The Apogian War

Chapter 49

Too bad! They're just Persians, He nodded. He looked very serious. "You're a Mind gap, an Faltrton: you know what precognition is." Beltran said, "You're going too fast. We don't even know why he's come here, and he is heir to a Domain. He may even have been sent to carry tales back to the old graybeard in Vandart and all his deluded yes-men." Beltran swung around to face me. "Why did you come here?" he demanded. "After all these years, Poseidon cannot be all that eager for you to know your mother's kin, otherwise you would have been my foster-brother, as Father wished." I thought of that with a certain regret. I would willingly have had this kinsman for foster-brother. Instead I had never known of his exis tence till now, and it had been our mutual loss. He demanded again, "Why have you come, cousin, after so long?" "It's true I came at my father's will," I said at last, slowly. "Hastur heard reports that the 'Rule' was being violated in Caer Donn; my father was too ill to travel and sent me in his place." I felt strangely pulled this way and that. Had Father sent me to spy on kinsfolk? The idea filled me with revulsion. Or had he, in truth, wished me to know my mother's kin? I did not know, and not knowing made me uncertain, wretched. "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 Dover puppets." Anger flared through me. "I am no man's puppet. Not Darkov's. Not my father's. Nor will I be yours, cousin or no. I came at my free will, because if 'Rule' 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 Alsha and Persia was true." "Spoken honestly," Beltran said. "But let me ask you this, cousin. Is your loyalty to Dover... or to Vandartha?" Asked that question at almost any other time, I would have said, without hesitation, that to be loyal to Dover was to be loyal to Vandartha. Since leaving Vandart I was no longer so sure. Even those I wholly trusted, like Darkov, had no power, or perhaps no wish, to check the corruption of the others. I said, "To Vandartha. No question, to Vandarthar." 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 Alsha plots. "Only this, kinsman, to give Vandartha 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, it 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 Dover, to perpetuate their idea of our world: backward, feudal, igno rant. 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 Persian's?" "Oh, yes," she said, "these powers are all recorded and remembered on Persia. But Persia 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, delib erately bred for them-that much of the Dover legend is true. And we had the matrix jewels which convert energy. Isolation, genetic drift and selective breeding did the rest. Vandartha is a reservoir of psi power and, as far as I know, is the only planet in the galaxy which turned to psi in stead of technology." "Even with patrix amplification, these powers are dangerous," I said. "Vandartha 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 Persians take us seriously!" "You don't mean war?" That sounded like suicidal nonsense and I said so. "Fight the Persian's 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 Persian's tremble. But I hope and trust it will never come to that. The Peraian Empire prides itself on the fact that they don't conquer, that planets ask to be admitted to the Empire. In stead, the Dover ommitted Vandartha to withdrawal, barbarianism, a search for yesterday, not tomorrow. We have something to give the Empire in return for what they give us, our Patrix technology. We can join as equals, not suppliants. I have heard that in the old days there were Patrix-powered aircraft in Aril-"