none (6 page)

Page 18

“Hell, no. They register your brainwaves and their distinct EEG patterns, or something like that; like a fingerprint. So somehow you are the only person who can open that lock; a great way to protect your private papers. That’s what I use this one for. Oh, I can do a few tricks with it.”

Kerwin stared at the small blue jewel in Ragan’s palm. It was smaller than his own, but the samedistinctive color. He repeated it slowly: “Matrix jewel.”

Ellers, sobering briefly, stared at Kerwin and said, “Yeah. The big secret of Darkover. The Terrans havebeen trying to beg, borrow, or steal some of the secrets of matrix technology for generations. There wasa big war fought here about that, twelve, twenty years ago—I don’t remember, long before my time. Oh,the Darkovans bring little ones into the Trade City, like Ragan’s there, and sell them; trade them off fordrugs, or metals, usually daggers, or small tools, or camera lenses. Somehow, they transform energywithout fission by-products. But they’re so small; we keep hearing rumors of big ones. Bigger ones eventhan yours, Jeff. But no Darkovan will talk about them. Hey,” he said, grinning, “maybe you
are
 
the lostheir to the Lord High Muckety-Muck in his castle after all! It’s for sure no bar girl would be wearing athing like that!”

Kerwin cradled the thing in his hand, but he did not look at it. It made his eyes blur with a strange dizzysickness. He tucked it inside his shirt again. He did not like the way Ragan was staring at him. Somehowit
reminded
 
him of something.

Ragan shoved his own small crystal—it was no longer than the bead a woman might braid at the end ofa long tress—toward Kerwin. He said, “Can you look into it?”

Someone had said that to him before. At some time someone had said
, Look into the matrix.
Awoman’s voice, low. Or had she said
 
, Do not look into the matrix… His head hurt. Pettishly hepushed the stone away. Ragan’s eyebrows went up again in appraisal. “That much, huh? Can you useyours?”

“Use it? How? I don’t know
 
one damn thing
 
about it,” he said rudely. Ragan shrugged; he said, “I can

only do tricks with mine. Watch.”

He up-ended the rough green-glass goblet to drink the last few drops from it, then turned it bottom-upand laid the tiny blue crystal on the foot of the goblet. His face took on an intent, concentrated stare;abruptly there was a small eye-hurting flash, a sizzling sound, and the rigid stem of the goblet melted,sagged sidewise, slid into a puddle of green glass. Ellers gasped and swore. Kerwin passed his hand overhis eyes; the goblet sat there, bowed down with the wilted stem. There was a Terran artist, heremembered from a course in art history, who had painted things like fur teacups and limp watches. History had judged him a lunatic, rather than a genius. The goblet, stem lolling to one side, looked just assurrealistic as his work.

“Could I do that? Could anybody?”

“With one the size of yours, you could do a hell of a lot more,” Ragan said, “if you knew how to use it. I don’t know how they work; but if you concentrate on them, they can move small objects, produce intense heat, or—well, other things. It doesn’t take much training to play around with the ones this size.”

Kerwin touched the lump at his chest. He said, “Then it isn’t just a trinket.”

“Hell, no. It’s worth a small fortune—maybe a big one; I’m no judge. I’m surprised they didn’t take it

Page 19

away from you before you left Darkover, considering how hard the Terrans have been trying to get hold

of some of the larger ones, to experiment with them and test their limits.”

Another of those dim memories surfaced. Drugged, on the Big Ship that had taken him to Terra, astewardess or attendant of some sort fumbling with the jewel; waking, screaming, nightmares. He hadthought it a side-effect of the drugs. He said somberly, “I think maybe they tried.”

“I’m sure the authorities at the HQ, would give a lot to have one that size to play around with,” Ragan sad. “You might consider turning it over to them; they’d probably give you anything you wanted for it, within reason. You might be able to get a really good assignment out of them.”

Kerwin grinned. He said, “Since I feel like hell whenever I take it off, that would present—somedifficulties.”

“You mean you never take it off?” Ellers demanded drunkenly. “That must present some troubles. You

don’t take it off even in the bath?”

Kerwin said, with a chuckle, “Oh, I
 
can
 
. I don’t like to; I feel—oh, I don’t know,
 
weird
—when I takeit off. Or leave it off for any amount of time.” He had always berated himself for being superstitious,irrational, compulsive, treating the thing as a fetish.

Ragan shook his head. “Like I say, they’re a strange kind of thing. They—hell, this makes no sense, butit
happens
 
: I don’t know how it works, I just know it does; maybe they
 
are
 
a low form of life. See,they
 
attach
 
themselves to you; you can’t just walk away and leave them behind, and nobody I heard ofever lost one. I know a man who kept losing his keys until he got one of these to tag on his keyring, andwhenever he left it behind, believe me, he
 
knew
 
where it was.”

That, Kerwin thought, explained a lot. Including a child, screaming as if he were half his age, when a Terran no-nonsense matron deprived him of his “lucky charm.” They had had to give it back to him in theend. He wondered, with a shiver, what would have happened if they had
 
not
 
. He didn’t think he wantedto know. He touched the hidden jewel again, shaking his head, remembering his childish sureness that thisheld the key to his hidden past, to his identity and the identity of his mother, to his obscured memoriesand half-forgotten dreams.

“Of course,” he said with heavy irony, “I was hoping it was that amulet that really
would
 
prove I was the long-lost son and heir of your Lord-High-Something-or-Other. Now all my illusions have been shattered.” He raised the goblet to his lips, calling the Darkovan girl to bring them more of the same.

And as he did so, his eyes fell on the goblet whose stem Ragan had melted. Hell, was he drunker thanhe’d ever believed?

The goblet stood upright on a solid green stem, unbroken, unsagging. There was nothing whateverwrong with it.

Chapter Three: The Strangers

«^»

Three drinks later Ragan excused himself, saying he had a commission at the HQ and had to report on itbefore he could get paid. When he had gone, Kerwin scowled impatiently at Ellers, who had matched

Page 20

Ragan drink for drink. This wasn’t the way he had wanted to spend his first night back on the worldwhose image he’d carried in his mind since childhood. He didn’t know quite what he
 
did
 
want— but itwasn’t to sit in a spaceport bar all night and get drunk!

“Look, Ellers—”

Only a gentle snore answered him; Ellers had slid down in his seat, out cold.

The plump Darkovan bar girl came with refills— Kerwin had lost track of how many—and looked at Ellers with a professional mixture of disappointment and resignation. Then, with a quick glance at Kerwin,he could see her shift her focus of interest; bending to pour, she brushed artfully against Kerwin. Herloose robe was unpinned at the throat so that he could see the valley between her breasts, and thefamiliar sweet smell of incense clung to her robe and her hair. A thread of awareness plucked a stringdeep in his gut, as he breathed in the scent of Darkover, of woman; but he looked again and saw that hereyes were hard and shallow, and the music of her voice frayed at the edges when she crooned, “You likewhat you see, big man?”

She spoke broken Terran Standard, not the musical idiom of the City dialect; that, Kerwin knewafterward, was what had bothered him most. “You like Lorrie, big man? You come ’long with me, I niceand warm, you see…”

There was a flat taste in Kerwin’s mouth that wasn’t just the aftertaste of the wine. Whatever the skyand sun, whatever they called the world, the girls around the Terran Trade City bars were all the same.

“You come? You come—?”

Without knowing quite what he was going to do, Kerwin grabbed the edge of the table and heavedhimself up, the bench going over with a crash behind him. He loomed over the girl, glaring through thedim and smoky light, and words in a language long forgotten rushed from his lips:

“Be gone with you, daughter of a mountain goat, and cover your shame elsewhere, not by lying

with men from worlds that despise your own! Where is the pride of the Cahuenga, shameful one?”

The girl gasped, cowered backward, a convulsive hand clutching her robe about her bared breasts, andbent almost to the ground. She swallowed, but for a moment her mouth only moved, without sound; thenshe whispered, “
 
S’dia shaya… d’sperdo, vai dom alzuo
…” and fled, sobbing; the sound of the soband the scent of her musky hair lingered in the room behind her.

Kerwin clung, swaying, to the edge of the table.
 
God, how drunk can you get! What was all that stuff I was spouting, anyway
 
? He was bewildered at himself; where did he get off anyway, scaring the poorgirl out of her wits? He was no more virtuous than the next man. What Puritan remnant had promptedhim to rise up in wrath and demolish her that way? He’d had his share of the spaceport wenches on moreworlds than one.

And what language had he been speaking, anyway? He
 
knew
 
it hadn’t been the city dialect, but what

was
 
it? He could not remember; try as he might, not a syllable remained of the words that had come into

his mind; only the form of the emotion remained.

Ellers, fortunately, had snored through the whole thing; he could imagine the ribbing the older man wouldhave given him, if he hadn’t. He thought,
 
We’d better get out of here while I can still navigate
 
—
 
andbefore I do something else that’s crazy
!

Page 21

He bent and shook Ellers, but Ellers didn’t even mumble. Kerwin remembered that Ellers had drunk asmuch as Kerwin and Ragan put together. He did this in every spaceport. Kerwin shrugged, set the benchhe’d knocked over back on its legs, lifted Ellers’s feet to them, and turned unsteadily toward the door.

Air. Fresh air. That was all he needed. Then he’d better get back inside the Terran Zone; at least, insidethe spaceport gates, he knew how to behave. But, he thought confused, I
 
thought
 
I knew how tobehave here on Darkover. What got into me?

The sun, bleared and angry-looking, lay low over the street. Shadows of deep mauve and indigo foldedthe huddled houses in a friendly gloom. There were people on the streets now, Darkovans in colorfulshirts and breeches, wearing heavy woven capes or the commonplace imported climbing jackets; womenmuffled to the eyebrows in fur; and once, gliding along, a tall form invisible beneath a hood and mantle ofstrange cut and color; but the gliding form was not human.

And even as he paused, looking up at the flaming sky, the sun sank with a rush and the swift dark cameswooping across the sky, a darkness like great soft wings, folding to blot out the brilliance; thefast-dropping night that gave this world its name. Leaping out in a sudden glare came the crown of vastwhite stars; and three of the small jeweled moons were in the sky, jade-green, peacock-blue, rose-pearl.

Kerwin stood staring upward, his eyes wet, unashamed of the sudden tears that had started to them. Itwas not illusion, then, despite the commonplace spaceport bars and the disillusion of the streets. It wasreal; he was home again; he had seen the falling dark over the sky, the blaze of the crown of stars theycalled Hastur’s Crown after the legend… He stood there until, with the sudden cooling of the air, thethick nightly mist gathered and the blaze dimmed, then vanished.

Slowly, he walked on. The first thin misty traces of rain were stirring; the tall beacon of the HQ in thesky gave him his bearings, and he moved, reluctantly, in that direction.