“That seems fair enough, my lady,” Valdrin said. “But it’s only fair it should go both ways. If you can’t deliver what you say, will Comyn Council pledge itself to withdraw all objections, and let us deal with the Terrans without interference?”
Elorie said, “I can only speak for Arilinn, not for Comyn Council,” but Hastur rose. In the quiet, resonant voice that filled the Council chamber without being loud, he said, “On the word of a Hastur, it shall be so.”
Kerwin met Taniquel’s eyes, seeing the shock in them. The word of Hastur was proverbial. And now it was all in their hands—if they could indeed do what Rannirl had said they could do, what Hastur had pledged they could do. The whole future direction of Darkover hung on their success or failure. And that success or failure hung on him, on Jeff Kerwin, on “Elorie’s barbarian”—the newest member of the circle, the weak link in the chain! It was a paralyzing responsibility, and Kerwin was terrified by the implications.
The formalities of leavetaking were endless, and halfway through them Kerwin slipped away unseen, back through the courtyards and through the shimmering haze of the Veil.
It was too heavy a weight to be borne, that their success or failure should hang on him alone… and he had thought he would have more time to learn! He remembered the agony of the first rapports, and was horribly afraid. He turned into his room and flung himself down on his bed in silent despair. It wasn’t fair to demand so much of him, so soon! It was too much, to insist that the whole fate of Darkover, the Darkover he knew and loved, should depend on his untried powers!
The ghostly scent in the room felt strong to him; in a flash of remote recognition, it penetrated a closed place in his memory.
Cleindon. My mother, who broke her vows to the Comyn, for an Earthman… must I pay for her betrayal?
A flash of something, recognition, memory, hovered at the edge of his senses, a voice that said it was not betrayal… He could not identify the dark, closing door of memory, standing half-ajar, a voice…
Blinding pain struck through his head; it was gone. He stood in his room, crying out in despair. “It’s too much! It’s not fair, that it should all depend on me…” And heard the words echoing in his mind, as if from the walls, as if someone else had stood here, crying these words in the same despair.
A soft step in the room, a voice that whispered his name, and Taniquel was at his side, the web of rapport meshing between them. The girl’s face, now solemn and free of mischief, was drawn and grieved with his trouble.
“But it’s not like that, Jeff,” she whispered at last. “We trust you, we all trust you. If we fail, it’s not your doing alone. Don’t you know that?” Her voice broke and she clung to him, holding him in her arms. Kerwin, shaken with a new, violent emotion, crushed the girl to him. Their lips met; and Kerwin knew that he had been wanting this since he first saw her, through the rain and sleet of a Darkovan night, through the smoke of a Terran room. The woman of his own people, the first to accept him as one of themselves.
“Jeff, we love you; if we fail, it’s not your failure, it’s ours. You won’t be the one to blame. But you won’t fail, Jeff. I know you won’t…”
Her arms sheltered him, their thoughts blended, and the upsurge of love and desire in him was something he had never known, never guessed.
Here was no easy conquest, no cheap girl from the spacemen’s bars, to give his body a moment’s ease but leave his heart untouched. Here was no encounter to leave the aftertaste of lust in his memory, and the sickening of loneliness when he sensed, as he had sensed so often, the woman’s emptiness as deep as his own disillusion.
Taniquel. Taniquel, who had been closer than any previous lover from that first instant of rapport between them, from her first accepting kiss. How was it that he had never known? He shut his eyes, the better to taste this closeness, the closeness that was more intense than the touch of lips or arms.
Taniquel whispered, “I’ve sensed… your loneliness and your need, Jeff. But I was afraid to let myself share them until now. Jeff, Jeff—I’ve taken your pain to myself, let me share this too.”
“But,” Kerwin said hoarsely, “I’m not afraid now. I was afraid only because I felt alone.”
“And now,” she spoke his thoughts, sinking into his arms with a surrender so absolute that he seemed never to have known a woman before, “you’ll never be alone again.”
* * *
Chapter Ten: The Way of Arilinn
« ^ »
If Kerwin had visualized the planetary survey as something to be done by magic, concentration into the matrixes, a quick mental process, he was quickly shown how wrong he was. The actual rapport work, Kennard told him, would come later; meanwhile there were preparations to be made, and only the Tower telepaths themselves could make them.
It was almost impossible to focus telepathic rapport, so they explained to him, unless the object or substance had first been brought into rapport with the telepath who would be using it. Kerwin had imagined that the gathering of the materials would be done by outsiders or menials; instead, he himself, as the least skilled in actual telepathic matrix work, was put to several small technical jobs in the preliminary stages. He had learned something of metallurgy on Terra; assisted by Corus, they located samples of various metals, and, working in a laboratory that reminded Jeff of an Earth-history conception of an alchemist’s study, smelted them down and with primitive but surprisingly effective techniques, reduced them to pure form. He wondered what on earth they were going to do with those miniature samples of iron, tin, copper, lead, zinc, and silver. He was even more confused when Corus started making molecular models of these metals, kindergarten affairs with little clay balls on sticks, pausing at times to concentrate on the metals and “sound” the atomic structure with his matrix. Kerwin quickly picked up the trick of this—it was not unlike his early experiments with glass and crystal structure.
Meanwhile Taniquel was out daily in the air-launch with Auster and Kennard, examining great maps, carefully coordinating them with photographs (made on excellent Terran cameras) of the terrain. Sometimes they were away for two or three days at a time.
Taniquel had explained to Kerwin why they needed the maps and pictures of the countryside. “You see,” she explained, “the picture—and the map—becomes a symbol of that piece of ground, and we can establish rapport with it through the picture. There was a time when a good psychic could find water, or minerals in the ground, but he had to be walking over it at the time.”
Kerwin nodded; even on Earth, where psi powers were still not much regarded, there were water-finders and dowsers. But on a map?
“We don’t find them on the map, silly,” Taniquel said. “The map is a device to establish contact with that piece of land, the territory represented by the map. We could find it by pure psychism, but it’s easier if we have something that directly represents it; like a photograph. We use the map to establish the contact, and to mark what we find there.”
Kerwin supposed the principle was the same as the folk-tale of the man who killed his enemy by sticking pins in his image; but as the memory came into his mind, Taniquel blanched and said, “No one trained at Arilinn would ever, ever do such a wicked thing!”
“But the principle is the same,” Kerwin said, “using an object as a focus for the powers of the mind.” But Taniquel still would not admit it. “It isn’t the same at all! That’s meddling with the mind, and it’s unlawful and—dirty,” she said vehemently, then looked at him with suspicion. “You took the monitor’s oath, didn’t you?” she demanded, as if wondering how anyone sworn that way could even have such thoughts. And Kerwin sighed, knowing he would never understand Taniquel. They shared so much, they had been so often in rapport, he felt that she was utterly known to him: And yet there were times when, as now, she became alien, wholly a stranger.
While they were making the maps and checking their accuracy with the Terran photographs (Kerwin, who knew something of cameras from his years on Terra, wa
s pressed into service developing, printing, and enlarging the enormous aerial views), Corus finished the work of making the metal samples; then Elorie brought them in on the work of constructing the matrix lattices, or “screens.”
This was hard, demanding work, both mentally and physically; they worked with molten glass, whose amorphous structure was nevertheless solid enough to hold the matrix crystals in the desired structure, a solid network encased in glass. Corus, whose PK potential was enormously high, had the task of holding the glassy stuff in a state of liquid pliancy without heat. Kerwin attempted this several times, but it frightened him to see Elorie plunge her frail white hands into the apparently boiling mass. Rannirl said dryly that if Kerwin lost his nerve and his control they could all be badly hurt, and refused to let him have control of the glass while they were working inside it. Layer after layer of the glass was poured, Elorie activating, with her own matrix, the tiny sensitized crystals suspended inside each layer; Rannirl, standing by to take control when hers faltered; and meanwhile following the whole process on a monitor screen not unlike the one Kerwin had seen in the house of the two matrix mechanics in Thendara, monitoring the complex interior crystalline structures being built up in the layers of glass, by a process analogous to the monitoring process that Taniquel, or Neyrissa, could do with the body of one of them.
Rannirl said once, at the end of a long stint working with the lattices, “I shouldn’t say this; but Elorie is wasted as a Keeper. She has the talent to be a technician; and she never will be, because we need Keepers too badly. If there were more women willing to work as Keepers—a Keeper doesn’t need that kind of talent, a Keeper doesn’t even have to learn to monitor; she simply has to hold the energon flows. Zandru’s hells, we could use a damned machine for that. I could build an amplifier that would do it, one that any good mechanic could handle! But it’s traditional, using a Keeper’s polarities and energy flows. And I can’t even teach Elorie as much as she wants to know about mechanics; she needs all her energy for the work she does in the circle! Damn it—” He lowered his voice and said, as if he expected to be overheard and blasted, “Keepers are an anachronism in this day and age. Cleindori was right, if they could only see it!” But when Kerwin stared and asked him what he had meant, Rannirl shook his head, tightened his mouth and said, “Forget I said it. It’s a dangerous point of view.” He would say no more, but Kerwin caught a fragment of thought about fanatics who thought that a Keeper’s ritual virginity was more important than her efficiency at the matrixes, and that this point of view was going to destroy the Towers sooner or later, if it hadn’t already.
Working with them, he felt his own sensitivity growing, day by day. He had no trouble now in visualizing almost any atomic structure; the work he had done with Neyrissa, in learning to monitor his own internal organs and processes, was beginning to carry over to seeing energy fields and atomic processes, and he had no trouble in maintaining the stasis in any crystalline structure. He was beginning to sense the internal structure of other substances now; once he found himself aware of oxidation of the iron in a slowly-rusting doorhinge; in his first unsupervised effort, he pulled out his matrix and with a fierce mental effort reversed the process.
He still got the splitting headaches when he was actually working with the screens—though now he could handle a shift in the relay nets unassisted—and the effort was tremendous, racking, each expenditure of psychic energy leaving him spent and drained, his body demanding enormous quantities of food and sleep.
He understood, now, the gargantuan appetites they all had—Elorie, for instance; he had been amused at her childlike greediness for sweets, and had been astonished at seeing so frail and dainty a little girl put away quantities of food that would have satiated a horse-drover. But now he realized that he was hungry all the time; his body, drained of energy, demanded replacements with ravenous hunger. And when the day’s work was completed—or called to a halt because Elorie could not endure any more of the strain—and Kerwin could rest, or when Taniquel had a little leisure to spend with him, he found that he could only fling himself down beside her and sleep.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very ardent lover,” he apologized once, half sick with chagrin; Taniquel close to him, loving and willing, but the only desire in his body was an exhausted hunger for sleep. Taniquel laughed softly, bending to kiss him.
“I know; I’ve been around matrix workers all my life, remember? It’s always that way when there’s work in hand—you have only so much energy, and it all goes into the work, and there’s nothing left. Don’t worry about it.” She laughed, a small mischievous chuckle. “When I was training at Neskaya, we used to test ourselves, sometimes, one of the men and I; we’d lie down together—and if either of us could even think of anything but sleep, we’d know we’d been cheating, not giving all we had to the matrix work!”
He felt a sudden inner storm of jealousy for the men she had known that way; but he was really too tired to care.
She stroked his hair. “Sleep, bredu—we’ll have time together when this is over, if you still want me.”
“If I still want you?” Kerwin sat upright, staring at the girl. She lay back on the pillow, her eyes closed, the freckles pale on her pixie face, her hair loosened, sunbright on the sheets. “What do you mean, Tani?”
“Oh, people change,” she said vaguely. “Never mind that now. Here—” She pulled him gently down, her light hands caressing his forehead. “Sleep, love; you’re worn out.”
Weary as he was, the words had driven sleep from his mind. How could Taniquel doubt—or was the girl in the grip of some premonition? Since they had been lovers, he had been happy; now, for the first time, disquiet moved in him, and he had a sudden mental flash of Taniquel, hand in hand with Auster, walking along the battlements of the tower. What had been between Taniquel and Auster?
He knew Taniquel cared for him in a way he had never guessed possible with any woman. They were in total harmony. He knew, now, why his casual affairs with women had never gone beneath the surface; the unrecognized telepathic sensitivity in him had picked up the fundamental shallowness of the kind of women he had known; he had chided himself for being an idealist, wanting more than any woman could give. Now he knew it was possible; his relationship with Taniquel had brought a whole dimension into focus; his first taste of shared passion and emotion, real intimacy. He knew Taniquel cared for him; could she possibly care for him so deeply, if she cared for someone else that way?
Many disquiets began to come into focus as he lay awake, his head throbbing, of course. Now it was clear to him; everyone in the Arilinn Tower knew they were lovers. Small things he had not noticed at the time, a smile from Kennard, a meaningful glance from Mesyr, even the small interchange with Neyrissa—Are you jealous?—now took on significance.
And I never realized; in a telepath culture they would take it for granted, there would be no such thing as privacy and I never understood… Suddenly the thought was violent, embarrassing: Telepaths all, were they reading his thoughts, his emotions, spying on what he had shared with Taniquel? Scalding embarrassment flooded him, as if he had had some shameful dream of walking naked in the public square and waked to find that it was true…
Taniquel drowsily holding his hand, curled against him, jerked awake as if touched by a live wire. Indignation flamed in her face.
“You—you are a barbarian,” she raged. “You— you Terranan!” She scrambled out of bed and caught up her dressing-gown; quickly she was gone, her light footsteps dying away with an angry pattering on the uneven floor. Kerwin, baffled at her sudden rage, lay with his head throbbing. He told himself that this would not do, he had work to do the next day, and lay down, trying hard to apply the techniques Neyrissa had taught him, relaxing his body, slowing his breathing to normal, trying to calm the tensions in his body by controlling his breath, to ease the blood pounding in his temples. But he was too confused and dismayed for much success.
But when they met again, she was gent
le and affectionate as ever, greeting him with her spontaneous embrace. “Forgive me, Jeff, I shouldn’t have been angry. It was unfair of me. It’s not for me to blame you, that you’ve lived among the Terranan and picked up some of their—their strange ways. You’ll come to understand us better, in time.”
And with the reassurance of her arms around him, her emotions meshing with his, he could not doubt the sincerity of her feelings.
Thirteen days after Hastur’s visit to Arilinn, the matrixes were prepared; and later that same day, in the great hall, Elorie told them, “We can begin the first surveying operation tonight.”
Kerwin felt last-minute panic. This would be his first experience in the prolonged rapport of a matrix circle.
“Why at night?” he asked.
It was Kennard who answered. “Most people sleep during the dark hours; we get less telepathic interference—in radio you’d call it static. There’s telepathic static, too.”
“I want all of you to get some sleep during the day,” Neyrissa said. “I want you all fresh and rested for tonight.”
Corus winked at Kerwin and said, “Better give Jeff a sedative; otherwise he’ll lie awake fretting.” But there was no malice in his words. Mesyr looked at him, questioningly.
“If you want something—”
He shook his head, feeling foolish. They talked a few minutes longer, then Elorie, yawning, said she was going to take her own advice, and went upstairs. One by one, they began to drift away from the fireside. Kerwin, not sleepy in spite of his weariness, waited, hoping Taniquel would join him. Perhaps, if she were with him, he might be able to forget the impending ordeal and relax.