Heritage and Exile (99 page)

“Wonderful,” I said with sarcastic emphasis. “All I have to do is go thirty or forty light-years to a planet out there, force or persuade someone there to come back with me to this planet, without telling him anything about it so he won't know what he ought to be afraid of, then figure a way to get him inside the Chapel without being fried to idiocy, and hope he'll hand over the Sword of Aldones when he gets it into his enthusiastic little hand!”

Ashara's colorless eyes held a flicker of scorn, and suddenly I felt ashamed of my sarcasm.

“Have you been in the matrix laboratory here? Have you seen the screen?”

I remembered, and suddenly knew what it was; one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic transmitters . . .
instantaneously, through space, perhaps through time . . .

“That hasn't been done for hundreds of years!”

“I know what Callina can do,” said Ashara with her strange smile. “And I shall be with you . . .”

She stood up, extended her hands to us both. She touched mine; she felt cold as a corpse, as the surface of a jewel. . . . Her voice was low, and for a moment it seemed almost menacing.

“Callina . . .”

Callina shrank away from the touch and somehow, though her face was molded in the impassive stillness of a Keeper, it seemed to me that she was weeping. “No!”

“Callina—” the low voice was soft, inexorable. Slowly, Callina held out her hands, let herself touch, join hands with us. . . .

The room vanished. We drifted, fathomless, in blueness, measureless space; blank emptiness like starless space, great bare chasms of nothingness. In Arilinn I had been taught to leave my body behind, go into the overworld of reality where the body is not, where we exist only as thoughts making form of the nothingness of the universe, but this was no region of the overworld I had ever known. I drifted, bodiless, in tingling mist. Then the emptiness between stars was charged with a spark, a flare of force, a stream of life, charging me; I could feel myself as a network of live nerves, lacework of living force. I clenched again the hand that had been cut from me, felt every nerve and sinew in it.

Then, suddenly in the emptiness, a face sketched itself on my mind.

I cannot describe that face, though I know, now, what it was. I saw it three times in all. There are no human words to describe it; it was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was terrible past all conception. It was not even evil, not as men in this life know evil; it was not human enough for that. It was—damnable. Only a fraction of a second it burned behind my eyes, but I knew I had looked straight in at the gates of hell.

I struggled back to reality. I was again in Ashara's blue-ice room; had I ever left it? Callina's hands were still clasped in mine, but Ashara was gone. The glass throne was empty, and as I looked on it the throne, too, was gone, vanished into the mirrored shimmer of the room. Had she ever been there at all? I felt giddy and disoriented, but Callina sagged against me, and I caught her, and the feel of her fainting body in my arms brought me back sternly to reality. The touch of her soft robes, of the end of her hair against my hand, seemed to touch some living nerve in me. I clasped her against me, burying my face against her shoulder. She smelled warm and sweet, with a subtle fragrance, not perfume or scent or cosmetic, just the soft scent of her skin, and it dizzied me; I wanted to go on holding her, but she opened her eyes and swiftly was aware again, holding herself upright and away from me. I bent my head. I dared not touch her, and would not against her will, but for that dizzying moment I wanted her more than I had ever wanted any woman living. Was it only that she was Keeper and so forbidden to me? I stood upright again, cold and aching, my face icy where it had lain against her heart; but I had control of myself again. She seemed unaware, immune to the torrent of feeling that raged in me. Of course, she was a Keeper, she had been taught to move beyond all this, immune to passion. . . .

“Callina,” I said, “cousin, forgive me.”

The faintest flicker of a smile moved on her face. “Never mind, Lew. I wish—” She left the rest unspoken, but I realized she was not quite so insulated from my own torment as I had believed.

“I am no more than human,” she said, and again the faint feather-touch to my wrist, the touch of a Keeper, reassured me. It was like a promise, but we drew apart, knowing that there must remain a barrier between us.

“Where is Ashara?” I asked.

Once again the flicker of a troubled smile on her face. “You had better not ask me,” she murmured. “You would never believe the answer.”

I frowned, and again the uncanny resemblance troubled me, the stillness of Ashara in Callina's quiet face—I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Abruptly, Callina moved toward some invisible door and we were outside, on the stone landing, solid, and I wondered if the blue-ice room had ever existed, or if the whole thing had been some kind of bizarre dream.

Something had happened. But I did not know what it could have been.

 

We returned another way to the Tower, and Callina led me through the relay chamber, into the room filled with the strange and mysterious artifacts of the Ages of Chaos. It was warm, and I pulled off my cloak and let the heat soak into my chilled body and aching arm, while Callina moved softly around the laboratory, adjusting specially modulated dampers, and finally gestured to the wide, shimmering glass panel, whose depths made me think of the blue-ice room of Ashara. I stared, frowning, into the cloudy depths. Sorcery? Unknown laws, non-causal sciences? They mingled and were one. The Gift I had borne in my blood, the freak thing in my heredity that made me Comyn, telepath,
laranzu,
matrix technician. . . . for such things as this I had been bred and trained; why should I fear them? Yet I was afraid, and Callina knew it.

I was trained at Arilinn, oldest and most powerful of the Towers, and had heard something—not much—about screens like this. It was a duplicator—it transmitted a desired pattern; it captured images and the realities behind them—no; it's impossible to explain, I didn't—and don't—know enough about the screens. Including how they were operated; but I supposed Callina knew and I was just there to strengthen her with the strength of the Alton Gift, to lend her power as—the thought sent ice through my veins—I had lent power for the raising of Sharra. Well, that was fair enough; power for power, reparation for betrayal. Still I was uneasy; I had allowed Kadarin to use me for the raising of Sharra without knowing enough about the dangers, and here I was repeating the same mistake. The difference was that I trusted to Callina. But even that frightened me; there had been a time when I had trusted Kadarin, too, called him friend, sworn brother,
bredu.

Again I stopped myself. I had to trust Callina; there was no other way. I went and stood before the screen.

Augmented by the screen, I could search, with telepathic forces augmented hundredfold, thousandfold, for such a one as we wanted. Of all the millions and billions of worlds in space and time, somewhere there was a mind such as we wanted, with a certain awareness—and a certain
lack
of awareness. With the screen we could attune that mind's vibrations to
this
particular place in time and space; here, now, between the two poles of the screen. The space annihilated by the matrix, we could shift the—well, we call them
energons,
which is as good a name as any—shift the energons of that particular mind and the body behind it, and bring them
here.
My mind played with words like matter-transmitter, hyperspace, dimension-travel; but those were only words. The screen was the reality.

I dropped into one of the chairs before the screen, fiddling with a calibration which would allow me to match resonances between myself and Callina—more accurately, between her matrix and mine. I said, not looking up, “You'll have to cut out the monitor screen, Callina,” and she nodded.

“There's a bypass relay through Arilinn.” She touched controls and the monitor surface, a glassy screen—large, but half the size of the giant screen before me—blinked fitfully and went dark, shunting every monitored matrix on Darkover out of this relay. A grill crackled, sent out a tiny staccato signal; Callina listened attentively to no sound that I could hear—the message was not audible, and I was too preoccupied to merge into the relays. Callina listened for a moment, then spoke—aloud, perhaps as a courtesy to me, perhaps to focus her own thoughts for the relay.

“Yes, I know, Maruca, but we have cut out the main circuits here in Thendara; you'll have to monitor from there.” Again the listening silence, then she rapped out, “Put up a third-level barrier around Thendara! That is a direct order from Comyn; observe and comply!” She turned away, sighing.

“That girl is the
noisiest
telepath on the planet! Now everyone with a scrap of telepathy on the whole planet will know something is going on in Thendara tonight!”

We had had no choice; I said so. She took her own place before the screen, and I blanked my mind against it, ready for whatever she should demand of me. What sort of alien would suit us? But without volition, at least on my part, a pattern shaped itself on the screen. I saw the dim symbols in the moment before my optic nerve overloaded and I went out; then I was blind and deaf in that instant of overload which is always terrifying, however familiar it may become.

Gradually, without external senses, I found orientation within the screen. My mind, extended through astronomical distances, traversed in fractional seconds whole galaxies and parsecs of subjective spacetime. Vague touches of consciousness, fragments of thought, emotions that floated like shadows—the flotsam of the mental universe.

Then before I felt contact, I saw the white-hot flare in the screen. Somewhere another mind had fitted into the pattern which we had cast out like a net, and when we found the fitting intelligence it had been captured.

I swung out, bodiless, divided into a billion subjective fragments, extended over a vast gulf of spacetime. If anything happened, I would never get back to my body now, but would drift on the spacetime curve forever.

With infinite caution I poured myself into the alien mind. There was a short, terrible struggle. It was embedded-enlaced in mine. The world was a holocaust of molten-glass fire and color. The air writhed. The glow on the screen was a shadow, then solid, then a clearing darkness. . . .

“Now!” I did not speak, simply flung the command at Callina, then light tore at my eyes, there was a ripping shock tearing at my brain, the floor seemed to rock and Callina was flung, reeling, into my arms as the energons seared the air and my brain.

Half stunned, but conscious, I saw that the screen was blank, the alien mind torn free of mine.

And in a crumpled heap on the floor, where she had fallen at the base of the screen, lay a slight, dark-haired woman.

I realized after a moment that I was still holding Callina in my arms; I let her go at the very instant that she moved to free herself of me. She knelt beside the strange woman, and I followed her.

“She's not dead?”

“Of course not.” With the instincts of the Arilinn-trained, Callina was already feeling for a pulse, though her own was still thready and irregular. “But that—transition—nearly killed us, and we knew what to expect. What do you think it must have been like for her?”

Soft brown hair, falling across her face, hid her features. I brushed it gently back, and stopped, my hand still touching her cheek, in bewilderment.

“Linnell—” I whispered.

“No,” said Callina, “She sleeps in her own room . . .” but her voice faltered as she looked down at the girl. Then I knew who it must be; the young nurse I had seen on the dreadful night in the Terran hospital in Vainwal. Even knowing, as I did, what had happened, I thought my mind would give way. That transition had taken its toll of me too and I had to take a moment to quiet my own pulses and breathing.

“Avarra be merciful,” Callina whispered. “What have we done?”

Of course,
I thought.
Of course.
Linnell was near to us both; sister, foster-sister. We had spoken with her just tonight. The pattern was at hand. Yet I still wondered, why Linnell, why not duplicate myself, or Callina? . . .

I tried to put it into simple words, more for myself than Callina.

“Cherilly's Law. Everything in the universe—you, me, that chair, the drinking fountain in Port Chicago spaceport—everything exists in one, and only one, exact duplicate. Nothing is unique except for a matrix; even atoms have minute differences in the orbit of their electrons . . . there are equations to calculate the number of possible variations, but I'm not enough of a mathematician to calculate them. Jeff could probably reel them all off to you.”