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You had good times there. You could have stayed there and been happy. But there was still acompulsion driving you, a restlessness, and when the Legate died and the new one wanted to bring in hisown men, you were ready to leave.

And by now the apprentice years were over. Until now you’d gone where they told you. Now theyasked you, within reason, where you wanted to go. And you never hesitated.

“Darkover.” And then you amended: “Cottman Four.”

The man in Personnel had stared awhile. “God in heaven, why would anyone want to go
 
there
 
?”

“No vacancies?” By now you were half resigned to letting the dream die.

“Oh, hell, yes. We can never get volunteers to go there. Do you know what the place is
 
like
 
? Cold as sin, among other things, and barbaric—big sections of it barred off to Earthmen, and you won’t be safe a step outside the Trade City. I’ve never been there myself, but the place, from what I hear, is always in an uproar. Added to which, there’s practically no trade with the Darkovans.”

“No? Thendara Spaceport is one of the biggest in the Service, I heard.”

“True.” The man explained gloomily, “It’s located between the upper and lower spiral arms of the Galaxy, so we have to recruit enough personnel to staff a major re-routing station. Thendara’s one of the main stops and transfer points for passengers and cargo. But it’s a hell of a place; if you go there, you might be stuck for years before they could locate a replacement for you, once you get tired of it. Look,” he added persuasively, “you’re getting on too well to throw yourself away out there. Rigel 9 is crying out for good men, and you could really get ahead there— maybe work up to Consul or even Legate, if you wanted to get into the Diplomatic branch. Why waste yourself on a half-frozen lump of rock way out at the edge of nowhere?”

You should have known better; but you thought, for once, maybe he really wanted to know; so you toldhim.

“I was born on Darkover.”

“Oh. One of
those
 
. I see.” You saw his face change, and you wanted to smash that smirk off his pink face. But you didn’t do it; you only stood there and watched him stamp your transfer application, and you knew that if you had ever had any intention of transfer to the Diplomatic Branch, or any hopes of working up to Legate, whatever he had stamped on your card had just killed them off; but you didn’t care. And then there was another of the Big Ships, and a growing excitement that gnawed at you so that you haunted the observation dome, searching for a red coal in the sky that grew at last to a blaze haunting your dreams. And then, after a time that seemed endless, the ship dropped lazily toward a great crimson

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planet that wore a necklace of four tiny moons, jewels set in the pendant of a carmine sky.

And you were home again.

Chapter Two: The Matrix

«^»

The
 
Southern Crown
 
made planet-fall at high noon on dayside. Jeff Kerwin, swinging efficiently downthe narrow steel rungs of the ladder from the airlock, dropped to the ground and took a deep breath. Ithad seemed that the very air should hold something rich and different and familiar and strange.

But it was just air. It smelled good, but after weeks of the canned air inside the spaceship, any air wouldsmell good. He inhaled it again, searching for some hint of his elusive memory in the fragrance. It wascold and bracing, with a hint of pollen and dust; but mostly it held the impersonal chemical stinks of anyspaceport. Hot tar. Concrete dust. The stinging ozone of liquid oxygen vaporizing from bleeder valves.

Might as well be back Earthside! Just another spaceport!

Well, what the hell? He told himself roughly to come off it.
 
The way you built it up in your mind,getting back to Darkover, you made it such a big deal that if the whole city came out to meet youwith parades and fanfares, it would still fall flat
 
!

He stepped back, out of the way of a group of Spaceforce men—tall in black leather, booted, blastersconcealing their menace behind snug holsters—with stars blazing on their sleeves. The sun was just afraction off the meridian—huge, red-orange, with little ragged fiery clouds hanging high in the thin sky. The saw-toothed mountains behind the spaceport cast their shadows over the Trade City, but the peakslay bathed in the sullen light. Memory searched for landmarks along the peaks. Kerwin’s eyes fixed onthe horizon, he stumbled over a cargo bale, and a good-natured voice said, “Star-gazing, Redhead?”

Kerwin brought himself back to the spaceport, with a wrench almost physical. “I’ve seen enough stars tolast me awhile,” he said. “I was thinking that the air smells good.”

The man at his side grinned. “That’s one comfort. I spent one tour of duty on a world where the air washigh-sulfur content. Perfectly healthy, or so the Medics said, but I went around feeling as if someone hadthrown a whole case of rotten eggs at me.”

He joined Kerwin on the concrete platform. “What’s it like—being home again?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Kerwin, but he looked at the newcomer with something like affection. Johnny Ellers was small and stocky and going bald on top, a tough little man in the black leather of a professional spaceman. Two dozen stars blazed in a riot of color on his sleeve; a star for every world where he had seen service. Kerwin, only a two-star man so far, had found Ellers a fund of information about almost every planet and every subject under the sun—any sun.

“We’d better move along,” Ellers said. The process crew was already swarming over the ship, readying it for skylift again within a few hours. Favorable orbits waited for no man. The spaceport was already jammed with cargo trucks, workhands, buzz-ing machinery, fuel trucks, and and instructions were being yelled in fifty languages and dialects. Kerwin looked around, getting his bearings. Beyond the spaceport gates lay the Trade City, the Terran Headquarters Building—and Darkover. He wanted to run toward it,

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but he checked himself, moving with Ellers into the line that was forming, to verify their identities and assignments. He gave up a fingerprint and signed a card verifying that he was who he said he was, received an identity certificate, and moved on.

“Where to?” asked Ellers, joining him again.

“I don’t know,” Kerwin said slowly. “I suppose I’d better report to the HQ for assignment.” He had no formal plans beyond this moment, and he wasn’t sure he wanted Ellers butting in and taking over. Much as he liked Ellers, he would have preferred to get reacquainted with Darkover on his own.

Ellers chuckled. “Report? Hell, you know better than that. You’re no greenie, still bug-eyed about hisfirst off-planet assignment! Tomorrow morning is time enough for the red tape. For tonight—” He wavedan expansive hand toward the spaceport gates. “Wine, women and song—not necessarily in that order.”

Kerwin hesitated, and Ellers urged, “Come on! I know the Trade City like the back of my hand. You’vegot to fit yourself out—and I know all the markets. If you do your shopping at the tourist traps, you canspend six months’ pay without half trying!”

That was true. The Big Ships were still too weight-conscious to permit transshipping of clothing andpersonal gear. It was cheaper to dispose of everything when you transferred, and buy a new outfit whenyou landed, than to take it along and pay the weight allowances. Every spaceport in the Terran Empirewas surrounded with a ring of shops, good, bad, and indifferent, all the way from luxury fashion centersto second-hand rag markets.

“And I know all the high spots, too. You haven’t lived till you’ve tried Darkovan
firi
 
. You know, back in the mountains they tell some funny stories about that stuff, especially its effect on women. One time, I remember—”

Kerwin let Ellers lead, listening with half an ear to the little man’s story, which was already taking afamiliar turn. To hear Ellers talk, he had had so many women, on so many worlds, that Kerwinsometimes wondered vaguely how he’d had time in between to get into space. The heroines of the storiesranged all the way from a Sirian bird-woman, with great blue wings and a cloak of down, to a princess of Arcturus IV surrounded by the handmaidens who are bound to her with links of living pseudoflesh till theday she dies.

The spaceport gates opened into a great square, surrounding a monument raised on high steps, and alittle park with trees. Kerwin looked at the trees, their violet leaves trembling in the wind, and swallowed.

Once he had known the Trade City fairly well. It had grown some since then—and it had shrunk. Thelooming skyscraper of Terran HQ, once awesome, was now just a big building. The ring of shops aroundthe square was deeper. He did not remember having seen, as a child, the loom of the massive,neon-fronted Sky Harbor Hotel. He sighed, trying to sort out the memories.

They crossed the square and turned into a street paved with hewn blocks of stone, so immense in sizethat it paralyzed his imagination to guess who or what had laid down those vast slabs. The street lay quietand empty; Kerwin supposed that most of the Terran population had gone to see the starship touchdown, and at this hour few Darkovans would be on the street. The real city still lay out of sight, out ofhearing—out of reach. He sighed again, and followed Ellers toward the string of spaceport shops.

“We can get a decent outfit in here.”

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It was a Darkovan shop, which meant that it spilled out halfway along the street and there was no cleardistinction between outside and in, between the merchandise for sale and the owner’s belongings. But thismuch concession had been made to custom of the alien Terrans, that some of the goods for sale were onracks and tables. As Kerwin passed beneath the outer arch, his nostrils dilated in recognition of a breathof the familiar; a whiff of scented smoke, the incense that perfumes every Darkovan home from gutter topalace. They hadn’t used it, not officially, in the Spacemen’s Orphanage in the Trade City; but most ofthe nurses and matrons were Darkovan, and the resinous fumes had clung to their hair and clothing. Ellerswrinkled his nose and made an “Ugh!” sound, but Kerwin found himself smiling. It was the first touch ofgenuine recognition in a world gone strange.

The shopkeeper, a little withered man in a yellow shirt and breeches, turned and murmured an idleformula: “
S’dia Shaya
.” It meant
you lend me grace
 
, and without thinking about it, Kerwin muttered anequally meaningless polite formula; and Ellers stared.

“I didn’t know you spoke the lingo! You told me you left here when you were just a kid!”

“I only speak the City dialect.” The little man was turning to a colorful rack of cloaks, jerkins, silken vests and tunics, and Kerwin, exasperated with himself, said curtly in Terran Standard, “Nothing like that. Clothing for
 
Terranan
 
, fellow.”

He concentrated on picking out a few changes of clothing—underwear, nightgear, just what he could getalong with for a few days until he found out what the job and climate would demand. There were heavymountain-weight parkas, intended for the mountains in the climbing preserves of Rigel and Capella Nine,lined with synthetic fibers, guaranteed to safeguard body heat down to minus thirty Centigrade or wellbelow, and he shrugged it aside, though Ellers, shivering, had already bought one and put it on; it wasn’t
that
 
cold even in the Hellers, and here in Thendara it felt like shirtsleeve weather to him. He warned Ellers in an undertone against buying shaving gear.

“Hell, Kerwin, going native? Going to grow a beard?”

“No, but you’ll get better ones in the Service canteens inside the HQ: Darkover is metal-poor, and what

metals they have aren’t as good as ours, and cost a hell of a lot more.”

While the shopkeeper was making up the parcels, Ellers drifted to a table near the entry-way.

“What sort of outfit is this, Kerwin? I’ve never seen anyone on Darkover wearing anything quite like
 
this

. Is it native Darkovan costume?”

Kerwin flinched;
 
native Darkovan costume
 
was a concept, like
 
the Darkovan language
 
, whichconsisted only in the simplifications of Empire outsiders. There were nine Darkovan languages he knewabout—although he could speak only one well, with a smattering of words from two others—andcostume on Darkover varied enormously, from the silks and fine-spun colors of the lowlands to thecoarse leathers and un-dyed furs of the far mountains. He joined his friend at the table, where a tangle ofodd garments, all more or less worn, most of them the utilitarian coarse breeches and shirts of the city,were flung at random there; but Kerwin saw at once what had attracted Ellers’s eye. It was a thing ofbeauty, green and dull yellows blended, richly embroidered in patterns that seemed familiar to him; hesuspected he was more fatigued than he realized. He held it up and saw that it was a long, hooded cloak.