“All right,” he said, “we’ll try. There’s no time to lose. Do you think you can work with me and Andrew?”
Dezi said sulkily, “Andrew doesn’t like me.”
“You’re too ready to think people don’t like you,” Damon reproved gently, thinking that it was bad enough for Dezi to know he chose him because Callista refused. But he could not betray Callista’s grief. And Ellemir should not try to do this work, so early in pregnancy. Pregnancy was about the only thing which could seriously interrupt a matrix worker’s capability, with its danger to the unborn child. And in the last day or two, linked with Ellemir, he had begun to pick up the first, faintest emanations of the developing brain, still formless, but there, real, enough to make their child a distinct separate presence to him.
He thought that there ought to be a way to compensate for this too, to protect a developing child. But he didn’t know of any, and he wasn’t going to experiment with his own! So it was himself, Andrew, and Dezi.
Andrew, a little while later, when Damon broached the subject, frowned and said, “I can’t say I’m crazy about the idea of working with Dezi.” But, at Damon’s remonstrance, admitted it was hardly worthy of an adult, to hold a grudge against a boy in his teens, a youngster who had, admittedly, been drunk at the time of the offense.
“And Dezi’s young for his age,” Damon told Andrew. “If he’d been acknowledged nedestro, he would have been given responsibilities to equal his privileges, all along. A year or two in the cadets would have made all the difference, or a year of good, hard, monkish discipline at Nevarsin. It’s our fault, not Dezi’s, that he’s turned out the way he has.”
Andrew did not protest further, but he still felt disquiet. No matter whose fault it was, if Dezi had flaws of character, Andrew did not feel right about working with him.
But Damon must know what he was doing. Andrew watched Damon making his preparations, remembering when he had first been taught to use a matrix. Callista had been part of the linkage of minds then, though she was still prisoner in the caves, and he had never seen her with his physical eyes. And now she was Keeper no more, and his wife…
Damon held his own matrix cradled between his hands, finally saying aloud, with an ironic smile, “I am always afraid to do this outside a Tower. I never lose the fear that it is not safe. An absurd fear, perhaps, but a real one.”
Dezi said gently, “I am glad you are afraid too, Damon. I am glad to know it is not only me.”
Damon said, in a shaking voice, “I think anyone who is not afraid to use this kind of force probably should not be trusted with it at all. The forces were so misused in the Ages of Chaos that Regis Hastur the Fourth decreed that from his day, no matrix circle should presume to use the great screens and relays outside the established Towers. That law was not made for such work as this, but there is still the sense of… of violating a taboo.” He turned to Andrew and said, “How would they treat frostbite in your world?”
Andrew answered thoughtfully, “The best treatment is arterial injection of neural stimulators: acetylcholine or something similar. Possibly transfusion, but medicine isn’t really my field.”
Damon sighed and said, “I seem to have been thrust into such work more often than I intended. Well, let us get on with it.” He let his mind sink deep into the matrix, reaching out for contact with Andrew. They had been linked before, and the old rapport quickly reestablished itself. For a moment there was a shadow-touch from Ellemir, only a hint, like the faint memory of a kiss, then she dropped gently out of the rapport at Damon’s admonition: she must guard her self and their child. For an instant Callista too lingered, a fragmentary touch, in the old closeness, and Andrew clung to the contact. For so long she had not touched even his hand and now they were linked together, close again—then, with : poignant sharpness, she broke the link, dropping away. Andrew felt empty and cold without the touch of her mind, and he sensed the wrenching aftertaste of grief. He was glad, for a moment, that Dezi was not yet in the rapport. Then Damon reached out and Andrew felt Dezi in the linkage, was momentarily aware of him, barriered, yet very much there, a cool firm strength, like a handclasp.
The threefold link persisted for a moment, Damon getting the feel of the two men with whom he must work so closely linked. With his eyes closed as always in a circle, he saw behind them the blue crystalline structure of the matrix gems which held them linked together, amplifying and sending out the individual, definite, electronic resonances of their brains, and beyond that, the purely subjective feel of them. Andrew was rocklike and strong, protective, so that Damon felt with a sigh of relief that his own lack of strength did not matter, Andrew had plenty for both of them. Dezi was a quick, darting precision, an awareness flicking here and there like reflections of light playing from a prism. Damon opened his eyes and saw them both; it was difficult to reconcile the actual physical presence with the mental feel within the matrix.
Dezi was so much—physically—the image of Coryn, his long-dead friend, his sworn brother. For the first time Damon let himself wonder how much of his love for Ellemir arose from that memory, the brother-friend he had loved so deeply when they were children, whose death had left him alone. Ellemir was like Coryn, and yet unlike, uniquely herself—He cut off the thought. He must not think of Ellemir in this strong link or he would be picking her up telepathically, and this strong rapport, this flow of energons, could overpower and deform their child’s developing brain. Quickly, picking up the contact with Dezi and Andrew, he began to visualize—to create on the thought-level where they would work—a strong and impregnable wall around them, so that no other person within Armida could be affected by their thoughts.
When we work with the men, healing them, we will bring them one by one behind this wall, so that nothing will overflow to damage Ellemir or the child, or trouble Callista’s peace, or disturb the sleep of Dom Esteban.
It was only a psychological device, he knew, nothing like the strong electrical-mental net around Arilinn, strong as the wall of the Tower itself, to keep out intruders in body or mind. But it had its own reality on the level where they would be working: it would protect them from outside interference, shielding those in Armida who might pick up their thoughts, and dilute or distort them. It would also focus the healing on the ones who needed it.
“Before we start, let’s have it clear what we’re going to do,” he said. Ferrika had some rather well drawn anatomical charts. She had been giving classes in basic hygiene to the women in the villages, an innovation of which Damon completely approved, and he had borrowed the charts she used, discarding the ones she used to teach pregnant women, but keeping the one which diagramed the circulation. “Look here, we have to restore circulation and healthy blood flow into the legs and feet, liquefy the frozen lymph and sluggish blood, and try to repair the nerve fibers damaged by freezing.”
Andrew, listening to the matter-of-fact way in which Damon spoke, in much the same way as a Terran medic would have described an intravenous injection, looked uneasily at the matrix between his hands. He did not doubt that Damon could do everything he said he could, and he was perfectly willing to help. But he thought they were a most unlikely hospital team.
The men were lying in the room where they had been taken. Most of them were still in their drugged sleep, but Raimon was awake, his eyes bright with fever, flushed and pain-racked.
Damon said gently, “We have come to do what we can for you, my friend.”
He bared the matrix in his hands; the man flinched.
“Sorcery,” he muttered, “such things are for the Hali’imyn…”
Damon shook his head. “A skill which anyone with the inborn talent can use. Andrew here is no Comyn-born, nor of the race of Cassilda, yet he is skilled in this work, and has come to help.”
Raimon’s feverish eyes fixed on the matrix. Damon saw the twisting sickness pass over his face, and even through his own growing euphoric rapport with the jewel, he somehow found enough separateness and detachment to say
gently, “Do not look directly into the matrix, friend, for you are not trained to the sight, and it will trouble your eyes and brain.”
The man averted his eyes, making a superstitious gesture, and Damon felt annoyed again, but he controlled it. He said, “Lie down, try to sleep, Raimon,” and then, firmly, “Dezi, give them another dose of Ferrika’s sleeping medicine. If they can sleep while we work, they will not interfere with the healing.” And if they slept, they would feel no fear, and thoughts of fear could interfere with the careful, delicate work they would be doing.
It was a pity Ferrika could not be taught this work, Damon thought. He wondered if she had even minimal laran. With her knowledge of healing, and the ability to use matrix skills, she would indeed be valuable to all the people on the estate.
That was what Callista ought to be doing, he decided, not work any stupid housewife could do!
As Raimon swallowed the sleeping medicine and sank back drowsily against his pillows, Damon gently reached out with his mind and picked up the threads of contact. Andrew, watching the lights in his matrix brightening and dimming in pulse with his breathing, felt Damon reach out, center his consciousness between himself and Dezi. To Andrew, subjectively, though Damon did not move or touch any of them, it was as if he leaned on them both, carefully supported, and then lowered his awareness into the wounded man’s body. Andrew could sense, could feel, the tension in the damaged flesh, the broken blood vessels, the blood which lay thick and sluggish in the bruised and torn tissues, distended or flaccid, pulpy, like meat frozen and then thawed. He felt Damon’s awareness of this, felt him search out, with something like the fingers of his mind, the damaged nerve sheathing in the bundles of fibers in ankle, toes, arches, tendons… Not much to be done there. As if they were against his own fingertips, Andrew could feel the tight tendons, feel the way in which Damon’s pressure relaxed them, feel impulses streaming again through the fibers, brokenly, damaged. The surface of the fibers would never wholly heal, but once again the impulses were moving, feeling had been restored. Damon flinched at the awareness of pain in the restored nerve fibers. It is a good thing I had them give Raimon sleeping medicine; he could never have endured the pain if he were awake. Then, with delicate, rhythmic pulsations, he began to stimulate the pulse of blood, the flow through arteries and veins nearly choked by the thick blood. Andrew felt Damon, intent on the delicate work deep in the layers of cells, falter and hesitate, his breathing ragged. He felt Dezi reach out and steady Damon’s heartbeat. Andrew felt himself reach out—the image in his mind was of a rock, strong behind Damon where the other man could lean his weight against him—and was conscious of something around them. Walls? Thick walls, enclosing them? Did it matter? He concentrated on lending strength to Damon, seeing, with his eyes shut, the blackened feet slowly changing color, reddening, paling. Finally Damon sighed, opened his eyes. Letting the rapport drop, except for a slender thread of contact, he bent over Raimon, who lay somnolent, touching the feet carefully with his fingers. The blackened skin was sloughing off in patches; below it lay reddened flesh, whealed and bruised-looking, but, Andrew knew, free of gangrenous taint or poison.
“He’ll have a hell of a lot of pain,” Damon said, bending to touch one of the smaller toes, where the nails had sloughed away with the broken and blackened skin, “and he might still lose a toe or two; the nerves were dead there, and I couldn’t do much. But he’ll recover, and he’ll have the use of his feet and hands. And he was the worst.” He tightened his mouth, sobered by the responsibility, and knew, ashamed of himself, that he had almost, somewhere inside himself, hoped for failure. It was too much, he thought, this kind of responsibility. But he could do it, and there were other men in the same danger. And now that he knew he could save them… He made his voice deliberately harsh as he turned to Dezi and Andrew.
“Well, what are we waiting for? We’d better get on to the others.”
Again, the picked-up threads of rapport. Andrew had the knack of it now, knew just how and when to flood Damon with his own strength when the other man faltered. They were working as a team, as Damon sank his consciousness into the second man’s feet and legs, and Andrew, some small part of him still apart from this, felt the walls enclosing them so that no random thought from outside intruded. He felt with Damon the descent, cell by slow cell, through the layers of flesh and skin and nerves and bone, gently stimulating, sloughing aside, reawakening. It was more effective than a surgeon’s knife, Andrew thought, but what a cost! Twice more the descent into raw, blackened frozen flesh before Damon finally let the last rapport go, separating them, and An-drew felt as if they had slipped outside an enclosed space, a surrounding wall. But four men lay sleeping, their legs and feet raw, sore, damaged, but healing. Definitely healing, without danger of blood poisoning or infection, clean and healthy wounds that would mend as quickly as possible.
They left the men sleeping, warning Ferrika to stay near them, and went back to the lower hall. Damon staggered, and Andrew reached out and supported him physically, feeling that he was repeating, in the physical world, what he had done so often in thought during the long rapport. Not for the first time, he had the feeling that Damon, so much older, was somehow the younger, to be protected.
Damon sat on the bench, exhaustedly leaning back against Andrew, the dead weariness and draining of matrix work settling down over him. He picked up some bread and fruit which had been left on the table after the evening meal, and chewed at it with ravenous hunger, feeling his depleted body demanding a renewal of energy. Dezi too had begun to eat hungrily.
Damon said, “You should eat something too, Andrew; matrix work depletes your energies so much, you’ll collapse.” He had almost forgotten that terrible drained feeling, as if his very life had gone out of him. At Arilinn he had been given technical explanations about the energy currents in the body, the channels of energy which carried physical as well as psychic strength. But he was too weary to remember them long.
Andrew said, “I’m not hungry,” and Damon replied with the ghost of a smile, “Yes you are. You just don’t know it yet.” He put out his hand to stop Dezi as the boy poured a cup of wine. “No, that’s dangerous. Drink water, or fetch some milk or soup from the kitchens, but no drink after something like this. Half a glass will make you drunk as a monk at Midwinter feast!”
Dezi shrugged and went off to the kitchen, returning with a jug of milk which he poured all around. Damon said, “Dezi, you were at Arilinn, so you don’t need explanations, but Andrew should know: you should eat about twice as much as usual, for a day or so, and if you have any dizziness, nausea, anything like that, come and tell me. Dezi, do they keep kirian here?”
Dezi said, “Ferrika does not make it, and with Domenic and myself both past threshold sickness, and Valdir in Nevarsin, I do not think anyone here has had need of it.”
Andrew asked, “What’s kirian?”
“A psychoactive drug which is used in the Towers, or among telepathic families. It lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, but it can also be helpful in cases of overwork or telepathic stresses. And some developing telepaths have a lot of sickness at adolescence, physical and psychic, when all the development is taking place at once. I suppose you’re too old for threshold sickness, Dezi?”
“I should think so,” the boy said scornfully. “I had outgrown it before I was fourteen.”
“Still, being away from matrix work since you left Arilinn, you might have a touch of it when you try to go back to it,” Damon warned. “And we still don’t know how Andrew will react.” He would ask Callista to try to make kirian. There should be some kept in every household of telepaths, against emergencies.
He put aside his cup of milk, half finished. He was deathly weary. “Go and rest, Dezi lad… you are worthy of Arilinn training, believe me.” He gave the boy a brief embrace and watched him go off toward his room near Dom Esteban’s, hoping the old man would sleep through the night so the boy could rest undisturbed.
Whatever De
zi’s faults, Damon considered, at least he had nursed the old man as filially as an acknowledged son would have. Was it affection, he wondered, or self-interest?
He let himself lean on Andrew as they climbed the stairs, making a rueful apology, but Andrew brushed it aside. “Forget it. You think I don’t know you pulled the whole weight of that?” So Damon let Andrew help him up the stairs, thinking, I lean on you now as I did in the matrix.…
In the outer room of their suite he hesitated a moment. “You aren’t Tower-trained, so you should be warned of this, too: matrix work… you’ll be impotent for a day or two. Don’t worry about it, it’s temporary.”
Andrew shrugged, with a twist of wry amusement, and Damon, remembering abruptly the real state of affairs between Andrew and Callista, knew that a word of apology would only reemphasize the tactlessness of his words. He asked himself how in hell he could have been groggy enough to have forgotten that.
In their room, Ellemir lay half asleep on the bed, wrapped in a fleecy white shawl. She had taken down her braids and her hair was scattered like light on the pillow. As Damon looked down at his wife, she sat up, blinking sleepily, then, as Ellemir always did, moving- from sleep to waking without transition, she held out her arms. “Oh, Damon, you look so weary, was it very terrible?”
He sank down beside her, resting his head against her breast. “No. Only I am no longer used to this work, and there is such a need for it, such a terrible need! Elli—” He sat bolt upright, looking down at her. “So many people here on Darkover are dying, when they should not die, suffering, being crippled, dying of minor injuries. It should not be so. We do not have the kind of medical services Andrew tells me that his Terrans have. But there are so many things that a man—or a woman—with a matrix can heal. And yet how are the injured to be taken to Arilinn or Neskaya or Dalereuth or Hali, to be treated in the Towers there? What do the matrix circles in the great Towers care for a poor workman’s frostbite, or some poor hunter clawed by a hunting-beast or kicked in the head by an oudrakhi?”