The Alton Gift (20 page)

"I do not know how to live with what I have done," Lew concluded. "I only know that I cannot go on as I have before."

"No, that much is clear," Father Conn said. "What new beginning would you make of your life?"

"A friend suggested I might find peace here. I suppose he meant the relief of confession. But that changes nothing!" Lew cried with a sudden rush of passion. "I cannot go back into the past and undo the damage to those men's minds. Even if I found a way off-planet and tracked each one down, how can there be forgiveness for me? What could I do that would ever make such a thing right?"

For a long moment Father Conn sat, watching him quietly, until Lew grew uneasy, wondering what the monk must think of him. "This monastery owes its beginning to a question very like yours," Father Conn said. "How is unendurable guilt to be endured? How is unbearable shame, or pain that sends men to the brink of madness, to be borne? How is life to be lived when all hope is gone?"

A shudder passed through Lew's body. The old monk had spoken his deepest fears, his most elemental questions. Lew felt the very

depths of his soul had been exposed, yet there was not the slightest tinge of censure or recrimination in those words.

Lew's gaze went to the opposite wall, where the saint bent beneath the weight of the world and all its sorrows. The carved wood had been worn to shadows, the unseeing eyes filled with such gentle sadness, such compassion, that Lew had to look away.

Raised to worship the four gods of the Comyn, Lew had never given serious thought to any other faith. The
cristoforos
were said to pray for the strength to carry their burdens. Could it be that they were answered? That he himself might find some ease, some power greater than his own flawed efforts?

"Will you not bide with us a time," Father Conn asked gently, "and see if you can discover that answer for yourself?"

If only it were possible
! "What should I do here?"

"Sing," Father Conn said. To Lew's astonished response, he added, "Pray, but only if you feel moved to do so. It isn't required. Work. Listen. Walk. Sleep. Let the solitude and peace of this place grow in you, little by little."

"I-I would like that."

A smile curved the corners of the old monk's mouth. "Then let us begin."

Earlier that same year, winter reluctantly eased its grip on the village of Rock Glen. Nestled in a vale along the road between Nevarsin and the wild Kilghard Hills, the little community prepared for spring, when the routes to the Lowlands would open. Men repaired harnesses, tended pack chervines in their sheds, and sorted the season's harvest of furs. Children ran shrieking through their homes, no longer content with the quiet indoor pursuits of ballad singing and storytelling, until their frantic mothers shooed them outdoors.

One day, as blue shadows crept across the mounds of layered, compacted snow, the man who called himself Jeram returned from checking his traps. Two of the older boys accompanied him, carrying a brace of mountain rabbit-horns. A healthy flush covered their exposed cheeks, and their eyes were bright from the exercise. Jeram led, placing each foot in the prints they had made on the outward journey.

The edges of the snow had softened in the warmth of the afternoon. Although the meltwater would freeze again that night, it was a good sign. The animals from the traps were thin, their stores of fat almost exhausted. Soon the smaller beasts would begin to starve or sicken. At least the wolves had not yet been driven to attack the village

livestock. Before then, Jeram thought, the first green shoots would push through the snow to nourish the prey animals.

Having drawn ahead of the village boys, Jeram paused, exhaling plumes of vapor. The little rise on which he stood looked down upon the village. Smoke rose from chimneys, and paths crisscrossed the open space from houses to storage barns to livestock sheds. Everything looked snug and neat.

It was, he thought, a good life. Fur-trapping in the winter, farming ice-melons, hardy rye and red wheat, then root vegetables and cabbages during the summer, caravans in spring and fall, and through the seasons, the songs and stories, the lore and gossip, the births and deaths and the thousand details of living. He had never dreamed of such a place, where excitement meant Sarita's baby had at last taken her first step or Collim's half-blind chervine doe had given birth to twins.

The brightness of the day stung his eyes. He blinked and cleared his throat. The boys caught up with him, laughing over a joke they had told a dozen times during the dark winter months. Something about a spaceman, a Dry Towner and a
leronis
, undoubtedly bawdy from the way they turned even redder as they caught his glance.

"Enough dawdling," he told them. "Let's get those rabbit-horns back, or they'll stew up tough as leather." In all probability; they would be dry and stringy no matter how long they simmered.

Jeram turned, glancing down at the snow before his feet. Without warning, the world slipped sideways. In his sight, the footprints elongated as if they were gel-plas. The snow, gray and crusted, rippled, shifting into a living, breathing thing. Colors merged and twisted.

Again he felt that terrible pressure against his mind, saw that face he did not recognize. Eyes glowed, burning through his insubstantial flesh.

"Who are you?" Jeram gasped. "What do you want with me?"

The ground reeled and dipped beneath his feet. For an instant, he seemed to leave his body, hovering in space. He tried to yell for help, but he had no voice. Gray rimmed his vision, condensing into blackness…

"Jeram! Jeram, say something, please! Are you hurt? What is the matter?" Liam, the older of the two, was shaking Jeram's shoulders. The boy's brow furrowed with concern.

With a jerk, Jeram came back to himself. He lay on his back in the

snow with no memory of having fallen. Gingerly, he wiggled his toes, checking for sensation and motor control. After determining that he could move all four extremities and there was no pain along his spine, he sat up.

"It's all right," he told the boys. "I'm—all right," and he prayed that he did not lie.

The younger boy, more shy than his brother, stared at Jeram. Both looked uncomfortable.

"What is it, lads?"

"You—you shouted something in another tongue. It didn't sound like anything we've ever heard."

Jeram clambered to his feet and ran a suddenly trembling hand over his rough-bearded cheeks. This was a moment he'd dreaded, one of them anyway, when he let down his guard, forgot all the d-corticator sleep learning tapes, and blurted out something in Terran Standard.

"I don't remember what I said." He tried to keep his tone casual. "I must have used one of the more bizarre dialects I've picked up over the years. I told you, didn't I, that I traveled a lot when I was young? That's why I've got this awful accent."

Jeram chuckled, as if it were a joke. Then, to demonstrate that all was well, he took the rabbit-horn carcasses and headed down the final slope.

"It would be better if you didn't say anything about this, especially not to Morna," he said after a while. "You know how women are. She'll only fret."

The boys were old enough to remember the fuss when Morna, widowed young, had taken in a half-frozen stranger and later married him in the freemate custom of the mountains. They shrugged, clearly content to leave their elders to their eccentric ways.

It snowed again that night, flurries that found their way through every chink in the cottage walls. Jeram fell asleep in Morna's arms, the two of them warmed by furs from animals that he himself had trapped. He awoke later to silence and the pounding of his heart. The bedchamber, one of three rooms, for Morna's family had been comfortably well-off, felt unnaturally still. Moving carefully so as not to awaken her, he

slipped out of bed and went to the window. Through the slitted shutters, he made out two of the four moons, awash in their pastel, multihued light. He wondered if he would ever get used to more than one moon swinging across a tapestry of unfamiliar stars…

I
chose this world, I chose this life. I am Darkovan now, and everything else is past and buried
.

The man who had once been Jeremiah Reed had come to Darkover battered and weary in spirit, darkly cynical. He had seen men and beasts and mountains valuable only as strategic tools.

What was he doing here, he had once grumbled, on this Closed Class-D world where natives settled their differences by hacking each other to bloody bits with swords? The Terran Station Chief wanted a heavily armed force, including tech specialists like Jeram, for some unfathomable reason.

When Jeram was deployed in a routine action on Old North Road, it had begun like any other policing mission. The local bigwigs were making trouble, they'd been told.

Take them out
, read the orders.
Get rid of the whole meddlesome, elitist Council with a single strike
.

The team had worked together with their Aldaran confederates, scoping the territory and laying out their ambush. Everything had gone according to plan, that much Jeram remembered. The locals were greatly outgunned, fighting only with primitive edged weapons. They should have been no threat at all.

But then
…

Then he had woken up in the blood-drenched mud, with his head pounding and a sickness like nothing he had ever known shivering through his nerves. His mind kept telling him that the enemy had been greater in numbers and more skillful than anyone anticipated. Something had happened to him, something that made his stomach twist and acid rise in his throat every time he tried to think about it.

The others in the team had gone back to the Thendara spaceport to wait for the last Federation ship home. Part of him longed to
get off this goddawful frozen twilit planet
, the same part that told him that the defeat had been a miscalculation, nothing more. Instead, for reasons he did not entirely understand, he had slipped out of the city. He would never find the answers if he left.

It was a stupid risk. If the native rulers, the Comyn, found out he had taken part in the ambush, they would probably execute him on sight.

Luck was with him, for no one stopped him or asked his business. No one demanded his identity. His d-corticator training allowed him to pass well enough, explaining away his accent as a distant dialect. With his fair skin and rust-dark hair, he blended in with the native population.

Days passed, weeks—no, they called them
tendays
here. He found work of one kind or another, striking up casual friendships on the road. As the bruises of the battle faded and the slash on his left shoulder healed, he felt a veil lift from his eyes. For the first time, he saw the world around him.

Darkover was cold, yes, but so were the Rocky Mountains, where he'd spent much of his childhood. The great Red Sun cast glorious shades of color upon color. The air smelled clean with wild herbs, pitch pine, and resin-trees.

The Hellers, that vast and towering mountain range, called to him. Something in their sheer heights and the crystalline beauty of the glaciers tugged at his soul. Perhaps these peaks reminded him of happier boyhood times, or perhaps it was something in their uncompromising starkness that stripped away the artifice of his former life. Here at last was a place where he could put the past behind him and start anew.

It had been a simple thing to change his name to something more Darkovan, to find a village beyond the traveled paths, where he could settle without too many questions. No one knew he was here. The Federation would never come after him with charges of desertion. His neighbors suspected nothing of his role in the Battle of Old North Road. His new life would have been perfect if it were not for his bad dreams.

Dreams were one thing, but this episode, with its lingering disorientation and loss of consciousness, was something else. If there was something seriously wrong with him, it might prove fatal. There were no antiepileptic drugs on the planet, let alone this far into the wilderness, or any effective treatments for a brain tumor or meningitis.

If I die, I die
, he thought as he slipped back into bed. After what he had been through, the thought had no power to frighten him. Dying

was easy; men had died all around him on Old North Road. Living, that was the hard part.

"Jeram! Oh gods, Jeram! Answer me!"

He felt cold air on his face, hands on his shoulders, the creak of a mattress on its supporting leather straps beneath him. The world moved sickeningly. His vision thinned at irregular intervals, dissolving… dissolving him with it…

He heard the voice again, a woman's voice, a voice he should know, but the words no longer made any sense. Sounds washed over him, resonated through his bones. The world swung ponderously, pendulumlike, up and down, in and out. It took him with it, further and higher with each enormous swing, out into nowhere with each swooping breath. Stars streaked past him, atoms, vibrations like the very rhythm of the universe…

"… threshold sickness, I'd stake my life on it…" said another voice, a woman's voice, but one he did not know.

"How can he possibly?" That was Morna: warm arms in the night, gray eyes alight with sadness and passion. "A good man to be sure, but a drifter out of nowhere?"

"I don't know, maybe some lord's unacknowledged—" The strange woman spoke again, with the kind of brisk authority that Jeram associated with nurses and kindergarten teachers. She said a few words in
casta
that he did not understand. "—families all through these mountains have
laran
, or so I've heard."

But I'm not one of you
… Jeram's breath came in gasps with the effort of containing his secret, holding back the fateful words.

He drifted in the far spaces between the stars, frozen like comet dust, stretching thinner and thinner on the interstellar cosmic wind…

The next moment, he shrank to microscopic size, tissues and cells, the intricate colorless patterning of mitochondria, the flash and sparkle of biochemical reactions, the drifting crystal-like particles of disease. Almost, he could reach out and touch them, change a receptor site in the protein coat of a virus, turn a virulent prion into an inert, harmless particle. They clung to his body like pollen, like grains of star-stuff.

"He's worse, isn't he?" Morna again. Sweet, loving Morna.

"We must take him to the Tower at Nevarsin," said the second woman, an undercurrent of fear in her voice. "If the
leroni
there cannot help him, then no one can."

A cup pressed against his lips. He had not realized how dry and chapped they were. "Drink," said a voice, and he did.

Fire washed through his body. He burned with it. Vision shredded into flame.

"More."

He swallowed again and again at the insistence of the voice, until he dissolved into darkness and felt no more.

Jeram came to himself sitting on a pony—Morna's pony, the flea-speckled gray—on a broad, well-traveled road a short distance from the steep gray walls of Nevarsin. He must have been fading in and out of consciousness for some time, for he remembered snatches of trail and trees, the smell of horse dung, the creak of oiled saddle leather, the wind tugging at his beard.

So it was real, not more hallucinations.

"Are you feeling better now?" He recognized the woman's voice but not her face. She reined in her own mount, a sturdy mountain pony, a bay with black points and such heavy feathering the length of its legs that it looked like a miniature draft horse. A chervine on a leading line carried supplies, perhaps trade goods as well.