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Page 45

“
 
Latti
!” The man touched her arm. “Leave it! Go,” he added to Kerwin, “you are not welcome here. Not in our house, not in our city, not on our world. We have no quarrel with you; but you bring danger on us even with your shadow. Go.” And from that, there was no appeal. Kerwin went.

Somehow he had halfway expected this. Another door slammed in his face; like the computer, coded sohe could not read the records of his own birth. But he could not drop it here, even though he wanted to,even though he was beginning to be frightened.

He took the precaution of covering his hair; and although he didn’t wear the Darkovan cloak, hecarefully took off all the insignia of the Service, so that when he went into the Old Town there wasnothing that could identify him with the spaceport people.

The address was in a crumbling slum; there was no bell, and after he knocked he stood waiting a longtime. He had half resolved to turn away again when the door opened and a woman stood there, holdingto the doorframe with an unsteady hand.

She was small and middle-aged, clad in nondescript shawls and bundled skirts, not quite rags and notreally dirty, but she gave a general impression of unkempt slovenliness. She looked at Kerwin with drearyindifference; it seemed to him that she focused her eyes with difficulty.

“Do you want something?” she asked, not caring.

“A man named Ragan sent me,” he said, and handed her the scribbled slip. “He said you were a matrix

technician.”

“I was once,” she said, still with that deadly indifference. “They cut me off from the main relays years

ago. Oh, I can still do some work, but it’ll cost you. If it was legal, you wouldn’t be here.”

“What I want’s not illegal, as far as I know. But maybe it’s impossible.”

A faint spark of interest flickered behind the dull eyes. “Come in.” She motioned him into the room.

Inside it was clean enough; it had a pungent-familiar smell, herbs burning in a brazier; the woman stirredthe fire, sending up fresh clouds of the pungent smoke, and when she turned, her eyes were more alert.

But Kerwin thought he had never seen so colorless a person. Her hair, coiled loose on her neck, was thesame faded grey as her bundled shawl; she walked wearily, stooping a little as if in some chronic pain. She lowered herself carefully into a chair and gestured him, with a tired, abrupt motion of her head, to sit.

“What do you want,
 
Terranan
 
?” At his look of surprise, her faded lips stretched faintly, not quite a smile. “Your speech is perfect,” she said, “but remember what I am. There is another world in your walk and the set of your head, in what you do with your hands. Don’t waste our time in lies.”

At least she hadn’t mistaken him for his mysterious double somewhere, Kerwin thought thankfully, andpushed back his headgear. He thought,
 
Maybe if I level with her, she’ll level with me
 
. He fumbled athis neck and laid down the crystal in front of her.

“I was born on Darkover,” he said, “but they sent me away. My father was Terran. I thought it would be

very simple to find out more about myself.”

Page 46

“It should be, with this.” she said, “Fit for a Keeper, it is.” She leaned forward; unlike the other mechanics, she did not shroud her hand when she touched it. Kerwin flinched; he hated to have it touched, for some reason. She saw the gesture and said, “So you know
 
that
 
much. Is it keyed?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She raised her eyebrows. Then she said, “Don’t worry; I can guard against it, even if it is. I’m notsuperstitious, and I learned a long time ago, from the old man himself, that any halfway-competenttechnician can do a Keeper’s work. I’ve done it enough. Let me take it.” She picked it up; he felt only afaint shock. The hands were beautiful, younger than the rest of her, smooth and supple and the nailswell-kept; he had expected them, somehow, to be gnawed and dirty. Again the gesture seemed familiar.

“Tell me about it,” she said, and Kerwin told her everything, feeling suddenly secure; the way in which he had been mistaken for some mysterious
 
other
 
, the attack in the street, the failure to find records in the orphanage, the refusal of the two matrix mechanics to tell him anything. At that she frowned scornfully.

“And they say they are free of superstition! Fools,” she said.

“What can you tell me?”

She touched the crystal with one beautifully manicured fingertip. She said, “This much: It’s not on themain banks. It may have come from one of the Forbidden Tower people. I don’t recognize it offhand,”she said. “But it’s hard to believe you have any Terran blood at all. Though there have been a few, andonce I saw old
 
Dom Ann’dra
 
… But that’s neither here nor there.” She went to a cupboard andrummaged in it, taking out something wrapped in a length of the insulating silk. Before her on the table sheplaced a small wicker-wood frame, then carefully untwisting the silks, she laid something in the frame. Itwas a small matrix; smaller than his own, but considerably larger than the one Ragan had showed him. Small lights played in it; Kerwin, looking at them, felt sick and nauseated. The woman looked into herown matrix, then into Kerwin’s, rose, stirred the brazier again so that clouds of the choking smoke rose,and Kerwin’s head.began to swim. The smoke seemed to contain some potent drug, for the woman,inhaling it deeply, stared at him with a sudden live glitter in her eyes.

“You,” she said, “you are not what you seem.” Her words slurred strangely. “You will find what you seek, but you will destroy it too. You were a trap that missed its firing, they sent you away to safety, from the blizzard to feed the banshee… You will find the thing you desire, you will destroy it but you will save it, too…”

Kerwin said rudely, “I didn’t come here to have my fortune told.”

She seemed not to hear, muttering almost incoherently. It was dark in the room, except for the dim glowof the brazier, and very cold. Impatient, Kerwin stirred; she made an imperative gesture and he sankback, surprised at the authority of the movement.
 
Muttering, drugged old witch! What the hell wasshe doing now
 
?

The crystal on the table, his own crystal, glowed and shimmered; the crystal in the wicker frame,between the woman’s slender hands, began slowly to glow with blue fire.

“The Golden Bell,” the woman muttered thickly, slurring the words and making them one,
 
Cleindori
 
. “Oh, yes, Cleindori was beautiful, long, long they sought her in the hills across the river, but she had gone where they could not pursue, the proud superstitious fools preaching the Way of Arilinn…”

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All the light in the room, now, was focused on the woman’s face, the light that seemed to pour from theblue center of the crystal. Kerwin sat there a long, long time, while the woman stared into the crystal andmuttered something to herself. Finally he wondered if she had gone into a trance, if she were a clairvoyantwho could answer his questions.

“Who am I?”

“You are the one they managed to send away, the brand snatched from the burning,” she said thickly. “There were others, but you were the most likely. They didn’t know, the proud Comyn, that you had been snatched away from them. That they had hidden the prey inside the hunter’s door, hidden the leaf inside the forest. All of them, Cleindori, Cassilde, the
 
Terranan
 
, the Ridenow boy…”

The lights in the crystal seemed to coagulate into a brilliant flash of flame. Kerwin flinched as it knifedthrough his eyes, but he could not move.

And then a scene rose before his eyes, clear and distinct, as if imprinted on the inside of his eyelids:

Two men and two women, all of them in Darkovan clothing, all seated around a table on whichlay a matrix crystal in a cradle; and one of the women, very frail, very fair, was bending over it,gripping the cradle so tightly that he could see the knuckles of her hands whitened by thatdesperate grip. Her face, framed in paling reddish hair, seemed eerily familiar… The menwatched, intent, unmovmg. One of them had dark hair and dark eyes, animal eyes, and Kerwinheard himself thinking
, The Terran,
 
and knew at the back of his mind that he looked on the face ofthe man whose name he would bear, and they all watched spellbound while the cold lights playedon the woman’s face like some strange aurora; and then the tall redheaded man suddenlywrenched the woman’s hands from the cradle; the blue fires died and the woman sank backsenseless in the dark man’s arms
 
…

The scene swept away; Kerwin saw moving clouds, cold drenching rain falling in a courtyard. A manstrode through a high-pillared corridor, a man in a jeweled cloak fastened high at the neck; a tall arrogantman, and Kerwin gasped, recognizing the dream-face of his earliest memories. The scene narrowed againto a high-walled chamber. The women were there, and one of the men. Kerwin seemed to see the scenefrom a strange perspective, as if he were either up very high or down very low, and he realized that he

was
 
there
 
, horror and sudden dread making him tremble. He seemed to look away from the four grouped around the matrix, at a closed door, a turning door-handle that moved slowly, very slowly, then was suddenly flung back, blotted out by dark forms that filled the doorway and blotted out the light, rushing forward…

Kerwin screamed. It was not his own voice, but the voice of a child, thin and terrible and terrifying, ashriek of utter despair and panic. He slumped forward across the table, the scene darkening before hiseyes, remembered screams ringing and ringing on and on in his ears long after his cry had jolted him up toconsciousness again.

Dazed, he straightened and passed his hand slowly across his eyes. His hand came away wet withclammy sweat—or tears? Confused, he shook his head. He was
 
not
 
in that high-walled room filled withvague shapes of terror. He stood in the stone-walled cottage of the old matrix technician; the fire in thebrazier had burned out, and the room was dark and cold. He could just see the woman; she hadcollapsed forward, her body lying across the table and atop the wicker frame, which had turned sidewiseand spilled the crystal out on to the table. But there was no blue light in her crystal now. It lay blank,grey, a featureless piece of glass.

Page 48

Kerwin looked down at the woman, angry and puzzled. She had shown him
something
—but what didit mean? Why had he screamed? He felt cautiously at his throat. His voice felt frayed.

“What the hell was that all about? I suppose the dark man was my father. But who were the others?”

The woman neither stirred nor spoke, and Kerwin scowled. Drunk, drugged? Not gently, he reached toshake her shoulder. “What was that? What did it mean? Who were they?”

With nightmarish, slow grace, the woman slid down and toppled sideways to the floor. Swearing,

Kerwin vaulted the table and knelt at her side, but he already knew what he would discover.

The woman was dead.

Chapter Six: Re-Exile

«^»

Kerwin’s throat still hurt, and he felt a ragged hysteria gripping at him.

All the doors keep closing in my face ‘t

Then he looked down at the dead woman with pity and a painful guilt. He had dragged her into this, andnow she was dead. This unknown unlovely woman, whose name he didn’t even know, and he hadinvolved her in the mysterious fate that was tracking him.

He looked at her matrix, lying grey and featureless on the table. Had it died when the woman died, then? Gingerly, he picked up his own and put it into his pocket, looked down at the dead woman again withregret and futile apology, and then, turning away, he went and called the police.

They came, green-clad, cross-belted Darkovans of the City Guard—the equivalent of metropolitanpolice, what there was of it on Darkover—not at all happy to see a Terran there, and they showed it. Reluctantly, with rigid politeness, they allowed him the legal privilege of summoning a Terran consulbefore questioning, a privilege Kerwin would just as soon have waived. He wasn’t at all eager for the HQ to know he had been making inquiries down here.