The Planet Savers, Marion Zimmer Bradley [novels for beginners .TXT] 📗

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."[102]

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[103] 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—"

"Do you think I care about danger? Or are you afraid I'll turn—foolhardy?"

"Not exactly. It's not a physical danger, Jason. It's an emotional—or rather an intellectual danger."

"Hell, don't you know any language but that psycho double-talk?"

"Let me finish, Jason. Jay Allison may have been repressed, overcontrolled, but you are seriously impulsive. You lack a balance-wheel, if I could put it that way. And if you run too many risks, your buried alter-ego may come to the surface and take over in sheer self-preservation."

"In other words," I said, laughing loudly, "if I scare that Allison stuffed-shirt he may start stirring in his grave?"

Forth coughed and smothered a laugh and said that was one way of putting it. I clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder and said, "Forget it, sir. I promise to be godly, sober and industrious—but is there any law against enjoying what I'm doing?"

Somebody burst out of the[104] warehouse-palace place, and shouted at me. "Jason? The guide is here," and I stood up, giving Forth a final grin. "Don't you worry. Jay Allison's good riddance," I said, and went back to meet the other guide they had chosen.

And I almost backed out when I saw the guide. For the guide was a woman.

She was small for a Darkovan girl, and narrowly built, the sort of body that could have been called boyish or coltish but certainly not, at first glance, feminine. Close-cut curls, blue-black and wispy, cast the faintest of shadows over a squarish sunburnt face, and her eyes were so thickly rimmed with heavy dark lashes that I could not guess their color. Her nose was snubbed and might have looked whimsical and was instead oddly arrogant. Her mouth was wide, and her chin round, and altogether I dismissed her as not at all a pretty woman.

She held up her palm and said rather sullenly, "Kyla-Raineach, free Amazon, licensed guide."

I acknowledged the gesture with a nod, scowling. The guild of free Amazons entered virtually every masculine field, but that of mountain guide seemed somewhat bizarre even for an Amazon. She seemed wiry and agile enough, her body, under the heavy blanket-like clothing, almost as lean of hip and flat of breast as my own; only the slender long legs were unequivocally feminine.

The other men were checking and loading supplies; I noted from the corner of my eye that Regis Hastur was taking his turn heaving bundles with the rest. I sat down on some still-undisturbed sacks, and motioned her to sit.

"You've had trail experience? We're going into the Hellers through Dammerung, and that's rough going even for professionals."

She said in a flat expressionless voice, "I was with the Terran Mapping expedition to the South Polar ridge last year."

"Ever been in the Hellers? If anything happened to me, could you lead the expedition safely back to Carthon?"

She looked down at her stubby fingers. "I'm sure I could," she said finally, and started to rise. "Is that all?"

"One thing more—" I gestured to her to stay put. "Kyla, you'll be one woman among eight men—"

The snubbed nose wrinkled up; "I don't expect you to crawl into my blankets, if that's what you mean. It's not in my contract—I hope!"

I felt my face burning. Damn the girl! "It's not in mine, anyway," I snapped, "but I can't answer for seven other men, most of them mountain roughnecks!" Even as I said it I wondered why I bothered; certainly a free Amazon could defend her own virtue, or not, if she wanted to, without any help from me. I[105] had to excuse myself by adding, "In either case you'll be a disturbing element—I don't want fights, either!"

She made a little low-pitched sound of amusement. "There's safety in numbers, and—are you familiar with the physiological effect of high altitudes on men acclimated to low ones?" Suddenly she threw back her head and the hidden sound became free and merry laughter. "Jason, I'm a free Amazon, and that means—no, I'm not neutered, though some of us are. But you have my word, I won't create any trouble of any recognizably female variety." She stood up. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to check the mountain equipment."

Her eyes were still laughing at me, but curiously I didn't mind at all. There was a refreshing element in her manner.

We started that night, a curiously lopsided little caravan. The pack animals were loaded into one truck and didn't like it. We had another stripped-down truck which carried supplies. The ancient stone roads, rutted and gullied here and there with the flood-waters and silt of decades, had not been planned for any travel other than the feet of men or beasts. We passed tiny villages and isolated country estates, and a few of the solitary towers where the matrix mechanics worked alone with the secret sciences of Darkover, towers of glareless stone which sometimes shone like blue beacons in the dark.

Kendricks drove the truck which carried the animals, and was amused by it. Rafe and I took turns driving the other truck, sharing the wide front seat with Regis Hastur and the girl Kyla, while the other men found seats between crates and sacks in the back. Once while Rafe was at the wheel and the girl dozing with her coat over her face to shut out the fierce sun, Regis asked me, "What are the trailcities like?"

I tried to tell him, but I've never been good at boiling things down into descriptions, and when he found I was not disposed to talk, he fell silent and I was free to drowse over what I knew of the trailmen and their world.

Nature seems to have a sameness on all inhabited worlds, tending toward the economy and simplicity of the human form. The upright carriage, freeing the hands, the opposable thumb, the color-sensitivity of retinal rods and cones, the development of language and of lengthy parental nurture—these things seem to be indispensable to the growth of civilization, and in the end they spell human. Except for minor variations depending on climate or foodstuff, the inhabitant of Megaera or Darkover is indistinguishable from the Terran or Sirian; differences are mainly cultural, and sometimes an isolated culture will mutate in a strange direction or remain,[106] atavists, somewhere halfway to the summit of the ladder of evolution—which, at least on the known planets, still reckons homo sapiens as the most complex of nature's forms.

The trailmen were a pausing-place which had proved tenacious. When the mainstream of evolution on Darkover left the trees to struggle for existence on the ground, a few remained behind. Evolution did not cease for them, but evolved homo arborens; nocturnal, nystalopic humanoids who lived out their lives in the extensive forests.

The truck bumped over the bad, rutted roads. The wind was chilly—the truck, a mere conveyance for hauling, had no such refinements of luxury as windows. I jolted awake—what nonsense had I been thinking? Vague ideas about evolution swirled in my brain like burst bubbles—the trailmen? They were just the trailmen, who could explain them? Jay Allison, maybe? Rafe turned his head and asked, "Where do we pull up for the night? It's getting dark, and we have all this gear to sort!" I roused myself, and took over the business of the expedition again.

But when the trucks had been parked and a tent pitched and the pack animals unloaded and hobbled, and a start made at getting the gear together—when all this had been done I lay awake, listening to Kendricks' heavy snoring, but myself afraid to sleep. Dozing in the truck, an odd lapse of consciousness had come over me ... myself yet not myself, drowsing over thoughts I did not recognize as my own. If I slept, who would I be when I woke?

We had made our camp in the bend of an enormous river, wide and shallow and unbridged; the river Kadarin, traditionally a point of no return for humans on Darkover. The river is fed by ocean tides and we would have to wait for low water to cross. Beyond the river lay thick forests, and beyond the forests the slopes of the Hellers, rising upward and upward; and their every fold and every valley was filled to the brim with forest, and in the forests lived the trailmen.

But though all this country was thickly populated with outlying colonies and nests, it would be no use to bargain with any of them; we must deal with the Old One of the North Nest, where I had spent so many of my boyhood years.

From time immemorial, the trailmen—usually inoffensive—had kept strict boundaries