The World Wreckers (6 page)

As the group made their way toward the door leading into the reception hall, a young girl came to Regis'

side. She said, with a quiet self-possession, "Lord Regis, you may not remember me."

"I don't," he said, and looked down into the lovely face. The girl was young and had the heart-shaped face and dark russet hair of their caste, and she had an air of calm and self-mastery quite at odds with her youth. He said, "That will be remedied when next we meet,
damisela.
You lend me grace; how may I serve you?"

"I am Linnea of Arilinn," she said, "born in High Windward, and I have worked in the relays here for seven years, Lord."

Regis flushed faintly. "Then must I have touched your mind many times unknowing; forgive me, I have

lived long among offworlders and I keep my barriers up without realizing it."

"Nevertheless, I know what is going on in Thendara," she said, "and I know you are looking for telepaths to work in this project with the Terrans."

Regis' eyes rested with a sort of relief on the sweet young face and he thought,
I wish she were going to
be with us there. She would understand.
Nevertheless, putting temptation aside, he said, "Child, we have too few Keepers to work the few telepath relays and circles we can command now. You are of more

worth at your post in Arilinn, working in the matrix screens."

"I know that, Regis," she said. "I wasn't speaking of myself, and anyway I'm not that good a telepath. I meant—my grandmother was trained as a matrix Keeper when she was a young girl. She gave up her

post and married when she was in her early teens, but she would remember the old way they were

trained back in the mountains."

"I don't know your family, forgive me. Who was your grandmother?"

"She was Desideria Leynier; she married Storn of Storn, and my mother was their third daughter,

Rafaela Storn-Lanart."

Regis shook his head. "She must have been Keeper years and years before I was born," he said. "I seem to have heard the name, but she must be older than—I hadn't believed any of them were still living, that

group trained by the Aldarans. Was she—" suddenly his face went white as his hair, "was she one of those who raised Sharra in the hills, seventy years ago? Long before the rebellions, of course—"

"Our family have always honored the forge-goddess," said Linnea quietly, "and we had nothing to do with the abuse of that power later."

"I know that, or you would have died when Sharra's matrix was broken," Regis said. Normal color began to flow back into his face. "Then, if your grandmother is not too old to make the journey from the hills

—"

"She is too old, Lord Regis, but she will make it just the same," Linnea said, and her gray eyes glinted with mischief. "You will find her a surprising person, my grandmother."

Acting on sudden impulse, Regis drew the girl's hand through his arm as they went into the lower

Council room. Suddenly, he felt less lonely.

As Old Hastur had said, much of what happened in the Council room was more of the same. Regis had

been hearing it for seven of his twenty-four years and it had had a familiar sound long before that. There had been, for almost a hundred years, one or another party on Darkover fascinated by Terran technology

and the hypothetical benefits of joining their interplanetary civilization. They were in the smallest of

minorities and seldom listened to. Once every few years the Council, or such a council as there was in

these days, gave them a formal hearing, thanked them for their opinions, solemnly voted to ignore their

recommendations and it was all over for a few more years. This was no exception. Regis sat in the seat

marked with the insignia of the Hastur, the silver fir on the blue ground and the Hastur slogan,

Permanedó
(Here we remain), and looked around the ancient highseats, filled now with the merest

remnant of the old
laran
caste; with minor nobility, younger sons, anyone who could or would take responsibility for one of the Domains.

He could ignore the first delegation, that group of smug businessmen who called themselves the Pan-

Darkovan League. They looked sleek and firm. Despite their complaints, they weren't hurting, even

though, he was willing to admit, there were fat profits to be had from an expanding civilization and it

hurt them to miss out.

But when the delegation from the lower foothills of the Hellers was ushered in, Regis sat up and

suddenly began to take notice.

He knew some of the mountain men. He'd climbed with them, in the days when he could manage to get

away on such trips. He'd lived at the edge of the mountains all his life. He liked them, in many ways,

better than the complacent lowland people of the Domains.

These were mountain men of the old style: booted and wrapped in thick fur shirt-cloaks, swarthy and

long-haired, and although some of them were young, their faces were lined with rough weather and their

eyes wrinkled with seeing into the far distances. They looked up at Regis with the old kind of respect for the Comyn caste, a direct and simple awareness; but they were wild-eyed with fatigue and grief which

had been sustained much longer than men are meant to bear such things. And even though they tried to

speak with stoical calm, some hint of this showed.

Their leader was an old man, grayed and grizzled with a profile something like one of the sharp-toothed

crags behind the city. He addressed himself to Old Hastur, even though Regis sat in the seat of the head

of council. "I am Daniskar of the Darriel Forst," he said briefly. "I swore thirty years ago that I'd starve to death and all my family with me before we crawled down into the lowlands to ask help of the Comyn,

let alone the accursed
Terrans.
" He looked about to spit, evidently remembered in time where he was and didn't. "But we're
dying
, Lord. Our children are starving. Dying."

Mine too,
thought Regis,
not starving but dying,
and leaned forward, speaking in the mountain tongue.

"
Com
'
ii
, I am to blame that we have heard nothing of crop failure or famine in your hills."

Daniskar shook his head. He said, "You don't get crops back there, Lord, there's no plowed land for

crops. We live off the forests. And that's the problem; we're being burned out.
Vai dom
, do you know how many forest fires we've had just this season? You wouldn't more than half believe me if I told you.

And nothing we can do stops them. Forest fires are nothing new; I fought them before my beard was

grown. I know as much as any man from the Kadarin to the Wall Around the World about forest fires.

But these—nothing we can do stops them. It's as if resin fuel had been poured on them. Our beacons fail.

I'd say they were being set by human hands, only what living man could be so evil? Men can kill men if

they hate them, but to harm a forest so that men who never harmed them would suffer, friend and foe

alike?"

Regis listened in shock and horror, seeing his own horror mirrored in other faces around the Council

room, and his mind, trained to think on many levels at once, ran counterpoint to Daniskar's words.

Darkover is a wooded world, and without our forests we die. No cover for beasts means no meat for

those who eat it, no nuts for bread where grains do not grow, no furs for warmth, no fuel where the lack

of fire means freezing and death. The death of the forest means no resin or phosphorescents for light, no fruits for wine, it means no soil, for only our forests hold the soil on the mountains with so much rain

and snow to wash it down to the lowlands. Without forests, over half of Darkover would quickly become

a frozen lump of dust, starving and dying.

"You people talk fine about keeping us free of the Terran Empire," said one of the businessmen, looking up belligerently at the council members and especially, it seemed to Regis, at the two Hasturs. "And you have a right to your own politics, though I notice you're quick enough to take advantage of Terran things when you're rich enough to afford them. Like coming here by plane, under guard, instead of packing

over the mountains on horse and by snow sled as I did! I don't even say you're all wrong; anyone who

takes a helping hand must turn to his helper's path! But how far are you going to make us go for this

thing you call freedom,
vai dom
'
ym?
Must all our mountain men die before you ask the Terrans to pull us out of quicksand? We have given them a spaceport and a crossroad in their Empire. We could be a

pivot in that Empire, an important one. Why don't we make them give us more?"

"We don't care about that," Daniskar said. "We don't want the Terrans here half so much as you do, Lords. But we need more help than you can give us. They have flying machines, chemicals, quick

communications, they could put a real effort to it."

"Do you want roads, factories, machinery in your world? Do you want another Trade City in the Hellers, Daniskar?" Old Hastur asked.

"Not me, Lord. I saw the edge of a Trade City once and they stink. But it's better than seeing all our people die. We need help from somewhere, and fast—or there won't be enough of us left to care whether

we get it or not!"

And the Terrans, Regis knew, would be only too glad to help. World after world had fallen into the

Empire in just such a way. A bad season, or an epidemic, or a few too many deaths from famine, and the

proudest world, knowing that now there were alternatives to the hard laws of survival of the strongest,

were no longer willing to submit themselves to those hard laws.

It's as if the gods themselves were against us.

First the telepaths go. One by one, in fratricidal blood-feud, or sterile from inbreeding, or by

assassination and mischance. Our old science goes from lack of telepath minds to make the matrices

work.

Now our forests.

Soon we will have no choice.

But why? Who?

It was like the flashing of a light; this was no blow of the gods. It was too deliberate. Darkover was

being murdered; not dying of natural causes, being murdered.

But who would possibly want to wreck a world? Who could profit?

When the delegation from the mountains had finished, they all waited expectantly for Regis to speak.

Even his grandfather turned his eyes on Regis, to see what he would say.

And what could he say? "You must have help with the fire problem," he said at last, "all the help you can get, whether it comes from the Terran Empire or elsewhere. But I'm not prepared yet to ask them to

reclassify our world for Open status, just for this. So far, we can pay for the help we ask for. As far as needed, I can pledge my own private resources for this." He did not need to look at his grandfather for approval of the rather reckless commitment he had made; it was the only thing to do. "We can also make demands of the chiefs in the lowlands, assess a part of the payment from them."

One of the men from the Pan-Darkovan League said, "Are you expecting us to bankrupt ourselves? If we had Open status as an Empire world we could demand this sort of help as a right, and there would be

outside investors coming in to help us exploit our unused resources to pay for it."

Regis said dryly, "My thanks for the lesson in elementary economics, monsieur. Nevertheless, although I'm sure you have made a study of the problem, I'm not sure I agree with you about what would be

exploited." His eyes, hard and piercing gray, and angry, met the lowlander's and it was the other man who dropped his gaze.

It was a delaying action, Regis knew, not a victory. Forest fires, if this were simply an unlucky season or a series of natural catastrophes, could be coped with. But in combination with the attack on telepaths—

my children
, he thought again with the familiar anguish, and tried to shut off the vivid, almost visible memory-picture of the two small fair faces in their coffins—or if some unknown force were actually

working to upset the delicate balance of forces on Darkover, then it was probably hopeless. The

Darkovans could cling to their own patterns and die—or change so radically that it would be a form of

death for most of those who knew it.

Is there any hope at all? Are we all doomed?

He had delayed a decision, but as they broke up and moved out of the room, he knew that it would

descend on him personally, more heavily than ever. He stopped to say a few gracious words to Daniskar

of the Darriel Forst. The other nobles would give adequate courtesies to the Pan-Darkovans, but the

sensitive and proud mountain men must not be neglected. When he took leave of the chief, he realized

that the girl Linnea was still close at his side, no longer touching him (physical contact was rare in a

telepath caste except in direct sexual or emotional encounters) but well within the range of his

perception. He turned and smiled at her, tiredly, and said, "This wouldn't be your first council, but I dare say it's the worst yet."

She nodded, gravely. "Those poor men," she whispered. "They are my own people, Lord Regis, men from our own villages, and I had no idea, I've been away in the lowlands so long. How terrible for them.

And for you—Regis, Regis, I had heard nothing about your children—" She raised her eyes to his. As

their glances locked they were suddenly in deep rapport. She blurted out, abruptly, "Let me give you others."

He raised his hands slowly, and laid them on either side of her face. Like the girl, he was too deeply

moved for speech. For an instant time stopped and they stood together outside it, more deeply joined

than in any act of love.

It was a new thing to Regis, although women had been attracted to him all his life. Mostly for the wrong