Lying awake, aflame with jealous rage, Kerwin fought a solitary battle, and toward morning came to grim equilibrium. The woman wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t going to let Auster wreck things for him. They had to work together, somehow or other. It was galling to lose out to Auster, but after all, it was only his pride that was involved. If Taniquel wanted Auster, she was welcome to him. She’d made her choice, and she could just stick to it.
It wasn’t ideal, but it worked, after a fashion. Taniquel was polite and icily remote, and he took his tone from her. Once again they began the work of building matrix screens, keying them into maps and aerial photographs; again they gathered for the circle, searching out iron deposits, and a few days later, silver and zinc. They day before they were to go into a fourth rapport search, Jeff came in from a solitary ride in the foothills to find Corus waiting for him, pale and excited.
“Jeff! Elorie wants us all in the matrix chamber, quickly!”
He followed the kid, wondering what had happened. The others were already gathered there, Rannirl with the maps in hand.
“Trouble,” he said. “I had word from our clients, just after I passed this map to them. In three separate places, here, here, and here— ” he indicated on the marked maps, “the people from across the Hellers, the damned Aldarans and their men, have moved in and filed claims on the lands we marked as being the richest deposits of copper; you know as well as I do that the Aldarans are pawns of the Terrans, with their Trade City at Caer Donn; they’re fronting for the Empire, claiming that land to set up a Terran industrial colony there. It’s empty land in the Hellers, not good for agriculture, and I don’t think anyone’s ever guessed it was good for mining; it’s too inaccessible. How did they know?”
“Coincidence,” Neyrissa said. “You know the people from Aldaran are close to the forge-folk. They’re always prospecting for metals, and they use fire-talismans in the hills the way we use matrix circles.”
Auster said angrily, “I can’t believe it’s coincidence! That this should happen the very first time Jeff is part of the circle! The front men for Terra move in on the richest claims, leaving us nothing to offer our clients but some weak ores, almost impossible to smelt! Not one, not two, but three of the claims!” He swung around angrily to face Kerwin. “How much did the Terrans pay you to betray us?”
“If you believe that, damn you, you’re more of a fool than I ever thought!”
Taniquel said angrily, “I know you don’t like Jeff, Auster, but this is outrageous! If you believe that, you’d believe anything!”
“It’s bad luck,” Kennard said, “but that’s all it is; sheer bad luck.”
Auster raged, “Once, I would believe coincidence; twice, coincidence and bad luck. But three times? Three? It’s coincidence like work for the midwife after a Ghost Wind is coincidence!”
Elorie frowned. She said, “Hush, hush! I won’t have this brawling! There is one way to settle it, Kennard. You’re an Alton. He can’t lie to you, Uncle.”
Kerwin knew immediately what she meant, even before she turned to him and said, “Will you consent to telepathic examination, Jeff?”
Rage surged through him. “Consent to it? I demand it,” he said. “And then, damn it, I’ll make you eat those words, Auster, I’ll cram them down your throat with my fist!” He faced Kennard, rage making him oblivious to the fear of facing that nightmarish probe. “Go ahead! Find out for yourself!”
Kennard hesitated. “I don’t really think—”
“It’s the only way,” said Neyrissa briskly. “And Jeff is willing.”
Kerwin closed his eyes, bracing himself for the painful shock of forced rapport. No matter how often it was done, it never became easier. He endured it for a moment, incredible intrusion, nightmarish violation, before the grey and merciful haze blotted out the pain. When he came to he was standing before them, gripping the edges of the table to keep from falling over. He heard his own breathing loud in the silent room.
Kennard was looking back and forth from him to Auster.
“Well?” Jeff demanded, his voice angry and defensive.
“I have always said that we could trust you, Jeff,” Kennard said quietly, “but there is something here. Something I do not understand. There is some blocking of your memory, Jeff.”
Auster said, “Could the Terrans have given him some kind of post-hypnotic conditioning? Planted him on us—a time bomb?”
“I assure you,” Kennard said, “you overestimate their knowledge of the mind. And I can assure you, Auster, that Jeff is not feeding them information. There’s no guilt in him.”
But a cold bleak horror had suddenly gripped Jeff by the throat.
Ever since arriving on Darkover he had been pushed around by some mysterious force. It had certainly not been the Comyn who destroyed his birth records, and the records of Jeff Kerwin who had claimed him, and gotten Empire citizenship for him, in the Terran computers. It had not been the Comyn who kept pushing him around until he had no place to go, and he had escaped; escaped to the Comyn.
Had he been planted on them, an unconscious spy within the Arilinn Tower?
“I never heard anything so damnably foolish,” Kennard said angrily. “I’d as soon believe it of you, Auster; or of Elorie herself! But if there’s this kind of suspicion among us, no one will benefit but the Terrans!” He took up the map. “More likely it’s one of the Aldarans; they have some telepaths there, and they work with unmonitored matrixes, outside the Tower relays. Your barrier may have slipped, Auster; that’s all. Call it bad luck and we’ll try again.”
* * *
Chapter Twelve: The Trap
« ^ »
He tried to dismiss the idea from his mind. After all, Kennard had warranted him guiltless after telepathic examination. That was, he knew, legal defense anywhere. But once roused, the idea persisted like pain in a nagging tooth.
Would I even have to know it, if the Terrans had planted me here?
I was so damned glad to be free of the Terran Zone that I didn’t even ask questions. Like, why did the computer at the Spaceman’s Orphanage have no records of me? They said that Auster, too, was born among the Terrans. I wonder if there’s a record of him there? Is there any reason why a telepath with a matrix, as Ragan suggested, couldn’t wipe the memory bank of a computer—clear it of one specific record? Everything he knew of computers, and everything he knew of matrixes, suggested that that wouldn’t be a difficult trick at all.
He went through the days silent and morose, lying on his bed for hours and trying to think of nothing, riding alone in the hills. He was conscious of Taniquel’s eyes watching him whenever he was with the others, feeling her sympathy (damned bitch, I don’t want her pity!) and the pain of her awareness. He avoided her when he could, but the memory of their little time as lovers cut like a knife. Because it had gone so much deeper with him than any casual relationship, it could not be casually dismissed; it stayed with him, painful.
He was vaguely aware that she was trying to encounter him, alone; he took perverse pleasure in evading her. One morning, however, he met her face to face on the stairs.
“Jeff,” she said, reaching out her hand to him. “Don’t run away—please, don’t keep running away. I want to talk to you.”
He shrugged, looking over her head. “What’s there to say?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and spilled over. “I can’t stand this,” she said, brokenly. “The two of us like enemies, and the Tower filled with—with spear-points of hate and suspicion! And jealousy—”
He said, the ice of his resentment giving way before the genuineness of her pain, “I don’t like it either, Tani. But it wasn’t my doing, remember.”
“Why must you—” She controlled her temper, biting her lip. She said, “I’m sorry you’re so unhappy, Jeff. Kennard explained to me, a little, how you felt about it, and I’m sorry, I didn’t understand—”
He said, knifing the words with heavy sarcasm, “If I’m unhappy enough, would you co
me back to me?” He took her, not gently, by the shoulders. “I suppose Auster’s got you to thinking the worst of me, that I’m a spy for the Terrans, or something like that?”
She was quiet between his hands, making no effort to break away. She said, “Auster isn’t lying, Jeff. He’s only saying what he believes. And if you think he is happy about it, then you are very much mistaken.”
“I suppose his heart would be broken if he managed to drive me away?”
“I don’t know, but he doesn’t hate you the way you feel that he does. Look at me, Jeff, can’t you tell I’m telling you the truth?”
“I suppose you ought to know just what Auster’s feeling,” he said, but Taniquel’s shoulders were trembling, and somehow the sight of Taniquel, the mischievous, the carefree, in tears, hurt worse than the suspicions of all the others. That was the hell of it, he thought wearily. If Auster had been lying out of malice, if Taniquel had left him for Auster in order to hurt him to make him jealous, he could at least have understood that kind of motivation. As it was, it was a complete mystery to him. Taniquel neither attacked nor defended, even in thought; she simply shared his pain. She fell against him, sobbing, clinging helplessly.
“Oh, Jeff, we were so happy when you came, and it meant so much to us to have you here, and now it’s all spoilt! Oh, if we could only know, if we could only be sure!”
He faced them down that night in the hall, waiting until they had gathered for their evening drinks before rising aggressively, hands clenched behind his back. Defiantly he had put on Terran clothes; defiantly, he spoke Cahuenga.
“Auster, you made an accusation; I submitted to telepathic examination, which should have settled it, but you didn’t accept my word or Kennard’s. What proof would you demand? What would you accept?”
Auster rose to his feet, slender, graceful, cat-lean; he said, “What do you want from me, Kerwin? I cannot call challenge on your Comyn immunity—”
“Comyn immunity be—” Kerwin used a word straight from the spaceport gutters. “I spent ten years on Terra, and they have an expression there which can be roughly translated as put up or shut up. Tell me, right here and now, what proof you will accept, and give me a chance here and now to prove it to your satisfaction. Or shut your mouth on the subject once and forever, and believe me, brother, if I hear one damned syllable, or pick up one single telepathic insinuation, I’ll beat the stuffing out of you!” He stood, fists clenched, and when Auster stepped to one side Jeff moved too, keeping straight in front of him. “I’m saying it again. Put up, or shut up and stay shut forever.”
There was a shocked silence in the room, and Jeff heard it with satisfaction. Mesyr made a small, remonstrating noise, almost an admonitory cluck: Now, children…
“Jeff’s right,” Rannirl said. “You can’t keep this up, Auster. Prove what you’re insinuating, or apologize to Jeff and keep your mouth buttoned about it afterward. Not just for Jeff’s sake; you owe it to all of us. We can’t live this way; we’re a circle. I don’t insist that you swear the oath of bredin, but you must somehow manage to live together in harmony. We can’t live like this, divided into two factions, with each group snarling at the other half. Elorie has enough to cope with, as it is.”
Auster looked at Kerwin. If looks could kill, Kerwin thought, Auster wouldn’t have any problem. But when he spoke, his voice was calm, considerate. “You’re right. We owe it to all of you to find out the truth once and for all. And Jeff himself has pledged to abide by the result. Elorie, can you build a trap matrix?”
“I can,” she flared. “But I won’t! Do your own dirty work!”
“Kennard can,” Neyrissa said, and Auster frowned. “Yes. But he’s prejudiced—in Jeff’s favor. He’s standing foster-father to him here!”
Kennard’s voice was quiet and dangerous. “If you dare assume that I, who have been mechanic at Arilinn since before the Changes, would falsify my oath—”
Rannirl raised his hand to stop them both. “I’ll build it,” he said. “Not because I’m on your side, Auster, but because we have to settle this one way or the other. Jeff—” He turned to Kerwin. “Do you trust me?”
Kerwin nodded. He wasn’t sure what a trap matrix was; but with Rannirl in charge of it, he was sure the trap wouldn’t be set for him.
“All right, then,” Rannirl said. “That’s settled. So until we can set the trap matrix for the next circle, can’t you two declare a truce?”
Jeff felt like saying, the hell I can, and he knew, looking at Auster’s sullen face, that the other man was equally unwilling. How could telepaths pretend? But Taniquel was on the edge of tears; and Jeff suddenly shrugged. What the hell, it wouldn’t hurt him to be civil; Auster only wanted to know the truth, and that was one thing they were agreed on anyhow. He said with a shrug, “I’ll let him alone if he lets me alone. Agreed?”
Auster’s taut face relaxed. He said, “Agreed.”
With the decision made, the tension relaxed and the next phase of the work began with an atmosphere that was, by contrast, almost friendly. This time they had to build a matrix lattice for the work known as “clearing”—which had not been done on this scale since the great days of the Comyn, when Towers dotted the land, giving power and technology to all the Domains.
They had located mineral and ore deposits and marked them for richness and accessibility. In the next step they would separate the deposits from the other minerals that contaminated them, so that the copper and other metals could be mined in a pure form without need for refining. Drop by drop, atom by atom, deep within the earth, by tiny shiftings of energy and force, the pure metals would be separated from the ores and the rock. Corus spent more time with his molecular models, fussing over precise weights and proportions. And this time, Elorie, with Rannirl, specially asked for Kerwin’s help in placing the crystals within their lattices. He was required to hold complex molecular patterns clearly visualized on a monitor screen, so that Elorie and Rannirl could place the blank crystals precisely inside the amorphous layers of glass. He learned things about atomic structure that even the Terran scientists did not know—his education in physics, for instance, had told him nothing about the nature of energons. It was wearying work, monotonous and nerve-racking rather than physically taxing, and always at the back of his mind was the knowledge of the test that would come with the trap matrix, whatever that was.
I want to know the truth, whatever it is.
Whatever it is?
Yes. Whatever it is.
One day they were working in one of the matrix laboratories, Jeff holding the complex internal crystal structure visualized for the monitor screen, when suddenly he saw the lattice structure blur together; melt into a blue flare and streak. Pain knifed through him; hardly knowing what he did, Jeff acted on pure instinct. He swiftly cut the rapport between Rannirl and Elorie, blanked the screens, and caught Elorie’s fainting body as she fell. For a panicked moment he thought she was not breathing; then her eye-lashes moved and she sighed.
“Working too hard, as usual,” said Rannirl, staring down at the lattice. “She will keep on, even when I beg her to rest. Good thing you caught her, Jeff, just when you did; otherwise we’d have the whole lattice to rebuild, and that would cost us a tenday. Well, Elorie?”
Elorie was crying weakly in exhaustion, lying limp in Jeff’s arms. Her face was deathly white, and her sobs shallow as if she no longer had the strength to breathe. Rannirl took her from Jeff’s arms, lifting her like a small child, and carried her out of the lab. He flung back over his shoulder, “Get Tani up here, and hurry!”
“Taniquel went with Kennard in the airlaunch,” Kerwin said.
“Then I’d better go up and try to get them in the relays,” Rannirl said, kicked the nearest door open with his foot. It was one of the unused rooms; it looked as if no one had set foot in it for decades. He laid the girl down on a couch covered with dusty tapestry, while Kerwin stood helplessly in the door. “Anything I can do?” he asked.
“You’
re an empath,” Rannirl said, “and qualified as a monitor; I haven’t done it in years. I’ll go up and try to get Neyrissa, but you’d better monitor her and see if her heart’s all right.”
And suddenly Kerwin remembered what Taniquel had done for him on that first night of testing, taking his pain into herself, when he collapsed with the breaking of his barriers.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said, and came closer to her. Elorie moved her head from side to side, like a fractious child. “No,” she said irritably. “No, let me be, I’m all right.” But she had to breathe twice while she said it and her face was like scraped bone.
“She’s always like this,” Rannirl said. “Do what you can, Jeff, I’ll go and find Neyrissa.”
Jeff came and bent over Elorie.
“I don’t suppose I’m as good at it as Tani or Neyrissa,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can.” Quickly, heightening his sensitivity, he ran his fingertips along her body, an inch or two away, feeling deep into the cells. Her heart was beating, but thin, irregular, threadlike; the pulse was faint, almost unreadable. Her breathing was so faint he could hardly feel it. Cautiously, he reached for rapport, seeking, with that heightened awareness, the limits of her weakness, trying to take her exhaustion upon himself as Taniquel had taken his pain. She stirred and made a faint movement, reaching with her hands for his, and he remembered how Taniquel had taken his hands in her own. The searching movement of her hands went on, and after a moment Jeff put his own between them, feeling the faint effort she made to close hers over them. She was almost unconscious. But gradually, as he knelt there with her hands in his, he could feel her breathing steady, sensed that her heart had begun to beat smoothly again, and saw the deathly white of her face beginning to transmute into a healthy color again. He did not realize how frightened he had been until he heard her breathing, calm and steady; she opened her eyes and looked at him. She was still a little pale, her soft lips still colorless.