A World Divided (35 page)

The injustice of that made Kerwin’s blood boil.

“Look here, sir, I’m not a tourist! I was born and brought up here—”

“Save it,” the Legate said. “You got me just curious enough to investigate that cock-and-bull story you told me about having been born here. Evidently you made the whole thing up, for some obscure reason of your own; there’s no record of any Jeff Kerwin anywhere in the Service. Except,” he added grimly, “the damned troublemaker I’m looking at right now.”

“That’s a lie!” Kerwin burst out in anger. Then he stopped himself. He had seen it himself, the red priority circuit for coded access warning. But he had bribed the man; and the man said,
it’s my job on the line.

“This is no world for snoops and troublemakers,” the Legate said. “I warned you once, remember; but I understand you had to do some pretty extensive nosing around. ...”

Kerwin drew breath, trying to present his case calmly and reasonably. “Sir, if I made this whole thing up out of whole cloth, why would anyone be bothered by what you call my ‘nosing around’? Can’t you see that if anything this proves my story—that there’s something funny going on?”

“All it proves to me,” said the Legate, “is that you’re a nut with a persecution complex; some notion that we’re all in a plot to keep you from finding out something or other.”

“It sounds so damned logical when you put it that way, doesn’t it?” Kerwin said, and his voice was bitter.

“Okay,” the Legate said, “just give me one good reason why anyone should bother plotting against one small-time civil servant, son of—as you claim—a spaceman in the Empire, somebody nobody ever heard of? Why would you be that important?”

Kerwin made a helpless gesture. What could he say to that? He knew his grandparents had existed, and he had been sent back to them, but if there was no record on Darkover of any Jeff Kerwin except himself, what could he say? Why would the woman at the orphanage lie? She had said herself that they were eager to retain contact with their boys. What proof did he have? Had he built the whole thing up from wishful thinking? His sanity reeled.

With a long sigh he let the memories go, and the dream.

“All right, sir, I’m sorry. I’ll stay out of it; I won’t try to find out anything more—”

“You won’t have the chance,” the Legate said coldly, “you won’t be here.”

“I won’t—” Something struck, grim and knife-cold, in Kerwin’s heart. The Legate nodded, his face rigid.

“The City Elders put your name on a list of
persona non grata
,” he said. “And even if they hadn’t, official policy is to take a dim view of anybody who gets too mixed up in native affairs.”

Kerwin felt as if he had been pole-axed; he stood motionless, feeling the blood drain from his face, leaving him cold and lifeless. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I put you down for transfer out,” the Legate said. “You can call it that if you want to. In plain words, you’ve stuck your big nose into too many corners, and we’re making damned sure you don’t do it again. You’re going to be on the next ship out of here.

Kerwin opened his mouth and then shut it again. He steadied himself against the Legate’s desk, feeling as if he might fall over if he didn’t. “You mean I’m being deported?”

“That’s about it,” the Legate confirmed. “In practice, it’s not that bad, of course. I signed it as if it were a routine transfer application; God knows, we get enough of them from out here. You have a clean record, and I’ll give you a clean-sheet recommendation. Within limits, you can have any assignment you’ve got the seniority for; see the Dispatch board about it.”

Kerwin said, through a queer thickening lump in his throat, “But sir, Darkover—” and stopped. It was his home. It was the only place he wanted to be.

The Legate shook his head, as if he could read Kerwin’s thoughts. He looked tired, worn, an old man, a weary man, struggling with a world too complex for him. “I’m sorry, son,” he said, kindly. “I guess I know how you feel. But I’ve got a job to do and not an awful lot of leeway in how I do it. That’s the way it is; you’re going to be on the next ship out of here. And don’t put in an application to come back, because you won’t get it.” He stood up. “I’m sorry, kid,” he said, and offered his hand.

Kerwin did not touch it. The Legate’s face hardened.

“You’re relived from duty as of now; inside twenty-eight hours, I want a formal transfer request filled out, with your preferred routing for assignment; if I have to do it for you, I’ll put you through for the penal colony on Lucifer Delta. You’re confined to quarters till you leave.” He bent over his desk, shuffling the papers there. Without looking up, he said, “You can go.”

Kerwin went. So he had lost, then—lost entirely. It had been too big for him, the mystery he faced; he had run up against something entirely beyond him.

Going back into his bleak rooms, Kerwin told himself not to be a fool. Why would the Legate lie? Was he a dreamer, a fool with delusions of persecution, compensating for his orphan childhood with dreams of grandeur?

He paced the floor, went restlessly to the window, staring at the red sun dipping toward the hills.
The bloody sun.
Some romantic poet had given Cottman’s Star that name a long time ago. As the swift dark came rushing from the mountains, he clenched his fists, staring into the sky.

He put his hand into his pocket and drew out the blue jewel. Somehow this was the key to the mystery, the key to all the closed doors slammed in his face. Maybe he should have shown it to the Legate ... no. The Legate knew perfectly well that Kerwin was telling the truth; only, for some reason, he had chosen not to admit it. Faced with the matrix, he would simply have invented some other lie.

Kerwin wondered how he knew the man had been lying. But he
knew
. Beyond a doubt, without hesitation, he knew the man had been lying, for some obscure reason of his own. But
why
?

He drew the curtains against the blackness outside, the lights of the spaceport below, and set the crystal on the table. He paused, hesitant, seeing in his mind’s eye the picture of a woman sprawled in unlovely death, the terror that had risen in him. ...

I saw something when she was looking into the matrix, but I can’t remember what it was. I only remember that it scared the hell out of me. ...
A woman’s face flickered in his mind, dark forms against an opening door.... He set his teeth against the surging panic, battering against the closed door of his memory, but he could not remember; only the fear, the scream in a child’s voice and darkness.

He told himself sternly not to be a fool. The man Ragan had used this crystal and it hadn’t hurt him. Feeling self-conscious, he laid the crystal on the table and shaded his eyes as the woman had done, staring into it.

Nothing happened.

Damn it, maybe there was a special knack to it, maybe he should have hunted up Ragan and persuaded him, or bribed him, to teach him how to use it. Well, too late for that now. He stared fiercely into the crystal, and for a moment it seemed that a pale light flickered inside it, crawling blue lights that made him feel vaguely sick. But it vanished. Kerwin shook his head. He had a crick in his neck and his eyes were playing tricks on him, that was all. The old “crystal-gazing” trick was just a form of self-hypnosis, he’d have to guard against that.

The light remained. It crept, a small faint pinpoint of color moving inside the jewel. It
flared
, and Kerwin jumped; it was like a red-hot wire touching something inside his brain. And then he heard something, a voice very far away, calling his name ... no. There were no words. But it was speaking to
him
, to no one else who had ever existed, a vastly
personal
message. It was something like,
You. Yes, you. I see you.

Or, even more, I
recognize you.

Dizzily he shook his head, gripping at the edge of the table with his fists. His head hurt, but he could not stop now. It seemed that he could hear speech, just random syllables ... a low murmuring voice, or voices, that went on and on just below the threshold of awareness, like a running, whispering stream murmuring over sharp stones.

That voice sounded like the redhead in the Sky Harbor Hotel, but when Kerwin whirled, half expecting to find that the man had somehow made his way into the very room, there was no one there and the bodiless voices were gone.

He leaned forward, staring into the crystal. And then, as it seemed to expand, to fill the room, he saw the face of a woman.

For a moment, because of the glint of red hair, he thought it was the small, pixielike girl they had called Taniquel. Then he realized that he had never seen her before.

Her hair was red, but a pale red, almost more golden than red; she was small and slender, and her face was round, childish, unmarred. She could not, Kerwin thought, be very far out of her teens. She looked straight at him, with wide, dreamy grey eyes that seemed to look, unfocused,
through
him.

I have faith in you,
she said somehow, wordlessly, or at least the words seemed to reverberate inside his head,
and we have such need of you that I have convinced the others. Come.

Kerwin’s hands clenched on the table.

“Where?
Where
?” he shouted.

But the crystal was blank and blue again, and the strange girl was gone; he heard his own cry echo foolishly on empty walls.

Had she ever been there? Kerwin wiped his forehead, damp with cold sweat. Had his own wishful thinking tried to give him an answer? He swept the crystal into his pocket. He couldn’t waste time on this. He had to pack for space, dispose of his gear, and leave Darkover, never to return. Leave his dreams behind, and the last of his youth. Leave behind all those vague memories and teasing dreams, those will-o’-the-wisps that had led him halfway to destruction. Make a new life for himself somewhere, a smaller life, bounded by the KEEP OUT sign of the old dead hopes and longing, make a life somehow out of the fragments of his old aspirations, with bitterness and resignation....

And then something rose up inside Jeff Kerwin, something that was not the meek CommTerra employee, something that stood up on its hind legs and pawed the ground and said, cold and clean and unmistakable:
No
.

That wasn’t the way it was going to be. The
Terranan
could never force him to go.

The voice from the crystal? No, Kerwin thought, the inner voice of his own mind, flatly rejecting the commands of the Legate. This was
his
world, and he’d be damned if they were going to force him off it.

He realized that he was moving automatically, without thought, like a long-buried other self. Kerwin watched himself moving around the room, discarding most of his gear; he thrust half a dozen minor keepsakes into a pocket, left the rest where they were. He put the matrix on its chain around his neck and tucked it carefully out of sight. He started to unbutton his uniform, then shrugged, left it the way it was, but went to a wardrobe and got out the embroidered Darkovan cloak he had bought his first night in Thendara, drew it around his shoulders and did up the fastenings. He glanced briefly in the mirror. Then, without a backward glance, he walked out of his quarters, the thought dimly skittering across the surface of his mind that he would never see them again.

He walked through the central living rooms of bachelor quarters, took a short cut through the deserted dining commons. At the outer door of the section he paused; a clear and unmistakable inner voice said,
no, not now, wait.

Not understanding, but riding the hunch—what else was there to do?—he sat down and waited. He felt, oddly, not impatient at all. The waiting had the same wary certainty of a cat at a mousehole; a secureness, a—a
rightness.
He sat quietly, hands clasped, whistling a monotonous little tune to himself. He did not feel restless. Half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half went by; his muscles began to feel cramped and he shifted automatically to relieve the tension, but he went on waiting, without knowing what he was waiting for.

Now
.

He stood up and stepped out into the deserted corridor. As he walked swiftly down the hall, he found himself wondering if there would be a pickup order out for him if he should be missed from his quarters. He supposed so. He had no plans, except the very basic one of refusing to obey the deportation order. This meant he must somehow get out, not only of the HQ, but of the Spaceport Zone and the entire Terran Zone unobserved. What would come after he did not know and, strangely, did not care.

Still riding the strange hunch, he turned out of the main corridor where he might meet off-duty acquaintances heading for the quarters, and went toward a little-used freight elevator. He told himself that he ought, at least, to take off the Darkovan cloak; if anyone met him wearing it, inside the HQ it would lead to question and discovery. He put up his hand to unfasten the clasps and sling it over his arm; back in uniform, he’d just be another invisible employee walking in the halls.