CHAPTER THREE

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Lew Alton’s narrative:

Vainwal: sixth year of exile

Ithought I had forgotten how to be happy.

And yet, that year on Vainwal, I was happy. The planet is more than the decadent city of the pleasure world. Perhaps we would have left it altogether—though not, perhaps, to return to Darkover—but my father found the climate beneficial to his lameness, and preferred to stay in the city where he could find hot springs and mineral baths, and sometimes, I suspect, companionship he could tolerate. I’ve wondered, sometimes, about that; but, close as we were, there are some things we could not—quite—share, and that was one area of itchy privacy I tried, hard, to stay away from. I suppose it’s hard enough with ordinary sons and their fathers.

When both father and son are telepaths, it becomes even more difficult. During my years in Arilinn, working in the telepathic relays as a matrix mechanic, I had learned a lot about privacy, and what it has to be when all around you are closer than your own skin. There used to be an old taboo preventing a mother and her grown son from working in the relays at the same time; or a father and his nubile daughter. My father could mask his thoughts better than most. Even so, I described that sort of thing, once, to somebody, as living with your skin off. During these years of exile, we’d been so close that there were times when neither of us was sure which thought belonged to whom. Any two solitary men are going to get on each other’s nerves from time to time. Add to that the fact that one of them is seriously ill and at least (let me not pass too lightly over this) intermittently insane, and it adds another turn of the screw. And we were both extremely powerful telepaths, and there had been long periods of time when I had no control over what I was sending. By the time I was even halfway sane again there were long periods of time where there was at least as much hate as there was love. We had been too close, too long.

Not the least of what I had to be grateful to Dio for was this; that she had broken that deadlock, broken into that unhealthy over-preoccupation with one another’s every thought. If we had been mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, at least there would have been a taboo we could break. For a father and son there was no such dramatic exit from the trap; or it seemed to us that there was not, though I cannot swear it never entered either of our minds. We were both old enough to make such a decision, we were away from the world which had ingrained such taboos, and we were alone together in an alien universe, among the headblind who would neither know nor care what levels of decadence we might choose to explore. Nevertheless, we let it alone; it was, perhaps, the only thing we never tried to share, and I think it may have been the only way we kept our sanity.

My father was quickly enchanted with Dio, too, and I think he was genuinely grateful to her; not least because she had come between our unhealthy preoccupation with one another. Yet, glad as he was to have some degree of freedom from my constant presence and to be free of fears for my continued sanity (and, though he had shielded them carefully from me, I was always aware of it, and a man watched constantly for signs of insanity will doubt his own sanity the more), the coming of Dio had left him alone. He could not admit his helplessness; Kennard Alton never would. Yet daily I saw him growing worse, and knew that a time would come, even if it had not come yet, when he needed me. He had always been there when I needed him, and I would not leave him alone, a prey to age and infirmity. So Dio and I found a home at the edge of the city, where he could call upon us when he needed us, and in the overflow of our own happiness, it was easy enough to spare him some time for companionship.

Well, we were happy. When I lost Marjorie, in the horror of that last night when Caer Donn had gone up in flames and we had tried, with our two lives thrust into the gap, to close the breach Sharra had made in the fabric of the world, we had both been ready to die. But it hadn’t happened that way; Majorie died, and I—lived on, but something had been destroyed in me that night. Not cut clean away, but, like my hand, rotting and festering and growing into terrifying inhuman shapes. Dio had gone unflinching into all that horror, and somehow, after that, I had healed clean.

Neither of us thought of marriage. Marriage di catenas, the ritual formalized marriage of the Domains, was a solemn joining of property, a mutual matter concerning two families, two houses, for the raising of children to inheritance and laran. What Dio and I had was so deeply personal that we had no wish or need to bring either family into it. With Marjorie, half my love for her had been a desire to see her as my wife, living with me at Armida, bringing up children we would share in common, the desire for the long quiet years of peace in our beloved home. With Dio it was something different. When Dio found herself pregnant, in the second year we were together, we were not really happy about it. But perhaps our bodies had spoken to what our minds refused to know. It lay deep in both of us, of course, a desire for continuity, something to come after us when we were gone, the deep-rooted desire for the only immortality anyone can ever know.

“I needn’t have the child, if you don’t want it,” she said, curled up at my side in our living room, which was high above the lights of Vainwal, below us; colored lights, strung gaily in ribbons along the streets; there was always some kind of festival here, noise and gaiety and confusion and the seeking of pleasure.

She was close enough to me to feel my instinctual flinching. She said “You dowant it—don’t you, Lew?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the truth, Dio.”

Truth; I resented the intrusion of our idyll by any third party, however beloved; someone who would inevitably destroy the deepest closeness between us; Dio would no longer be altogether preoccupied with my needs and wishes, and in that way, selfishly, I resented the knowledge that she was pregnant.

Truth, equally; I remembered with anguish that night— the very night before her death—when I knew that Marjorie was carrying the child she would not live long enough to bear. I had sensed the tentative life as I now sensed the new and growing seed of life in Dio and my very soul shrank from seeing it extinguished. Maybe it was only squeamishness. But, selfishly, I wished thischild to live. I said, “I want it and I do not. It is you who will have to bear it; you must make the choice. Whatever you decide, I will try to be happy with your decision.”

For a long time she watched the changing play of lights in the city below us. At last she said, “It will change my life in ways I can’t even imagine. I’m a little afraid to change that much. It’s you I want, Lew, not your child,” and she laid her head on my shoulder. Yet I sensed she was as ambivalent as I. “At the same time, it’s something that—that came out ; of our love. I can’t help wanting—” She stopped and swal-i lowed, and laid her hand, almost protectively, over her belly. “I love you, Lew, and I love your child because it’s yours. And this is something that could be—well, different and stronger than either of us, but partof what we have together. Does that make any sense to you?”

I stroked her hair. At that moment she seemed so infinitely precious to me, more so than she had ever been before; perhaps more than she would ever be again.

“I’m frightened, Lew. It’s too big. I don’t think I have the right to decide something as big as that. Maybe the decision was made by something beyond either of us. I never thought much about God, or the Gods, or whatever there is. I keep feeling that there’s something terrible waiting for us, and I don’t want to lose even a minute of what happiness we could have together.” Again the little gesture, holding her hand I over her womb, as if to shield the child there. She said, in a scared whisper, “I’m a Ridenow. It’s not just a thing, Lew, it’s alive, I can feel it alive—oh, not moving, I won’t feel it moving for months yet, but I can sense it there. It’s alive and I think it wants to live. Whether it does or not, I wantit to live—I want to feel it living. I’m scared of the changes it will make, but I want to have it, Lew. I want this baby.”