The men had finished burying the Rangers; Valdir vetoed making a cookfire, directing the men to get cold food from their saddlebags. They sat eating, grimly discussing the burnt station and the dead Rangers in a dialect of which Larry could understand little. He could not eat; the food stuck in his throat. It was his first sight of violence and death and it had sickened him. He had known that violence was not unheard-of on Darkover, he had himself had a brief brush with it in his fight with the street boys, but now it assumed a dark and frightening aspect. With an almost painful nostalgia, he wished he were back in the safety of the Terran Zone.
Or was that safety, too, a mere illusion? Was there violence and cruelty and fear there, too, hidden behind the façades, and was he just now becoming aware of all these things? He choked over the piece of dry biscuit he was eating, and turned his eyes away from Kennard’s too-searching gaze.
Valdir Alton’s tall form shadowed him, and the Darkovan lord dropped on the grass at his side. He said, “Sorry that your hunt had to end this way, Lerrys. It wasn’t what we planned.”
“Do you really think I’d be worrying about a hunt when people are dead?” Larry asked.
Valdir’s eyes were shrewd. “Nothing like this in your life before? Nothing like this in your world? Everything in the Terran Zone very neat and law-abiding?” Once again Larry had the feeling that—as with Lorill Hastur—his thoughts were being read. He remembered, with a small twinge of fear, how Valdir Alton had probed the mind of the dying Ranger.
He said, “I suppose there are law-breakers on Earth and in the Terran Zone, too. Only here it seems so—”
“So close up and personal?” Valdir asked. “Tell me something, Lerrys: Is a man more or less dead when he is killed neatly by a gun or a bomb, than when he is—” He moved his head toward where the dead Ranger had lain. His face was suddenly bitter as he added, “That seems to be the main difference between your people and ours. At least the men who killed poor Garin did not do their killing while they were a safe distance away!”
Larry said—glad to have something between himself and the memory of a dead man with a bleeding wound in his chest— “The main thing is that most of our people don’t do any killing at all! We have laws and police to handle that sort of thing for us!”
“While here we feel that every man should handle his own affairs for himself, before they spread into wars,” Valdir said steadily. “If any man offends me, damages my property or my family, steals my goods—it’s my personal duty to revenge myself on that man—or to forgive him, if I see fit, without dragging in others who really have no part in the quarrel.”
Larry was trying to fit that together—the contrast between the fierce individualism of the Darkovan code, and the Terran’s acceptance of an orderly society, based on rules and laws. “A government of laws and not of men,” he said, and at Valdir’s raised eyebrow, explained, “that’s supposed to be the original theory behind the Terran governments.”
“While ours is a government of men—because laws can’t be anything but the expression of men who make them,” Valdir said. His face was grave and serious and Larry knew that while he might have started this conversation for the purpose of taking his young guest’s mind off the scene of unfamiliar violence, now he was deeply involved in what he was saying. “It’s one reason we want little to do with the Terrans, as such,” he said. “Without offense to you personally. It’s true that we have wars on Darkover, but they are small local hand-to-hand skirmishes; they seldom get bigger than this—” again he motioned toward the blackening ruin of the Ranger station. “The individual who makes trouble is promptly punished and the matter ends there, without involving a whole countryside.”
“But—” Larry hesitated, remembering he was Valdir’s guest. The older man said encouragingly, “Go ahead.”