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A little dwarfed creature pattered by, giving Kerwin a swift upward glance from green eyes that glowed,catlike, in the dark, but had unmistakable human intelligence behind them; Kerwin moved quickly aside,for the
 
kyrri
 
were strange creatures who fed on electrical energy and could give unwary strangers painful,though not fatal, shocks if they were jostled or crowded.

Kerwin walked on through the market of the Old Town, savoring the unfamiliar sounds and smells. Anold woman was selling fried fish in a little stall; she dropped the bundles of fish into a thick batter, theninto the bowl of clear green oil. She looked up and with voluble words in a dialect too thick forunderstanding, handed him the fresh fish. He started to shake his head, but it smelt good and he shruggedand fumbled for coins in his purse, but she looked at him, startled, and the coins dropped on the groundas she backed away. In her babble he caught again the word
 
Comyn
 
, and frowned. The devil! Heseemed to have the knack, tonight, of innocently scaring people half to death. Well, with the city full ofredheaded men and women on some kind of family reunion,

Kcrwin decided red hair was even unluckier than they’d told him in the orphanage!

Maybe it was this fantastic nobleman’s cloak he was wearing. He’d take it off, but it was too cold for histhin Terran uniform; besides, he surmised that in his Terran clothes he couldn’t be really safe in this partof the city.

He admitted it to himself, now; he had had just this kind of imposture in mind when he bought the cloak. But too many people were staring. He turned, deciding he had better take the fastest route back to the HQ.

He walked swiftly now through dark, deserted streets. He heard a step behind him—a slow, purposefulstep; but told himself not to be suspicious; he wasn’t the only man who might have a good reason to beout in the rain tonight! The step kept pace with him, then quickened to overtake him, and Kerwinstepped aside to let the follower pass in the narrow street.

That was a mistake. Kerwin felt a searing pain; then the top of his head exploded and from somewherehe heard a voice crying out strange words:

Say to the son of the barbarian that he shall come no more to the plains of Arilinn! The

Forbidden Tower is broken and the Golden Bell is avenged!

That didn’t make sense, Kerwin thought in the split second before his head struck the pavement and heknew no more.

Chapter Four: The Search

«^»

It was dawn, and it was raining hard, and somebody somewhere was talking right in his ear.

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“Lie still,
 
vai dom
 
, no one will hurt you! Vandals! What has come to the city, when Comyn can be

attacked…”

And another voice, rougher: “Don’t be a donkey; can’t you see the uniform? The man’s
 
Terranan
 
andsomebody’s head will roll for this. Go and call the watch, quickly!”

Someone tried to lift his head, and Kerwin decided it was his head that was going to roll, because itexploded and he slid back into unconsciousness again.

Then, after confused noises and pain, a bright white light seemed to shine into the innermost recesses ofhis brain. He felt someone mauling his head, which hurt like hell, and grunted in pain, and someone tookthe light out of his eyes.

He was lying in an antiseptic white bed in an antiseptic white room, and a man in a white smock, wearingthe caduceus emblem of Medic and Psych, was bending over him.

“All right now?”

Kerwin started to nod, but his head exploded again and he thought better of it. The doctor handed him asmall paper cup of red liquid; it burned his mouth and stung all the way down, but his head stoppedhurting.

“What happened?” Kerwin asked.

Johnny Ellers put his head around the door; his eyes looked bloodshot. “You ask that?
 
I
pass out— butyou’re the one gets slugged and rolled! The greenest kid, on his first planetside assignment, ought toknow better than that! And why the hell were you wandering around in the native section? Didn’t youstudy the off-limits map?”

There was a warning in his words. Kerwin said, slowly, “Yeah. I must’ve got lost.”

How much of what he remembered was true? Had he dreamed all the rest—his bizarre wanderings inthe Darkovan cloak, all the people who had mistaken him for
 
someone else
 
… Had it all been wishfulthinking, based on his desire to belong?

“What day is this?”

“Morning after the night before,” Ellers said.

“Where did it happen? Where did I get knocked out?”

“God knows,” the doctor said. “Evidently someone found you and got scared; dragged you to the edge of the spaceport square and dumped you there about dawn.” The doctor moved out of eye range and Kerwin found that it hurt his head to try and follow him, so he went back to sleep. Ragan, the girl in the wineshop, the redheaded aristocrats and the strange encounter in the Sky Harbor Hotel drifted in his mind as he slipped away. If he’d started by thinking that this return to Darkover was an anticlimax to his dreams, at least he’d had enough adventure now to last him fifty years.

No satirical demon whispered in his ear that he hadn’t started yet.

His head was still bandaged when he reported to the Legate for assignment the next morning, and the

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Legate regarded him without enthusiasm.

“I need Medics and technicians, mapmakers and linguists, and what do they send me? Communications men! Hell, I know it’s not your fault, they send me what they can get. I hear you actually requested transfer out here, so maybe I can keep you a while; usually what I get are greenies who transfer out as soon as they have enough seniority credits. I hear you got yourself smashed up a little, wandering around alone in the native quarter. Didn’t they tell you that’s not smart, here?”

Kerwin just said, “I got lost, sir.”

“But why the hell were you wandering around outside the spaceport area anyhow? There’s nothing

interesting back there.” He scowled. “Why would you want to go exploring on your own?”

Kerwin said doggedly, “I was born here, sir.” If they were going to discriminate against him because ofthat, he wanted to know it right away. But the Legate only looked thoughtful.

“You may be fortunate,” he said. “Darkover is not a popular assignment; but if it’s home to you, you won’t hate it quite as much. Maybe. I didn’t volunteer, you know; I got in with the wrong political crowd, and I’m serving—you might say—a sentence here. If you actually like the place, you might have quite a career ahead of you; because, as I told you, under normal conditions nobody stays much longer than they have to. So you think you’ll like it here?”

“I don’t know. But I did want to come back.” He added, feeling somehow that he could trust this man,

“It was almost a compulsion. What I remembered as a child.”

The Legate nodded. He was not a young man, and his eyes were sad. “God, don’t I know!” he said. “The longing for the smell of your own air, the color of your own sun. I know, lad. I’ve been out for fortyyears, and I’ve seen Alpha twice in that time, and I hope I die there. What’s the old saying…
 
Thoughstars like weeds be thickly sown, no world of stars can match your own
 
…” He broke off. “Bornhere, huh? Who was your mother?”

Kerwin thought of the women in the spaceport café and then tried not to think about them. At least hisfather had cared enough about his son to get citizenship for him, to leave him in the Spacemen’s Orphanage.

“I don’t know, sir. That’s one of the things I hoped would be recorded here.”

“Kerwin,” the Legate mused. “I seem to have heard the name. I’ve only been here four or five years, local time. But if your father had married here, it would be in Records, downstairs. Or the Orphanage would have records. They’re fairly careful who they take in there; ordinary foundlings get turned over to the Hierarchs of the City. And then, you were sent back to Earth; that’s
 
very
 
rare. Normally you would have been kept here and given work or training by the Department, mapping worker, interpreter, something where it would be an advantage to you to know the language like a native.”

“I’ve thought I was probably Darkovan…”

“I doubt that; your hair. We Terrans have a lot of redheads—hyperadrenal types, we go in for the

adventurous life. With certain exceptions, there aren’t many redheaded Darkovans…”

Kerwin started to mention that he’d run into at least four, last night, and then could not speak the words.

Literally he
 
could not;
 
it was like a fist rammed at his throat. Instead he listened to the Legate talking

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about Darkover.

“It’s a funny place,” he said. “We hold scraps of it for trade, Trade Cities here and in Caer Donn up in the Hellers, the spaceport here and the big airfield out at Port Chicago, just as we do elsewhere. You know the routine. We leave governments alone, usually. After the people of the various planets have seen what we have to offer in the way of advanced technology and trade, membership in a galactic civilization, they start to get tired of living under primitive or barbarian conditions and hierarchies and monarchies and autarchies; and they petition to come into the Empire. And we’re here to enforce plebiscites and protect them against entrenched tyrannies. It’s almost a mathematical formula; you can predict the thing. A class-D world like this will hold out maybe a hundred, hundred and ten years. But Darkover isn’t following the pattern, and we don’t quite know why.”

He struck his clenched fist on his acres of desk. “They say we just don’t have a damned thing they want. Oh, they trade with us, sometimes; give us silver, or platinum, or jewels, or small matrix crystals— youknow what they are?—for things like cameras and medical supplies and cheap down or syntheticmountain gear, ice axes, that sort of thing. Metal tools, especially; they’re metal-starved. But they don’thave the faintest interest in setting up industrial or technological exchange with us, they haven’t asked fortechnological experts or advice, they don’t have anything resembling a commercial system…”

Kerwin remembered some of this from his briefing on the ship. “Are you talking about the government orthe common people?”

“Both,” the Legate snorted. “The government’s a little hard to locate. At first we thought there wasn’t

any. Hell, there might as well
 
not
 
be!”

The Darkovans, according to the Legate, were ruled by a caste who lived in virtual seclusion; they wereincorruptible and, especially, unapproachable. A mystery, a riddle.

“One of the few things they do trade for, is
 
horses
 
,” the Legate told him. “Horses. Can you figure that? We offer them planes, surface transit, roadbuilding machinery—and what do they buy? Horses. I gather there are big herds of them, out on the outer steppes, the plains of Valeron and Arilinn, and in the uplands of the Kilghard Hills. They say they don’t want to build roads, and from what I know of the terrain, it wouldn’t be easy, but we’ve offered them all kinds of technical help and they don’t want it. They buy a few planes, now and then. God knows what they do with them. They don’t have airstrips and they don’t buy enough fuel, but they do buy them.” He leaned his chin on his hands.

“It’s a crazy place. I never have figured it out. To tell the truth, I don’t really give a damn. Who knows?

Maybe you’ll figure it out some day.”

When he next had free time, late the next day, Kerwin went out through the more respectable section ofthe Trade City, toward the Spacemen’s Orphanage. He remembered every step of the way. It rosebefore him, a white cool building, strange and alien as it had always been among the trees, set back at theend of a long walk from the street; the Terran star-and-rocket emblem blazed over the door. The outerhall was empty, but through an open door he saw a small group of boys working industriously around aglobe. From behind the building he could hear the high cheery sound of children playing.

In the big office that had been the terror of his childhood, Kerwin waited until a lady dressed respectablyin muted Darkovan clothing—loose skirt, furred jacket over all—came out and inquired in a friendlymanner what she could do for him.