Leonie had been so sure that her choice was lifelong, had been so reluctant to release her. . . .
Andrew reached for Callista’s cold hand. Damon said, frowning, “No, I know you were not neutered, of course not. If your cycles have come on, your clock is running again. But it was done sometimes in the old days, when they felt virginity was less of a burden to a girl still immature.”
“But now it’s begun, she’ll be all right, won’t she?” Ellemir asked anxiously, and Damon said, “We’ll hope so.” Perhaps the arousal of last night, abortive as it had been, had reawakened some of those blocked pathways in her body; if she had suddenly matured, it might be that her illness and physical discomfort might be the normal troubles of early development. He remembered from his years in the Tower that young women in Keeper’s training, or for that matter any women working with psi mechanics above the level of monitor, were subject to recurrent and occasionally excruciating menstrual difficulties. Callista, following his thought, laughed a little and said, “Well, I have handed out golden-flower tea and such remedies to other women at Arilinn, and always thought myself lucky that I was immune to their miseries. It seems I have joined the ranks of normal women in that respect at least! I know we have golden-flower tea in the stillroom; Ferrika gives it to half the women on the estate. Perhaps a dose of that will be all I need.”
Ellemir said, “I’ll go and fetch you some,” and after awhile she came back with a small cup of some steaming hot brew. It had a pungent herbal smell, strongly aromatic. Callista’s voice held, for a moment, an echo of her old gaiety.
“Would you believe I have never tasted this? I hope it’s not too dreadful a potion!”
Ellemir laughed. “It would serve you right if it were, you wretched girl, if you hand out such decoctions with no idea of what they taste like! No, actually, it’s rather nice tasting. I never minded taking it. It will make you sleepy, though, so lie down and let it do its work.”
Obediently Callista drank off the steaming stuff and settled down under her blanket. Ellemir brought some needlework and sat beside her, and Damon said, “Come along, Andrew, they’ll be all right now,” and let him out of the room.
Downstairs, in the stone-floored still-room, Damon began to look through Callista’s supply of herbs, essences, distilling equipment. Andrew, looking at the oddly shaped flasks, the mortars and pestles and the bottles ranged on shelves, the bunches of dried herbs, leaves, stalks, pods, flowers, seeds, asked, “Are these all drugs and medicines?”
“Oh, no,” Damon said absently, pulling a drawer open. “These”—he gestured to some crushed seeds—“are cooking spices, and she makes incense to sweeten the air, and some cosmetic lotions and perfumes. None of the stuff you can buy in the towns is half as good as what’s made here by the old recipes.”
“What was that stuff Ellemir gave her?”
Damon shrugged. “Golden-flower? It’s a smooth muscle tonic, good for cramps and spasms of all kinds. It can’t hurt her; they give it to pregnant women and to babies with the colic too.” But, he wondered, frowning, if it could help Callista. Such serious interference with the physical processes . . . how could Leonie have done such a thing?
Andrew picked up the thought, as clearly as if Damon had spoken it aloud. “I knew Keepers underwent some physical changes. But this?”
“I am shocked too,” said Damon, turning a bunch of white thornleaf in his hands. “It’s certainly not customary these days. I had believed it was against the laws. Of course Leonie’s intentions couldn’t have been better. You saw the alterations in the nerve currents. Some of the girls do have a dreadful time with their woman’s cycles, and Leonie probably could not bear to see her suffering. But what a price to pay!” He scowled and began opening drawers again. “If Callista had freely chosen . . . but Leonie didn’t tell her! That is what I find hard to understand, or to forgive!”
Andrew felt an insidious dismay, a physical horror. Why should it, after all, shock him so much? Physical modification was not, after all, anything so unheard of. Most of the women who crewed Empire starships—they were made sterile by deep space radiations anyway—were spared the nuisance of menstruation. Hormone treatments made it unnecessary for women not actively engaged in childbearing. Why should it shock him so? It wasn’t shocking, except that Damon found it so! Would he ever get used to this goldfish-bowl life? Couldn’t he even think his own thoughts?
Damon was turning over bunches of herbs. He said, “You must understand. Callista is past twenty. She’s a grown woman who has been doing difficult, highly technical work as a matrix mechanic for years. She’s an experienced professional in the most demanding work on Darkover. Now none of her previous training, none of her skills, nothing is any good to her at all. She’s struggling with deconditioning, and with sexual awakening, and she has all the emotional problems of any bride. And now, on top of all that, I discover that physically she’s been held in the state of a girl of twelve or thirteen! Evanda! If I had only known. . . .”
Andrew looked at the floor. More than once, since the terrible fiasco of last night, he had felt as he imagined a rapist must feel. If Callista was, physically, an unawakened girl in her early teens—he felt a spasm of horror.
Damon said gently, “Don’t! Callista didn’t know it herself. Remember, for six years she’s been functioning as an adult, experienced professional.” Yet he knew this was not entirely true, either. Callista must have been aware of the enormous and ineradicable gulf between her and the other women. Leonie might have spared her protégée some physical suffering, but at what price?
Well, it was a good sign that the menstrual cycle had spontaneously reinstated itself. Perhaps other barriers would disappear with nothing more than time and patience. He picked up a bunch of dried blossoms and cautiously sniffed. “Good, here we are. Kireseth—no, don’t smell it, Andrew, it does funny things to the human brain.” He felt the faint guilt of memory. The taboo against the kireseth, among psi workers, was absolute, and he felt as if he had committed a crime in handling it. He said, speaking more to himself than Andrew, “I can make kirian from this. I don’t know how to distill it as they do in Arilinn, but I can make a tincture. . . .” His mind was busy with possibilities: a strong solution of the resins dissolved out in alcohol. Perhaps with Ferrika’s help he could make a single distillation. He put the stuff down, fancying that the smell of it was going to the roots of his brain, destroying controls, breaking barriers between mind and body. . . .
Andrew paced restlessly in the still-room. His own mind was filled with horrors. “Damon, Callista must have known what could happen.”
“Of course she knew,” said Damon, not really listening to him. “She learned that before she was fifteen years old, that no man can touch a Keeper.”
“And if I could hurt or frighten her so terribly—Damon!” Suddenly he was overcome by the horror and revulsion which had gripped him last night. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what she wanted me to do? She asked me to . . . to knock her unconscious and rape her when she . . . when she could not resist.” He tried to convey some of the horror that had awakened in him; but Damon only looked thoughtful.
“It just might have worked, at that,” he said. “It was intelligent of Callista to think of it. It shows she has some grasp of the problems involved.”
Andrew could not keep back a horrified “Good God! And you can say it like that, so calmly.”
Damon, turning, suddenly realized that the younger man was at the edge of his endurance. He said gently, “Andrew, you do know what saved you from being killed, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything any more. And what I do know doesn’t help much!” He felt ragged despair. “Do you really think I could have—”
“No, no, of course not, bredu. I understand why you couldn’t. I don’t think any decent man could!” Gently, he laid a hand on Andrew’s wrist. “Andrew, what saved you—saved you both—was the fact that she wasn’t afraid. That she loved you, want
ed you. So all she hit you with was the physical reflex she couldn’t control. She didn’t even knock you out; it was hitting your head on the furniture that did that. If she had been terrified and fighting you, if you had really been trying to take her unwilling, can you imagine what she would have thrown at you?” he demanded. “Callista is one of the most powerful telepaths on Darkover, and trained as a Keeper in Arilinn! If she had hated it, if she had thought of it as rape, if she had felt any . . . any fear or revulsion against your desire, you’d have been dead!” He repeated for emphasis, “You’d be dead, dead, dead!”
But she was afraid, Andrew thought, until Damon and Ellemir made contact. . . . It was the awareness of Ellemir’s pleasure that made her want to share it! Even more disturbing was the thought of Damon, aware of Callista as he had been aware of Ellemir. Damon, sensing his distress, was for a moment shocked, experiencing it as a rebuff. They had all been so close, didn’t Andrew want to be part of what they were? He laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, a rare touch for a telepath, natural enough at this moment in the awareness of the intimacy they had shared. Andrew shrank from it, and Damon withdrew, troubled and a little saddened. Must he stay at such a distance? How long? How long? Was he brother or stranger?
But he said gently, “I know it’s new to you, Andrew. I keep forgetting that I grew up as a telepath, taking this sort of thing for granted. It will be all right, you’ll see.”
All right? Andrew asked himself. To know that only the fact that he had become an involuntary voyeur kept his wife from killing him? To know that Damon—and Ellemir—both took this kind of thing for granted, expected it, welcomed it? Did Damon resent his wanting Callista all to himself? He remembered the suggestion that Callista had made, remembered the feel of Ellemir in his arms, warm, responsive—as Callista could not be. Shocked, in desperate confusion, he turned away from Damon, blundering with horror to get out of the room. He was overloaded with shame and horror. He wanted—needed—to get away, anywhere, anywhere out of here, away from Damon’s too revealing touch, from the man who could read his most intimate thoughts. He did not know that he was virtually ill, with a very real illness known as culture shock. He only knew he felt sick, and the sickness took the form of furious rage against Damon. The heavy scent of the herbs made him afraid he would vomit. He said thickly, “I’ve got to get some air,” and pushed the door open, stumbling through the deserted kitchens and into the yard. He stood with the heavy snow falling all around him, and damned the planet where he had come and the chances that had brought him here.
I should have died when the plane went down. Callie doesn’t need me. . . . I’m never going to do anything but hurt her.
Damon said behind him, “Andrew, come and talk to me. Don’t go off like this alone and try to shut it all out.”
“Oh, God,” Andrew said, drawing a breath like a sob, “I have to. I can’t talk any more. I can’t take it any more. Let me alone, damn it, can’t you just let me alone for a little while?”
He felt Damon’s presence like a sharp physical pain, a pressure, a compulsion. He knew he was hurting Damon; refused to know, to turn, to look. . . . Finally Damon said very gently, “All right, Ann’dra. I know you’ve had all you can take. A little while, then. But not too long.” And Andrew knew without turning that Damon was gone. No, he thought with a shudder of horror, Damon had never been there at all, was still back in the little stone-floored still-room.
He stood in the courtyard, heavy snow blowing around him, its fury only a little abated by the enclosing walls. Callista. He reached for the reassurance of her touch, but she was not there, only a faint pulse, restless, and he dared not disturb her drugged sleep.
What can I do? What can I do? To his dismay and horror he began to weep, alone in the wilderness of snow. He had never felt so alone in his life, not even when the plane went down and he found himself alone on a strange planet, beneath a strange sun, in trackless unmapped mountains. . . .
Everything I ever knew is gone, useless, meaningless or worse. My friends are strangers, my wife the most alien of all. My world is gone, renounced. I can never go back; they think me dead.
He thought, I hope I catch pneumonia and die, then, aware of the childishness of that, realized he was in very real danger. Drearily, not from any sense of self-preservation, but the remnant of vague duty, he turned and went inside. The house looked alien, strange, not a place where any Terran could manage to live. Had it ever seemed welcoming, home? He looked with profound alienation around the empty hall, glad it was empty. Dom Esteban must be taking his midday rest. The maids were gossiping in soft voices. He sank down wearily on a bench, let his head rest in his arms, and stayed there, not asleep, but in retreat, hoping that if he stayed very quiet it would all go away somehow and not be real.
A long time later someone put a drink in his hands. He swallowed it gratefully, found another, and another, blurring his senses. He heard himself babbling, pouring it all out to a suddenly sympathetic ear. There were more drinks. He knew, and welcomed it, when he passed out.
There was a voice in his mind, worming its way past his barriers, deep into his unconscious, past his resistance.
No one wants you here. No one needs you here. Why not go away now, while you can, before something dreadful happens. Go away now, back where you came from, back to your own world. You’ll be happier there. Go now. Go away now. No one will know or care.
Andrew knew there was some flaw in his reasoning. Damon had given him some good reason why he should not go, then he remembered that he was angry with Damon.
The voice persisted, gentle, cajoling:
You think Damon is your friend. Don’t trust Damon. He will use you, when he needs help, and then turn on you. There was something familiar about the voice, but it wasn’t a voice at all. It was somehow inside his mind! He tried in panic to shut it out, but it was so soothing. Go away now. Go away now. No one needs you here. You will be happy when you go back to your own people. You will never be happy here.
With fumbling steps, Andrew went out into the side hall. He found his riding cloak, fastened it around his shoulders. Someone was helping him, buckling it around him. Damon, was it? Damon knew he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t trust Damon. He would be happy with his own people. He would get back to Thendara, back to the Trade City and the Terran Empire where his mind was his own. . . .
Go now. No one wants you here.
Even thickly drunk and blurred as he was, the violence of the storm struck him hard enough to take his breath away. He was about to turn back, but the voice pounded inside his head.
Go now. Go away. No one wants you here. You’ve failed. You’re only hurting Callista. Go away, go to your own people.
His boots floundered in the snow, but he kept on, lifting and dropping them with dogged determination. Callista doesn’t need you. He was drunker than he realized. He could hardly walk. He could hardly breathe, or did the flurrying snow take his breath away, snatch it, refuse to give it back?
Go away. Go back to your own people. No one needs you here.
He came a little to himself, with a final desperate attempt at self-preservation. He was alone in the storm, and the lights of Armida had vanished in the darkness. He turned desperately, stumbling, falling to his knees, realizing he was drunk, or mad. He stumbled to his feet, felt his mind blurring, fell full length in the snow. He must get up, go on, go back, get to shelter—but he was so tired.
I will just rest here for a minute . . . just a minute. . . .
Darkness covered his mind and he lost consciousness.
CHAPTER NINE
Damon worked for a long time in the narrow, stone-floored still-room, finally giving up in disgust. There was no way that he could make kirian as it was made in Arilinn. He had neither the skill nor, he suspected from a relatively thorough investigation of the equipment here, the proper materials. He regarded the crude tincture which he had managed to produce without enthusiasm. He didn’t think he would care to experiment wit
h it himself, and he was sure Callista would not. There was, however, a considerable amount of the raw material, and he might be able to do better another day. Perhaps he should have begun with an ether extraction. He would ask Callista. As he washed his hands and carefully disposed of the residues, he thought suddenly of Andrew. Where had he gone? But when he went upstairs again, to find Callista still sleeping, Ellemir answered his concerned question with surprise.
“Andrew? No, I thought him still with you. Shall I come—”
“No, stay with Callista.” He thought Andrew must have gone down to talk to the men, or out to the stables through the underground tunnels. But Dom Esteban, alone at his frugal supper with Eduin and Caradoc, frowned when questioned.
“Andrew? I saw him drinking in the lower hall with Dezi. From the way they were pouring it down, I suppose he has passed out somewhere.” The old man’s gray eyebrows bristled with scorn. “Nice behavior, with his wife ill, to go off and get himself sodden drunk! How is Callista?”
Damon said, “I don’t know.” and thought suddenly that the old Dom knew. What else could it be, with Callista ill in bed and Andrew going off to get drunk? But one of the strongest sexual taboos on Darkover was that which separated the generations. Even if Dom Esteban had been Damon’s own father instead of Ellemir’s, custom would have forbidden him to discuss this.
Damon searched the house, in all the likely places, then, in growing panic, all the unlikely ones. Finally he summoned the servants, to hear that no one had seen Andrew since midafternoon, when he and Dezi had been drinking in the lower hall.
He sent for Dezi, suddenly afraid lest Andrew, drunk and not yet accustomed to Darkovan weather, should have gone out into the blizzard, underestimating its power. When the youngster came into the room, he asked, “Where is Andrew?”
Dezi shrugged. “Who knows? I’m not his guardian or his foster-brother!”
But at the unconcealable flash of triumph, a momentary glint before Dezi’s eyes evaded his, suddenly Damon knew. “All right,” he said grimly. “Where is he, Dezi? You were the last to see him.”
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