Heritage and Exile (69 page)

“Whatever comes of it,” I said, “I do too,
preciosa.
Thank you.”

My father, of course, was delighted; but troubled, too, and he would not tell me why. And now that we were not so close he could shield his thoughts from me. At first Dio was well and blooming, quite free of the minor troubles which some women feel in pregnancy; she said she had never been happier or healthier. I watched the changes in her body with amusement and delight. It was a joyful time; we both waited for the child's birth, and even began to talk about the possibility—which I had never been willing, before, to acknowledge—that someday we would return to Darkover together, and share the world of our birth with our son or daughter.

Son or daughter. It troubled me, not to know which, Dio had not a great deal of
laran
and had not been trained to use what little she had. She sensed the presence and the life of the child, but that was all; she could not tell which, and when I could not understand this, she told me with spirit that an unborn child probably had no awareness of its own gender, and therefore, not being aware of its own sex, she could not read its mind. The Terran medics could have taken a blood sample and a chromosome analysis and told us which, but that seemed a sick and heartless way to find out. Perhaps, I thought, Dio would develop the sensitivity to find it out, or if all else failed, I would know when the child was born. Whichever it might be, I would love it. My father wanted a son but I refused to think in those terms.

“This child, even if it is a son, will not be Heir to Armida. Forget it,” I told him, and Kennard said with a sigh, “No, it will not. You have Aldaran blood; and the Aldaran gift is precognition. I do not know why it will not, but it will not.” And then he asked me if I had had Dio monitored to make certain all was well with the child.

“The Terran medics say that all is well,” I told him, defensively. “If you want her monitored, do it yourself!”

“I
cannot,
Lew.” it was the first time he had ever confessed weakness to me. I looked at my father carefully for the first time, it seemed, in months, his eyes sunken deep in his face, his hands twisted and almost useless now. It seemed as if the flesh was wasting off his bones. I reached out to him and as I had often enough done to him, he rebuffed the touch, slamming down barriers. Then he drew a long breath and looked me straight in the eye.
“Laran
sometimes fails with age. Probably it is no more than that. You are free from Sharra now, are you not? You have Ridenow blood; you and Dio are cousins. My father's wife was a Ridenow, and so was his mother. A woman who bears a child with
laran
should be monitored.”

I sighed. This was the simplest of the techniques I had learned in Arilinn; a child of thirteen can learn to monitor the body's functions, nerves, psychic channels. Monitoring a pregnant woman and her child is a little more complex, but even so, there was no difficulty in it. “I'll—try.”

But I knew he could feel my inner shrinking. The Sharra matrix was packed away into the farthest corner of the farthest closet of the apartments I shared with Dio, and not twice in ten days, now, did I think of that peculiar bondage. But then, I did not use my own personal matrix, either, or seek to use any
laran
except the simplest, that reading of unspoken thoughts which no telepath can ever completely blockade from his mind.

“When?” he insisted.

“Soon,” I said, cutting him off.

Get out! Get out of my mind! Between you and Sharra, I have no mind of my own!
He winced with the violence of the thought, and I felt pain and regret. In spite of all that had been between us, I loved my father, and could not endure that look of anguish on his face. I put my hand out to him.

“You are not well, sir. What do the Terran medics say to you?”

“I know what they would say, and so I have not asked them,” he said, with a flicker of humor, then returned to the former urgency. “Lew, promise me; if you find you cannot monitor Dio, then promise me—Lerrys is still on Vainwal, though I think he will soon leave for Council season. If you cannot monitor her, send for Lerrys and make him do it. He is a Ridenow—”

“And Dio is a Ridenow, and has
laran
rights in the estate, and the legal right to sit in Council,” I said. “Lerrys quarreled with her because she had not married me; he said her children should have a legal claim to the Alton Domain!” I swore, with such violence that my father flinched again, as if I had struck him or gripped his thin crippled hands in a vise-grip.

“Like it or not, Lew,” my father said, “Dio's child is the son to the Heir to Alton. What you say or think cannot change it. You can forswear or forgo your own birthright, but you cannot renounce it on your son's behalf.”

I swore again, turned on my heel and left him. He came after me, his step uneven, his voice filled with angry urgency.

“Are you going to marry Dio?”

“That's
my
business,” I said, slamming down a barrier again. I could do it, now, without going into the black nothingness. He said, tightening his mouth, “I swore I would never force or pressure you to marry. But remember; refusing to decide is also a decision. If you refuse to decide to marry her, you have decided that your son shall be born
nedestro,
and a time may come when you will regret it bitterly.”

“Then,” I said, my voice hard, “I will regret it.”

“Have you asked Dio how she feels?”

Surely he must know that we had discussed it endlessly, both of us reluctant to marry in the Terran fashion, but even less willing to bring my father, and Dio's brothers, into the kind of property-based discussions and settlements there would have to be before I could marry her
di catenas.
It had no relevance here on Vainwal, in any case. We had considered ourselves married in what Darkovans called freemate marriage—the sharing of a bed, a meal, a fire-side—and desired no more; it would become as legal as any
catenas
marriage when our child was born. But now I faced that, too; if our son was born
nedestro,
he could not inherit from me; if I should die Dio would have to turn to her Ridenow kin. Whatever happened, I must provide for her.

When I explained it that way, as a matter of simple and practical logic, Dio was willing enough, and the next day we went to the Empire HQ on Vainwal and registered our marriage there. I settled the legal questions, so that if I died before her, or before our child had grown to maturity, she could legally claim property belonging to me, on Terra or on Darkover, and our son would have similar rights in my estate. I realized, somewhere about halfway through these procedures, that both of us, without any prearrangement, had mutually begun referring to the child as “he.” Father had reminded me that I was part Aldaran, and precognition was one of those gifts. I accepted it as that. And knowing that, I knew all that I needed to know, so why trouble myself with monitoring?

A day or two later, Dio said, out of a clear blue sky, as we sat at breakfast in our high room above the city, “Lew, I lied to you.”

“Lied,
preciosa?”
I looked at her candid fair face. In general one telepath cannot lie to another but there are levels of truth and deceit. Dio had let her hair grow; now it was long enough to tie at the back of her neck, and her eyes were that color so common in fair-haired women, which can be blue or green or gray, depending on the health, and mood, and what she is wearing. She had on a loose dress of leaf-green—her body was heavy, now—and her eyes glowed like emeralds.

“Lied,” she repeated. “You thought it was an accident—that I had become pregnant by accident or oversight. It was deliberate. I am sorry.”

“But why, Dio?” I was not angry, only perplexed. I had not wanted this to happen, at first, but now I was altogether happy about it.

“Lerrys—had threatened to take me back to Darkover for this Council season,” she said. “A pregnant woman cannot travel in space. It was the only way I could think of to make sure he would not force me to go.”

I said, “I am glad you did.” I could not, now, envision life without Dio.

“And now, I suppose, he will use the knowledge that I am married, and have a son,” I said. It was the first time I had been willing to ask myself what would become of the Alton Domain, with both my father and myself self-exiled. My brother Marius was never accepted by the Council; but if there really was no other Alton Heir, they might make the best of a bad bargain and accept him. Otherwise it would probably go to my cousin Gabriel Lanart; he had married a Hastur, after all, and he had three sons and two daughters by his Hastur wife. They had wanted to give it, and the command of the Guards, to Gabriel in the first place, and my father would have saved a lot of trouble if he had permitted it.

It would all be the same in the end anyhow, for I would never return to Darkover.

Time slid out of focus. I was kneeling in a room in a high tower, and outside the last crimson light of the red sun set across the high peaks of the Venza mountains behind Thendara. I knelt at the bedside of a little girl, five or six years old, with fair hair, and golden eyes . . . Marjorie's eyes . . . I had knelt at Marjorie's side like this . . . and we had seen her together,
our child, that
child . . . but it had never been, it would never be, Marjorie was dead . . . dead . . . a great fire blazed, surged through my brain . . . and Dio was beside me, her hand on the hilt of a great sword. . . .

Shaken, I surfaced, to see Dio looking at me in shock and dismay.

“Our child, Lew—? And on Darkover—”

I gripped at the back of a chair to steady myself. After a time I said shakily, “I have heard of a
laran
—I thought it was only in the Ages of Chaos—which could see, not only the future, but many futures, some of which may never come to pass; all of the things which
might
someday happen. Perhaps—perhaps, somewhere in my Alton or Aldaran heritage there is a trace of that
laran,
so that I see things which may never be. For I have seen that child once before—with Marjorie—and I thought it was
her
child.” Dimly I realized that I had spoken Marjorie's name aloud for the first time since her death. I would always remember her love; but she had receded very far, and I was healed of that, too. “Marjorie,” I said again. “I thought it was our child, our daughter; she had Marjorie's eyes. But Marjorie died before she could bear me any child, and so what I thought was a true vision of the future never came to be. Yet now I see it again. What does it mean, Dio?”

She said, with a wavering smile, “Now I wish my
laran
were better trained. I don't know, Lew. I don't know what it means.”

Nor did I; but it made me desperately uneasy. We did not talk about it any more, but I think it worked inward, coloring my mood. Later that day she said she had an appointment with one of the medics at the Terran Empire hospital; she could have found any kind of midwife or birth-woman in Vainwal, which spanned a dozen dozen cultures, but since she could not be tended as she would be on Darkover, the cool impersonality of the Terran hospital suited her best.

I went with her. Now, thinking back, it seems to me that she was very quiet, shadowed, perhaps, by some weight of foreknowledge. She came out looking troubled, and the doctor, a slight, preoccupied young man, gestured to me to come and talk with him.

“Don't be alarmed,” he said at once. “Your wife is perfectly well, and the baby's heartbeat is strong and sound. But there are things I don't understand. Mr. Montray-Lanart—” my father and I both used that name on Terra, for Alton is a Domain, a title, rather than a personal name, and
Lord Armida
meant nothing here—“I notice your hand; is it a congenital deformity? Forgive me for asking—”

“No,” I said curtly. “It was the result of a serious accident.”

“And you did not have it regenerated or regrown?”

“No.” The word was hard and final and this time he understood that I would not talk about it. I understand there are cultures where there are religious taboos against that kind of thing, and it was all right with me if he thought I was that sort of idiot. It was better than trying to talk about it. He looked troubled, but he said, “Are there twins in your family, or other multiple births?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We checked the fetus with radiosound,” he said, “and there seems to be—some anomaly. You must prepare yourself for the fact that there might be some—minor deformity, unless it is twins and our equipment did not pick up exactly what we intended; twins or multiple births lying across one another can create rather odd images.”

I shook my head, not wanting to think about that. But my hand was
not
a congenital deformity, so why was I worried? If Dio was carrying twins, or something like that, it was not surprising that we could not clearly identify male or female.

Dio asked, when I came out, what the doctor had said.

“He said he thought you might be carrying twins.”

She looked troubled, too. She said, “He told me the placenta was in a difficult position—could not see the baby's body as clearly as he could wish,” she said. “But it would be nice to have twins. A boy
and
a girl, perhaps.” She leaned on my arm and said, “I'm glad it won't be long now. Not forty days, perhaps. I'm tired of carrying him, or them, around—it will be nice to let you hold him for a while!”

I took her home, but when we arrived we found a message on the communicator which was an integral part of all Empire apartments; my father was ill and asking for me. Dio offered to go with me; but she was tired after the morning's excursion, so she sent him loving messages, and begged his pardon for not attending him, and I set off for the city alone.