“Neyrissa meant it, youngster,” said Kennard, pausing beside him.‘ “The monitor’s word is law, in cases like this. Better get some rest, or tonight will be too much for you.”
A moment of silence; then Kennard’s heavy brows went into his hairline. “Oh,” he said, “it’s like that, is it?”
Kerwin exploded. “Damn it, is there no privacy at all here?”
Kennard looked at him with a wry, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an Alton; we’re the strongest telepaths in the Comyn. And—well, I’ve lived on Terra; I married a Terran woman. So perhaps I understand more than some of the younger ones would. Don’t be offended, but—may I say something, as I would to—to a younger brother or a nephew?”
Touched against his will, Kerwin said, “Yes, of course.”
Kennard thought for a minute, then said, “Don’t blame Taniquel for leaving you alone just now, just when you feel that you need her most. I know how you feel—Zandru’s hells, how well I know!” He chuckled as if at some private joke. “But Tani knows, too. And when a matrix operation is in train, a big one like this especially, celibacy is the rule, and necessary. She knows better than to play around with that. For that matter, one of us should have talked to you about it before.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Kerwin said slowly, rebelling. “Why should it make any difference?”
Kennard answered with another question. “Why do you think the Keepers are required to be virgins?”
Kerwin hadn’t the faintest idea, but it suddenly struck him that it explained Elorie. On the surface, she was a lovely young woman, certainly as beautiful as Taniquel, but as sexless as a child of seven or eight. Rannirl had said something about ritual virginity—and Elorie was certainly as unconscious of her own beauty and desirability as the youngest, most unaware of children. Or more so; most little girls, by eight or nine, were quite aware of their own femininity and one could see in them the seeds of desirability. Elorie, somehow, seemed entirely unaware of her own womanhood.
“In the ancient days it was regarded as a ritual thing,” Kennard said. “I think that’s drivel. The fact remains that it’s terribly dangerous for a woman to work in the centerpolar position in a matrix circle, holding the energon flows, unless she’s a virgin; it has something to do with nerve currents. Even on the edges of the circle, the women observe strict chastity for a considerable time beforehand. As for you—well, you are going to need every scrap of your nervous energy and strength tonight, and Taniquel knows that. Hence, you get some sleep. Alone. And I might as well warn you, if you haven’t already found it out, that you won’t be much good to a woman for some days afterward. Don’t let it worry you; it’s just a side effect of the energy drains.” He laid a kindly, almost fatherly hand on Kerwin’s wrist. “The trouble is, Jeff, you’ve become so much a part of us that we forget you haven’t always been here; we take it for granted that you’ll know all these things without being told.”
Jeff said in a low voice, touched by Kennard’s warmth, “Thank you—kinsman.” He used the word without selfconsciousness, for the first time. If he had been foster-brother to Cleindori, Jeff’s mother— Kerwin already knew that fosterage, on Darkover, created family ties that were, in many cases, stronger than those of blood.
He asked on an impulse, “Did you know my father, Kennard?”
Kennard hesitated. Then he said, slowly, “Yes. I suppose you could say I knew him quite well. Not— not as well as I could have wished, or things might have been different. It didn’t help me to change anything.”
“What was my father like?” Kerwin asked.
Kennard sighed. He said, “Jeff Kerwin? Not much like you; you look like my sister. Kerwin was big and dark and practical; a no-nonsense kind of man. But he had imagination, too. Lewis—my brother—knew him better than I did. He introduced him to Cleindori.” Kennard frowned suddenly and said, “Look, this is no time for this. Go and rest.” He sensed that Kennard was troubled. Abruptly, whether because he sensed something, picked up an image from Kennard’s mind, Kerwin asked:
“Kennard, how did my mother die?”
Kennard’s jaw set in a tight line. He said, “Don’t ask me, Jeff. Before they consented to let you come here—” He stopped, obviously considering what to say, and Kerwin sensed that the older man was holding himself tightly blocked against Kerwin picking up even a fragment of thought. He said, “I was at Arilinn, too, then. And they asked me to come back because they were so short-handed, after—after what happened. But before they consented to let you come here, they made me—made me swear I wouldn’t answer certain questions, and that’s one of them. Jeff, the past is past. Think of today. Everybody at Arilinn, everybody in the Domains, has to put the past behind us and think of what we’re doing for Darkover and for our people.” There was a hint of old pain in his face, but he was still tightly barriered.
“Jeff, when you came here, we were all very doubtful about you. But now, win or lose, you’re one of us. True Darkovan—and true Comyn. That thought may not be as reassuring as it would be to have Tani with you,” he added, with an attempt at flippancy, “but it should help, just a little. Now go and sleep—kinsman.”
They sent for him at moonrise. The Arilinn Tower felt strange and still in the deep night, and the matrix chamber was filled with the strange resonating quiet. They gathered, speaking in hushed voices, feeling the stillness as a living thing around them, a very real presence they hated to disturb. Kerwin felt slack, empty, exhausted. He noticed that Kennard was limping more than usual; Elorie looked sleepy and cross, and Neyrissa spoke sharply when Rannirl made some jocular remark.
Taniquel touched Kerwin’s forehead, and he felt the faint feather-touch of her thoughts, the swift sure rapport. He did not flinch away from it now. “He’s all right, Elorie.”
Elorie glanced from Taniquel to Neyrissa. “You monitor, Tani. We need Neyrissa in the circle,” she explained, at Neyrissa’s injured glance. “She’s stronger; and she’s been working longer.” To Kerwin, she explained, “When we’re working in a circle like this, we need a monitor outside the circle, and Taniquel’s the best empath we have; she’ll stay in rapport with all of us, so if one of us forgets to breathe, or gets a muscle cramp, she’ll know it before we do, and keep us from being too depleted or damaged. Auster, you hold the barriers,” she directed, adding, for the benefit of the newcomer, “we all drop our individual barriers, and he puts up a group barrier which keeps out telepathic eavesdropping; and he’ll sense it if anyone tries to interfere with us. In the old days there were alien forces on Darkover; perhaps, for all we know, there still are. The barrier around the gestalt formed by our minds will protect us.”
Kennard was holding a smaller matrix lattice— one of the glass-surfaced screens like the one they had constructed. He was turning it this way and that, toward each of them, frowning and making some small adjustments on a calibrated dial. Lights glowed here and there in its depth. He said, absentmindedly, “Auster’s barrier should hold, but just for safety’s sake I’ll put a damper on, and focus it around the Tower. Second level, Rannirl?”
“Third, I think,” Elorie said.
Kennard raised his eyebrows. “Everyone in the Domains will know that something’s going on in Arilinn tonight!”
“Let them,” Elorie said indifferently. “I already asked them to take Arilinn out of the relay net tonight. It’s our affair.”
Kennard finished what he was doing with the damper, and began to lay the maps out on the table in front of them; and with them a large number of colored crayons. He asked, “Do you want me to mark the maps? Or shall we have Kerwin do it?”
“You mark them,” Elorie said. “I want Corus and Jeff in the outer circle. Corus has enough PK that sooner or later we’ll be able to do mining with him, and Jeff has a fabulous sense of structural perception. Jeff— ” She placed him just beyond Rannirl. “And Corus here.”
The great matrix lattice lay in its cradle before her.
/> Auster said, “Ready here.”
To Kerwin the moonlit silence in the room seemed to deepen; in the quiet air, it seemed that they were somehow insulated, their very breathing deepening, echoing around them. A faint picture floated through his mind, and he knew that Corus had touched him with a fragment of rapport, a strong glass wall surrounding us, clearly seen through, but impenetrable… He could sense the very walls of the Arilinn Tower, not the real Tower somehow but a mental picture of it, like but unlike, an archetypal Tower, and he heard someone in the circle thinking, It has stood here like this for hundred and hundreds of years…
Elorie’s hands were folded before her; he had been cautioned again and again, never touch a Keeper, even accidentally, within the circle, and indeed none of them ever touched Elorie, though sometimes Rannirl, who was the technician, would support her briefly with a light hand on her shoulder; and Elorie never touched anyone. Kerwin had noticed that; she could come very close to them, could hand him pills, stand close to him, but she never actually touched anyone; it was simply part of the taboo that surrounded a Keeper, banning even the most fragmentary physical touch. And yet, even though he could see her slender hands folded on the table, he felt her reach out her hands to them, and all round the circle it seemed that they linked hands, meshing into a tight grip all round; and yet to Kerwin it seemed, and he knew that each of them shared the sensation, that Elorie held one hand, and Taniquel, the monitor, the other. Kerwin swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, as Elorie’s grey eyes met his; they glimmered, like the molten shimmer of the matrix, and he felt her pick them up like a meshed web drawn between her strong hands, a net of sparkling threads in which they were embedded like jewels, each its own flashing color; the warm rose-grey of Taniquel’s watchfulness, the diamond-hard brilliance of Auster, Corus with a bright colorless luster, each of them with his or her own individual sound and color in the moonglow net that was Elorie…
Through Kennard’s eyes they saw the map spread on the table. Kerwin floated toward it, and somehow felt himself soaring out, as if he flew, bodiless, wingless, over a great expanse of countryside, with the magnet strength of the pure metallic sample that lay in the cradle beside the matrix lattice. He seemed to stretch out, infinitely extended, unaware of the limits of his body; then Rannirl projected a swift, whirling pattern, and Kerwin, without surprise, found himself tracing, with all of his mind and consciousness, a molecular model as once his fingers had traced the clay balls and sticks of the kindergarten model. Through Corus’s sensitive fingertips he felt the whirling electrons, the strange amalgam of nucleus, protons, the atomic structure of the metal they sought.
Copper. Its structure seemed to glow and swirl from the map, attuned as it was to the terrain which the map had suddenly become, he could feel the metal there. It was not, quite, like sinking into the crystal structure of the glass. It was curiously different, as if, through map and photographs that had, somehow, the texture of soil and rock and grass and trees, he traced the palpable magnetic currents and brushed aside all irrelevant atomic patterns. He was hundreds of times as sensitive to the terrain under his —hands? Surely not! Under his mind, his thoughts, but still, somehow, he was sifting the very soil in search of the glowing and complex structure of copper atoms, to where they clustered… rich deposits of ore…
Dull, throbbing pain knifed him; he twisted through the copper atoms, he had become copper, hiding within the ground, entangled with other unfamiliar electrons, other structures, so thickly entangled that it was impossible to breathe, atoms whirling and meshing and colliding. He was in the energy currents; he wandered in them and flowed in them. For a moment, disembodied sentience, he looked out through Rannirl’s eyes at the complex patterns, looked down on a strange flat-squeezed countryside, which he knew intellectually was the map, but which was still somehow the great aerial perspective of the Kilghard Hills spread out below him, hilltop eyries and crags and chasms, rocks and trees—and through it all he traced the sequences of copper atoms… He saw and felt through Kennard’s eyes, moved on the tip of an orange crayon down to the surface of the map, a mark that meant nothing, absorbed as he was in the whirl of structures and patterns, pure copper atoms entangled painfully into the complex molecules of rich ores… Kennard, he knew, followed him, measuring distances and transmuted them into measurements and marks on the maps… he moved on, interwoven with the meshing, sparkling layers of the matrix lattice, which had, somehow, become the map and the very surface of the planet… He never knew, for time ceased entirely to have meaning, how long he whirled and probed and flashed, soil, rock, lava, riding magnetic currents, how many times Rannirl’s perceptions picked him up and he rode down on the tip of Kennard’s crayon, for his whole substance to be transmuted into markings on the map… But at last the whirling slowed and stilled. He felt Corus (a liquid crystallizing, cooling into crystal) drop out of the mesh with a sensation like a shattering crash; heard Rannirl slide out of some invisible gap; felt Elorie gently open her hand and drop Kennard (invisible fingers set a doll on a table) out of the web; then pain, like the agony of breathing water, racked Kerwin as he felt himself drop in free-fall into nowhere; Auster (a glass shattering, freeing a prisoner) made a thick sound of exhaustion, sliding forward with his head on the table. An invisible rope broke and Neyrissa fell, crumpled, as if from a great height. The first thing Kerwin saw was Taniquel, sighing wearily, straightening her cramped body. Kennard’s knotted fingers, swollen and tight with pain, released a stump of crayon, and he grimaced, holding one hand with the other. Kerwin could see the swelling in the fingers, the tension in them, and for the first time was aware of the joint-disease that had crippled Kennard and would some day paralyze him if he lived so long. The map was covered with cryptic symbols. Elorie put her hands over her face with a sound like a sob of exhaustion, and Taniquel rose and went to her, bending over her with a look of concern and dismay, running her hands over her in the monitor’s touch, an inch away from her forehead.
Taniquel said, “No more. Corus’s heart nearly stopped; and Kennard is in pain.”
Elorie came on unsteady tiptoe to stand behind Rannirl and Kennard, looking at the maps. She touched Kennard’s swollen hand with the lightest of fingertip-touches, more a symbolic gesture than a real one. She said, with a swift sidelong glance at Kerwin, “Jeff did all the structural work; did you notice?”
Kennard raised his head to grin unsteadily at Kerwin. He was still absentmindedly rubbing his hands, as if they hurt him, and Taniquel came and took them gently into her own, holding them cradled softly between her soft fingers. Kerwin saw the taut lines of pain leaving the older man’s face. Kennard said, “He was there all the time, holding all the structures; it was easy with him in the net. He’s going to be as good a technician as you are, Rannirl.”
“That wouldn’t take much doing,” Rannirl said. “I’m a mechanic, not a technician; I can do a technician’s work, but I look pretty bad when there’s a real technician around. Kerwin can have my place any time he wants it; you could, Ken, if you were strong enough.”
“Thanks. I’ll leave it to Jeff, bredu,” Kennard said, with an affectionate smile at Rannirl. He leaned forward, resting his head for a minute on Taniquel’s shoulder, and Kerwin caught a fragment of her thought, he’s too old for this work, and a furious surge of resentment, we’re so damned short-handed…
“But we did it,” said Corus, looking at the map, and Elorie touched the surface of the map with a light finger. “Look, Kennard has measured every copper deposit in the Kilghard Hills, and all the places where the ores are richest, as well as those places where they are so mixed with other ores as to be practically useless. Even the depth is marked, and the richness, and the chemical composition of the ores so they will know what equipment they will need for assaying and refining.” Suddenly, through her heavy-eyed weariness, her eyes were exultant. “Show me the Terrans who could do so much, for all their technology!”
She stretched, catlike. “Do you realize wha
t we’ve done?” she demanded. “It worked, all of you—it worked! Now are you glad you listened to me? Who’s a barbarian now?” She went to Jeff, stretched her hands to him, and her delicate fingertips just touched his; a gesture, he sensed, as meaningful to Elorie, behind the structure of taboo and untouchability, as another girl’s spontaneous hug would have been. “Oh, Jeff, I knew we could do it with you, you’re so strong, so powerful, you helped us so much!”
Impulsively, his hands tightened on hers; but she drew away, her face suddenly white, and her eyes met his; he could see the flash of panic in them. She clasped her hands together in a terrified gesture, and there was sudden appeal in her eyes; but it was only a moment. Then she slumped, and Neyrissa caught the girl in her arms.
“Lean on me, Elorie,” she said gently. “You’re exhausted, and no wonder, after all that.”
Elorie swayed tiredly and covered her eyes, childishly, with her clenched fists. Neyrissa lifted her into strong arms, and said, “I’ll take her to her room and see that she eats something.”
Kerwin was aware again of his own agonizingly cramped muscles; he stretched and turned to the window, where the sun was flooding in, already high in the sky. He had not been aware of its rising. They had been within the matrix, and in rapport, for more than an entire night!
Rannirl folded the map carefully. “We’ll try again in a few days with iron samples,” he said. “Then tin, lead, aluminum—it will be easier next time, now that we know what Jeff can do in the network.” He grinned at Jeff and said, “Do you know this is the first time there’s been a full circle at Arilinn in twelve years or more?” He looked past Auster, frowning. “Auster, what’s the matter with you, kinsman? This is a time for rejoicing!”
Auster’s eyes were fixed on Kerwin with steady, unblinking malevolence. And Kerwin knew: He’s not happy that I did it.