The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the olderlaran weapons which were as dreadful as anything the Terran empire could produce…

“I don’t think Gabriel will challenge you,” Andres said. “But they’ll ask why, at your age, you’re not married, and whether you have a legitimate child for an Heir.”

I felt the scars at my mouth pull as I grimaced. “Married, yes, but not for long; that was what Lerrys came here about,” I said. “And no children, nor likely to have.”

Marius started to ask questions; Jeff stared him down. He knew what I was talking about. “We were afraid, at Arilinn, that would happen, but the technique of cell-monitoring at that level was lost sometime in the Ages of Chaos. Some of us are working to master it again—it’s quicker and safer than some of the DNA work they do in the Empire. I don’t suppose you fathered any bastards before you went offworld?”

There had been adventures in my youth, but if I had fathered a child—I put it bluntly to myself—the girl involved would have been proud to tell me so. And Marjorie had died, her child unborn.

“They’d accept Marius if I tested him for the Alton Gift, perhaps,” I said. “They might have no choice. Comyn law says there mustbe an Heir named, a succession insured. By letting Kennard take me offworld, they gave tacit consent for Marius as presumptive Heir, I’d think. The law is clear enough.” I didn’t want to test Marius for the Alton Gift—not by the shock tactics my father had used on me, and I knew no others. Not now. And with my matrix in the shape it was in… about all I could do would be to give a demonstration of the powers of Sharra!

It wanted me, the fires sought to call me back…

But there were other things to think about now.

“Marius should be tested before the formal challenge,” I said. “You’re First at Arilinn; you can do that, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” Jeff said. “Why not? I suspect he has some laran, perhaps Ridenow gift—there’s Ridenow in the Alton lineage, and Ardais, too; Kennard’s mother was Ardais and I always suspected he had a touch of catalyst telepathy.”

Marius had been tearing a buttered roll to pieces. He said now, without looking up, “What I have, I think, is—is the Aldaran Gift. I can see—ahead. Not far, not very clearly; but the Aldaran Gift is precognition, and I—I have that.”

That he would have had from our half-Terran mother. In these days the gifts were entangled anyhow, bred out by intermarriage between the Domains. But I stared at him and demanded, “How would you know about the Aldaran Gift?”

He said impatiently, “The Aldarans are all the kin I have! And hell, Lew, the Comyn weren’t very eager to claim me as kin! I spent one summer with Beltran—why not?”

This was a new factor to be reckoned with.

“I know he didn’t treat you well,” Marius went on, defensively, “but your quarrel was a private one, after all. What do you expect, that I should declare blood-feud for three generations because of that? Are we the barbarians the Terrans call us, then?”

There was no answer to that, but I didn’t know what to say.

“We could all use some information about the future,” I said. “If you’ve got thatGift, for the love of Aldones tell me what’s going to happen if I claim the Domain? Will they accept you as my Heir?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed, and once again he seemed young, vulnerable, a boy half his age. “I—I tried to find out. They told me that sometimes that happened, you couldn’t see too clear for yourself or anyone close to you…”

That was true enough, and since it was true, I wondered, not for the first time, what good that Gift was to anyone. Perhaps, in the days when Aldarans could see the fate of rulers, kingdoms, even of the planet… and that was another disquieting thought. Maybe the Aldarans, with their foresight, saw that Darkover would go the way of the Terran Empire and that was why they had joined forces, for so long, with Terra. I wondered if Beltran had entirely broken with them after the Sharra rebellion.

Well, there was one way to find out, but there was no time for it now. I strode restlessly to the window, looked out across the bustle of the cobbled square. Men were leading animals to the market, workmen going about carrying tools; a quiet familiar bustle. Because of the season, there was only a light thin powdering of snow on the stones; Festival, and High Summer, were upon us. Still it seemed cold to me after Vainwal and I dressed in my warmest cloak. Let the Terrans call me barbarianif they liked, I was home again, I would wear the warm clothes my own world demanded. The fur lining felt good even at this season as I drew it round me. Both Marius and Jeff offered to accompany me; but this was private business and I must attend to it by myself, so I refused.

It was a bright day; the sun, huge and red—the Terrans called it Cottman’s Star, but to me it was just the sun, and just the way a sun should be—hung on the horizon, coming free of layers of morning cloud, and there were two small shadows in the sky where Liriel and Kyrddis were waning. Once I could have told you what month we were in, and what tenday of which month, by the position of the moons; as well as what to plant, in season, or what animals would be rutting or dropping their young; there is a month called Horse Month because more than three-quarters of the mares will foal before it fades, and there are all kinds of jokes about Wind Month because that is when the stallions and chervines and other animals run in rut; I suppose, where people live very close to the land, they work too hard to have much time for rutting, like the stallions, except at the proper season, and it becomes an uneasy joke.

But all that land… knowledge was only a dim memory, though I supposed, as I lived here longer, it would come back to me. As I strode through the morning streets, I felt comfortable under morning light and shadowed moons, something in my brain soothed and fed by the familiar lights. I’ve been on several planets, with anywhere from one to six moons—with more than that, the tides make the place uninhabitable—and suns yellow, red and blazing blue-white; at least I knew this one would not burn my skin red or brown!

So Marius, in addition to a Terran education, had the Aldaran Gift. That could be a dangerous combination, and I wondered how the Council would feel when they knew. Would they accept him, or would they demand that I adopt one of Gabriel’s sons?

It was a fairly stiff walk from the quarter of the city where my father and his forefathers had kept their town house, to the gates of the Terran Zone. A high wind was blowing, and I felt stiff. I wasn’t used to this kind of walk, and for six years I had lived on a world, Terra or Vainwal, where urgent business could be settled by mechanical communicators—anywhere in the Empire I could have settled the formalities for the dissolution of a marriage by communicator and video-screens—and where, if personal appearance had really been necessary, I could have all kinds of mechanical transport at a moment’s notice. Darkover has never had much interest in roads—it takes either machine labor, man-hours or matrix work to build good roads, and our world has never wanted to pay the price of any of those three. I’d spent my share of time in a Tower, providing the kind of communication you can get through the relays, telepathically operated; and I’d done my share of mining, too, and chemically purifying minerals. I’d monitored, and trained monitors. But I knew how hard it was to find enough talent for the matrix work, and it was no longer required of my caste, who had laran, that they spend their lives behind Tower walls, working for the people they served.

Were we Comyn the rulers of our people, because of ourlaran …or were we their slaves? And which was which? A slave is a slave, even if, for hislaran work, the people he serves surround him in every luxury and bow to his every word. A protected class quickly becomes an exploited and exploiting class. Look at women.