Star of Danger, Page 2

  Larry said at last, hesitantly in Darkovan, “Are you speaking to me?”

  “Who else?” The strange boy’s hands, encased in thick dark gloves, strayed to the handle of his knife, as if absentmindedly. “What are you staring at?”

  “I was just looking at the spaceport.”

  “And where did you get those ridiculous clothes?”

  “Now look here,” Larry said, taken aback at the rude tone in which the boy spoke, “why are you asking me all these questions? I’m wearing the clothes I have—and for that matter, I don’t think much of yours,” he added belligerently. “What is it to you, anyhow?”

  The strange boy looked startled. He blinked. “But have I made a mistake? I never saw—who are you?”

  “My name is Larry Montray.”

  The boy with the knife frowned. “I can’t take it in. Do you—forgive me, but by some chance do you belong to the spaceport? No offense is intended, but—”

  “I just came in on the ship Pantomime,” Larry said.

  The stranger frowned. He said, slowly, “That explains it, I suppose. But you speak the language so well, and you look like—you must excuse my mistake, it was natural.” He stood staring at Larry for another minute. Then, suddenly, as if breaking the dam: “I’ve never spoken before to an off-worlder! What is it like to travel in space? Is it true that there are many suns like this one? What are the other worlds like?”

  But before Larry could answer, he heard his father’s voice, raised sharply. “Larry! Where have you gotten to?”

  “I’m here,” he called, turning around, realizing that where he stood, he was hidden in the shadow of the archway. “Just a minute—” he turned back to the strange boy, but to his surprise and exasperation, the Darkovan boy had turned his back and was walking rapidly away. He disappeared into the dark mouth of a narrow street across the square. Larry stood frowning, looking after him.

  His father came quickly toward him.

  “What were you doing? Just watching the square? I suppose there’s no harm, but—” He sounded agitated. “Who were you talking to? One of the natives?”

  “Just a kid about my age,” Larry said. “Dad, he thought—”

  “Never mind now.” His father cut him off, rather sharply. “We have to find our quarters and get settled. You’ll learn soon enough. Come along.”

  Larry followed, puzzled and exasperated at his father’s curtness. This wasn’t like Dad. But his first disappointment at the ordinariness of Darkover had suddenly disappeared.

  That kid thought I was Darkovan. Even with the clothes I was wearing. From hearing me speak the language, he couldn’t tell the difference.

  He looked back, almost wistfully, at the vanishing panorama of Darkover beyond the forbidden gateway. They were passing now into a street of houses and buildings that were just like Earth ones, and Larry’s father sighed—with relief?

  “Just like home. At least you won’t be too homesick here,” he said, checked the numbers on a card he held, and pushed open a door. “Our rooms are in this building.”

  Inside, the lights had been set so that the light was that of Earth at noon, and the apartment—five rooms on the fourth floor—might have been the one they had left on Earth. All the while they were unpacking, dialing food from the dispensers, exploring the rooms, Larry’s thoughts ran a new and strange pattern.

  What was the point of living on a strange world if you did your best to make your house, the furniture, the very light, look exactly like the old one? Why not stay on Earth if you felt like that?

  Okay, if they wanted it this way. That was okay with him. But he was going to see more of Darkover than this.

  He was going to see what lay behond that gate. The new world was beautiful, and strange—and he could hardly wait to explore it.

  Homesick? What did Dad think he was?

  * * *

  II

  « ^ »

  LARRY PUSHED BACK the heavy steel door of Quarters B building, and emerged into the thin cold cutting wind of the courtyard between buildings. He stood there shivering, looking at the sky; the huge red sun hung low, slowly dropping toward the horizon, where thin ice-clouds massed in mountains of crimson and scarlet and purple.

  Behind him Rick Stewart shivered audibly, pulling his coat tight. “Brrrr, I wish they had a passageway between the buildings! And I can’t see a thing in this light. Let’s get inside, Larry.” He waited a minute, impatiently. “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing.” Larry shrugged and followed the other lad into Quarters A, where their rooms were located. How could he say that this brief daily passage between Quarters B—where the school for spaceport youngsters, from kindergarten to pre-university, was located—and Quarters A, was his only chance to look at Darkover?

  Inside, in the cool yellow Earthlike light, Rick relaxed. “You’re an odd one,” he said, as they took the elevator to their floor. “I’d think the light out there would hurt your eyes.”

  “No, I like it. I wish we could get out and explore.”

  “Well, shall we go down to the spaceport?” Rick chuckled. “There’s nothing to see there but starships, and they’re an old story to me, but I suppose to you they’re still exciting.”

  Larry felt exasperated at the patronizing amusement in Rick’s voice. Rick had been on Darkover three years—and frankly admitted that he had never been beyond the spaceport. “Not that,” he said; “I’d like to get into the town—see what it’s like.” His pent-up annoyance suddenly escaped. “I’ve been on Darkover three weeks, and I might as well be back on Earth! Even here in the school, I’m studying the same things I was studying at home! History of Terra, early Space Exploration, Standard Literature, mathematics—”

  “You bet,” Rick said. “You don’t think any Terran citizens would stay here, if their kids couldn’t get a decent education, do you? Requirements for any Empire university.”

  “I know that. But after all, living on this planet, we should know a little something about it, shouldn’t we?”

  Rick shrugged again. “I can’t imagine why.” They came into the rooms Larry shared with his father, and dumped their school books and paraphernalia. Larry went to the food dispenser—from which food prepared in central kitchens was delivered by pneumatic tube and charged to their account—and dialed himself a drink and a snack, asking Rick what he wanted. The boys stretched out on the furniture, eating hungrily.

  “You are an odd one,” Rick repeated. “Why do you care about this planet? We’re not going to stay here all our lives. What good would it do to learn everything about it? What we get in the Terran Empire schools will be valid on any Empire planet where they send us. As for me, I’m going into the Space Academy when I’m eighteen—and goodness knows, that’s reason enough to hit the books on navigation and math!”

  Larry munched a cracker. “It just seems funny,” he repeated with stubborn emphasis, “to live on a world like this and not know more about it. Why not stay on Earth, if their culture is the only one you care about?”

  Rick’s chuckle was tolerant. “This your first planet out from Earth? Oh, well, that explains it. After you’ve seen a couple, you’ll realize that there’s nothing out there but a lot of barbarians and outworlders. Unless you’re going in for archaeology or history as a career, why clutter up your mind with the details?”

  Larry couldn’t answer. He didn’t try. He finished his cracker and opened his book on navigation. “Was this the problem that was bothering you?”

  But while they put their heads together, figuring out interstellar orbits and plotting collision curves, Larry was still thinking with frustrated eagerness of the world outside —the world, it seemed now, he’d never know.

  Rick didn’t seem to care. None of the youngsters he’d met here in the Trade City seemed to care. They were Earthmen, and anything outside the Terran Zone was alien— and they couldn’t have cared less. They lived the same life they’d have lived on any Empire planet, and that was the way
they wanted it.

  They’d even been surprised—no, thunderstruck—to hear that he’d learned the Darkovan speech. They couldn’t imagine why. One of the teachers had been faintly sympathetic; he’d shown Larry how to make the complicated letters of the Darkovan alphabet, and even loaned him a few books written in Darkovan. But there wasn’t much time for that. Mostly he got the same schooling he’d have had on Earth. Darkover, even the light of Darkover’s red sun, was barriered out by walls and yellow earth-type lights; and the closed minds of the Terran Zone personnel were even more of a barrier.

  When Rick had gone, Larry put his books away and sat scowling, thinking it over, until his father came in.

  “How’s it going, Dad?”

  He was fascinated by his father’s work, but Wade Montray wouldn’t talk about it much. Larry knew that his father worked in the customs office, and that his work was, in a general way, to see that no contraband was smuggled from Darkover to the Terran Zone, or vice versa. It sounded interesting to Larry, through his father kept insisting it was not much different from the work he’d done on Earth.

  But today he seemed somewhat more communicative.

  “How about dialing us some supper? I was too busy, today, to stop and eat. We had some trouble at the Bureau. One of the City Elders came to us, as mad as a drenched cat. He insisted that one of our men had carried weapons into the City, and we had to check it up. What happened was that some young fool of a Darkovan had offered one of the Spaceport Guards a lot of money to sell him one of his pistols and report it lost. When we checked with the man, sure enough, he’d done just that. Of course, he lost his rank and he’ll be on the next spaceship out of Darkover. The confounded fool!”

  “Why, Dad?”

  Wade Montray leaned his chin on his hands. “You don’t know much Darkovan history, do you? They have a thing called the Compact, signed a thousand years ago, which makes it illegal for anyone to have or to use any weapon except the kind which brings the man who uses it into the same risk as the man he attacks with it.”

  “I don’t think I quite understand that, Dad.”

  “Well, look. If you wear a sword, or a knife, in order to use it, you have to get close to your victim—and for all you know, he may have a knife and be better than you are at using it. But guns, shockers, blasters, atomic bombs— you can use those without taking any risk of getting hurt yourself. Anyway, Darkover signed the Compact, and before they agreed to let the Terran Empire build a spaceport here for trade, we had to give them iron-clad guarantees that we’d help them keep contraband out of Darkover.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Larry said. He had heard the tales of the early planetary wars on Earth.

  “Anyway. The man who bought this gun from our space-force guard has a collection of rare old weapons, and he swears he only wanted it as part of his collection—but nobody can be sure of that. Contraband does get across the border sometimes, no matter how careful we are. So I had quite a day trying to trace it down. Then I had to arrange for a couple of students from the medical schools here to go out into the back country on Darkover, studying diseases. We’ve arranged to admit a few Darkovans to the medical schools here. Their medical science isn’t up to much, and they think very highly of our doctors. But it isn’t easy even then. The more superstitious natives are prejudiced against anything Terran. And the higher caste Darkovans won’t have anything to do with us because it’s beneath their dignity to associate with aliens. They think we’re barbarians. I talked to one of their aristocrats today and he behaved as if I smelled bad.” Wade Montray sighed.

  “They think we’re barbarians,” Larry said slowly, “and here in the Terran Zone, we think they are.”

  “That’s right. And there doesn’t seem to be any answer.”

  Larry put down his fork. He burst out, suddenly, “Dad, when am I going to get a chance to see something of Darkover?” All his frustration exploded in him. “All this time and I saw more through a gate on the spaceport than I’ve seen since!”

  His father leaned back and looked at him, curiously. “Do you want to see it so much?”

  Larry made it an understatement. “I do.”

  His father sighed. “It’s not easy,” he said. “The Darkovans don’t especially like having Terrans here. We’re more or less expected to keep to our own Trade Cities.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” said Wade Montray, shaking his head. “Mostly they’re afraid of our influence on them. Of course they’re not all like that, but enough of them are.”

  Larry’s face fell, and his father added, slowly, “I can try to get permission, sometime, to take you on a trip to one of the other Trade Cities; you’d see the country in between. As for the Old Town near the spaceport—well, it’s rather a rough section, because all the spacemen in from the ships spend their furloughs there. They’re used to Earthmen, of course, but there isn’t much to see.” He sighed again. “I know how you feel, Larry. I suppose I can take you to see the market, if that will get rid of this itch you have to see something outside the Terran Zone.”

  “When? Now?”

  His father laughed. “Get a warm coat, then. It gets cold here, nights.”

  The sun hung, a huge low red ball on the rim of the world, as they crossed the Terran Zone, threaded the maze of the official buildings and came out at the edge of the levels which led downward to the spaceports. They did not go down toward the ships, but instead walked along the highest level. They passed the gate where—once before— Larry had stood to look out at the city; only this time they went on past that gate and toward another one, at the far edge of the port.

  This gate was larger, and guarded by black-clad men armed with holstered weapons. Both of the guards nodded in recognition at Larry’s father as they went through into the open square.

  “Don’t forget the curfew, Mr. Montray. All Zone personnell not on duty are supposed to be inside the gates by midnight, our time.”

  Montray nodded. As they crossed the square side by side, he asked, “How are you getting along on the new sleep cycle, Larry?”

  “It doesn’t bother me.” Darkover had a twenty-eight hour period of rotation, and Larry knew that some people found it difficult to adjust to longer days and nights, but he hadn’t had any trouble.

  The open square between the spaceport and the Darkovan city of Thendara was wide, open to the sky, and darkly spacious in the last red light of the sun. At one side it was lighted with the arclights from the spaceport; at the other side, it was already dimly lit with paler lights in a medium pinkish color. At the far end there was a row of shops, and Darkovans and Earthmen were moving about in front of them. The wares displayed were of a bewildering variety: furs, pottery dishes, ornate polished knives with bright sheaths, all kinds of fruits, and what looked like sweets and candies. But as Larry paused to inspect them, his father said in a low voice, “This is just the tourist section—the overflow from the spaceport. I thought you’d rather see the old market. You can come here any time.”

  They turned into a sidestreet floored with uneven cobblestones, to narrow for any sort of vehicle. His father walked swiftly, as if he knew where he was going, and Larry thought, not without resentment, He’s been here before. He knows just where to go. Yet he never realized that I’d want to see all this, too.

  The houses on either side were low, constructed of stone for the most part, and seemed very old. They all had a great many windows with thick, translucent, colored or frosted glass set in patterns into the panes, so that nothing could be seen from outside. Between the houses were low stalls made of reeds or wood, and a variety of outbuildings. Larry wondered what the houses were like inside. As he passed one of them, there was a strong smell of roasting meat, and behind one of the houses he heard the voices of children playing. A man rode slowly down the street, mounted on a small brownish horse; Larry realized that he controlled the horse without bit or bridle, with only a halter and the reins.

  The narro
w street widened and came out into a much larger open space, filled with the low reed stalls, canvas tents with many-colored awnings, or small stone kiosks. It was dimly lighted with the flaring enclosed lights. Around the perimeter of the market, horses and carts were tied, and Larry looked at them curiously.

  “Horses?”

  Montray nodded. “They don’t manufacture any surface transport of any sort. We’ve tried to get them interested in a market for autocars or helicopters, but they say they don’t like building roads and nobody is in a hurry anyway. It’s a barbarian world, Larry. I told you that. Between ourselves,” he lowered his voice, “I think many of the Darkovan people would like some of our kind of machinery and manufacturing. But the people who run things want to keep their world just the way it is. They like it better this way.”

  Larry was looking around in fascination. He said, “I’d hate to see this market turned into a big mechanized shopping center, though. The ones on Earth are ugly.”

  His father smiled. “You wouldn’t like it if you had to live with it,” he said. “You’re like all youngsters, you romanticize old-fashioned things. Believe me, the Darkovan authorities aren’t romantic. It’s just easier for them to go on running things their own way, if they keep the people doing things the way they always have. But it won’t last long.” He sounded quietly certain. “Once the Terran Empire comes in to show people what a star-travel civilization can be like, people will want progress.”

  A tall, hard-faced man in a long, wrapped cloak gave them a sharp, angry glance from harsh blue eyes, then lowered thick eyelashes and walked past them. Larry looked up at his father.

  “Dad, that man heard what you said, and he didn’t like it!”

  “Nonsense,” his father said. “I wasn’t speaking that loud, and very few of them can speak Terran languages. It’s all part of the same thing. They trade with us, yet they want nothing to do with our culture.” He stopped beside a row of stalls. “Can you see anything you’d like here?” There was a row of blue-and-white glazed bowls in small and larger sizes, a similar row of green-and-brown ones. At the next stall there were knives and daggers of various sorts, and Larry found himself thinking of the Darkovan boy who had worn a knife in his belt. He picked up one and fingered it idly; at his father’s frown, he laughed a little and put it back. What would he do with it? Earthmen didn’t wear swords!