I put my hand over hers, trying to sense it, feeling—maybe it was my imagination—the sense of something living. I remembered the depthless, measureless grief I had felt, knowing Marjorie would not live to bear me her child. Was it only the memory of thatgrief, or did I really sense deeper sorrow awaiting us? Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully accepted that Marjorie was gone, that death was forever, that there would be no reunion in this world or the next. But under my hand and Dio’s was life, a return of hope, something in the future. We were not only living from day to day, grasping for pleasure wholly our own, but life went on, and there was always more life to live. I kissed her on the forehead and on the lips, then bent to kiss her belly too.

“Whatever comes of it,” I said, “I do too, preciosa. Thank you.”

My father, of course, was delighted; but troubled, too, and he would not tell me why. And now that we were not so close, he could shield his thoughts from me. At first Dio was well and blooming, quite free of the minor troubles which some women feel in pregnancy; she said she had never been happier or healthier. I watched the changes in her body with amusement and delight. It was a joyful time; we both waited for the child’s birth, and even begun to talk about the possibility—which I had never been willing, before, to acknowledge—that someday we would return to Darkover together, and share the world of our birth with our son or daughter.

Son or daughter. It troubled me, not to know which. Dio had not a great deal of laranand had not been trained to use what little she had. She sensed the presence and the life of the child, but that was all; she could not tell which, and when I could not understand this, she told me with spirit that an unborn child probably had no awareness of its own gender, and therefore, not being aware of its own sex, she could not read its mind. The Terran medics could have taken a blood sample and a chromosome analysis and told us which, but that seemed a sick and heartless way to find out. Perhaps, I thought, Dio would develop the sensitivity to find it out, or if all else failed, I would know when the child was born. Whichever it might be, I would love it. My father wanted a son but I refused to think in those terms.

“This child, even if it is a son, will not be Heir to Armida. Forget it,” I told him, and Kennard said with a sigh, “No, it will not. You have Aldaran blood; and the Aldaran gift is precognition. I do not know why it will not, but it will not.” And then he asked me if I had had Dio monitored to make certain all was well with the child.

“The Terran medics say that all is well,” I told him, defensively. “If you want her monitored, do it yourself!”

“I cannot, Lew.” It was the first time he had ever confessed weakness to me. I looked at my father carefully for the first time, it seemed, in months, his eyes sunken deep in his face, his hands twisted and almost useless now. It seemed as if the flesh was wasting off his bones. I reached out to him and as I had often enough done to him, he rebuffed the touch, slamming down barriers. Then he drew a long breath and looked me straight in the eye. “ Laransometimes fails with age. Probably it is no more than that. You are free from Sharra now, are you not? You have Ridenow blood; you and Dio are cousins. My father’s wife was a Ridenow, and so was his mother. A woman who bears a child with laranshould be monitored.”

I sighed. This was the simplest of the techniques I had learned in Arilinn; a child of thirteen can learn to monitor the body’s functions, nerves, psychic channels. Monitoring a pregnant woman and her child is a little more complex, but even so, there was no difficulty in it. “I’ll—try.”

But I knew he could feel my inner shrinking. The Sharra matrix was packed away into the farthest corner of the farthest closet of the apartments I shared with Dio, and not twice in ten days, now, did I think of that peculiar bondage. But then, I did not use my own personal matrix, either, or seek to use any laranexcept the simplest, that reading of unspoken thoughts which no telepath can ever completely blockade from his mind.

“When?” he insisted.

“Soon,” I said, cutting him off.

Get out! Get out of my mind! Between you and Sharra, I have no mind of my own! He winced with the violence of the thought, and I felt pain and regret. In spite of all that had been between us, I loved my father, and could not endure that look of anguish on his face. I put my hand out to him.

“You are not well, sir. What do the Terran medics say to you?”

“I know what they would say, and so I have not asked them,” he said, with a flicker of humor, then returned to the former urgency. “Lew, promise me; if you find you cannot monitor Dio, then promise me—Lerrys is still on Vainwal, though I think he will soon leave for Council season. If you cannot monitor her, send for Lerrys and make him do it. He is a Ridenow—”

“And Dio is a Ridenow, and has laranrights in the estate, and the legal right to sit in Council,” I said. “Lerrys quarreled with her because she had not married me; he said her children should have a legal claim to the Alton Domain!” I swore, with such violence that my father flinched again, as if I had struck him or gripped his thin crippled hands in a vise-grip.

“Like it or not, Lew,” my father said, “Dio’s child is the son of the Heir to Alton. What you say or think cannot change it. You can forswear or forgo your own birthright, but you cannot renounce it on your son’s behalf.”

I swore again, turned on my heel and left him. He came after me, his step uneven, his voice filled with angry urgency.

“Are you going to marry Dio?”

“That’s mybusiness,” I said, slamming down a barrier again. I could do it, now, without going into the black nothingness. He said, tightening his mouth, “I swore I would never force or pressure you to marry. But remember; refusing to decide is also a decision. If you refuse to decide to marry her, you have decided that your son shall be born nedestro, and a time may come when you will regret it bitterly.”

“Then,” I said, my voice hard, “I will regret it.”

“Have you asked Dio how she feels?”

Surely he must know that we had discussed it endlessly, both of us reluctant to marry in the Terran fashion, but even less willing to bring my father, and Die’s brothers, into the kind of property-based discussions and settlements there would have to be before I could marry her di catenas. It had no relevance here on Vainwal, in any case. We had considered ourselves married in what Darkovans called freemate marriage—the sharing of a bed, a meal, a fireside—and desired no more; it would become as legal as any catenasmarriage when our child was born. But now I faced that, too; if our son was born nedestro, he could not inherit from me; if I should die Dio would have to turn to her Ridenow kin. Whatever happened, I must provide for her.

When I explained it that way, as a matter of simple and practical logic, Dio was willing enough, and the next day we went to the Empire HQ on Vainwal and registered our marriage there. I settled the legal questions, so that if I died before her, or before our child had grown to maturity, she could legally claim property belonging to me, on Terra or on Darkover, and our son would have similar rights in my estate. I realized, somewhere about halfway through these procedures, that both of us, without any prearrangement, had mutually begun referring to the child as “he.” Father had reminded me that I was part Aldaran, and precognition was one of those gifts. I accepted it as that. And knowing that, I knew all that I needed to know, so why trouble myself with monitoring?

A day or two later, Dio said, out of a clear blue sky, as we sat at breakfast in our high room above the city, “Lew, I lied to you.”