A World Divided (33 page)

“You don’t know what you’re monkeying with.”

“And I won’t, unless you tell me.”

“Stubborn damned fool,” Ragan said. “Well, it’s your neck. What do you expect
me
to do? And what’s in it for me?”

Now Kerwin felt on safer ground. He would have distrusted it if the shrewd Darkovan had offered to help him.

“Damned if I know, but there must be something you want from me, or you wouldn’t have spent so much time hanging around waiting for me to ask you questions. Money? You know how much a Communications man makes with the Empire. Enough to live on, but no big rake-offs. I expect—” his mouth twisted—“that you’ll be expecting some pickings whatever happens. And that you have a good reason to expect them. Start with this.” He picked up the matrix crystal on its chain. “How do I find out about it?”

Ragan shook his head. “I gave you the best advice I could; I’m not going to get mixed up in that part of it. If you have to know more, there are licensed matrix mechanics, even in the Terran Zone. They can’t do much. But they can give you answers. I still say keep out of it. Get as far away as you can. You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re monkeying with.”

Of all of this Kerwin had fastened only on the strange knowledge that there were licensed matrix mechanics. “I thought it was this big secret the Terrans didn’t know anything about!”

“I told you; they trade for the little ones. Like mine. And the small ones, almost anybody can learn to handle. The way I do. A few tricks.”

“What does a matrix mechanic do?”

Ragan shrugged. “Say you have legal papers you want to lock up, and you don’t even feel safe about trusting them to a banker; you buy one of the smaller matrixes—if you can afford it, they’re not cheap, even the tiny ones—and get the mechanic to key it to your personal pattern; your own brainwaves, like a fingerprint. Then you decide shut that box, and the matrix will seal those edges so that nothing in the world, not a sledgehammer or a nuclear explosion, will ever open them again; nothing except your own personal decision, your own mental ‘Open Sesame.’ You think
Open
at it, and it opens. No combination to remember, no secret bank-account number, nothing.”

Kerwin whistled. “What a gadget! Come to think of it, I can imagine some pretty dangerous uses for that kind of thing.”

“Right,” Ragan said drily. “I don’t know a lot of Darkovan history, but the Darkovans aren’t letting any of the bigger matrixes out of their hands. Even with the little ones you can do some fairly nasty tricks, even though they can’t handle more than the smallest measure of energy. Suppose, for instance, you have a business rival who owns some sensitive machinery. You concentrate on your crystal—even a little one like mine—and raise the heat in a thermostat, say, three degrees Centigrade, and melt the most important circuits. You want to put your competitor out of business? You hire an unscrupulous matrix mechanic to sabotage him, mess up his electrical equipment, short out his circuits, and you can still prove you never went near the place. I think they’re scared green, up at HQ, that the Darkovans will play some trick with matrixes—wipe the memory banks of their computers, mess up the navigational control center of their starships. The Darkovans have no reason to do such a thing. But the very fact that that kind of technology exists, indicates to the Terrans that they ought to know how it works and how to guard against it.” Again he grinned, wryly. “That’s why I say they’d probably give you a small fortune, or let you write your own ticket, if you turned that one of yours over to them. It’s the biggest one I ever saw.”

Kerwin recalled fragmentary memories; a Terran starship’s stewardess, fumbling at the shirt of a drugged and screaming child. “So tell me, how the hell did
I
get one that size?”

Ragan shrugged. “Kerwin, my friend, if I knew the answer to that, I’d go to the Terran Zone and let them beg me to write
my
own ticket. I’m no fortuneteller”

Kerwin thought about that for a minute. He said, “Maybe a fortuneteller or something like it is what I need. Well, I’ve heard there are telepaths and psychics all over Darkover.”

“You don’t know what you’re playing around with,” Ragan said, “but if you’re bound and determined to risk it, I know a woman, down in the Old Town. She used to be—well, no matter. If anybody can tell you, she can. Give her this.” He fumbled in his pocket for a bit of paper, scribbled briefly on it. “I’ve got contacts in the Darkovan Zone; it’s how I make my living. I warn you; it’ll cost you plenty. She’ll be risking something and she’ll make you pay for it.”

“And you?”

Ragan’s brief, dry chuckle sounded loud. “For a name and an address? Hell, you bought me a drink, and maybe I’ve got a score to settle with another redhead or two. Good luck,
Tallo
.” He raised his hand and Jeff watched him go, wondering. What was he being steered into? He studied the address, realizing that it was in the most unsavory part of Thendara, in the Old Town, the haunt of thieves and pimps and worse. He wasn’t anxious to go there in Terran uniform. He wasn’t anxious to go there at all. Even as a kid, he’d known better.

In the end he made cautious inquiries about matrix mechanics in the better part of town and found out that they operated quite openly; he found the names of three licensed and bonded ones in the most respectable part of the city, and chose one at random.

It lay in a district of wide, high houses, with walls of translucent building stone; here and there he saw a park, a public building of some sort, a walled compound bearing a small placard saying it was the Guild House of the Order of Renunciates—he wondered if that was something like a convent or monastery—and the streets were wide and well-kept without paving stones. In an empty square men were working on an unfinished building whose walls rose gaunt, half completed; men laying stones with mortar, sawing, hammering. In the next street was a market where shawled women bargained for food, small children clinging to their skirts, or sat in little clusters at a stall selling fried fish and deep-fried sweet cakes and mushrooms. The very commonplace minutiae of everyday life were reassuring; women gossiping, children playing catch-the-monkey in and out of the stalls and teasing their mothers for sweets or fried mushrooms. They called this culture
barbarian
, Jeff thought resentfully, because they had no complicated transit or technology and felt no need for it. They had no rocket-cars, no great roadways and skyscrapers, no spaceports; but they had no steel factories, or stinking chemical refineries, none of what some Terran writer had called “dark Satanic mills,” no dark mines filled with slave labor or robot machinery. Kerwin chuckled dryly to himself; he was romanticizing. Looking at a livery stable where horses were being packed and saddled, he reflected that shoveling horse manure on a morning when the snow lay three feet deep wasn’t all that much better than working in a mill or a mine, either.

He located the address he was looking for and was admitted by a quietly dressed woman, who showed him into an enclosed room, a kind of study hung with pale draperies.
Insulating draperies,
Jeff found himself thinking, and raised a mental eyebrow at himself. What the hell! A woman and a man came toward him; they were tall and stately, fair-skinned with grey eyes and an air of quiet authority and poise. But they both seemed startled, almost awed.

“
Vai dom
,” said the man, “you lend us grace. How may we serve you?”

But before Kerwin could answer the woman curled her lip in swift disdain. “
Terranan,
” she said with flat hostility. “What do you want?”

The man’s face mirrored the change in hers. They were enough alike to be brother and sister and Kerwin noted in the fluid light that although both were dark of hair and grey-eyed, there were pale reddish glints, hardly noticeable, in the hair of both. But they had nothing like the red hair and aristocratic bearing of the three redheads in the Sky Harbor Hotel that night.

He said, “I want information about this,” and extended the matrix to them. The woman frowned, motioned it away, went to a bench and picked up a length of something sparkling, like a silk shot with metallic or crystalline glitter. She shrouded her hand carefully with the stuff, and as she returned and carefully picked up the matrix out of his hand so that her bare hands did not touch it, Kerwin was struck with a brief, painful
déjà vu.

She scanned it briefly, the man looking over her shoulder. Then the man said, with sharp hostility, “Where did you get this? Did you steal it?”

Kerwin knew perfectly well that the accusation did not have quite the force it would have had in the Terran Zone; just the same it made him angry. He said, “No, damn it. I have had it ever since I can remember, and I don’t know how I came by it. Can you tell me what it is or where it came from?”

He saw them exchange a glance. Then the woman shrugged and sat down at a small desk, the matrix in her hand. She examined it carefully with a hand lens, her face thoughtful and withdrawn. Before the desk was a heavy glass plate, opaque, dark, with small lights glittering deep inside the glass; the woman made another of those familiar-strange gestures and lights began to wink on and off inside the glass with a hypnotic effect. Kerwin watched, still in the grip of the
déjà vu
thinking,
I have seen this before.

The woman said, her back to Kerwin, “It is not on the main monitor screen.”

The man bent over her, wrapped his hand in a fold of the insulating stuff, and touched the crystal. Then he looked at the woman, startled, and said, “Do you suppose he knows what he has here?”

“Not a chance,” the woman said. “He is from off-planet; how would he know?”

“Is he a spy sent to draw us out?”

“No; he is ignorant, I sense it. But we cannot afford to risk it; too many have died who were touched even by the shadow of the Forbidden Tower. Get rid of him.”

Kerwin wondered with a little annoyance if they were going to keep talking right past him Then, in shock, he realized that they were not speaking the dialect of Thendara, nor even the pure
casta
of the mountains. They were speaking that language whose form he somehow knew without being able to understand consciously a single syllable.

The woman raised her head and said to the man, “Give him a chance. Perhaps he is really altogether ignorant and he could be in danger.” Then she said to Kerwin in the language of the spaceport, “Can you tell me anything about how you came by this crystal?”

Kerwin said slowly, “I think it was my mother’s. I don’t know who she was.” Then, hesitantly, aware that it was relevant, he repeated the words he had heard the night he was struck down in the Old Town.

“Say to the son of the barbarian that he shall come no more to the plains of Arilinn, that the Golden Bell is avenged. ...”

The woman suddenly shuddered; he saw her perfect poise split and crack. Hastily she stood up and the man extended the crystal to Kerwin as if their movements were somehow synchronized.

“It is not for us to meddle in the affairs of the
vai leroni
,” she said flatly. “We can tell you nothing.”

Kerwin said, shocked, “But—you know something—you can’t—”

The man shook his head, his face blank and unreadable.
Why do I feel as if I ought to be able to know what he was thinking?
Kerwin wondered.

“Go,
Terranan.
We know nothing.”

“What are the
vai leroni
? What—”

But the two faces, so alike, distant and arrogant, were closed and impassive; and behind the impassivity, frightened; Kerwin knew it.

“It is not for us.”

Kerwin felt as if he would explode with frustration. He put out his hand in a futile, pleading gesture, and the man stepped back, avoiding the touch, the woman withdrawing fastidiously.

“But, my God, you can’t leave it like that, if you know something—you have to tell me—”

The woman’s face softened slightly. “This much, I will say; I thought
that
—” she indicated the crystal, “had been destroyed when—when the Golden Bell was broken. Since they saw fit to leave it with you, they may some day see fit to give you an explanation. But if I were you, I would not wait for it. You—”

“
Latti
!” The man touched her arm. “Leave it! Go,” he added to Kerwin, “you are not welcome here. Not in our house, not in our city, not on our world. We have no quarrel with you; but you bring danger on us even with your shadow. Go.” And from that, there was no appeal. Kerwin went.

Somehow he had halfway expected this. Another door slammed in his face; like the computer, coded so he could not read the records of his own birth. But he could not drop it here, even though he wanted to, even though he was beginning to be frightened.

He took the precaution of covering his hair; and although he didn’t wear the Darkovan cloak, he carefully took off all the insignia of the Service, so that when he went into the Old Town there was nothing that could identify him with the spaceport people.

The address was in a crumbling slum; there was no bell, and after he knocked he stood waiting a long time. He had half resolved to turn away again when the door opened and a woman stood there, holding to the doorframe with an unsteady hand.

She was small and middle-aged, clad in nondescript shawls and bundled skirts, not quite rags and not really dirty, but she gave a general impression of unkempt slovenliness. She looked at Kerwin with dreary indifference; it seemed to him that she focused her eyes with difficulty.

“Do you want something?” she asked, not caring.

“A man named Ragan sent me,” he said, and handed her the scribbled slip. “He said you were a matrix technician.”