A World Divided (36 page)

Clear, unmistakable, the negative warning in his mind. Puzzled, he dropped his hand and let the cloak be. He emerged from the elevator into a narrow walkway and paused to orient himself; this part of the building was not familiar to him. There was a door at the end of the walkway; he pushed it open and emerged into a crowded lobby. What looked like a whole shift of maintenance workers in uniform was milling around, getting ready to go off duty. And a large group of Darkovans in their colorful dress and long cloaks were making their way through the crowd toward the outer door and the gates. Kerwin, at first taken aback by the crowd, realized quickly that no one was paying the slightest attention to him. Slowly, unobtrusively, he made his way through the crowd, and managed to join the group of Darkovans. None of them took the slightest notice of him. He supposed they were some formal delegation from the city, one of the committees that helped administer the Trade City. They formed a random stream in the crowd, going in their own special direction, and Kerwin, at the edge of the group, streamed along with them, into the street, outside the HQ, through the gateway that led out of the enclosure. The Spaceforce guards there gave them, and Kerwin, only the most cursory of glances.

Outside the gate the group of Darkovans began to break up into twos and threes, talking, lingering. One of the men gave Kerwin a polite look of non-recognition and inquiry. Kerwin murmured a formal phrase, turned quickly and walked at random into a side street.

 

The Old Town was already shadowed with dimness. The wind blew chill, and Kerwin shivered a little in the warm cloak. Where was he going, anyhow?

He hesitated at the corner of the street where, once in a restaurant, he had faced Ragan down. Should he seek out the place and try and see if the little man could be useful to him?

Again the clear, unmistakable
no
from that inner mentor. Kerwin wondered if he was imagining things, rationalizing. Well, it didn’t matter much, one way or the other, and it had gotten him out of the HQ; so whatever the hunch he was riding, he’d stay with it a while. He looked back at the HQ building, already half wiped out in the thickening mist, then tuned his back on it and it was like the slamming of a mental door. That was the end of that. He had cut himself adrift and he would not look back again.

A curious peace seemed to descend over him with this decision. He turned his back on the known streets and began to walk quickly away from the Trade City area.

He had never come quite so far into the Old Town, even on that day he sought out the old matrix mechanic, the day that had ended with her death. Down here the buildings were old, built of that heavy translucent stone, chill against the blowing wind. At this hour there were few people in the streets; now and then a solitary walker, a workman in one of the cheap imported climbing jackets, walked head down against the wind; once a woman carried in a curtained sedan chair on the shoulders of four men; once, moving noiselessly in the lee of the building, a silver-mantled, gliding nonhuman regarded him with uninvolved malice.

A group of street gamins in ragged smocks, barefoot, moved toward him as if to pester him for alms; suddenly they drew back, whispered to each other, and ran off. Was it the ceremonial cloak, the red hair they could see beneath the hood?

The swift mist was thickening; now snow began to fall, soft thick heavy flakes; and Kerwin became quickly aware that he was hopelessly lost in the unfamiliar streets. He had been walking almost at random, turning corners on impulse, with that strange, almost dreamish sensation that it didn’t matter which way he went. Now, in a great and open square, so unfamiliar that he had not the slightest idea how far he had come, he stopped, shaking his head, coming up to normal consciousness.

Dazed, he looked around. Maybe he should try and get back to the HQ, take whatever punishment was coming. No. That way lay exile. He had already settled that. But the curious hunch that had been guiding him all this way seemed to be running out, and now it deserted him entirely. He stood staring this way and that, wiping snowflakes from his eyes and trying to decide which way he should go. Down one side of the square there was a row of little shops, all fast-shuttered against the night. Kerwin mopped his wet face with a wet sleeve, staring through the thick snow at a solitary house; a mansion, really, the town house of some nobleman. Inside there were lights, and he could see, through the translucent wall, dark blurred forms. Drawn almost magnetically to the lights, Kerwin crossed the square and stood just outside the half-open gate. Inside was a flight of shallow steps, which led to the invisible pull of that door.

He told himself that was madness; but his steps carried him on, automatically, toward the gate. He put a hand on it, and when nothing happened, he opened it and went through and stood on the lower step. And there he stopped, sanity and madness fighting in him, and the worst part of it was, Kerwin wasn’t quite sure which was which.

You’re being an awful God-damned fool, Jefferson Andrew Kerwin. Get out—just turn right around and get the hell out of here before you get yourself into something you
really
can’t handle. Not just something predictable like being slugged and rolled in an alley.

Step by slow step, he went up the sleet-slipperied steps toward the lighted doorway.
Two late to turn back now.
He grasped the handle, noticing peripherally the design, in the shape of a phoenix. He twisted it slowly, and the door opened and Kerwin stepped inside.

 

Miles away, in the Terran Zone, a man had gone to a communicator and requested a specially coded priority circuit to speak with the Legate.

“Your bird’s flown,” he said.

The Legate’s face on the screen was composed and smug.

“I thought so. Push hard enough and they’d have to make a move. I knew they wouldn’t let us deport him.”

“You sound awfully sure, sir. He sounds like an independent cuss. Maybe he just walked off on his own; went over the wall. He wouldn’t be the first. Not even the first one named Kerwin.”

The Legate shrugged. “We’ll soon find out.”

“You want him tailed any further, then?”

The answer was immediate. “No! Hell, no! These people are nobody’s fools! In the state he was in he might not have spotted a tail; it’s for damn sure
they
would. Let him go; no strings. It’s their move. Now—we wait.”

“We’ve been doing that for more than twenty years,” the man grumbled.

“We’ll wait twenty more if we have to. But the catalyst’s working now; somehow I don’t think it will be that long. Wait and see.”

The screen went blank. After a while the Legate pushed another button and hit a special access code marked KERWIN.

He looked satisfied.

Kerwin stood blinking against the warmth and light of the spacious hallway. He mopped snow from his face again, and for a moment all he could hear was the wind and snow outside, slapping against the closed door. Then a bright tinkle of laughter broke the silence.

“Elorie has won,” said a light, girlish voice, somehow familiar to him. “I told you so.”

A thick velvet curtain parted, just before him, and a girl stood there, a slender young woman with red hair in a green dress with a high collar, and a pixie-pretty face. She was laughing at him. Behind her two man came through the curtains, and Kerwin wondered if he had somehow wandered into a daydream—or nightmare. For they were the three redheads from the Sky Harbor Hotel; the pretty woman was Taniquel, and behind her, the feline and arrogant Auster, the thickset, urbane man who had introduced himself as Kennard. It was Kennard who spoke now.

“Did you doubt it, Tani?”

“The
Terranan
!” Auster stood glowering; Kennard gently moved Taniquel out of his way, and came toward Kerwin, who stood bewildered, wondering if he ought to apologize for this intrusion. Kennard stopped a step or two from Kerwin and said, “Welcome home, my boy.”

Auster said something sarcastic, curling his lip in an ironic smile.

Kerwin said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“Tell me,” Kennard countered, “how did you find this place?”

Kerwin said, too baffled for anything but the truth, “I don’t know. I just came. Hunch, I guess.”

“No,” Kennard said gravely, “it was a test; and you passed it.”

“A
test
?” Suddenly Kerwin was both angry and apprehensive. Ever since he landed on Darkover, somebody had been pushing him around; and now, when he made what he thought was an independent move to break away, he found himself led here.

“I suppose I ought to be grateful. Right now all I want is an explanation! Test? What for? Who
are
you people? What do you want with me? Are you still mistaking me for someone else? Who do you think I am?”

“Not who,” said Taniquel, “what.”And at the same time Kennard said, “No, we knew
who
you were all along. What we had to find out—” And the two of them stopped, looked at each other and laughed. Then the girl said, “You tell him, Ken. He’s
your
kinsman.”

Kerwin jerked up his head and stared at them, and Kennard said, “We are all your kinsmen, if it comes to that; but I knew who you were, or at least I guessed, from the beginning. And if I had not known, your matrix would have told me, because I have seen it before and worked with it before. But we had to test you, to see if you had inherited
laran
, if you were genuinely one of us.”

Kerwin frowned and said, “What do you mean? I am a Terran.”

Kennard shook his head and said, “That’s as may be. Among us the child takes the rank and privilege of the parent of higher caste. And your mother was a woman of the Comyn; my foster-sister, Cleindori Aillard.”

There was a sudden silence, while Kerwin heard the word
Comyn
echo and re-echo in the room.

“Remember,” Kennard said at last, “that we mistook you for one of ourselves, that night in the Sky Harbor Hotel. We were not so wrong as we thought—not so wrong as you told us we were.”

Auster interrupted again with something unintelligible. It was strange how clearly he could understand Kennard and Taniquel, and hardly a word of Auster’s speech.

“Your foster-sister?” Kerwin asked. “Who are you?”

“Kennard-Gwynn Lanart-Alton, Heir to Armida,” the older man said. “Your mother and I were fostered together; we are blood kin as well, though the relationship is—complicated. When Cleindori—died—you were taken away; by night and by stealth. We tried to trace her child; but there was, at that time, a—” Again he hesitated. “I’m not trying to be secretive, I give you my word; it’s only that I can’t imagine how to make it clear to you without giving you a long history of the political complications of forty-odd years ago in the Domains. There were—problems, and when we knew where you were, we decided to leave you there for a time; at least you were safe there. By the time we could try and reclaim you, they had already sent you to Terra, and all we could do was wait. I was reasonably sure of who you were, that night in the hotel. And then your matrix turned up on one of the monitor screens ...”

“What?”

“I can’t explain just now. Any more than I can explain Auster’s stupidity when he met you in the bar, except that he’d been drinking. Of course, you weren’t exactly cooperative, either.”

Again Auster exploded into unintelligible speech, and Kennard motioned him to silence. “Save your breath, Auster, he’s not getting a word of it. Anyway, you passed the first test; you have rudimentary
laran
. And because of who you are, and—and certain other things—we’re going to find out if you have enough of it to be useful to us. I gather you want to stay on Darkover; we offer you a chance at that.”

Dazed, still off balance, and feeling somewhere inside himself that Kennard’s explanations were only confusing the issue further, Kerwin could do nothing but stare.

Well, he had followed his hunch; and if it had led him from the trap to the cookpot, he had only himself to thank.

Well, here I am,
he thought.
The only trouble is, I haven’t the foggiest notion of where “here” is!

“What is this place?” he asked. “Is it—” He repeated the word he had heard Kennard say: “Armida?”

Kennard shook his head, laughing. “Armida is the Great House of the Alton domain,” he said. “It’s in the Kilghard Hills, more than a day’s ride from here. This is the town house belonging to my family. The rational thing would have been to bring you to Comyn Castle; but there were some of the Comyn who didn’t want anything to do with this—” he hesitated “—this experiment until they knew what was going to happen, one way or another. And it was better that we shouldn’t let too many people in on what was happening.”

Kerwin looked around at the rich draperies, the walls hung with panels of curtain. The place seemed familiar, somehow, familiar and strange, out of those long-ago, half-forgotten dreams. Kennard answered his unspoken thought:

“You may possibly have been here once or twice. As a very young child. I doubt if you would remember, though. Anyhow—” He glanced at Taniquel and Auster. “We should go, as soon as we can. I want to leave the city as quickly as possible. And Elorie is waiting.” His face was suddenly somber. “I don’t have to tell you that there are—some people—who will take a very dim view of all this, and we want to present them with something already accomplished.” His eyes seemed to go right through Kerwin as he said, “You’ve already been attacked once, haven’t you?”