The small, weathered-looking man met David's eyes with a flash of steel blue stare, then almost visibly shrugged. He's a straight one; no interest. David, without experience in Rondo's type of underworld, was baffled by the hostile indifference.
The man in spaceman's uniform seemed sunk in apathy, but he got up politely enough and offered David a hand. "A pleasure, Dr. Hamilton. My name is David Conner."
"Then we're namesakes," David said with a smile. His thought, quickly guarded: nonpsychotic? What's the matter with him? Conner's type was at least familiar; he was tall, thin, slightly balding, skin between brown and black, dark, gleaming eyes, now dulled with apathy and the barest pretense of civility. He wasn't hostile, but David felt, with a crawling of his skin, that if all of them dropped dead Conner wouldn't even blink. He would shrug and envy them.
Jason led him on. "Keral."
The tall boy/girl, almost two or three inches taller than David himself, turned with a swift grace. David met a fluid impact of clear eyes, deep as running water, and a light, lovely, girlish voice which murmured in a soft unaccented tone: "You have done us a kindness to come here, David Hamilton."
Who and what—!
Jason murmured in his ear, "A chieri; a Darkovan tribe; most of us didn't believe they existed until he came and asked to join us."
"He—?"
Jason caught his confusion. Then and later David was to wonder, never to know or prove but to suspect, whether Jason Allison, perhaps without knowing it himself, was near enough a telepath to pick up thoughts. "He or she, you mean? I don't know either; you can't exactly ask an I.B.—pardon me; Empire Medic slang for Intelligent Being, sapient nonhuman—what sex he, she or it is. Not when you're unsure how they'll react. Maybe Regis knows."
David's eyes went back to the chieri, and Keral looked up again and for the first time smiled, a lovely thing that transfigured the fair, frightened face. It was a gleam of brightness which made the chieri like a light in the room and David wondered how the others could take their eyes off her—him? Damn!
Conner looked up and came after them. He chuckled low-voiced in David's ear, "After you've been on a dozen planets and seen a dozen cultures you get used to that. You haven't lived until you've made attempts to pick up what you thought was a charming girl and had a nasty surprise or two when you found the delightful creature was one of the local swordsmen. Cultures are peculiar things."
David shared the laughter and felt a little relieved. Conner's psychotic apathy wasn't a constant thing then, for at this moment the spaceman seemed normal and good natured.
Conner went on, still in that friendly intimate tone, "Never made a mistake about this one, though. Missy—?"
The sullen-faced girl looked up at David with deliberate and practiced charm. She had thick, light hair, gathered into an elaborate coiffure, and David thought her dress, for anyone who had been warned of the icy and stormy Darkovan climate, was courting death from exposure; but as Conner had said, cultures on different planets set impregnable standards for feminine behavior, and there was evidently some reason for this one to flaunt her femaleness in this exact way. She smiled with that quick-eyed radiance and murmured, "Hello, David."
"Which David?" Conner demanded; and David Hamilton thought swiftly, he's jealous, as the girl Missy murmured, "Why, both of you, of course." She held David's hand an extra moment, but the hand was cool and soft and belied the look of sensuous beguilement the girl turned on them both. She said in her lovely murmur, "I'm a little bewildered here." A lie, something in David said, cold and precise. "I thought it would be exciting to meet all of you. An adventure." Another lie. What does she want?
Jason urged him on and Conner sank into the seat beside Missy. That was evidently what he had wanted.
"Leaving me till last, as usual," said a sprightly voice. It was the old woman, and she was even older than David had thought: wrinkled, her face shrunken, but erect and slender as ever in a long graceful robe of thick, dark blue woven wool, over it a slight shawl of knitted fur. Her hands, knotted and gnarled with age, were still graceful in motion, and the voice clear and light. Her eyes rested on Missy, not with the condemnation of age for youth but with an echo of David's own curiosity. Then she came back to David. "You must be weary of running this gauntlet. I am Desideria of Storn, and if I am rude, forgive me; I have never met Terrans in this number. But no one, as they say in the mountains, is so young he cannot teach or so old he cannot learn. So let us see what we have to learn from one another, all of us. It's likely to be more than any of us expect. I am too old to waste time in preliminaries. Jason?"
Dr. Allison said, "Regis, you're the expert. You take charge."
"But that's exactly what I am not," Regis Hastur said.
David admired the way that without moving, without raising his voice, he gathered all their eyes to him. For the first time David thought, at the back of his mind, that perhaps being a developed telepath who could use all the latent powers of his own mind might not be such a bad thing.
Regis went on: "As most of you know, telepaths were once abundant on this planet. They are now growing scarce, and their old powers are to a large degree lost, bred out or diminished for lack of knowledge on how to use them. To some extent I know what I can do with my powers, such as they are. I don't know exactly what they are or how I use them. I gather most of you are in the same situation. Hence this project, which at the moment is only a small pilot project to find out what powers, exactly, each of us has; how we got them and why; exactly what they are good for; whether training plays any part in their development; and so forth. In short, to find out what telepaths are made of. But as to where we start—I have no idea. Each of us has some experience. Each one of you is welcome to contribute ideas and questions and we'll follow up as many of them as seem to have the slightest bearing on the case. Meanwhile—" and he made a courteous gesture, "please consider yourselves my guests, and if there is anything any of you require, you have only to ask."
"Then as the only nontelepath in the group," Jason Allison said, "I'm going to suggest that we start in a peculiarly Terran way. There is a lot of superstitious rubbish talked about psi powers. The first thing we Terrans usually do if we run across something we don't understand is to measure it. So, if all of you will cooperate, I am going to start—with David Hamilton's help—by giving each one of you a physical examination to see if you have any physical features in common. This will mean, among other things, a full reading of detectable brain electricity and radiation. After that I am going to try and measure your psi abilities, although I'm prepared to find out that we don't have the right measuring sticks. You can't measure anything until you develop the right scales. But maybe some of you can help me find a scale for measuring. David, suppose I start with you, and then you can help me with the others. The laboratories they've given us are just a few doors from here; I'm sorry to keep the rest of you waiting, but it won't be long."
As they went into a small examination room—it was marked SPECIAL PROJECT, A, Allison—David said to Jason, "What's the idea? You have Medical HQ records on me on the big computer, covering everything from measles vaccine at six months to the time I broke my little toe as a fourth year Medic student playing tennis; I know these kind of records followed me to Darkover! You need to examine me like you need two heads!"
"Guilty as charged," said Jason. He went to the desktop scanner and punched out David's name and Terran Empire contract number. "Did they tell you you're on salary to Empire Medic, by the way? No, I wanted to start with a chance to talk to you. I do want your EEG; the ones they take for Terran Medic are only checking for epilepsy or overt brain damage, and if you had any of those I'd know. I want readings from all of you—" he was moving around, attaching the narrow electrodes to David's skull as he spoke, "and later I'll want them while you people are trying out your telepathic talents, to see if there's a measurable energy discharge. But we can skip your heart and lungs and digestion for the moment. Here, lie back." He connect
ed the machine. "Just breathe for a few minutes."
"The one I'm dying to get my hands on," he continued a few minutes later, removing the taped EEG record from the reader, "is the chieri."
"Are they human?"
"Nobody knows, even on Darkover. I doubt if any Terran has ever spoken to one. If they have, they aren't telling. Fortunately I have permission to keep this project entirely under wraps, or the Terran Medical HQ would be all over the poor creature, just out of simple curiosity, of course. A new specimen."
"I can see why. I admit I'm curious too." David did not say that his interest was not medical.
"I lived with nonhumans—the trailmen—for a few years when I was a kid," Jason said, "and worked with Terran Medical during a bad epidemic a few years ago." He sounded vaguely bitter. "Oh, the Terran HQ was very nice to the trailmen. Did everything they could to make them feel at home here, but still—specimens in a zoo. Maybe you have to be Darkovan and live with nonhuman races long enough to take them for granted, before you start thinking of them as people."
"Are there so many nonhuman races on Darkover?"
"At least four that I know about," said Jason, "and more that I don't, I'm sure."
David thought about that for a moment. He said, "Could that be why there are so many natural telepaths here? Telepathy might be the only way of really communicating with nonhuman races."
Jason said, vaguely startled, "That's a viewpoint that hadn't occurred to me. That's why I want to use all of you on this project. Nobody but a telepath would be likely to know—how did Regis put it?—what telepaths are made of. Well, shall we start on the physicals for the others?"
Much of the morning was routine work after that, a reassuringly humdrum beginning to a project David had feared would be terrifyingly outré. They discovered little that they did not already know, and that afternoon, during a brief break for meals, sat looking over the results. Routine physical examinations of Conner had disclosed abnormal EEG patterns akin to, but different from, those associated with hereditary migraine and some psychomotor epilepsy; David showed these also, although in a subclinical degree. So, to some small degree, did Rondo and Danilo. Confusingly, Regis Hastur did not, and they had not finished with Desideria or begun with Missy or Keral.
"I wonder if this is going to be the one common factor?" Jason asked.
"I doubt it, or why doesn't Regis have it? I gather he's something extraordinary in the way of telepaths," David said, and extraordinary in every other way, he thought.
"He certainly has extraordinary charm," Jason agreed, and David laughed aloud. They were already, it seemed to him, close friends. "Jason, do me a favor. Let me take a reading from you."
The older man looked at him in momentary surprise, then laughed and shrugged. "Suit yourself. Eventually I'm going to feed all these records through the big Medic computer and find out if there is any common factor—minor blood fraction, whatever?"
"I can give you two common factors right now," David said. "They all have gray or blue eyes—all the Darkovans, that is, and all the offworlders except Conner. And his obviously isn't hereditary, but—with that history—post-traumatic."
Jason was thinking that over. He said, "Years ago, a group of Terrans worked for a while with a group of the Comyn, investigating telepathy and matrix mechanics—you know what that is?"
"I've read about the Darkovan matrices—aren't they jewels which transform brain waves directly into energy without fission or fusion by-products?"
"That's right. The simpler ones can be used by anyone, even those with no telepathic talents. The more complex ones demand a high degree of telepathic talent to use them at all, which is why the trade in them died out; not enough telepaths around to handle them; and for obvious reasons, telepathy is dangerous to the ordinary politician. So there have been subtle pressures against any publicity about the Darkovan telepaths. But as I started to say, over the last hundred years there have been sporadic efforts to work with Darkovan telepaths. The Darkovans haven't usually wanted to cooperate, until now, when it may be too late. We found out one thing; at least on Darkover, telepathy is linked to red hair. If you see a red-headed Darkovan, he's a telepath."
"That would suggest that telepathy may be linked to the function of the adrenal glands," said David. "I can tell you another thing they all have in common. They're all ectomorphs."
"Ecto—come again?"
"Body types—ectomorphs are tall and thin, mesomorphs run to muscle, endomorphs run to fat and gut."
"So far that's true," Jason said, pushing away his plate. "Let's get back and see if it holds true with the others."
It was true of Desideria, at least. The old lady was exquisitely cooperative, although she smiled her delightful wry smile when they punctiliously summoned a nurse to be present to assist her in disrobing:
"At my age, lads, this is the nicest compliment you could have given me!"
Even the nurse had trouble keeping her professional face on at that one, and David had to turn away to hide a grin. God, what a charmer she must have been forty years ago. "How old are you—for the record?" he asked.
She told him, but Jason, long acquainted with the Darkovan numeral system, had to work it out for David and convert it into standard Empire years. It worked out at ninety-two. Following the clue they had had, David asked her: "It's true that Darkovan telepaths all have red hair?"
"True," Desideria said. "When I was a girl mine was as red as fire. The tradition is that the redder the hair the more talent for matrix work and the stronger the laran gift, and in general we found that this was true. I was one of a small group of girls at Castle Aldaran being trained for matrix work with some of the Terrans. Let me see if I can remember the technical names. I used to have total recall," she mused, "but remember how old I am." She was silent a moment. "I have—or had—clairvoyance, a high degree of clairaudience, a small degree of precognition not exceeding three months, and limited psychokinesis, manipulating objects not exceeding fourteen grains in weight without the aid of a matrix," she said finally. "Perhaps the records have been kept at Castle Aldaran, if they weren't destroyed during one of the mountain wars. I can try to find out, if you like."
"We like," Jason assured her eagerly. "Did any of you ever run to fat? Or were you all tall and thin?"
"Tall and thin or small and thin," she said, "but again, they used to say: the taller they are for a girl, the stronger the laran talent. There's an old story that some of the mountain Comyn telepaths had chieri blood, and looking at Keral I can believe it."
Jason and David both caught the implications of that long before Desideria realized she had said anything unusual. They stared at each other in a wild surmise: "If humans and chieri could crossbreed—"
"That means the chieri are not nonhuman but a human subspecies," David finished.
"This is only a legend," Desideria cautioned, "from prehistory almost."
"Find us some of those legends, will you," Jason requested, trying to hide his eagerness, and turned back to the EEG machine. He began meticulously explaining how it worked before attaching the electrodes to her scalp, but Desideria waved him away. "Enough, enough. You Terrans have your technology and I'm too old to be curious about it. As long as it won't give me a shock, that's all I care about." She lay back, smiling, on the table.
David was calibrating the switches prior to turning on the recording needle when he felt it, completely out of context, like an electrifying shock wave and without any prior warning:
—Deep in his body, sharp, intense, almost painful surge of physical desire; sexual waking; intense, exquisite sensation—
Shocked and abashed, he straightened with an indrawn breath. Jason, frowning vaguely, had stopped what he was doing, but seemed oblivious. The physical upsurge went on; David realized that without any direct stimulus he had a strong erection. What? How—
—Gentle woman's fingers, caressing him. Soft words, murmured almost too low to hear, in a language he could not understand
. The softness of a warm, womanly body, under him, around him—
Where the hell was this coming from? In all his experience of involuntary telepathy in his home hospital, David had never picked up anything like this, and it was shocking and somehow shaming; he felt like a voyeur. He looked at Desideria, wondering. Her eyes were closed, but he sensed quickly that she was equally baffled. Was she feeling it too? For an instant, the thin and frail gray form of the old woman seemed to shift and blur, and a young and lovely girl in a cloud of luminous copper gold hair lay there, smiling up at him, her eyes closed, in soft, sweet, feminine awareness. David felt his very guts wrenched with the agony of desire.
It spread like a sparkling net, a thin spider web of physical awareness. It was not in the room at all. Conner's anguished, deathly, aching loneliness, reaching out, clawing deep for contact—David suddenly knew: it was Missy he held in his arms, pinned down with his own naked body, thrusting deeper and deeper until the violent explosion came . . . .
In the aftermath, while his breathing returned to normal—had he himself exploded in orgasm? No, not physically at least—David felt on the fringes of the thinning net of spider web contact, Regis' puzzlement, Rondo's satirical, sated laughter, a flare of luminous brilliance which he already associated with Keral; it reached out, wrapped him in a sudden twist of closeness . . . .
David? It was almost a voice, and David felt a soft surge of content, of gentle reassurance; I'm here, Keral. I don't understand it either, but I suppose it's nothing to be frightened about.
David was still bewildered. Desideria, still lying motionless, looked to his confused mind—were his eyes open? Under oath he could not be sure—like a double exposure, an exquisite young girl/an old woman, curled softly and sweetly in love. As if compelled, David reached out and touched her hand, raised it lovingly to his lips. She opened her eyes and was the old woman again, and her gray eyes were brimming with tears. She put her hand against his check and David realized that his own eyes were brimming. Abruptly the room was normal again, the overflowing waves of sexuality dimming, dying away. They were alone with the oblivious Terran nurse, still moving around quietly picking up scraps of gauze and assembling the paraphernalia of routine examinations.
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