When he came out of it this time he was lying on the floor of the octagonal matrix chamber, and Kennard and Neyrissa and Auster were standing and looking down at him. Somewhere he heard muffled sobbing and saw, with the fringes of his mind, young Corus hunched over, his face buried in his hands. Rannirl was standing with his arm around Corus, holding the boy against him. Kerwin’s head was a giant balloon filled with red-hot seething pain. It was so awful he couldn’t breathe for a second; then he felt his lungs expand and a hoarse sound coming from him, without volition.
Kennard knelt beside him and said, “Can you sit up?”
Somehow he managed it. Auster put out a hand to help him, looking sick. He said, with an unusual friendliness in his voice, “Jeff, we’ve all been through it, one way or the other. Here, lean on me.” Detached, surprised at himself, Kerwin accepted the other man’s hand. Kennard asked, “Corus, are you all right?”
Corus raised a blotched, tear-stained face. He looked sick, but he said, “I’ll live.”
Neyrissa said with gentle detachment, “You’re doing it to yourself, you know. You have a choice.”
Elorie said, in a taut voice, “Let’s get through it quickly. None of us can take much more.” She was shaking, but she stretched a hand to Corus, and Kerwin felt, like a faint snap and jolt of electricity, felt it somewhere inside his mind, the re-building of the mesh. Auster, then Rannirl, Neyrissa, dropped into place; Kennard, still holding Kerwin, dropped away and was gone. Elorie did not speak, but suddenly her grey eyes filled up all the space in the room and Jeff heard her commanding whisper.
“Come.”
With a jolt, the breath crashing from his body, he felt the impact of their meshed minds as if he had dropped into one facet of the carven crystal. A pattern flamed like a giant star of fire in his mind, and he felt himself run all around the circle, flowing like water, swirling in and out of contact; Elorie, cool, aloof,
holding him at the end of a lifeline
... Kennard’s gentle sureness; a feather-touch of rapport, shaky, frightened, from Corus; a sullen flare from Auster, sparks meshing, jolting apart ... Neyrissa, a soft searching touch ...
“Enough,” said Kennard sharply and suddenly Kerwin was himself again, and the others were not intangible energy-swirls in the room around him, but separate people again, standing grouped around him.
Rannirl whistled. “Zandru’s hells, what a barrier! If we ever get it all the way down, Jeff, you’ll be one hell of a technician, but we’ve got to get rid of that barrier first!”
Corus said, “It wasn’t quite as bad the second time. He did make it, part way.”
Kerwin’s head was still one seething mass of fire. He said, “I thought, whatever it was you did to me—”
“We got rid of part of it,” Kennard said, and he went on speaking, but suddenly the words had no meaning. Elorie glanced sharply at Kerwin; she said something, but the words were just noise, static in Kerwin’s brain. He shook his head, not understanding.
Kennard said in Cahuenga, “Headache any better?”
“Yeah, sure,” Kerwin muttered; it wasn’t, if anything it was worse, but he didn’t have the energy to say so. Kennard didn’t argue. He took Kerwin firmly by the shoulders, led him into the next room and put him into a cushiony chair. Neyrissa said, “Here, this is my business,” came and put her light hands on Kerwin’s head.
Kerwin didn’t say anything. He was past that now. He was rocking in a giant swing, faster and faster, on a pendulum of dizzy pain. Elorie said something. Neyrissa spoke to him in a tone of urgent question, but none of it made any sense to Kerwin. Even Kennard’s voice was only a blur of meaningless syllables, verbal hash, word salad. He heard Neyrissa say, “I’m not getting through to him. Get Taniquel up here, fast. Maybe she can ...”
Words rose and fell around him like a song sung in a strange language. The world blurred into grey fog and he was swinging on a giant pendulum further and further out, into darkness and pale lights, nothingness ...
Then Taniquel was there, blurring before his eyes; she fell to her knees beside him with a cry of distress.
“Jeff! Oh, Jeff, can you hear me?”
How could he help it, Kerwin thought with the unreason of pain, when she was shouting right in his ear?
“Jeff, please look at me, let me help—”
“No more,” he muttered. “No more of this. I’ve had enough for one night, haven’t I?”
“Please, Jeff, I can’t help you unless you let me—” Taniquel begged, and he felt her hand, hot and painful on his throbbing head. He twitched restlessly, trying to throw it off. It felt like hot iron. He wished they would all go away and let him alone.
Then slowly, slowly, as if some tense, full vein had been tapped, he felt the pain drain away. Moment by moment it receded until at last he could see the girl clearly again. He sat up, the pain just a dim throb at the base of his brain.
“Good enough,” Kennard said briskly. “I think you’ll work out, eventually.”
Auster muttered, “It’s not worth the trouble!”
Kerwin said, “I heard that,” and Kennard gave a slow, grimly triumphant nod.
“You see,” he said. “I told you so. I told you it was worth the risk.” He drew a long, weary sigh.
Kerwin lurched to his feet and stood there, gripping the chair back. He felt as if he had been dragged through a wringer, but he was painfully at peace. Taniquel was slumped beside his chair, grey and exhausted, Neyrissa beside her, holding her head. She said, weakly, raising her eyes, “Don’t worry about it, Jeff. I was just—just glad I could do something for you.”
Kennard looked tired, too, but triumphant. Corus looked up and smiled at him, shakily, and it struck Kerwin, with a curious wrench, that the boy had been crying over his pain. Even Auster, biting his lip, said, “I’ve got to give you this. You’re one of us. You can’t blame me for doubting, but—well, don’t hold it against me.”
Elorie came and stood on tiptoe; close enough to embrace him, though she didn’t. She raised one hand and touched his cheek, just a feather-touch with the tips of her fingers. She said, “Welcome, Jeff-the-barbarian,” and smiled into his eyes.
Rannirl linked arms with him as they went down the stairs to the hall where they had met earlier that night. “At least, this time, we can decide for ourselves what we want to drink,” he said, laughing, and Kerwin realized that he had come through the final ordeal. Taniquel had accepted him from the beginning, but now they all accepted him with the same completeness. He, who had never belonged anywhere, was now overwhelmed with the knowledge of how deeply he belonged. Taniquel came and sat on the arm of his chair. Mesyr came and asked if he wanted something to eat or drink. Rannirl poured him a glass of cool, fragrant wine that tasted faintly of apples, and said, “I think you’ll like this; it comes from our estates.” It was incongruously like a birthday party.
Sometime later that evening he found himself next to Kennard. Sensitized to the man’s mood, he heard himself say, “You look happy about this. Auster isn’t pleased, but you are. Why?”
“Why isn’t Auster, or why am I?” Kennard asked with a twist of droll laughter.
“Both.”
“Because you’re part Terran,” Kennard replied somberly. “If you
do
become a working part of a matrix circle—actually inside a Tower—and the Council accepts it, then there’s a chance the Council will accept
my
sons.”
He frowned, looking over Kerwin’s head into a sad distance.
“You see,” he said at last, “I did what Cleindori did. I married outside Comyn—married a woman who was part Terran. And I have two sons. And it sets a precedent. I would like to think that one day, my sons could come here ...” He fell silent. Kerwin could have asked a dozen more questions, but he sensed that this wasn’t the time. It didn’t seem to matter. He belonged.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The World Outside
The days slipped by in Arilinn and Kerwin soon began to feel as if he had been there all his life. And yet, in a curious way, he was like a man lost in an enchanted dream, as if all his old dreams and desires had come to life and he had stepped into them and closed a wall behind him. It was as if the Terran Zone and the Trade City had never existed. Never, in any world, had he felt so much at home. Never had he belonged anywhere as he belonged here. It made him almost uneasy to be so happy; he wasn’t used to it.
Under Rannirl’s guidance, he studied matrix mechanics. He didn’t get too far with the theory; he felt that maybe Tani had the right idea when she called it magic. Spacemen didn’t understand the mathematics of an interstellar drive, either, but it worked. He was quicker in learning the simper psychokinetic feats with the small matrix crystals; and Neyrissa, the monitor, taught him to go into his own body, searching out the patterns of his blood flowing in his veins, to regulate, quicken or slow his heartbeats, raise or lower his blood pressure, watch over the flows of what she called the channels, and what Kerwin suspected would have been called, by Terran medics, the autonomic nervous system. It was considerably more sophisticated than any biofeedback technique he had ever known in the Terran Zone.
He made less progress in the rapport circle. He had learned to take his turn—with Corus or Neyrissa at his side—in the relays, the communication network of telepaths between the Towers, which sent messages and news of what was happening, between Neskaya and Arilinn and Hali and faraway Dalereuth; messages that still meant little to Jeff, about a forest fire in the Kilghard Hills, an outbreak of bandit raids far away on the fringes of the Hellers, an outbreak of a contagious fever in Dalereuth, the birth of triplets near the Lake Country; citizens, too, came to the Stranger’s Room of the Tower and asked that messages be sent through the relays, matters of business or news of births and deaths and the arrangement of marriages.
But in the working of the circle he was less successful. He knew they were all anxiously watching his progress, now that they had accepted him; it seemed sometimes that they watched over him like hawks. Taniquel insisted they were pushing him too fast, while Auster glowered and accused Kennard and Elorie of coddling him. But as yet he could endure only a few minutes at a time in the matrix circle. It wasn’t, evidently, a process that could be hurried; but he gained a few seconds a day, holding out longer each time under the stresses of contact before he collapsed.
The headaches continued, and if anything they got worse, but for some reason it didn’t discourage any of them. Neyrissa taught him to control them, a little, by regulating the inner pressure of the blood vessels around the eye sockets and inside the skull. But there were still plenty of times when he found himself unable to endure anything but a darkened room and silence, with his head splitting. Corus made up rude jokes about him, and Rannirl predicted pessimistically that he’d get worse before he got better, but they were all patient with him; once, even, when he was shut up with one of the blinding headaches, he heard Mesyr—whom he had thought disliked him—remonstrating with Elorie, whom she obviously adored, for making noise in a hallway outside the corridor of his room.
Once or twice, when it got too bad, Taniquel came unasked to his room and did the trick she had done the first night, touching his temples with light fingers and draining the pain away as if she had tapped a valve. She didn’t like doing it, Kerwin knew; it exhausted her, and it scared Kerwin—and made him ashamed, too—seeing her so grey and haggard afterward. And it infuriated Neyrissa.
“He has got to learn to do it for himself, Tani. It is not good for you, or for him either, if you do for him what he can and must learn to do for himself! And now look at you,” she scolded, “you have incapacitated yourself too!”
Taniquel said faintly, “I can’t endure his pain. And since I have to feel it anyway, I may as well help him.”
Then learn to barrier yourself,” Neyrissa admonished. “A monitor must never become so deeply involved, you know that! If you go on like this, Tani, you know very well what will happen!”
Taniquel looked at her with a mischievous smile. “Are you jealous, Neyrissa?” But the older woman only frowned at Kerwin angrily, and went out of the room.
“What was all that about, Tani?” Kerwin asked, but Taniquel did not answer. Kerwin wondered if he would ever understand the small interactions among the people here, the courtesies and the things left unsaid in a telepathic society.
And yet he had begun to relax. Strange as the Arilinn Tower was, it wasn’t a magical fairy-tale castle, just a big stone building where people lived. The gliding, silent, nonhuman servants still made him a little uneasy, but he didn’t have to see much of them, and he was getting used to their silent ways and learning to ignore them as the others did, unless he wanted something. The place wasn’t all wizard and hobgoblin. The enchanted tower wasn’t enchanted at all. For some curious reason he felt pleased when he discovered a leak in the roof, right over his room, and since no workman or outsider could come inside the Veil, he and Rannirl had to climb up on the dizzily sloping roof and fix it themselves. Somehow that prosaic incident made the place more real to him, less dreamlike.
He began to learn the language they spoke among themselves—they called it
casta
—for, while he could understand and telepathically, he knew that sooner or later he would have to deal with local non-telepaths. He read some history of Darkover from the Darkovan, not the Terran point of view; there weren’t many books, but Kennard was something of a scholar, and had an extensive history of the days of the Hundred Kingdoms—which seemed, to Jeff, somewhat more complicated than that of medieval Europe—and another of the Hastur Wars which, at the end of the Ages of Chaos, had united most of the countryside under the Seven Domains and the Comyn Council. Kennard warned him that accurate history was all but unknown; these had been compiled from tradition, legend, old ballads, and stories, since for almost a thousand years writing had been left to the brothers of Saint Valentine at Nevarsin Monastery, and literacy had been all but lost. But from all this Jeff gathered that at one time, Darkover had had a highly developed technology of the matrix stones, and that its misuse had reduced the Seven Domains to a chaotic anarchy, after which the Hasturs had formed the system of Towers under the Keepers, pledged to chastity to avoid dynastic squabbles, and bound by vows and severe ethical principles.