patrick_morris_miller | Reading Darkover in the 21st Century: The Heritage of Hastur

First publication in 1975 by DAW Books (DAW Collectors #160)

Read from DAW omnibus Heritage and Exile (DAW Collectors #1219)

Time period: After the Comyn (Against the Terrans: The Second Age)

The Cadet Guard turns boys into men! Except when it turns them into broken wrecks. Young Regis Hastur, laranless and just returned from schooling at Nevarsin, will see it happen and be able to do nothing about it.

Meanwhile, a circle of untrained telepaths, most with their own special problems, launches an effort to make Darkover a player on the interstellar stage, using a matrix stone far beyond their abilities to control... a matrix stone that just wants to burn. What could possibly go wrong?

Regis Hastur is following the standard plan for young Comyn men. As a boy he was shipped off to Saint Valentine of the Snows where he learned to read and write - uncommon on Darkover - and absorbed some of the repressive attitudes on homosexuality of the cristoforo monks. Now at the age of 15, his schooling is done and he wants to leave Darkover for the Terran Empire and interstellar travel.

This would never be permitted to a Comyn, except Regis has developed no trace of laran, and at his age he believes this means he has none, and thus the Comyn have no hold on him. Danvan Hastur, Regis' grandfather and Regent for the Council chair (Elhalyns being almost always incompetent to rule and the incumbent, Derik, also being underaged) points out that Hastur laran can come late, and twists his elbow to first spend three years in the Cadet Guards, traditional finishing school for Comyn boys.

The Cadet Guards are much like any military school or academy. Regis quickly finds a friend in Danilo Syrtis - a gentle cristoforo who shares brief flashes of telepathic rapport with Regis - suggesting he may have catalyst telepathy, the all but lost Gift of unlocking the latent laran of others.

But the cadet master, Dyan Ardais, is unusually sadistic even by the military school standard. When Regis' sword skills prove a notch above the usual Cadet, Dyan takes charge of his drill and pushes him to his limits and past.

Worse still are the whispers concerning Octavien Vallonde, who left the Guards under a cloud rather than prove his claim against Dyan under telepathic questioning. And though his obvious sexual interest in Regis never takes the form of outright assault, Danilo - cristoforo and thus filled with abhorrence for love between men - suffers under Dyan's attentions, both physical, mental, and telepathic, intended to break his resistance. Instead, Danilo pulls his sword on Dyan - and is promptly dismissed from the Guards in ceremonial disgrace and sent back to his ancestral seat.

Meanwhile: Lew Alton, a few years older than Regis and his friend from a summer in Armida, is briefly assigned command of the Guard. He knows from experience that Dyan belongs nowhere near his post, but is prevented for political reasons from reassigning him. As Regis cannot bring himself to speak plainly what he suspects Dyan is doing, and Danilo refuses to even discuss the matter, Lew is useless in addressing Dyan's predations.

But soon Lew is relieved of his job of watching and doing nothing, and sent to the pariah domain of Aldaran, where adherence to the Compact has eroded and it is rumored that the old Terran starport is selling forbidden weapons. At the city of Caer Donn, Lew finds much Terran science being used for and by Aldaran... and meets a circle of laran users who believe they can develop matrix technology into a power source suitable for starships:

Beltran Aldaran, son of lord Kermiac Aldaran, possessed of laran but only latent telepathy, and who wants to rediscover lost matrix science to trade to the Terrans for their knowledge,
Marjorie Scott, flame-haired, extremely powerful but untrained telepath, and very soon Lew's lover,
Rafe Scott, Marjorie's brother, at the age of twelve already a powerful telepath who can do minor pyrokinetic tricks,
Thyra Darriell, eldest daughter of Kermiac but not legitimated and half-sister of Marjorie, at least a quarter chieri, immediately distrustful of Lew, and madder than two sacks of ferrets,
Robert Raymon Kadarin, or so he says he calls himself on Darkover. Just call him Kadarin; just about everyone else does. Charismatic, enigmatic, looks to be about 30 but admits to being much older. Claims to have spent ten years in Terran Intelligence and to have a price on his head. Does not know his parentage, but has feline eyes and six fingers on each hand, and believes himself likely sterile.

Lew, with his Tower training in the matrix arts, is just what this crew of fools needs. In short order Kadarin has talked him into forming them into a circle, with Beltran acting as monitor, a role even his latent laran will allow him to play... and Marjorie as Keeper, frustrating the dream of young love. It's alright, Kadarin says. It's only for a little while, Kadarin says.

A circle needs a great matrix stone to achieve great things, and Kadarin has his eye on just the one: the Sharra matrix that once devastated Brynat Scarface and his men. Its guardian Desideria Leyner, older now than in The Winds of Darkover, knows Kadarin for bad news the moment she sees him (and tells him he knows her true age, which clearly shocks him), and warns him against using this matrix in particular, but he charms her into handing it over, with a promise to allow Lew to guide its use.

Early experiments have promising results: the circle powers up a Terran helicopter and hovers it a few feet above the ground. But when the Sharra matrix was used as a weapon it developed a taste for destruction and wants to rain fire on Castle Aldaran and Caer Donn. And this circle of misfits is not large enough to keep in check a ninth level matrix, one that could pull one of Darkover's moons out of the sky.

The band of fools reasons that what they need is more telepaths. A catalyst telepath could awaken the latent laran possessed by many Darkovans, but that Gift is lost, the gene extinct.

Except Lew Alton knows of a catalyst telepath, one who has no reason to love the Comyn...

Continuity

Here is the most interior description yet of learning and using laran. Also, Lew Alton gives his circle, and us, some canned lectures in the workings of Towers, Keepers, and matrices: Keepers were not always women; both laran and sexual arousal use the same nerve paths, which is the cause of threshold sickness, and the danger of sexuality to Keepers; once Keepers were trained from early childhood and subjected to severe conditioning. (This will cause great difficulties in The Forbidden Tower.) What precisely a Keeper does, and why a monitor is so important, are also seen, as is what it means for a matrix itself to be monitored.

(The copy editor was completely inconsistent with whether to use matrices or matrixes as the plural.)

The Gift of catalyst telepathy is a central element of this novel. Odd; in previous novels Terrans' latent laran seems to have been activated just by rapport with Darkovans. Or maybe it's an undocumented side effect of being the Terran protagonist of a Darkover story.

The Aldaran domain has already been established as a renegade outlier in other novels, in ways such as their erosion of the Compact and their liberal training of Keepers; here we're told they were "exiled centuries ago from Comyn - no man alive now knew why".

Kennard Alton, seen as a youth in Star of Danger, is now advanced in years; a fall on a flight of stairs forces him to deputize Lew, his son, as commander of the Guard.

We're told the story of Cleindori, the last of the Keepers trained to keep herself cloistered. When she left her Tower and had a child - while continuing to use her skills, and kept all of her powers - she was murdered by fanatic traditionalists. More will be told of her in The Bloody Sun; the end of the strict sexlessness of Keepers has been touched on before, and will be detailed in The Forbidden Tower. Now it is usual for a Keeper to hang up the red robe after a few years.

Here a young Linnea Storn-Lanart, who later will offer to bear Regis children (and partner Danilo in a laran-fueled orgy) is suggested to Lew as a possible wife. She tells him her great-grandmother was trained as a Keeper; presumably that ancestor never donned the red robe.

The Alton Gift, we are told, is the ability to force rapport, but apparently it often comes with a side order of precognitive flashes, a very useful thing for the writer who wants to foreshadow. Lew sees Regis at what may be the great telepath convention at the end of The World Wreckers.

Kadarin found the name and crewlist of the colony ship that crashed in Darkover Landfall; he tells Lew of how many common Darkovan names are names from that ship's complement.

The debate over the Compact continues from other books: is it really better for the best sword wielder to get their way than for the best laran wielder? (Though a high level matrix is far more destructive than an army of swordsmen.)

Consent issues

Dyan Fucking Ardais.

Dyan Ardais is a sexual predator who targets children. And it's pretty clear that it's widely known. And nobody is willing to do anything about it.

(And he's the author's husband in thin disguise. If you absolutely want details, look here. But only if you have a strong stomach. And that site doesn't even have Bradley's damning depositions. Please forgive me for not linking to those.)

It's clear that Octavien Vallonde was one of his victims. Dyan's interactions with Regis have a clear aspect of grooming to them. And when Danilo refuses his physical attentions:

he did something with his mind, so that wherever I was, alone or with others, I felt him touching me, heard his... foul whispers, that awful, mocking laugh of his.

And when his crimes are hauled out into the light of the Comyn Council chambers, his 'punishment' is... to be forced to name Danilo the heir to the Ardais Domain.

Octavien does not receive even that mockery of justice.

Dyan is not the only one to violate the minds of others; when Lew and Marjorie defy Kadarin's increasingly unhinged will, he uses both laran and drugs to force him back into the circle where he participates in the devastation of Caer Donn.

Now, lesser considerations.

Though Keepers are no longer required to be lifelong virgins, "they learned not to attract desires they dared not satisfy" - a common thread through the Darkover stories is considering women to bear the responsibility of men's attraction to them.

For Kadarin, the ends justify the means, and this certainly extends to kidnapping Danilo to use his catalyst telepathy.

And Regis realizes his laran is blocked because, at Nevarsin, the cristoforo monks and their homophobia made him need to forget his (entirely voluntary and not proscribed - for young men, somewhat approved of - by the general culture of Darkover) sexual relationship with Lew, as a youth at Armida. Father Valentine is continuing to do harm after two thousand years.

Collected miscellanea

The characterization of Danilo as an abuse victim refusing to speak or even think of the abuse is horrifyingly familiar - I once knew someone in a similar position. (And again, disgust at the author.)

Allegedly, Dyan Ardais is (in the words of the late Dorothy J. Heydt) such a spherical bastard because in the original version of this story he was three separate villains, whom Bradley welded together into the one.

There is a Guardsman named Nascar. I suspect the resemblance to the stock car league is entirely coincidental.

At the end, the Terrans commit to playing a more active role in upholding the Compact. The means stated by which the weapons they sell shall be made trackable does not seem like it would work very well.

The Hastur Gift lies latent in its holder until ceremonially awakened by one with the active Gift. One wonders if this inspired the Haldane magic from the Deryni stories.

Concluding thoughts

The Heritage of Hastur reads far differently for me now than it did when I first read it circa 1990, knowing nothing of Bradley's misdeeds and less than nothing about Breen at all.

There seems to be a pattern with Darkover stories concerning the same characters: whatever triumph they win in an early one will turn to ashes in a later installment. Here, Regis and Danilo's victories are Pyrrhic at best, and Lew is broken. And they have Sharra's Exile to look forward to... As do I, but there are a good number of books to go first.