The Colors of Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley (free e reader .txt) 📖

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