 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Kristi Nowak. The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley Author's Note I've always wanted to write, but not until I discovered the old pulp science fantasy magazines at the age of 16 did this general desire become a specific urge to write science fantasy adventures? I took a lot of detours on the way. I discovered SF in its golden age, the age of Kutner, C. L. Moore, Lee Brackett, Ed Hamilton, and Jack Vance. But while I was still collecting rejection slips from my early efforts, the fashion changed. Adventures on faraway worlds and strange dimensions went out of fashion and the new look in science fiction, emphasis on the science, came in. So my first stories were straight science fiction, and I'm not trying to put down that kind of story, it has its place. By and large, the kind of science fiction which makes tomorrow's headlines as near as this morning's coffee has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at ease with a rapidly changing world. But, fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science fiction are willing to wait for tomorrow to read tomorrow's headlines. Once again I think there is a place, a wish, a need, and hunger for the wonder and color of the world way out, the world beyond the stars, the world we won't live to see. That is why I wrote The Door Through Space. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Kristi Nowak. The Door Through Space, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Chapter 1 Beyond the spaceport gates, the men of the Kharsa were hunting down a thief. I heard the shrill cries, the pad-padding of feet and strides just a little too long and loping to be human, raising echoes all down the dark dusty streets leading up to the main square. But the square itself lay empty in the crimson noon of Wolf. Overhead the dim red amber of Phi Coronis, Wolf's old and dying sun gave out a pale and heatless light. The pair of Space Force guards at the gates, wearing the black leathers of the Terran Empire, shockers holstered at their belts, were drowsing under the arched gateway where the star and rocket emblem proclaimed the domain of Terra. One of them, a snub-nosed youngster only a few weeks out from Earth, cocked an inquisitive ear at the cries and scuffling feet, then jerked his head at me. Hey, Cargill, you can talk their lingo. What's going on out there? I stepped out past the gateway to listen. There was still no one to be seen in the square. It lay white and windswept, a barricade of emptiness. To one side the spaceport and the skyscraper of the Terran headquarters, and at the other side the clutter of low buildings, the street shine, the little spaceport cafe smelling of coffee and jocco, and the dark opening mouths of streets that rambled down into the Kharsa, the old town, the native quarter. But I was alone in the square with the shrill cries, closer now raising echoes from the enclosing walls, and the loping of many feet down one of the dirty streets. Then I saw him running, dodging a hail of stones flying around his head, someone or something small and cloaked and agile. Behind him the still faceless mob howled and threw stones. I could not yet understand the cries, but they were out for blood and I knew it. I said briefly, trouble-coming, just before the mobs spilled out into the square. The fleeing dwarf stared about wildly for an instant, his head jerking from side to side so rapidly that it was impossible to get even a fleeting impression of his face, human or non-human, familiar or bizarre. Then, like a pellet loosed from its sling, he made straight for the gateway and safety, and behind him the loping mob yelled and howled and came pouring over half the square, just half. Then, by that sudden intuition which permeates even the most crazed mob with some semblance of reason, they came to a ragged halt, heads turning from side to side. I stepped up on the lower step of the headquarters building and looked over them. Most of them were chocks, the furred, man-tall non-humans of the Kharsa, and not the better class. Their fur was unkempt, their tails naked with filth and disease, their leather aprons hung in tatters. One or two in the crowd were humans, the dregs of the Kharsa. But the star and rocket emblem blazoned across the spaceport gates, sobered even the wildest bloodlust somewhat. They milled and shifted uneasily in their half of the square. For a moment I did not see where their quarry had gone. Then I saw him crouched, not four feet from me, in a patch of shadow. Simultaneously the mob saw him huddled just beyond the gateway and a howl of frustration and rage went ringing round the square. Someone threw a stone, it zipped over my head narrowly missing me and landed at the feet of the black leathered guard. He jerked his head up and gestured with the shocker which had suddenly come unholstered. The gesture should have been enough. On Wolf Terran Law has been written in blood and fire and exploding atoms and the line is drawn firm and clear. The men of the space force do not interfere in the old town or in any of the native cities. But when violence steps over the threshold, passing the blazen of the star and rocket, punishment is swift and terrible. The threat should have been enough. Instead a howl of abuse went up from the crowd. The space force guards were shoulder to shoulder behind me now. The snub-nosed kid, looking slightly pale, called out, Get inside the gates, Cargill, if I have to shoot. The older man motioned him to silence. Wait. Cargill, he called. I nodded to show that I heard. You talk there, Lingo. Tell them to haul off. Damned if I want to shoot. I stepped down and walked into the open square, across the crumbled white stones toward the ragged mob. Even with two armed space force men at my back, it made my skin crawl. But I flung up my empty hand in token of peace. Take your mob out of the square! I shouted in the jargon of the Kharsa. This territory is held in compact of peace. Settle your quarrels elsewhere. There was a little stirring in the crowd. The shock of being addressed in their own tongue, instead of the Terran standard which the Empire had forced on Wolf, held them silent for a minute. I'd learned that long ago, that speaking in any of the languages of Wolf would give me a minute's advantage. But only a minute. Then one of the mob yelled, We'll go if you give him to us. He's no right to Terran sanctuary. I walked over to the huddled dwarf, miserably trying to make himself smaller against the wall. I nudged him with my foot. Get up. Who are you? The hood fell away from his face as he twitched to his feet. He was trembling violently. In the shadow of the hood I saw a furred face, wearing velvety muzzle and great soft golden eyes which held intelligence and terror. What have you done? Can't you talk? He held out the tray which he had shielded under his cloak, an ordinary peddler's tray. Toys. Sell toys. Children. You got them? I shook my head and pushed the creature away with only a glance at the array of delicately crafted mannequins, tiny animals, prisms and crystal whirly gigs. You'd better get out of here. Scram. Down that street, I pointed. A voice from the crowd shouted again and it had a very ugly sound. He's a spy of Nebrum! Nebrum! The dwarfish non-human gabbled something then doubled behind me. I saw him dodge, faint in the direction of the gates. Then, as the crowd surged that way, run for the street shrine across the square, slipping from recess to recess of the wall. A hail of stones went flying in that direction. The little toy seller dodged into the street shrine. Then there was a horse. Ah! Of terror and the crowd edged away, surged backward. The next minute it had begun to melt away, its entity dissolving into separate creatures, slipping into the side alleys and the dark streets that disgorged into the square. Within three minutes the square lay empty again in the pale crimson noon. The kid in black leather let his breath go and swore, slipping his shocker into his holster. He stared and demanded profanely. Where'd the little fellow go? Who knows, the other shrugged. Probably sneaked into one of the alleys. Did you see where he went, Cargill? I came slowly back to the gateway. To me it had seemed that he ducked into the street shrine and vanished into thin air, but I've lived on Wolf long enough to know you can't trust your eyes here. I said so, and the kid swore again, gulping, more upset than he wanted to admit. Does this kind of thing happen often? All the time his companion assured him soberly with a sidewise wink at me. I didn't return the wink. The kid wouldn't let it drop. Where did you learn their lingo, Mr. Cargill? I've been on Wolf a long time, I said, spun on my heel and walked toward headquarters. I tried not to hear, but their voices followed me anyhow, discreetly lowered, but not lowered enough. Kid, don't you know who he is? That's Cargill of the Secret Service. Six years ago he was the best man in intelligence before the voice lowered another decibel. And then there was the kid's voice asking, shaken. But what the hell happened to his face? I should have been used to it by now. I'd been hearing it more or less behind my back for six years. Well, if my luck held, I'd never hear it again. I strode up the white steps of the skyscraper to finish the arrangements that would take me away from Wolf forever. To the other end of the empire. To the other end of the galaxy. Anywhere, so long as I need not wear my past like a medallion around my neck, or blazoned and branded on what was left of my ruined face. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Of The Door Through Space This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Kristi Nowak. The Door Through Space By Marion Zimmer Bradley Chapter 2 The Terran Empire has set its blaze in on four hundred planets circling more than three hundred suns. No matter what the color of the sun, the number of the moons overhead, or the geography of the planet, once you step inside a headquarters building, you are on Earth. And Earth would be alien to many who call themselves Earthmen, judging by the strangeness I always felt when I stepped into that marble and glass world inside the skyscraper. I heard the sound of my steps ringing into thin resonance along the marble corridor and squinted my eyes, readjusting them painfully to the cold yellowness of the lights. The traffic division was efficiency made insolent in glass and chrome and polished steel, mirrors and windows and looming electronic clerical machines. Most of one wall was taken up by a TV monitor which gave a view of the spaceport, a vast open space lighted with blue-white mercury vapor lamps and a chained-down skyscraper of a starship littered over with swarming ants. The process crew was getting the big ship ready for skylift tomorrow morning. I gave it a second and then a third look. I'd be on it when it lifted. Turning away from the monitored spaceport, I watched myself stride forward in the mirrored surfaces that were everywhere. A tall man, a lean man, bleached out by years under a red sun and deeply scarred on both cheeks and around the mouse. Even after six years behind a desk, my neat business clothes, suitable for an Earthman with a desk job, didn't fit quite right and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet approximating the lean, stooping walk of a dry-towner from the coronus planes. The clerk behind the sign marked transportation was a little rabbit of a man with a sun-lamp tan barricaded by a small-sized spaceport of desk and looking as if he liked being shut up there. He looked up in civil inquiry. Can I do something for you? My name's Cargill. Have you a pass for me? He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional spacemen which I obviously wasn't. Let me check my records, he hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the glassy surface. Shadows came and went and I saw myself half-reflected, a tipsy shadow in a flurry of racing colors. The patterns finally stabilized and the clerk read off names. Brill, Cameron. Ah, yes. Cargill, Ray Sandrew. Department 38, Transfer Transportation. Is that you? I admitted it and he started punching more buttons when the sound of the name made connection in whatever desk clerks use for a brain. He stopped with his hand halfway to the button. Are you Ray's Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? The Ray's Cargill? It's right there, I said, gesturing wearily at the projected pattern under the glassy surface. Why, I thought... I mean, everybody took it for granted. That is, I heard. You thought Cargill had been killed a long time ago because his name never turned up in news dispatches anymore. I grin sourly, seeing my image dissolve in blurring shadows and feeling the long-heeled scar in my mouth draw up to make the grin hideous. I'm Cargill, all right. I've been up on floor 38 for six years holding down a desk any clerk could handle. You, for instance. He gaped. He was a rabbit of a man who had never stepped out of the safe, familiar boundaries of the Terran trade city. You mean you're the man who went to Charon in disguise and routed out the lists, the man who scouted the Black Ridge and Shainsaw? And you've been working at a desk upstairs all these years? It's hard to believe, sir. My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing it. The pass? Right away, sir. He punched buttons and a printed chip of plastic extruded from the slot on the desktop. Your fingerprint, please? He pressed my finger to the still soft surface of the plastic, indelibly recording the print, waited for a moment for it to harden, then laid the chip in the slot of a pneumatic tube. I heard it whoosh away. They'll check your fingerprint against that when you board the ship. Skylift isn't till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process crew finishes with her. He glanced at the monitor screen where the swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile spacecraft. It will be another hour or two. Where are you going, Mr. Cargill? Some planet in the Hyades cluster. Vanewal, I think. Something like that. What's it like there? How should I know? I'd never been there either. I only knew that Vanewal had a red sun and the Terran legate could use a trained intelligence officer and not pin him down to a desk. There was respect and even envy in the little man's voice. Could I buy you a drink before you go aboard, Mr. Cargill? Thanks, but I have a few loose ends to tie up. I didn't, but I was damned if I'd spend my last hour on Wolf under the eyes of a deskbound rabbit who preferred his adventure safely second hand. But after I'd left the office in the building, I almost wished I had taken him up on it. It would be at least an hour before I could board the starship, with nothing to do but hash over old memories better forgotten. The sun was lower now. Phi Coronis is a dim star, a dying star, and once past the crimson zenith of noon its light slants into a long pale reddish twilight. Four of Wolf's five moons were clustered in a pale bouquet overhead, mingling thin violet moonlight into the crimson dusk. The shadows were blue and purple in the empty square as I walked across the stones and stood looking down one of the side streets. A few steps, and I was in an untidy slum which might have been on another world from the neat bright trade city which lay west of the spaceport. The charsa was alive and reeking with the sounds and smells of human and half-human life. A naked child, diminutive in golden furred, darted between two of the chinked pebble houses and disappeared, spilling fragile laughter like breaking glass. A little beast, half-snake and half-cat, crawled across a roof, spread leathery wings and flapped to the ground. The sour, pungent reek of incense from the open street shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a hulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glare as I passed. I turned, retracing my steps. There was no danger, of course, so close to the trade city. Even on such planets as Wolf, Tara's laws are respected within earshot of their gates. But there had been rioting here and in Charon during the last month. After the display of mob violence this afternoon, a lone Terran, unarmed, might turn up as a solitary corpse flung on the steps of the HQ building. There had been a time when I had walked alone from Shainsah to the Polar Colony. I had known how to melt into this kind of night, shabby and inconspicuous, a worn shirt cloak hunched around my shoulders, weaponless except for the razor-sharp skein in the clasp of the cloak, walking on the balls of my feet like a dry-towner, not looking or sounding or smelling like an earthman. That rabbit in the traffic office had stirred up things I'd be wiser to forget. It had been six years, six years of slow death behind a desk, since the day when Raquel Sensar had left me a marked man, death warrant written on my scarred face anywhere outside the narrow confines of the Terran Law on Wolf. Raquel Sensar, my fists clenched with the old impotent hate, if I could get my hands on him. It had been Raquel who first led me through the byways of the Kharsa, teaching me the jargon of a dozen tribes, the chirping call of the Yaman, the way of the cat-man of the rainforests, the Arget of the Thieves' market, the walk and step of the dry-towners from Shainsah and Dailon and Ardkaran, the patched cities of dusty salt stone which spread out on the bottoms of wolves' vanished oceans. Raquel was from Shainsah, human, tall as an earthman, weathered by salt and sun, and he had worked for Terran Intelligence since we were boys. We had traveled all over our world together and found it good. And then, for some reason I had never known, it had come to an end. Even now I was not wholly sure why he had erupted that day into violence and a final explosion. Then he had disappeared, leaving me a marked man, and a lonely one. Julie had gone with him. I strode the streets of the slum, unseeing, my thoughts running a familiar channel. Julie, my kid sister, clinging around Raquel's neck, her gray eyes hating me. I had never seen her again. That had been six years ago. One more adventure had shown me that my usefulness to the Secret Service was over. Raquel had vanished, but he had left me a legacy. My name, written in the sure scrolls of death anywhere outside the safe boundaries of Terran Law. A marked man I had gone back to slow stagnation behind a desk. I stood it as long as I could. When it finally got too bad, Magnuson had been sympathetic. He was the Chief of Terran Intelligence on Wolf, and I was next in line for his job. But he understood when I quit. He'd arranged the transfer and the pass, and I was leaving to-night. I was nearly back to the spaceport by now, across from the street shrine at the edge of the square. It was here that little toy seller had vanished. But it was exactly like a thousand, a hundred thousand other street shrines on Wolf. A smudge of incense reeking and stinking before the squatting image of Nebron, the toad god whose face and symbol were everywhere on Wolf. I stared for a moment at the ugly idol, then slowly moved away. The lighted curtains of the spaceport cafe attracted my attention and I went inside. A few spaceport personnel and storm gear were drinking coffee at the counter. A pair of furred chocks lounging beneath the mirrors at the far end, and a trio of dry-towners, rangy, weathered men in crimson and blue shirt cloaks, were standing at a wall shelf, eating Terran food with aloof dignity. In my business clothes I felt more conspicuous than the chocks. What place had a civilian here between the uniforms of the spacemen and the colorful brilliance of the dry-towners? A snub-nosed girl with alabaster hair came to take my order. I asked for Jaco and Bunlets and carried the food to a wall shelf near the dry-towners. Their dialect fell soft and familiar on my ears. One of them, without altering the expression on his face or the easy tone of his voice, began to make elaborate comments on my entrance, my appearance, my ancestry, and probably personal habits, all defined in the colorfully obscene dialect of Chainsa. That had happened before. The wolf and sense of humor is only half human. The finest joke is to criticize and insult a stranger, preferably an earth man, to his very face in an unknown language, perfectly deadpan. In my civilian clothes I was obviously fair game. A look or gesture of resentment would have lost face and dignity, what the dry-towners called their kihar permanently. I leaned over and remarked in their own dialect that I would, at some future, an unspecified time appreciate the opportunity to return their compliments. By rights they should have laughed, made some barbed remark about my command of language and crossed their hands in a symbol of jest decently reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each other a drink and that would be that. But it didn't happen that way, not this time. The tallest of the three world upsetting his drink in the process. I heard its thin shatter through the squeal of the alabaster-haired girl as the chair crashed over. They faced me three abreast and one of them fumbled in the clasp of his shirt cloak. I edged backward, my own hand racing up for a skin I hadn't carried in six years and fronted them squarely, hoping I could face down the prospect of a rough house. They wouldn't kill me this close to the HQ, but at least I was in for an unpleasant mauling. I couldn't handle three men and if nerves were this taut in the charsa I might get knifed. Quite by accident, of course. The chocks moaned and gibbered. The dry-towners glared at me and I tensed for the moment when their steady stare would explode into violence. Then I became aware that they were gazing, not at me, but at something or someone behind me. The skeins snicked back into the clasps of their cloaks. Then they broke rank, turned, and ran. They ran, blundering into stools, leaving havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their wake. One man barged into the counter, swore, and ran on, limping. I let my breath go. Something had put the fear of God into those brutes and it wasn't my own ugly mug. I turned and saw the girl. She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like clasped hands and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery across the breast, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized toad-god, Nebron. Her features were delicate, chiseled, pale, a dry-town face, all human, all woman, but set in an alien and unearthly repose. The great eyes gleamed red. They were fixed, almost unseeing, but the crimson lips were curved with inhuman malice. She stood motionless, looking at me as if wondering why I had not run with the others. In half a second the smile flickered off and was replaced by the starter look of recognition. Whoever and whatever she was she had saved me a mauling. I started to phrase formal thanks, then broke off in astonishment. The cafe had emptied and we were entirely alone. Even the chocks had leaped through an open window. I saw the whisk of a disappearing tale. We stood frozen, looking at one another while the toad-god sprawled across her breasts, rose and fell for half a dozen breaths. Then I took one step forward and she took one step backward at the same instant. In one swift movement she was outside in the dark street. It took me only an instant to get into the street after her, but as I stepped across the door there was a little stirring in the air like the rising of heat waves across the salt flats at noon. Then the street shrine was empty and nowhere was there any sign of the girl. She had vanished. She simply was not there. I gaped at the empty shrine. She had stepped inside and vanished like a wreath of smoke, like the little toy seller they had hunted out of the harse. There were eyes in the street again and, becoming aware of where I was, I moved away. The shrines of Nebron are on every corner of Wolf, but this is one instance when familiarity does not breed contempt. The street was dark and seemed empty, but it was packed with all the little noises of living. I was not unobserved, and meddling with a street shrine would be just as dangerous as the skeins of my three loudmouthed dry town roughnecks. I turned and crossed the square for the last time, turning toward the loom of the spaceship. Filing the girl away is just another riddle of Wolf I'd never solve. How wrong I was. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The Door Through Space This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Christine Awak. The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley Chapter 3 From the spaceport gates exchanging brief greetings with the guards, I took a last look at the Kharsa. For a minute I toyed with the notion of just disappearing down one of those streets. It's not hard to disappear on Wolf, if you know how, and I knew, or had known once. Loyalty to Terra? What a Terra given me except a taste of color and adventure out there in the dry towns, and then taken it away again. If an Earth-man is very lucky, and very careful, he lasts about ten years in intelligence. I had had two years more than my share, and I still knew enough to leave my Terran identity behind like a worn-out jacket. I could seek out Recall, settle our blood feud, see Julie again. How could I see Julie again, as her husband's murderer? No other way. Blood feud on Wolf is a terrible and elaborate ritual of the Code Dwello, and once I stepped outside the borders of Terran Law, sooner or later Recall and I would meet, and one of us would die. I looked back, just once, at the dark rambling streets away from the square. Then I turned toward the blue-white lights that hurt my eyes and the starship that loomed huge and hateful before me. A steward in white took my fingerprint and led me to a coffin-sized chamber. He brought me coffee and sandwiches. I hadn't, after all, eaten in the spaceport cafe. Then got me into the skyhook and strapped me deftly and firmly into the acceleration cushions, tugged at the garrison belts until I ached all over. A long needle went into my arm, the narcotic that would keep me safely drowsy all through the terrible tug of interstellar acceleration. Doors clanged, buzzers vibrated lower down in the ship, men tramped the corridors calling to one another in the language of the spaceports. I understood one word in four. I shut my eyes, not caring. At the end of the trip there would be another star, another world, another language, another life. I had spent all my adult life on Wolf. Julie had been a child under the Red Star, but it was a pair of wide crimson eyes and black hair combed into ringlets like spun black glass that went down with me into the bottomless pit of sleep. Someone was shaking me. Ah, come on, Cargill. Wake up, man. Shake your boots! My mouth, foul-tasting and stiff, fumbled at the shapes of words. What havin'? What ya want? My eyes throbbed. When I got them open I saw two men in black leathers bending over me. We were still inside gravity. Get out of the sky-hook. You're comin' with us. What? Even through the layers of the sedative that got to me, only a criminal under interstellar law can be removed from a passage-paid starship once he has formally checked in on board. I was legally, at this moment, on my planet of destination. I haven't been charged. Did I say you had? snapped one man. Shut up, he's doped, the other said hurriedly. Look, he continued, pronouncing every word loudly and distinctly. Get up, now. Come with us. The coordinator will hold up last off if we don't get off in three minutes, and operations will scream. Come on, please. Then I was stumbling along the lighted empty corridor, swaying between the two men, foggily realizing the crew must think me a fugitive caught trying to leave the planet. The locks dilated. A uniformed spaceman watched us, fussily regarding a chronometer. He fretted. The dispatcher's office. We're doing the best we can, the Space Force man said. Can you walk, Cargill? I could, though my feet were a little shaky on the ladders. The violet moonlight had deepened to mauve, and gusty winds spun tendrils of grit across my face. The Space Force men shepherded me, one on either side to the gateway. What the hell is all this? Is something wrong with my pass? The guard shook his head. How would I know? Magnuson put out the order, take it up with him. Believe me, I muttered. I will. They looked at each other. Hell, said one. He's not under arrest. We don't have to haul him around like a convict. Can you walk all right now, Cargill? You know where the Secret Service office is, don't you? Floor 38. The Chief wants you. And make it fast. I knew it made no sense to ask questions. They obviously knew no more than I did. I asked anyhow. Are they holding the ship for me? I'm supposed to be leaving on it. Not that one, the guard answered, jerking his head toward the Space Port. I looked back, just in time to see the dust-dimmed ship leap upward, briefly whitening in the field of searchlights and vanish into the surging clouds above. My head was clearing fast, and anger speeded up the process. The HQ building was empty in the chill silence of just before dawn. I had to rout out a dosing elevator operator, and as the lift swooped upward my anger rose with it. I wasn't working for Magnuson any more. What right had he, or anybody, to grab me off an outbound starship like a criminal? By the time I barged into his office I was spoiling for a fight. The Secret Service office was full of grayish-pink morning and yellow lights left on from the night before. Magnuson, at his desk, looked as if he'd slept in his rumpled uniform. He was a big bowl of a man, and his littered desk looked, as always, like the track of a typhoon in the salt flats. The clutter was weighed down here and there with solidific cubes of the five Magnuson youngsters, and, as usual, Magnuson was fiddling with one of the cubes. He said, not looking up, Sorry to pull this at the last minute, race. There was just time to put out a pull order and get you off the ship, but no time to explain. I glared at him. Seems I can't even get off the planet without trouble. You raised hell all the time I was here, but when I tried to leave? What is this anyhow? I'm sick of being shoved around! Magnuson made a conciliating gesture. Wait until you hear, he began, and broke off, looking at someone who was sitting in the chair in front of his desk, somebody whose back was turned to me. Then the person twisted, and I stopped cold, blinking and wondering if this were a hallucination and I'd wake up in the starship's skyhook far out in space. Then the woman cried, Race! Race! Don't you know me? I took one day's to step, and another. Then she flew across the space between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up still disbelieving. Julie? Oh, Race, I thought I'd die when Mack told me you were leaving tonight. It's been the only thing that's kept me alive, knowing, knowing I'd see you. She sobbed and laughed, her face buried in my shoulder. I let her cry for a minute, then held my sister at arm's length. For a moment I had forgotten the six years that lay between us. Now I saw them, all of them, printed plain on her face. Julie had been a pretty girl. Six years had fined her face into beauty, but there was tension in the set of her shoulders, and her gray eyes had looked on horrors. She looked tiny and thin, and unbearably frail under the scanty folds of her fur robe, a dry-town woman's robe. Her wrists were manacled, the jeweled, tight bracelets fastened together by the links of a long, fine chain of silvered guilt that clashed a little, thinly, as her hands fell to her sides. What's wrong, Julie? Where's Rakal? She shivered, and now I could see that she was in a state of shock. Gone! He's gone! That's all I know, and—Oh, race! Race! He took Rindy with him! From the tone of her voice I had thought she was sobbing. Now I realized that her eyes were dry. She was long past tears. Gently I unclashed her clenched fingers and put her back in the chair. She sat like a doll, her hands falling to her sides with a thin clash of chains. When I picked them up and laid them in her lap, she let them lie their motionless. I stood over her and demanded. Who's Rindy? She didn't move. Our daughter, Race, our little girl! Magnuson broke in, his voice harsh. Well, Kargil, should I have let you leave? Don't be a damn fool! I was afraid you'd tell the poor kid she had to live with her own mistakes, growled Magnuson. You're capable of it. For the first time Julie showed a sign of animation. I was afraid to come to you, Mac. You never wanted me to marry Recall either. Water under the bridge, Magnuson grunted. And I've got lads of my own, Miss Kargil, Mrs. He stopped in distress, vaguely remembering that in the dry towns an improper form of address can be a deadly insult. But she guessed his predicament. You used to call me Julie, Mac. It will do now. You've changed, he said quietly. Julie then, tell Race what you told me, all of it. She turned to me. I shouldn't have come for myself. I knew that. Julie was proud and she had always had the courage to live with her own mistakes. When I first saw her I knew this wouldn't be anything so simple as the complaint of an abused wife or even an abandoned or deserted mother. I took a chair, watching her, and listening. She began. You made a mistake when you turned Recall out of the service, Mac. In his way he was the most loyal man you had on Wolf. Magnuson had evidently not expected her to take this tack. He scowled and looked disconcerted, shifting uneasily in his big chair. But when Julie did not continue, obviously awaiting his answer, he said, Julie, he left me no choice. I never knew how his mind worked, that final deal he engineered. Have you any idea how much that cost the service? And have you taken a good look at your brother's face, Julie girl? Julie raised her eyes slowly and I saw her flinch. I knew how she felt. For three years I had kept my mirror covered, growing an untidy straggle of beard because it hid the scars and saved me the ordeal of facing myself to shave. Julie whispered, Recall's is just as bad, worse. That's some satisfaction, I said, and Mac stared at us baffled. Even now I don't know what it was all about. And you never will, I said for the hundredth time. We've been over this before, nobody could understand it unless he'd lived in the dry towns. Let's not talk about it. You talk, Julie. What brought you here like this? What brought the kid? There's no way I can tell you the end without telling you the beginning, she said reasonably. At first Recall worked as a trader in Shainsaw. I wasn't surprised. The dry towns were the core of Terran trade on Wolf, and it was through their cooperation that Terra existed here peaceably, on a world only half human, or less. The men of the dry towns existed strangely poised between two worlds. They had made dealings with the first Terran ships and thus gave entrance to the wedge of the Terran Empire. And yet they stood proud and apart. They alone had never yielded to the Terranizing which overtakes all Empire planets sooner or later. There were no trade cities in the dry towns. An earthmen who went there unprotected faced a thousand deaths, each one worse than the last. There were those who said that the men of Shainsaw and Daelan and Edcoran had sold the rest of Wolf to the Terrans to keep the Terrans from their own door. Even Recall, who had worked with Terra since boyhood had finally come to a point of decision and gone his own way. And it was not Terra's way. That was what Julie was saying now. He didn't like what Terra was doing on Wolf. I'm not so sure I like it myself. Magnuson interrupted her again. Do you know what Wolf was like when we came here? Have you seen the slave colony, the idiot's village? Your own brother went to Shainsaw and routed out the Liss. And Recall helped him, Julie reminded him. Even after he left you he tried to keep out of things. He could have told them a good deal that would hurt you after ten years in intelligence, you know. I knew. It was, although I wasn't going to tell Julie this, one reason why, at the end, during that terrible explosion of violence which no normal Terran mind could comprehend, I had done my best to kill him. We had both known that after this the planet would not hold the two of us. We could both go on living only by dividing it unevenly. I had been given the slow death of the Terran zone. And he had all the rest. But he never told them anything. I tell you, he was one of the most loyal... Mac-agrented. Yeah, he's an angel. Go ahead. She didn't, not immediately. Instead, she asked what sounded like an irrelevant question. Is it true what he told me that the Empire has a standing offer of a reward for a working model of a matter transmitter? That offer's been standing for 300 years, Terran reckoning. One million credits cash. Don't tell me he was figuring to invent one. I don't think so, but I think he heard rumors about one. He said with that kind of money he could bargain the Terran's right out of Shainsaw. That was where it started. He began coming and going at odd times, but he never said any more about it. He wouldn't talk to me at all. When was all this? About four months ago. In other words, just about the time of the riots in Charon. She nodded. Yes, he was away in Charon when the ghost wind blew and he came back with knife-cuts in his thigh. I asked if he had been mixed up in the anti-Terran rioting, but he wouldn't tell me. Race, I don't know anything about politics. I don't really care. But just about that time, the Great House in Shainsaw changed hands. I'm sure Recall had something to do with that. And then... Julie twisted her chained hands together in her lap. He tried to mix Rindi up in it. It was crazy, awful. He brought her some sort of non-human toy from one of the lowland towns, Charon, I think. It was a weird thing, scared me. But he'd sit Rindi down in the sunlight and have her look into it, and Rindi would gavel all sorts of nonsense about little men and birds and a toy-maker. The chains about Julie's wrists clashed as she twisted her hands together. I stared somberly at the fetters. The chain, which was long, did not really hamper her movements much. Such chains were symbolic ornaments, and most dry-town women went all their lives with fettered hands. But even after the years I'd spent in the dry towns, the sight still brought an uneasiness to my throat, a vague discomfort. We had a terrible fight over that, Julie went on. I was afraid, afraid of what it was doing to Rindi. I threw it out, and Rindi woke up and screamed. Julie checked herself and caught it vanishing self-control. But you don't want to hear about that. It was then I threatened to leave him and take Rindi. The next day, suddenly the hysteria Julie had been forcing back broke free, and she rocked back and forth in her chair, shaken and strangled with sobs. He took Rindi. Oh, race, he's crazy. Crazy. I think he hates Rindi. He… he… race, he smashed her toys. He took every toy the child had and broke them one by one, smashed them into powder. Every toy the child had. Julie, please, please. Magnus and pleaded, shaken. If we're dealing with a maniac. I don't dare think he'd harm her. He warned me not to come here, or I'd never see her again. But if it meant war against Tara, I had to come. But, Mac, please, don't do anything against him. Please, please, he's got my baby. He's got my little girl. Her voice failed and she buried her face in her hands. Mac picked up the solitipic cube of his five-year-old son and turned it between his pudgy fingers, saying unhappily, Julie, we'll take every precaution. But can't you see, we've got to get him. If there's a question of a matter transmitter or anything like that in the hands of Tara's enemies, I could see that too. But Julie's agonized face came between me and the picture of disaster. I clenched my fist around the chair arm, not surprised to see the fragile plastic buckle crack and split under my grip if it had been Recall's neck. Mac, let me handle this. Julie, shall I find Rindy for you? A hope was born in her ravaged face and died while I looked. Race, he'd kill you. Or have you killed? He'd try, I admitted. The moment Recall knew I was outside the Terran Zone, I'd walk with death. I had accepted the code during my years in Chainsaw, but now I was an Earthman and felt only contempt. Can't you see, once he knows I'm at large, that very code of his will force him to abandon any intrigue, whatever you call it, conspiracy, and come after me first. That way we do two things. We get him out of hiding, and we get him out of the conspiracy if there is one. I looked at the shaking Julie and something snapped. I stooped and lifted her not gently, my hands biting her shoulders. And I won't kill him, do you hear? He may wish I had by the time I get through with him. I'll beat the living hell out of him. I'll cram my fists down his throat, but I'll settle it with him like an Earthman. I won't kill him. Hear me, Julie? Because that's the worst thing I could do to him. Catch him and let him live afterward. Magnuson stepped toward me and pried my crushing hands off her arms. Julie rubbed the bruises mechanically, not knowing what she was doing. Mack said, You can't do it, Cargill. You wouldn't get as far as Delon. You haven't been out of the Zone in six years. Besides, his eye is rested full on my face. I hate to say this race, but damn it, man, go and take a good look at yourself in a mirror. Do you think I'd have ever pulled you off the Secret Service otherwise? How in hell can you disguise yourself now? There are plenty of scarred men in the dry towns, I said. Raqqa will remember my scars, but I don't think anyone else will look twice. Magnuson walked to the window, his huge form bulked against the light, perceptibly darkening the office. He looked over the faraway panorama, the niche bright trade city below and the vast wilderness lying outside. I could almost hear the wheels grinding in his head. Finally, he swung around. Race, I've heard these rumors before, but you're the only man I could have sent to track them down, and I wouldn't send you out in cold blood to be killed. I won't now. Space Force will pick him up. I heard the harsh inward gasp of Julie's breath and said, Damn it, no, the first move you make. I couldn't finish. Rindy was in his hands, and I knew, Recall, he hadn't been given to making idle threats. We all three knew what Recall might do at the first hint of the long arm of Terran Law reaching out for him. I said, For God's sakes, let's keep Space Force out of it. Let it look like a personal matter between Recall and me, and let us settle it on those terms. Remember, he's got the kid. Magnuson sighed. Again, he picked up one of the cubes and stared into the clear plastic, where the three-dimensional image of a nine-year-old girl looked out at him smiling and innocent. His face was transparent as the plastic cube. Mack acts tough, but he has five kids, and he is as soft as a dish of pudding where a kid is concerned. I know. Another thing, too. If we send out Space Force after all the riots, how many Terrans are on this planet? A few thousand? No more. What chance would we have if it turned into a full-scale rebellion? None at all. Unless we wanted to order a massacre, sure we have bombs and disc guns and all that. But would you dare use them? And where would we be after that? We're here to keep the pot from boiling over, to keep out of planetary incidents, not push them along to a point where a bluff won't work. That's why we've got to pick up Recall before he gets out of hand. I said, give me a month. Then you can move in if you have to. Recall can't do much against Terra in that time, and I might be able to keep Rindy out of it. Magnuson stared at me hard-eyed. If you do this against my advice, I won't be able to step in and pull you out of a jam later on, you know. And God help you if you start up the machines and can't stop them. I knew that. A month wasn't much. Wolf is forty thousand miles of diameter, at least half unexplored, mountain and forest swarming with non-human and semi-human cities where the Terrans had never been. Finding Recall or any one man would be like picking out one star in the Andromeda Nebula. Not impossible. Not quite impossible. Max eyes wandered again to his child's face, deep in the transparent cube. He turned it in his hands. Okay, Cargill, he said slowly. So we're all crazy. I'll be crazy too. Try it your way. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of The Door Through Space This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Christine Awok. The Door Through Space The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Chapter 4 By sunset I was ready to leave. I hadn't had any loose ends to tie up in the trade city since I'd already disposed of most of my gear before boarding the ship. I'd never been in better circumstances to take off for parts unknown. Mac, still disapproving, had opened the files to me and I'd spent most of the day in the back rooms of Floor 38 searching intelligence files to refresh my memory, scanning the pages of my own old reports sent years ago from Chainsaw and Daylan. He had sent out one of the non-humans who worked for us to buy or acquire somewhere in the old town a dry-towners outfit and the other things I would wear and carry. I would have liked to go myself. I felt that I needed the practice. I was only now beginning to realize how much I might have forgotten in the years behind a desk. But, until I was ready to make my presence known, no one must know that Race Cargill had not left Wolf on the Starship. Above all, I must not be seen in the Kharsa until I went there in the dry-town disguise which had become, years ago, a deep second nature, almost an alternate personality. About sunset I walked through the clean little streets of the Terran Trade City toward the Magnuson home where Julie was waiting for me. Most of the men who go into civil service of the Empire come from Earth or from the close-in planets of Proxima and Alpha Centaurus. They go out unmarried and they stay that way or marry women native to the planets where they are sent. But Joanna Magnuson was one of the rare Earth women who had come out with her husband twenty years ago. There are two kinds of Earth women like that. They make their quarterings a little bit of home or a little bit of hell. Joanna had made their house look like a transported corner of Earth. I never knew quite what to think of the Magnuson household. It seemed to me almost madness to live under a red sun yet come inside to yellow light, to live on a world with the wild beauty of Wolf and yet live as they might have lived on their home planet. Or maybe I was the one who was out of step. I had done the reprehensible thing they called going native. Possibly I had done just that and in absorbing myself into the New World had lost the ability to fit into the old. Joanna, a chubby, comfortable woman in her forties opened the door and gave me her hand. Come in, race. Julie's expecting you. It's good of you. I broke off, unable to express my gratitude. Julie and I had come from Earth. Our father had been an officer on the old starship Landfall when Julie was only a child. He had died in a wreck off Procyon and Mack Magnuson had found me a place in intelligence because I spoke four of the wolf languages and haunted the Kharsa with Raqqal whenever I could get away. They had also taken Julie into their own home like a younger sister. They hadn't said much because they had liked Raqqal when the breakup came. But that terrible night when Raqqal and I nearly killed each other and Raqqal came with his face bleeding and took Julie away with him had hurt them hard. Yet it had made them all the kinder to me. Joanna said forthrightly, Nonsense, race, what else could we do? She drew me along the hall. You can talk in here. I delayed a minute before going through the door she indicated. How is Julie? Better, I think. I put her to bed in Metta's room and she slept most of the day. She'll be all right. I'll leave you to talk. Joanna opened the door and went away. Julie was awake and dressed and already some of the terrible frozen horror was gone from her face. The room, one of the children's bedrooms, wasn't a big one. Even at the top of the Secret Service a cop doesn't live too well, not on Tara's civil service pay scale, not with five youngsters. It looked as if all five of the kids had taken it to pieces one at a time. I sat down on a too low chair and said, Julie, we haven't much time. I've got to be out of the city before dark. I want to know about Raqqal, what he does, what he's like now. Remember, I haven't seen him for years. Tell me everything, his friends, his amusements, everything you know. I always thought you knew him better than I did. Julie had a fidgety little way of coiling the links of the chain around her wrists and it made me nervous. It's routine, Julie, police work. Mostly I play by ear, but I try to start out by being methodical. She answered everything I asked her, but the sum total wasn't much and it wouldn't help much. As I said, it's easy to disappear on Wolf. Julie knew he had been friendly with the new holders of the great house on Shainsah, but she didn't even know their name. I heard one of the Magnuson children fly to the street door and return, shouting for her mother. Joanna knocked at the door of the room and came in. There's a chalk outside who wants to see you, race. I nodded, probably my fancy dress. Can I change in the back room, Joanna? Will you keep my clothes here till I get back? I went to the door and spoke to the furred non-human in the sibilant jargon of the Kharsa and he handed me what looked like a bundle of rags. There were hard lumps inside. The chalk said softly, I hear a rumor in the Kharsa, race. Perhaps it will help you. Three men from Shainsah are in the city. They came here to seek a woman who has vanished and a toy maker. They are returning at sunrise. Perhaps you can arrange to travel in their caravan. I thanked him and carried the bundle inside. In the empty back room I stripped to the skin and unrolled the bundle. There was a pair of baggy striped breeches, a worn and shabby shirt cloak with capacious pockets, a looped belt with half the guilt rubbed away in the base metal showing through and a scuffed pair of ankle boots tied with frayed thongs of different colors. There was a little cluster of amulets and seals. I chose two or three of the commonest kind and strung them around my neck. One of the lumps in the bundle was a small jar, holding nothing but the ordinary spices sold in the market with which the average dry towner flavors food. I rubbed some of the powder on my body, put a pinch in the pocket of my shirt cloak with a long, unfamiliar pungency. The second lump was a skein and unlike the worn and shabby garments this was brand new and sharp and bright, and its edge held a razor-glint. I tucked it into the clasp of my shirt cloak, a reassuring weight. It was the only weapon I could dare to carry. The last of the solid objects in the bundle was a flat wooden case about nine by ten inches. I slid it open. It was divided carefully into sections cushioned with sponge-absorbent plastic and in them lay tiny slips of glass on wolf as precious as jewels. They were lenses, camera lenses, microscope lenses, even eyeglass lenses. Packed close, there were nearly a hundred of them nested by the shock-absorbent stuff. They were my excuse for travel to Shainsaw. Over and above the necessities of trade a few items of terrain manufacture, vacuum tubes, transistors, lenses for cameras and binoculars, liquors and finely forged small tools are literally worth their weight in platinum. Even in cities where terrains have never gone these things bring exorbitant prices and trading in them is a dry-town privilege. Recall had been a traitor, so Julie told me, in fine wire and surgical instruments wolf is not a mechanized planet and has never developed any indigenous industrial system. The psychology of the non-human seldom runs to technological advances. I went down the hallway again to the room where Julie was waiting. Catching a glimpse in a full-length mirror I was startled. All traces of the Terran civil servant, clumsy and uncomfortable in his ill-fitting clothes, had dropped away. A dry-towner, rangy and scarred, looked out at me and it seemed that the expression on his face was one of amazement. Joanna whirled as I came into the room invisibly paled before recovering her self-control. She gave me a nervous little giggle. Goodness race! I didn't know you! Julie whispered, Yes, I remember you better like that. You're... you look so much like... The door flew open and Mickey Magnuson scampered into the room a chubby little boy browned by a terra-type sunlamp and glowing with health. In his hand he held some sparkling thing that gave off tiny flashes and glints of color. I gave the kid a grin before I realized that I was disguised anyhow and probably a hideous sight. The little boy backed off but Joanna put her plump hand on his shoulder murmuring soothing things. Mickey toddled toward Julie holding up the shining thing in his hands as if to display something very precious and beloved. Julie bent and held out her arms then her face contracted and she snatched at the plaything. Mickey, what's that? He thrust it protectively behind his back. Mine! Mickey, don't be naughty! Joanna chided. Please let me see. Julie coaxed and he brought it out slowly still suspicious. It was an angled prism of crystal star-shaped set in a frame which could get the stars spinning like a solid pick but it displayed a new and comical face every time it was turned. Round and round charmed at being the center of attention. There seemed to be dozens of faces shifting with each spin of the prism human and non-human all dim and slightly distorted. My own face, Julie's, Joanna's came out of the crystal surface. Not a reflection but a caricature. A choked sound from Julie made me turn into smay. She had let herself drop to the floor and was sitting there white as death supporting herself with her two hands. Race! Find out where he got that! That thing! I bent and shook her. What's the matter with you? She landed. She had lapsed into the dazed, sleep-walking horror of this morning. She whispered, It's not a toy. Rindy had one. Joanna, where did he get it? She pointed at the shining thing with an expression of horror which would have been laughable had it been less real, less filled with terror. Joanna cocked her head to one side and wrinkled her forehead reflectively. Why, I don't know. Now you come to ask me. I thought maybe one of the chocks had given it to Mickey. Bought it in the Bazaar maybe. He loves it. Do get up off the floor, Julie. Julie scrambled to her feet. She said, Rindy had one. It terrified me. She would sit and look at it by the hour. And I told you about it, Race. I threw it out once and she woke up and screamed. She shrieked for hours and hours and she ran out in the dark and dug for it in the trash pile where I buried it. She went out in the dark, broke all her fingernails, but she dug it out again. She checked herself, staring at Joanna, her eyes wide in appeal. Well, dear, said Joanna, with mild rebuking kindness, you needn't be so upset. I don't think Mickey's so attached to it as all that. And anyhow, I'm not going to throw it away. She patted Julie reassuringly on the shoulder, then gave Mickey a little shove toward the door and turned to follow him. You'll want to talk alone before Race leaves. Good luck wherever you're going, Race. She held at her hand forthrightly. And don't worry about Julie, she added in an undertone. We'll take good care of her. When I came back to Julie, she was standing by the window looking through the oddly filtered glass that dimmed the red sun to orange. Joanna thinks I'm crazy, Race. She thinks you're upset. Rindy's an odd child, a real dry-towner, but it's not my imagination, Race. It's not. There's something. Suddenly she sobbed aloud again. Home sick, Julie. I was a little the first years, but I was happy, believe me. She turned her face to me, shining with tears. You've got to believe I never regretted it for a minute. I'm glad, I said, Dully. That made it just fine. Only that toy. Who knows, it might be a clue to something. The toy had reminded me of something, too, and I tried to remember what it was. I'd seen non-human toys in the Kharsa, even bought them from Axe Kids. When a single man is invited frequently to a home with five youngsters, it's about the only way he can repay that hospitality by bringing the children odd trifles and knick-knacks. But I had never seen anything quite like this one until... Until yesterday. The toy seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa, the one who had fled into the Shrine of Nebron and vanished. He had had half a dozen of those prism and star-sparklers. I tried to call up a mental picture of the little toy seller. I didn't have much luck. I'd seen him only in that one swift glance from beneath his hood. Julie, have you ever seen a little man, like a chock only smaller, twisted, hunchbacked? He sells toys. She looked blank. I don't think so. Although there are dwarf chocks in the polar cities, but I'm sure I've never seen one. It was just an idea. But it was something to think about. A toy seller had vanished. Recall, before disappearing, had smashed all Rindy's toys, and the sight of a plaything of cunningly cut crystal had sent Julie into hysterics. I'd better go before it's too dark, I said. I buckled the final clasp of my shirt-cloak, fitted my skin another notch into it, and counted the money Mack had advanced me for expenses. I want to get into the Kharsa and hunt up a caravan to Shainsah. You're going there first? Where else? Julie turned, leaning one hand against the wall. She looked frail and ill, years older than she was. Suddenly she flung her thin arms around me, and a link of the chain on her fettered hand struck me hard as she cried out, Race! Race! He'll kill you! How can I live with that on my conscience, too? You can live with a hell of a lot on your conscience. I disengaged her arms firmly from my neck. A link of the chain caught on the clasp of my shirt-cloak, and again something snapped inside me. I grasped the chain in my two hands and gave a mighty heave, bracing my foot against the wall. The link snapped asunder. A flying end struck Julie under the eye. I ripped at the seals of the jeweled cuffs, tore them from her arms, and threw the whole assembly into a corner where it fell with a clash. Damn it! I roared. That's over. You're never going to wear those things again. Maybe after six years in the dry towns, Julie was beginning to guess what those six years behind the desk had meant to me. Julie, I'll find your rindy for you, and I'll bring Recall in alive. But don't ask more than that. Just alive. And don't ask me how. He'd be alive when I got through with him. Sure he'd be alive. Just. THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE by Marion Zimmer Bradley CHAPTER V It was getting dark when I slipped through the side gate, shabby and inconspicuous into the spaceport square. Beyond the other lamps, I knew that the old city was beginning to take on life with the falling night. Out of the chinked pebble houses, men and women, human and non-human, came forth into the moonlit streets. If anyone noticed me cross the square, which I doubted. They took me for just another dry town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity-satisfied, was drifting back where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away, and soon was walking in the dark. The Kharsa was not unfamiliar to me as a Terran, but for the last six years I had seen only its daytime face. I doubted if there were a dozen earthmen in the old town tonight, though I saw one in the bazaar, dirty and lurching, drunk. One of those who run renegade and homeless between worlds belonging to neither. This was what I had nearly become. I went further up the hill with the rising streets. Once I turned and saw below me the bright-lighted spaceport, the black, many-windowed loom of the skyscraper like a patch of alien shadow in the red-violet moonlight. I turned my back on them and walked on. At the fringe of the thieves market I paused outside a wine-shop where dry-towners were made welcome. A golden, non-human child murmured something as she pattered by me in the street, and I stopped, gripped by a spasm of stage fright. Had the dialect of Shane Saw grown rusty on my tongue? Spies were given short shrift on Wolf, and a mile from the spaceport I might as well have been on one of those moons. There were no spaceport shockers at my back now, and someone might remember the tale of an earthman with a scarred face who had gone to Shane Saw in disguise. I shrugged the shirt-cloak around my shoulders, pushing the door and went in. I had remembered that Raqal was waiting for me. Not beyond this door, but at the end of the trail, behind some other door somewhere, and we have a byword in Shane Saw. A trail without beginning has no end. Right there I stopped thinking about Julie, Rindy, the Terran Empire, or what Raqal, who knew too many of Tara's secrets, might do if he had turned renegade. My fingers went up and stroked musingly the ridge of the scar tissue along my mouth. At that moment I was thinking only of Raqal, of an unsettled blood feud, and of my revenge. Red lamps were burning inside the wine-shop where men reclined on frowsy couches. I stumbled over to one of them, found an empty place, and let myself sink down on it, arranging myself automatically in the sprawl of dry-towners indoors. In public they stood rigid and formal, even to eat and drink. Among themselves anything less than a loose-limbed sprawl betrayed insulting watchfulness. Only a man who fears secret murder keeps himself on guard. A girl with a tangled rope of hair down her back came toward me. Her hands were unchained, meaning she was a woman of the lowest class, not worth safeguarding. Her first smock was shabby and matted with filth. I sent her for wine. When it came it was surprisingly good, the sweet and treacherous wine of Ardkaran. I sipped it slowly, looking round. If a caravan of Shane Saw were leaving tomorrow, it would be known here. The word dropped that I was returning there would bring me by iron-bound custom and invitation to travel in their company. When I sent the woman for wine a second time a man on a nearby couch got up and walked over to me. He was tall even for a dry-towner, and there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was no riff-raff of the Kharsa either, for his shirt cloak was of rich silk interwoven with metallic threads and crusted with heavy embroideries. The hilt of his skin was carved from a single green gem. He stood looking down at me for some time before he spoke. I never forget a voice, although I cannot bring your face to mind. Have I a duty toward you? I had spoken a jargon to the girl, but he addressed me in the lilting sing-song speech of Shane Saw. I made no answer, gesturing him to be seated. On Wolf formal courtesy requires a series of polite non-sequiturs, and while a direct question merely borders on rudeness, a direct answer is the mark of a simpleton. A drink. He was unasked. He retorted and summoned the tangle-headed girl. Bring us better wine than this swill. With that word in gesture, I recognized him and my teeth clamped hard on my lip. This was the loudmouth who had sworn fight in the Spaceport Café and run away before the dark girl with the sign of Nebron scrawled on her breast. But in this poor light he had not recognized me. I moved deliberately into the full red glow. If he did not know me for the Terran he had challenged last night in the café it was unlikely that anyone else would. He stared at me for some minutes, but in the end he only shrugged and poured wine from the bottle he had ordered. Three drinks later I knew that his name was Kiral and that he was a trader in wire and fine-steel tools through the non-human towns. And I had given him the name I had chosen, Raskar. He asked, Are you thinking of returning to Shane Saw? Worry of a trap I hesitated, but the question seemed harmless so I only countered. How long in the Kharsa? Several weeks. Trading? No, he applied himself to the wine again. I was searching for a member of my family. Did you find him? Her, said Kiral, and ceremoniously spat. No, I didn't find her. What is your business in Shane Saw? I chuckled briefly. As a matter of fact I am searching for a member of my family. He narrowed his eyelids as if he suspected me of mocking him, but personal privacy is the most rigid convention of the Dry Towns and such mockery showed a sensible disregard for prying questions if I did not choose to answer them. He questioned no further. I can use an extra man to handle the loads. Are you good with pack-animals? If so, you are welcome to travel under the protection of my caravan. I agreed. Then, reflecting that Julian recall must, after all, be known in Shane Saw, I asked, Do you know a trader who calls himself Sensor? He stared slightly. I saw his eyes move along my scars, then reserved like a lowered curtain shut itself over his face, concealing a brief, satisfied glimmer. No, he lied and stood up. We leave at first daylight. Have your gear ready. He flipped something at me and I caught it in mid-air. It was a stone incised with Kiral's name in the ideographs of Shane Saw. You can sleep with the caravan if you care to. Show that token to Kuhn. Kiral's caravan was encamped in a barred field past the furthest gates of the Kharsa. About a dozen men were busy loading the pack-animals. Horses shipped in from dark over mostly. I asked the first man I met for Kuhn. He pointed out a burly fellow in a shiny red shirt cloak who was busy chewing out one of the young men for the way he'd put a pack saddle on his beast. Shane Saw is a good language for cursing, but Kuhn had a special talent at it. I blinked in admiration while I waited for him to get his breath so I could hand him Kiral's token. In the light of the fire I saw what I'd half expected. He was the second of the dry towners who tried to rough me up in the spaceport cafe. Kuhn barely glanced at the cut stone and tossed it back, pointing out one of the pack horses. Load your personal gear on that one, then get busy and show this much-headed wearer of sandals, an insult carrying particularly filthy implications in Shane Saw, how to fasten a pack strap. He drew a breath and began to swear at the luckless youngster again, and I relaxed. He evidently hadn't recognized me either. I took the strap in my hand, guiding it through the saddle-loop. Like that, I told the kid. And Kuhn stopped swearing long enough to give me a curt nod of acknowledgment and point out a heap of boxed and crated objects. Help him load up! We want to get clear of the city by daybreak, he ordered, and went off to swear at someone else. Kiral turned up at dawn, and a few minutes later the camp had vanished into a small scattering of litter and we were on our way. Kiral's caravan, in spite of Kuhn's cursing, was well managed and well handled. The men were dry towners, eleven of them, intent and capable and, most of them, very young. They were cheerful on the trail, handling pack animals competently during the day, and spent most of the nights grouped around the fire, gambling silently on the fall of the cut crystal prisms they used for dice. Three days out of the harse, I began to worry about Kuhn. It was, of course, a spectacular piece of bad luck to find all three of the men from the Spaceport Cafe in Kiral's caravan. Kiral had obviously not known me, and even by daylight he paid no attention to me except to give an occasional order. The second of the three was a gangling kid who probably never gave me a second look, let alone a third. But Kuhn was another matter. He was a man my own age, and his fierce eyes had a shrewdness in them that I did not trust. More than once I caught him watching me, and on the two or three occasions when he drew me into conversation I found his questions more direct than dry town good manners allowed. I weighed the possibility that I might have to kill him but I did not. We crossed the foothills and began to climb upward toward the mountains. The first few days I found myself short of breath as we worked upward into thinner air. Then my acclimatization returned and I began to fall into the pattern of the days and nights on the trail. The trade city was still a beacon in the night, but its glow on the horizon grew dimmer with each day's march. We climbed higher, along dangerous trails where men had to dismount and let the pack animals pick their way The noon day blazed redder and brighter and the dry towners who came from the parched lands in the sea bottoms were burned and blistered by the fierce light. I had grown up under the blazing sun of Terra and a red sun-like wolf, even at its hottest, caused me no discomfort. This alone would have made me suspect. Once again I found Quinn's fierce eyes watching me. As we crossed the passes and began to descend the long trail through the thick forests we got into non-human country. In the ghost wind we skirted the country around Charon and the woods inhabited by the terrible Yaman, bird-like creatures who turned cannibal when the ghost wind blows. Later the trail wound through thicker forests of indigo trees and grayish purple brushwood and at night we heard the howls of the cat-men of these latitudes. At night we set guards about the caravan and the dark spaces and shadows were filled with noises and queer smells and rustlings. Nevertheless the days marches and the night watches passed without event until the night I shared guard with Quinn. I had posted myself at the edge of the camp, the fire behind me. The men were sleeping rolls of snores huddled close around the fire. The animals, hobbled with double ropes front feet to hind feet, shifted uneasily and let out uncanny whines. I heard Quinn pacing behind me. I heard a rustle at the edge of the forest, a stir and whisper beyond the trees and turned to speak to him. Then saw him slipping away toward the skirts of the clearing. For a moment I thought nothing of it, thinking that he was taking a few steps toward the gap in the trees where he had disappeared. I suppose I had the idea that he had slipped away to investigate some noise or shadow and that I should be at hand. Then I saw the flicker of lights beyond the trees. Light from the lantern Quinn had been carrying in his hand. He was signalling. I slipped to the safety class from the hill to my skin and went after him. In the dimming glow of the fire I fancied I saw luminous eyes watching me and my back crawled. I crept up behind him and leaped. We went down in a tangle of flailing legs and arms and in less than a second he had his skin out and I was gripping his wrist trying desperately to force the blade away from my throat. I gasped. Don't be a fool. One yell and the whole camp will be awake. Who are you signalling? In the light of the fallen lantern lips drawn back in a snarl he looked almost inhuman. He strained at the knife for a moment then dropped it. Let me up, he said. I got up and kicked the fallen skin toward him. Put that away. What in hell were you doing trying to bring the cat-men down on us? For a moment he looked taken aback then his fierce face closed down again and he said wrathfully, Can't a man walk away from the camp without being half strangled? I glared at him. But realized I really had nothing to go by. He might have been answering a call of nature and the movement of the lantern accidental and if someone had jumped me from behind I might have pulled a knife on him myself so I only said, Don't do it again. We're all too jumpy. There were no other incidents that night or the next. The night after while I lay huddled in my shirt cloak and blanket by the fire I saw Quinn slip out of his bedroll and steal away. A moment later there was a gleam in the darkness but before I could summon the resolve to get up and face it out with him he turned looking cautiously at the snoring men and crawled back into his blankets. While we were unpacking at the next camp Carol halted beside me. Heard anything queer lately? I've got the notion we're being trailed. We'll be out of these forests tomorrow and after that it's clear road all the way to Shane Saw. If anything's going to happen, it will happen tonight. I debated speaking to him about Quinn's signals. No, I had my own business waiting for me in Shane Saw. Why mix myself up with some other private intrigue? He said, I'm putting you and Quinn on watch again. The old men doze off and the young fellows get to daydreaming or fooling around. That's all right most of the time but I want someone who'll keep his eyes open tonight. Did you ever know Quinn before this? Never set eyes on him. Funny, I had the notion. He shrugged, turned away, then stopped. Don't think twice about rousing the camp if there's any disturbance. Better a false alarm than an ambush that catches us all in our blankets. If it came to a fight we might be in a bad way. We all carry skeins but I don't think there's a shocker in the whole group let alone a gun. You don't have one by any chance. After the men had turned in Quinn patrolling the camp halted a minute beside me and cocked his head in the forest. What's going on in there? Who knows, cat-men on the prowl probably. Thinking the horses would make a good meal or maybe that we would. Think it will come to a fight? I wouldn't know. He surveyed me for a moment without speaking. And if it did, we'd fight. Then I sucked in my breath for Quinn had spoken Taren standard and I without thinking had answered in the same language. He grinned showing white teeth filed to a point. I thought so. I seized his shoulder and demanded roughly and what are you going to do about it? That depends on you, he answered and what you want in chainsaw. Tell me the truth, what were you doing in the Taren zone? He gave me no chance to answer. You know who Kural is, don't you? A traitor, I said who pays my wages and minds his own affairs. I moved backward, handed my skein, braced for a sudden rush. He made no aggressive motion, however. Kural told me you'd been asking questions about recall since are, he said. Clever. Now I, for one, could have told you that he'd never set eyes on recall. I, he broke off, hearing a noise in the forest, a long eerie howl. I muttered, if you've brought them down on us. He shook his head urgently. I had to take that chance to get word to the others. It won't work. Where's the girl? I hardly heard him. I was hearing twig snap and silently sneaking feet. I turned for a yell that would rouse the camp and Quinn grabbed my hand hard, saying insistently, quick, where's the girl? Go back and tell her it won't work, if Kural suspected. He never finished the sentence. Just behind us came another of the long eerie howls. I knocked Quinn away, and suddenly the night was filled with crouching forms that came down on us like a whirlwind. I shouted madly as the camp came alive with men struggling out of blankets, fighting for life itself. I ran hard, still shouting for the enclosure where we had tied the horses. A cat-man slim and black furred was crouched and cutting the hobble strings of the nearest animal. I hurled myself on him. He exploded, clawing, raking my shoulder with talons that ripped through rough cloth like paper. I whipped out my skin and slashed upward. The talons contracted on my shoulder and I gasped with pain. Then the thing howled and fell away, clawing at the air. It twitched and lay still. Four shots and rapid succession cracked in the clearing. Kural to the contrary, someone must have had a pistol. I heard one of the cat things wail, a horse drying rattle. Something dark clawed my arm and I slashed with the knife, and down as another set of talons fastened on my back, rolling and clutching. I managed to get the thing's forelimbs wedged under my elbow, my knee and its spine. I heaved, bent it backward, backward till it screamed a high wail. Then I felt the spine snap and the dead thing mulled once, just air escaping from collapsing lungs and slid limp from my thigh. I wrecked it had not been over four feet tall and in the light of the dying fire it might have been a dead lynx. Rascar! I heard a gasp, I whirled and saw Kural go down, struggling, drowning in half a dozen or more of the fierce half-humans. I leaped at the smother of bodies, ripped one away with a stranglehold, slashed at its throat. They were easy to kill. I heard a high urgent scream in their mewing tongue. Then the furred black thing seemed to melt into the forest as silently as they had come. Kural dazed, his forehead running blood, his arm slashed to the bone, was sitting on the ground still stunned. Somebody had to take charge. Cat lights! They won't come back if we have enough light. They can only see well in the dark. Someone stirred the fire. It blazed up as they piled on dead branches and I roughly commanded one of the kids to fill every lantern he could find and get them burning. Four of the dead things were lying in the clearing. The young stride helped loading horses for the first day, gazed down at one of the cat men, half disemboweled by somebody's skeen and suddenly bolted for the bushes where I heard him retching. I set the others with stronger stomachs to dragging the bodies away from the clearing while badly Kural was hurt. He had the rip in his arm and his face was covered with blood from a shallow scalp wound but he insisted on getting up to inspect the hurts of the others. There was no one without a claw wound in leg or back or shoulder but none were serious and we were all feeling fairly cheerful when someone demanded, Where's Quinn? He didn't seem to be anywhere. Kural staggered slightly insisting on searching but I felt we wouldn't find him. He probably went off with his friends, I snorted and told about the signaling that Kural looked grave. You should have told me, he began but shouts from the far end of the clearing sent us racing there. We nearly stumbled over a single, solitary motionless form outstretched and lifeless, blind eyes staring upward at the moons. It was Quinn and his throat had been torn completely out. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of The Door Through Space This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G Recording by Christine Awak The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley Chapter 6 Once we were free of the forest the road to the dry towns lay straight before us with no hidden dangers. Some of us limped for a day or two or favored an arm or leg clawed by the cat men but I knew that what Kural said was true. It was a lucky caravan which had to fight off only one attack. Quinn haunted me. A night or two of turning over his cryptic words in my mind had convinced me that whoever or whatever he'd been signalling it wasn't the cat men. And his urgent question, where's the girl, swam endlessly in my brain making no more sense than when I had first heard it. Who had he mistaken me for? What did he think I was mixed up in? And who, above all, were the others who had to be signaled at the risk of an attack by cat men which had meant his own death. With Quinn dead and Kural thinking I'd saved his life a large part of the responsibility for the caravan now fell on me. And strangely I enjoyed it making the most of this interval when I was separated from the thought of blood feud or revenge the need of spying or the threat of exposure. During those days and nights on the trail I grew back slowly into the dry towner I once had been. I knew I would be sorry when the walls of Shainsaw rose on the horizon bringing me back inescapably to my own quest. We swung wide, leaving the straight trail to Shainsaw and Kural announced his intention of stopping for half a day at Karnasa one of the walled non-human cities which lay well off the travelled road. To my inadvertent show of surprise he returned that he had trading connections there. We all need a day's rest and the silent ones will buy from me though they have few dealings with men. Look here, I owe you something. You have lenses? You can get a better price in Karnasa than you'd get in Ardkaran or Shainsaw. I'll vouch for you. Kural had been most friendly since the night I had dug him out from under the cat-men and I knew no way to refuse without exposing myself for the sham trader I was. But I was deathly apprehensive. Even with Rekal I had never entered any of the non-human towns. On Wolf human and non-human have lived side by side for centuries and the human is not always the superior being. I might pass among the dry towners and the relatively stupid humanoid chocks for another dry towner but Rekal had cautioned me I could not pass among non-humans for native wolfen and warned me against trying. Nevertheless I accompanied Kural carrying the box which had cost about a week's pay in the Terran Zone and was worth a small fortune in the dry towns. Karnasa seemed inside the gates like any other town. The houses were round, beehive fashion and the streets totally empty. Just inside the gates a hooded figure greeted us and gestured us by signs to follow him. He was covered from head to foot with some coarse and shiny fiber woven into stuff that looked like sacking. But under the thick hooding was horror. It slithered and it had nothing like a recognizable human shape or walk and I felt the primeval ape and meek howering and gibbering in the corner of my mind. Kural muttered close to my ear no outsider is ever allowed to look on the silent ones in their real form. I think they're deaf and dumb but be damn careful. You bet, I whispered and was glad the streets were empty. I walked along trying not to look at the gliding motion of the shrouded thing up ahead. The trading was done in an open hut of reeds which looked as if it had been built in a hurry and was not square, round, hexagonal or any other recognizable geometrical shape. It formed a pattern of its own presumably but my human eyes couldn't see it. Kural said in a breath of a whisper, they'll tear it down and burn it after we leave. We're supposed to have contaminated it too greatly for any of the silent ones ever to enter again. My family has traded with them for centuries and we're almost the only ones who have ever entered the city. Then two of the silent ones of Konarsa also covered with that coarse shiny stuff slithered into the hut and Kural choked off his words as if he had swallowed them. It was the strangest trading I had ever done. Kural laid out the small forged steel tools in the coils of thin fine wire and I unpacked my lenses and laid them out in neat rows. The silent ones neither spoke nor moved but through a thin piece in the gray veiling I saw a speck which might have been a phosphorescent eye moving back and forth as if scanning the things laid out for their inspection. I smothered a gasp for suddenly blank spaces appeared in the rows of merchandise. Certain small tools, wire cutters, calipers, surgical scissors had vanished and all the coils of wire had disappeared. Blanks equally had appeared in the rows of lenses. All of my tiny, powerful microscope lenses had vanished. I cast a quick glance at Kural but he seemed unsurprised. I recalled vague rumors of the silent ones and concluded that, eerie though it seemed, this was merely their way of doing business. Kural pointed at one of the tools at an exceptionally fine pair of binocular lenses and at the last coils of wire. The shrouded ones did not move but the lenses in the wire vanished. The small tool remained and after a moment Kural dropped his hand. I took my cue from Kural and remained motionless awaiting whatever surprise was coming. I had halfway expected what happened next. In the blank spaces little points of light began to glimmer and after a moment blue and red and green gemstones appeared there. To me the substitution appeared roughly equitable and fair though I am no judge of the fine points of gems. Kural scowled slightly and pointed to one of the green gems and after a moment it whisked away and a blue one took its place. In another spot where a fine set of surgical instruments had lain Kural pointed at the blue gem which now lay there, shook his head and held out three fingers. After a moment a second blue stone lay winking beside the first. Kural did not move but inexorably held out the three fingers. There was a little swirling in the air and then both gems vanished and the case of surgical instruments lay in their place. Still Kural did not move but held the three fingers out for a full minute. Finally he dropped them and bent to pick up the case instruments. Again the little swirl in the air and the instruments vanished. In their place lay three of the blue gems. My mouth twitched in the first amusement I had felt since we entered this uncanny place. Evidently bargaining with the silent ones was not a great deal different than bargaining with anyone, anywhere. Nevertheless under the eyes of those shrouded but horrible forms if they had eyes which I doubted I had no impulse to protest their offered prices. I gathered up the rejected lenses, repacked them neatly and helped Kural recreate the tools and instruments the silent ones had not wanted. I noticed that in addition to the microscope lenses and surgical instruments they had taken all the fine wire. I couldn't imagine and didn't particularly want to imagine what they intended to do with it. On our way back through the streets un-shepherded this time Kural's tongue was loosened as if with a great release from tension. Their psychokinetics, he told me, quite a few of the non-human races are. I guess they have to be and having no eyes and no hands but sometimes I wonder if we of the dry towns ought to deal with them at all. What do you mean? I asked, not really listening. I was thinking mostly about the way the small objects had melted away and reappeared. The sight had stirred some uncomfortable memory, a vague sense of danger. It was not tangible enough for me to know why I feared it but just a subliminal uneasiness that kept prodding at me, like a tooth that isn't quite aching yet. Kural said, We of Shainsaw live between fire and flood, Tara on the one hand and on the other maybe something worse. Who knows? We know so little about the silent ones and those like them. Who knows? Maybe we're giving them the weapons to destroy us. He broke off with a gasp and stood staring down one of the streets. It lay open and bare between two rows of round houses and Kural was staring fixedly at a doorway which had opened there. I followed his paralyzed gaze and saw the girl. Hair like spun black glass fell in hard waves around her shoulders and the red eyes smiled with alien malice, alien mischief beneath the dark crown of little stars and the toad god sprawled in hideous embroideries across the white folds of her breast. Kural gulped hoarsely. His hand flew up as he clutched the charm strung about his neck. I imitated the gesture mechanically, watching Kural, wondering if he would turn and run again, but he stood frozen for a minute. Then the spell broke and he took one step toward the girl, arms outstretched. May Lynn! he cried and there was heartbreak in his voice. And again the cry making ringing echoes in the strange street. May Lynn! May Lynn! This time it was the girl who whirled and fled. Her white robes fluttered and I saw the twinkle of her flying feet as she vanished into the space between the houses and was gone. Kural took one blind step down the street, then another, but before he could burst into a run I had him by the arm dragging him back to sanity. Man, you've gone mad! Chase in a non-human town? He struggled for a minute, then with a harsh sigh he said, It's all right, I won't, and shook loose from my arm. He did not speak again until we reached the gates of Canarsa and they closed, silently and untouched behind us. I had forgotten the place already. I had space only to think of the girl whose space I had not forgotten since the moment when she saved me and disappeared. Now she had appeared again to Kural. What did it all mean? I asked as we walked toward the camp, do you know that girl? But I knew the question was futile. Kural's face was closed, conceding nothing and his friendliness had vanished completely. He said, Now you know. You saved me from the camp men and again in Canarsa, so my hands are bound from harming you. But it is evil to have dealings with those who have been touched by the Toad God. He spat noisily on the ground looking at me with loathing and said, We will reach Canarsa in three days. Stay away from me. The door through space by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Chapter 7 Chainsaw, first in the chain of dry towns that lie in the bed of a long dried ocean, is set at the center of a great alkali plain, a dusty, parched city, bleached by a million years of sun. The houses are high, spreading buildings with many rooms and wide windows. The poor sort were made of sun-dried brick, the more imposing being cut from the bleached salt stone of the cliffs that rise behind the city. News travels fast in the dry towns. If Recal were in the city, he'd soon know that I was here and guess who I was or why I'd come. I might disguise myself so that my own sister or the mother who bore me would not know me, but I had no illusions about my ability to disguise myself from Recal. He had created the disguise that was me. When the second sun set red and burning behind the salt cliffs, I knew he was not in Chainsaw, but I stayed on waiting for something to happen. At night I slept in a cubbyhole behind a wine-shop, paying an inordinate price for that very dubious privilege. And every day, in the sleepy silence of the blood-red noon, I paced the public square of Chainsaw. This went on for four days. No one took the slightest notice of another nameless man in a shabby shirt cloak without name or identity or known business. No one appeared to see me except the dusty children with pale, fleecy hair who played their patient games and the windswept curbing of the square. They surveyed my scarred face with neither curiosity or fear, and it occurred to me that Rindy might be such another as these. If I had still been thinking like an earthman, I might have tried to question one of the children or win their confidence, but I had a deeper game in hand. On the fifth day I was so much a fixture that my pacing went unnoticed even by the children. On the gray moss of the square a few dried-looking old men, their faces as faded as their shirt cloaks and bearing the knife scars of a hundred forgotten flights, drowsed on the stone benches. And along the flagged walk at the edge of the square, as suddenly as an autumn storm in the salt flats, a woman came walking. She was tall, with a proud swinging walk and a metallic clashing kept rhythm to her swift steps. Her arms were fettered, each wrist bound with a jeweled bracelet and the bracelets linked together by a long, silver-guilt chain passed through a silken loop at her waist. From the loop swung a tiny golden padlock, but in the lock stood an even tinier key, signifying that she was a higher cast than her husband or consort and that her fettering was by choice and not command. She stopped directly before me and raised her arm in formal greeting like a man. The chain made a tinkling sound in the hushed square as her other hand was pulled up tight against the silken loop at her waist. She stood surveying me for a few moments and finally I raised my head and returned her gaze. I don't know why I had expected her to have hair like spun black glass and eyes that burned with the red reflection of the burning star. This woman's eyes were darker than the poison berries of the salt cliffs and her mouth was a cut berry that looked just as dangerous. She was young, the slimness of her shoulders and the narrow steel-chained wrists told me how very young she was. But her face had seen weather and storms and her dark eyes had weathered worse psychic storms than that. She did not flinch at the sight of my scars and met my gaze without dropping her eyes. You are a stranger. What is your business in chainsaw? I met the direct question with the insolence it demanded, hardly moving my lips. I have come to buy women for the brothels of Ardkaran, perhaps when washed you might be suitable. Who could arrange for your sale? She took the rebuke impassively, though the bitter crimson of her mouth twitched a little in mischief or rage. But she made no sign. The battle was joined between us and I knew already that it would be fought to the end. From somewhere in her draperies something fell to the ground with a little tinkle. But I knew that trick too and I did not move. Finally she went away without bending to retrieve it and when I looked around I saw that all the fleece-hair children had stolen away leaving their playthings lying on the curb. But one or two of the gaffers on the stone benches who were old enough to show curiosity without losing face were watching me with impassive eyes. I could have asked the woman's name then, but I held back knowing it could only lessen the prestige I had gained from the encounter. I glanced down, without seeming to do so, at the tiny mirror which had fallen from the recesses of the fur robe. Her name might have been inscribed on the reverse. But I left it lying there to be picked up by the children when they returned and went back to the wine-shop. I had accomplished my first objective. If you can't be inconspicuous, be so damned conspicuous that nobody can miss you. And that in itself is a fair concealment. How many people can accurately describe a street riot? I was finishing off a bad meal with a stone-bottle of worse wine when the chalk came in, disregarding the proprietor and made straight for me. He was furred immaculately white. His velvet muzzle was contracted as if the very smells might soil it and he kept a dainty paw outstretched to ward off accidental contact with greasy counters or tables or tapestries. His fur was scented and his throat circled with a collar of embroidered silk. This pampered minion surveyed me with the innocent malice of an uninvolved non-human for merely human intrigues. You are wanted in the great house of Shanatha's guardman. He spoke the chainsaw-dialect with an affected lisp. Will it please you to come with me? I came with no more than polite protest, but was startled. I had not expected the encounter to reach the great house so soon. Shanatha's great house had changed hands four times since I had last been in Shanatha. I wasn't overly anxious to appear there. The white chalk, as out of place in the rough dry town as a jewel in the streets or a raindrop in the desert, led me along a winding boulevard to an outlying district. He made no attempt to engage me in conversation and, indeed, I got the distinct impression that this cocked comb of a non-human considered me well beneath his notice. He seemed much more aware of the blowing dust in the street which ruffled and smudged his carefully combed fur. The great house was carved from blocks of rough pink basalt. The entry guarded by two great cariadids and wrapped in chains of carved metal set somehow into the surface of the basalt. The guilt had long ago worn away from the chains so that it alternately gleamed gold or smudged base metal. The cariadids were patient and blind. Their jewel eyes long vanished under a hotter sun than today's. The entrance hall was enormous. A Terran starship could have stood upright inside it was my first impression, but I dismissed that thought quickly. Any Terran thought was apt to betray me. But the main hall was built on a scale even more huge and it was even colder than the legendary hell of the chocks. It was far too big for the people in it. There was a little solar heater in the ceiling but it didn't help much. A dim glow came from a metal brazier but that didn't help much either. The chalk melted into the shadows and I went down the steps into the hall by myself feeling carefully for each step with my feet and trying not to seem to be doing so. My comparative night blindness is the only significant way in which I really differ from a native wolfen. There were three men, two women, and a child in the room. They were all dry-towners and had an obscure family likeness and they all wore rich garments of fur dyed in many colors. One of the men, old and stooped and withered, was doing something to the brazier. A slim boy of fourteen was sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions in the corner. There was something wrong with his legs. A girl of ten in a two-short smock that showed long, spider-thin legs and one of her low leather boots was playing with some sort of shimmery crystals, spilling them out into patterns and scooping them up again from the uneven stones of the floor. One of the women was a fat, creased slattern whose jewels and dyed furs did not disguise her greasy slovenliness. Her hands were unchained and she was biting into a fruit which dripped red juice down the rich blue fur of her robe. The old man gave her a look like murder as I came in and she straightened slightly but did not discard the fruit. The whole room had a curious look of austere, dignified poverty to which the fat woman was the only discordant note. But it was the remaining man and woman who drew my attention so that I noticed the others only peripherally in their outermost orbit. One was Kiral standing at the foot of the dais and glowering at me. The other was the dark-eyed woman I had rebuked today in the public square. Kiral said, So it's you, and his voice held nothing. Not rebuke, not friendliness or lack of it, not even hatred. Nothing. There was only one way to meet it. I faced the girl. She was sitting on a throne like chair next to the fat woman and looked like a doe next to a pig and said boldly, I assume this summons to mean that you informed your kinsmen of my offer. She flushed, and that was triumph enough. I held back the triumph, however, worry of overconfidence. The gaffer laughed the high cackle of age and Kiral broke in with a sharp, angry monosyllable by which I knew that my remark had indeed been repeated and had lost nothing in the telling. But only the line of his jaw betrayed the anger as he said calmly, Be quiet, Delisa. Where did you pick this up? I said boldly, The great house has changed rulers since last I smelled the salt-cliffs. Newcomers do not know my name, and theirs is unknown to me. The old gaffer said thinly to Kiral, Our name has lost Kirar. One daughter is lured away by the toymaker and another babbles with strangers in the square, and a homeless no good of the streets does not know our name. My eyes, growing accustomed to the dark blaze of the braziers, saw that Kiral was biting his lip and scowling. Then he gestured to a table where an array of glassware was set, and at the gesture the white chuck came on noiseless feet and poured wine. If you have no blood feud with my family, will you drink with me? I will, I said, relaxing. Even if he had associated the trader with the scarred earthmen of the spaceport, he seemed to have decided to drop the matter. He seemed startled, but he waited until I had lifted the glass and taken a sip. Then, with a movement like lightning, he leaped from the dais and struck the glass from my lips. I staggered back, wiping my cut mouth in a split second juggling possibilities. The insult was terrible and deadly. I could do nothing now but fight. Men had been murdered in Shainsaw I had come to settle one feud, not involve myself in another. But even while these lightning thoughts flickered in my mind, I had whipped out my skin and I was surprised at the shrillness of my own voice. You can try to have a fence beneath your own roof. Spy and renegade! Kiral thundered. He did not touch his skein. From the table he caught a long, forethonged whip, making it whistle through the air. The long-legged child scuttled backward. I stepped back one pace, trying to conceal my desperate puzzlement. I could not guess what had prompted Kiral's attack, but whatever it was, I must have made some bad mistake and could count myself lucky to get out of there alive. Kiral's voice perceptibly trembled with rage. You dare to come into my own home after I have tracked you to the charsa and back, blind fool that I was, but now you shall pay. The whip sank through the air, hissing past my shoulders. I dodged to one side, retreating step by step as Kiral swung the powerful thongs. It cracked again, and a pain like the burning of red-hot iron seared my upper arm. My skein rattled down from numb fingers. The whip whacked the floor. Pick up your skein, said Kiral. Pick it up if you dare. He poised the lash again. The fat woman screamed. I stood rigid, gauging my chances of disarming him with a sudden leap. Suddenly the girl, Dallisa, leaped from her seat with a harsh musical chiming of chains. Kiral, no! No, Kiral! He moved slightly, but did not take his eyes from me. No, wait! She ran to him and caught his whip-arm, dragging it down and spoke to him hurriedly and urgently. Kiral's face changed as she spoke. He drew a long breath and threw the whip down beside my skein on the floor. Answer straight on your life. What are you doing in Shainsa? I could hardly take it in that for the moment I was reprieved from sudden death, from being beaten into bloody death here at Kiral's feet. The girl went back to her throne-like chair. Now I must either tell the truth or continue to lie, and I was lost in a game where I didn't know the rules. The explanation I thought might get me out alive might be the very one which would bring down instant and painful death. Suddenly, with a poignancy that was almost pain, I wished Raqal were standing here at my side. But I had to bluff it out alone. If they had recognized me for race-cargill, the Terran spy who had often been in Shainsa, they might release me. It was possible, I supposed, that they were Terran sympathizers. On the other hand, Kiral's shouts of spy, renegade seemed to suggest the opposite. I stood, trying to ignore the searing pain in my lashed arm, but I knew that blood was running hot down my shoulder. Finally, I said. I came to settle blood feud. Kiral's lips thinned in what might have been meant for a smile. You shall assuredly, but with whom remains to be seen. Knowing I had nothing more to lose, I said, with a renegade called Raqal-Sansar. Only the old man echoed my words, Dali. Raqal-Sansar. I felt heartened, seeing I wasn't dead yet. I have sworn to kill him. Kiral suddenly clapped his hands and shouted to the white chuck to clean up the broken glass on the floor. He said huskily, you are not yourself, Raqal-Sansar. I told you he wasn't. Said Dali, so high and hysterical. I told you he wasn't. A scarred man, tall. What was I to think? Kiral sounded and looked badly shaken. He filled a glass himself and handed it to me, saying hoarsely. I did not believe even the renegade Raqal would break the codes so far as to drink with me. He would not. I could be positive about this. The codes of Tara had made some superficial impress on Raqal, but down deep his own world held sway. If these men were at blood feud with Raqal and he stood here where I stood, he would have let himself be beaten into bloody rags before tasting their wine. I took the glass, raised it, and drained it. Then, holding it out for more, I said, Raqal's life is mine, but I swear by the red star and by the unmoving mountains, by the black snow and by the ghost wind I have no quarrel with any beneath this roof. I cast the glass to the floor where it shattered on the stones. Kiral hesitated, but under the blazing eyes of the girl he quickly poured himself a glass of wine and drank a few sips, then flung down the glass. He stepped forward and laid his hands on my shoulders. I winced as he touched the welt of the lash and could not raise my own arm to complete the ceremonial toast. Kiral stepped away and shrugged. Shall I have one of the women see to your hurt? He looked at Dalissa, but she twisted her mouth. Do it yourself! It is nothing, I said, not truthfully, but I demand and requital that since we are bound by spilled blood under your roof that you give me what news you have of Raqal, the spy and renegade. Kiral said fiercely, I knew, would I be under my own roof? The old gaffer on the day has broken to shrill whining laughter. You have drunk with him, Kiral. Now he's bound you not to do him harm. I know the story of Raqal. He was a spy for Tara twelve years, twelve years, and then he fought and flung their filthy money in their faces and left them. But his partner was some dry-town half-breed or Taran spy and they fought with clawed gloves and near killed one another except the Tarans who have no honor stopped him. Marks of the kafiq on his face? By Shahra the Golden Chained said Kiral gazing at me with something like a grin. You are, if nothing else, a very clever man. What are you, spy or half-caste of some art Quran slut? What I am doesn't matter to you, I said. You have blood feud with Raqal but mine is older than yours and his life is mine. As you are bound in honor to kill the formal phrases came easily now to my tongue the earth men had slipped away. So you are bound in honor to help me kill if anyone beneath your roof knows anything of Raqal. Kiral's smile bared his teeth. Raqal works against the son of the ape. He said, using the insulting wolf term for the Tarans. If we help you to kill him we remove a goat from our flanks. I prefer to let the filthy Taranans spend their strength trying to remove it themselves. Moreover, I believe you are yourself an earth man. You have no right to the courtesy I extend to we the people of the sky and I have drunk wine with me and I have no quarrel with you. He raised his hand in dismissal out fencing me. Leave my roof in safety and my city with honor. I could not protest or plead. Aman's Kirhar, his personal dignity is a precious thing in Shainsa and he had placed me so I could not compromise mine further in words. Yet I lost Kirhal equally if I left it his bidding like an inferior dismissed. One desperate gamble remained. A word. I said raising my hand and while he half turned startled believing I was indeed about to compromise my dignity by a further plea I flung it at him. I will bet Shegri with you. His iron composure looked shaken. I had delivered a blow to his belief that I was an earth man for it is doubtful if there are six earth men on wolf who know about Shegri the dangerous game of the dry towns. It is no ordinary gamble for what the better stakes is his life possibly his reason. Rarely indeed will a man beg Shegri unless he has nothing further to lose. It is a cruel, possibly decadent game which has no parallel anywhere in the known universe. But I had no choice. I had struck a cold trail in Shainsa recall might be anywhere on the planet and half of Magnuson's month was already up unless I could force Kirhal to tell what he knew I might as well quit. So I repeated. I will bet Shegri with you. And Kirhal stood unmoving. Shagrin wagers is his courage and endurance in the face of torture and an unknown fate. On his side the stakes are clearly determined beforehand but if he loses his punishment or penalty is at the whim of the one who has accepted him and he may be put to whatever doom the winner determines. And this is the contest. The Shagrin permits himself to be tortured from sunrise to sunset. If he endures, he wins. It is as simple as that. He can stop the torture at any moment by a word but to do so is a concession of defeat. This is not as dangerous as it might at first seem. The other party to the bet is bound by the ironclad codes of wolf to inflict no permanent physical damage no injury that will not heal with three sun courses. But from sunrise to sunset any torment or painful ingenuity which the half human mentality of wolf can devise must be endured. The man who can outthink the torture of the moment the man who can hold in his mind a single thought of his goal that man can claim the stakes he has set as well as other concessions made traditional. The silence grew in the hall. Dalissa had straightened and was watching me intently. Her lips parted and the tip of a little red tongue visible between her teeth. The only sound was the tiny crunching as the fat woman nibbled at nuts and cast their shells into the brazier. Even the child on the steps had abandoned her game with the crystal dice and sat looking up at me with her mouth open. I waited. Your stakes? Tell me all you know of R'Khal Sinsaar and keep silence about me and Shainsa. By the red shadow Kiral burst out. You have courage, R'Askar. Say only yes or no. I retorted. Rebuked he fell silent. Dalissa leaned forward and again for some unknown reason I thought of a girl with hair like spun black glass. Kiral raised his hand. R'Khal Sinsaar, I believe you are Taran and I will not deal with you. And finally you have twice saved my life and I would find small pleasure in torturing you. I say no. Drink again with me and we part without a quarrel. Beaten I turned to go. Wait! said Dalissa. She stood up and came down the dais slowly this time walking with dignity to the rhythm of her musically clashing chains. I have a quarrel with this man. I started to say that I did not quarrel with women and stopped myself. The Taran concept of chivalry has no equivalent on wolf. She looked at me with her dark, poison-berry eyes. I see and level and amused and said I will bet shaggy with you unless you fear me, R'Askar. And I knew suddenly that if I lost I might better have trusted myself to Kiral and his whip or to the wild beast things of the mountains.