The World Wreckers (26 page)

overwhelming awareness of returning life and spring and a world reborn.

(And somewhere in a high hidden vantage point above the garden, Andrea too saw the madness of the

dance whirl through the red-headed ones and even through senses blunted for centuries, felt the old

madness of surging life and renewal, and stood paralyzed, caught up, anguished, with old throbbings

beating through her life and battering at closed and agonizing doors. Caught in an anguish beyond

endurance, clamped in fearful agony of remembrance and grief, she stood frozen, her eyes burning in

silent and outflooding fury…)

The surging, flooding beat of the invisible music, the very life of the planet, the magnetic currents of the spring itself, beat in them all, wakening them to the total ecstasy of the world. Even the dying felt the call, life struggling and surging to reestablish itself through the prevalence of death and ruin on a planet struggling helplessly for survival. It was Regis in whom the surge of renewed life first reached explosive force of need; sudden, dark and mindless, it surged through him and he reached out, still blinded with

the surging life of the gathering dance, and drew the girl at his side into his arms. Together, they sank down into the soft grass.

And then, spun away one by one from the wheeling dance of life, they moved together, sinking down in

twos and threes. David, feeling the waves crest within him, breaking over his head, blind and dizzied

with the madness of life, felt hands on his body, a whisper, was blindly conscious of an exquisite girl's face surrounded by masses of flaming hair. He felt himself drop out of the dance, sink into her arms. He

was almost wholly unaware of movements or how it happened, but within what seemed seconds they

were lying close together, naked on the warm moon-flooded grass. It was like madness, with the damp

scent of flowers all around them both, and all around them in the night the sounds of love; kisses,

murmurs, the final dropping down of the last dancers into silent groups, hot plunging fierceness, cries of supplication, hunger, content. He was caught up unknowing, moving in a blind and deaf need with the

delicate strength of the girl's body in his arms.

And yet—blind? deaf? Or more aware than with all of his ordinary senses because he no longer used

them?
Not me alone
, he knew, as for a timelessly brief and yet unending instant he blended into the familiar and intense sweetness of Keral transfigured by love (
Again, again, I am here with you, beloved

—); and then, as if the last garment had been swept away, leaving him wholly naked for the first time in

his life, he found himself blending, swiftly and intensely, into the overwhelming life around him.

He felt, as he had never felt any touch before (although he knew beyond sight that she was at the far end of the garden, lying in Danilo's arms) Linnea's soft lips touch his face; felt yet again the wild sweetness of Keral, so well-known and eternally unfamiliar; sank into a momentary rapport with Jason, as his

friend's hands closed violently over the breasts of an unknown girl; and then sank into fierce rapport

with Regis (images, blurring even as he sensed them: of crossed swords; the meshing of wrists in the

flying grip of aerialists; the violent and intensely sensuous struggle of wrestlers gripped in a hold more ardent than lovers). For an overwhelming and releasing moment, he sensed what it would be to let his

own awareness of manhood disappear—had Keral had to face this mingling of grief, joy and

humiliation?—as his mind and body melted into that of an unknown girl, and he looked up into Regis'

eyes at the very instant of surrender and consummation. Then David was back in his own body, the girl

under him soft, pliant, demanding. And there was nothing else… and everything else… for a blind

instant… forever… heat… explosion… slow subsiding waves… stars that spin and whirled inside and

outside, and a world slowly darkening into silence.

The seconds, or three hours later—none of them ever knew—David surfaced slowly, like coming up

from a very deep dive. The girl's soft body was still cradled in his arms, her silken hair blinding his eyes.

He stroked it softly and kissed it before brushing it away from his face, raised himself on his elbow, and looked into the startled and smiling face of Desideria. There was a moment of shock and amazement and

instantaneous rearrangement of awareness, and then the memory of what had brought them together

came back and David laughed. What did it matter? Age, or even sex, were at this moment, and to what

they were, irrelevant. He saw the backlash of doubt and regret sweep the old woman's face; he laughed

and kissed her and saw the fear dissolve. She said softly, in a whisper, "I have heard it said in old stories; what is done under the four joining moons is the will of the gods and outside what men would wish or

desire. But I have never known until this moment what was meant."

He smiled at her and clasped her hands. All around them, the garden was quiet with the soft murmurs of

returning, separate, ordinary awareness. David reached about for his clothes, for it was chilly even in the spring, and felt like a dog who cocks his ears at a sound no man can hear. It was quiet and peaceful in

the garden, but a nag of fright and sudden awareness kept jerking on an invisible nerve. He looked

around with sudden apprehension, reached out for Conner:

David? I don't know, I don't like it
—
fireworks
…
for the first time in my life healed and happy
…
never
again to drift alone, but even here
,
here
…

Keral screamed suddenly, a wild cry of mingled terror and joy, as a faint burst of light moved in the

garden, and eight or ten tall forms appeared out of the tingling air, tall and pale with silvery floating hair and great grave eyes that seemed to gleam of their own light. He ran toward them; moving surefooted

through the conjoined couples still lying in the grass, and was caught up in embrace after embrace, while David, staring in amazement, recognized and knew who they must be; the surviving chieri, appeared—

as legend told man that they could appear—out of nothingness, come to see their youngest and their

beloved in his moment of happiness and returning of life and hope. All around them, the workings of the

ordinary world of night were beginning to return, and stirrings of wonder, of joy and amusement, and

laughing chagrin, and a shared purpose too deep and real for ordinary words were returning. David

knew, at too deep a level for speech (was it Regis who had cast the thought into the invisible net?), that nothing would ever again wholly separate the telepaths of Darkover; they might have separate purposes

on the surface, but a potential lost or mislaid for years had returned; and as the chieri had been before them, they were a people at one with themselves and each other.

Keral was still laughing and murmuring with the joyousness of reunion. And yet beneath it all, an

undercurrent of fear was beginning to run, like a palpable smell of danger. David felt the hairs on his

body bristle. Danilo, putting Linnea gently aside, reached like a cat for his sword; no visible danger,

pure instinct. Conner sprang to his feet.

And then, unmistakable, it was Rondo who yelled—or were there words?—a great cry of outrage and

anguish:

No! I told you their plans because I wanted to get free of this world, but they have never harmed me, and
I want no part in murder
—

And a running figure which suddenly froze and rose upward, upward, physically upward through the

thickening air, like a flying demon, surrounded with a glare of growing light. He seized something with

a strange twisting gesture, in mid-air, and body and glowing thing rocketed upward, upward…

In mid-air, thousands of feet above the castle, it burst like a great shower of fireworks; there was a silent scream of unbelievable pain and dying anguish and there was a ripped out silence, a great gaping

toothache hole in the world where Rondo's thoughts and voice and mind had been. And then came the

sound of the explosion, muffled by distance, far out in space and harmless, but still it rocked the castle, reverberated—and died away.

And then, in the midst of the chieri and surrounded by their light, stood a woman, wearing drab Empire

clothes, struggling against the invisible force that had thrust her out of concealment and into the light; the look of sated and triumphant rage on her face giving way to fear, amazement, and disbelief.

I thought you were all dead. I did not know any of you had survived to return to this world, even to die.

"No." The voice of the eldest of the chieri, a tall and beautiful woman, ageless and beyond everything in man, was like a reverberation in the world. "We live, although not for long. But we cannot give death for death; we must give life for death—"

"Her name is Andrea," said the young, red-haired Free Amazon, rising from the garden darkness, "and I knew she would have destroyed us if she could, but I did not know—"

"No," said the old chieri again, with infinite grief and gentleness, speaking directly to Andrea. "We know you, even over these many, many turns of the years, Narzainye kui, child of the Yellow Forest,

who abandoned us in despair during the years of our search. We mourned you as one long, long dead,

beloved…"

The face of the woman was drawn with agony and grief. "And I bore a child on one of the outer worlds, to a stranger whose name I never knew, or face I never saw—a child conceived in madness and thrown

out to die, in madness, thinking you all dead and gone—"

"The long, long years of madness," Keral whispered, and took Andrea's face between his hands in infinite tenderness. She opened her spasmodically closed eyes and looked up at him, seeing the glow of

heightened beauty, the infinite power which lay within Keral, the height of potential life. Keral said

quietly:

"All is not ended. I live—and you see what has happened to me. Perhaps even the child you bore lives somewhere; we are hard to kill—" and his eyes briefly sought for Missy in the crowd, in speculation

which could be read on the clear features. "But our race lives, Andrea, in these people; I knew even as a babe that our blood survived in them. And as you see—"

Keral's unearthly beauty seemed to shimmer, and for the first (and only) time, David perceived Keral for

an instant as the exquisite girl he had at first thought Keral and in instantaneous recognition knew the

truth; that the chieri showed the height of the Change, and full feminine awareness (Missy had only

mimicked it) in pregnancy. And now he understood Keral's madness of joy, which had swept them all

away—and saved them all; and probably saved a world as well.

And then, with trained medical awareness, forgetting that he was still half-naked, he leaped forward,

catching Andrea in his arms as the aging chieri woman crumpled senseless to the ground.

Epilogue

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THE WOMAN WHO for centuries had called herself Andrea Closson sat on a high balcony in the

Comyn Castle at Thendara, looking out over green and faraway hills. The point of no return had been

very nearly reached; and yet, as she told herself before, the world could be saved, but it had demanded

resources which were not available on Darkover:

Except for herself.

She had not spared herself. Every scrap of talent which she had used, for two hundred years, in learning

how to wreck worlds, had been thrown into the struggle to save one; and every cent of the enormous

fortune it had made her had been placed at the disposal of those who were struggling on every front to

return Darkover to itself. This world was her own, and had been miraculously returned to her when she

knew that a handful of her people survived and that their blood survived in the very Darkovan telepaths

she had despised. And now, as they awaited the birth of Keral's child, she knew it would remain, even

though not a pure line.

The chieri might not survive. This alone could not return her race to strength and survival. They had,

indeed, reached the point of no return. It was certain that Missy would never bear a child; she had been

too deeply damaged and blunted in the hundreds of years of struggle for survival, abandoned. Andrea

faced her own guilt, but it was as if it had happened to someone else; what is done in madness cannot be

remembered in sanity without worse madness. Still, Keral lived, and Keral's child would live, bringing

new vigor and new powers to the telepath race.

"And that's not all," said David, coming out on the balcony. He had a strange ability to follow Andrea's thoughts, and she had grown to love him in her own strange and hidden way. Jason, Regis and Linnea

were with him, and David said, "The telepaths here, at least, will not die out. Do you realize that—how many is it, Jason?"

"One hundred and one," Jason said, "that's women of the Telepath Council—pregnant. And at least nineteen of them with twins and three with triplets. That at least ensures a flourishing younger

generation." He looked at Linnea, who laughed and took Regis' hand. She was very near her own time

now, heavily pregnant but as beautiful as ever.

"We are going to work with the Empire," Regis said; "It was decided in council; Darkovans cannot cut themselves entirely off from a galactic civilization. We will train telepaths for spaceship communication.

We know, now, that contact with telepaths will arouse latent telepathy in those who don't seem to have

it. I expect, from Darkover, it will spread out all through the known galaxy. And those who are born