The harsh, disconnected way he spoke made me wonder if he was raving or drunk. “Just what do you mean, a game the Terrans are playing, with the Comyn to help?”
I had come here to find out if Aldaran was dangerously allied with Terra, to the danger of Comyn. Now this man Kadarin accused the Comyn of playing Terra’s games. I said, “I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about It sounds like rubbish.”
“Well, start with this,” Kadarin said. “Do you know who the Darkovans are, where we came from? Did anyone ever tell you that we’re the first and oldest of the Terran colonies? No, I thought you didn’t know that. By rights we should be equal to any of the planetary governments that sit in the Empire Council, doing our part to make the laws of the Empire, as other colonies do. We should be part of the galactic civilization we live in. Instead, we’re treated like a backward, uncivilized world, poor relations to be content with what crumbs of knowledge they’re willing to dole out to us drop by drop, kept carefully apart from the mainstream of the Empire, allowed to go on living as barbarians!”
“Why? If this is true, why?”
“Because the Comyn want it that way,” Kadarin said. “It suits their purposes. Don’t you even know Darkover is a Terran colony? You said they mocked your Terran blood. Damn them, what do they think they are? Terrans, all of them.”
“You’re stark raving mad!”
“You’d like to think so. So would they. More flattering, isn’t it to think of your father’s precious caste as being descended from gods and divinely appointed to rule all Darkover. Too bad! They’re just Terrans, like all the rest of the Empire colonies!” He stopped pacing and stood, staring down at us from his great height, he was a full head taller than I am, and I am not small. “I tell you, I’ve seen the records on Terra, and in the Administrative Archives on the Coronis colony. The facts are buried there, or supposed to be buried, but anybody with a security clearance can get them quickly enough.”
I demanded, “Where did you get all this stuff?” I could have used a much ruder word; out of deference to the women I used one meaning, literally, stable-sweepings.
He said, “Remarkable fertile stuff, stable-sweepings. Grows good crops. The facts are there. I have a gift for languages, like all telepaths—oh, yes, I am one, Dom Lewis. By the way, do you know you have a Terran name?”
“Surely not,” I said. Lewis had been a given name among the Altons for centuries.
“I have stood on the island of Lewis on Terra itself,” said the man Kadarin.
“Coincidence,” I said. “Human tongues evolve the same syllables, having the same vocal mechanism.”
“Your ignorance, Dom Lewis, is appalling,” said Kadarin coldly. “Some day, if you want a lesson in linguistics, you should travel in the Empire and hear for yourself what strange syllables the human tongue evolves for itself when there is no common language transmitted in culture.” I felt a sudden twinge of dread, like a cold wind. He went on. “Meanwhile, don’t make ignorant statements which only show what an untraveled boy you are. Virtually every given name ever recorded on Darkover is a name known on Terra, and in a very small part of Terra at that. The drone-pipe, oldest of Darkovan instruments, was known once on Terra, but they survive only in museums, the art of playing them lost; musicians came here to relearn the art and found music that survived from a very small geographical area, the British or Brictish Islands. Linguists studying your language found traces of three Terran languages. Spanish in your casta; English and Gaelic in your cahuenga, and the Dry-Town languages. The language spoken in the Hellers is a form of pure Gaelic which is no longer spoken on Terra but survives in old manuscripts. Well, to make a long tale short, as the old wife said when she cropped her cow’s brush, they soon found the record of a single ship, sent out before the Terran colonies had bound themselves together into the Empire, which vanished without trace and was believed crashed or lost. And they found the crewlist of that ship.”