The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Then the Old-One’s painful decision that I was too alien for them, and the difficult and dangerous journey my trailmen foster-parents and foster-brothers had undertaken, to help me out of the Hellers and arrange for me to be taken to the Trade City. After two years of physically painful and mentally rebellious readjustment to daytime living, the owl-eyed trailmen saw best, and lived largely, by moonlight, I had found a niche for myself, and settled down. But all of the later years (after Jay Allison had taken over, I supposed, from a basic pattern of memory common to both of us) had vanished into the limbo of the subconscious.

  A bookrack was crammed with large microcards; I slipped one into the viewer, with a queer sense of spying, and found myself listening apprehensively to hear that measured step and Jay Allison’s falsetto voice demanding what the hell I was doing, meddling with his possessions. Eye to the viewer, I read briefly at random, something about the management of compound fracture, then realized I had understood exactly three words in a paragraph. I put my fist against my forehead and heard the words echoing there emptily; “laceration…primary efflusion…serum and lymph…granulation tissue.…” I presumed that the words meant something and that I once had known what. But if I had a medical education, I didn’t recall a syllable of it. I didn’t know a fracture from a fraction.

  In a sudden frenzy of impatience I stripped off the white coat and put on the first shirt I came to, a crimson thing that hung in the line of white coats like an exotic bird in snow country. I went back to rummaging the drawers and bureaus. Carelessly shoved in a pigeonhole I found another microcard that looked familiar; and when I slipped it mechanically into the viewer it turned out to be a book on mountaineering which, oddly enough, I remembered buying as a youngster. It dispelled my last, lingering doubts. Evidently I had bought it before the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.

  Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle of whiskey. I remembered Forth’s words that he’d never seen Jay Allison drink, and suddenly I thought, “The fool!” I fixed myself a drink and sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book.

  * * * *

  Not till I’d entered medical school, I suspected, did the two halves of me fork so strongly apart…so strongly that there had been days and weeks and, I suspected, years where Jay Allison had kept me prisoner. I tried to juggle dates in my mind, looked at a calendar, and got such a mental jolt that I put it face-down to think about when I was a little drunker.

  I wondered if my detailed memories of my teens and early twenties were the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn’t think so. People forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year, the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason—I had al ways been the watcher behind, the person Jay Allison dared not be? Why was he past thirty—and I just 22?

  A ringing shattered the silence; I had to hunt for the intercom on the bedroom wall. I said, “Who is it?” and an unfamiliar voice demanded, “Dr. Allison?”

  I said automatically, “Nobody here by that name,” and started to put back the mouthpiece. Then I stopped and gulped and asked, “Is that you, Dr. Forth?”

  It was, and I breathed again. I didn’t even want to think about what I’d say if somebody else had demanded to know why in the devil I was answering Dr. Allison’s private telephone. When Forth had finished, I went to the mirror, and stared, trying to see behind my face the sharp features of that stranger, Doctor Jason Allison. I delayed, even while I was wondering what few things I should pack for a trip into the mountains and the habit of hunting parties was making mental lists about heat-socks and windbreakers. The face that looked at me was a young face, unlined and faintly freckled, the same face as always except that I’d lost my suntan; Jay Allison had kept me indoors too long. Suddenly I struck the mirror lightly with my fist.

  “The hell with you, Dr. Allison,” I said, and went to see if he had kept any clothes fit to pack.

  * * * *

  Dr. Forth was waiting for me in the small skyport on the roof, and so was a small ’copter, one of the fairly old ones assigned to Medical Service when they were too beat-up for services with higher priority. Forth took one startled stare at my crimson shirt, but all he said was, “Hello, Jason. Here’s something we’ve got to decide right away; do we tell the crew who you really are?”

  I shook my head emphatically. “I’m not Jay Allison; I don’t want his name or his reputation. Unless there are men on the crew who know Allison by sight—”

  “Some of them do, but I don’t think they’d recognize you.”

  “Tell them I’m his twin brother,” I said humorlessly.

  “That wouldn’t be necessary. There’s not enough resemblance.” Forth raised his head and beckoned to a man who was doing something near the ’copter. He said under his breath, “You’ll see what I mean,” as the man approached.

  He wore the uniform of Spaceforce—black leather with a little rainbow of stars on his sleeve meaning he’d seen service on a dozen different planets, a different colored star for each one. He wasn’t a young man, but on the wrong side of fifty, seamed and burly and huge, with a split lip and weathered face. I liked his looks. We shook hands and Forth said, “This is our man, Kendricks. He’s called Jason, and he’s an expert on the trailmen. Jason, this is Buck Kendricks.”

  “Glad to know you, Jason.” I thought Kendricks looked at me half a second more than necessary. “The ’copter’s ready. Climb in, Doc—you’re going as far as Carthon, aren’t you?”

  We put on zippered windbreaks and the ’copter soared noiselessly into the pale crimson sky. I sat beside Forth, looking down through pale lilac clouds at the pattern of Darkover spread below me.

  “Kendricks was giving me a funny eye, Doc. What’s biting him?”

  “He has known Jay Allison for eight years,” Forth said quietly, “and he hasn’t recognized you yet.”

  But we let it ride at that, to my great relief, and didn’t talk any more about me at all. As we flew under silent whirring blades, turning our backs on the settled country which lay near the Trade City, we talked about Darkover itself. Forth told me about the trailmen’s fever and managed to give me some idea about what the blood fraction was, and why it was necessary to persuade fifty or sixty of the humanoids to return with me, to donate blood from which the antibody could be, first isolated, then synthesised.

  It would be a totally unheard-of thing, if I could accomplish it. Most of the trailmen never touched ground in their entire lives, except when crossing the passes above the snow line. Not a dozen of them, including my foster-parents who had so painfully brought me out across Dammerung, had ever crossed the ring of encircling mountains that walled them away from the rest of the planet. Humans sometimes penetrated the lower forests in search of the trailmen. It was one-way traffic. The trailmen never came in search of them.

  * * * *

  We talked, too, about some of those humans who had crossed the mountains into trailmen country—those mountains profanely dubbed the Hellers by the first Terrans who had tried to fly over them in anything lower or slower than a spaceship. (The Darkovan name for the Hellers was even more explicit, and even in translation, unrepeatable.)

  “What about this crew you picked? They’re not Terrans?”

  Forth shook his head. “It would be murder to send anyone recognizably Terran into the Hellers. You know how the trailmen feel about outsiders getting into their country.” I knew. Forth continued, “Just the same, there will be two Terrans with you.”

  “They don’t know Jay Allison?” I didn’t want to be burdened with anyone—no
t anyone—who would know me, or expect me to behave like my forgotten other self.

  “Kendricks knows you,” Forth said, “but I’m going to be perfectly truthful. I never knew Jay Allison well, except in line of work. I know a lot of things—from the past couple of days—which came out during the hypnotic sessions, which he’d never have dreamed of telling me, or anyone else, consciously. And that comes under the heading of a professional confidence—even from you. And for that reason, I’m sending Kendricks along—and you’re going to have to take the chance he’ll recognize you. Isn’t that Carthon down there?”

  * * * *

  Carthon lay nestled under the outlying foothills of the Hellers, ancient and sprawling and squatty, and burned brown with the dust of five thousand years. Children ran out to stare at the ’copter as we landed near the city; few planes ever flew low enough to be seen, this near the Hellers.

  Forth had sent his crew ahead and parked them in an abandoned huge place at the edge of the city which might once have been a warehouse or a ruined palace. Inside there were a couple of trucks, stripped down to framework and flatbed like all machinery shipped through space from Terra. There were pack animals, dark shapes in the gloom. Crates were stacked up in an orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing—loose sleeved shirts, tight wrapped breeches, low boots—were squatting around it, talking. They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran Standard, letting one of the men translate for him.

  Forth introduced me simply as “Jason,” after the Darkovan custom, and I looked the men over, one by one. Back when I’d climbed for fun, I’d liked to pick my own men; but whoever had picked this crew must have known his business.

  Three were mountain Darkovans, lean swart men enough alike to be brothers; I learned after a while that they actually were brothers, Hjalmar, Garin and Vardo. All three were well over six feet, and Hjalmar stood head and shoulders over his brothers, whom I never learned to tell apart. The fourth man, a redhead, was dressed rather better than the others and introduced as Lerrys Ridenow—the double name indicating high Darkovan aristocracy. He looked muscular and agile enough, but his hands were suspiciously well-kept for a mountain man, and I wondered how much experience he’d had.

  The fifth man shook hands with me, speaking to Kendricks and Forth as if they were old friends. “Don’t I know you from someplace, Jason?”

  He looked Darkovan, and wore Darkovan clothes, but Forth had forewarned me, and attack seemed the best defense. “Aren’t you Terran?”

  “My father was,” he said, and I understood; a situation not exactly uncommon, but ticklish on a planet like Darkover. I said carelessly, “I may have seen you around the HQ. I can’t place you, though.”

  “My name’s Rafe Scott. I thought I knew most of the professional guides on Darkover, but I admit I don’t get into the Hellers much,” he confessed. “Which route are we going to take?”

  I found myself drawn into the middle of the group of men, accepting one of the small sweetish Darkovan cigarettes, looking over the plan somebody had scribbled down on the top of a packing case. I borrowed a pencil from Rafe and bent over the case, sketching out a rough map of the terrain I remembered so well from boyhood. I might be bewildered about blood fractions, but when it came to climbing I knew what I was doing. Rafe and Lerrys and the Darkovan brothers crowded behind me to look over the sketch, and Lerrys put a long fingernail on the route I’d indicated.

  “Your elevation’s pretty bad here,” he said diffidently, “and on the ’Narr campaign the trailmen attacked us here, and it was bad fighting along those ledges.”

  I looked at him with new respect; dainty hands or not, he evidently knew the country. Kendricks patted the blaster on his hip and said grimly, “But this isn’t the ’Narr campaign. I’d like to see any trailmen attack us while I have this.”

  “But you’re not going to have it,” said a voice behind us, a crisp authoritative voice. “Take off that gun, man!”

  Kendricks and I whirled together, to see the speaker; a tall young Darkovan, still standing in the shadows. The newcomer spoke to me directly:

  “I’m told you are Terran, but that you understand the trailmen. Surely you don’t intend to carry fission or fusion weapons against them?”

  And I suddenly realized that we were in Darkovan territory now, and that we must reckon with the Darkovan horror of guns or of any weapon which reaches beyond the arm’s-length of the man who wields it. A simple heat-gun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a super-cobalt planetbuster.

  Kendricks protested, “We can’t travel unarmed through trailmen country! We’re apt to meet hostile bands of the creatures—and they’re nasty with those long knives they carry!”

  The stranger said calmly, “I’ve no objection to you, or anyone else, carrying a knife for self-defense.”

  “A knife?” Kendricks drew breath to roar. “Listen, you bug-eyed son-of-a—who do you think you are, anyway?”

  The Darkovans muttered. The man in the shadows said, “Regis Hastur.”

  Kendricks stared pop-eyed. My own eyes could have popped, but I decided it was time for me to take charge, if I were ever going to.

  I rapped, “All right, this is my show. Buck, give me the gun.”

  He looked wrathfully at me for a space of seconds, while I wondered what I’d do if he didn’t. Then, slowly, he unbuckled the straps and handed it to me, butt first.

  I’d never realized quite how undressed a Spaceforce man looked without his blaster. I balanced it on my palm for a minute while Regis Hastur came out of the shadows. He was tall, and had the reddish hair and fair skin of Darkovan aristocracy, and on his face was some indefinable stamp—arrogance, perhaps, or the consciousness that the Hasturs had ruled this world for centuries long before the Terrans brought ships and trade and the universe to their doors. He was looking at me as if he approved of me, and that was one step worse than the former situation.

  So, using the respectful Darkovan idiom of speaking to a superior (which he was) but keeping my voice hard, I said, “There’s just one leader on any trek, Lord Hastur. On this one, I’m it. If you want to discuss whether or not we carry guns, I suggest you discuss it with me in private—and let me give the orders.”

  One of the Darkovans gasped. I knew I could have been mobbed. But with a mixed bag of men, I had to grab leadership quick or be relegated to nowhere. I didn’t give Regis Hastur a chance to answer that, either; I said, “Come back here. I want to talk to you anyway.”

  He came, and I remembered to breathe. I led the way to a fairly deserted corner of the immense place, faced him and demanded, “As for you—what are you doing here? You’re not intending to cross the mountains with us?”

  He met my scowl levelly. “I certainly am.”

  I groaned. “Why? You’re the Regent’s grandson. Important people don’t take on this kind of dangerous work. If anything happens to you, it will be my responsibility!” I was going to have enough trouble, I was thinking, without shepherding along one of the most revered Personages on the whole damned planet! I didn’t want anyone around who had to be fawned on, or deferred to, or even listened to.

  He frowned slightly, and I had the unpleasant impression that he knew what I was thinking. “In the first place—it will mean something to the trailmen, won’t it—to have a Hastur with you, suing for this favor?”

  It certainly would. The trailmen paid little enough heed to the ordinary humans, except for considering them fair game for plundering when they came uninvited into trailman country. But they, with all Darkover, revered the Hasturs, and it was a fine point of diplomacy—if the Darkovans sent their most important leader, they might listen to him.

  “In the second place,” Regis Hastur continued, “the Darkovans are my people, and it’s my business to negotiate for them. In the third place, I know the trailmen’s dialect—not
well, but I can speak it a little. And in the fourth, I’ve climbed mountains all my life. Purely as an amateur, but I can assure you I won’t be in the way.”

  There was little enough I could say to that. He seemed to have covered every point—or every point but one, and he added, shrewdly, after a minute, “Don’t worry; I’m perfectly willing to have you take charge. I won’t claim—privilege.”

  I had to be satisfied with that.

  * * * *

  Darkover is a civilized planet with a fairly high standard of living, but it is not a mechanized or a technological culture. The people don’t do much mining, or build factories, and the few which were founded by Terran enterprise never were very successful; outside the Terran Trade City, machinery or modern transportation is almost unknown.

  While the other men checked and loaded supplies and Rafe Scott went out to contact some friends of his and arrange for last-minute details, I sat down with Forth to memorize the medical details I must put so clearly to the trailmen.

  “If we could only have kept your medical knowledge!”

  “Trouble is, being a doctor doesn’t suit my personality,” I said. I felt absurdly light-hearted. Where I sat, I could raise my head and study the panorama of blackish-green foothills which lay beyond Carthon, and search out the stone roadways, like a tiny white ribbon, which we could follow for the first stage of the trip. Forth evidently did not share my enthusiasm.

  “You know, Jason, there is one real danger—”