A long time later Callista knew she was drowsing, in tremendous content, still surrounded by them all. Ellemir was asleep with her head on Andrew’s shoulder. Callista felt weary, strange, and blissful, dropping now into Damon’s consciousness, now into Andrew’s, now submerging for minutes at a time into Ellemir’s sleep. Drifting between past and future, aware of her own body as she had never been since childhood, she knew she would be able to go into Council and swear her marriage had been consummated, and then, with a reluctance which actually made her laugh a little, that she had come from this night pregnant. She did not really want a child, not yet. She had wanted a little time to learn about herself, to know the kind of growth Ellemir had known, to explore all the new and unexplained dimensions in her life.
But I’ll live through it, women do, she thought with secret laughter, and the laughter spilled over to Damon. He reached out, enlacing her fingers with his.
Thank the Gods you can laugh about it, Callie!
It isn’t as if it had to be a choice, as I feared. As if I could never use my own particular skills again. It’s a broadening of what I am, not a narrowing of choices.
She still resented the need to have a child by the Council’s choice and not her own—she would never forgive the Council for their attitude—but she accepted the necessity and knew she would easily manage to love the unwanted child, enough to hope that the coming daughter would not know, until she was old enough to understand, just how very much she had been unwanted.
But I want never to know who fathered it… Please, Elli, even in monitoring, never, never let me be sure. And they promised one another, silently, that they would never try to know whether the child conceived this night was Damon’s daughter or Andrew’s. They might suspect, but they would never know for certain.
For hours they lay dozing, resting, sharing the fourfold rapport, feeling it come and go. Although all the others had drifted into sleep toward morning, Damon found himself wakeful and a little fearful. Had he weakened them, or himself, for the coming battle? Could Callista clear her channels quickly enough?
And then, dropping into Callista’s consciousness, he knew that they would always be wholly clear, for whichever force she chose to use them. She would not need the kireseth; now she knew within herself how it felt to switch them over from sexual messages to the full strength of laran. And Damon knew, with surging confidence, that he could meet whatever came.
And then he knew, reluctantly, why the use of kireseth had been abandoned. As a rare and sacramental rite, it was safe and necessary, helping the Keepers reaffirm their common humanity, reaffirming the close bond of the old Tower circles, the closest bond known, closer than kin, closer than sexual desire.
But it could all too easily become an escape, an addiction. Would men, with this freedom accessible, ever accept the occasional periods of impotence after demanding work? Would women accept the discipline of learning to keep the channels clear? Kireseth, with overuse, was dangerous. A thousand stories of the Ghost Winds in the Hellers made that clear. And the temptation to overuse it would be almost irresistible.
So it had first fallen into a taboo, for rare and sacramental use, later the taboo being enlarged to total disuse and disrepute. With regret for what he would always remember as one of the peak experiences of his life, Damon knew that even as a Year’s End ritual it might be too tempting. It had brought them, undamaged, through the last barrier to their completion, but in future they must rely on discipline and self-denial.
Self-denial? Never, when they had one another.
And yet, if all of time coexisted at once, this magical hour would always be present and real to them as it was now.
Sadly, lovingly, feeling their presence all around him and regretting the necessity to separate, he sighed. One by one, he woke them.
“Sunrise is near,” he said soberly. “They will observe the terms precisely, but they will not give us a moment’s advantage, so we must be ready for them. It is time to prepare for the challenge.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-three
« ^ »
It was the thin darkness which preceded the dawn. Damon, standing at the still-dark window, not even grayed with the coming light, felt ill at ease. The exultation was still with him, but there was a small gnawing insecurity.
Had this, after all, been the wrong thing to do? By all the laws of Arilinn, this should have weakened them, made them unfit for the coming conflict. Had he made the most tragic, and irrevocable of all mistakes? Had he, loving all of them, condemned them to death and worse?
No. He had staked all their lives on the rightness of what they were doing. If the old laws of Arilinn were right after all, then they all deserved to die and he would accept that death, if not gladly, at least with a sense of justice. They were working in a new tradition, less cruel and crippling than the one he had rejected, and his belief that they were right must triumph.
He had wrapped himself in a warm robe against the cold of the overworld. Callista had done the same, and had wrapped a fluffy shawl around Ellemir’s shoulders. Andrew, shrugging into his fur riding cloak, asked, “What exactly is going to happen, Damon?”
“Exactly? There’s no way I can tell you that,” Damon said. “It is the old test for a Keeper: we will build our Tower in the overworld, and they will try to destroy it, and us with it. If they cannot destroy it, they must acknowledge that it is lawful and has a right to be there. If they destroy it… well, you know what will happen then. So we must not allow them to destroy it.”
Callista was looking pale and frightened. He took her face gently between his hands.
“Nothing can hurt us in the overworld unless you believe that it can.” Then he knew what was troubling her: all her life she had been conditioned to believe that her power rested in her ritual virginity.
“Take your matrix,” he commanded gently.
She obeyed hesitantly.
“Focus on it. See?” he told her, as the lights slowly gathered in the stone. “And you know your channels are clear.”
They were. And it was not only the kireseth. Freed of the enormous tensions and armoring of the Keeper’s training, the channels were no longer frozen. She could command their natural selectivity. But why had no instinct told her this?
“Damon, how and why could they allow a secret like this to be forgotten?”
It meant that no one ever had to make the cruel choice Leonie had forced on her as a child, which other Keepers for ages past had accepted in selfless loyalty to Comyn and Towers.
“How could they abandon this”—her words took in all the wonder and discovery of the night just past—“for that!”
“I do not know,” Damon said sadly, “nor do I know if they will accept it now. It threatens what they have been taught, makes their sacrifices and their suffering useless, an act of folly.”
And he felt a clutch of pain at his heart, knowing that in what he did, as with all great discoveries, there were the seeds of bitter conflict. Men and women would die to champion one or the other side in this great struggle, and he knew, with a great surge of anguish, that a daughter of his own, with the face and the name of a flower, a daughter born to him by neither of these women here in this room, would be brutally murdered for daring to try to bring this knowledge into Arilinn itself. Mercifully the knowledge blurred again; the time was now, and he dared not concern himself with past or future.
“Arilinn, as all the other Towers, is locked into a decision our forefathers made. They may have been guided by reasons which were valid then, but are not valid now. I am not forcing the Tower circles to abandon their choice, if it is truly their choice and if, after knowing the cost, knowing there is now an alternative, they choose to keep to their own ways. But I want them to know that there is an alternative, that if I, working alone and outcast, have found one alternative, then there may be others, dozens of others, and some of these others might even be more acceptable to them than the one I have found. But I am
claiming the right, for myself and my circle, to work in my own way, under such laws as seem right and proper to us.”
It seemed so simple and so rational. How could others threaten them with death or mutilation for that? Yet Callista knew that they had threatened and they would carry out the threat.
Andrew said to Ellemir, “I am not concerned for you, but I wish I could be sure this would not threaten your child.”
He knew he had hit on Ellemir’s own fear. But she said steadfastly, “Do you trust Damon or not? If he felt there was danger, he would have explained it to me, and let me make the choice in full knowledge.”
“I trust him.” But, Andrew wondered, did Damon simply feel that if they lost the coming battle it would be useless for any of them to survive anyway, including Ellemir and the baby? Firmly he cut off that line of thought. Damon was their Keeper. Andrew’s only responsibility was to decide whether or not Damon was worthy of trust and then to trust him and follow his directives, without mental reservations. So he asked, “What do we do first?”
“We build the Tower, and we establish it firmly with all our strength. It has been there for a long time, but it is what we imagine it to be.” He added to Ellemir, “You have never been in the overworld; you have only kept watch for me here. Link with me, and I will bring you there.”
With a strong mental thrust he was in the overworld, Ellemir beside him in the featureless grayness. Dimly at first, but with more clarity moment by moment in the overlight, he could make out the sheltering walls of their landmark.
At first it had been a rude shelter, like a herdsman’s hut, visualized almost accidentally. But with each successive use it had grown and strengthened, and now a true, declared Tower rose around them, with great lucent blue-shining walls, as real to his touch and step as the room in Comyn Castle where they had consummated their fourfold bond. Indeed they had brought much of that world with them, because, Damon thought, the fourfold bond and its completion was in a way the most important thing that had ever happened to any of them.
As always in the overworld he felt taller, stronger, more confident, which was the essence of it all. Ellemir, at his side, did not resemble Callista nearly as much as she did in the solid world. Physically, she and Callista were very much alike, but here where the mind determined the physical appearance, they were very unlike. Damon knew enough of genetics to wonder briefly if they were not identical twins after all. If they were not, it might mean that Callista could bear him a child without as much risk as Ellemir. But that was a thought for another time, another level of consciousness.
After an instant Callista and Andrew joined them in the overworld. He noticed that Callista had not clothed herself in the crimson robe of a Keeper. As the thought reached her she smiled and said, “I leave that office to you, Damon.”
For a duel between Keepers, perhaps he should be clothed in the ritual crimson sacrosanct to a Keeper, but he shrank from the blasphemy and suddenly knew why.
He would not fight this battle by Arilinn’s laws! He was not Keeper by their cruel life-denying laws, but he was tenerézu of an older tradition, defending his right to be so! He would wear the colors of his Domain and no more.
Andrew took up the stance of a paxman or bodyguard, just two steps behind him. Damon reached for Ellemir’s hand on his right, for Callista’s on his left, felt their fingertips lightly as a touch in the overworld always felt. He said in a low voice, “The sun rises over our Tower. Feel its strength around us. We built it here for shelter. Now it must stand here, not only for us, but as a symbol for all matrix mechanics who refuse the cruel constraints of the Towers, a shelter and a beacon for all those who will come after us.”
It seemed to Andrew, although the lucent blue walls of the Tower rose around him, that he could see the sun of the overworld through its walls. Callista had once explained it to him:
In the world of the overlight, where they were now, there was no such thing as darkness, because the light did not come from a solid sun. It came from the energy-net body of the sun, which could shine right through the energy-net body of the planet. To Andrew the red sun was enormous, a pale rim rising beyond and somehow through the Tower, shedding scattered crimson light, dripping bloody clouds.
Lightning flared around them, blinding them, and for a moment it seemed that the Tower rocked, trembled, that the very fabric of the overworld shook into grayness. It has come Damon thought, the attack they awaited. Strongly linked to one another, they felt the Tower’s walls strong and sheltering around them, while Damon flicked an explanation to Andrew and Ellemir, less experienced than himself.
They will try to destroy the Tower, but since it is our visualization of the Tower which holds it firm here, they cannot budge it unless our own perception of it falters.
One of the games of technicians in training was to fight duels in jest in the overworld, where the thought-stuff was endlessly pliable and all of their constructs could be wiped out with a thought as quickly as they had been brought into being. Although he knew it was only an illusion, Damon still felt a purely irrational twinge of physical fright as lightning bolt after lightning bolt struck the Tower, seeming to shake it with deafening thunderclaps. This could be a dangerous game, for whatever happened to the astral-world body could also happen, by repercussion, to the physical self. But behind the walls of their Tower they were safe.
They cannot harm us. And I do not want to harm them, only to be safe with my friends… but he knew they would not accept that. Sooner or later the endless attack from outside must weaken them. His only defense was to attack.
As quickly as thought they were standing together on the highest battlement of their Tower. To Andrew it felt like rock beneath his feet. He was clothed, as always in the over-world, in the grayish silvery fabric of a Terran Empire uniform, and as he became aware of it, he felt it alter. No, I am really not Terran now. He realized, with just a flicker of consciousness, that he was wearing the saddle-rubbed leather breeches and the furred riding jacket he wore for work around the estate. Well, that was now his truest self; he belonged to Armida now.
As they stood at the top of the Tower they could see the loom of Arilinn, like a flaming beacon. How, Damon wondered, had it come so near? Then he realized it was the visualization of Leonie and her circle, who had spoken of the forbidden Tower as built on their very threshold. To Damon it had seemed very distant, worlds away. But now they were close together, so close that he could see Leonie, a crimson-veiled statue, grasp handfuls of plastic thought-stuff and hurl lightning. Damon struck it in midair with his own lightning, saw it explode, crash over the circle standing on the pinnacle of Arilinn, saw a crack in the fortress Tower of Arilinn.
They perceive us as a threat to them! Why?
Only a moment, and the thunder was crashing around them again, a fierce duel of lightning bolts, hurled and intercepted, and he felt a random thought—it must be Andrew’s— I feel like Jove hurling his thunders. He wondered with an infinitesimal fragment of his consciousness who or what Jove was.
I can batter down the Tower of Arilinn, because for some reason they are afraid of us. But Leonie abruptly changed her tactics. The lightnings died and they were suddenly smothering, drowning as a rain of sickening slime cascaded over them, suffocating them, making them retch with disgust. Like dung, semen, horse manure, the trails left by the slugs who invaded the greenhouse in a wet season… they were drowning in foulness. Is this how they see what we have done? Damon struggled to clear his mind of sickness, wiping his face free of the—No, that was to give it reality. Quickly, linking hands and minds with his circle, he thickened the slime, made it the richness of fertilized soil, let it fall from their bodies until from its rich depths flowers and growing things sprang up, covering the roof of the Tower where they stood in the rioting life of an early spring blooming. They stood triumphant in the field of flowers, reaffirming life out of ugliness.
I fought the Great Cat from outside the Tower, and I triumphed. As if to affir
m the act which had brought him the awareness of his own psi power, undiminished by the years he had spent outside the Tower, he called up the Great Cat, pouring their linked minds into the image, sending it out to hover over the heights of Arilinn. While the Great Cat ravaged the Kilghard Hills and brought darkness and terror and hunger to all our people, you sat safe in Arilinn and you did nothing to help them!
The two Towers stood now so close that he could see Leonie’s face through her veil, shining with wrath and despair. In the overworld, Damon thought detachedly, she was still as beautiful as she had ever been. But he could see her for only a moment, for her face vanished in a swirling darkness which wiped out sight of her circle. Where Leonie had stood, a dragon reared upward, roaring and breathing flame. Golden-scaled, golden-clawed, towering to the sky above Arilinn, its fire showered down on the forbidden Tower. Damon felt the blistering heat, felt as if his body were crisping and withering in the fire, heard Callista cry out in agony, felt Ellemir’s terror, and for a moment wondered if Leonie must succeed after all in driving them from the overworld, forcing them back into their physical bodies…
But with the flame he also felt the awareness of a legend in Andrew’s mind: Burn us and we will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes… Reaching with all his last strength through the fire and the burning which threatened to drive them all from the overworld, Damon linked them closer still. Together they poured all their psychic force into the shifting stuff of the overworld, linking into a giant bird, feathers blazing, burning up in the ecstatic union which consumed them, their four linked minds joined. In Andrew’s mind Damon felt them curled naked together, inside a darkness, inside an unhatched egg, while the flames wholly consumed them, burned them down into ash. Then, in an ever-expanding ecstasy, the shell around them broke and they burst upward from the ashes, spreading mighty wings in a single, linked burst of flaming energy, soaring over Arilinn, triumphant… From the phoenix beak came thunder, lightning, shaking and rumbling the Tower of Arilinn. Damon saw, as if far below, the small forms of Leonie and her circle, watching in despair and dread.