Marion Zimmer Bradley

“ We had made our camp in the bend of an enormous river, wide and shallow and unbridged; the river Kadarin, traditionally a point of no return for humans on Darkover. The river is fed by ocean tides and we would have to wait for low water to cross. Beyond the river lay thick forests, and beyond the forests the slopes of the Hellers, rising upward and upward; and their every fold and every valley was filled to the brim with forest, and in the forests lived the trailmen. ”

“ The fourth time I saw it, I called softly to Kyla: "See anything?"
"I was beginning to think it was my eyes, or the altitude. I saw, Jason."
"Look for a spot where we can take a break," I directed. We climbed along a shallow ledge, the faint imperceptible flutters in the brushwood climbing with us on either side. I muttered to the girl, "I'll be glad when we get clear of this. At least we'll be able to see what's coming after us!"
"If it comes to a fight," she said surprisingly, "I'd rather fight on gravel than ice." ”

“ Kyla brought her left hand up to her right on the third loop. She made a long reach, missed her grab, swung again, and clung, breathing hard, to the safe fifth loop. I watched, sick with dread. The damned girl should have told me what she intended.
Kyla glanced down and we got a glimpse of her face, glistening with the mixture of sunburn cream and sweat, drawn with effort. Her tiny swaying figure hung twelve feet above the white tumbling water, and if she lost her grip, only a miracle could bring her out alive. ”

“ The fifth man shook hands with me, speaking to Kendricks and Forth as if they were old friends. "Don't I know you from someplace, Jason?"
He looked Darkovan, and wore Darkovan clothes, but Forth had forewarned me, and attack seemed the best defense. "Aren't you Terran?"
"My father was," he said, and I understood; a situation not exactly uncommon, but ticklish on a planet like Darkover. ”

“ We had to make our way through tangles of underbrush which would have been nothing to a trailman, but which made our ground-accustomed bodies ache with the effort of getting over or through them; and once the track was totally blocked by a barricade of tangled dead brushwood, borne down on floodwater after a sudden thaw or cloud-burst. We had to work painfully around it over a three-hundred-foot rockslide, which we could cross only one at a time, crab-fashion, leaning double to balance ourselves; and no one complained now about the rope. ”

“ The weight of the unexpected blow spun Regis around, and the next moment Jay Allison, who had never touched another human being except with the remote hands of healing, closed steely, murderous hands around Regis' throat. The world thinned out into a crimson rage. ”

“ Father, the Terrans call me a wise doctor, a man of healing. Among the Terrans I can see that my people, if they will come to us and help us, have air they can breathe and food which will suit them and that they are guarded from the light. ”

“ She held up her palm and said rather sullenly, "Kyla-Raineach, free Amazon, licensed guide."
I acknowledged the gesture with a nod, scowling. The guild of free Amazons entered virtually every masculine field, but that of mountain guide seemed somewhat bizarre even for an Amazon. She seemed wiry and agile enough, her body, under the heavy blanket-like clothing, almost as lean of hip and flat of breast as my own; only the slender long legs were unequivocally feminine. ”

“ But you cannot in all honesty blame us. You cannot say that we spread the disease; we never go beyond the mountains. Are we to blame that the winds change or the moons come together in the sky? When the time has come for men to die, they die." He stretched his hand in dismissal. "I will give your men safe-conduct to the river, Jason. Do not return."
Regis Hastur rose suddenly and faced him. "Will you hear me, Father?" He used the ceremonial title without hesitation, and the Old One said in distress, "The son of Hastur need never speak as a suppliant to the Sky People!" ”

“ Buck Kendricks was bone-white, his mouth widening as he said hoarsely, "Jay! Doctor Allison—for God's sake—"
A doctor's training creates reactions that are almost reflexes; Jay Allison recovered some degree of sanity as he became aware that someone was stretched out in front of him, half-naked, and bleeding profusely. He motioned away the crowding strangers and said in his bad Darkovan, "Let her alone, this is my work." He didn't know enough words to curse them away, so he switched to Terran, speaking to Kendricks:
"Buck, get these people away, give the patient some air. ”

“ There was a moment's silence. Finally the Old One said, "Indifferent—no. But helpless. My people die when they leave the mountains. The air is too rich for them. The food is wrong. The light blinds and tortures them. ”

“ A simple heat-gun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a super-cobalt planetbuster.
Kendricks protested, "We can't travel unarmed through trailmen country! We're apt to meet hostile bands of the creatures—and they're nasty with those long knives they carry!"
The stranger said calmly, "I've no objection to you, or anyone else, carrying a knife for self-defense."
"A knife?" Kendricks drew breath to roar. "Listen, you bug-eyed son-of-a—who do you think you are, anyway?"
The Darkovans muttered. The man in the shadows said, "Regis Hastur." ”

“ And you may witness what your foster-son has sworn here; if one of your sons dies, your alien son will answer for it with his own life."
The words had poured from me in a flood. They were not all mine; some unconscious thing had recalled in me that Jay Allison had power to make these promises. For the first time I began to see what force, what guilt, what dedication working in Jay Allison had turned him aside from me. I remained at the Old One's feet, kneeling, overcome, ashamed of the thing I had become. Jay Allison was worth ten of me. Irresponsible, Forth had said. ”

“ People forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year, the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason—I had al [98] ways been the watcher behind, the person Jay Allison dared not be? ”

“ Evidently I had bought it before the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.
Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle of whiskey. I remembered Forth's words that he'd never seen Jay Allison drink, and suddenly I thought, "The fool!" I fixed myself a drink and sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book. ”

“ If we kill a single trailman, except in hand-to-hand fight in self-defense, we might as well pack up and go home. We're on a peaceful mission, and we're begging a favor. Even if we're attacked—we kill only as a last resort, and in hand-to-hand combat! ”

“ When he reached an age to be unhappy with you, you let a dozen of your people risk their lives to take him to his own. You cannot ask me to believe that you are indifferent to the death of a million of my people, when the fate of one could stir your pity! ”

“ Nothing, of course, to an experienced climber—a foot-wide ledge might as well be a four-lane superhighway. Kendricks made a nervous joke about a tightrope walker, but when his turn came he picked his way securely, without losing balance. The amateurs—Lerrys Ridenow, Regis, Rafe—came across without hesitation, but I wondered how well they would have done at a less secure altitude; to a real mountaineer, a footpath is a footpath, whether in a meadow, above a two-foot drop, a thirty-foot ledge, or a sheer mountain face three miles above the first level spot. ”

“ You may be the only Terran on Darkover, maybe the only human, who could get into a trailman's Nest without being murdered."
"Sir—as a citizen of the Empire, I don't have any choice, do I?"
"Jay, look," Forth said, and I felt him trying to reach through the barricade and touch, really touch that cold contained young man, "we couldn't order any man to do anything like this. Aside from the ordinary dangers, it could destroy your personal balance, maybe permanently. I'm asking you to volunteer something above and beyond the call of duty. Man to man—what do you say?" ”

“ I shook my head. "Better sleep while you can." I felt that this [129] night of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but—habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors—dirty and unsanitary as any beast's den.
Kyla said broodingly, "You're a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are you—in Terra's world?" ”

“ Rafe muttered, "anyone living in this forest would have to live in the treetops, or go totally blind!"
Kendricks whispered to me, "Are we being followed? Are they going to jump us?"
"I don't think so. What you hear are just the inhabitants of the city—going about their daily business up there."
"Queer business it must be," Regis said curiously, and as we walked along the mossy, needly forest floor, I told him something of the trailmen's lives. I had lost my fear. If anyone came at us now, I could speak their language, I could identify myself, tell my business, name my foster-parents. ”

“ Jay Allison pushed the girl's hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they—not even human—could have a sense of duty!
With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan—where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement ”

“ We talked, too, about some of those humans who had crossed the mountains into trailmen country—those mountains profanely dubbed the Hellers by the first Terrans who had tried to fly over them in anything lower or slower than a spaceship. (The Darkovan name for the Hellers was even more explicit, and even in translation, unrepeatable.)
"What about this crew you picked? They're not Terrans?"
Forth shook his head. "It would be murder to send anyone recognizably Terran into the Hellers. You know how the trailmen feel about outsiders getting into their country." ”

“ Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a grimace of distaste, "I didn't mean that literally. But the trailmen are not human. It wouldn't be genocide, just an exterminator's job. A public health measure."
Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what he was saying. He said, "Galactic center would have to rule on whether they're dumb animals or intelligent non-humans, and whether they're entitled to the status of a civilization. ”

“ Some day we'll tackle the Wall Around the World—it's been tried, but no one ever climbed the peak."
"No one ever will," Lerrys stated positively, "There's two hundred feet of sheer rock cliff, Prince Regis, you'd need wings to get up. And there's the avalanche ledge they call Hell's Alley—"
Kendricks broke in irritably, "I don't care whether it's ever been climbed or ever will be climbed, we're not going to climb it now!" ”

“ Kendricks made no reply except a non-committal grunt. I held myself back by main force from touching Kyla, remembering what she was, and finally said, "We'd better quit talking. The others want to sleep, if we don't."
After a time I heard Kendricks snoring, and Kyla's quiet even breaths. I wondered drowsily how Jay would have felt about this situation—he who hated Darkover and avoided contact with every other human being, crowded between a Darkovan free-Amazon and half a dozen assorted roughnecks. ”

“ Rafe or Lerrys, who were lightly built and acrobatic, could probably do it as a simple stunt on the level, in a field; on a steep and rocky mountainside, where a fall might mean being dashed a thousand feet down the torrent, I doubted it. The trailmen's bridge was out ... but what other choice was there?
I beckoned to Kendricks, he being the man I was the most inclined to trust with my life at the moment, and said, "It looks uncrossable, but I think two men could get across, if they were steady on their feet. The others can hold us on ropes, in case we do get knocked down. ”

“ When I mentioned the Terran Legate's offer to recognize the trailmen as a separate and independent government, he frowned and rebuked me:
"We of the Sky People have no dealings with the Terrans, and care nothing for their recognition—or its lack."
For that I had no answer, and the Old One continued, kindly but indifferently, "We do not like to think that the fever which is a children's little sickness with us shall kill so many of your kind. ”

“ Dr. Forth—by now I was sure he was Dr. Forth—followed the direction of my eyes.
"Where did you get the scar?"
"Knife fight. One of the bands of those-who-may-not-enter-cities caught us on the slopes, and we—" the memory thinned out again, and I said despairingly, "It's all confused! What's the matter? Why am I up on Medical? Have I had an accident? Amnesia?"
"Not exactly. I'll explain."
I got up and walked to the window, unsteadily because my feet wanted to walk slowly while I felt like bursting through some invisible net and striding there at one bound. ”

“ Darkover is a civilized planet with a fairly high standard of living, but it is not a mechanized or a technological culture. The people don't do much mining, or build factories, and the few which were founded by Terran enterprise never were very successful; outside the Terran Trade City, machinery or modern transportation is almost unknown.
While the other men checked and loaded supplies and Rafe Scott went out to contact some friends of his and arrange for last-minute details, I sat down with Forth to memorize the medical details I must put so clearly to the trailmen. ”

“ Nature seems to have a sameness on all inhabited worlds, tending toward the economy and simplicity of the human form. The upright carriage, freeing the hands, the opposable thumb, the color-sensitivity of retinal rods and cones, the development of language and of lengthy parental nurture—these things seem to be indispensable to the growth of civilization, and in the end they spell human. Except for minor variations depending on climate or foodstuff, the inhabitant of Megaera or Darkover is indistinguishable from the Terran or Sirian ”