It was an old room in the depths of the house, the four old god-forms painted crudely on the walls, lights burning before them. Regis held Mikhail on his lap, letting the child sleepily twist a button on his tunic, until the witnesses came, four old men and two old women of the household. One of the women had been Javanne’s nurse in childhood, and his own.
He took his place solemnly at the altar, Mikhail in his arms.
“I swear before Aldones, Lord of Light and my divine forefather, that Hastur of Hasturs is this child by unbroken blood line, known to me in true descent. And in default of any heir of my body, therefore do I, Regis-Rafael Felix Alar Hastur y Elhalyn, choose and name him my nedestro heir and swear that none save my first-born son in true marriage shall ever displace him as my heir; and that so long as I live, none shall challenge his right to my hearth, my home or my heritage. Thus I take oath in the presence of witnesses known to us both. I declare that my son shall be no more called Mikhail Regis Lanart-Hastur, but—” He paused, hesitating among old Comyn names for suitable new names which would confirm the ritual. There was no time to search the rolls for names of honor. He would commemorate, then, the desperate need which had driven him to this. “I name him Danilo,” he said at last. “He shall be called Danilo Lanart Hastur, and I will so maintain to all challenge, facing my father before me and my sons to follow me, my ancestry and my posterity. And this claim may never be renounced by me while I live, nor in my name by any of the heirs of my body.” He bent and kissed his son on the soft baby lips. It was done. They had a strange beginning. He wondered what the end would be. He turned his eyes on his old nurse.
“Foster-mother, I place you in charge of my son. When the roads are safe, you must take him to the Lord Hastur at Thendara, and see to it that he is given the Sign of Comyn.”
Javanne was dropping slow tears, but she said nothing except, “Let me kiss him once more,” and allowed the old woman to carry the child away. Regis followed them with his eyes. His son. It was a strange feeling. He wondered if he had laran or the unknown Hastur gift; he wondered if he would ever know, would ever see the child again.
“I must go,” he said to his sister. “Send for my horse and someone to open the gates without noise.” As they waited together in the gateway, he said, “If I do not return—”
“Speak no ill-omen!” she said quickly.
“Javanne, do you have the Hastur gift?”
“I do not know,” she said. “None knows till it is wakened by one who holds it. We had always thought that you had no laran. . . .”
He nodded grimly. He had grown up with that, and even now it was too sore a wound to touch.
She said, “A day will come when you must go to Grandfather, who holds it to waken in his heir, and ask for the gift. Then, and only then, you will know what it is. I do not know myself,” she said. “Only if you had died before you were declared a man, or before you had fathered a son, it would have been wakened in me so that, before my own death, I might pass it to one of my sons.”
And so it might pass, still. He heard the soft clop-clopclop of hooves in the dark. He prepared to mount, turned back a moment and took Javanne briefly in his arms. She was crying. He blinked tears from his own eyes. He whispered, “Be good to my son, darling.” What more could he say?
She kissed him quickly in the dark and said, “Say you’ll come back, brother. Don’t say anything else.” Without waiting for another word, she wrenched herself free of him and ran back into the dark house.
The gates of Edelweiss swung shut behind him. Regis was alone. The night was dark, fog-shrouded. He fastened his cloak about his throat, touching the small pouch where the matrix lay. Even through the insulation he could feel it, though no other could have, a small live thing, throbbing. . . . He was alone with it, under the small horn of moon lowering behind the distant hills. Soon even that small light would be gone.
He braced himself, murmured to his horse, straightened his back and rode away northward, on the first step of his unknown journey.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
Until the day I die, I am sure I shall return in dreams to that first joyous time at Aldaran.
In my dreams, everything that came after has been wiped out, all the pain and terror, and I remember only that time when we were all together and I was happy, wholly happy for the first and last time in my life. In those dreams Thyra moves with all her strange wild beauty, but gentle and subdued, as she was during those days, tender and pliant and loving. Beltran is there, too, with his fire and the enthusiasm of the dream from which we had all taken the spark, my friend, almost my brother. Kadarin is always there, and in my dreams he is always smiling, kind, a rock of strength bearing us all up when we faltered. And Rafe, the son I shall never have, always beside me, his eyes lifted to mine.
And Marjorie.
Marjorie is always with me in those dreams. But there is nothing I can say about Marjorie. Only that we were together and in love, and as yet the fear was only a little, little shadow, like a breath of chill from a glacier not yet in sight. I wanted her, of course, and I resented the fact that I could not touch her even in the most casual way. But it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Psi work uses up so much energy and strength that there’s nothing much left. I was with her every waking moment and it was enough. Almost enough. And we could wait for the rest.
I wanted a well-trained team, so I worked with them day by day, trying to shape us all together into a functioning circle which could work together, precisely tuned. As yet we were working with our small matrices; before we joined together to open and call forth the power of the big one, we must be absolutely attuned to one another, with no hidden weaknesses. I would have felt safer with a circle of six or eight, as at Arilinn. Five is a small circle, even with Beltran working outside as a psi monitor. But Thyra and Kadarin were stronger than most of us at Arilinn—I knew they were both stronger than I, though I had more skill and training—and Marjorie was fantastically talented. Even at Arilinn, they would have chosen her the first day as a potential Keeper.
Deep warmth and affection, even love, had sprung up among all of us with the gradual blending of our minds. It was always like this, in the building of a circle. It was closer than family intimacy, closer than sexual love. It was a sort of blending, as if we all melted into one another, each of us contributing something special, individual and unique, and somehow all of us together becoming more than the sum of us.
But the others were growing impatient. It was Thyra who finally voiced what they were all wanting to know.
“When do we begin to work with the Sharra matrix? We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
I demurred. “I’d hoped to find others to work with us; I’m not sure we can operate a ninth-level matrix alone.”
Rafe asked, “What’s a ninth-level matrix?”
“In general,” I said dryly, “it’s a matrix not safe to handle with less than nine workers. And that’s with a good, fully trained Keeper.”
Kadarin said, “I told you we should have chosen Thyra.”
“I won’t argue with you about it. Thyra is a very strong telepath; she is an excellent technician and mechanic. But no Keeper.”
Thyra asked, “Exactly how does a Keeper differ from any other telepath?”
I struggled to put it into language she could understand. “A Keeper is the central control in the circle; you’ve all seen that. She holds together the forces. Do you know what energons are?”
Only Rafe ventured to ask, “Are they the little wavy things that I can’t quite see when I look into the matrix?”
Actually that was a very good answer. I said, “They’re a purely theoretical name for something nobody’s sure really exists. It’s been postulated that the part of the brain which controls psi forces gives off a certain type of vibration which we call energons. We can describe what they do, though we can’t really describe them. These, when directed and focused through a matrix—I show
ed you—become immensely amplified, with the matrix acting as a transformer. It is the amplified energons which transform energy. Well, in a matrix circle, it is the Keeper who receives the flow of energons from all members of the circle and weaves them all into a single focused beam, and this, the focused beam, is what goes through the large matrix.”
“Why are Keepers always women?”
“They aren’t. There have been male Keepers, powerful ones, and other men who have taken a Keeper’s place. I can do it myself. But women have more positive energon flows, and they begin to generate them younger and keep them longer.”
“You explained why a Keeper has to be chaste,” Marjorie said, “but I still don’t understand it.”
Kadarin said, “That’s because it’s superstitious drivel. There’s nothing to understand; it’s gibberish.”
“In the old days,” I said, “when the really enormous matrix screens were made, the big synthetic ones, the Keepers were virgins, trained from early childhood and conditioned in ways you wouldn’t believe. You know how close a matrix circle is.” I looked around at them, savoring the closeness. “In those days a Keeper had to learn to be part of the circle and yet completely, completely apart from it.”
Marjorie said, “I should think they’d have gone mad.”
“A good many of them did. Even now, most of the women who work as Keepers give it up after a year or two. It’s too difficult and frustrating. The Keepers at the towers aren’t required to be virgins any more. But while they are working as Keepers, they stay strictly chaste.”
“It sounds like nonsense,” Thyra said.
“Not a bit of it,” I said. “The Keeper takes and channels all that energy from all of you. No one who has ever handled these very high energy-flows wants to take the slightest chance of short-circuiting them through her own body. It would be like getting in the way of a lightning-bolt.” I held out the scar again. “A three-second backflow did that to me. Well, then. In the body there are clusters of nerve fibers which control the energy flows. The trouble is that the same nerve clusters carry two kinds of energy: they carry the psi flows, the energons which carry power to the brain; they also carry the sexual messages and energies. This is why some telepaths get threshold sickness when they’re in their teens: the two kinds of energy, sexual energies and laran, are both wakening at once. If they aren’t properly handled, you can get an overload, sometimes a killer overload, because each stimulates the other and you get a circular feedback.”
Beltran asked, “Is that why—”
I nodded, knowing what he was going to ask. “Whenever there’s an energon drain, as in concentrated matrix work, there’s some nerve overloading. Your energies are depleted—have you noticed how we’ve all been eating?—and your sexual energies are at a low ebb, too. The major side effect for men is temporary impotence.” I repeated, smiling reassuringly at Beltran, “Temporary impotence. Nothing to worry about, but it does take some getting used to. By the way, if you ever find you can’t eat, come to one of us right away for monitoring; that can be an early-warning signal that your energy flows are out of order.”
“Monitoring. That’s what you’re teaching me to do, then?” Beltran asked, and I nodded. “That’s right. Even if you can’t link into the circle, we can use you as a psi monitor.” I knew he was still resentful about this. He knew enough by now to know it was the work usually done by the youngest and least skilled in the circle. The worst of it was that unless he could stop projecting this resentment, we couldn’t even use him near the circle. Not even as a psi monitor. There are few things that can disrupt a circle faster than uncontrolled resentments.
I said, “In a sense, the Keeper and the psi monitor are at the two ends of a circle—and almost equally important.” This was true. “Often enough, the life of the Keeper is in the hands of the monitor, because she has no energy to waste in watching over her own body.”
Beltran grinned ruefully, but he grinned. “So Marjorie is the head and I’m the old cow’s tail!”
“By no means. Rather she’s at the top of the ladder and you’re on the ground holding it steady. You’re the lifeline.” I remembered suddenly that we had come far astray from the subject, and said, “With a Keeper, if the nerve channels are not completely clear they can overload, and the Keeper will burn up like a torch. So while the nerve channels are being used to carry these tremendous energy overloads, they cannot be used to carry any other form of energy. And only complete chastity can keep the channels clear enough.”
Marjorie said, “I can feel the channels all the time now. Even when I’m not working in the matrices. Even when I’m asleep.”
“Good.” That meant she was functioning as a Keeper now. Beltran looked at her with half shut eyes and said, “I can see them, almost.”
“That’s good, too,” I said. “A time will come when you’ll be able to sense the energy flows from across the room—or a mile away—and pinpoint any backflows or energy disruptions in any of us.”
I deliberately changed the subject. I asked, “Precisely what do we want to do with the Sharra matrix, Beltran?”
“You know my plans.”
“Plans, yes, precisely what do you want to do first? I know that in the end you want to prove that a matrix this size can power a starship—”
“Can it?” Marjorie asked.
“A matrix this size, love, could bring one of the smaller moons right down out of its orbit, if we were insane enough to try. It would, of course, destroy Darkover along with it. Powering a starship with one might be possible, but we can’t start there. Among other reasons, we haven’t got a starship yet. We need a smaller project to experiment with, to learn to direct and focus the force. This force is fire-powered, so we also need a place to work where, if we lose control for a few seconds, we won’t burn up a thousand leagues of forest.”
I saw Beltran shudder. He was mountain-bred too, and shared with all Darkovans the fear of forest fire. “Father has four Terran aircraft, two lights planes and two helicopters. One helicopter is away in the lowlands, but would the other be suitable for experiment?”
I considered. “The explosive fuel should be removed first,” I said, “so if anything does go wrong it won’t burn. Otherwise a helicopter might be ideal, experimenting with the rotors to lift and power and control it. It’s a question of developing control and precision. You wouldn’t put Rafe, here, to riding your fastest racehorse.”
Rafe said shyly, “Lew, you said we need other telepaths. Lord Kermiac . . . didn’t he train matrix mechanics before any of us were born? Why isn’t he one of us?”
True. He had trained Desideria and trained her so well that she could use the Sharra matrix—
“And she used it alone,” said Kadarin, picking up my thoughts. “So why does it worry you that we are so few?”
“She didn’t use it alone,” I said. “She had fifty to a hundred believers focusing their raw emotion on the stone. More, she did not try to control it or focus it. She used it as a weapon, rather, she let it use her.” I felt a sudden cold shudder of fear, as if every hair on my body were prickling and standing erect. I cut off the thought. I was tower-trained. I had no will to wield it for power. I was sworn.
“As for Kermiac,” I said, “he is old, past controlling a matrix. I wouldn’t risk it, Rafe.”
Beltran grew angry. “Damn it, you might have the courtesy to ask him!”
That seemed fair enough, when I weighed the experience he must have had against his age and weakness. “Ask him, if you will. But don’t press him. Let him make his own choice freely.”
“He will not,” Marjorie said. She colored as we all turned on her. “I thought it was my place, as Keeper, to ask him. He called it to my mind that he would not even teach me. He said a circle was only as strong as the weakest person in it, and he would endanger all our lives.”
I felt both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed because I would have welcomed a chance to join him in that special bond that comes
only among the members of a circle, to feel myself truly one of his kin. Relieved, because what he had told Marjorie was true, and we all knew it.
Thyra said rebelliously, “Does he understand how much we need him? Isn’t it worth some risk?”
I would have risked the hazards to us, not those to him. At Arilinn they recommended gradual relinquishing of the work after early middle age, as vitality lessened.
“Always Arilinn,” Thyra said impatiently, as if I had spoken aloud. “Do they train them there to be cowards?”
I turned on her, tensing myself against that sudden inner anger which Thyra could rouse in me so easily. Then, sternly controlling myself before Marjorie or the others could be caught up in the whirlpool emotion which swirled and raced between Thyra and me, I said, “One thing they do teach us, Thyra, is to be honest with ourselves and each other.” I held out my hands to her. If she had been taught at Arilinn she would have known already that anger was all too often a concealment for less permissible emotions. “Are you ready to be so honest with me?”
Reluctantly, she took my extended hand between her own. I fought to keep my barriers down, not to barricade myself against her. She was trembling, and I knew this was a new and distressing experience to her, that no man except Kadarin, who had been her lover for so long, had ever stirred her senses. I thought, for a moment, she would cry. It would have been better if she had, but she bit her lip and stared at me, defiant. She whispered, half-aloud, “Don’t—”
I broke the trembling rapport, knowing I could not force Thyra, as I would have had to do at Arilinn, to go into this all the way and confront what she refused to see. I couldn’t. Not before Marjorie.
It was not cowardice, I told myself fiercely. We were all kinsmen and kinswomen. There was simply no need.
I said, changing the subject quickly, “We can try keying the Sharra matrix tomorrow, if you want. Have you explained to your father, Beltran, that we will need an isolated place to work, and asked leave to use the helicopter?”
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