Rannirl held up a hand. “At the same time finding out where they are,” he drawled, “and spreading all over Darkover with their infernal machines instead of staying decently shut up in their Trade Cities!”
Valdrin said hotly, “I deplore that as much as you do! I have no love for the Empire, but if the alternative is to slip backward into primitivism ...”
“There is an alternative,” Rannirl said, “We can make your survey for you—and do the mining, too, if you like. And we can do it quicker than the Terrans.”
Kerwin drew a deep breath. He should have guessed. If a matrix crystal could power an aircraft, what were the limits of that power?
God, what a concept! And to keep the Terran engineers out of the Domains ...
Kerwin had not realized until this moment how deeply he felt on this subject; his years on Terra came back to his mind, dirty industrialized cities, men living for machinery, his dismay when he came back to Thendara and found the Trade City only a little corner of the Empire. With the passionate love of an exile for his home, he understood Hastur’s dream; to keep Darkover what it was, keep it out of the Empire.
Valdrin said, “It sounds good, my lords, but the Comyn haven’t been that strong, not for centuries—maybe never. My great-granfer used to tell stories of buildings raised by matrix power, and roads built, and such-like things, but in my time it’s been all a man can do to get enough iron to shoe his horses!”
“It sounds good, yes,” said another of the men, “but I think it more likely the Comyn are just trying to delay us until the Terrans lose interest and go elsewhere. I think we ought to deal with the Terrans.”
Valdrin said, “Lord Hastur, we need more than vague talk about the old Comyn powers and the Tower circles. How long would it take you to make this survey for us?”
Rannirl glanced at Hastur, as if asking permission to speak. He asked, “How long would the Terrans need to do it?”
“Theyve promised it to us in half a year.”
Rannirl glanced at Elorie, at Kennard, and Kerwin felt that they shared an exchange from which he was excluded. Then he said, “Half a year, eh? What would you say to forty days?”
“On one condition,” Auster broke in passionately. “That if we do it for you, you’ll abandon all ideas of dealing with the Terran engineers!”
“That seems only fair,” said Elorie, speaking for the first time, and Kerwin noticed how a silence dropped in the room as the Keeper spoke. “If we prove to you that we can do more for you than your Terran engineers, will you be content to be guided by the Council? Our only desire is that Darkover shall continue to be Darkover, not a replica of the Terran Empire ... or a third-rate imitation! If we succeed, you will allow yourselves to be guided by Comyn Council and Arilinn in all things.”
“That seems fair enough, my lady,” Valdrin said. “But it’s only fair it should go both ways. If you can’t deliver what you say, will Comyn Council pledge itself to withdraw all objections, and let us deal with the Terrans without interference?”
Elorie said, “I can only speak for Arilinn, not for Comyn Council,” but Hastur rose. In the quiet, resonant voice that filled the Council chamber without being loud, he said, “On the word of a Hastur, it shall be so.”
Kerwin met Taniquel’s eyes, seeing the shock in them. The word of Hastur was proverbial. And now it was all in their hands—if they could indeed do what Rannirl had said they could do, what Hastur had pledged they could do. The whole future direction of Darkover hung on their success or failure. And that success or failure hung on him, on Jeff Kerwin, on “Elorie’s barbarian”—the newest member of the circle, the weak link in the chain! It was a paralyzing responsibility, and Kerwin was terrified by the implications.
The formalities of leavetaking were endless, and halfway through them Kerwin slipped away unseen, back through the courtyards and through the shimmering haze of the Veil.
It was too heavy a weight to be borne, that their success or failure should hang on him alone ... and he had thought he would have more time to learn! He remembered the agony of the first rapports, and was horribly afraid. He turned into his room and flung himself down on his bed in silent despair. It wasn’t fair to demand so much of him, so soon! It was too much, to insist that the whole fate of Darkover, the Darkover he knew and loved, should depend on his untried powers!
The ghostly scent in the room felt strong to him; in a flash of remote recognition, it penetrated a closed place in his memory.
Cleindori. My mother, who broke her vows to the Comyn, for an Earthman ... must I pay for her betrayal?
A flash of something, recognition, memory, hovered at the edge of his senses, a voice that said
it was not betrayal
. ... He could not identify the dark, closing door of memory, standing half-ajar, a voice ...
Blinding pain struck through his head; it was gone. He stood in his room, crying out in despair. “It’s too much! It’s not fair, that it should all depend on me ...” And heard the words echoing in his mind, as if from the walls, as if someone else had stood here, crying these words in the same despair.
A soft step in the room, a voice that whispered his name, and Taniquel was at his side, the web of rapport meshing between them. The girl’s face, now solemn and free of mischief, was drawn and grieved with his trouble.
“But it’s not like that, Jeff,” she whispered at last. “We trust you, we all trust you. If we fail, it’s not your doing alone. Don’t you know that?” Her voice broke and she clung to him, holding him in her arms. Kerwin, shaken with a new, violent emotion, crushed the girl to him. Their lips met; and Kerwin knew that he had been wanting this since he first saw her, through the smoke of a Terran room. The woman of his own people, the first to accept him as one of themselves.
“Jeff, we love you; if we fail, it’s not your failure, it’s ours. You won’t be the one to blame. But you won’t fail, Jeff. I know you won’t. ...”
Her arms sheltered him, their thoughts blended, and the upsurge of love and desire in him was something he had never known, never guessed.
Here was no easy conquest, no cheap girl from the spacemen’s bars, to give his body a moment’s ease but leave his heart untouched. Here was no encounter to leave the aftertaste of lust in his memory, and the sickening of loneliness when he sensed, as he had sensed so often, the woman’s emptiness as deep as his own disillusion.
Taniquel. Taniquel, who had been closer than any previous lover from that first instant of rapport between them, from her first accepting kiss. How was it that he had never known? He shut his eyes, the better to taste this closeness, the closeness that was more intense than the touch of lips or arms.
Taniquel whispered, “I’ve sensed ... your loneliness and your need, Jeff. But I was afraid to let myself share them until now. Jeff, Jeff—I’ve taken your pain to myself, let me share this too.”
“But,” Kerwin said hoarsely, “I’m not afraid now. I was afraid only because I felt alone.”
“And now,” she spoke his thoughts, sinking into his arms with a surrender so absolute that he seemed never to have known a woman before, “you’ll never be alone again.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Way of Arilinn
If Kerwin had visualized the planetary survey as something to be done by magic, concentration into the matrixes, a quick mental process, he was quickly shown how wrong he was. The actual rapport work, Kennard told him, would come later; meanwhile there were preparations to be made, and only the Tower telepaths themselves could make them.
It was almost impossible to focus telepathic rapport, so they explained to him, unless the object or substance had first been brought into a rapport with the telepath who would be using it. Kerwin had imagined that the gathering of the materials would be done by outsiders or menials; instead, he himself, as the least skilled in actual telepathic matrix work, was put to several small technical jobs in the preliminary stages. He had learned something of metallurgy on Terra; assisted by Corus, they located samples of various metals, and, working in a laboratory that reminded Jeff of an Earth-history conception of an alchemist’s study, smelted them down and with primitive but surprisingly effective techniques, reduced them to pure form. He wondered what on earth they were going to do with those miniature samples of iron, tin, copper, lead, zinc, and silver. He was even more confused when Corus started making molecular models of these metals, kindergarten affairs with little clay balls on sticks, pausing at times to concentrate on the metals and “sound” the atomic structure with his matrix. Kerwin quickly picked up the trick of this—it was not unlike his early experiments with glass and crystal structure.
Meanwhile Taniquel was out daily in the air-launch with Auster and Kennard, examining great maps, carefully coordinating them with photographs (made on excellent Terran cameras) of the terrain. Sometimes they were away for two or three days at a time.
Taniquel had explained to Kerwin why they needed the maps and pictures of the countryside. “You see,” she explained, “the picture—and the map—becomes a symbol of that piece of ground, and we can establish rapport with it through the picture. There was a time when a good psychic could find water, or minerals in the ground, but he had to be walking over it at the time.”
Kerwin nodded; even on Earth, where psi powers were still not much regarded, there were water-finders and dowsers. But on a
map
?
“We don’t find them on the map, silly,” Taniquel said. “The map is a device to establish contact with that piece of land, the territory
represented
by the map. We could find it by pure psychism, but it’s easier if we have something that directly represents it; like a photograph. We use the map to establish the contact, and to mark what we find there.”
Kerwin supposed the principle was the same as the folk-tale of the man who killed his enemy by sticking pins in his image; but as the memory came into his mind, Taniquel blanched and said, “No one trained at Arilinn would ever,
ever
do such a wicked thing!”
“But the principle is the same,” Kerwin said, “using an object as a focus for the powers of the mind.” But Taniquel still would not admit it. “It isn’t the same at all! That’s meddling with the mind, and it’s unlawful and—
dirty
,” she said vehemently, then looked at him with suspicion. “You took the monitor’s oath, didn’t you?” she demanded, as if wondering how anyone sworn that way could even have such thoughts. And Kerwin sighed, knowing he would never understand Taniquel. They shared so much, they had been so often in rapport, he felt that she was utterly known to him: And yet there were times when, as now, she became alien, wholly a stranger.
While they were making the maps and checking their accuracy with the Terran photographs (Kerwin, who knew something of cameras from his years on Terra, was pressed into service developing, printing, and enlarging the enormous aerial views), Corus finished the work of making the metal samples; then Elorie brought them in on the work of constructing the matrix lattices, or “screens.”
This was hard, demanding work, both mentally and physically; they worked with molten glass, whose amorphous structure was nevertheless solid enough to hold the matrix crystals in the desired structure, a solid network encased in glass. Corus, whose PK potential was enormously high, had the task of holding the glassy stuff in a state of liquid pliancy without heat. Kerwin attempted this several times, but it frightened him to see Elorie plunge her frail white hands into the apparently boiling mass. Rannirl said dryly that if Kerwin lost his nerve and his control they could all be badly hurt, and refused to let him have control of the glass while they were working inside it. Layer after layer of the glass was poured, Elorie activating, with her own matrix, the tiny sensitized crystals suspended inside each layer; Rannirl standing by to take control when hers faltered; and meanwhile following the whole process on a monitor screen not unlike the one Kerwin had seen in the house of the two matrix mechanics in Thendara, monitoring the complex interior crystalline structures being built up in the layers of glass, by a process analogous to the monitoring process that Taniquel, or Neyrissa, could do with the body of one of them.
Rannirl said once, at the end of a long stint working with the lattices, “I shouldn’t say this; but Elorie is wasted as a Keeper. She has the talent to be a technician; and she never will be, because we need Keepers too badly. If there were more women willing to work as Keepers—a Keeper doesn’t need that kind of talent, a Keeper doesn’t even have to learn to monitor; she simply has to hold the energon flows. Zandru’s hells, we could use a damned
machine
for that. I could build an amplifier that would do it, one that any good mechanic could handle! But it’s traditional, using a Keeper’s polarities and energy flows. And I can’t even teach Elorie as much as she wants to know about mechanics; she needs all her energy for the work she does in the circle! Damn it—” He lowered his voice and said, as if he expected to be overheard and blasted, “Keepers are an anachronism in this day and age. Cleindori was right, if they could only see it!” But when Kerwin stared and asked him what he had meant, Rannirl shook his head, tightened his mouth and said, “Forget I said it. It’s a dangerous point of view.” He would say no more, but Kerwin caught a fragment of thought about fanatics who thought that a Keeper’s ritual virginity was more important than her efficiency at the matrixes, and that this point of view was going to destroy the Towers sooner or later, if it hadn’t already.
Working with them, he felt his own sensitivity growing, day by day. He had no trouble now in visualizing almost any atomic structure; the work he had done with Neyrissa, in learning to monitor his own internal organs and processes, was beginning to carry over to seeing energy fields and atomic processes, and he had no trouble in maintaining the stasis in any crystalline structure. He was beginning to sense the internal structure of other substances now; once he found himself aware of oxidation of the iron in a slowly-rusting doorhinge; in his first unsupervised effort, he pulled out his matrix and with a fierce mental effort reversed the process.