To Save a World (9 page)

"No," Desideria whispered, "No." He thought she was going to sob aloud, but she didn't. She drew a deep breath and mastered herself. "No, David. I'm an old, old woman. It wouldn't—oh, damn her. Damn her, that consummate little bitch. No, that's not fair. She's young, she may not even know, and she's not under any vows."

They both heard Regis, like a mental flash;—
I'd stop her, but I hate to start exercising authority so soon
.
They aren't even Darkovan and I'm not their overlord
.

Desideria said quietly, "Damn that fool of a girl for starting this so early in the game. Loose sex in a random crew of assorted telepaths is like putting a bitch in heat down into a wolf pack; it starts all sorts of odd explosions—David, had I better tell her a few of the facts of life?"

Regis dropped in, from outside:
Do
,
Desideria
.
We can't have this
.
You've got to remember
,
though
,
she may never have met another functioning telepath in her whole life
.
She probably did it in all innocence
.
Why shouldn't she and Conner go off for a bit of pillow pounding if they want to? But they've got to learn how not to broadcast it all over the scenery
.
I wish to hell it hadn't happened
.
You talk to her and David can talk to Conner
,
if you like
—

—
Thanks
—
I think
—David said ironically to himself, and was astonished to hear clearly, like Regis' voice;

—
I would talk to him myself
,
but you're at least a Terran
.
He wouldn't listen to me
.

Abruptly David returned to normal consciousness. Jason was vaguely red around the ears, but he shook his head. "I can tell that something's going on," he said, "but I don't know what."

David said, with an embarrassed glance at Desideria, "I think I'd better explain later. You wouldn't believe."

"Living on Darkover," Jason said, "you learn to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day. I picked up a little, that's all. But why did she choose Conner?"

"Who else?" Desideria said. "Exclude Regis as too high in the scale of authority for her and Danilo not interested, you and David too busy, Rondo too old and too psychotic, Keral too uncanny—and too ambiguous in outward gender. And it's normal for her immediately to establish an instant sexual rapport with someone; it's her means of survival. Conner is young, male and virile. But damn her for starting this so early."

David felt as if a thunderstorm had subsided. He knew, in a strange unconscious knowledge, that he had shared something very strange, particularly with Desideria and with Keral, but the very strangeness of it blurred it. He was relieved, and ashamed of himself at his relief, when Desideria said, "If you don't need any more records just now, can I claim the privilege of my gray hairs and ask to rest? You can get the rest of your data later."

"Of course; nurse," Jason said, "take Lady Storn to her quarters. Then come back and bring us Keral."

Neither of them spoke until the chieri entered. David looked up, astonished and a little abashed at how eager he was to see again that luminous brilliance and luster of Keral's smile.

Keral came in and sat obediently where they suggested. Jason hardly knew how to begin, but the chieri took it out of their hands.

"I am very young and very ignorant of your ways here," Keral said, "and I am slow to learn your language, and have few words to describe the things I can do. Maybe you will help me learn. Regis has told me that you want to examine my physical structure; I am completely willing. I am also curious about your kind of beings, and would like to learn. We shall share knowledge, then."

Jason turned on the Darkovan nurse and said fiercely: "Tanya, if one word about this gets out of the project before I give my signed okay, you can pack for space and you'll find yourself doing routine physicals in the mines of Wolf 814."

"I know the rules, doctor," she said stiffly.

"Make damn sure you keep'em, then."

The chieri stripped without hesitation and stood before them, calmly, as if nakedness were no more unusual than being clothed.
No nudity taboos in his culture, then
. Yes,
his
, for Keral was male. So much for that question. Oddly, David felt a little saddened. The routine data were simple, though he punctiliously explained to Keral what he was doing. Blood pressure: slightly below human norm. Heart action: somewhat faster, and his heart was slightly to the right rather than to the left; there were also slight abnormalities, by human standards, in the shape of the aorta, the inner ear, and the retina of the eyes. But the big surprise was still to come.

"You realize," said Jason, low-voiced, as they hooked up the electrodes.

"Yes. But is Keral a sport—" he could not say freak—"or is this normal for a chieri?"

"It's not clearly normal for a human," Jason said, "and it's not normal for the trailmen, either, though I have heard it's not uncommon. You realize, of course, what it is. Keral is at least theoretically a functional hermaphrodite—dual-sexed, with perhaps a faint balance toward maleness."

David said, looking at Keral and meeting that unexpectedly close look again—
just what had they shared?
—"I suggest we just ask him. I doubt if it's a particularly taboo subject. Cultures without nudity taboos don't have many sexual taboos either."

But, although Keral seemed willing enough to answer their questions, he was unusually dense about that one, and David could not make him understand. His people? No, of course they were not all like him, every being alive was different from every other. No, he had never fathered a child. No, he had never borne a child. (The questions seemed to distress him; David thought for a moment that Keral was going to cry and felt again that almost anguished need to comfort him.) Finally they abandoned the questioning. As Keral learned their language he would learn what was meant. Perhaps as he grew into rapport with David—he could put the question directly without the need of a language barrier. David realized that he had come a long way in a single day, for he was already quite willing to contemplate this as a reasonable solution to a question.

Keral was dismissed, with a gentle look backward at David. David sighed. He was tired. "Only Missy left," he said. "Tanya, bring her in." He thought, amusedly, that they both took it for granted it was safer to have the nurse around.

She looked up at him with a faintly provocative smile, but made no comment while he took her history. Name? Melissa Gentry, usually known as Missy. Planet of origin? Vainwal VI.
Lie,
thought David. Age? Twenty-four.
Another lie.
Why is she lying so persistently? How does she think she can get away with it, in a crew of telepaths? Doesn't she
know?

He realized, suddenly, that she was beaming a direct seductiveness at him; a provocative smile, a deliberate little sensual wriggle, a spark of awareness. Is she an exhibitionist? Or a nymphomaniac? Or very stupid? He was cold and professional as he directed her to disrobe. "Tanya, give her a sheet," he said, and turned away while she was carefully draped.

Height: five feet ten. Taller than she looks. Weight: ninety-nine pounds. Blood pressure: 70 over 48. Dangerously low, but I don't know the gravity she's used to. Heart rate: 131. Dextrocardiac. Appendix: can't find the damn thing by fluoroscope. X-ray—hm, what's this? Female—oh, unquestionably, after that performance earlier, but there are certain structural abnormalities . . . .

Confusing. He hooked up the electrodes for the EEG, reassured her, asked her to lie still, watched as the slow spikes, strange, unmistakable, exactly like—

He stared, in wild surmise, at Jason.

Once before, not more than a few minutes earlier, they had seen that identical pattern, and never before.

Never before in any human.

Missy, the liar, the nymphomaniac, was a chieri.

And from way-the-hell off at the other end of the galaxy.

He disconnected the electrodes, trying to keep his voice normal, bored. "That will do for now," he said, and when she had dressed and gone, the two doctors looked at one another.

"Well," David said at last, "we've made a good start at finding out what telepaths are made of. And I'm more bewildered than I was this morning."

Jason's answer was instant and heartfelt. "You and me both!"

A SMALL CARAVAN of pack animals wound slowly over the hills, through a heavy, drizzling rain. At the head of the caravan rode the two Darkovan guides who had been engaged in the city near the spaceport; both were members of the Guild of Free Amazons, and wore the customary Free Amazon dress: low boots of soft leather, undyed, fur-lined riding trousers, a fur smock, brief enough for riding, and heavy embroidered leather jackets and hoods. One had pale red, braided hair, coiled low on her neck and tucked into her hood; the other, close-cropped dark curls. They both had the somewhat hard, boyish look which women wear when they choose, against all the sanctions of a patriarchal society, to do a man's work and take a man's freedom. In addition, the one with braided hair had the flat body and hardened jawline of a woman artificially neutered. This was still illegal on Darkover but could be obtained, like most contraband, for a price.

"The coldest damn spring in forty seasons," the one with braided hair complained to her comrade, hugging her cloak to her. "What prompts this wretched offworlder to travel in the hills at this season?"

"She
says
she is surveying fur-bearing animals to consider exporting them," the younger girl said with a skeptical shrug. "She must come from a cold world; at least, the climate seems not to bother her; I offered to supply her with fur cloaks and blankets and she told me not to bother. Also she rides in the rain without a waterproof, but if she wishes to end her days bent like a cripple from dampness it's her lookout. Offworlders are all mad, if you ask me, madder than the
Terrans
themselves. But what's wrong with the climate, Darilyn? I was reared in these hills. There is too little rain for this season—drizzles where we should have downpours—and it's far too cold."

Darilyn moved her head grimly toward the distant hills. Where a familiar skyline should have risen grayed green and blue with the thick evergreens, the hills lay ragged and black. "Forest fire," she said, "what else? Remember those wretched children in the last three or four villages, lining the road? Beggars—in the mountains!" she spoke with disgust and fury. "There was a time when our people would have starved rather than suffer such shame, Menella."

"Maybe too many of them did," Menella said slowly, and as they topped a smell rise, she looked down, her mouth contracted with bitterness, at the gray, dirty gullies where mud was washing down the side of the hills. "Even with this little rain, look at that. If a Ghost Wind blows this summer nothing will be left in these hills but bare rock."

Riding several hundred feet behind Them, Andrea Closson watched the Darkovan women without interest. Her mind was on her own plans, and she was observing carefully every sign of erosion and change.

This world might as well be a spaceport town. There's not much here worth keeping, she thought without sentiment. The forests I knew—they must have vanished long ago, with those who dwelt there.

A fool's errand, to come so far. What was I hoping to find, to see?

She drew up her horse and waited for the pair of her assistants to come even with her. Both were shivering, wrapped in furs and heat-suits, and she looked at them with dispassionate contempt, wondering how the other agents spread out and filtering around the planet were faring. She herself found the climate damp but tolerable in her ordinary riding dress. She said, "We won't go much further. Have you enough specimens to make it seem credible?"

One of the men nodded. He said, indicating a pack animal laden with small cages, "Half a dozen, mixed male and female, of at least a dozen small fur bearers. I understand they are the kinds most used by the natives for clothing and ornament. Some are right pretty, too."

"We'll do a full-scale analysis of their breeding strength, likelihood to prosper in various other climates, and the like, when we return to the Trade City," Andrea said. "The girls have done a good job as trappers as well as guides. Meanwhile it might be a good idea to collect soil and food samples from their natural habitats. We'll camp near here for the night, do that, and turn back in the morning."

Before long, the clearing they had reached was bustling with the activity of setting up small tents: one for the two Amazons, one for Andrea, one for her assistants. One of the assistants wrote in a locked record book. The Amazon girl Menella went off with her snares to fetch meat for supper. Andrea stood under the trees, silent, her eyes fixed on the distant skyline, the black and jagged stumps rising lonely to the rain. Not a pleasant sight for any lover of trees, she thought dispassionately; but I've seen lovelier worlds than this die in a good cause. In my own way I'm dying in a good cause, helping man to spread further, have more progress. I have no child, nor shall I ever have, but some of these great spaceports, the giant steps mankind takes between stars, are perhaps my children.

And if a world stands in the way of technology, who is to judge the fittest to survive? One race dies; another is born. Who should know that better than I? A race without the strength to survive dies like the better races which have come and gone before it.

They told me in the spaceport that Free Amazons were better guides and woodsmen than most men, and so far they are right. Yet it is a strange sight to me; women who might bear children, electing of their own free will not to do so. A sign, perhaps, of a sickness between men and women, in any world. I do not understand men. How could I? I do not understand women, either.

Does anyone ever understand anyone? I'd better stick to my own job. I understand planets and ecologies and I've got a job to do on this one.

She returned to her tent and unlocked a metal box with a heavy combination lock. She did not turn the lock, but touched one finger lightly to her temple and laid a finger of her other hand against the lock. After a moment it whirred and dropped open. From inside she took a small sealed packet, which she thrust into her pocket, and went off into the woods.

Under the trees she knelt, dug up with her own strong hands unaided by any tool a small hole in the ground. She picked up a handful of the soil. It was moist, soft, rain-drenched and sweet-smelling, and alive with small invisible creeping things.

Andrea unwrapped the small package from its protective coating of impervious plastic. It looked like a grayish dust with black flecks. It too is alive, she thought: Well, that is the way of life. New times—and new predators.

Which will survive? Can I load the dice strongly enough?
This
—she fingered the living soil of Darkover—
or this
.

She emptied the grayish black, evil-smelling dust into the soil; covered it; fastidiously brushed the dust from her long fingers. She walked back toward the camp.

A picture rose in her mind; the crystal black virus working under the ground, against all the creeping things, worms, nematodes, all the things that make a soil live; spreading, growing, reseeding itself to make a dying soil even more barren.

What would I have done to those who poisoned my forests?

Why should I have done anything? We no longer had need of our forests. But on the other hand I need shed no tears for those who came after us. If it is their turn to be swept away—well, they will go as we went.

She checked off a mental list.

Telepaths.

Forests.

Soil.

Ocean? No. The population which remains must be fed somehow. Leave the ocean alone. In any case it is not much used now, and as food supplies decline, the movement of men from the forests to the oceans will cause enough social disruption in itself. So the very existence of an untapped ocean resource will work for me; it's only necessary to make the people demand the technology which will open up the ocean to exploring and mining."

She moved slowly back toward the camp. A whiff of sweet-smelling familiar smoke from the campfire came to her, with a smell of cooking food. She saw Menella moving around the fire with her companion, her own assistants watching the girls; but oddly without desire, she realized. The Free Amazons puzzled her a little. They seemed to have the trick of coexisting with men without arousing either desire or resentment, as if at will they could become men . . . .

—
Dangerous ground. Don't think along those lines!

The effort to turn off a recurrent, dangerous train of thought blanked her face almost to automatism. She reached up, not thinking, and brought down a handful of leaves and buds which, in the springtime rains, were expanding into down-filled pods. Her hands moving slowly, by old habit, she stripped the pods to their soft fibers and her long fingers twisted, gently, relentlessly, them into a soft thread.

Still spinning the soft fiber between her hands she walked into the camp; suddenly, realizing what she was doing, she crumpled the thread and threw it away, and walked to the fire.

She asked, deliberately jolly, "Whatever's cooking smells good. When do we eat?"