To Save a World Read Free

it to STOP. The words blurred there. But she closed her lids the better to see it inside her eyes, in memory.
    High mountains, a familiar skyline, dark against the crimson sky of the lowering sun; a sun like a red and bloody disk. Only the tall buildings of the Trade City, pictured beneath the incredibly familiar mountains and sun, were new and surprising.
    So they call it Darkover now.
    A murmur of music whispered in her mind, the total recall that she had found intolerable for the first hundred years and had done as much as she could to desensitize; now she could not remember the name of the melody, and spent a few split seconds rummaging in a past she had deliberately put away, before emerging with the name of the melody and the odd, dry sound of reed wood flutes:
    "Weary are the hills."
    Yes, that was the name. Another of those intolerable clear pictures came into her mind again, a girl in a brief yellow tunic playing on the flute; then her mouth twisted and she opened her eyes. "A girl," she said grimly aloud, "I wasn't even a girl then. I was—what I was is what I decided not to think about. I've been here, and a woman, for—Evanda and Avarra! How long? It doesn't bear thinking about, how long I've been here!"
    But the memory persisted, running along a track it was impossible to stop, and finally, knowing it was pure self-indulgence, but also knowing it was the only way to put an end to this, Andrea pressed a button and pulled the message unit toward her, speaking softly.
    "Fix me a scan-and-destruct tape on everything which has been written about Cottman's Star IV, called Darkover, a Class D Closed world. I'll handle this one myself."
    The voice on the other end of this line had been extensively trained never to sound surprised, but Andrea, with her sudden supersensitized awareness, heard surprise anyhow:
    "You are going in person? What cover?"
    She considered that briefly. "I will go as an animal handler, considering the transport of small legal quantities of native fur-bearers to nearby worlds for breeding and development there," she said at last. She had been so many things on so many worlds. She understood and liked animals and she need never be on her guard against their intrusive thoughts.
    But when the scan-and-destruct had been absorbed and discarded, when she was packed and ready to board her transit on the first leg of the impossibly long transgalactic journey to that small planet out on the rim of nowhere; which now bore the name of Darkover, a fear roused again in her. A fear centuries buried, rousing deep in the curious convolutions of a brain which, living as a human, she used only fractionally.
    Suppose, after all this time and all the different people I've been, once I stand again under the four moons and the light of the bloody sun strikes me, suppose—suppose the old me, the real me, the self I was before I was Andrea, before I was wanderer, queen, spaceman; courtesan, businesswoman, suppose the old me came back? What then?
    What then? Then at least I would die where I was born, she thought with weary resignation, and pressed her long hands over her eyes. For the moment, if there had been anybody to see, she looked neither human nor woman.
    Narzain-ye kui , she thought in a language long dead; exiled child of the Yellow Forest, where have you not traveled? Return once more, see what the treading feet of the long seasons have made of the world your people could not hold, and then die here; die alone if you must, knowing that not even a memory remains of the footsteps of your folk in the fastnesses of the Mountains of Light . . . .

 
     
CHAPTER ONE
     
     
    HE SENSED that there were footsteps behind him again.
    It was troubling. They were not the familiar steps and presence of his bodyguard Danilo. Those he heard everywhere he went and because he loved Danilo and had taken the young man as his paxman and esquire, he neither resented them nor changed his steps a fraction for them. Dani would not