“These powers and skills—” Damon paused and collected himself, trying to speak calmly, for he was shouting. Then he said, “Cleindori, since I was a young man I have believed that the Way of Arilinn—and of all the other Towers on whom the people of Arilinn force their will—is cruel and inhuman. I believe this; and I fought, laying my life as forfeit, so that men and women in the Towers need not give up all their lives to a living death, sealed within Tower walls. Such skills as we have can be learned by any man or woman, Comyn or Commoner, if they possess the inborn talent. It is like playing the lute; one is born with an ear for music and can learn the way of plucking the strings, but even for that difficult vocation no one should be asked to give up home and family, life or love. We have taught much to others; and we have won the right to teach them without penalty. A day will come, Cleindori, when the ancient matrix sciences of our world will be free to any who can use them, and the Towers will be no more needed.”
“But we are still outcaste,” argued Cleindori. “Father, if you had seen Janine’s face when she spoke of you, calling it the Forbidden Tower. ...”
Damon’s face tightened. “I do not love Janine so much that her evil opinion of me will lose me any sleep of nights.”
“But Cleindori is right,” Kennard said. “We are renegades. Here in the countryside people hold to your ways; but all over the Domains they turn only to the Towers to know of laran. I too am to go to a Tower, Neskaya perhaps, or perhaps to Arilinn itself, when I have done my three years’ service in the Guards; if Cleindori goes to Arilinn, they said I could not go until she had completed her years of seclusion, for a Keeper in training cannot have a foster-brother near, or anyone to whom she is bound by affection—”
“Cleindori is not going to Arilinn,” Damon said, “and there’s an end of it.” And he repeated, even more vehemently, “Human flesh and blood cannot endure the Way of Arilinn!”
“And again I say that is foolish,” Cleindori said, “for Callista endured it; and the lady Hilary of Syrtis; and Margwenn of Thendara; and Leominda of Neskaya; and Janine of Arilinn; and Leonie’s self; and nine-hundred-and-twenty-odd Keepers before her, so they say. And what they endured, I can endure if I must.”
She leaned her chin on her folded hands, looking up at him seriously. “You have told me often enough, since I was only a child, that a Keeper is responsible only to her own conscience. And that everywhere, among the best of women and men, conscience is the only guide for that they do. Father, I feel it is laid upon me to be a Keeper.”
“You can be Keeper among us, when you are grown,” said Damon, “without such torment as you must endure at Arilinn.”
“Oh!” She rose angrily to her feet and began to pace in the chamber. “You are my father, you would keep me always a little girl! Father, do you think I do not know that without the Towers of the Domains, our world is dark with barbarism? I have not been very far abroad, but I have been to Thendara, and I have seen the spaceships of the Terrans there, and I know that we have resisted their Empire only because the Towers give our world what we need, with our ancient matrix sciences. If the Towers go dark, Darkover falls into the hands of the Empire, like a ripe plum, for the people will cry out for the technology and the trade of the Empire!”
Damon said quietly, “I do not think that this is inevitable. I have no hatred for the Terrans; my closest friend was Terran-born, your uncle Ann’dra. But it is for this I am working, that when every Tower is dark, there will be enough laran among the populace of the Domains that Darkover may be independent, and not go begging to the Terrans. That day will come, Cleindori. I tell you, a day will come when every Tower in the Domains stands bare and empty, the haunt of evil birds of prey—”
“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, the 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 Ari
linn can change them!”
Damon looked at his daughter, 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. Behin
d 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.”
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