Damia

by Anne McCaffrey

  Not from what I gathered from Jeff and Rowan.

  Isthia signaled to the medics to administer deep-sleep drugs and intravenous nourishment to Damia.

  With great reluctance then, they turned to Larak’s shell. Because they had to, they opened it and saw with some little relief that there was no mark of the violence of his death on the young face. A curiously surprised smile lingered on his lips.

  Isthia turned away in tears and Jeran, too numb by the total tragedy to display his own sorrow, put his arm around her to lead her away.

  “Prime,” the captain of the ship said respectfully when they entered the control room, “we have located the debris of the alien ship. Permission to recover the fragments?”

  “Permission granted. Isthia and I will return to the Tower. Signal when you’re ready to be ’ported, Captain.”

  “Very good, sir,” the captain said, and stiffened to a rigid attention. The unashamed tears in his eyes and his very crisp salute expressed wordlessly his pride, his sympathy, and his sorrow.

  * * *

  Struggling against a will determined to keep her asleep, Damia fought her way to semi-consciousness.

  “I can’t keep her under. She’s resisting,” a remote voice rang in peals.

  As distant as the sound was, like a far echo in a subterranean cavern, each syllable fell like a hammer on her exposed nerves. Sobbing, Damia struggled for consciousness, sanity, and a release from this agony. She couldn’t seem to trigger the reflexes that would divert pain, and an effort to call Afra to help her met with not only the resistance of increased agony but a vast blackness. Her mind was as stiff as iron, holding each thought firmly to it as though magnetized in place.

  “Damia, do not reach. Do not use your mind,” a gentle voice said in her ear. She recognized the voice as Isthia’s, and her grandmother’s presence restored her wavering sanity. She felt the touch of Isthia’s cool, capable hands on her forehead.

  Damia opened her eyes and tried to focus on the face above her. With trembling, weak hands she pressed Isthia’s fingers against her temples in an unconscious plea for relief of pain.

  “What happened? Why can’t I control my mind?” Damia cried, tears of weakness streaming down her face.

  “You rather stretched yourself, destroying Sodan,” Isthia said. “But you did get him, you know.”

  “I can’t remember,” Damia groaned, blinking away tears so she could at least see clearly.

  “Every rating in FT&T does.”

  “Oh, my head. It’s all blank and there’s something I’ve got to do, Isthia.” Damia tried to rise but, though Isthia exerted little pressure, she sank weakly back into the bed. “I’ve got something I must do, only I can’t remember what it is.”

  “You did do what you must, dear, I assure you. But you’ve suffered a tremendous trauma, and you must rest,” Isthia said, her voice in the croon that had soothed Damia as a rebellious child. Cool hands stroked her face and she welcomed the relief, for her skin felt so hot and hard. Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain inside her skull. “I’m putting you back to sleep now, love,” and Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm. “We’re very proud of you but you must sleep. Only sleep can heal your mind.”

  “‘Great nature’s second course, that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.’ What’s knitting, Isthia? I’ve never known.” Even Damia recognized that she was babbling as the cool, scalliony taste in her throat heralded the spread of the drug.

  Again, after what seemed no passage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinably relentless need.

  “I can’t understand it,” came Isthia’s voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia’s pained mind like tympany in a closet. “That last dose was enough to put a city to sleep.”

  “She’s worrying at something and probably won’t rest until she’s resolved it. Let’s wake her up and find out.”

  The second voice was masculine and sounded vaguely familiar, also vaguely annoyed. With a grateful smile, she labelled it “Dad.” She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw her father’s face swimming out of an indistinct background.

  “Dad,” she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.

  “Dear Damia,” he said with such loving pride that she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold.

  Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches, a mind that once had blithely coursed light-years, but she soon managed to communicate her crime.

  Larak and Afra! They were ahead of me in the focus. I killed them when I had to destroy Sodan. I must have killed them because I’m still alive!

  Behind Jeff she heard her mother’s cry and Isthia’s exclamation.

  “No, no,” Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. “You’re not at fault, dear Damia. Yes, you drew power through the Larak-focus to destroy Sodan and succeeded. Only you were capable of such a magnificent thrust! Furthermore, without you to throw us into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT&T. And that’s the truth your mother will verify.”

  Damia heard the Rowan murmur affirmatively.

  “But I can’t hear anything right now,” and in spite of herself, Damia felt her chin quiver and tears of pure terror welled out of her eyes. “Have I lost my mind?”

  “Of course you haven’t,” and the Rowan elbowed Jeff to one side to kneel by her daughter and tenderly stroke her hair back from her flushed and tear-stained face. “You saved us, you know. You really did.”

  Isthia moved the Rowan gently but firmly to one side.

  “You must go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care, Damia,” Isthia said with therapeutic asperity. “You knit like this,” and she inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia’s mind. It was an adroit gambit, designed to fragment concentration, but Damia saw it for the evasion it was.

  “I must be told all that happened,” she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. “I remember. Sodan made one last thrust at us.” She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering, too, that she had tried to intercept it and, “Larak died,” she said in a flat voice. “And Afra. I couldn’t shield in time.”

  “Afra lives,” the Rowan said in a steady voice.

  “But Larak doesn’t. Why Larak?” Damia demanded, desperately striving to uncover what she felt they were still hiding from her.

  “Your brother was the focus, Damia,” the Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of Larak’s death. “Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to shield Larak, but he couldn’t draw sufficient help from you. Your father and I also tried to support him, but he was the focus. Without you to help, we couldn’t even have cushioned Afra in time. Sodan’s was truly a powerful mentality.”

  Damia looked from her mother’s face to her father’s and knew that they spoke the truth. But a reservation hovered in their eyes and their manner.

  “You haven’t told me everything,” she said, fighting both immense fatigue and the drugs.

  “All right, skeptic,” Jeff said, lifting her into his arms. “Though there’s nothing wrong with your hearing, so why they haven’t been assailed by his snores, I do not know. Everyone else is using ear plugs,” he added as he carried her down a dim hall.

  Pausing at an open door, he swung her so she could see into the room. A night light hung over the bed, illuminating Afra’s quiet face, deeply lined with fatigue and pain. Denying even the physical evidence, Damia reached out, touching just enough for reassurance the distressed mental rumble that meant Afra inhabited his body.

  “Damia! Don’t do that!” Jeff roared, hurting more than her ears as he bore her back down the hall to her room.

  “I won’t again but I had to,” s
he sobbed, her head ballooning with agony.

  “And we’ll make sure you don’t until your mind is completely healed. Out you go, missy,” and she was powerless against the three minds that reinstated the welcome oblivion of sleep.

  * * *

  An insistent whisper nibbled at the corners of her awareness and roused Damia from restorative sleep. Cringing in anticipation of the return of pain, she was mildly surprised to feel only the faintest discomfort. Experimentally, Damia pushed a depressant on the ache and that, too, disappeared. Unutterably pleased by her success, she sat up in bed. It was night and the gentle breeze wafted scents which she recognized as Denebian. She stretched until a cramp caught her in the side.

  Heavens, hasn’t anyone moved me in months? she asked herself, noting that her mental tone was firm. She lay back in bed, deliberating. Poor Damia, she said in a self-derisive tone, ever since that encounter with that dreadful alien mind, she’s been nothing but a T-4. T-9? T-3? Damia tried out the different ratings for size and then discarded them all, along with her melodrama. You idiot. You’ll never know till you try.

  Tentatively, without apparent effort, she reached out and counted the pulses of another—no, two other—sleepers. Afra’s was the faint one. But, Damia realized in calm triumph, it was there. Which brought her up sharp against the second fact.

  She slid from her bed to stand by the window. Sometime during her last deep slumber, she—and Afra—had been moved to Deneb, to her grandmother’s forest retreat. This room looked out onto the back of the clearing in which the house stood. Beyond the lawn of evergrass, beyond the bank of the stream, to where the forest began her glance traveled. And stopped when she saw the white oblong. Instinct told her that Larak was buried there and the thought of Larak buried and his touch forever gone broke her. She wept, biting her knuckles and pressing her arms tightly into her ribs to muffle the sound of her mourning.

  Out of the night, out of the stillness, the whisper that had roused her tugged at her again. She stifled her tears to listen, trying to identify that sliver of sound. It faded before she caught it.

  Resolutely now, she laid her sorrow gently in the deepest part of her soul, a part of her but apart forever. No matter what Jeff and the Rowan said, she had caused Larak’s death, and maimed Afra. Had she been less preoccupied, less self-centered, she would not have been dazzled by the fancy that Sodan was her Prince Charming, her knight in cylindrical armor.

  Such a spoiled child she’d been: egotistical, arrogant, proud, making demands she had no right to request, wanting privileges she had not earned, rewards she was too immature to appreciate . . .

  The whisper again, fainter but somehow surer. With a startled cry of joy, Damia whirled from her room, running on light feet down the hall. Catching at the door frame to break her headlong flight, she hesitated on the threshold.

  She caught her breath as she realized that Afra was sitting up. He was looking at her with a smile of disbelief on his face.

  “You’ve been calling me,” she whispered, half-questioning, half-stating.

  “In a lame-brained way,” he replied with a wry half-smile. “I can’t seem to reach beyond the edge of the bed.”

  “Don’t try. It hurts,” she said quickly, stepping into the room to pause shyly at the foot of the bed.

  Afra grimaced, rubbing his temples. “I know it hurts, but I can’t seem to find any balance in my skull,” he confessed, his voice uneven, worried. “Even as a child, I always had that.”

  “May I?” she asked formally, unexpectedly timid with him.

  Closing his eyes, Afra nodded.

  Sitting down as if her slender frame might jar the bed, Damia lightly laid her fingertips to his temples, and touched his mind as delicately as she knew how. Afra stiffened with pain and Damia quickly established a block, regardless of the cost to her own recent recovery. She drew away the pain, laying in the tenderer areas a healing mental anaesthesia. Jealously, she noticed someone else had been tending the damage.

  Isthia . . . has . . . a . . . delicate . . . touch, too. He sent the thought with deliberate and slow care.

  “Oh, Afra,” Damia cried for the agony the simple phrase cost him. “You aren’t burned out. You’re no lamebrain either. As if I would let you be. You’ll be just as strong as ever. I’ll help!”

  Afra leaned forward, his face close to hers, his yellow eyes blazing.

  “You’ll help?” he asked in a low, intense voice as he searched her face. “How, Damia?”

  Her fingers plucking shyly and nervously at his blanket, Damia could not look away from an Afra who had altered disturbingly. Damia tried to fathom the startling change in this familiar figure. Unable to resort to a mental touch, she saw Afra for the first time with only physical sight. And he was suddenly very different. Very masculine! That was it. All at once, Afra appeared startlingly male to her.

  She was appalled to think that she had blundered about so, looking for a mind that was superior to hers: a mind that demanded her respect and admiration, that could lead hers, and support her with sure understanding and empathy. And that mind had always been available! Every time she had needed it—on Deneb, on Callisto, everywhere she’d ever been. Only she hadn’t looked for it.

  “Damia? Speechless?” Afra teased her, his smooth tenor voice tender.

  She nodded violently as she felt his warm fingers closing around her nervously plucking hand. Immediately she experienced a profoundly sensual empathy.

  “Why, you wanted me even then, on Callisto, when you denied me? Didn’t you? You just waited . . . and waited . . . Whatever for? I’ve always needed you, Afra! Always! Why do you think I’ve been so lonely?” The words burst from her.

  With a low, triumphant laugh, Afra pulled her into his arms, cradling her body against his and settling her head against his shoulder.

  “Familiarity breeds contempt?” he asked, mocking her gently with her own words.

  “And how could you . . . a T-3 . . . manage to mask . . .” she went on, fueling her indignation.

  “Familiarity also bred certain skills, Damia.” And he chuckled, holding her firmly despite her halfhearted attempt to struggle free. But he was physically stronger than she imagined, delighted by that as well.

  “You and that aloof attitude of yours. When you wouldn’t take me on Callisto I was sure it was Mother . . .”

  “Your mother was no more for me than Sodan was for you,” Afra said, his eyes stern as she stared up at him, shaken by his harsh tone.

  His expression altered again, his arms tightened convulsively as he bent his head and kissed her with an urgent, lusty eagerness.

  “Sodan may have loved you, in his fashion, Damia,” Afra’s voice said in her ear, “but mine will be far more satisfying for you.”

  Trembling, Damia opened her mind to Afra without a single reservation. Their lips met again as Afra held her tightly in what shortly became far more than a mere meeting of minds.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  DAMIA roused the next morning, aware first of having slept very deeply. Then, of feeling unusually refreshed, relaxed, and self-satisfied. Having established those states, she was abruptly aware of what had transpired the previous night. And sat up in the bed.

  Curled on his side and still sound asleep was Afra, his long arms dangling over the edge of the bed. She couldn’t see his face, but she gave him just the briefest mental touch and sighed with relief: his mind-tone had noticeably improved overnight.

  That can be a fringe benefit of loving, you know, said Isthia in a whispery mental voice.

  Grandmother! Even as Damia bridled at Isthia’s amused observation, she also noted that receipt of the carefully tendered message caused her mind no pain.

  I would have had to be mute or dead not to hear the way you two were vibrating. Isthia kept her “voice” quiet, but Damia could not miss the amused quality of it.

  The two of us? Then Afra’s able to ’path?

  Well, let’s just say that there ar
e certain emotions that broadcast in spite of themselves. Just let him find his own balance.

  Isthia appeared in the doorway, a cup in each hand. Entering the room quietly, she gave Damia one cup and then went to the other side of the bed, to scrutinize Afra’s sleeping face. Damia bristled possessively.

  Down, girl, Isthia said with an ironic smile, I’m on your side. Afra has been special to me, too, for vastly different reasons.

  Damia wanted to discover them, but Isthia waggled a finger at her the moment she felt Damia’s pressure.

  Don’t, Damia. Enough that I’m on your side.

  Damia tried a different tack. What did you mean then? Let him find his own balance?

  Isthia’s expression became rueful. I couldn’t help overhearing your very creditable offer to him last night. But that won’t be needed. Nor any notion of yours to sacrifice yourself to restore him. Now, now, don’t hackle at me. Professionally, I’ve every reason to believe that he’ll make a full recovery, given time and plenty of quiet. That’s one reason I convinced your parents to let me bring you both here to Deneb. Callisto’s far too frenetic a place for mental convalescents.

  Any Tower would be, Damia thought, and sipped at the hot brew, eyeing her grandmother speculatively.

  Then what did you mean—you’re on my side?

  Isthia regarded her with exaggerated incredulity. You mean, you think you can jump from mooning over that Sodan character to a liaison with Afra and not expect repercussions?

  It’s NOT a liaison. It’s a bonding! Damia said in an unequivocal tone. You should know that . . .

  Isthia held up one hand in rebuke. I closed my mind when I realized which way your . . . ah . . . suddenly discovered rapport was heading. I do practice discretion as well as metamorphics, you know.

  Mother will object. Damia gritted her teeth. During last night’s passionate consummation, she certainly had had no time to consider “repercussions.”

  Well, she has had Afra’s support for many years and she’ll be annoyed at having to replace him, but I suspect you’ll find that your father might have more cogent objections.