“And not needed,” Damon said. “Any halfway competent psi-technician can do most of a Keeper’s work, and pay no higher price than a few days of impotence.”
Leonie smiled faintly and said, “There are many men who think even that price too high, Damon.”
Damon nodded, thinking of his brother Lorenz, and the contempt in his voice when he said of Damon: “Half monk, half eunuch.”
“And for women,” Leonie said, “it was discovered that a Keeper need not be neutered, though they had not yet discovered the training techniques we use. It was sufficient to fix the channels steadily clear, so they would not carry any impulses save the psi impulses. So it was done, without the barbarism of neutering. But in our age, even that seemed too much an impairment of a woman.” Leonie’s face was scornful. “I think it was only the pride of the men of Comyn, who felt that a woman’s most precious attribute was her fertility, her ability to pass on their male heritage. They became squeamish about any impairment of a woman’s ability to bear children.”
Damon said, in a low voice, “It also meant that a woman who thought as a young girl that she wished to be Keeper need not make a lifetime choice before she fully knew the burden it demanded.”
Leonie dismissed that. “You are a man, Damon, and I do not expect you to understand. It was to spare the women this heavy burden of choice.” Suddenly her voice broke. “Do you think I would not rather have had all that cut cleanly from me in childhood, rather than going all my life imprisoned, knowing I held the key to my prison, and that only my own oath, my own honor, the word of a Hastur, kept me so… so prisoned.” He could not tell whether it was grief or anger that made her voice tremble. “If I had my way, if you men of Comyn were not so concerned with a woman’s precious fertility, any girl-child coming to the Tower would be neutered at once, and live her life as Keeper happy, and free of the burden of womanhood. She would be free of pain and the never-ending reminders of choice—that she can never choose once and for all, but must make that choice anew every day of her life.”
“You would make them slaves lifelong to the Tower?”
Leonie’s voice was almost inaudible, but to Damon it was like a cry. “Do you think we are not slaves?”
“Leonie, Leonie, if you felt it so, why did you bear it all these years? There were others who could have taken it from your shoulders when it grew too heavy to be borne.”
“I am a Hastur,” she said, “and I have given oath never to lay down my burden until I had trained another to take it from me. Do you think I did not try?” She looked straight at him, and Damon tensed with remembered anguish, for as his thoughts formed her, so she was in the pverworld, and it was the Leonie of his first years in the Tower who stood before him. He would never know if any other man thought her beautiful, but to him she was infinitely beautiful, desirable, holding the very strings of his soul between her slender hands… He turned away, fighting to see her only as he had seen her last in the flesh, seen her at his wedding: a woman calm, aging, controlled, past rage or rebellion.
“I thought you content with power and reverence, Leonie, with the highest place of all, equal to any Comyn lord—Leonie of Arilinn, Lady of Darkover.”
She said, the words coming from immense distances, “Had you known I rebelled, then would I have been a failure, Damon. My very life, my sanity, my place as Keeper, depended on that, that I should hardly know it myself. Yet I tried again and again to train another to take my place, so I could lay down a burden too heavy for me. Always when I had trained a Keeper, some other Tower would discover that their Keeper had chosen to leave them, or that her training had failed and she was fit for nothing but to leave and marry. A fine lot of weak and aimless women they were, none with the strength to endure. I was the only Keeper in all the Domains who held my office past twenty years. And even when I began to grow old, three times I gave up my own successor, twice to go to Dalereuth and once to Neskaya, and I who had trained a Keeper for every Tower in the Domains wished to train one for Arilinn, so that I might have some rest. You were there, Damon, you saw what happened. Six young girls, each with the talent to work as Keeper. But three were already women and, young as they were, had known some sexual wakening. Their channels were already differentiated and could not carry such strong frequencies, though two of them later became monitors and technicians, in Arilinn or in Neskaya. Then I began to choose younger and younger girls, almost children. I came near to success with Hilary. Two years she worked with me as underKeeper, rikhi, but you know what she endured, and at last I felt I must take pity on her and let her go. Then Callista—”
“And you made sure she would not fail,” Damon said, enraged, “by altering her channels so she could not mature!”
“I am a Keeper,” Leonie said angrily, “and responsible only to my own conscience! And she consented to what was done. Could I foresee that her fancy would light on this Terranan, and her oath would be as nothing to her?”
Before Damon’s accusing silence she added, defensively, “And even so, Damon, I love her, I could not bear her unhappiness! Had I believed it only a childish fancy, I would have brought her back here to Arilinn with me. I would have showered her with so much love and tenderness that she would never regret her Terran lover. And yet… and yet she made me believe…” In the fluid levels of the overworld, Damon could see and share with Leonie the image Leonie had seen in Callista’s mind: Callista lying in Andrew’s arms, spent and vulnerable, as he carried her from the caves of Corresanti.
Now that he had seen her, if only reflected in Leonie’s mind, as she might have been, undamaged, unchanged—having once seen Callista like that—he knew he would never be content until he had seen her so again. He said quietly, “I cannot believe you would have done this if you did not believe it could be undone.”
“I am a Keeper,” she repeated indomitably, “and responsible only to my own conscience.”
This was true. By the law of the Towers, a Keeper was infallible, her lightest word law where every member of her circle was concerned. Yet Damon persisted.
“If it was so, why did you not neuter her, and have done with it?” She was silent. At last she said, “You speak so because you are a man, Damon, and to you a woman is nothing but a wife, an instrument to give you sons, to pass on your precious Comyn heritage. I have other purposes. Damon, I was so weary, and I felt I could not bear to spend my energy and strength, to put all my heart into her for years and years, and then watch her waken, and go from me into some man’s arms. Or, like Hilary, to sicken and suffer the tortures of a damned soul with every waxing moon. It was not selfishness, Damon! It was not only a longing to lay down my own work and have rest! I loved her as I had never loved Hilary. I knew she would not fail, but I feared she was too strong to give way, even under such suffering as Hilary’s, that she would endure it—as I did, Damon—year after long year. So I spared her this, as I had the right to do.” She added defiantly, “I was her Keeper!”
“And you removed her right to choose!” .
“No woman of the Comyn has choice,” Leonie said almost in a whisper, “not truly. I did not choose to be Keeper, or to be sent to a Tower. I was a Hastur, and it was my destiny, just as the destiny of my playmates was to marry and bear sons to their clans. And it was not irrevocable. In my own childhood I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she told me it was reversible. She told me it was lawful, where neutering was not, so that women might be reclaimed, if their parents chose, for those dynastic marriages so dear to Comyn hearts, and there was no chance of impairing the precious fertility of a Comyn daughter!” The sarcasm in her voice was so bitter that Damon quailed.
“It is reversible—how?” Damon demanded. “Callista cannot live like this, neither Keeper nor free.”
“I do not know,” Leonie said. “When it was done, I never believed it would have to be reversed, and so I made no plans for this day. But I was glad—as near as anything could make me glad—when she told me I had wrought less well than I tho
ught.” Again he shared with Leonie the brief vision of Callista in Andrew’s arms as he carried her from Corresanti. “But it seems she was mistaken.”
Leonie looked wrung and exhausted. “Damon, Damon, let her come back to us! Is it so evil a thing, that she should be Lady of Arilinn? Why should she give that up, to be wife to some Terranan and bear his half-caste brats?”
Damon answered, and knew his voice was shaking, “If she wished to be Lady of Arilinn, I would lay down my life defending her right to remain so. But she has chosen otherwise. She is wife to an honorable man I am proud to call brother, and I do not want to see their happiness destroyed. But even if Andrew were not my friend, I would defend Callista’s right to order her life as she will. To lay down the title of Lady of Arilinn, if she so desires, to be wife to a charcoal-burner in the forest, or to take up sword like the Lady Bruna her foremother and command the Guards in her brother’s place! It is her life, Leonie, not mine or yours!”
Leonie buried her face in her hands. Her voice was sick and choked. “Be it so, then. She shall have choice, though I had none, though you had none. She shall choose what you men of Darkover have called the only fit life for a woman! And it is I who must suffer for her choice, bearing the weight of Arilinn till Janine is old enough and strong enough to bear the burden.” Her face was so old and bitter that Damon shrank from her.
But he thought that it was no true burden to her. Once, perhaps, she might have laid it down. But now she had nothing else, and it was everything to her, to have this power of life and death over them all, all the poor wretches who gave their lives for the Towers. It meant much to her, he knew, that Callista had to come to her and beg for what should be hers by right!
He said, making his voice hard, “It has always been the law. I have heard you say that the life of a Keeper is too hard to be borne unconsenting. And it has always been so, that a Keeper is freed when she can no longer do her work in safety. You said it, yes, you are a Keeper and responsible only for your own conscience. But what is it to be a Keeper, Leonie, if the conscience of a Keeper does not demand an honesty worthy of a Keeper, or of a Hastur!”
There was another long silence. At last she said, “On the word of a Hastur, Damon, I do not know how it is to be undone. All my search of the records has told me only that in the old days, when this was commonly done—it was done after the Towers had ceased to neuter their Keepers, so that the sacred fertility of a Comynara need not suffer even in theory —such Keepers were sent to Neskaya. So I sought there for the records. Theolinda, at Neskaya, told me that all the manuscripts were destroyed when Neskaya was burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos. And so, although I still feel Callista should return to us, there is only one way to rediscover what must be done for Callista. Damon, do you know what is meant by Timesearch?”
He felt a curious rippling coldness, as if the very fabric of the overworld were wavering beneath his feet. “I had heard that technique, too, was lost.”
“No, for I have done it,” said Leonie. “The course of a river had shifted, and farms and villages all along the watershed were threatened with drought or flood and famine. I did a Timesearch to discover precisely where it had run a hundred years before, so that we could divert it back into a course where it could run, and not waste energy trying to force it to flow without a natural channel. It was not easy.” Her voice was thinned and afraid. “And you would have to go further than I went. You would have to go back before the burning of Neskaya, during the Hastur rebellions. That was an evil time. Could you reach that level, do you think?”
Damon said slowly, “I can work on many levels of the overworld. There are others, of course, to which I have no access. I do not know how to reach the one where Timesearch can be done.”
“I can guide you there,” Leonie said. “You know, of course, that the overworlds are only a series of agreements. Here in the gray world it is easier to visualize your physical body moving on a plain of gray space, with thoughtforms for landmarks”—she gestured to the dimly glowing form of Arilinn behind them—“than to approach the truth, which is that your mind is a tenuous web of intangibles moving in a realm of abstractions. You learned as much, of course, during your first year in the Tower. It is possible, of course, that the over-world is nearer the objective reality of the universe than the world of form, what you call the real world. Yet even there any good technician can see, at will, bodies as webs of atoms and whirling energy and magnetic fields.”
Damon nodded, knowing this was true.
“It is not easy to get your mind far enough from the agreements of what you call the real world to be free of time as you know it. Time itself is probably no more than a way of structuring reality so that our brains can make some sense out of it,” Leonie said. “Probably in the ultimate reality of the universe, to which our experiences are approximations, there is no experience of time as a sequence, but past and present and future all exist together as one chaotic whole. On a physical level—of course that includes the level where we are now, the world of images, where our visualization constantly recreates the world we prefer to see around us—we find it easier to travel along a personal sequence from what we call past to present to future. But in reality even a physical organism probably exists in its entirety at once, and its biological development from embryo to senility and death is merely another of its dimensions, like length. Am I confusing you, Damon?”
“Not much. Go on.”
“On the level of Timesearch that whole concept of linear sequence disappears. You must create it for yourself so that you do not become lost in the chaotic reality, and you must anchor yourself somehow so that you will not regress your physical body through the resonances. It is like wandering blindfold in a mirror-maze. I would rather do anything in this universe than try it again. Yet I fear that only in such a quest into time can you find an answer for Callista. Damon, must you risk it?”
“I must, Leonie. I made Callista a promise.” He would not tell Leonie of the extremity in which the promise had been made, or of the agony she had endured, when it would have been easier to die, because she trusted that promise. “I am not a Hastur, but I will not forswear my word.”
Leonie sighed deeply. She said, “I am a Hastur, and a Keeper, responsible for everyone who has given me an oath, man or woman. I feel now that if it were for me to choose, no woman would be trained as Keeper unless she first consented to be neutered, as was done in the ancient days. But the world will go as it will, and not as I would have it. I will take responsibility, Damon, yet I cannot take all the responsibility. I am the only surviving Keeper at Arilinn. Neskaya is often out of the relays because Theolinda is not strong enough even now, and Dalereuth is using a mechanic’s circle with no Keeper, so that I feel guilty keeping Janine at my side in Arilinn. We cannot train enough Keepers as it is now, Damon, and those we train often lose their powers while still young. Do you see why we need Callista so terribly, Damon?”
It was a problem with no answer, but Damon would not have Callista made a pawn, and Leonie knew it. She said at last, in wonder, “How you must love her, Damon! Perhaps it is to you I should have given her.”
Damon replied, “Love? Not in that sense, Leonie. Though she is dear to me, and I who have so little courage admire it above all else in anyone.”
“You have little courage, Damon?” Leonie was silent for a long time and he saw her image ripple and waver like heat waves in the desert beyond the Dry Towns. “Damon, oh, Damon, have I destroyed everyone I love? Only now do I see that I broke you, as I broke Callista…”
The sound of that rang, timeless, like an echo, in Damon. Have I destroyed everyone I love? Everyone I love, everyone I—everyone I love?
“You said it was for my own good that you sent me from Arilinn, Leonie, that I was too sensitive, that the work would destroy me.” He had lived with those words for years, had choked on them, swallowed them in bitterness, hating himself for living to hear them or repeat them. He never thought to doubt t
hem, not for an instant… the word of a Keeper, a Hastur.
Trapped, she cried out, “What could I possibly have said to you?” Then, in a great cry of agony: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with our whole system of training psi workers! How can it possibly be right to sacrifice lives wholesale this way? Callista’s, Hilary’s, yours!” She added, with indescribable bitterness, “My own.”
If she had had the courage, Damon thought, bitterly or the honesty, to tell him the truth, to say to him, “one of us must go, and I am Keeper, and cannot be spared,” then he would have lost to Arilinn, yes, but he would not have been lost to himself.
But now he had recovered something lost when he was sent from the Towers. He was whole again, not broken as he was when Leonie cast him out, thinking of himself as weak, useless, not strong enough for the work he had chosen.
Something was desperately wrong with the system of training psi workers. Now even Leonie knew it.
He was shocked by the tragedy in Leonie’s eyes. She whispered, “What do you want of me, Damon? Because I came near to destroying your life in my weakness, does the honor of a Hastur demand I must stand unflinching and let you destroy mine in turn?”
Damon bowed his head. His long love, the suffering he had mastered, the love he had thought burned out years ago, lent him compassion. Here in the overworld, where no hint of physical passion could lend danger to the gesture or the thought, he reached for Leonie, and as he had longed to do through many hoepless years, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It did not matter that only images met, that they were, in the real world, a tenday ride apart, that no more than Callista could she ever have responded to his passion. None of this mattered. It was a kiss of such despairing love as he had never given, would never again give to any living woman. For a moment Leonie’s image wavered, flowed, until she was again the younger Leonie, radiant, chaste, untouchable, the Leonie for whose very presence he had hungered for so many anguished, lonely years, and tormented himself with guilt for the longing.