A World Divided (58 page)

He kissed her, without speaking. Darkovan customs were idealistic, but they took some getting used to. And he was just as glad to have Elorie to himself.

But that made him think of something else.

“Taniquel was no virgin, certainly. And yet she worked in the matrix circle—”

“Taniquel was not a Keeper,” Elorie said soberly, “and she was never required to do a Keeper’s work, never required to gather the energons of the circle and direct them. Such vows, and such—such abstinence—were not required of her, nor of Neyrissa, no more than of any of the men. And a few generations ago—in the time of the Forbidden Tower—there was a Keeper who left Arilinn to marry, and continued to use her powers; it was a great scandal; I do not know all the story, it was such a tale as they did not tell to children. And I do not know how she did it.” Quickly, as if she feared he would question further, she said, “Some things, I am sure, I can still do with my own matrix. Let me try.”

But when she had taken it from the tiny leather case in which she kept it, wrapped in its insulating silks, she hesitated.

“I feel so strange. Not like myself. I don’t seem to—to belong to myself any more.”

“You belong to me,” Kerwin said firmly, and she smiled.

“Are your Terran wives property? No, I think not, love; I belong to myself; but I will willingly share every moment of my life with you,” she said.

“Is there a difference?” Kerwin asked.

Her soft laugh always delighted him. “To you, perhaps not. To me, it is very important. If I had wished to be some man’s property, I could have wedded someone before I was out of childhood, and would never have gone to the Tower.” She took the matrix in her hand; but Kerwin saw the tentative way in which she touched it, contrasting her hesitation with the sureness she had shown in the matrix chamber. She was frightened! He wanted to tell her he didn’t give a damn, put it away, he didn’t want her to touch the accursed thing—she was too precious to risk—and then he saw her eyes.

Elorie loved him. She had given up her whole world for him, all she was and all she could have been. Even now, Kerwin knew, he had only the dimmest, outsider’s perception of what it meant to be a Keeper. If she needed this, he had to let her try. Even if it killed her, he had to let her try.

“But promise me, Elorie,” he said, taking her shoulders in his hands and tipping her head back to look into her eyes, “no risks. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t try it.”

He felt that she hardly heard him. Her slight fingers curved around the matrix; her face was distant and abstracted. She said, not to him, “The shape of the air here is different, we are among the mountains; I must be careful not to interfere with his breathing.” She moved her head, an imperious small signal, and he felt her drop into rapport, in-tangibly, like a caress.

He rose and looked into the mirror. He could see Elorie perfectly well, in her thin grey dress, her bright hair bent over the matrix in her hand; but he could not see himself. He looked down; he could see himself perfectly well, but he did not reflect in the mirror.

“But, but, I can see myself—”

“Oh, yes, and if anyone bumps into you, they will know perfectly well that you are there,” she said with a sting of a smile. “You have not become a ghost, my love of a barbarian, I have only changed the look of the air around you, for a little while. But I think it will hold long enough for you to get into the orphanage unseen.”

Her face held the triumph of a gleeful child. Jeff bent down to kiss her and saw the strangeness in the mirror, Elorie evidently lifted up and resting on nothing. He smiled. It was not a difficult matrix operation; he could probably have done it himself. But it had proved to her ...

“That I’m not blind and deaf to it,” she said, picking up his thought, and her voice sounded tight, though she was still smiling the childish smile. “Go, darling, I’m not sure how long I can hold it, and you shouldn’t waste any time.”

He left her there in the Terran hotel room, passing silently and unseen down the corridors. In the lobby people passed him, unseeing. He had a curious, lunatic sense of power. No wonder the Comyn were all but invincible—

 

The Spacemen’s Orphanage looked just as it had looked a few scant months ago. A few of the boys were doing something to the grounds, kneeling around a patch of flowers, supervised by an older boy with a badge on his arm. Silent as a ghost, Kerwin hesitated before walking up the white steps. What should he do first? Go unseen into the office, check files and records? Quickly he dismissed that notion; he might be invisible, but if he started handling books or punching buttons, the people in the office would see
something
even if it was only books and papers moving of their own accord; and sooner or later they’d start investigating.

And sooner or later someone would bump into him.

He stopped and considered. In the third-floor dormitory where he had slept with five other boys, he had carved his initials, at the age of nine, into a window-frame. The frame might have been repaired or replaced; but if it hadn’t, and he could find the carving, it would prove something, to his own satisfaction; at least he wouldn’t have to carry around the sneaking suspicion that he never
had
been there, that he had imagined the whole thing, that all his memories were hallucinations.

And after all, the dormitory was an old one and many of the boys had done the same thing. The Darkovan nurses and the children’s counselors had left them a good deal of freedom in some areas. In his day the dormitory had been battered, orderly and clean enough, but bearing the imprint of many childish pranks and experiments with tools.

He went up through the halls, passing an open classroom door, trying to tread lightly, but two or three heads turned as he passed.
So they heard someone walking in the halls, so what?
Nevertheless, he rose on tiptoe and tried to make as little noise as possible.

A Darkovan woman, hair coiled low on her neck and fastened with a leather butterfly-clasp, her long tartan skirt and shawl faintly scented with incense, went along the hall, singing softly to herself. She went into one of the rooms and came out with a sleepy toddler cradled in her arms. Kerwin froze automatically, even though he knew himself invisible, and the woman seemed unconscious of him, still humming her mountain song.

“
Laszlo, Laszlo, dors di ma main . . .
”

Kerwin had heard the song of his own childhood, a silly rhyme about a little boy whose foster-mother stuffed him with cakes and sweets until he cried for bread and milk; he remembered, once, being told that the song went back to the historical period called the time of the Hundred Kingdoms, and the Hastur Wars that had ended them, and that the verses were a political satire about over-benevolent governments.

Kerwin drew aside as the woman passed him, feeling the rustle of her garments; but as they passed each other, she frowned curiously, and broke off her song; had she heard his breathing, smelled some unfamiliar scent from his clothing?

“
Laszlo, Laszlo . . .
” she began to croon her little song again, but the child in her arms twisted, turning his face over the woman’s shoulder, looking straight at Kerwin. He said something in baby-talk, thrusting one chubby fist at Kerwin, and the nurse frowned, turning.

“What man? There’s nobody there,
chiy’llu
,” she scolded softly, and Kerwin turned and tiptoed down the hallway, his heart suddenly pounding. Could a child’s eyes penetrate Elorie’s illusion?

He paused at the top of the stairs, trying to get his bearings. Finally he turned toward what he thought was the right room.

It was quiet and sunlit, eight small, neatly-made cots in little cubicles around the edges of the room, and in the open play space between, a group of toy figures, men and buildings and spaceships, was arranged on a small table. Carefully stepping around the toys, he saw that a tall white skyscraper had been built at the center of the toy group, and sighed; the children had built the Terran HQ that loomed so large in their thoughts.

He was wasting time. He moved to the windows and moved his fingers along the molding at eye-level. No, there were no carvings ... suddenly he realized what he was doing. Yes, he had carved his initials at eye-level, but the eye-level of a nine-year-old boy, not his present two meters and more!

He stooped and felt again at mid-level. Yes, there were carvings in the soft wood; rough crosses, hearts, tick-tack-toe crosses. And then, at the left, in the squarish letters of the Terran Standard alphabet, he saw the childish work of his first pocketknife.

 

J. A. K. JR

 

Not until he saw the initials did he realize that he was shaking. His fists were clenched so hard that his nails hurt his palms. He did not realize, until now, that he had ever doubted finding them; but now, as he touched the childish, rude gouges in the wood, he knew that he had doubted his own sanity and that the doubt had gone deep.

“They lied, they lied,” he said aloud.

“Who lied?” asked a quiet voice. “And why?”

Kerwin turned quickly toward the door. A short, sturdy, grey-haired man was standing there, looking straight at him. So Elorie’s illusion had worn off; he had been seen, and heard—and found.

Now what?

The man’s eyes, intelligent and kindly, rested on Kerwin without anger. “We never allow visitors in the dormitories,” he said. “If you wanted to see a particular child, you should have asked to see him in the playroom.” His eyes narrowed suddenly. “But I know your face,” he said. “Your name is Jeff, isn’t it? Kerradine, Kermit—”

“Kerwin,” he said, and the man nodded.

“Yes, of course; we called you
Tallo
. What are you doing here, young Kerwin?”

Abruptly, Kerwin decided to tell the truth. “Looking for my initials, carved here,” he said.

“Now why would you want to do that? Sentiment? Old times sake?”

“Not a bit of it. A few months ago I came here,” Kerwin said, “and they told me in the office that there were no records of my ever having been here, no records of my parentage—that I was lying when I claimed to remember being brought up here. I don’t blame the matron—she evidently was since my time—but when the computer showed no records of my fingerprints—well, I started doubting my own sanity.” He pointed to the carved initials. “I’m sane, anyhow. I cut those initials here when I was a kid.”

“Now why would that happen?” the man demanded. “Oh, I forgot—I don’t suppose you remember my name; I’m Jon Harley. I used to teach mathematics to the older boys. Still do, as far as that goes.”

Jeff clasped the hand the man held out to him. “I remember you, sir. You stopped a fight I got into once, and bandaged up my chin afterward, didn’t you?”

Harley chuckled. “I remember that, all right. You were a young rowdy, right enough. I remember when your father brought you to us. You were about five, I think.”

Had his father lived so long? I ought to remember him, then, thought Kerwin, but try as he might there was only the elusive blank space in his memory, fragmentary memories of dreams.

“Did you know my father, sir?”

The man said, regretfully, “I saw him only that once, you know, when he brought you here. But, for goodness sake, young Kerwin, come downstairs and have a drink or something. Computers do get out of order, sometimes, I suppose; perhaps we should check the written files and school records.”

Kerwin realized that he should have waited, demanded, tried to see someone who would actually
remember
him. Like Mr. Harley. “Is there anyone else still here who could remember me?”

Harley thought it over. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s been a long time, and there’s a considerable turnover. Some of the maids, perhaps, but I think I’m the only teacher who would remember you. Most of the nurses and teachers are young; we try to keep them young, children need young people about them. I go on and on, old fellow that I am, because it’s hard to get good teachers to come out from Terra, and they want someone who speaks the language without accent.” He said, with a deprecating shrug, “Come down to my office, young Jeff. Tell me what you’re doing these days. I remember you were sent to Terra. Tell me how you happened to come back to Darkover.”

In the old man’s austere office, filled with the open-window noises of children playing outside, Jeff accepted a drink he didn’t want, fighting unspoken questions to which, he supposed, old Harley wouldn’t have the answer.

“You say you remember my father bringing me here. My mother—was she with him?”

Harley shook his head. “He said nothing about having a wife,” he said, almost prissily.

But, Kerwin thought, he had acknowledged his son, and that wasn’t easy under Terran Empire laws. “What was my father like?”

“As I say, I saw him only once, and it wasn’t easy to tell what he looked like. His nose had been broken, and he’d been in some kind of fight; there was a lot of rioting in Thendara about then; some political upheaval. I never knew the details. He was wearing Darkovan clothing; but he had his Terran identifications. We asked you questions about your mother, but you couldn’t talk.”

“At
five years old?
”

“You didn’t talk for another year or so,” Harley said, frankly. “To be truthful, we thought you were mentally deficient. That’s one reason I remember you so well; because we all spent a lot of time trying to teach you to talk; we had a speech therapist come from Thendara HQ to work with you. You didn’t speak a word, either in Terran
or
Darkovan.”

Kerwin listened in amazement as the old man talked on.