth, Dio.”

  Truth; I resented the intrusion of our idyll by any third party, however beloved; someone who would inevitably destroy the deepest closeness between us; Dio would no longer be altogether preoccupied with my needs and wishes, and in that way, selfishly, I resented the knowledge that she was pregnant.

  Truth, equally; I remembered with anguish that night— the very night before her death—when I knew that Marjorie was carrying the child she would not live long enough to bear. I had sensed the tentative life as I now sensed the new and growing seed of life in Dio and my very soul shrank from seeing it extinguished. Maybe it was only squeamishness. But, selfishly, I wished this child to live. I said, “I want it and I do not. It is you who will have to bear it; you must make the choice. Whatever you decide, I will try to be happy with your decision.”

  For a long time she watched the changing play of lights in the city below us. At last she said, “It will change my life in ways I can’t even imagine. I’m a little afraid to change that much. It’s you I want, Lew, not your child,” and she laid her head on my shoulder. Yet I sensed she was as ambivalent as I. “At the same time, it’s something that—that came out ; of our love. I can’t help wanting—” She stopped and swal-i lowed, and laid her hand, almost protectively, over her belly. “I love you, Lew, and I love your child because it’s yours. And this is something that could be—well, different and stronger than either of us, but part of what we have together. Does that make any sense to you?”

  I stroked her hair. At that moment she seemed so infinitely precious
to me, more so than she had ever been before; perhaps more than she would ever be again.

  “I’m frightened, Lew. It’s too big. I don’t think I have the right to decide something as big as that. Maybe the decision was made by something beyond either of us. I never thought much about God, or the Gods, or whatever there is. I keep feeling that there’s something terrible waiting for us, and I don’t want to lose even a minute of what happiness we could have together.” Again the little gesture, holding her hand I over her womb, as if to shield the child there. She said, in a scared whisper, “I’m a Ridenow. It’s not just a thing, Lew, it’s alive, I can feel it alive—oh, not moving, I won’t feel it moving for months yet, but I can sense it there. It’s alive and I think it wants to live. Whether it does or not, I want it to live—I want to feel it living. I’m scared of the changes it will make, but I want to have it, Lew. I want this baby.”

  I put my hand over hers, trying to sense it, feeling—maybe it was my imagination—the sense of something living. I remembered the depthless, measureless grief I had felt, knowing Marjorie would not live to bear me her child. Was it only the memory of that grief, or did I really sense deeper sorrow awaiting us? Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully accepted that Marjorie was gone, that death was forever, that there would be no reunion in this world or the next. But under my hand and Dio’s was life, a return of hope, something in the future. We were not only living from day to day, grasping for pleasure wholly our own, but life went on, and there was always more life to live. I kissed her on the forehead and on the lips, then bent to kiss her belly too.

  “Whatever comes of it,” I said, “I do too, preciosa. Thank you.”

  My father, of course, was delighted; but troubled, too, and he would not tell me why. And now that we were not so close, he could shield his thoughts from me. At first Dio was well and blooming, quite free of the minor troubles which some women feel in pregnancy; she said she had never been happier or healthier. I watched the changes in her body with amusement and delight. It was a joyful time; we both waited for the child’s birth, and even begun to talk about the possibility—which I had never been willing, before, to acknowledge—that someday we would return to Darkover together, and share the world of our birth with our son or daughter.

  Son or daughter. It troubled me, not to know which. Dio had not a great deal of laran and had not been trained to use what little she had. She sensed the presence and the life of the child, but that was all; she could not tell which, and when I could not understand this, she told me with spirit that an unborn child probably had no awareness of its own gender, and therefore, not being aware of its own sex, she could not read its mind. The Terran medics could have taken a blood sample and a chromosome analysis and told us which, but that seemed a sick and heartless way to find out. Perhaps, I thought, Dio would develop the sensitivity to find it out, or if all else failed, I would know when the child was born. Whichever it might be, I would love it. My father wanted a son but I refused to think in those terms.

  “This child, even if it is a son, will not be Heir to Armida. Forget it,” I told him, and Kennard said with a sigh, “No, it will not. You have Aldaran blood; and the Aldaran gift is precognition. I do not know why it will not, but it will not.” And then he asked me if I had had Dio monitored to make certain all was well with the child.

  “The Terran medics say that all is well,” I told him, defensively. “If you want her monitored, do it yourself!”

  “I cannot, Lew.” It was the first time he had ever confessed weakness to me. I looked at my father carefully for the first time, it seemed, in months, his eyes sunken deep in his face, his hands twisted and almost useless now. It seemed as if the flesh was wasting off his bones. I reached out to him and as I had often enough done to him, he rebuffed the touch, slamming down barriers. Then he drew a long breath and looked me straight in the eye. “Laran sometimes fails with age. Probably it is no more than that. You are free from Sharra now, are you not? You have Ridenow blood; you and Dio are cousins. My father’s wife was a Ridenow, and so was his mother. A woman who bears a child with laran should be monitored.”

  I sighed. This was the simplest of the techniques I had learned in Arilinn; a child of thirteen can learn to monitor the body’s functions, nerves, psychic channels. Monitoring a pregnant woman and her child is a little more complex, but even so, there was no difficulty in it. “I’ll—try.”

  But I knew he could feel my inner shrinking. The Sharra matrix was packed away into the farthest corner of the farthest closet of the apartments I shared with Dio, and not twice in ten days, now, did I think of that peculiar bondage. But then, I did not use my own personal matrix, either, or seek to use any laran except the simplest, that reading of unspoken thoughts which no telepath can ever completely blockade from his mind.

  “When?” he insisted.

  “Soon,” I said, cutting him off.

  Get out! Get out of my mind! Between you and Sharra, I have no mind of my own! He winced with the violence of the thought, and I felt pain and regret. In spite of all that had been between us, I loved my father, and could not endure that look of anguish on his face. I put my hand out to him.

  “You are not well, sir. What do the Terran medics say to you?”

  “I know what they would say, and so I have not asked them,” he said, with a flicker of humor, then returned to the former urgency. “Lew, promise me; if you find you cannot monitor Dio, then promise me—Lerrys is still on Vainwal, though I think he will soon leave for Council season. If you cannot monitor her, send for Lerrys and make him do it. He is a Ridenow—”

  “And Dio is a Ridenow, and has laran rights in the estate, and the legal right to sit in Council,” I said. “Lerrys quarreled with her because she had not married me; he said her children should have a legal claim to the Alton Domain!” I swore, with such violence that my father flinched again, as if I had struck him or gripped his thin crippled hands in a vise-grip.

  “Like it or not, Lew,” my father said, “Dio’s child is the son of the Heir to Alton. What you say or think cannot change it. You can forswear or forgo your own birthright, but you cannot renounce it on your son’s behalf.”

  I swore again, turned on my heel and left him. He came after me, his step uneven, his voice filled with angry urgency.

  “Are you going to marry Dio?”

  “That’s my business,” I said, slamming down a barrier again. I could do it, now, without going into the black nothingness. He said, tightening his mouth, “I swore I would never force or pressure you to marry. But remember; refusing to decide is also a decision. If you refuse to decide to marry her, you have decided that your son shall be born nedestro, and a time may come when you will regret it bitterly.”

  “Then,” I said, my voice hard, “I will regret it.”

  “Have you asked Dio how she feels?”

  Surely he must know that we had discussed it endlessly, both of us reluctant to marry in the Terran fashion, but even less willing to bring my father, and Die’s brothers, into the kind of property-based discussions and settlements there would have to be before I could marry her di catenas. It had no relevance here on Vainwal, in any case. We had considered ourselves married in what Darkovans called freemate marriage—the sharing of a bed, a meal, a fireside—and desired no more; it would become as legal as any catenas marriage when our child was born. But now I faced that, too; if our son was born nedestro, he could not inherit from me; if I should die Dio would have to turn to her Ridenow kin. Whatever happened, I must provide for her.

  When I explained it that way, as a matter of simple and practical logic, Dio was willing enough, and the next day we went to the Empire HQ on Vainwal and registered our marriage there. I settled the legal questions, so that if I died before her, or before our child had grown to maturity, she could legally claim property belonging to me, on Terra or on Darkover, and our son would have similar rights in my estate. I realized, somewhere about halfway through these procedures, that both of
us, without any prearrangement, had mutually begun referring to the child as “he.” Father had reminded me that I was part Aldaran, and precognition was one of those gifts. I accepted it as that. And knowing that, I knew all that I needed to know, so why trouble myself with monitoring?

  A day or two later, Dio said, out of a clear blue sky, as we sat at breakfast in our high room above the city, “Lew, I lied to you.”

  “Lied,preciosa?” I looked at her candid fair face. In general one telepath cannot lie to another but there are levels of truth and deceit. Dio had let her hair grow; now it was long enough to tie at the back of her neck, and her eyes were that color so common in fair-haired women, which can be blue or green or gray, depending on the health, and mood, and what she is wearing. She had on a loose dress of leaf-green—her body was heavy, now—and her eyes glowed like emeralds.

  “Lied,” she repeated. “You thought it was an accident— that I had become pregnant by accident or oversight. It was deliberate. I am sorry.”

  “But why, Dio?” I was not angry, only perplexed. I had not wanted this to happen, at first, but now I was altogether happy about it.

  “Lerrys—had threatened to take me back to Darkover for this Council season,” she said. “A pregnant woman cannot travel in space. It was the only way I could think of to make sure he would not force me to go.”

  I said, “I am glad you did.” I could not, now, envision life without Dio.

  “And now, I suppose, he will use the knowledge that I am married, and have a son,” I said. It was the first time I had been willing to ask myself what would become of the Alton Domain, with both my father and myself self-exiled. My brother Marius was never accepted by the Council; but if there really was no other Alton Heir, they might make the best of a bad bargain and accept him. Otherwise it would probably go to my cousin Gabriel Lanart; he had married a Hastur, after all, and he had three sons and two daughters by his Hastur wife. They had wanted to give it, and the command of the Guards, to Gabriel in the first place, and my father would have saved a lot of trouble if he had permitted it.