The World Wreckers

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  And yet-blind? deaf? Or more aware than with all of his ordinary senses because he no longer used them? Not me alone, he knew, as for a tunelessly brief and yet unending instant he blended into the familiar and intense sweetness of Keral transfigured by love (Again, again, I am here with you, beloved-); and then, as if the last garment had been swept away, leaving him wholly naked for the first time in his life, he found himself blending, swiftly and intensely, into the overwhelming life around him.

  He felt, as he had never felt any touch before (although he knew beyond sight that she was at the far end of the garden, lying in Danilo's arms) Linnea's soft lips touch his face; felt yet again the wild sweetness of Keral, so well-known and eternally unfamiliar; sank into a momentary rapport with Jason, as his friend's hands closed violently over the breasts of an unknown girl; and then sank into fierce rapport with Regis (images, blurring even as he sensed them: of crossed swords; the meshing of wrists in the flying grip of aerialists; the violent and intensely sensuous struggle of wrestlers gripped in a hold more ardent than lovers). For an overwhelming and releasing moment, he sensed what it would be to let his own awareness of manhood disappear -had Keral had to face this mingling of grief, joy and humiliation?-as his mind and body melted into that of an unknown girl, and he looked up into Regis' eyes at the very instant of surrender and consummation. Then David was back in his own body, the girl under him soft, pliant, demanding. And there was nothing else . . . and everything else ... for a blind instant . . . forever . . . heat . . . explosion . . . slow subsiding waves . . . stars that spun and whirled inside and outside, and a world slowly darkening into silence.

  Three seconds, or three hours later-none of them ever knew-David surfaced slowly, like coming up from a very deep drive. The girl's soft body was still cradled in his arms, her silken hair blinding his eyes. He stroked it softly and kissed it before brushing it away from his face, raised himself on his elbow, and looked into the startled and smiling face of Desideria. There was a moment of shock and amazement and instantaneous rearrangement of awareness, and then the memory of what had brought them together came back and David laughed. What did it matter? Age, or even sex, were at this moment, and to what they were, irrelevant. He saw the backlash of doubt and regret sweep the old woman's face; he laughed and kissed her and saw the fear dissolve. She said softly, in a whisper, "I have heard it said in old stories; what is done under the four joining moons is the will of the gods and outside what men would wish or desire. But I have never known until this moment what was meant."

  He smiled at her and clasped her hands. All around them, the garden was quiet with the soft murmurs of returning, separate, ordinary awareness. David reached about for his clothes, for it was chilly even in the spring, and felt like a dog who cocks his ears at a sound no man can hear. It was quiet and peaceful in the garden, but a nag of fright and sudden awareness kept jerking on an invisible nerve. He looked around with sudden apprehension, reached out for Conner:

  David? 1 don't know, I don't like it-fireworks . . . for the first time in my life healed and happy . . . never again to drift alone, but even here, here. . . .

  Keral screamed suddenly, a wild cry of mingled terror and joy, as a faint burst of light moved in the garden, and eight or ten tall forms appeared out of the tingling air, tall and pale with silvery floating hair and great grave eyes that seemed to gleam of their own light.. He ran toward them, moving surefooted through the conjoined couples still lying in the grass, and was caught up in embrace after embrace, while David, staring in amazement, recognized and knew who they must be; the surviving chieri, appeared-as legend told man that they could appear-out of nothingness, come to see their youngest and their beloved in his moment of happiness and returning of life and hope. All around them, the workings of the ordinary world of night were beginning to return, and stirrings of wonder, of joy and amusement, and laughing chagrin, and a shared purpose too deep and real for ordinary words were returning. David knew, at too deep a level for speech (was it Regis who had cast the thought into the invisible net?), that nothing would ever again wholly separate the telepaths of Darkover; they might have separate purposes on the surface, but a potential lost or mislaid for years had returned; and as the chieri had been before them, they were a people at one with themselves and each other.

  Keral was still laughing and murmuring with the .joyousness of reunion. And yet beneath it all, an undercurrent of fear was beginning to run, like a palpable smell of danger. David felt the hairs on his body bristle. Danilo, putting Linnea gently aside, reached like a cat for his sword; no visible danger, pure instinct. Conner sprang to his feet.

  And then, unmistakable, it was Rondo who yelled-or were there words?-a great cry of outrage and anguish:

  No! I told you their plans because I wanted to get free of this world, but they have never harmed me, and I want no part in murder-

  And a running figure which suddenly froze and rose upward, upward, physically upward through the thickening air, like a flying demon, surrounded with a glare of growing light. He seized something with a strange twisting gesture, in mid-air, and body and glowing thing rocketed upward, upward. . . .

  In mid-air, thousands of feet above the castle, it burst, like a great shower of fireworks; there was a silent scream of unbelievable pain and dying anguish and there was a ripped out silence, a great gaping toothache hole in the world where Rondo's thoughts and voice and mind had been. And then came the sound of the explosion, muffled by distance, far out in space and harmless, but still it rocked the castle, reverberated-and died away.

  And then, in the midst of the chieri and surrounded by their light, stood a woman, wearing drab Empire clothes, struggling against the invisible force that had thrust her out of concealment and into the light; the look of sated and triumphant rage on her face giving way to fear, amazement, and disbelief.

  I thought you were all dead. I did not know any of you had survived to return to this world, even to die.

  "No." The voice of the eldest of the chieri, a tall and beautiful woman, ageless and beyond everything in man, was like a reverberation in the world. "We live, although not for long. But we cannot give death for death; we must give life for death-"

  "Her name is Andrea," said the young, red-haired Free Amazon, rising from the garden darkness, "and I knew she would have destroyed us if she could, but I did not know-"

  "No," said the old chieri again, with infinite grief and gentleness, speaking directly to Andrea. "We know you, even over these many, many turns of the years, Narzain-ye kui, child of the Yellow Forest, who abandoned us in despair during the years of search. We mourned you as one long, long dead, beloved. . . ."

  The face of the woman was drawn with agony and grief. "And I bore a child on one of the outer worlds, to a stranger whose name I never knew, or face I never saw-a child conceived in madness and thrown out to die, in madness, thinking you all dead and gone-"

  "The long, long years of madness," Keral whispered, and took Andrea's face between his hands in infinite tenderness. She opened her spasmodically closed eyes and looked up at him, .seeing the glow of heightened beauty, the infinite power which lay within Keral, the height of potential life. Keral said quietly:

  "All is not ended. I live-and you see what has happened to me. Perhaps even the child you bore lives somewhere; we are hard to kill-" and his eyes briefly sought for Missy in the crowd, in speculation which could be read on the clear features. "But our race lives, Andrea, in these people; I knew even as a babe that our blood survived in them. And as you see-"Keral's unearthly beauty seemed to shimmer, and for the first (and only) time, David perceived Keral for an instant as the exquisite girl he had at first thought Keral and in instantaneous recognition knew the truth; that the chieri showed the height of the Change, and full feminine awareness (Missy had only mimicked it) in pregnancy. And now he understood Keral's madness of joy, which had swept them all away-and saved them all; and probably saved a world as well.

  And then, with trained m
edical awareness, forgetting that he was still half-naked, he leaped forward, catching Andrea in his arms as the aging chieri woman crumpled senseless to the ground.

  Epilogue:

  the woman who for centuries had called herself Andrea Closson sat on a high balcony in the Comyn Castle at Thendara, looking out over green and faraway hills. She knew, beyond sight, what was happening in those hills. The point of no return had been very nearly reached; and yet, as she told herself before, the world could be saved, but it had demanded resources which were not available on Darkover:

  Except for herself.

  She had not spared herself. Every scrap of the talent which she had used, for two hundred years, in learning how to wreck worlds, had been thrown into the struggle to save one; and every cent of the enormous fortune it had made her had been placed at the disposal of those who were struggling on every front to return Darkover to itself. This world was her own, and had been miraculously returned to her when she knew that a handful of her people survived and that their blood survived in the very Darkovan telepaths she had despised. And now, as they awaited the birth of Keral's child, she knew it would remain, even though not a pure line.

  The chieri might not survive. This alone could not return her race to strength and survival. They had, indeed, reached the point of no return. It was certain that Missy would never bear a child; she had been too deeply damaged and blunted in the hundreds of years of struggle for survival, abandoned. Andrea faced her own guilt, but it was as if it had happened to someone else; what is done in madness cannot be remembered in sanity without worse madness. Still, Keral lived, and Keral's child would live, bringing new vigor and new powers to the telepath race.

  "And that's not all," said David, coming out on the balcony. He had a strange ability to follow Andrea's thoughts, and she had grown to love him in her own strange and hidden way. Jason, Regis and Linnea were with him, and David said, "The telepaths here, at least, will not die out. Do you realize that-how many is it, Jason?"

  "One hundred and one," Jason said, "that's women of the Telepath Council-pregnant. And at least nineteen of them with twins and three with triplets. That at least ensures a flourishing younger generation." He looked at Linnea, who laughed and took Regis' hand. She was very near her own time now, heavily pregnant but as beautiful as ever.

  "We are going to work with the Empire," Regis said; "It was decided in council; Darkovans cannot cut themselves entirely off from a galactic civilization. We will train telepaths for spaceship communication. We know, now, that contact with telepaths will arouse latent telepathy in those who don't seem to have it. I expect, from Darkover, it will spread out all through the known galaxy. And those who are born with it won't go insane, so that in a few more generations there will be a sizable leaven of telepaths on all planets; and we will bring them here, and train them to use their powers in sanity and happiness. And in return for this we have a pledge that Darkover will remain always the world we know, and love, and need for our continuing sanity and nourishment; never just another world in a chain of identical worlds."

  David listened a moment, as if to an invisible voice; went away. Linnea, seeming to listen also, smiled and pressed Regis' hand. "It won't be long for me, either, now," she said.

  Regis came and sat beside Andrea. She had aged greatly in the long months of struggle in the woods and mountains, working with close directions to save the ruined world; explicit instructions on how to restore soil to life, which trees to plant for the swiftest ground cover against erosion, what to do in every niche of the complex ecology. But her lined face was peaceful and gentle, and again she looked like a chieri, inspiring the old awe and love. He said: "What will you do now-" He hesitated, then called her by her chieri name, and she smiled:

  "I await only the birth of Keral's child; then I will return to my own forest with my people, for the few last cuere allotted to me. But I will lay down my years content, knowing that if my own leaves fall, there will be new buds in the spring I will never see."

  Regis reached out to touch her hand, and she clasped it, quietly. They sat there, looking out over the mists on the hills.

  Linnea said, "You have given so much-"

  Andrea smiled. "I do not need a fortune now."

  "I wish you had come back before," Regis said, wrung with honest grief.

  "Perhaps it would have been too soon," Andrea's calm voice was speculative. "In any case, I knew no longer where my own world lay. . . ."

  "Those who hired you, what will they do? When Dark-over does not fall ripe to their hands?" "What can they do? To trap me, or even to claim my bond, they would have to admit they hired me, and world-wrecking is illegal. I think they will just admit their defeat. But now the Terran Empire knows exactly how they work; they will have a harder time wrecking other worlds."

  There was a stir behind them, and Keral, pale and lovely, with David just behind, came out on the balcony. They came straight to Andrea, and Keral turned, took a small squirming thing from David's arms, and laid it in Andrea's. Keral murmured, "Not for love, but because it means more to you than any other; look here and see a world reborn."

  Andrea reached out and touched Keral's soft hair. "Yes," she said in a whisper, "for love."

  David drew Keral away, and they stood clasped close, looking into the green world. They were both still bemused, not needing to look to see: still, the tiny, infinitely strange and beautiful scrap of a baby, with red-headed fuzz; the first of a second chain of telepaths with chieri blood. And it was their own stake in a newborn world. This had begun with a child in Keral's arms, the complex train of emotions and experiences, and David thought they would always have a debt to Melora and her child. Over Keral's shoulder he met Regis' eyes and smiled.

  Andrea lay back, closing her eyes and yet seeing, without sight, a green and growing world, with life springing up from the soil, leaves falling from the trees and returning in endless cycle, rivers, valleys, mountains, surging with life, and beyond them the endless life of the silent forests of Dark-over under the moon. Far away, like a distant song, she heard music, the music of her people in the forests of falling leaves, where they awaited her coming. Time would pass over them, and they would not return, but fall like leaves; but while Darkover lived they would never wholly die, and after them the very Empire would be seasoned with their memory, with their beauty and the eternal gift of bridging the gap between man and mankind; the gift that was love. She smiled with her eyes closed, feeling the strong Me and already budding sensitivity of the child in her arms; hearing the distant music, which rose and fell like wind in the leaves, and faded quietly into silence, like a falling breeze in the forest.

  Not until Keral's child began to stir and fret and kick in her cold arms did any of the others realize that Andrea Closson, chieri, child of the Yellow Forest, worldwrecker and redeemer, had come home only to die.