I struggled back to reality. I was in Ashara’s blue-ice tower room again. Again? Had I left it? I felt giddy and confused, disoriented; but Callina threw herself at me, and the convulsive pressure of her arms, the damp fragrance of her hair and her wet face against mine, brought me back to sanity.
Over her shoulder I saw that the carven throne was empty. “Where is Ashara?” I asked numbly.
Callina straightened, her sobs vanishing without trace. Her face held a sudden, uncanny stillness. “You had better not ask me,” she murmured. “You would never believe the answer.”
I frowned. I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Had we seen Ashara at all, or only her semblance? Had Callina seen that face?
Outdoors the lights had faded; we walked through the rainy courtyard and the echoing passages without once speaking. In Callina’s matrix laboratory it was warm; I pulled off my cloak, letting the heat soak into my chilled body and aching arm, while Callina busied herself adjusting the telepathic dampers. I crossed the room to the immense screen I had seen the day before, and stared, frowning, into its cloudy depths. Transmitter.
At its side, cradled in the silk shock-absorber, was the largest matrix I had ever seen. An ordinary matrix mechanic operates the first sis. levels. A telepath can manipulate the seventh and eighth. Sharra was ninth or tenth — I had never been sure — and demanded at, least three linked minds, one of them a telepath. I could not even guess at the level of this one.
Sorcery? Unknown laws of science? They were one. But the freak Gift born in my blood, a spark in my nerves — I was Comyn, and for such things as this the Comyn had been bred.
To explain the screen fully would be impossible outside the Comyn. It captured images. It was a duplicator; a trap for a desired pattern. An automatic assembly of a set of predetermined requisites — no, I can’t explain and I won’t try.
But with my telepathic force, augmented by the matrix, I could search, without space limitation, for such a mind as we wanted. Of all the billions of human and nonhuman minds in the million worlds in spacetime, somewhere was one exactly suited to our purpose, having a certain awareness — and a certain lack of awareness.
With the screen, we could attune that mind’s vibration to this sector in spacetime; here, now, between the poles of the screen. Then, space annihilated by the matrix, we could shift the energons of mind and body and bring them here.
My brain played with words like hyperspace and dimension-travel and matter-transmitter, but those were only words.
I dropped into the chair below the screen, bending to calibrate the controls to my own cerebral pattern. I fiddled fussily with the dial, not looking up. “You’ll have to cut out the monitor screen, Callina.”
She crossed the room and touched a series of studs; the bank of lights winked out, shunting every matrix on Dark-over out of this monitor. “There’s a bypass relay through the Arilinn tower,” she explained.
A grill crackled and sent out a tiny staccato signal. Callina listened a moment, then said, “Yes, I know, Maruca. But we have cut out the main circuits. You’ll have to hold the energons in Arilinn tonight.”
She waited; then rapped out, “Put up a third-level barrier around Thendara! That is a command from Comyn; acknowledge and comply!” She turned away, sighing.
“That girl is the noisiest telepath on the planet,” she said. “I wish any other Keeper had been at Arilinn tonight. There are a few who can cut through a third-level barrier, but if I asked for a fourth—” she sighed. I understood; a fourth-level barrier would have alerted every telepath on the planet to the fact that something was going on in the Comyn Castle.
We’d chance it. She took her place before the matrix, and I blanked my mind against the screen. I shut out sense impressions, reaching to adjust the psychokinetic waves into the pattern we wanted. What sort of alien would suit us? But without volition on my part, a pattern laid itself down.
I saw, in the instant before my optic nerve overloaded and went out, the dim symbols of a pattern in the matrix; then I went blind and deaf in that instant of overload that is always terrifying.
Gradually, without external senses, I found orientation in the screen. My mind, extended to astronomical proportions, swept incredible distances; traversed, in fractional seconds, whole parsecs and galaxies of subjective spacetime. There came vague touches of consciousness, fragments of thought, emotions that floated like shadows — the flotsam of the mental universe.
Then, before I felt contact, I saw the white-hot flare in the screen. Somewhere another mind had fitted into the pattern. We had cast it out through time and space, like a net, and when we met a mind that fitted, it had been snared.
I swung out, bodiless, divided into a billion subjective fragments, extended over a vast gulf of spacetime. If anything happened, I would never get back into my body, but would float in the spacetime curve forever.
With infinite caution, I poured myself into the alien mind. There was a short but terrible struggle; it was embedded, enlaced in mine. The world was a holocaust of molten-glass fire and color. The air writhed with cold flames, and the glow on the screen was a shadow and then a clearing darkness and then an image, captive in my mind, and then-Light tore at my eyes. A ripping shock slammed through my brain, the floor seemed to rock and the walls to crash together and apart, and Callina was flung, reeling, against me as the energons seared the air and my brain.
Half stunned, but conscious, I looked up at Callina. The alien mind was torn free of mine. The screen was blank.
And in a crumpled heap on the floor, at the base of the Screen, where she had fallen, lay a slender, dark-haired girl.
CHAPTER NINE
Unsteadily, Callina knelt beside the crumpled form. I followed slowly, and bent over beside her.
“She isn’t dead?”
“Of course not.” Callina looked up. “But that was terrible, even for us. What do you think it was like for her? She’s in shock.”
The girl was lying on her side, one arm across her face.
Soft brown hair, falling forward, hid her features. I brushed it lightly back — then stopped, my hand still touching her cheek, in dazed bewilderment.
“It’s Linnell,” Callina choked. “Linnell!”
Lying on the cold floor was the girl on the spaceport; the girl I had seen in my first confused moments in Thendara.
For a moment, even knowing as I did what had happened, I thought my mind would give way. The transition had taken its toll of me, too. Every nerve in my body ached.
“What have we done?” Callina moaned. “What have we done?”
I held her tight. Of course, I thought; of course. Linnell was near; she was close to both of us; we had both been talking, and thinking of Linnell tonight. And yet…
“You know Cherillys’ two point law?” I tried to put it into simple words. “Everything, everywhere, except a matrix, exists in one exact duplicate. This chair, my cloak, the screwdriver on your table, the public fountain in Port Chicago — everything in the universe exists in one exact molecular duplicate. Nothing is unique except a matrix; but there are no three things alike in the universe.”
“Then this is — Linnell’s twin?”
“More than that. Only once in a million years or so would duplicates also be twins. This is her real twin. Same fingerprints. Same retinal eye patterns. Same betagraphs and blood type. She won’t be much like Linnell in personality, probably, because the duplicates of Linnell’s environment are scattered all over the galaxy. But in flesh and blood, they’re identical. Even her chromosomes are identical with Linnell’s.
I took up the girl’s wrist and turned it over. The curious matrix mark of the Comyn was duplicated there. “Birthmark,” I said, “but the effect is identical in her flesh. See?”
I stood up. Callina stared and stared. “Can she live in this environment, then?”
“Why not? If she’s Linnell’s duplicate, she breathes oxygen in the same ratio we do, and her internal organs
are adjusted to about the same gravity.”
“Can you carry her? She’ll get another bad shock if she wakes up in this place!” Callina indicated the matrix equipment.
I grinned humorlessly.- “She’ll get one anyway.” But I managed to scoop her up, one-armed. She was frail and light, like Linnell. Callina held curtains aside for me, showed me where to lay her. I covered the girl, for it was cold, and Callina murmured, “I wonder where she comes from?”
“She was born on a world with gravity about the same as Darkover, which narrows it considerably. Vialles, Wolf, even Terra. Or, of course, some planet we never heard of.” Her speech had impressed me as Terran; but I hadn’t told Callina about that episode on the spaceport, and didn’t intend to. “Let’s leave her to sleep off the shock, and get some sleep Ourselves.”
Callina stood in the door with me, her hands locked on mine. She looked haggard and worn, but lovely to me after the shared danger, shared weariness. I bent and kissed her.
“Callina,” I whispered. It was half a question, but she freed her hand gently and I did not press her. She was right. We were both desperately exhausted. It would have been raving insanity. I put her gently away and went out without looking back. It was raining hard, but until the wet red morning rose sunlessly over Thendara I paced the courtyard, restless, and the drops on my face were not all rain.
Toward dawn I fought back to self-control, and went back to the Keeper’s Tower. I was afraid that without Callina at my side I would not find a way into the blue-ice room, or that Ashara had vanished into some inaccessible place. But she was there; and such was the illusion of the frosty light, or of my tired eyes, that she seemed younger, less guarded; like a strange, icy, inhuman Callina. My brain almost refused to think clearly, but I finally managed to formulate my plea.
“You can see — time. Tell me. The child Dyan calls mine—”
“It is yours,” Ashara said.
“Who—”
“I know. You’ve been celibate, except for Diotima Ridenow Comyn, since your Marjorie died.” She looked right through my astonished stare. “No, I didn’t read your mind, I thought the Ridenow girl might be suitable to train as I — as I trained Callina. She was not. I’m not concerned with your moralities or Diotima’s; it’s a matter of physical nerve alignments.” She went on, passionlessly, “Hastur would not accept the bare word of those who brought the child; so he brought her to my keeping for search. She is here in the Tower. You may see her. She is yours. Come with me.”
To my surprise — I don’t know why, but somehow I had felt that Ashara could not leave her strange blue-ice room-she led me through another of the bewildering blue doors and into a plain circular room. One of the furry nonhuman mutes — the servants of the Keeper’s Tower — scurried away on noiseless padded feet.
In the cool normal light Ashara’s flickering figure was colorless, almost invisible. I wondered; was it the sorceress herself, or merely a projection she wanted me to see? The room was simply furnished, and on a narrow white cot at the center, a little girl lay fast asleep. Pale reddish-gold hair lay scattered on the pillow.
I went slowly to the child, and looked down. She was very small; five or six, maybe younger. And as I looked down I knew they had told the truth. In ways impossible to explain, except to a telepath and an Alton, I knew; this was my own child, born of my own seed. The tiny triangular face bore not the slightest resemblance to my own; but my blood knew. Not my father’s. Not my brother’s. My own. My flesh.
“Who was her mother?” I asked softly.
“You’ll be happier all your life if I never tell you.”
“I can take it! Some light woman of Carthon or Daillon?”
“No.”
The child murmured, stirred and opened her eyes. I took one step toward her — then turned, in an agony of appeal, on Ashara. Those eyes, those eyes, gold-flecked amber…
“Marjorie,” I said hoarsely, painfully, “Marjorie died, she died…”
“She is not Marjorie Scott’s daughter.” Ashara’s voice was clear, cool, pitiless. “Her mother was Thyra Scott.”
“Thyra? I fought an insane impulse to laugh. “Thyra? That’s impossible! I never — I wouldn’t have touched that she-devil’s fingertips, much less—”
“Nevertheless, this is your child. And Thyra’s. The details are not clear to me. There is a time — I am not sure. They may have had you drugged, hypnotized. Perhaps I could find out. It would not be easy, even for me. That part of your mind is a closed and sealed room. It does not matter.”
I shut my teeth on a black, sickening rage. Thyra! That red hellion, so like and so unlike Marjorie, perfect foil for Kadarin! What had they done? How—
“It does not matter. It is your child.”
Resentfully, accepting the fact, I glowered at the little girl. She sat up, tense as a scared small animal, and it wrenched at me with sudden hurt. I had seen Marjorie look like that. Small, scared. Lost and lonesome.
I said, as gently as I could, “Don’t be afraid of me, chiya. I’m not a very pretty sight, but I don’t eat little girls.”
The little girl smiled. The small pointed face was suddenly charming; a tiny gnome’s grin marred by a dimple. There were twin gaps in the straight little teeth.
“They said you were my father.”
I turned, but Ashara was gone, leaving me alone with my unexpected daughter. I sat down uneasily on the edge of the cot. “So it would seem. How do they call you, chiya?”
“Marja,” she said shyly. “I mean Marguerhia—” she lisped the name, Marjorie’s name, in the odd old-world dialect still heard in the mountains sometimes. “Marguerhia Kadarin, but I just be Marja.” She knelt upright, looking me over. “Where is your other hand?”
I laughed uneasily. I wasn’t used to children. “It was hurt, and they had to take it off.”
Her amber eyes were enormous. She snuggled against my knee, and I put my aim around her, still trying to get it clear in my mind.
Thyra’s child. Thyra Scott had been Kadarin’s wife — if you could call it that. But everyone knew he was rumored to be half-brother to the Scotts, Zeb Scott’s child by one of the half-human mountain things. Back in the Hellers, half-brothers and sisters sometimes married; and it was not uncommon for such a marriage to adopt the child of one by someone else, thus avoiding the worst consequences of too much inbreeding. I scowled, trying to penetrate the gray murk which surrounded part of the Sharra affair in my mind. I had never probed that partial amnesia; I had felt, instinctively, that madness might lie there.
Perhaps I had been drugged with aphrosone. I knew how that worked. The one drugged lives a life outwardly normal, 15ut he himself knows nothing of what he does, losing continuity of thought between each breath. Memory is retained in symbolic dreams; a psychiatrist, hearing what was dreamed during the time spent under aphrosone, can unravel the symbols and tell the victim what really happened. I had never wanted to know. I didn’t now.
“Where were you brought up, Marja?”
“In a big house with a lot of other little girls and boys,” she said. “They’re orphans. I’m not. I’m something else. Matron says it’s a wicked word I must never, never say, but I’ll whisper it to you.”
“Don’t.” I winced slightly; I could guess.
And Lawton, in the Trade City, had told me; Kadarin never goes anywhere — except to the spaceman’s orphanage.
Marja put her head sleepily on my shoulder. I started to lay her down. Then I felt a curious stir and realized, abruptly, that the child had reached out and made contact with my mind!
The thought was staggering. Amazed, I stared at the tiny girl. Impossible! Children do not have telepathic power — even Alton children! Never!
Never? I couldn’t say that; obviously, Marja did have it.
I caught my arms around her; but I broke the contact gently, not knowing how much she could endure.
But one thing I did know. Whoever had the legal right of it, this little girl was m
ine! And no one and nothing was going to keep her from me. Marjorie was dead; but Marja lived, whoever her parents, with Marjorie’s face sketched in her features, the child Marjorie would have borne me if she had lived, and the rest was better forgotten. And if anyone — Hastur, Dyan, Kadarin himself — thought they could keep my daughter from me, they were welcome to try!
Dawn was paling outside the tower, and abruptly I was conscious of exhaustion. I had had quite a night. I laid Marja down in the cot; drew up the warm covers under her chin. She looked up at me wistfully, without a word.
On an impulse I bent and hugged her. “Sleep well, little daughter,” I said, and went very softly out of the room.
CHAPTER TEN
The next day, Beltran of Aldaran, with his mountain escort, came to the Comyn Castle.
I had not wanted to be present at the ceremonies which welcomed him; but Hastur insisted and I finally agreed. I’d have to meet Beltran sometime. It had better be among strangers where we could both be impersonal.
He greeted me with some constraint; we had once been friends, but the past lay between us, with its grim shadow of blood. I was grateful for the set phrases of custom; I could mouth them without examining them for a hostility I dared not show.
Beltran presented me, ceremoniously, to some of his escort. A few of them remembered me from years ago; but I looked away as I met a dark familiar face.
“You remember Rafael Scott,” Beltran of Aldaran said.
I did.
There is no such word as endless, or the ceremonies would still be going on. However, at last Beltran and his people were handed over to servants, to be shown to rooms, fed, and permitted to recuperate for the further formalities of the evening. As we dispersed, Rafe Scott followed me from the hall, and I turned to him brusquely.
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