“You see,” said the woman Thyra, from her place in Kadarin’s shadow, “it’s useless to talk to him. He’s one of the Comyn puppets.”
Anger flared through me. ‘I am no man’s puppet. Not Hastur’s. Not my father’s. Nor will I be yours, cousin or no. I came at my free will, because if Compact is broken it touches all our lives. And more than that, whatever my father said, I wished to know for myself whether what they had told me of Aldaran and Terra was true.”
“Spoken honestly,” Beltran said. “But let me ask you this, cousin. Is your loyalty to Comyn … or to Darkover?”
Asked that question at almost any other time, I would have said, without hesitation, that to be loyal to Comyn was to be loyal to Darkover. Since leaving Thendara I was no longer so sure. Even those I wholly trusted, like Hastur, had no power, or perhaps no wish, to check the corruption of the others. I said, ‘To Darkover. No question, to Darkover.”
He said vehemently, “Then you should be one of us! You were sent to us at this moment, I think, because we needed you, because we couldn’t go on without someone like you!”
“To do what?” I wanted no part in any Aldaran plots.
“Only this, kinsman, to give Darkover her rightful place, as a world belonging to our own time, not a barbarian backwater! We deserve the place on the Empire Council which we should have had, centuries ago, if the Empire had been honest with us. And we are going to have it!”
“A noble dream,” I said, “if you can manage it. Just how are you going to bring this about?”
“It won’t be easy,” Beltran said. “It’s suited the Empire, and the Comyn, to perpetuate their idea of our world: backward, feudal, ignorant. And we have become many of these things.”
“Yet,” Thyra said from the shadows, “we have one thing which is wholly Darkovan and unique. Our psi powers.” She leaned forward to put a log on the fire and I saw her features briefly, lit by flame, dark, vital, glowing. I said, “If they are unique to Darkover, what of your theory that we are all Terrans?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “these powers are all recorded and remembered on Terra. But Terra neglected the powers of the mind, concentrating on material things, metal and machinery and computers. So their psi powers were forgotten and bred out. Instead we developed them, deliberately bred for them—that much of the Comyn legend is true. And we had the matrix jewels which convert energy. Isolation, genetic drift and selective breeding did the rest. Darkover is a reservoir of psi power and, as far as I know, is the only planet in the galaxy which turned to psi instead of technology.”
“Even with matrix amplification, these powers are dangerous,” I said. “Darkovan technology has to be used with caution, and sparsely. The price, in human terms, is usually too high.”
The woman shrugged. “You cannot take hawks without climbing cliffs,” she said.
“Just what is it you intend to do?”
“Make the Terrans take us seriously!”
“You don’t mean war?” That sounded like suicidal nonsense and I said so. “Fight the Terrans, weapons against weapons?”
“No. Or only if they need to be shown that we are neither
Ignorant nor helpless,” Kadarin said. “A high-level matrix, I understand, is a weapon to make even the Terrans tremble. But I hope and trust it will never come to that. The Terran Empire prides itself on the fact that they don’t conquer, that planets ask to be admitted to the Empire. Instead, the Comyn committed Darkover to withdrawal, barbarianism, a search for yesterday, not tomorrow. We have something to give the Empire in return for what they give us, our matrix technology. We can join as equals, not suppliants. I have heard that in the old days there were matrix-powered aircraft in Arilinn—”
“True,” I said, “as recently as in my father’s time.”
“And why not now?” He did not wait for me to answer. “Also, we could have a really effective communications technique—”
“We have that now.”
“But the towers work only under Comyn domination, not for the entire population of the world.”