The Colors of Space

M >> Marion Zimmer Bradley >> The Colors of Space

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Bart demanded, as they climbed in, "Are you taking me to my father?"

"Wait till we get to my place," Raynor Three said, taking the controls
and putting the machine in the air. "Just lean back and enjoy the trip,
huh?"

Bart relaxed against the cushions, but he still felt apprehensive. Where
was his father? If he was a fugitive from the Lhari, he might by now be
at the other end of the galaxy. But if his father couldn't travel on
Lhari ships, and if he had been here, the chances were that he was still
somewhere in the Procyon system.

They flew for a long time; across low hills, patchwork agricultural
districts, towns, and then for a long time over water. The copter had
automatic controls, but Raynor Three kept it on manual, and Bart
wondered if the Mentorian just didn't want to talk.

It began to descend, at last, toward a small green hill, bright in the
last gold rays on sunset. A small domelike pink bubble rose out of the
hill. Raynor Three set the copter neatly down on a platform that slid
shut after them, unfastened their seat belts and gave Bart a hand to
climb out.

He ushered him into a living room of glass and chrome, softly lighted,
but deserted and faintly dusty. Raynor pushed a switch; soft music came
on, and the carpets caressed his feet. He motioned Bart to a chair.

"You're safe here, for a while," Raynor Three said, "though how long,
nobody knows. But so far, I've been above suspicion."'

Bart leaned back; the chair was very comfortable, but the comfort could
not help him to relax.

"Where is my father?" he demanded.

Raynor Three stood looking down at him, his mobile face drawn and
strange. "I guess I can't put it off any longer," he said softly. Then
he covered his face with his hands. From behind them hoarse words came,
choked with emotion.

"Your father is dead, Bart. I--I killed him."

CHAPTER SIX

For a moment Bart stared, frozen, unable to move, his very ears refusing
the words he heard. Had this all been another cruel trick, then, a trap,
a betrayal? He rose and looked wildly around the room, as if the glass
walls were a cage closing in on him.

"Murderer!" he flung at Raynor, and took a step toward him, his clenched
fists coming up. He'd been shoved around too long, but here he had one
of them right in front of him, and for once he'd hit back! He'd start by
taking Raynor Three apart--in small pieces! "You--you rotten murderer!"

Raynor Three made no move to defend himself. "Bart," he said
compassionately, "sit down and listen to me. No, I'm no murderer. I--I
shouldn't have put it that way."

Bart's hands dropped to his sides, but he heard his voice crack with
pain and grief: "I suppose you'll tell me he was a spy or a traitor and
you _had_ to kill him!"

"Not even that. I tried to save your father, I did everything I could.
I'm no murderer, Bart. I killed him, yes--God forgive me, because I'll
never forgive myself!"

Bart's fists unclenched and he stared down at Raynor Three, shaking his
head in bewilderment and pain. "I knew he was dead! I knew it all along!
I was trying not to believe it, but I knew!"

"I liked your father. I admired him. He took a long chance, and it
killed him. I could have stopped him, I should have stopped him, but how
could I? Where did I have the right to stop him, after what I did
to--" he stopped, almost in mid-word, as if a switch had been turned.

But Bart was not listening. He swung away, striding to the wall as if he
would kick it in, striking it with his two clenched fists, his whole
being in revolt. _Dad, oh, Dad! I kept going, I thought at the end of it
you'd be here and it would all be over. But here I am at the end of it
all, and you're not here, you won't ever be here again._

Dimly, he knew when Raynor Three rose and left him alone. He leaned his
head on his clenched fists, and cried.

After a long time he raised his head and blew his nose, his face setting
itself in new, hard, unaccustomed lines, slowly coming to terms with the
hard, painful reality. His father was dead. His dangerous,
dead-in-earnest game of escape had no happy ending of reunion with his
father. They couldn't sit together and laugh about how scared he had
been. His father was _dead_, and he, Bart, was alone and in danger. His
face looked very grim indeed, and years older than he was.

After a long time Raynor Three opened the door quietly. "Come and have
something to eat, Bart."

"I'm not hungry."

"Well, I am," Raynor Three said, "and you ought to be. You'll need it."
He pulled knobs and the appropriate tables and chairs extruded
themselves from the walls. Raynor unsealed hot cartons and spread them
on the table, saying lightly, "Looks good--not that I can claim any
credit, I subscribe to a food service that delivers them hot by
pneumatic tube."

Bart felt sickened by the thought of eating, but when he put a polite
fork in the food, he discovered that he was famished and ate up
everything in sight. When they had finished, Raynor dumped the cartons
into a disposal chute, went to a small portable bar and put a glass into
his hand.

"Drink this."

Bart touched his lips to the glass, made a face and put it away.
"Thanks, but I don't drink."

"Call it medicine, you'll need something," Raynor Three said crossly.
"I've got a lot to tell you, and I don't want you going off half-primed
in the middle of a sentence. If you'd rather have a shot of
tranquilizer, all right; otherwise, I prescribe that you drink what I
gave you." He gave Bart a quick, wry grin. "I really am a medic, you
know."

Feeling like a scolded child, Bart drank. It burned his mouth, but after
it was down, he felt a sort of warm burning in his insides that
gradually spread a sense of well-being all through him. It wasn't
alcohol, but whatever it was, it had quite a kick.

"Thanks," he muttered. "Why are you taking this trouble, Raynor? There
must be danger--"

"Don't you know--" Raynor broke off. "Obviously, you don't. Your mother
never said much about your Mentorian family tree, I suppose? She was a
Raynor." He smiled at Bart, a little ruefully. "I won't claim a
kinsman's privileges until you decide how much to trust me."

Raynor Three settled back.

"It's a long story and I only know part of it," he began. "Our family,
the Raynors, have traded with the Lhari for more generations than I can
count. When I was a young man, I qualified as a medic on the Lhari
ships, and I've been star-hopping ever since. People call us the slaves
of the Lhari--maybe we are," he added wryly. "But I began it just
because space is where I belong, and there's nowhere else that I've ever
wanted to be. And I'll take it at any price.

"I never questioned what I was doing until a few years ago. It was your
father who made me wonder if we Mentorians were blind and selfish--this
privilege ought to belong to everyone, not just the Lhari. More and
more, the Lhari monopoly seemed wrong to me. But I was just a medic. And
if I involved myself in any conspiracy against the Lhari, they'd find it
out in the routine psych-checking.

"And then we worked out how it could be done. Before every trip, with
self-hypnosis and self-suggestion, I erase my own memories--a sort of
artificial amnesia--so that the Lhari can't find out any more than I
want them to find out. Of course, it also means that I have no memory,
while I'm on the Lhari ships, of what I've agreed to while I'm--" His
face suddenly worked, and his mouth moved without words, as if he had
run into some powerful barrier against speech.

It was a full minute, while Bart stared in dismay, before he found his
voice again, saying, "So far, it was just a sort of loose network,
trying to put together stray bits of information that the Lhari didn't
think important enough to censor.

"And then came the big breakthrough. There was a young Apprentice
astrogator named David Briscoe. He'd taken some runs in special test
ships, and read some extremely obscure research data from the early days
of the contact between men and Lhari, and he had a wild idea. He did the
bravest thing anyone has ever done. He stripped himself of all
identifying data--so that if he died, no one would be in trouble with
the Lhari--and stowed away on a Lhari ship."

"But--" Bart's lips were dry--"didn't he die in the warp-drive?"

Slowly, Raynor Three shook his head.

"No, he didn't. No drugs, no cold-sleep--but he didn't die. Don't you
see, Bart?" He leaned forward, urgently.

"_It's all a fake!_ The Lhari have just been saying that to justify
their refusal to give us the secret of the catalyst that generates the
warp-drive frequencies! Such a simple lie, and it's worked for all these
years!"

* * * * *

"A Mentorian found him and didn't have the heart to turn him over to the
Lhari. So he was smuggled clear again. But when that Mentorian underwent
the routine brain-checks at the end of the voyage, the Lhari found out
what had happened. They didn't know Briscoe's name, but they wrung that
Mentorian out like a wet dishcloth and got a description that was as
good as fingerprints. They tracked down young Briscoe and killed him.
They killed the first man he'd talked to. They killed the second. The
third was your father."

"The murdering devils!"

Raynor sighed. "Your father and Briscoe's father were old friends.
Briscoe's father was dying with incurable heart disease; _his_ son was
dead, and old Briscoe had only one thought in his mind--to make sure he
didn't die for nothing. So he took your father's papers, knowing they
were as good as a death warrant, slipped away and boarded a Lhari ship
that led roundabout to stars where the message hadn't reached yet. He
led them a good chase. Did he die or did they track him down and kill
him?" Bart bowed his head and told the story.

"Meanwhile," Raynor Three continued, "your father came to me, knowing I
was sympathetic, knowing I was a Lhari-trained surgeon. He had just one
thought in his mind: to do, again, what David Briscoe had done, and make
sure the news got out this time. He cooked up a plan that was even
braver and more desperate. He decided to sign on a Lhari ship as a
member of the crew."

"As a Mentorian?" Bart asked, but something cold, like ice water
trickling down his back, told him this was not what Raynor meant. "The
brainwashing--"

"No," said Raynor, "not as a Mentorian; he couldn't have escaped the
psych-checking. _As a Lhari._"

Bart gasped. "How--"

"Men and Lhari are very much alike," Raynor Three said. "A few small
things--skin color, the shape of the ears, the hands and claws--keep
humans from seeing that the Lhari are men."

"Don't say that," Bart almost yelled. "Those filthy, murdering devils!
You call those monsters men?"

"I've lived among the Lhari all my life. They're not devils, Bart, they
have their reasons. Physiologically, the Lhari are--well, _humanoid_, if
you like that better. They're a lot more like a man than a man is like,
for instance, a gorilla. Your father convinced me that with minor
plastic and facial surgery, he could pass as a Lhari. And finally I gave
in, and did the surgery--"

"And it killed him!"

"Not really. It was a completely unforeseeable thing--a blood clot broke
loose in a vein, and lodged in his brain. He was dead in seconds. It
could have happened at any time," he said, "yet I feel responsible, even
though I keep telling myself I'm not. And I'll help you as much as I
can--for his sake, and for your mother's. The Lhari don't watch me too
closely--they figure that anything I do they'll catch in the
brainwashing. But I'm still one step ahead of them, as long as I can
erase my own memories."

Bart was sifting it all, slowly, in his mind.

"Why was Dad doing this? What could he gain?"

"You know we can build ships as good as the Lhari ships, but we don't
know anything about the rare catalyst they use for warp-drive fuel.
Captain Steele had hopes of being able to discover where they got it."

"But couldn't they find out where the Lhari ships go for fueling?"

"No. There's no way to trail a Lhari ship," he reminded Bart. "We can
follow them inside a star-system, but then they pop into warp-drive, and
we don't know where they go when they aren't running between _our_
stars.

"We've gathered together what information we _do_ have, and we know that
after a certain number of runs in our part of the galaxy, ships take off
in the direction of Antares. There's a ship, due to come in here in
about ten days, called the _Swiftwing_, which is just about due to make
the Antares run. Captain Steele had managed to arrange--I don't know
how, and I don't want to know how--for a vacancy on that ship, and
somehow he got credentials. You see, it's a very good spy system, a
network between the stars, but the weak link is this: everything, every
message, every man, has to travel back and forth by the Lhari ships
themselves."

He rose, shaking it all off impatiently. "Well, it's finished now. Your
father is dead. What are you going to do? If you want to go back to
Vega, you can probably convince the Lhari you're just an innocent
bystander. They _don't_ hurt bystanders or children, Bart. They aren't
bad people. They're just protecting their business monopoly.

"The safest way to handle it would be this: let me erase your memories
of what I've told you tonight. Then just let the Lhari capture you. They
won't kill you. They'll just give you a light psych-check. When they
find out you don't know anything, they'll send you back to Vega, and you
can spend the rest of your life in peace, running Vega Interplanet and
Eight Colors."

Bart turned on him furiously. "You mean, go home like a good little boy,
and pretend none of this ever happened? What do you think I am, anyhow?"
Bart's chin set in the new, hard line. "What I want is a chance to go on
where Dad left off!"

"It won't be easy, and it could be dangerous," Raynor Three said, "but
there's nothing else to be done. We had the arrangements all made; and
now somebody's got to take the dangerous risk of calling them off. Are
you game for a little plastic surgery--just enough to change your looks
again, with new forged papers? You can't go by the _Swiftwing_--it
doesn't carry passengers--but there's another route you can take."

Bart sprang up. "No," he said, "I know a better way. Let me go on the
_Swiftwing_--in Dad's place--_as a Lhari_!"

"Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's too
dangerous." But his gold eyes glinted.

"Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did. And my eyes can stand
Lhari lights. You said yourself, it's going to be a dangerous job just
calling off all the arrangements. So let's _not_ call them off. Just let
me take Dad's place!"

"Bart, you're only a boy--"

"What was Dave Briscoe? No, Raynor. Dad left me a lot more than Vega
Interplanet, and you know it. I'll finish what he started, and then
maybe I'll begin to deserve what he left me."

Raynor Three gripped Bart's hand. He said, in a voice that shook, "All
right, Bart. You're your father's son. I can't say more than that. I
haven't any right to stop you."

CHAPTER SEVEN

"All right, Bart, today we'll let you look at yourself," Raynor Three
said.

Bart smiled under the muffling layers of bandage around his face. His
hands were bandaged, too, and he had not been permitted to look in a
mirror. But the transition had been surprisingly painless--or perhaps
his sense of well-being had been due to Raynor Three slipping him some
drug.

He'd been given injections of a chemical that would change the color of
his skin; there had been minor operations on his face, his hands, his
feet.

"Let's see you get up and walk around."

Bart obeyed awkwardly, and Raynor frowned. "Hurt?"

"Not exactly, but I feel as if I were limping."

"That's to be expected. I changed the angle of the heel tendon and the
muscle of the arch. You're using a different set of muscles when you
walk; until they harden up, you'll have some assorted Charley horses.
Have any trouble hearing me?"

"No, though I'd hear better without all these bandages," Bart said
impatiently.

"All in good time. Any trouble breathing?"

"No, except for the bandages."

"Fine. I changed the shape of your ears and nostrils, and it might have
affected your hearing or your breathing. Now, listen, Bart: I'm going to
take the bandages off your hands first. Sit down."

Bart sat across the table from him, obediently sticking out his hands.
Raynor Three said, "Shut your eyes."

Bart did as he was told and felt Raynor Three's long fingers working at
the bandages.

"Move each finger as I touch it." Bart obeyed, and Raynor said
neutrally, "Good. Now, take a deep breath and then open your eyes."

Impatiently Bart flicked his lids open. In spite of the warning, his
breath went out in a harsh, jolting gasp. His hands lay on the table
before him--but they were not his hands.

The narrow, long fingers were pearl-gray, tipped with whitish-pink claws
that curved out over the tips. Nervously Bart moved one finger, and the
long claw flicked out like a cat's, retracted. He swallowed.

"Golly!" He felt strangely wobbly.

"A beautiful job, if I do say so. Be careful not to scratch yourself,
and practice picking up small things."

Bart saw that the long grayish claws were trembling. "How did you
make--the claws?"

"Quite simple, really," Raynor beamed. "I injected protein compounds
into the nail matrix, which speeded up nail growth terrifically, and
then, as they grew, shaped them. Joining on those tiny muscles for the
retracting mechanism was the tricky part though."

Bart was moving his hands experimentally. Once over the shock, they felt
quite normal. The claws didn't get in his way half so much as he'd
expected when he picked up a pen that lay beside him and, with the blunt
tip, made a few of the strange-looking dots and wedges that were the
Lhari alphabet.

"Practice writing this," said Raynor Three, and laid a plastic-encased
folder down beside him. It was a set of ship's papers printed in Lhari.
Bart read it through, seeing that it was made out to the equivalent of
Astrogator, First Class, Bartol.

"That's your name now, the name your father would have used. Memorize
it, get used to the sound of it, practice writing it. Don't worry too
much about the rating; it's an elementary one, what we'd call Apprentice
rating, and I have a training tape for you anyhow. My brother got hold
of it, don't ask me how--and don't ask him!"

"When am I going to see my face?"

"When I think you're ready for the shock," Raynor said bluntly. "It
almost threw you when I showed you your hands."

He made Bart walk around some more briefly, slowly, he unwound the
bandages; then turned and picked up a mirror at the bottom of his
medic's case, turning it right side up. "Here. But take it easy."

But when Bart looked in the mirror he felt no unexpected shock, only an
unnerving revulsion.

His hair was bleached-white and fluffy, almost feathery to the touch.
His skin was grayish-rose, and his eyelids had been altered just enough
to make his eyes look long, narrow and slanted. His nostrils were mere
slits, and he moved his tongue over lips that felt oddly thin.

"I did as little to your teeth as I thought I could get away with-capped
the front ones," Raynor Three told him. "So if you get a toothache
you're out of luck--you won't dare go to a Lhari dentist. I could have
done more, but it would have made you look too freakish when we changed
you back to human again--if you live that long," he added grimly.

_I hadn't thought about that. And if Raynor is going to forget me, who
will do it?_ The cold knot of fear, never wholly absent, moved in him
again.

Watching his face, Raynor Three said gently, "It's a big network, Bart.
I'm not telling you much, for your own safety. But when you get to
Antares, they'll tell you all you need to know."

He lifted Bart's oddly clawed hands. "I warned you, remember--the change
isn't completely reversible. Your hands will always look--strange. The
fingers had to be lengthened, for instance. I wanted to make you as safe
as possible among the Lhari. I think you'll pass anything but an X-ray.
Just be careful not to break any bones."

He gave Bart a package. "This is the Lhari training tape. Listen to it
as often as you can, then destroy it--_completely_--before you leave
here. The _Swiftwing_ is due in port three days from now, and they stay
here a week. I don't know how we'll manage it, but I'll guarantee
there'll be a vacancy of one Astrogator, First Class, on that ship." He
rose. "And now I'm going back to town and erase the memory." He stopped,
looking intently at Bart.

"So if you see me, stay away from me and don't speak, because I won't
know you from any other Lhari. Understand? From here on, you're on your
own, Bart."

He held out his hand. "This is the rough part, Son." His face moved
strangely. "I'm part of this network between the stars, but I don't know
what I've done before, and I'll never know how it comes out. It's funny
to stand here and look at you and realize that I won't even remember
you." The gold-glinted eyes blinked rapidly. "Goodbye, Bart. And--good
luck, Son."

Bart took his hand, deeply moved, with the strange sense that this was
another death--a worse one than Briscoe's. He tried to speak and
couldn't.

"Well--" Raynor's mouth twisted into a wry grin. "Ouch! Careful with
those claws. The Lhari don't shake hands."

He turned abruptly and went out of the door and out of Bart's life,
while Bart stood at the dome-window, feeling alone as he had never felt
alone before.

* * * * *

He had to wait six days, and they felt like six eternities. He played
the training tape over and over. With his Academy background, it wasn't
nearly so difficult as he'd feared. He read and reread the set of papers
identifying him as Astrogator, First Class, Bartol. Forged, he supposed.
Or was there, somewhere, a real Bartol?

The last morning he slept uneasily late. He finished his last meal as a
human, spent part of the day removing all traces of his presence from
Raynor's home, burned the training tape, and finally got into the silky,
silvery tights and cloak that Raynor had provided. He could use his
hands now as if they belonged to him; he even found the claws handy and
useful. He could write his signature, and copy out instructions from the
training tape, without a moment's hesitation.

Toward dusk, a young Lhari slipped unobserved out of Raynor's house and
hiked unnoticed to the edges of a small city nearby, where he mingled
with the crowd and hired a skycab from an unobservant human driver to
take him to the spaceport city. The skycab driver was startled, but not,
Bart judged, unusually so, to pick up a Lhari passenger.

"Been doing a little sight-seeing on our planet, hey?"

"That's right," Bart said in Universal, not trying to fake his idea of
the Lhari accent. Raynor had told him that only a few of the Lhari had
that characteristic sibilant "r" and "s" and warned him against trying
to imitate it. _Just speak naturally; there are dialects of Lhari, just
as there are dialects of the different human languages, and they all
sound different in Universal anyhow._ "Just looking around some."

The skycab driver frowned and looked down at his controls, and Bart felt
curiously snubbed. Then he remembered. He himself had little to say to
the Lhari when they spoke to him.

_He was an alien, a monster. He couldn't expect to be treated like a
human being any more._

When the skycab let him off before the spaceport, it felt strange to see
how the crowds edged away from him as he made a way through them. He
caught a glimpse of himself in one of the mirror-ramps, a tall thin
strange form in a metallic cloak, head crested with feathery white, and
felt overwhelmingly homesick for his own familiar face.

He was beginning to feel hungry, and realized that he could not go into
an ordinary restaurant without attracting attention. There were
refreshment stands all over the spaceport, and he briefly considered
getting a snack at one of these.

No, that was just putting it off. The time had to come when he must face
his fear and test his disguise among the Lhari themselves. Reviewing his
knowledge of the construction of spaceports, he remembered that one side
was the terminal, where humans and visitors and passengers were freely
admitted; the other side, for Lhari and their Mentorian employees only,
contained--along with business offices of many sorts--a sort of arcade
with amusement centers, shops and restaurants catering to the personnel
of the Lhari ships. With nine or ten ships docking every day, Raynor had
assured him that a strange Lhari face would be lost in the crowds very
easily.

He went to one of the doors marked DANGER, LHARI LIGHTS BEYOND, and
passed through the glaring corridor of offices and storage-warehouses,
finally coming out into a sort of wide mall. The lights were fierce, but
he could endure them without trouble now, though his head ached faintly.
Raynor, testing his light tolerance, had assured him that he could endure
anything the Lhari could, without permanent damage to his optic nerves,
though he would have headaches until he got used to them.

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