“Don’t worry about me, Lew; we’ll be all right,” she said, and I kissed her again, and Kathie motioned to the other nurse to stand aside so that I could lift Dio onto the rolling bed they would use to take her away into their inner sanctuaries. Her arms tightened around me, but I knew I had to let her go.

I paced the halls, smelling the sharp hospital smells that reminded me of my own ordeal, sharply aware of the phantom pain in my missing hand. I would rather live in Zandru’s ninth and coldest hell than within the reach of those damnable smells. Blurred by distance, and my own growing weariness, I could feel Dio’s fear, and hear her crying out for me— I would have tried to fight my way to her side, but it would have done no good, not here on this alien world. At home, beneath our own red sun, I would have been sharing her ordeal, in close mental rapport with her… no man could allow his wife to go through childbirth alone. How, now, could we share our child, when I, his father, had been isolated from the birth? Even in the distance, I could feel her fright, bravely concealed, her pain, and then it all went into the blurring of drugs. Why had they done that? She was healthy and strong, well prepared for childbirth, she should not have needed nor wanted this unconsciousness, and I knew she had not asked for it. Had they drugged her against her will? I berated myself, that my own distaste for the hospital surrounding, my own revived horror at the memory of the Terran hospital where they had tried, and failed, to save my hand, had prevented me from what I should have done. I should have stayed in rapport with her mind, been present with her in every moment, telepathically, even if I was prevented from being physically present. I had failed her, and I was full of dread.

I tried to quiet my growing dismay. In a few hours, we would have our son. I should have called my father, at some time during this endless day. He would have come to the hospital, kept me company here. Well, I would send him word as soon as our son was born.

Could I be to my son such a father as Kennard had been to me, fighting endlessly to have me accepted, trying to protect me from any insult or slight, fighting to have me given every privilege and duty of a Comyn son? I hoped I would not have to be as hard on my son as my father had been on me; would have less reason. Yet I could understand now, a little, why he had been so harsh.

What would we call the boy? Would Dio object if I wanted to name him Kennard? My own name was Lewis-Kennard; my father’s older brother had been named Lewis. Kennard-Marius, perhaps, for my brother and my father. Or would Dio want, perhaps, to name him for one of her own brothers, her favorite, Lerrys, perhaps? Lerrys had quarreled with me, perhaps he would not want his name given to my son… I played with these thoughts to hide my own desperate unease, my growing concern at the delay—why was I told nothing?

Perhaps I should go now—there was a communicator screen in the lower lobby of the hospital—and call Kennard, telling him where I was, and what was happening. He would want to know, and I realized that at this moment I would welcome his company. What would he think, I wondered, when he saw the young nurse Kathie, who was so much like Linnell? Maybe he would not even see the resemblance, perhaps I was simply in a hypernormal state which had exaggerated a slight likeness into a near-identity. After all, most young girls have a dimple somewhere and a small scar somewhere else. Nor is it unusual for a young woman of Terran ancestry—and whether we liked it or not, Darkover had been colonized from a single homogeneous stock, which accounted for our strong ethnic similarity—to be brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a heart-shaped face and a sweet husky voice. My own agitation had done the rest, and exaggerated. She was probably not at all like Linnell, and I would certainly see it, in the unlikely event that I could see them standing side by side…

Perhaps it was my own growing exhaustion, the effort I was making to hold sleep at bay; it seemed for a minute that I could see them standing side by side, Linnell in her Festival gown, and somehow Linnell looked older, worn, and Kathie, by her side, somehow was wearing Darkovan clothing too… and behind them, it seemed, there was a wavering darkness—

There was a soft sound and I turned to see the young nurse who looked so much like Linnell… yes, she didlook like her, the resemblance was not an illusion; calling up Linnell’s picture in my mind had made me surer than ever.

Ah, to be at home, in the hills near Armida, riding with Marius and Linnell over those hills, with the old Terran coridom Andres threatening to beat us for racing and riding at so breakneck a pace that Marius and I tore our breeches and Linnell’s hair tangled in the wind too much for her governess to brush it properly…by now Linnell was probably married to Prince Derik, and Derik crowned, so that my foster-sister was a Queen—

“Mr. Montray?”

I whirled. “What is it? Dio? The baby? Is everything all right?” I thought she looked subdued, deeply troubled; and she would not meet my eyes.

“Your wife is perfectly all right,” she said gently, “but Doctor DiVario wants to see you, about the baby.”

The young doctor was a woman; I was grateful for that, glad Dio had been spared the indignity of male attendance. Sometimes a strong telepath or empath can transcend the difference of gender, but here among the headblind, I knew Dio would prefer a doctor of her own sex. The woman looked tired and strained, and I knew that, if she had not empathy, not in the strong sense of the Ridenow gift, she at least had that rudimentary awareness that differentiates the indifferent doctor from the good one.

“Mr. Montray-Lanart? Your wife is well; you can see her in a few minutes,” she said, and I whispered a prayer of thanks to the Mother Avarra, a prayer I had not known I remembered. Then I said, “Our child?”

She bent her head and already I knew—I thought, the worst. “Dead?”

“It was simply too soon,” she said, “and we could do nothing.”

“But,” I protested, like a fool, “the life-support, the artificial wombs—babies born even more prematurely than this have lived…”

She waved that aside. She looked strained. She said, “We did not let your wife see. The minute we knew, we—drugged her. I am sorry, but I felt it the safest way; she was very agitated. She should be coming out of the anesthetic any moment, now, and you should be with her. But first—” she said, and looked at me with what I recognized, uncomfortably, as pity, “you must see. It is the law, so that you cannot accuse us of making away with a healthy child—” and I remembered there was a thriving market in adoptive children, for women who did not want to be bothered bearing their own. I sensed the young doctor’s distress, and somehow it made me remember a dream—I could not remember the details, something about the doctor who had said to me here, a few days ago, that I should be prepared for some degree of deformity… something dreadful, blood, horror…

She took me into a small bare room, with cabinets and closed doors and sinks, and a tray lying covered with a white cloth. She said, “I am sorry,” and uncovered it.

Once I came up through the veils of the drug and saw the horror which had grown at the end of my arm. The messages, deep within the cells, which bid a hand be a hand and not a foot or a hoof or a bird’s wing…

I had screamed my throat raw—

But no sound escaped me this time. I shut my eyes, and felt the young doctor’s compassionate hand on my shoulder. I think she knew I was glad our child lay there, lifeless, for I would surely—I could not have let it live. Not like that. But I was glad it was not my hand which had…

… thrust through Dio’s body and wrenched the child forth bloody, clawed, feathered, a horror past horror…