Darkover: First Contact
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
DARKOVER LANDFALL
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
TWO TO CONQUER
PROLOGUE: THE ALIEN
BOOK ONE - The Foster Brothers
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
BOOK TWO - The Kilghard Wolf
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
BOOK THREE - The Dark Twin
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
The Critics Hail Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover Novels:
“A rich and highly colored tale of politics and magic, courage and pressure . . . Topflight adventure in every way!”
—Lester Del Rey in Analog (for The Heritage of Hastur)
“May well be [Bradley’s] masterpiece.”
—New York Newsday (for The Heritage of Hastur)
“Literate and exciting.”
—New York Times Book Review (for City of Sorcery)
“Suspenseful, powerfully written, and deeply moving.”
—Library Journal (for Stormqueen!)
“A warm, shrewd portrait of women from different backgrounds working together under adverse conditions.”
—Publishers Weekly (for City of Sorcery)
“I don’t think any series novels have succeeded for me the way Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels did.”
—Locus (general)
“Delightful . . . a fascinating world and a great read.”
—Locus (for Exile’s Song)
“Darkover is the essence, the quintessence, my most personal and best-loved work.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
A Reader’s Guide to DARKOVER
THE FOUNDING:
A “lost ship” of Terran origin, in the pre-empire colonizing days, lands on a planet with a dim red star, later to be called Darkover.
DARKOVER LANDFALL
THE AGES OF CHAOS:
One thousand years after the original landfall settlement, society has returned to the feudal level. The Darkovans, their Terran technology renounced or forgotten, have turned instead to freewheeling, out-of-control matrix technology, psi powers, and terrible psi weapons. The populace lives under the domination of the Towers and a tyrannical breeding program to staff the Towers with unnaturally powerful, inbred gifts of laran.
STORMQUEEN!
HAWKMISTRESS!
THE HUNDRED KINGDOMS:
An age of war and strife retaining many of the decimating and disastrous effects of the Ages of Chaos. The lands which are later to become the Seven Domains are divided by continuous border conflicts into a multitude of small, belligerent kingdoms, named for convenience “The Hundred Kingdoms.” The close of this era is heralded by the adoption of the Compact, instituted by Varzil the Good. A landmark and turning point in the history of Darkover, the Compact bans all distance weapons, making it a matter of honor that one who seeks to kill must himself face equal risk of death.
TWO TO CONQUER
THE HEIRS OF THE HAMMERFELL
THE FALL OF NESKAYA
ZANDRU’S FORGE
THE RENUNCIATES:
During the Ages of Chaos and the time of the Hundred Kingdoms, there were two orders of women who set themselves apart from the patriarchal nature of Darkovan feudal society: the priestesses of Avarra and the warriors of the Sisterhood of the Sword. Eventually these two independent groups merged to form the powerful and legally chartered Order of Renunciates or Free Amazons, a guild of women bound only by oath as a sisterhood of mutual responsibility. Their primary allegiance is to each other rather than to family, clan, caste, or any man save a temporary employer. Alone among Darkovan women, they are exempt from the usual legal restrictions and protections. Their reason for existence is to provide the women of Darkover an alternative to their socially restrictive lives.
THE SHATTERED CHAIN
THENDARA HOUSE
CITY OF SORCERY
AGAINST THE TERRANS
—THE FIRST AGE (Recontact):
After the Hastur Wars, the Hundred Kingdoms are consolidated into the Seven Domains, and ruled by a hereditary aristocracy of seven families, called the Comyn, allegedly descended from the legendary Hastur, Lord of Light. It is during this era that the Terran Empire, really a form of confederacy, rediscovers Darkover, which they know as the fourth planet of the Cottman star system. The fact that Darkover is a lost colony of the Empire is not easily or readily acknowledged by Darkovans and their Comyn overlords.
REDISCOVERY (with Mercedes Lackey)
THE SPELL SWORD
THE FORBIDDEN TOWER
STAR OF DANGER
WINDS OF DARKOVER
AGAINST THE TERRANS
—THE SECOND AGE (After the Comyn):
With the initial shock of recontact beginning to wear off, and the Terran spaceport a permanent establishment on the outskirts of the city of Thendara, the younger and less traditional elements of Darkovan society begin the first real exchange of knowledge with the Terrans—learning Terran science and technology and teaching Darkovan matrix technology in turn. Eventually Regis Hastur, the young Comyn lord most active in these exchanges, becomes Regent in a provisional government allied to the Terrans. Darkover is once again reunited with its founding Empire.
THE BLOODY SUN
THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR
THE PLANET SAVERS
SHARRA’S EXILE
THE WORLD WRECKERS
EXILE’S SONG
THE SHADOW MATRIX
TRAITOR’S SUN
THE DARKOVER ANTHOLOGIES:
These volumes of stories edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, strive to “fill in the blanks” of Darkovan history, and elaborate on the eras, tales, and characters which have captured readers’ imaginations.
THE KEEPER’S PRICE
SWORD OF CHAOS
FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR
RED SUN OF DARKOVER
FOUR MOONS OF DARKOVER
DOMAINS OF DARKOVER
RENUNICATES OF DARKOVER
LERONI OF DARKOVER
TOWERS OF DARKOVER
MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY’S DARKOVER
SNOWS OF DARKOVER
DARKOVER NOVELS IN OMNIBUS EDITIONS
HERITAGE AND EXILE
omnibus:
The Heritage of Hastur | Sharra’s Exile
THE AGES OF CHAOS
omnibus:
Stormqueen! | Hawkmistress!
THE SAGA OF THE RENUNICATES
omnibus:
The Shattered Chain | Thendara House | City of Sorcery
THE FORBIDDEN CIRCLE
omnibus:
The Spell Sword | The Forbidden Tower
A WORLD DIVIDED
omnibus:
&nb
sp; Star of Danger | The Bloody Sun | The Winds of Darkover
DARKOVER: FIRST CONTACT
omnibus:
Darkover Landfall | Two to Conquer
DARKOVER LANDFALL
Copyright © 1972 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
TWO TO CONQUER
Copyright © 1980 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
DARKOVER: FIRST CONTACT
Copyright © 2004 by The Marion Zimmer Bradley
Literary Works Trust
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1305.
DAW Books are distributed by the Penguin Group (USA).
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
First Paperback Printing, September 2004
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA.
HECHO EN U.S.A.
eISBN : 978-1-101-49830-9
S.A.
http://us.penguingroup.com
Two to Conquer
For Tanith Lee, to commemorate an old argument which neither of us won, or lost, or ever will
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Darkover Landfall:
The songs quoted in the text from the New Hebrides Commune are all from the Songs of the Hebrides, collected by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser and published 1909, 1922 by Boosey and Hawkes. The Seagull of the Land-Under-Waves, English worlds by Mrs. Kennedy-Fraser, from the Gaelic of Kenneth MacLeod. Caristiona, words traditional, English by Kenneth MacLeod. The Fairy’s Love Song, English words by James Hogg (adapted). The Mull-Fisher’s Song, English words by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser. The Coolins of Rum, English words by Elfrida Rivers, by special permission.
Two to Conquer
To “Cinhil MacAran” of the SCA for the first verse of “Four and Twenty Leroni”—to the tune of “The Ball of Kirriemuir”—and to Patricia Mathews for creating the Sisterhood of the Sword and dressing them in red.
DARKOVER LANDFALL
CHAPTER ONE
The landing gear was almost the least of their worries; but it made a serious problem in getting in and out. The great starship lay tilted at a forty-five degree angle with the exit ladders and chutes coming nowhere near the ground, and the doors going nowhere. All the damage hadn’t been assessed yet—not nearly—but they estimated that roughly half the crew’s quarters and three-fourths of the passenger sections were uninhabitable.
Already half a dozen small rough shelters, as well as the tentlike field hospital, had been hastily thrown up in the great clearing. They’d been made, mostly out of plastic sheeting and logs from the resinous local trees, which had been cut with buzz-saws and timbering equipment from the supply materials for the colonists. All this had taken place over Captain Leicester’s serious protests; he had yielded only to a technicality. His orders were absolute when the ship was in space; on a planet the Colony Expedition Force was in charge.
The fact that it wasn’t the right planet was a technicality that no one had felt able to tackle . . . yet.
It was, reflected Rafael MacAran as he stood on the low peak above the crashed spaceship, a beautiful planet. That is, what they could see of it, which wasn’t all that much. The gravity was a little less than Earth’s, and the oxygen content a little higher, which itself meant a certain feeling of well-being and euphoria for anyone born and brought up on Earth. No one reared on Earth in the twenty-first century, like Rafael MacAran, had ever smelled such sweet and resinous air, or seen faraway hills through such a clean bright morning.
The hills and the distant mountains rose around them in an apparently endless panorama, fold beyond fold, gradually losing color with distance, turning first dim green, then dimmer blue, and finally to dimmest violet and purple. The great sun was deep red, the color of spilt blood; and that morning they had seen the four moons, like great multicolored jewels, hanging off the horns of the distant mountains.
MacAran set his pack down, pulled out the transit and began to set up its tripod legs. He bent to adjust the instrument, wiping sweat from his forehead. God, how hot it seemed after the brutal ice-cold of last night and the sudden snow that had swept from the mountain-range so swiftly they had barely had time to take shelter! And now the snow lay in melting runnels as he pulled off his nylon parka and mopped his brow.
He straightened up, looking around for convenient horizons. He already knew, thanks to the new-model altimeter which could compensate for different gravity strengths, that they were about a thousand feet above sea level—or what would be sea level if there were any seas on this planet which they couldn’t yet be sure of. In the stress and dangers of the crash-landing no one except the Third Officer had gotten a clear look at the planet from space, and she had died twenty minutes after impact while they were still digging bodies out of the wreckage of the bridge.
They knew that there were three planets in this system: one an oversized, frozen-methane giant, the other a small barren rock, more moon than planet except for its solitary orbit, and this one. They knew that this one was what Earth Expeditionary Forces called a Class M planet—roughly Earth-type and probably habitable. And now they knew they were on it. That was just about all they knew about it, except what they had discovered in the last seventy-two hours. The red sun, the four moons, the extremes of temperature, the mountains all had been discovered in the frantic intervals of digging out and identifying the dead, setting up a hasty field hospital and drafting every able-bodied person to care for the injured, bury the dead, and set up hasty shelters while the ship was still inhabitable.
Rafael MacAran started pulling his surveying instruments from his pack but he didn’t attend to them. He had needed this brief interval alone more than he had realized; a little time to recover from the repeated and terrible shocks of the last few hours—the crash, and a concussion which would have put him into a hospital on crowded, medically-hypersensitive Earth. Here the medical officer, harried from worse injuries, tested his reflexes briefly, handed him some headache pills and went on to the seriously hurt and the dying. His head still felt like an oversized toothache although the visual blurring had cleared up after the first night’s sleep. The next day he had been drafted, with all the other able-bodied men not on the medical staff or the engineering crews in the ship, to dig mass graves for the dead. And then there had been the mind-shaking shock of finding Jenny among them.
Jenny. He had envisioned her safe and well, too busy at her own job to hunt him up and reassure him. Then among the mangled dead, the unmistakable silver-bright hair of his only sister. There hadn’t even been time for tears. There were too many dead. He did the only thing he could do. He reported to Camilla Del Rey, deputizing for Captain Leicester on the identity detail, that the name of Jenny MacAran should be transferred from the lists of unlocated survivors to the list of definitely identified dead.
Camilla’s only comment had been a terse, quiet “Thank you, MacAran.” There was no time for sympathy, no time for mourning or even humane expressions of kindness. And yet Jenny had been Camilla’s close friend, she’d really loved that damned Del Rey girl like a sister—just why, Rafael had never known, but Jenny had, and there must have been some reason. He realized somewhere below the surface, that he had hoped Camilla would shed for Jenny the tears he could not manage to weep. Someone ought to cry for Jenny, and he couldn’t. Not yet.
He turned his eyes on his instruments again. If they had known their definite latitude on the planet it would have been easier, but the height of the sun above the horizon would give them some rough idea.
Below him in a great bowl of land at least five miles across filled with low brushwood and scrubby trees, the crashed spaceship lay. Rafael, looking at it from this distance, felt a strange sinking feeling. Captain Leicester was supposed to be working with the crew to assess the damage and estimate the time needed to make repairs. Rafael knew nothing about the workings of starships—his own field was ge
ology. But it didn’t look to him as if that ship was ever going anywhere again.
Then he turned off the thought. That was for the engineering crews to say. They knew, and he didn’t. He’d seen some near-miracles done by engineering these days. At worst this would be an uncomfortable interval of a few days or a couple of weeks, then they’d be on their way again, and a new habitable planet would be charted on the Expeditionary Forces starmaps for colonization. This one, despite the brutal cold at night, looked extremely habitable. Maybe they’d even get to share some of the finder’s fees, which would go to improve the Coronis Colony where they’d be by then.
And they’d all have something to talk about when they were Old Settlers in the Coronis Colony, fifty or sixty years from now.
But if the ship never did get off the ground again. . . .
Impossible. This wasn’t a charted planet, okayed for colonizing, and already opened up. The Coronis Colony—Phi Coronis Delta—was already the site of a flourishing mining settlement. There was a functioning spaceport and a crew of engineers and technicians had been working there for ten years preparing the planet for settlement and studying its ecology. You couldn’t set down, raw and unhelped by technology, on a completely unknown world. It couldn’t be done.
Anyway, that was somebody else’s job and he’d better do his own now. He made all the observations he could, noted them in his pocket notebook, and packed up the tripod starting down the hill again. He moved easily across the rock-strewn slope through the tough underbrush and trees carrying his pack effortlessly in the light gravity. It was cleaner and easier than a hike on Earth, and he cast a longing eye at the distant mountains. Maybe if their stay stretched out more than a few days, he could be spared to take a brief climb into them. Rock samples and some geological notations should be worth something to Earth Expeditionary and it would be a lot better than a climbing trip on Earth, where every National Park from Yellowstone to Himalaya was choked with jet-brought tourists three hundred days of the year.
