Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover - Star of Danger

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

Star of Danger

Marion Zimmer Bradley

a darkover novel

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

ELF digital back-up edition 1.0

click for scan notes and proofing history

valid XHTML 1.0 strict

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y.

Printed in U.S.A.

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

DEDICATION

To my son Patrick but for whose help this book would have been written

much sooner.

frontis

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

^ »

IT DIDN’T look at all like an alien planet.

Larry Montray, standing on the long ramp that led downward from the

giant spaceship, felt the cold touch of sharp disillusion and disappointment.

Darkover. Hundreds of light-years from Earth, a strange world under a

strange sun— and it didn’t look different at all.

It was night. Below him lay the spaceport, lighted almost to a daytime

dazzle by rows of blue-white arclights; an enormous flat expanse of

concrete ramps and runways, the blurred outlines of the giant starships dim

through the lights; levels and stairways and ramps leading upward to the

lines of high streets and the dark shapes of skyscrapers beyond the port.

But Larry had seen spaceships and spaceports on Earth. With a father in the

service of the Terran Empire, you got used to seeing things like that.

He didn’t know what he’d expected of the new world— but he hadn’t

expected it to look just like any spaceport on Earth!

He’d expected so much…

Of course, Larry had always known that he’d go out into space someday.

The Terran Empire had spread itself over a thousand worlds surrounding a

thousand suns, and no son of Terra ever considered staying there all his life.

But he’d been resigned to waiting at least a few more years. In the old

days, before star travel, a boy of sixteen could ship out as cabin boy on a

windjammer, and see the world. And back in the early days of star travel,

when the immense interstellar distances meant years and years in the gulfs

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

between the stars, they’d shipped young kids to crew the starships—so they

wouldn’t be old men when the voyages ended.

But those days were gone.. Now, a trip of a hundred light-years could be

made in about that many days, and men, not boys, manned the ships and

the Trade Cities of the Terran Empire. At sixteen Larry had been resigned

to waiting. Not happy about it. Just resigned.

And then the news had come. Wade Montray, his father, had put in for

transfer to the Civil Service on the planet Darkover, far out in the edge of

the Milky Way. And Larry— whose mother had died before he was old

enough to remember her, and who had no other living relatives—was going

with him.

He’d ransacked his school library, and all the local reading rooms, to find

out something about Darkover. He didn’t learn much. It was the fourth

planet of a medium-sized dark red star, invisible from Earth’s sky, and so

dim that it had a name only in star-catalogues. It was a world smaller than

Earth, it had four moons, it was a world at an arrested cultural level without

very much technology or science. The major products exported from

Darkover were medicinal earths and biological drugs, jewel stones, fine

metals for precision tools, and a few luxury goods—silks, furs, wines.

A brief footnote in the catalogue had excited Larry almost beyond

endurance: Although the natives of Darkover are human, there are several

intelligent cultures of non-humans present on this planet.

Nonhumans! You didn’t see them often on Earth. Rarely, near one of the

spaceports, you’d see a Jovian trundling by in his portable breathing-tank

of methane gas; Earth’s oxygen was just as poisonous to him as the gas to

an Earth-man. And now and again, you might catch a curious, exciting

glimpse of some tall, winged man-thing from one of the outer worlds. But

you never saw them up close. You couldn’t think of them as people,

somehow.

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

He’d badgered his father with insistent questions until his father said, in

exasperation, “How should I know? I’m not an information manual! I

know that Darkover has a red sun, a cold climate, and a language supposed

to be derived from the old Earth languages! I know it has four moons and

that there are nonhumans there—and that’s all I know! So why don’t you

wait and find out when you get there?”

When Dad got that look in his eye, it was better not to ask questions. So

Larry kept the rest of them to himself.

But one evening, as Larry was sorting things in his room, deciding to throw

away stacks of outgrown books, toys, odds and ends he’d somehow

accumulated in the last few years, his father knocked at his door.

“Busy, son?”

“Come in, Dad.”

Wade Montray came in, nodding at the clutter on the bed. “Good idea. You

can’t take more than a few pounds of luggage with you, even these days.

I’ve got something for you—picked it up at the Transfer Center.” He

handed Larry a flat package; turning it over, Larry saw that it was a set of

tapes for his recording machine.

“Language tapes,” his father said, “since you’re so anxious to learn all

about Darkover. You could get along all right in Standard, of course—

everyone around the Spaceport and the Trade City speaks it. Most of the

people going out to Darkover don’t bother with the language, but I thought

you might be interested.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ll hook up the tapes tonight.”

His father nodded. He was a stern-looking man, tall and quiet with dark

eyes—Larry suspected that his own red hair and gray eyes came from his

unremembered mother— and he hadn’t smiled much lately; but now he

smiled at Larry. “It’s a good idea. I’ve found out that it helps to be able to

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

speak to people in their own language, instead of expecting them to speak

yours.”

He moved the tapes aside and sat down on Larry’s bed. The smile slid

away and he was grave again.

“Son, do you really mind leaving Earth? It’s come to me, again and again,

that it’s not fair to take you away from your home, out to the edge of

nowhere. I almost didn’t put in for that transfer thinking of that. Even now

—” he hesitated. “Larry, if you’d rather, you can stay here, and I can send

for you in a few years, when you’re through with school and college.”

Larry felt his throat go suddenly tight.

“Leave me here? On Earth?”

“There are good schools and universities, son. Nobody knows what sort of

education you’d be getting in quarters on Darkover.”

Larry stared straight at his father, his mouth set hard to keep it from

trembling. “Dad, don’t you want me along? If you—if you want to get rid

of me, I won’t make a fuss. But—” he stopped, swallowing hard.

“Son! Larry!” His father reached for his hands and held them, hard, for a

minute. “Don’t say that again, huh? Only I promised your mother you’d get

a good education. And here I am dragging you halfway across the universe,

off on a crazy adventure, just because I’ve got the itch in my bones and

don’t want to stay here like a sensible man. It’s selfish to want to go, and

worse to want to take you with me!”

Larry said, slowly, “I guess I must take after you, then, Dad. Because I

don’t want to stay in one spot like what you call a sensible man, either.

Dad, I want to go. Couldn’t you figure that out? I’ve never wanted

anything so much!”

Wade Montray drew a long sigh. “I hoped you’d say that—how I hoped

you’d say that!” He tossed the tapes into a pile of Larry’s clothes, and

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover- Star of Danger

stood up.

“All right, son. Brush up on the language, then. There must be more than

one sort of education.”

Listening to the language tapes, moving his tongue around the strange fluid

tones of the Darkovan speech, Larry had felt his excitement grow and

grow. There were strange new concepts and thoughts in this language, and

hints of things that excited him. One of the proverbs caught at his

imagination with a strange, tense glow: It is wrong to keep a dragon

chained for roasting your meat.

Were there dragons on Darkover? Or was it a proverbial phrase based on

legend? What did the proverb mean? That if you had a fire-breathing

dragon, it was dangerous to make him work for you? Or, did it mean that it

was foolish to use something big and important for some small, silly job of

work? It seemed to open up a crack into a strange world where he glimpsed

unknown ideas, strange animals, new colors and thoughts through a

glimmer of the unknown.

His excitement had grown with every day that passed, until they had taken

the shuttle to the enormous spaceport and boarded the ship itself. The

starship was huge and strange, like an alien city; but the trip itself had been

a let-down. It wasn’t much different than a cruise by ocean liner, except

that you couldn’t see any ocean. You had to stay in your cabin most of the

time, or in one of the cramped recreation areas. There were shots and

immunizations for everything under the sun—under any sun, Larry

corrected himself—so that he went around with a sore arm for the first two

weeks of the trip.

The only moment of excitement had come early in the voyage; just after

breakway from Earth’s sun, when there had been a guided tour of the ship

for everyone who wasn’t still struggling with acceleration sickness. Larry

had been fascinated by the crew’s quarters, by the high navigation deck

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