Kennard knelt beside him and said, “Can you sit up?”
Somehow he managed it. Auster put out a hand to help him, looking sick. He said, with an unusual friendliness in his voice, “Jeff, we’ve all been through it, one way or the other. Here, lean on me.” Detached, surprised at himself, Kerwin accepted the other man’s hand. Kennard asked, “Corus, are you all right?”
Corus raised a blotched, tear-stained face. He looked sick, but he said, “I’ll live.”
Neyrissa said with gentle detachment, “You’re doing it to yourself, you know. You have a choice.”
Elorie said, in a taut voice, “Let’s get through it quickly. None of us can take much more.” She was shaking, but she stretched a hand to Corus, and Kerwin felt, like a faint snap and jolt of electricity, felt it somewhere inside his mind, the re-building of the mesh. Auster, then Rannirl, Neyrissa, dropped into place; Kennard, still holding Kerwin, dropped away and was gone. Elorie did not speak, but suddenly her grey eyes filled up all the space in the room and Jeff heard her commanding whisper:
“Come.”
With a jolt, the breath crashing from his body, he felt the impact of their meshed minds as if he had dropped into one facet of the carven crystal. A pattern flamed like a giant star of fire in his mind, and he felt himself run all around the circle, flowing like water, swirling in and out of contact; Elorie, cool, aloof, holding him at the end of a lifeline… Kennard’s gentle sureness; a feather-touch of rapport, shaky, frightened, from Corus; a sullen flare from Auster, sparks meshing, jolting apart… Neyrissa, a soft searching touch…
“Enough,” said Kennard sharply, and suddenly Kerwin was himself again, and the others were not intangible energy-swirls in the room around him, but separate people again, standing grouped around him.
Rannirl whistled. “Zandru’s hells, what a barrier! If we ever get it all the way down, Jeff, you’ll be one hell of a technician, but we’ve got to get rid of that barrier first!”
Corus said, “It wasn’t quite as bad the second time. He did make it, part way.”
Kerwin’s head was still one seething mass of fire. He said, “I thought, whatever it was you did to me—”
“We got rid of part of it,” Kennard said, and he went on speaking, but suddenly the words had no meaning. Elorie glanced sharply at Kerwin; she said something, but the words were just noise, static in Kerwin’s brain. He shook his head, not understanding.
Kennard said in Cahuenga, “Headache any better?”
“Yeah, sure,” Kerwin muttered; it wasn’t, if anything it was worse, but he didn’t have the energy to say so. Kennard didn’t argue. He took Kerwin firmly by the shoulders, led him into the next room and put him into a cushiony chair. Neyrissa said, “Here, this is my business,” came and put her light hands on Kerwin’s head.
Kerwin didn’t say anything. He was past that now. He was rocking in a giant swing, faster and faster, on a pendulum of dizzy pain. Elorie said something. Neyrissa spoke to him in a tone of urgent question, but none of it made any sense to Kerwin. Even Kennard’s voice was only a blur of meaningless syllables, verbal hash, word salad. He heard Neyrissa say, “I’m not getting through to him. Get Taniquel up here, fast. Maybe she can…”
Words rose and fell around him like a song sung in a strange language. The world blurred into grey fog and he was swinging on a giant pendulum, further and further out, into darkness and pale lights, nothingness…
Then Taniquel was there, blurring before his eyes; she fell to her knees beside him with a cry of distress.
“Jeff! Oh, Jeff, can you hear me?”
How could he help it, Kerwin thought with the unreason of pain, when she was shouting right in his ear?
“Jeff, please look at me, let me help—
“No more,” he muttered. “No more of this. I’ve had enough for one night, haven’t I?”
“Please, Jeff, I can’t help you unless you let me—” Taniquel begged, and he felt her hand, hot and painful on his throbbing head. He twitched restlessly, trying to throw it off. It felt like hot iron. He wished they would all go away and let him alone.
Then slowly, slowly, as if some tense, full vein had been tapped, he felt the pain drain away. Moment by moment it receded until at last he could see the girl clearly again. He sat up, the pain just a dim throb at the base of his brain.
“Good enough,” Kennard said briskly. “I think you’ll work out, eventually.”
Auster muttered, “It’s not worth the trouble!”
Kerwin said, “I heard that,” and Kennard gave a slow, grimly triumphant nod.
“You see,” he said. “I told you so. I told you it was worth the risk.” He drew a long, weary sigh.
Kerwin lurched to his feet and stood there, gripping the chair back. He felt as if he had been dragged through a wringer, but he was painfully at peace. Taniquel was slumped beside his chair, grey and exhausted, Neyrissa beside her, holding her head. She said, weakly, raising her eyes, “Don’t worry about it, Jeff. I was just—just glad I could do something for you.”
Kennard looked tired, too, but triumphant. Corus looked up and smiled at him, shakily, and it struck Kerwin, with a curious wrench, that the boy had been crying over his pain. Even Auster, biting his lip, said, “I’ve got to give you this. You’re one of us. You can’t blame me for doubting, but—well, don’t hold it against me.”
Elorie came and stood on tiptoe; close enough to embrace him, though she didn’t. She raised one hand and touched his cheek, just a feather-touch with the tips of her fingers. She said, “Welcome, Jeff-the-barbarian,” and smiled into his eyes.
Rannirl linked arms with him as they went down the stairs to the hall where they had met earlier that night. “At least, this time, we can decide for ourselves what we want to drink,” he said, laughing, and Kerwin realized that he had come through the final ordeal. Taniquel had accepted him from the beginning, but now they all accepted him with the same completeness. He, who had never belonged anywhere, was now overwhelmed with the knowledge of how deeply he belonged. Taniquel came and sat on the arm of his chair. Mesyr came and asked if he wanted something to eat or drink. Rannirl poured him a glass of a cool, fragrant wine that tasted faintly of apples, and said, “I think you’ll like this; it comes from our estates.” It was incongruously like a birthday party.
Sometime later that evening he found himself next to Kennard. Sensitized to the man’s mood, he heard himself say, “You look happy about this. Auster isn’t pleased, but you are. Why?”
“Why isn’t Auster, or why am I?” Kennard asked with a twist of droll laughter.
“Both.”
“Because you’re part Terran,” Kennard replied somberly. “If you do become a working part of a matrix circle—actually inside a Tower—and the Council accepts it, then there’s a chance the Council will accept my sons.”
He frowned, looking over Kerwin’s head into a sad distance.
“You see,” he said at last, “I did what Cleindori did. I married outside Comyn—married a woman who was part Terran. And I have two sons. And it sets a precedent. I would like to think that one day, my sons could come here…” He fell silent. Kerwin could have asked a dozen more questions, but he sensed that this wasn’t the time. It didn’t seem to matter. He belonged.
* * *
Chapter Eight: The World Outside
« ^ »
The days slipped by in Arilinn and Kerwin soon began to feel as if he had been there all his life. And yet, in a curious way, he was like a man lost in an enchanted dream, as if all his old dreams and desires had come to life and he had stepped into them and closed a wall behind him. It was as if the Terran Zone and the Trade City had never existed. Never, in any world, had he felt so much at home. Never had he belonged anywhere as he belonged here. It made him almost uneasy to be so happy; he wasn’t used to it.
Under Rannirl’s guidance, he studied matrix mechanics. He didn’t get too far with the theory; he felt that maybe Tani had the right idea when she ca
lled it magic. Spacemen didn’t understand the mathematics of an interstellar drive, either, but it worked. He was quicker in learning the simpler psychokinetic feats with the small matrix crystals; and Neyrissa, the monitor, taught him to go into his own body, searching out the patterns of his blood flowing in his veins, to regulate, quicken or slow his heartbeats, raise or lower his blood pressure, watch over the flows of what she called the channels, and what Kerwin suspected would have been called, by Terran medics, the autonomic nervous system. It was considerably more sophisticated than any biofeedback technique he had ever known in the Terran Zone.
He made less progress in the rapport circle. He had learned to take his turn—with Corus or Neyrissa at his side—in the relays, the communication network of telepaths between the Towers, which sent messages and news of what was happening, between Neskaya and Arilinn and Hali and faraway Dalereuth; messages that still meant little to Jeff, about a forest fire in the Kilghard Hills, an outbreak of bandit raids far away on the fringes of the Hellers, an outbreak of a contagious fever in Dalereuth, the birth of triplets near the Lake Country; citizens, too, came to the Stranger’s Room of the Tower and asked that messages be sent through the relays, matters of business or news of births and deaths and the arrangement of marriages.
But in the working of the circle he was less successful. He knew they were all anxiously watching his progress, now that they had accepted him; it seemed sometimes that they watched over him like hawks. Taniquel insisted they were pushing him too fast, while Auster glowered and accused Kennard and Elorie of coddling him. But as yet he could endure only a few minutes at a time in the matrix circle. It wasn’t, evidently, a process that could be hurried; but he gained a few seconds a day, holding out longer each time under the stresses of contact before he collapsed.
The headaches continued, and if anything they got worse, but for some reason it didn’t discourage any of them. Neyrissa taught him to control them, a little, by regulating the inner pressure of the blood vessels around the eye sockets and inside the skull. But there were still plenty of times when he found himself unable to endure anything but a darkened room and silence, with his head splitting. Corus made up rude jokes about him, and Rannirl predicted pessimistically that he’d get worse before he got better, but they were all patient with him; once, even, when he was shut up with one of the blinding headaches, he heard Mesyr—whom he had thought disliked him— remonstrating with Elorie, whom she obviously adored, for making noise in a hallway outside the corridor of his room.
Once or twice, when it got too bad, Taniquel came unasked to his room and did the trick she had done the first night, touching his temples with light fingers and draining the pain away as if she had tapped a valve. She didn’t like doing it, Kerwin knew; it exhausted her, and it scared Kerwin—and made him ashamed, too—seeing her so grey and haggard afterward. And it infuriated Neyrissa.
“He has got to learn to do it for himself, Tani. It is not good for you, or for him either, if you do for him what he can and must learn to do for himself! And now look at you,” she scolded, “you have incapacitated yourself, too!”
Taniquel said faintly, “I can’t endure his pain. And since I have to feel it anyway, I may as well help him.”
“Then learn to barrier yourself,” Neyrissa admonished. “A monitor must never become so deeply involved, you know that! If you go on like this, Tani, you know very well what will happen!”
Taniquel looked at her with a mischievous smile. “Are you jealous, Neyrissa?” But the older woman only frowned at Kerwin angrily, and went out of the room.
“What was all that about, Tani?” Kerwin asked, but Taniquel did not answer. Kerwin wondered if he would ever understand the small interactions among the people here, the courtesies and the things left unsaid in a telepathic society.
And yet he had begun to relax. Strange as the Arilinn Tower was, it wasn’t a magical fairy-tale castle, just a big stone building where people lived. The gliding, silent, nonhuman servants still made him a little uneasy, but he didn’t have to see much of them, and he was getting used to their silent ways and learning to ignore them as the others did, unless he wanted something. The place wasn’t all wizard and hobgoblin. The enchanted tower wasn’t enchanted at all. For some curious reason he felt pleased when he discovered a leak in the roof, right over his room, and since no workman or outsider could come inside the Veil, he and Rannirl had to climb up on the dizzily sloping roof and fix it themselves. Somehow that prosaic incident made the place more real to him, less dreamlike.
He began to learn the language they spoke among themselves—they called it casta—for, while he could understand and telepathically, he knew that sooner or later he would have to deal with local non-telepaths. He read some history of Darkover from the Darkovan, not the Terran point of view; there weren’t many books, but Kennard was something of a scholar, and had an extensive history of the days of the Hundred Kingdoms—which seemed, to Jeff, somewhat more complicated than that of medieval Europe—and another of the Hastur Wars which, at the end of the Ages of Chaos, had united most of the countryside under the Seven Domains and the Comyn Council. Kennard warned him that accurate history was all but unknown; these had been compiled from tradition, legend, old ballads, and stories, since for almost a thousand years writing had been left to the brothers of Saint Valentine at Nevarsin Monastery, and literacy had been all but lost. But from all this Jeff gathered that at one time, Darkover had had a highly developed technology of the matrix stones, and that its misuse had reduced the Seven Domains to a chaotic anarchy, after which the Hasturs had formed the system of Towers under the Keepers, pledged to chastity to avoid dynastic squabbles, and bound by vows and severe ethical principles.
He had begun to lose track of time, but he thought he had been at Arilinn for three or four tendays when Neyrissa, at the end of a training session, said unexpectedly, “I think you could function as monitor in a circle now, without too much difficulty. I’ll certify you as monitor, and give you the oath, if you want me to.”
Jeff regarded her in astonishment and dismay. She mistook his surprise and said, “If you would rather take the oath at Elorie’s hands, it is your lawful right, but I assure you, in practice we don’t trouble the Keeper with such things; I am fully qualified to receive your first oath.”
Kerwin shook his head. He said, “I’m not sure I want to take any kind of oath! I wasn’t told—I don’t understand!”
“But you cannot work in the circle without the monitor’s oath,” Neyrissa said with a faint frown. “No one trained at Arilinn would ever consider it. Nor would anyone from another Tower be willing to work with you, unsworn—why don’t you want to take the oath?” She regarded him with dismay and the suspicion that had vanished from all their eyes except Auster’s. “Are you proposing to betray us?”
It was a minute or two before Kerwin realized she had not spoken that last sentence aloud.
She was, he realized, old enough to be his mother; he wondered, suddenly, if she had known Cleindori, but would not ask. Cleindori had betrayed Arilinn. And Kerwin knew her son would never be free of that stigma, unless he earned the freedom.
He said slowly, “I wasn’t told I would have to take oaths. It’s not, in general, a Terran custom. I don’t know what I would have to swear to.” He added, on an impulse, “Would you take an oath you didn’t know, without knowing to what it bound you?”
Slowly the suspicion and anger left her face. She said, “I hadn’t thought of that, Kerwin. The monitor’s oath is taken even of children when they are tested here. Other oaths may be asked of you later, but this one binds you only to basic principles; you swear never to use your starstone to force the will or conscience of any living thing, never to invade the mind of any other unwilling, and to use your powers only for helping or healing, and never to make war. The oath is very old; it goes back to the days before the Ages of Chaos, and there are those who say it was devised by the first Hastur when he gave a matrix to his first paxm
an; but that’s a legend, of course. We do know it has been formally given in Arilinn since the days of Varzil the Good, and perhaps before.” She added, with a scornful twist of her thin mouth, “Certainly there is nothing in a monitor’s oath that could offend the conscience of Hastur himself, let alone a Terranan!”
Kerwin thought about that a moment. It had been a long time since anyone had called him that; not since his first night here. Finally he shrugged. What had he to lose? Sooner or later he would have to put aside his Terran standards, choose Darkovan principles and ethics, and why not now? He shrugged. “I’ll take your oath,” he said.
As he repeated the archaic words—to force no living thing against will or conscience, to meddle unasked with no mind nor body save to help or heal, never to use the powers of the starstone to force the mind or conscience—he thought almost for the first time of the truly frightening powers of the matrix in the hands of a skilled operator. The power to interfere with people’s thoughts, to slow or speed their heartbeats, check the flow of blood, withdraw oxygen from the brain… a truly terrifying responsibility, and he suspected that the monitor’s oath had much the same force as the Hippocratic oath in Terran medicine.
Neyrissa had insisted that the oath be taken in rapport—it was customary, she said, and he suspected that the reason was to monitor any mental reservations, a rudimentary form of lie-detector, which was so normal between telepaths that he realized it did not imply lack of trust. As he spoke the words—understanding, now, why they were being exacted, and realizing that he genuinely meant them —he was aware of Neyrissa’s closeness; somehow it felt as if they were physically very close together, although actually the woman was sitting at the far end of the room, her head lowered and her eyes bent on her matrix, not even looking at him. As soon as Kerwin had finished, Neyrissa rose quickly and said, “I’m tired of being shut up indoors; let’s go out into the air. Would you care for a ride? It’s still early, and there’s nothing much to do today, neither of us is listed for the relays. What would you say to hawking? I’d like some birds for supper, wouldn’t you?”