The next instant, her fingertips met Lian’s palms. The touch dropped them into rapport. The barriers of years and distance, of gender and the scars of living, all vanished. It was as if they had never been apart, an intimacy even closer than that which Silvana experienced when working in a matrix circle. This closeness needed no artificial enhancement of mind energy, of thought and emotion. Each flowed into the other.
For the briefest instant, Silvana felt a wrenching of her own hope, her own unacknowledged desire. She had indeed been Lian’s childhood heart mate, and in some corner of her own thoughts, she had expected the bond to be lifelong and mutual. Lian had grown into a fully functional adult, capable of the depth of attachment necessary for the Change. But not with her, not as the male who might have been her lover.
The sorrow lasted only a fraction of a heartbeat. Lian radiated both contentment and delight to such a degree that Silvana felt herself swept up, carried away, incandescent with happiness. Laughter, sweet as a mountain stream, rang out. She could not tell whether it was her own or Lian’s, and she did not care.
As the rapport faded, a dozen thoughts leaped into Silvana’s mind. She felt awkward again, a little embarrassed at having expected that although she might have changed, Lian had remained as they had parted.
I have never ceased to love you, Kierestelli, Lian said, speaking mind to mind.
“My heart friend,” the words sprang from her mouth. “Nothing is as I imagined it.”
Not the constancy of her father’s love, not her mother’s grief at their separation, not the secret hopes she had harbored about returning here. Perhaps not even who she was, what it meant to be a Keeper . . . and her place among the Comyn as the daughter of a man who could have been king.
She had kept herself apart for so much of her adult life, how could she know?
“No,” Lian said. “It is better.”
Silvana caught a vivid impression from Lian’s mind, a kaleidoscope of images and sensations, a strange chieri, tall as all those people, but strong, with a quintessential masculine beauty like her father’s, hair like a river of iridescence, dancing together with Lian, dancing in ecstasy beneath the four moons . . .
She found herself gasping, dazzled into breathlessness by the shared memory. Tears stung her eyes, and her heart ached, though not with sorrow.
David put an arm around each of them, ever and always human. “Take a little time with us, Stelli, as much as you need. Talk, rest, think things through. Wander through these woods. You’re safe among those who love you.”
20
At the end of Lian’s last day, the two of them hiked high into the mountains. Silvana carried a blanket and a little food in her pack, for she was not sure how late they might lie out under the stars. The meadow where they used to play as children was smaller than she remembered, but she could not decide if that was because the entire world had been bigger then or because the trees were slowly encroaching on the open space.
The day’s warmth clung to the grass. When she lay down on it, forgoing the blanket, the smell of honey and fresh green rose up. It would linger on her skin, in her hair, evoking memories of childhood’s long, dreamy days.
They lay side by side, silent and still, an arm’s length apart, while the light drained from the sky. Silvana felt as if she were floating in a cloud-lake spun of twilight and the sounds of night-rousing birds. Her mind and Lian’s had been in light rapport, so subtle and sensitive that she could sense the beating of the baby’s heart.
In a way, it is my child, too.
Yes, dearest heart friend, as it belongs to all of us. As we belong to one another.
Sadness hovered on the borders of Silvana’s thoughts. Her sojourn, like Lian’s, was nearing its end. No one had to tell her that. She simply knew that she could not stay, not because she was not welcome but because her life had a different shape, a different rhythm.
When she met Lian’s gaze, she looked into the mirror of her own soul. They were not the same, but each embodied the best blending of human and chieri. Each had been conceived on a night when differences had fallen away, when there had been no boundaries between lovers.
Lian looked away, up to the stars that even now had grown from pinpoints against the lavender dusk to a veil of brilliance. Already the temperature was falling.
Silvana rolled on to her side and propped herself up on one elbow. Lian looked so peaceful, wanting nothing more than what this glorious night offered, but Lian was half chieri and had been raised in harmony with the forest. She, on the other hand, was entirely human, had come to the trees in fear and confusion, and had spent the better part of her adult life trying to maintain her distance from her own people. Certainly, she had done everything she could to prevent her family from learning her whereabouts.
She had to go back. She knew it, and she also knew that she could not take the peace of this moment, the joy of her psychic bond with Lian, with her. A dozen questions buzzed around her mind like angry bees, none of them worth asking. The ones Lian would answer, she already knew the response to, but the ones she could not figure out—What should I say to my mother? Can my life as a Keeper ever go back to what it was before?—no one could tell her.
A ripple passed through the serenity of Lian’s mind. “You are troubled, heart friend.”
“It is the human condition.” She smiled in gentle self-mockery. “We are always between one thing and another, always wanting whatever we do not have. I don’t know why I thought it might be different here. I have changed my location but not what lies within me.”
“You had not come to terms with your past—why you came here, why you left—in your time in the Tower?”
She shook her head. “I learned to examine my thoughts and motives in every area of my life except this. Now I know that my father came back for me, it has eased the bitterness but given me no new direction. I am a Hastur, daughter of a king, but I don’t know what that means. Do I have responsibilities beyond those I have taken on for myself? What do I owe Darkover? My mother? The Comyn? And what do they owe me? It’s very confusing.”
“Confusing, yes. Humans and all things that pertain to them are, or so my father has taught me.” Cloth rustled on grass as Lian shifted position, easing the weight of the baby. “This is a time of change for all of us, my people as well.”
“Two new children—”
“Much more than that. Yes, my people rejoice because we now have hope when before there was none, but it cannot be more than a slim one. I spoke of the change that has come over our entire world. The—” Lian used a word that meant, roughly, Those-who-show-the-earth-disrespect—“changed Darkover when they removed their ships, but they are not gone.”
Despite herself, Silvana glanced skyward. She saw nothing amiss among the stars, but what did she expect? “They still walk other worlds, I suppose, and fly their ships between them.” She wondered if the Terranan were still engaged in the war that precipitated their withdrawal.
“They do.”
“How can you know that? I have heard nothing of them over the relays.” She wondered whether her mother had contacted Nevarsin Tower for this reason.
“We used to roam the stars,” Lian said in such a way that Silvana knew the reference was to the chieri of the distant past. “In the end we returned here, to the world of our origin, and for a long time we gave no thought to everything we had learned and built. But the knowledge was not lost. Since the time of the—the time when you and I were conceived, some among us have delved again into the old learning.”
“Darkover must never again be vulnerable to those who would pillage our resources,” Silvana murmured. Her own father had stood against the World Wreckers; must she as a Hastur now answer a renewed threat?
“What must I do?” The question came as a whisper, as if she were hoping not to hear the answer.
“Dear one, I am not saying tho
se evildoers have indeed returned. But there are others . . . up there, passing . . . and setting down far across the sands. Dirav bade me speak to you of this. It was felt that you might hear it more clearly from me.”
For a long moment, neither spoke. Lian was waiting for her to reach her own understanding.
“That is the reason I must go back. So that I will be ready.” Silvana heard the bleakness in her own voice and dismissed it as self-indulgent. She was an adult, Comynara and Keeper. She was also Hastur, although as she had said, she did not yet know what that meant. But she would.
She peered up at the stars, like powdered gemstones strewn across a black velvet cloth, and wondered which of them was a starship . . . and what that ship might bring to Darkover.
When Silvana and Lian returned to the dwelling of Lian’s parents, Dirav was waiting. They settled around a fire made fragrant with chips of resinous wood. The flames burned with a soft blue-green hue. Keral took out a harp and sang, a wordless sweet-sad melody that Silvana remembered from her childhood. It seemed to her that the trees themselves grew quiet, listening. She drifted effortlessly on the lilting tune, her laran senses as vivid as sight or hearing, touch or taste. As the song died into silence, she found herself alone with Dirav. The others had withdrawn.
Dirav held out one hand and dropped a ruby-tinted crystal into hers. The instant it touched her skin, it came alive. She started as a twist of light flared in its depths. She held it up so that the fire’s light shone through it. It glowed with its own crimson luminosity. On closer inspection, she made out not just a single shimmering light but a multiplicity, reflection upon dancing reflection. Each had its own pattern, its own rhythm. It was as if a dozen—a hundred and more—Gifted minds had imprinted on this single gem.
She lowered the crystal and met Dirav’s gaze. How is this possible?
“When your people came to Darkover millennia ago, my people taught them the secret of the starstones, where to mine them, how to key them to individual minds, and how to build them into higher-order matrix screens.”
Silvana nodded. Some of this was the history every Tower novice learned.
“The blue starstones are the best suited to human laran,” Dirav went on, “but they are not the only type. Others can retain the imprint of a personality or even the incarnation of an elemental force.”
Like Sharra, the Form of Fire.
“And this, this is the rarest of them all. We call it a heartstone.”
Silvana closed her eyes, focusing her inner senses on the stone. She felt it resonate with her mental touch, but there was none of the amplification of laran characteristic of a blue starstone. She might, by force of will, channel her laran through it, but it was made for some other purpose. She relaxed her focus, inviting the stone to guide her, to tell her how it worked . . .
. . . and found herself linked to other minds, chieri minds, as if in a circle . . . many more than she had ever experienced . . . some in this very forest, others in mountain fastnesses. She had no sense of the effortful concentration of matrix work. Instead, ease suffused the unity, giving it a responsiveness and fluidity beyond any human circle. In this unity, distance no longer existed. Nor time, she suspected.
This is the technology we once used, shimmered through her consciousness. And now, in time of need, we remember.
With an effort, Silvana detached a part of her thoughts from the chieri-unity. Her vision doubled into overlapping images of what she saw with her physical eyes and what she felt with deeper, surer senses. “Time of need?”
“Others,” Lian had said. “Up there, passing . . . and setting down far across the sands.”
Cool, slender fingers closed over hers. “You may have occasion to call upon us. Just because we have withdrawn to the planet of our origin does not mean we have forgotten what we once knew during those times when we were equally at home in the vast reaches of space.”
Was that what the heartstone was for?
Firelight gleamed on silver-gray eyes. “One of the things. But it is not good for a human, even one accustomed to our ways and trained in laran as you are, to spend too much time in its depths.”
Reluctantly, Silvana withdrew her mind from the stone. The loss of contact felt as if a telepathic damper had just been turned on, as if part of her that had been vividly awake had been severed from her. How easy it would be to plunge back into that greater consciousness, that merging, and lose all track of time.
With trembling hands, she drew out a square of insulating silk from the pouch she wore on a cord around her neck, wrapped the heartstone, and tucked it beside her own starstone. The heartstone emitted a pulse of warmth, gently muted, and then subsided to a state that was neither inert nor completely quiescent. The ruby-touched unity hovered just at the edge of her laran senses. With it, she would never be truly alone.
When she let out her breath, she admitted to herself that she did not know what she would have done if it had not been safe to keep the two stones in such proximity. She did not think she would have had the strength to set the heartstone aside.
Dirav, watching her, gave a gesture of approval. She had passed a test. Had she been anything less than a trained Keeper, she would have succumbed.
“In time of need,” he said aloud, implying both a promise and a warning.
“In time of need, and only then,” she agreed.
21
Captain Poulos had not exaggerated his warning. From the moment the mate, Offenbach, had taken Gareth in charge, he had been assigned one physically strenuous task after another. He could not remember having worked this hard in his life, and he seemed to have been given the heaviest lifting. The reason for this had become clear during one of his infrequent breaks. One of the other crew, an older man with a potbelly and a hooked nose, explained that the Lamonica couldn’t afford to upgrade its artificial gravity, and despite a program of exercise, prolonged time in space weakened both muscle and bone. They’d been a long time looking for a safe port, meaning one where the Federation Spaceforce wouldn’t find them. They’d gotten weaker, but their cargo hadn’t gotten any less massive.
“Local labor, that’s the thing. Cheap, and the gravity don’t wear ’em down none,” Potbelly had concluded, spitting a wad of something brown and foul-smelling. It narrowly missed Gareth’s feet and landed with a squishy sound.
Local labor, indeed.
Toward dusk, Gareth lowered himself to the ground in a rough circle with the rest of Lamonica’s crew. They sat outside, relaxing in the breeze that sprang up with the lengthening shadows. It wasn’t much cooler than the rest of the air and carried a bitter tang, but it was better than the stale, heavy air of the prefab structures. Gareth had not yet had the chance to go inside the ship itself, but he understood from the other men that the air there was even worse.
Gareth rested his forehead against his folded arms on his knees. He wished he had the privacy to take out his starstone and attempt a little laran healing on himself. Grandmother Linnea had taught him only the most basic monitoring, but with the proper motivation, such as aching in every joint and muscle, he was sure he could figure the rest out.
“You’re all right,” Potbelly said to Gareth, punching him none too gently in the shoulder.
“For a native,” one of the other men quipped, but without malice.
“If you off-worlders are so superior,” Gareth groaned, “you can carry my share tomorrow.”
“Shy-oot up, Taz,” one of the others said.
“Shy-oot? Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“Gods of space, not another of Robbard’s bad jokes! Spare the poor boyo!”
“Spare you, you mean!” The repartee went back and forth, with no one having much energy to take it beyond a few enigmatic jibes.
“What’s in those crates, anyway?” Gareth spoke up when the pauses lengthened. “Rocks?”
“Nothing you need to know about,” Robbard said, an edge in his voice.
“Leave the kid be,” said Taz. “It’s just a question. If you’d been hauling several times your sorry weight all day, you might want to know it was worth the while.”
“Kid doesn’t need to know.” Robbard squinted against the sun, low against the line of western hills. “Captain wouldn’t like it.”
Gareth kept his head down. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“Robbard’s right,” Potbelly said. “It’s safer not to ask. Curiosity’s not too healthy in certain lines of work, if you take my meaning. If Captain Poulos wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”
Offenbach stuck his head out of one of the smaller structures. “Grub!”
With the others, Gareth collected a packet of food cubes and a cup of some synthetic material. He shook his head at the offer of a ration of space grog. One whiff convinced him of its potency, and he had no intention of impairing his faculties. The food cubes foamed up into thick paste on contact with the air. Some of the crew scooped it up with their fingers, others took out metal spoons. Gareth found the concoction flat and unappetizing, although he assumed it was nutritionally adequate. The roasted antelope and spiced grain he’d eaten at Nuriya faded into a dream that had happened to someone else.
He drew out a cup from the water cask, then paused. It looked and smelled safe enough, although with the alkali reek characteristic of oasis water. He’d been drinking it all day without a thought.
“Something wrong?” Taz appeared at his elbow.
“N-no. I was just wondering. This water’s local, isn’t it?”
“You think we got fuel to burn, carting around our own water? Nah, we get it dirtside.”
Gareth shrugged. Water was heavy, as he’d learned from their trek across the Sands of the Sun. “From the village?”