Dread Companion
by Andre Norton
1
But A few days ago (I shall never trust the divisions of time again and say with any certainty, “This is a day; that is a week; we face a year!”) I was shown some very ancient tapes, copied, I was assured, from ones that had been made originally on fabled Terra. And some aspects of the information they stored were so like my own experiences that I could only believe that those who had first recorded them, back in a mist of time so great that I could not count the planet years – any more than one can truly give sum to the number of stars – had followed a trail like that which chance and my own stubbornness set me.
Had I not invincible proof of what had happened to me and several others, I might be judged now to be spinning some comet-hair tale for the astonishment of the credulous. But this much is true, and records prove it. I was born on Chalox in the planet and space-time year of 2405 After Flight. I was between sixteen and seventeen years old, planet age, when I left Chalox to land on Dylan. I am still no more than a year older – yet the year is now 2483!
Time! Sometimes, when I look squarely at those dates and think how those years fled for me, it brings back such fears that I must busy myself feverishly about some task, putting all my strength and thoughts into it, until the surge of panic that chokes me lessens. Were it not for Jorth, whom I can reach out and touch, who shares my burden, I might- But of that I shall not think at all – now or ever!
– As I say, I was born on Chalox. My father was Rhyn Halcrow, a Survey scout. He was of Talgrinnian stock, which means Second Wave, Terran outspread. My mother was a Forsmanian, of a trading family. They were human, too, but of the First Wave outspread, and had mutated from what is believed to be the original Terran.
Their marriage was a planet one as is usual for a man in the services, and it lasted three Chalox years. After the ceremonial break-bond, my father was assigned to a new outwave exploratory pattern. He left my mother with the excellent life pension of a planet wife and her freedom to contact another tie if she wished – or if her father wished, for the Forsmanians are strictly family oriented, with the eldest male making the major decisions for the clan.
Within a matter of months, my mother did take another husband, one of her cousins, thus keeping her first grant-for-marriage dowry strictly within the clan, in what her people considered a very practical and equitable arrangement.
As for me, I was already established in the creche for Service children at Lattmah. The break was complete. I never saw either of my parents again. That I was a girl presented a minor problem, since the majority of such cross-births are male and the offspring trained from childhood for government service.
Unfortunately, I inherited my mother’s sex but my father’s spirit and interests. I would have been supremely happy as a scout, a seeker-out of far places and strange sights. My favored reading among the tapes were the accounts of exploration, trading on primitive planets, and the like. Perhaps I might have fitted in with the free traders. But among them women are so few and those so guarded and cherished that I might have been even more straitly prisoned on one of their spaceports, seeing my mate only at long intervals, bound by their law to remarry again if his ship was reported missing for more than a stated time.
As it was, I did what I could to prepare myself for a possible escape from Chalox. I became a keeper of records, adept in several techniques, including that of implanted recall. And I had my name down – Kilda c’ Rhyn – on every possible off-planet listing as soon as the authorities allowed me to register.
That no opportunity presented itself began to worry me. I was less than a year from the time when I could no longer stay at the creche but would arbitrarily be fitted into any niche those in charge might select. They might even return me to my mother’s clan, and such was not for me. So, in desperation, I appealed, at last, to the one among my teachers whom I thought the most sympathetic.
Lazk Volk was a mutant crossbreed. The mixing of races in his case had resulted in certain deformities of body that even the most advanced plasta-surgery could not correct. But his mind showed such a potential for learning and teaching that he had never left the creche. Through his vast tape library and the visits of scouts and other far travelers to his quarters, he had gained knowledge far outstripping any local memory bank except the government one.
Because in some small ways we were alike, each yearning for what was denied us, Lazk Volk and I became friends. I had served for four years as recorder and librarian for him when I voiced my fear of being without a future, save one not of my choosing. I was hoping that he might answer with an offer of steady employment. Though that would be no true solution to my desire to travel, I would have, in his wealth of knowledge, the second best.
He stretched out his thin double arms in a gesture habitual to him, wiggling his boneless fingers above the keyboard that produced anything he might wish – from the complete history of the planet Firedrake to a dinner-of-first-ceremony. With most of his misshapen figure muffled in a robe of Bora rainbow cloth, rippling rich color at his slightest movement, he was like a thick bolster perched on one end. Only his four arms and his conical head showed he was a living being.
For the second time he flicked his wiggling fingers back and forth. Then his slit of a mouth opened.
“No.”
“No? Why?” I was startled enough to use a demanding tone that I would never have tried with him ordinarily.
“No – I do not take you into my service. That is the easy way, Kilda. And you are not meant to walk easy roads.” He pressed one of those many buttons now, and my chair spun about so that I no longer faced him, but rather the wall on which was a projection screen, now like a huge mirror.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Myself.”
“Describe!” His tone was such that we might be in one of the training booths where he had begun to shape my mind for the retention and collection of knowledge.
“I am a woman. My hair – it is – ” I hesitated. Those living in the creche were so varied from crossbreeding that we had no norm of either good looks or downright ugliness. I knew that certain kinds of faces, coloring, forms gave me pleasure to look upon. But I had no vanity, nor any idea as to whether I could be deemed even passable in appearance. “My hair,” I began again resolutely, “is of the color dark brown. I have two eyes – which are blue-green – one nose, a mouth. My skin is also brown, but lighter in shade than my hair. For the rest – my body is humanoid, and it is healthy. What is it that you wish me to see – other than this?”
“You have youth. And though you list your attributes so baldly, Kilda, you will discover, once you walk beyond these walls, that you will be considered above the ordinary in the sight of most. And, as you note, you have an adequate and healthy body. Therefore, you shall not waste this by crawling into shadows and turning your back upon the world.”
“It is better,” I protested, “to stay where I am happy than to be returned to a Forsmanian clan house or to be a clerk in some government hive until I become as dull-witted as the walls about me.”
“Perhaps so.” He nodded. I was surprised at winning my point so easily. Then he went on. “But you cite only two of the possibilities now before you. There are others – ”
“Trade marriage?” I ventured the third I had considered.
“As a means of escape? I think not. The traders are too careful of their women, having so few of them. You might find such an alliance even more stultifying than your first two suggestions. There is this – ”
He must have pressed another of his buttons, for there flashed on the screen, obliterating my own image, a government announcement. It was one of those general offers to emigrants, a fulsome and probably much overstated listing of all the glowing opportunities awaiting the properly qualified on a frontier planet.