“I don’t think so,” Kerwin said, sizing the man up, and wondering if he could have been one of the kids from the Spaceman’s Orphanage. It was impossible to tell, after—how long? Ten or twelve years, Terran reckoning; he’d forgotten the conversion factors for the Darkovan year. Even if they’d been childhood friends, that amount of time would have wiped it out. And he didn’t remember anyone named Ragan, although that didn’t mean anything.
“But you’re not Terran, are you,” Ragan inquired.
The memory of a clerk’s sneer—one of those—rushed through Kerwin’s mind; but he shoved it aside. “My father was. I was born here, brought up in the Spaceman’s Orphanage. I left pretty young, though.”
“That must be it,” Ragan said. “I spent a few years there. I do liaison work for the Trade City when they have to hire Darkovans: guides, mountaineers, that kind of thing. Organize caravans into the mountains, into the other Trade cities, whatever.”
Kerwin was still trying to decide whether the man had a recognizably Darkovan accent. He finally asked him. “Are you Darkovan?”
Ragan shrugged. The bitterness in his voice was really appalling. “Who knows? For that matter, who cares?”
He lifted his glass and drank. Kerwin followed suit, sensing that he would be drunk fairly soon; he never was much of a drinker and the Darkovan liquor, which of course as a child he had never tasted, was strong stuff. It didn’t seem to matter. Ragan was staring again and that didn’t seem to matter either.
Kerwin thought, Maybe we’re a lot the same. My mother was probably Darkovan; if she’d been Terran, there’d have been records. She could have been anything. My father was in the Space Service; that’s the one thing I know for sure. But apart from that, who and what am I? And how did he come to have a halfbreed son?
“At least he cared enough to get Empire citizenship for you,” Ragan said bitterly, and Jeff stared, not realizing that he had actually been saying all this aloud. “Mine didn’t even care that much!”
“But you’ve got red hair,” Jeff said and wondered why he had said it, but Ragan seemed not to hear, staring into his glass, and Ellers interrupted, with an air of injury:
“Listen, you two, this is supposed to be a celebration! Drink up!”
Ragan leaned his chin in his hands, staring across the table at Kerwin. “So you came here, at least partly, to try and locate your parents—your people?”
“To find out something about them,” Kerwin amended.
“Had it ever occurred to you that you might be better off not knowing?”
It had. He’d been all the way through that and out the other side. “I don’t care if my mother was one of those girls,” he said, nodding toward the women who were coming and going, fetching drinks, stopping to chaff with the men, exchanging jokes and innuendos. “I want to know about it.”
To be sure which world can claim me, Darkover or Terra. To be certain . . .
“But aren’t there records at the orphanage?”
“I haven’t had a chance to look,” Kerwin said. “That’s the first place to go, anyhow. I don’t know how much they can tell me. But it’s a good place to start.”
Kerwin fumbled, with fingers made clumsy by drink, at the copper chain that had been around his neck as long as he could remember. He said, “Only this. They told me, in the orphanage, that it was around my neck when I came there.”
They didn’t like it. The matron told me I was too big to wear lucky charms, and tried to get it away from me. I screamed ... why had I forgotten that? ... and fought so hard that they finally let me keep it. Why in the hell would I do that? My grandparents didn’t like it, either, and I learned to keep it out of sight.
“Oh, nuts,” interrupted Ellers rudely. “The long-lost talisman! So you’ll show it to them and they’ll recognize that you’re the long-lost son and heir to the Lord High Muckety-Muck in his castle, and you’ll live happily ever after!” He made an indescribable sound of derision. Kerwin felt angry color flooding his face. If Ellers really believed that rubbish. ...
“Can I have a look at it?” Ragan asked, holding out his hand.
Kerwin slipped the chain off his neck; but when Ragan would have taken it, he cradled it in his palm; it had always made him nervous for anyone else to touch it. He had never wanted to ask them, in Psych, just why. They probably would have had a pat and ready answer, something slimy about his subconscious mind.
The chain was of copper, a valuable metal on Darkover. But the blue stone itself had always seemed unremarkable to him; a cheap trinket, something a poor girl might treasure; not even carved, just a pretty blue crystal, a bit of glass.
But Ragan’s eyes narrowed as he looked at it, and he gave a low whistle. “By the wolf of Alar! You know what this is, Kerwin?”
Kerwin shrugged. “Some semiprecious stone from the Hellers, I suppose. I’m no geologist.”
“It’s a matrix jewel,” Ragan said, and at Kerwin’s blank stare, elaborated, “a psychokinetic crystal.”
“I”m lost,” Ellers said, and stretched out his hand to take the small gem. Quickly, protectively, Kerwin closed his hand over it, and Ragan raised his eyebrows.
“Keyed?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kerwin said, “only I somehow don’t like people touching it. Silly, I suppose.”
“Not at all,” Ragan said, and suddenly seemed to make up his mind.
“I have one,” he said. “Nothing like that size; a little one, the kind they sell in the markets for suitcase locks and children’s toys. One like yours—well, they don’t just lie around in the street, you know; it’s probably worth a small fortune, and if it was ever monitored on any of the main banks, it won’t be hard to tell who it belonged to. But even the little ones like mine—” He took a small wrapped roll of leather out of an inside pocket and carefully unrolled the leather. A tiny blue crystal rolled out.
“They’re like that,” he said. “Maybe they have a low-level form of life, no one has ever figured out. Anyway, they’re definitely one-man jewels; seal a lock with one of them, and nothing will ever open it except your own intention to open it.”
“Are you saying they’re magic?” Ellers demanded angrily.
“Hell, no. They register your brainwaves and their distinct EEG patterns, or something like that; like a fingerprint. So somehow you are the only person who can open that lock; a great way to protect your private papers. That’s what I use this one for. Oh, I can do a few tricks with it.”
Kerwin stared at the small blue jewel in Ragan’s palm. It was smaller than his own, but the same distinctive color. He repeated it slowly: “Matrix jewel.”
Ellers, sobering briefly, stared at Kerwin and said, “Yeah. The big secret of Darkover. The Terrans have been trying to beg, borrow, or steal some of the secrets of matrix technology for generations. There was a big war fought here about that, twelve, twenty years ago—I don’t remember, long before my time. Oh, the Darkovans bring little ones into the Trade City, like Ragan’s there, and sell them; trade them off for drugs, or metals, usually daggers, or small tools, or camera lenses. Somehow, they transform energy without fission by-products. But they’re so small; we keep hearing rumors of big ones. Bigger ones even than yours, Jeff. But no Darkovan will talk about them. Hey,” he said, grinning, “maybe you are the lost heir to the Lord High Muckety-Muck in his castle after all! It’s for sure no bar girl would be wearing a thing like that!”
Kerwin cradled the thing in his hand, but he did not look at it. It made his eyes blur with a strange dizzy sickness. He tucked it inside his shirt again. He did not like the way Ragan was staring at him. Somehow it reminded him of something.
Ragan shoved his own small crystal—it was no longer than the bead a woman might braid at the end of a long tress—toward Kerwin. He said, “Can you look into it?”
Someone had said that to him before. At some time someone had said, Look into the matrix. A woman’s voice, low. Or had she said, Do not look into th
e matrix.... His head hurt. Pettishly he pushed the stone away. Ragan’s eyebrows went up again in appraisal. “That much, huh? Can you use yours?”
“Use it? How? I don’t know one damn thing about it,” he said rudely. Ragan shrugged; he said, “I can only do tricks with mine. Watch.”
He up-ended the rough green-glass goblet to drink the last few drops from it, then turned it bottom-up and laid the tiny blue crystal on the foot of the goblet. His face took on an intent, concentrated stare; abruptly there was a small eye-hurting flash, a sizzling sound, and the rigid stem of goblet melted, sagged sidewise, slid into a puddle of green glass. Ellers gasped and swore. Kerwin passed his hand over his eyes; the goblet sat there, bowed down with the wilted stem. There was a Terran artist, he remembered from a course in art history, who had painted things like fur teacups and limp watches. History had judged him a lunatic, rather than a genius. The goblet, stem lolling to one side, looked just as surrealistic as his work.
“Could I do that? Could anybody?”
“With one the size of yours, you could do a hell of a lot more,” Ragan said, “if you knew how to use it. I don’t know how they work; but if you concentrate on them, they can move small objects, produce intense heat, or—well, other things. It doesn’t take much training to play around with the ones this size.”
Kerwin touched the lump at his chest. He said, “Then it isn’t just a trinket.”
“Hell, no. It’s worth a small fortune—maybe a big one; I’m no judge. I’m surprised they didn’t take it away from you before you left Darkover, considering how hard the Terrans have been trying to get hold of some of the larger ones, to experiment with them and test their limits.”
Another of those dim memories surfaced. Drugged, on the Big Ship that had taken him to Terra, a stewardess or attendant of some sort fumbling with the jewel; waking, screaming, nightmares. He had thought it a side-effect of the drugs. He said somberly, “I think maybe they tried.”
“I’m sure the authorities at the HQ would give a lot to have one that size to play around with,” Ragan said. “You might consider turning it over to them; they’d probably give you anything you wanted for it, within reason. You might be able to get a really good assignment out of them.”
Kerwin grinned. He said, “since I feel like hell whenever I take it off, that would present—some difficulties.”
“You mean you never take it off?” Ellers demanded drunkenly. “That must present some troubles. You don’t take it off even in the bath?”
Kerwin said, with a chuckle, “Oh, I can. I don’t like to; I feel—oh, I don’t know, weird—when I take it off. Or leave it off for any amount of time.” He had always berated himself for being superstitious, irrational, compulsive, treating the thing as a fetish.
Ragan shook his head. “Like I say, they’re a strange kind of thing. They—hell, this makes no sense, but it happens: I don’t know how it works, I just know it does; maybe they are a low form of life. See, they attach themselves to you; you can’t just walk away and leave them behind, and nobody I heard of ever lost one. I know a man who kept losing his keys until he got one of these to tag on his keyring, and whenever he left it behind, believe me, he knew where it was.”
That, Kerwin thought, explained a lot. Including a child, screaming as if he were half his age, when a Terran no-nonsense matron deprived him of his “lucky charm.” They had had to give it back to him in the end. He wondered, with a shiver, what would have happened if they had not. He didn’t think he wanted to know. He touched the hidden jewel again, shaking his head, remembering his childish sureness that this held the key to his hidden past, to his identity and the identity of his mother, to his obscured memories and half-forgotten dreams.
“Of course,” he said with heavy irony, “I was hoping it was that amulet that really would prove I was the long-lost son and heir of your Lord-High-Something-or-Other. Now all my illusions have been shattered.” He raised the goblet to his lips, calling the Darkovan girl to bring them more of the same.
And as he did so, his eyes fell on the goblet whose stem Ragan had melted. Hell, was he drunker than he’d ever believed?
The goblet stood upright on a solid green stem, unbroken, unsagging. There was nothing whatever wrong with it.
CHAPTER THREE
The Strangers
Three drinks later Ragan excused himself, saying he had a commission at the HQ and had to report on it before he could get paid. When he had gone, Kerwin scowled impatiently at Ellers, who had matched Ragan drink for drink. This wasn’t the way he had wanted to spend his first night back on the world whose image he’d carried in his mind since childhood. He didn’t know quite what he did want—but it wasn’t to sit in a spaceport bar all night and get drunk!
“Look, Ellers—”
Only a gentle snore answered him; Ellers had slid down in his seat, out cold.
The plump Darkovan bar girl came with refills—Kerwin had lost track of how many—and looked at Ellers with a professional mixture of disappointment and resignation. Then, with a quick glance at Kerwin, he could see her shift her focus of interest; bending to pour, she brushed artfully against Kerwin. Her loose robe was unpinned at the throat so that he could see the valley between her breasts, and the familiar sweet smell of incense clung to her robe and her hair. A thread of awareness plucked a string deep in his gut, as he breathed in the scent of Darkover, of woman; but he looked again and saw that her eyes were hard and shallow, and the music of her voice frayed at the edges when she crooned, “You like what you see, big man?”
She spoke broken Terran Standard, not the musical idiom of the City dialect; that, Kerwin knew afterward, was what had bothered him most. “You like Lomie, big man? You come ’long with me, I nice and warm, you see ...”
There was a flat taste in Kerwin’s mouth that wasn’t just the aftertaste of the wine. Whatever the sky and sun, whatever they called the world, the girls around the Terran Trade City bars were all the same.
“You come? You come—?”
Without knowing quite what he was going to do, Kerwin grabbed the edge of the table and heaved himself up, the bench going over with a crash behind him. He loomed over the girl, glaring through the dim and smoky light, and words in a language long forgotten rushed from his lips:
“Be gone with you, daughter of a mountain goat, and cover your shame elsewhere, not by lying with men from worlds that despise your own! Where is the pride of the Cahuenga, shameful one?”
The girl gasped, cowered backward, a convulsive hand clutching her robe about her bared breasts, and bent almost to the ground. She swallowed, but for a moment her mouth only moved, without sound; then she whispered, “S’dia shaya ... d’sperdo, vai dom alzuo. ... ” and fled, sobbing; the sound of the sob and the scent of her musky hair lingered in the room behind her.
Kerwin clung, swaying, to the edge of the table. God, how drunk can you get! What was all that stuff I was spouting, anyway? He was bewildered at himself; where did he get off anyway, scaring the poor girl out of her wits? He was no more virtuous than the next man. What Puritan remnant had prompted him to rise up in wrath and demolish her that way? He’d had his share of the spaceport wenches on more worlds than one.
And what language had he been speaking, anyway? He knew it hadn’t been the city dialect, but what was it? He could not remember; try as he might, not a syllable remained of the words that had come into his mind; only the form of the emotion remained.
Ellers, fortunately, had snored through the whole thing; he could imagine the ribbing the older man would have given him, if he hadn’t. He thought, We’d better get out of here while I can still navigate—and before I do something else that’s crazy!
He bent and shook Ellers, but Ellers didn’t even mumble. Kerwin remembered that Ellers had drunk as much as Kerwin and Ragan put together. He did this in every spaceport. Kerwin shrugged, set the bench he’d knocked over back on its legs, lifted Eller’s feet to them, and turned unsteadily toward the door.
<
br /> Air. Fresh air. That was all he needed. Then he’d better get back inside the Terran Zone; at least, inside the spaceport gates, he knew how to behave. But, he thought confused, I thought I knew how to behave here on Darkover. What got into me?
The sun, bleared and angry-looking, lay low over the street. Shadows of deep mauve and indigo folded the huddled houses in a friendly gloom. There were people on the streets now, Darkovans in colorful shirts and breeches, wearing heavy woven capes or the commonplace imported climbing jackets; women muffled to the eyebrows in fur; and once, gliding along, a tall form invisible beneath a hood and mantle of strange cut and color; but the gliding form was not human.
And even as he paused, looking up at the flaming sky, the sun sank with a rush and the swift dark came swooping across the sky, a darkness like great soft wings, folding to blot out the brilliance; the fast-dropping night that gave this world its name. Leaping out in a sudden glare came the crown of vast white stars; and three of the small jeweled moons were in the sky, jade-green, peacock-blue, rose-pearl.
Kerwin stood staring upward, his eyes wet, unashamed of the sudden tears that had started to them. It was not illusion, then, despite the commonplace spaceport bars and the disillusion of the streets. It was real; he was home again; he had seen the falling dark over the sky, the blaze of the crown of stars they called Hastur’s Crown after the legend ... He stood there until, with the sudden cooling of the air, the thick nightly mist gathered and the blaze dimmed, then vanished.
Slowly, he walked on. The first thin misty traces of rain were stirring; the tall beacon of the HQ in the sky gave him his bearings, and he moved, reluctantly, in that direction.
He was thinking of the Darkovan girl in the bar, the one he had rebuffed so unexpectedly—and so strangely. She had been warm and lissome, and she was clean, and what more could a man want for a welcome home? Why had he sent her away—and sent her away like that?
He felt strangely restless, at loose ends. Home? A home meant more than a familiar sky and stars overhead. A home meant people. He had had a home on Earth if that was what he wanted. No, he thought soberly; his grandparents had never wanted him, only a second chance to remake his father in their own image. In space? Ellers, perhaps, was the closest friend he had, and what was Johnny Ellers? A bum of the spaceports, a planet-hopper. Kerwin felt the sudden hunger for roots, a home, for a people and a world he had never known. Never been allowed to know. The words he had said, self-deriding, to Ellers, came back to his mind: I had hoped it was the amulet that would prove I was the long-lost son and heir. . . .
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