To Save a World (11 page)

"Well, they are gone.'' David led him back the way he had come. His bump of direction had deserted him now that he was no longer following the signals of Keral's panic and he had to inquire the way twice. It was icy cold, the wind growing in intensity with every minute, and David realized he was chilled through. The chieri reached out with a quick gesture and flipped a corner of his own long cloak around David's shoulders.

The warmth of the HQ building closed around them and David relaxed thankfully. He felt, from Keral's direction, a faint surge of renewed panic, and turned to him in anxious solicitude, but Keral only said faintly, "I am not used to being within walls. Never mind, it is better than the crowds."

A picture, swift, strange and beautiful flashed in and out of his mind, multidimensional, multi-sensed:

—soft wind, blowing leaves; a thousand fragrances each known, accepted, cherished; a roof overhead that smelled of leaves and gave softly to the wind, yet gave warm security from slashing rain; water, splashing, softness under foot—

"Your home?"

He did not need an answer, and he felt oddly apologetic as he drew the chieri on to the first of the maze of intertwining escalators he took for granted in a large building;
Damn it
,
David
, he berated himself,
quit being romantic
.
Living in a forest may sound and smell great
,
but you're here and there's work to be done
.

Nevertheless, the contrast nagged at him as he drew Keral into his own bleak, depersonalized quarters. Had he really lived for years in surroundings as grim as a jail cell, absorbed in his work? He fussed around, finding his strange guest a place to sit, and felt the shivering tension in the chieri slowly relax.

"You said you were coming to see me, Keral, when you panicked in the crowd. Not that you aren't welcome, even at this hour. But what did you want?"

"It seemed," Keral said in that light strange voice, "that while your people learned of me, I could also learn of you, and I could do this better among you here than in isolation. I am not yet fluent enough in your language; it is easier if I touch you—" he reached for David's hand, clasped it lightly, and the flow of images reached the Terran:

. . . . a civilization new and strange and yet not so different from those my people knew millennia ago. Perhaps we have been selfish, withdrawing into our forests and (knowing we die, alas, singing our lamentation alone) waiting here and silently living in beauty and memory; perhaps those who come after us may profit from what we are/what we know. Let us go among them and learn from them, see what people will live in our world when we are gone . . . .

The strange, forlorn sadness of the flow of thought brought an almost anguished feeling of loneliness to David. Feeling that he might burst out crying if he didn't, he pulled his hands away from Keral and swallowed hard. Keral looked at him, curious and not offended.

"Is it not mannerly, in your culture, to touch? Forgive me. I could not do it with everyone, but you are—I
can
touch you and it does not—frighten me," he fumbled for words, and David, moved again, reached out and reclasped the thin, cool hands in his. He said softly, "Why are your people dying, Keral? Regis told me they were only a legend now."

. . . . Infinite sadness, like a song of farewell borne from distant shores . . . leaves fall, buds wither unborn, our people grow old and die with no children to renew their songs . . . and I, loneliest of all because I die here in exile . . . hands of a stranger clasped in mine, a loving stranger but stranger still . . . .

David:
Willing exile is exile none the less.

. . . . who will reconcile me to the paths I must walk alone . . . .

David:
Mountains divide us and a world of seas . . . and we in dreams behold . . . .

The wave crested; broke; splashed in soft surf on a silent shore of pain. David swallowed hard and their hands fell apart. They had come briefly closer than even their growing ease with one another could tolerate, and they drew apart again. Keral said, "I came here for that; that you could learn about my people. Many of the others are too old; they would die away from their forests. I am willing to give you what I can; but I too am curious to know. Let me be part of your researches, David. Let me know what you find out; share with me what you learn. I can pick up your language quickly; my people have a gift for this."

"You certainly have," David said, suddenly struck by this; yesterday when they were introduced Keral had fumbled in speaking even a few words of Regis' rather scholarly
casta
language, and that now he was speaking in easy, fluent phrases, the
cahuenga
or lingua franca spoken all over Darkover by Terran and Darkovan alike, which David had learned by educator tapes on the ship coming here. He said, "I have no objection; I am sure that Jason and the authorities would be happy to give you this privilege if you want it. And if you want to stay here, I'll do what I can to help you feel less—hemmed in. Although I have no authority on my own, and you ought to take it up with Regis, of course. If you want to know what we're learning, you're welcome to share what I've found out myself. But will you answer a few questions, too? You were so confused yesterday, and it was so hard to get through to you and make you understand. For instance: how old are you?"

—
He looks about seventeen, though he must be older
—

"I am a stripling of my own people," Keral said, "almost the latest-born among them. But you would know how many sun-circlings I have lived, and I cannot tell you. I think perhaps your people count time differently than we do. To us, many turns of the sun go by and it is as a sleep and a sleep, the beginning and ending of a song. I must try and think in different ways when I talk to your kind of people, and that is why the elders among us cannot any longer tolerate to come among you. The days and leaf fallings seem to—to regulate your thoughts and your words and your inner processes. I was born—how can I mark it in ways you can understand?—in the time before the great star over the polar ice shifted to its latest place. Does that mean anything to you?"

"No," David said, "I'm no astronomer but I'll bet someone can pinpoint it in time." He felt stunned.
Are you trying to tell me you're maybe hundreds of years old? Legends of immortal races!
"And yet, long-lived as your people are, you say your people are dying? I don't want to give you pain, Keral. But we must know."

"We have been dying since many centuries before the Terrans came to Darkover for the first time," said the chieri. His voice was quiet and positive. "We were never a plentiful or prolific race—is this the right word?—and although during our high years we grew and multiplied as with a tree in bud, all things run down and perish. As time meant less and less to us, we did not realize. Perhaps some change, the cooling of the sun, made this change in our innermost cells. The times when we can bear children are spaced apart—many, many sun-circlings apart. I think as the sun cooled they grew further apart. It often happened that when one of our people was ripened for mating, there would be none other ready to mate with her. And although we did not die of ourselves, we could be killed by accident, beasts, weather or mischance. More died than were born. This process was slow, so slow that even we did not know, until our elders saw that no children at all had been born, until some of the youngest were past mating at all; and inevitably, some day, not soon but not in the unforeseen times either, we must die and be gone." His voice was flat, unemotional and clinical. "We sought many remedies; as you learn to understand our words I will tell you what I have heard from my elders—of the shifts we sought to preserve our people. Yet there was no help and we will vanish and be as if we had never been, like the leaves of the last springtime."

The very quietness of Keral's words tugged at David's heart with their bleak, forlorn acceptance. He could not bear that quiet; he could not bear to see the luminous brilliance he had first touched in Keral extinguished in this misery; yet what could he do?

"Well, my people have a proverb:
never say die
," he said. "Regis believes that the Darkovan telepaths are all dying out, but he's doing something about it, not singing sad songs of sorrow. Maybe it's not as late as you think, Keral; and even if it's true, we are going to do our damnedest to learn everything we can and be grateful for the chance to get it from you."

Keral's luminous smile lit up again. "It does me good to hear this; as I told you, my people have sat too long in our forests singing songs of sorrow and waiting for the leaves to cover us up. So that—here I am."

David took up the folders he had been studying at supper. He said, "You are convinced there is no other race like you?"

Keral's silent affirmative.

David dropped his bombshell, gently, almost without emphasis: "Did you know that Missy is a chieri?"

He was not prepared for Keral's surge of violent revulsion, disgust and shock.

"Impossible! That—female animal? No, David; believe me, my friend, our people are not like that. David, I
touched
her; as I touched you a few moments ago. Do you honestly believe I could be mistaken?"

"Not by your own standards," David said, puzzled but prepared to defend the findings of his own science until Keral could give better grounds than physical revulsion. "In that case there is a race like enough to yours to be twin. Let me show you what I mean."

He spread out the physiological data. Keral betrayed more knowledge of anatomy than David would have believed; evidently, the language barrier once surmounted, he had a very good grasp of these things. David had to explain the instrument readings and diagrams to him; but once Keral grasped them, he examined them with a frown and a growing disquiet.

"David, I cannot understand it but my instinct tells me you are wrong, while my intelligence tells me you must be right! How shall we resolve this?"

"Missy lied to every question we asked her. Every question, without exception; compulsively. If she is a wide-open telepath, and she is—we both know that from what happened with Conner—why did she do it? How did she believe she could get away with it?" Almost too late he remembered that a touch on the question of sexuality had made Keral freeze and draw away, earlier. Yet Keral had spoken clearly and clinically, though regretfully, just now, about his own people and their declining reproductive powers. A puzzle . . . .

Keral said: "I know of only one way to be sure, and it could even be dangerous, but let us take it. Can we bring Missy here without alarming her, David? I might know of a way to question and find out her truths. Why does any being lie? Only out of fear or a wish for profit, and what profit could she have in lying? Perhaps we can find the fear behind her lies and soothe it."

"I'll try," David said, and went off down the hospital corridor, having left Keral (curled on David's bed, curiously nibbling the fruit-and-nut candy) to wait. He remembered that all of them except the Darkovans had been quartered in rooms in this wing; he felt briefly embarrassed. Suppose he interrupted Conner and Missy in bed again? Oh, hell, who cares? At home on Earth if I found two acquaintances in bed, I'd excuse myself and ask them to come along when they were finished. It's the damned voyeur taboo and after all, telepaths would have to get used to that, I guess. It didn't seem to bother Regis, he was just afraid it would disrupt the rest of us who didn't expect to be overhearing such things.

Yet if Missy's not human, but can and does have sex freely and openly with humans, can the chieri be said to be nonhuman at all? And if they do interbreed with humans, why are they dying out? Hell, here I am looking for answers even before I have the right questions. I'd better get some facts.

Missy opened the door of her room and he saw that she was alone.

David? What does he want? I felt him coming.

It's idiotic to go through all these motions when we can pick up each other's minds and emotions. I guess none of us is used to it yet.

Aloud, to ease off the odd disquiet both in himself and her, he said, "Missy, if you're not busy, would you come down to my room for a little while? We'd like to ask you a couple of questions."

Curiosity flickered in her pale gray eyes. She said, "Why not?" and came along. He noted again the slender height and grace, not as outré as Keral's odd beauty, but still enough to mark her anywhere on any world. She reacted with mild surprise to the sight of Keral, but made no comment. David felt a strange wariness in her as she accepted some of the candies he had brought from downstairs, curled up on a corner of his bed beside Keral.

Habits of movement, speech, all are culture bound. Missy walks and acts like a lovely woman, sure of her own desirability, confident in it—

Or does the confidence go so deep? There's something forlorn about her. She looks lost, that's it; she's not like anyone else . . . .

He tried to make it an ordinary social occasion. "Sorry I've nothing to offer you; when we've been here longer it may be more organized. There must be a place to get something to drink somewhere around here. At least if there isn't it will be the first Empire planet I've heard about where there wasn't. Missy, I've forgotten; what world did they find you on?"

—
wariness. wariness. A blur of fear like a small animal scooting to ground in its hole.

. . . there have been so many . . .

"It's one of those with an unpronounceable name," she said.

Keral raised his pale eyes to hers. A faint spark flew. "I'm good at languages," he said lightly. "Try me."

Panic. Retreat. Terror. She jerked her hands violently away.

She did not. She did not move. "I was born on Lanach, so I suppose you'd call me a Lanchy."

David did not get the warning flicker of earlier lies, and sensed she was telling the truth, or believed she was. He said: "I've seen Lanach on star maps, but I believed it had been colonized mostly by the darker races and ethnic groups."