And then he was alone on the gray plain, and the landmark was very far away on the horizon. Although he walked for eternities, days, hours, aeons, he could not reach it. He knew that Damon and Callista and Ellemir were all inside, and they had found the answer and they were happy, but he was alone again, a stranger, never to be part of them again. As soon as he drew near the grayness expanded, elastic, and he was far away and the structure was on the far horizon again. And yet somehow at the same time he was inside his walls, and Callista was lying in his arms—or was it Ellemir, or somehow was he making love to them both at once?—and it was Damon who was wandering outside on the horizon, struggling to come near to the landmark, and never reaching it, never, never. . . . He said to Ellemir, “You must take him some of the kireseth flowers,” but she turned into Callista, and said, “It is forbidden for the Tower-trained,” and he could not decide whether he was there, lying between the two women, or whether he was outside, wandering on the distant horizon. . . . Somehow he knew he was trapped inside Damon’s dream, and he could not get out.
He woke with a start. Callista slept restlessly in the gray darkness of the room. He heard himself say, half aloud, “You will know what to do with them when it is time . . .” and then, wondering what he had meant, knew the words were part of Damon’s dream. Then he slept again, wandering in the gray and formless realms until dawn. Partly aware that it was not his own consciousness at all, he wondered if he were himself, or if he had somehow become entangled with Damon as well.
He found himself thinking that precognition was almost worse than having no gift at all. If it were a warning, you could be guided by it. But it was just time out of focus, and even Leonie did not understand time. And Andrew in his own awareness wished Damon would keep his damned troubling dreams to himself.
It was a cold, bitter morning, with sleet falling. Damon felt that the sky reflected his own mood.
He had avoided this work for many years, now he was being forced into it again. And he knew, now, that it was not only for Callista’s sake. He had been wrong to renounce it so completely.
He had been misled by the taboo barring telepaths from matrix work outside the Towers. That taboo might, after the Ages of Chaos, have made some sense. But now he felt, with every nerve in him, that it was wrong.
There was so much work for telepaths to do. And it was being left undone.
He had built himself a new career, of sorts, in the Guardsmen, but it had never satisfied him completely. Nor could he find, as Andrew did, satisfaction and fulfillment in helping to manage the estate of his father-in-law. He knew that for many a younger son, without an estate of his own, this would have been a perfect solution: landless himself, to have an estate where his sons would share in the heritage. But it was not for Damon. He knew that any halfway skilled steward could do his work as well. He was there simply to assure that no unscrupulous paid employee took advantage of his wife’s father.
He did not begrudge the time spent on the work of the estate. His life was here with Ellemir, and it would tear him into fragments to be parted, now, from Andrew or from Callista.
It was different for Andrew. He had grown to manhood in a world not unlike this, and for him it was recovering a world he had thought lost forever when he left Terra. But Damon now had begun to guess that his real work was this, the work he had been trained in the Towers to do.
“Your part and Ellemir’s,” he told Andrew, “is simply to guard us against intrusion. If there are any interruptions—though I have tried to arrange that there will be none—you can deal with it. Otherwise you must simply remain in rapport and lend me your strength.”
Callista’s work was far more difficult. At first she had been reluctant to take part in this way, but he had managed to persuade her, and he was glad, for he could trust her completely. Like himself, she was Arilinn-trained, a skilled psi monitor, and knew precisely what was wanted. She would watch over his life functions and make sure that his body continued to function as it should while his essential self was elsewhere.
She looked pale and strange, and he knew she was reluctant to return to this work she had abandoned forever, not, like himself, out of fear or distaste, but because it had been such a wrench to abandon it. Having made the renunciation, she was reluctant to compromise.
Yet this was her own true work, Damon knew. It was what she was born and trained to do. It was wrong and cruel that a woman could not do this work without renouncing womanhood. For anything less than working among the great relays and screens, Callista would be completely qualified, were she married a dozen times and as many times a mother! Yet she was lost to the Towers, and it was no less a loss to her. It was a foolish notion, he considered, that with the loss of virginity she would be deprived of all the skills so painstakingly trained into her, and all the knowledge learned at such cost during all those years in Arilinn!
He thought, I do not believe it, and caught his breath. This was blasphemy, sacrilege unthinkable! Yet he looked at Callista and thought defiantly, Nevertheless, I do not believe it!
Yet he was violating the Tower taboo even in using her as a monitor. How stupid, how appallingly stupid!
Of course, legally he was doing nothing wrong. Callista, though she had declared intent to marry by a freemate ceremony, was not, in fact, Andrew’s wife. She was still a virgin, and therefore qualified. . . . How stupid the whole thing was! How tragically stupid!
Something was wrong, he thought once again, terrribly and tragically wrong with the whole concept of training telepaths on Darkover. Because of the abuses of the Ages of Chaos, because of the crimes of men and women dead so long that even their bones were dust, other men and women were condemned to a living death.
Callista asked gently, “What’s wrong, Damon? You look so angry!”
He could not explain it to her. She was still bound by the taboos, deep in her bones. He said, “I’m cold,” and left it at that. He had wrapped himself in a loose robe, which would at least protect his body from the awful chilling of the overworld. He noted that Callista had also substituted a long, warm wrapper for her ordinary housedress. He lay back in a padded armchair, while Callista made herself comfortable on a cushion at his feet. Andrew and Ellemir were a little further away, and Ellemir said, “When I kept watch for you, you had me stay physically in contact with the pulse spots.”
“You’re untrained, darling. Callista has been doing this work since she was a little girl. She could even monitor me from another room, if she had to. You and Andrew are basically superfluous, though it’s a help to have you both here. If something should interrupt us—I’ve given orders, but if, the Gods forbid, the house should take fire or Dom Esteban fall ill and need help—you can deal with it, and protect Callista and me from disturbance.”
Callista had her matrix in her lap. He noted that she had fastened it to the pulse spot with a bit of ribbon. There were different ways of handling a matrix, and at Arilinn everyone was encouraged to experiment and find the way most congenial. He noted that she contacted the psi jewel without physically looking into the stone, while he himself gazed into the depths of his own, seeing the swirling lights slowly focus. . . . He began to breathe more and more slowly, sensing it when Callista made contact with his mind, matching the resonances of her body’s field to his own. More dimly and at a distance he felt her bring Andrew and Ellemir into the rapport. For a moment he relaxed into the content of having them all around him, close, reassuring, in the closest bond known. At this moment he knew that he was closer to Callista than to anyone in the world. Closer than to Ellemir, whose body he knew so well, whose thoughts he had shared, who had so briefly and heartbreakingly sheltered their child. Yet Callista was close to him as twin to unborn twin, and Ellemir somewhere in the outside distance. Beyond her he sensed Andrew, a giant, a rock of strength, protecting them, safeguarding them. . . .
He felt the walls of their sheltering place enclosing them, the astral structure he had built while he worked with the frostbi
tten men. Then, with that curious upward thrust, he was in the overworld, and he could see the walls taking shape around them. When he had built it with Andrew and Dezi it had resembled a travel-shelter of rough brown stone, perhaps because he had regarded it as temporary. Structures in the overworld were what you thought they were. He noticed that the rough brick and stone had now become smooth and lucent, that there was a slate-colored stone floor beneath his feet, not unlike that of Callista’s little still-room. From where he stood, in the green and gold colors of his Domain, he could see an array of furnishings. Noticed like this, they looked curiously transparent and insubstantial, but he knew that if he tried to sit on them they would take on strength and solidity. They would be comfortable and would, furthermore, provide whatever surface he wanted—velvet or silk or fur at his own will. On one of these Callista lay, and she too looked oddly transparent, though he knew she would solidify too, as they were here longer. Andrew and Ellemir looked more dim, and he saw that they were asleep on the other furniture, because they were here only in his mind, not conscious on the overworld level at all. Only their thoughts, drifting through his in the rapport where Callista held them, were strong and present. They were passive here, lending all their strength to Damon. He floated for a moment, enjoying the comfort of a support circle, knowing it would keep him from some of the awful draining he had known before. He noted how Callista held in her hands a series of threads like a spiderweb, and he knew this was how she visualized the control she was keeping over his body where it lay in the more solid world. If his breathing faltered, if his circulation was impaired by the cramped position, if, even, he developed an itch which could disturb his concentration here in the overworld, she could repair the damage long before he was conscious of it. Guarded by Callista, his body was safe, here behind the shelter of their landmark.
But he could not linger here, and even as he was aware of it he felt himself move through the impalpable walls of the shelter. His thoughts provided exit, though no outsider could ever enter, and he was out on the gray and featureless plain of the overworld. In the distance he could see the peaks of the Arilinn Tower, or, rather, the duplicate of that Tower in the overworld.
For a thousand years, perhaps, the thoughts of every psi-technician who moved into the overworld had created Arilinn as a safe landmark. Why was it so far away? Damon wondered, then knew: this was Callista’s visualization, working in link with his own, and to her Arilinn seemed very far indeed. But here in the overworld space had no reality and with the swiftness—literally—of thought, he stood before the gates of Arilinn.
He had been driven forth. Could he get in now if he tried? With the thought he was inside, standing on the steps of the outer court, Leonie before him in her crimson robes, veiled.
“I know why you have come, Damon. I have searched everywhere for the records you want, and I have learned, in these days, more of the history of Arilinn than I had ever guessed. I had known, indeed, that in the first days of the Towers, many Keepers were emmasca , of chieri blood, neither man nor woman. I had not known that when such births grew rare, as the chieri mingled less and less with humankind, some of the earliest Keepers were neutered to resemble them. Did you know, Damon, that not only neutered women, but castrated males were used at some times for Keepers? What a barbarism!”
“And not needed,” Damon said. “Any halfway competent psi-technician can do most of a Keeper’s work, and pay no higher price than a few days of impotence.”
Leonie smiled faintly and said, “There are many men who think even that price too high, Damon.”
Damon nodded, thinking of his brother Lorenz, and the contempt in his voice when he said of Damon: “Half monk, half eunuch.”
“And for women,” Leonie said, “it was discovered that a Keeper need not be neutered, though they had not yet discovered the training techniques we use. It was sufficient to fix the channels steadily clear, so they would not carry any impulses save the psi impulses. So it was done, without the barbarism of neutering. But in our age, even that seemed too much an impairment of a woman.” Leonie’s face was scornful. “I think it was only the pride of the men of Comyn, who felt that a woman’s most precious attribute was her fertility, her ability to pass on their male heritage. They became squeamish about any impairment of a woman’s ability to bear children.”
Damon said, in a low voice, “It also meant that a woman who thought as a young girl that she wished to be Keeper need not make a lifetime choice before she fully knew the burden it demanded.”
Leonie dismissed that. “You are a man, Damon, and I do not expect you to understand. It was to spare the women this heavy burden of choice.” Suddenly her voice broke. “Do you think I would not rather have had all that cut cleanly from me in childhood, rather than going all my life imprisoned, knowing I held the key to my prison, and that only my own oath, my own honor, the word of a Hastur, kept me so . . . so prisoned.” He could not tell whether it was grief or anger that made her voice tremble. “If I had my way, if you men of Comyn were not so concerned with a woman’s precious fertility, any girl-child coming to the Tower would be neutered at once, and live her life as Keeper happy, and free of the burden of womanhood. She would be free of pain and the never-ending reminders of choice—that she can never choose once and for all, but must make that choice anew every day of her life.”
“You would make them slaves lifelong to the Tower?”
Leonie’s voice was almost inaudible, but to Damon it was like a cry. “Do you think we are not slaves?”
“Leonie, Leonie, if you felt it so, why did you bear it all these years? There were others who could have taken it from your shoulders when it grew too heavy to be borne.”
“I am a Hastur,” she said, “and I have given oath never to lay down my burden until I had trained another to take it from me. Do you think I did not try?” She looked straight at him, and Damon tensed with remembered anguish, for as his thoughts formed her, so she was in the overworld, and it was the Leonie of his first years in the Tower who stood before him. He would never know if any other man thought her beautiful, but to him she was infinitely beautiful, desirable, holding the very strings of his soul between her slender hands. . . . He turned away, fighting to see her only as he had seen her last in the flesh, seen her at his wedding: a woman calm, aging, controlled, past rage or rebellion.
“I thought you content with power and reverence, Leonie, with the highest place of all, equal to any Comyn lord—Leonie of Arilinn, Lady of Darkover.”
She said, the words coming from immense distances, “Had you known I rebelled, then would I have been a failure, Damon. My very life, my sanity, my place as Keeper, depended on that, that I should hardly know it myself. Yet I tried again and again to train another to take my place, so I could lay down a burden too heavy for me. Always when I had trained a Keeper, some other Tower would discover that their Keeper had chosen to leave them, or that her training had failed and she was fit for nothing but to leave and marry. A fine lot of weak and aimless women they were, none with the strength to endure. I was the only Keeper in all the Domains who held my office past twenty years. And even when I began to grow old, three times I gave up my own successor, twice to go to Dalereuth and once to Neskaya, and I who had trained a Keeper for every Tower in the Domains wished to train one for Arilinn, so that I might have some rest. You were there, Damon, you saw what happened. Six young girls, each with the talent to work as Keeper. But three were already women and, young as they were, had known some sexual wakening. Their channels were already differentiated and could not carry such strong frequencies, though two of them later became monitors and technicians, in Arilinn or in Neskaya. Then I began to choose younger and younger girls, almost children. I came near to success with Hilary. Two years she worked with me as underKeeper, rikhi, but you know what she endured, and at last I felt I must take pity on her and let her go. Then Callista—”
“And you made sure she would not fail,” Damon said, enraged, “by alter
ing her channels so she could not mature!”
“I am a Keeper,” Leonie said angrily, “and responsible only to my own conscience! And she consented to what was done. Could I foresee that her fancy would light on this Terranan, and her oath would be as nothing to her?”
Before Damon’s accusing silence she added, defensively, “And even so, Damon, I love her, I could not bear her unhappiness! Had I believed it only a childish fancy, I would have brought her back here to Arilinn with me. I would have showered her with so much love and tenderness that she would never regret her Terran lover. And yet . . . and yet she made me believe . . .” In the fluid levels of the overworld, Damon could see and share with Leonie the image Leonie had seen in Callista’s mind: Callista lying in Andrew’s arms, spent and vulnerable, as he carried her from the caves of Corresanti.
Now that he had seen her, if only reflected in Leonie’s mind, as, she might have been, undamaged, unchanged—having once seen Callista like that—he knew he would never be content until he had seen her so again. He said quietly, “I cannot believe you would have done this if you did not believe it could be undone.”
“I am a Keeper,” she repeated indomitably, “and responsible only to my own conscience.”
This was true. By the law of the Towers, a Keeper was infallible, her lightest word law where every member of her circle was concerned. Yet Damon persisted.
“If it was so, why did you not neuter her, and have done with it?” She was silent. At last she said, “You speak so because you are a man, Damon, and to you a woman is nothing but a wife, an instrument to give you sons, to pass on your precious Comyn heritage. I have other purposes. Damon, I was so weary, and I felt I could not bear to spend my energy and strength, to put all my heart into her for years and years, and then watch her waken, and go from me into some man’s arms. Or, like Hilary, to sicken and suffer the tortures of a damned soul with every waxing moon. It was not selfishness, Damon! It was not only a longing to lay down my own work and have rest! I loved her as I had never loved Hilary. I knew she would not fail, but I feared she was too strong to give way, even under such suffering as Hilary’s, that she would endure it—as I did, Damon—year after long year. So I spared her this, as I had the right to do.” She added defiantly, “I was her Keeper!”
The Forbidden Circle Page 44