Heritage and Exile

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  I hardly believed this; that, once again, slowly, stumbling like a novice, I was making contact with the matrix stone after six years, though I had, as yet, barely touched the surface. I dared a deeper touch. . . .

  Fire. Blazing through my hand. Pain . . . outrageous, burning agony—in a hand that was not there to burn. I heard myself cry out . . . or was it the sound of Marjorie screaming . . . before my locked eyes the fire-form rose high, locks tossing in the firestorm wind, like a woman, tall and chained, her body and limbs and hair all on fire. . . .

  Sharra!

  I let the matrix stone drop as if it had burned through my good hand; felt the pain of having it away from my body, tried to scrabble for it with a hand that was no longer part of my arm . . . I felt it there, felt the burning pain through every finger, pain in the lines of the palm, in the nails burning . . . Sobbing with pain, I fumbled the matrix into its sheath around my neck and wrenched my mind away from the fire-image, feeling it slowly burn down and subside. Dio was staring at me in horror.

  I said, my mouth stiff and fumbling on the words, “I’m—I’m sorry, bredhiya, I—I didn’t mean to frighten you—”

  She caught me close to her, and I buried my head in her breast. She whispered, “Lew, it is I should beg forgiveness—I did not know that would happen—I would never have asked—Avarra’s mercy, what was that?”

  I drew a deep breath, feeling the pain tearing at the hand that was not there. I could not speak the words aloud. The fire-form was still behind my eyes, blazing. I blinked, trying to make it go away, and said, “You know.”

  She whispered, “But how . . .”

  “Somehow, the damned thing is keyed into my own matrix. Whenever I try to use it, I see . . . only that.” I swallowed and said thickly, “I thought I was free. I thought I was—was healed, and free of that . . .”

  “Why don’t you destroy it?”

  My smile was only a painful grimace. “That would probably be the best answer. Because I am sure I would die with it . . . very quickly and not at all pleasantly. But I was too cowardly for that.”

  “Oh, no, no, no—” She held me close, hugging me desperately. I swallowed, drew several deep breaths, knowing this was hurting her more than me; Ridenow, empath, Dio could not bear any suffering . . . there were times when I wondered whether what she felt for me had been love, or whether she had given me her body, her heart, her comfort, as one soothes a screaming baby because one cannot bear his crying and will do anything, anything to shut him up. . . .

  But it had helped me, to know my pain hurt Dio and I must somehow try and control it. “Get me a drink, will you?” When she brought it, calming herself a little by the need to collect her thoughts and look for something, I sipped, trying to quiet my mind. “I am sorry, I thought I was free of that.”

  “I can’t bear it,” she said fiercely. “I can’t bear it, that you think you should apologize to me. . . .” She was crying, too. She laid her hand over the baby and said, trying to make a joke of it, “Already he is troubled when he hears his mother and father yelling at each other!”

  I picked up on it at once and made a joke of it too, saying with exaggerated humor, “Well, we must be very quiet and not wake up the baby!”

  She came and curled up next to me on the couch, leaning against my breast. She said seriously, “Lew, on Darkover—there are matrix technicians who could free you—aren’t there?”

  “Do you think my father hasn’t done his best? And he was First at Arilinn for almost ten years. If he can’t do it, it probably can’t be done.”

  “No,” she said, “but you are better; it doesn’t happen now as often as it did in the first years—does it? Maybe, now, they could find a way. . . .”

  The communicator jangled and I went to answer it. I might have known it would be my father’s voice.

  “Lew, are you all right? I felt uneasy. . . .”

  I wasn’t surprised. Every telepath on this planet, if there were any others, must have felt that shock. Even the distant voice of my father tried to reassure me. “It hasn’t happened for a long time, has it? Don’t get discouraged, Lew, give yourself time to heal. . . .”

  Time? The rest of my life, I thought, holding the voice-piece of the communicator under my chin with the stump of my left hand, the fingers of my remaining hand nervously smoothing the insulating silks over my matrix. Never again. I would never touch the matrix again, not when—this—was waiting for me. What I said to my father was surface noise, mouthed platitudes of reassurance, and he must have known it, but he did not press me; he probably knew I would have slammed down the communicator and refused to answer it again. All he said was, “In ten days there is a ship which will touch at Darkover. I have booked a double passage; and a reservation on the ship which leaves ten days after that, so that if something should prevent my taking ship on the first, I will be on the second, and your place is reserved too. I think you should come; has this, tonight, not proved it to you, that you must face it soon or late?”

  I managed not to shout at him the furious refusal storming in my mind. The distance, and the mechanical communicator, blocked out thoughts; this was the best way to talk to my father, after all. I even managed to thank him for his attempt at kindness. But after I had refused him again and replaced the communicator set, Dio said, “He’s right, you know. You can’t live the rest of your life with this. It started on Darkover and it should end there. You can’t go through your life dragging that—that horrible link behind you. And I understand—you said something, once—that you cannot leave it. . . .”

  I shook my head. “No. It—it nags me. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  I had tried to abandon it, when we left the lake cabin on Terra where we had been living while my hand healed after the final failure and the amputation. I had gone halfway round the world and then . . . the fire-form behind my eyes, blurring out all sight and sense. . . . I had had to return, to pack it among our luggage . . . to carry it with me, a monstrous incubus, a demon haunting me; like my father’s presence within my mind, something of which I would never be free.

  “The question’s academic,” I said, “You can’t go, and I won’t leave you. That’s what my father wanted.”

  “The baby might not be born for forty days, at least . . . you could go and return. . . .”

  “I don’t know about babies,” I said, “but I do know they come when they will and not when we expect them.” But why did the thought bring such anguish and fear? Surely it was only the aftermath of Sharra’s impact on my shattered nerves.

  “What about the others? You were a whole matrix circle, linked to the Sharra matrix—weren’t you? Why didn’t they die?”

  “Maybe they did,” I said. “Marjorie did. She was our—you’d have to say, our Keeper. And I took it from her when she—when she burned out.” I could talk about it, now, almost dispassionately, as if I were talking of something that had happened a long time ago to someone else. “The others were not linked quite so tight to Sharra. Rafe was only a child. Beltran of Aldaran—my cousin—he was outside the circle. I don’t think they would die when they lost contact with the matrix, or even when it went offworld. The link was made through me.” In a matrix circle, where there is a high-level matrix, it is the Keeper who links with the matrix, and then with the individual matrix stones of the telepaths in her circle. I was a high-level matrix mechanic; I had taught Marjorie to make that link, so that in a very real sense, I had been Keeper to the Keeper. . . .

  “And the others?” Dio persisted. I resented her dragging it out of me this way, but I supposed I would have to think of this sooner or later, or she would never believe I had really explored all avenues to be free. And I owed her this; Sharra had touched her too, now, although at a safe remove, and even touched our child.

  I said, “The others? Kadarin and Thyra? I don’t know; I don’t know what happened to them, or where they were when—when everything went up.”

  She persisted. “If you couldn’t lea
ve the matrix behind, wouldn’t they have died when the matrix went offworld?”

  Again I grimaced when I tried to smile. I said, “I hope so,” and even as I spoke, knew it was not true. Kadarin. We had been friends, brothers, kinsmen, united in a shared dream which would bring Darkover and Terra close together, heal our shattered heritage . . . at last, that had been what we shared at first. Without knowing I was doing it, I fingered the scars on my face. He had given me those scars. And Thyra. Marjorie’s half-sister; Kadarin’s woman. I had loved her, hated her, desired her . . . I could not think that she was dead. Somewhere, somehow, I knew she lived, and that Kadarin lived. I could not explain it; but I knew.

  Reason beyond all reasons, the thousandth reason I could never return to Darkover . . .

  After Dio was asleep I sat long in the outer room of the apartment, looking down at the lights of the city below me, the lights which were never extinguished, far into the night. On Vainwal the pursuit of pleasure goes on, deepening and growing more frantic as the day’s rhythms subside, when other people are sleeping. Down there, perhaps, I could find some kind of forgetfulness. Wasn’t that, after all, why I had come to Vainwal, to forget duty and responsibility? But now I had a wife and a child, and I owed them something. Dio’s little finger meant more to me than all the unexplored pleasures of Vainwal.

  And my son. . . . I had been angry when my father said it. But it was true. He should be born at Armida; when he was five years old I would take him out, as my father had taken me riding on his shoulder, to see the great river of wild horses flowing down through the valley. . . .

  No; that was gone, renounced. There would be other worlds for my son. Dozens, hundreds of them, an Empire of them, and beyond. I went and laid myself down beside my sleeping wife and slept. But even through my sleep, uneasy dreams moved, I saw my hand again, the horror that had grown there . . . and it reached out, reached into Dio’s body, clawing at the child, pulling it forth bloody, dripping, dying . . . I woke with my own shriek in my ears, and Dio staring at me in shock. I covered her carefully, kissed her and went to sleep in the other room where my nightmares would not disturb her dreams.

  This time I slept peacefully without nightmares; it was Dio who woke me in the graying dawn, saying hesitantly “Lew, I feel so strange—I think the baby’s coming. It’s early—but I think I should go and be certain.”

  It was far too early; but the Terrans have made something of a specialty of this, artificial wombs for babes cast from their mothers too young, and most of them, in that artificial life-support, do quite well, though they are beyond the thoughts and tenderness of their mothers; I have wondered, sometimes, if this is why so many Terrans are headblind, without any traceable laran, the distance from that most intimate of contacts, where the mother teaches the little heart to beat, and all things in the unborn body to function as they should . . . the body can grow, artificially supported and nourished, but what of the mind and laran?

  Well, if this should damage the unborn child’s laran, so be it, if it saved his life . . . my own laran had done me little good. And surely it would not hurt this child to be away from our troubled thoughts and fears, and such torment as it had certainly overheard during my ill-fated attempt to monitor. That attempt had certainly brought on this premature labor, and Dio must have known it, but she did not reproach me, and once, when I spoke of it, she hushed me, saying, “I wanted it, too.”

  So I was cheerful as we made our way through the streets, from which all but a hardy few pleasure-seekers had vanished in these last gray hours before sunrise. The Terran hospital was pale and austere in the growing light, and Dio flinched as fast elevators swooped us upward to the highest floors, where they kept maternity cases; high above the sound and clamor of the noisy pleasure-world. I told them who I was and what was happening, and some functionary assured Dio that a technician would be there in a few moments to take her to a room.

  We sat on characterless, comfortless furniture, waiting. After a time, a young woman entered the room. She was wearing Medic clothing, bearing the curious staff-and-serpents of Terran medical services; I had been told that it was an antique religious symbol, but the medics seemed to know no more than I about what it meant. But there was something in the voice that made me look up and cry out with pleasure.

  “Linnell!”

  For the girl in uniform was my own foster-sister. Avarra alone knew what she was doing on Darkover, or in that curious uniform, but I hurried to her, took her hands, repeating her name. I could have kissed her, and I nearly did, but the young nurse drew back in outrage.

  “What—I don’t understand!” she exclaimed, indignant, and I blinked, realizing I had made an insane blunder. But even now, staring, I could only shake my head and say, “It’s amazing—it’s more than just a resemblance! You are Linnell!”

  “But I’m not, of course,” she said, with a puzzled, chilly smile. Dio laughed. She said, “It’s true, of course, you are very like my husband’s foster-sister. Very, very like. And how strange to meet a double of a close relative, here on Vainwal, of all places! But of course Linnell would never have come here, Lew; she’s too conventional. Can you imagine Linnell wearing that kind of outfit?”

  And of course I couldn’t; I thought of Linnell, in her heavy tartan skirt and embroidered over-tunic, her hair hanging in shining brown braids down her neck. This woman was wearing a white tunic and close-fitting trousers . . . a Darkovan in such costume would have feared incipient lung-fever, and Linnell would have died of outraged modesty. There was a little patch with a name written on it. I could read the Terran letters now, after a fashion, not well, but better than Dio. I spelled them out, slowly.

  “K-a-t-h—”

  “Kathie Marshall,” she said, with a friendly smile. She even had the little dimple near the right corner of her mouth, and the small scar on her chin which she’d gotten when we’d gone riding in a forbidden canyon on Armida land and our horses had stumbled and fallen under us. I asked her, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me where you got that scar?”

  “Why, I’ve had it since I was ten,” she said. “I think it was an accident with an air-sled; I had four stitches.”

  I shook my head, baffled. “My foster-sister has one just like it, in the same place.” But Dio made a sharp movement, as of pain, and instantly the woman, familiar-strange, Linnell—Kathie, was all professional solicitude.

  “Have you timed the contradictions? Good. Here, I’ll take you and get you into bed—” and as Dio turned to me, grabbing at my hand in sudden panic, she reassured, “Don’t worry about it; your husband can come and stay with you, as soon as the doctor’s had a look at you and seen what’s going on. Don’t worry,” she said to me, and the expression on her face was exactly like Linnell’s, sober and sweet and gentle. “She’s very healthy, and we can do a lot, even if the baby is born too soon. Don’t worry about your wife, or the baby either.”

  And within the hour they called me into her room. Dio was lying in bed in a sterile hospital gown, but the surroundings were pleasant enough in the Vainwal fashion, green plants everywhere, patterns of shimmering rainbows beyond the windows; laser holograms, I supposed, but pleasant to watch, distracting the mind of the prospective mother from what was going on.

  “Our coridom behaves like this when a prize mare is about to foal,” Dio said wryly. “Petting her and fussing over her and whispering reassuring words into her ears, instead of leaving her alone to get on with it. They’re all over me with machines supposed to tell them everything about the baby including the color of his eyes, but they won’t tell me anything.”

  They let me stay with her in the early stages, rubbing her back, giving her sips of water, reminding her of the proper breathing; but we all knew it was too soon, and I was afraid. And I sensed Dio’s fear too, the tensing of fright, even through her careful attempts to relax, to cooperate with the inexorable process that was thrusting our child, unready, too soon into the world. We watched the rainbows, played a
game or two with cards, but even I noticed one omission; neither of us discussed the future, or spoke of a name for the coming child. I told myself we were waiting until we knew whether we were really naming a son or daughter, that was all. Every hour or so they would send me out into the hall, while they came and examined her; and as the day moved on toward nightfall, after one of these intervals, the young nurse, Kathie, said, “You’ll have to stay down here, Mr. Montray; they’re taking her up to surgery. Things aren’t going quite as they should, and this baby will be very premature, so we need all kinds of support for him, or her, right at hand the minute he’s born.”

  “But I want Lew with me—” Dio cried, almost in tears, and clung, hard, to my good hand.

  Kathie said gently, “I know. I’m sure it would comfort both of you. But, you see, we have to think first of the baby. As soon as the baby’s born we’ll let your husband come up and stay with you again. But not now, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

  I held Dio close, trying to reassure her with my touch. I knew how she felt, let myself sink into her body, into her pain—on Darkover, no telepath, no Comyn, would have considered being apart from the woman who bore his child, sharing her ordeal, so that he too should know the price of a child . . . but we were not on our home world, and there was nothing to be done.

  “He is frightened,” Dio whispered, her voice shaken, and it frightened me too, to see her cry; I had grown so accustomed to her courage, her unflinching strength which had so often supported my own fears. Well, it was my turn to be strong.