She felt Callista flinch from the words. “It is a… reflex. I find it as hard to break as it was hard to learn.”
Ellemir said impulsively, “You must have been very lonely, Callista!”
Callista’s words seemed to come up from some barricaded depth. “Lonely? Not always. In the Tower we are closer than you can imagine. So much a part of one another. Even so, as Keeper I was always apart from them, separated by a… a barrier no one could ever cross. It would have been easier, I think, to be truly alone.” Ellemir felt that her sister was not speaking to her at all, but to remote and unsharable memories, trying to put words to something she had never been willing to speak about.
“The others in the Tower could… could give some expression to that closeness. Could touch. Could love. A Keeper learns a double separateness. To be close, closer than any other, to each mind within the matrix circle, and yet never… never quite real to them. Never a woman, never even a living, breathing human being. Only… only part of the screens and relays.” She paused, her mind lost in that strange, barricaded, lonely life which had been hers for so many years.
“So many women try it, and fail. They become involved, somehow, with the human side of the other men and women there. In my first year at Arilinn, I saw six young girls come there, to be trained as Keeper, and fail. And I was proud because I could endure the training. It is… not easy,” she said, knowing the words ridiculously inadequate. They gave no hint of the months of rigid physical and mental discipline, until her mind was trained to unbelievable power, until her body could endure the inhuman flows and stresses. She said at last, softly and bitterly, “Now I wish I had failed too!” and stopped, hearing her own words and horrified by them.
Ellemir said softly, “I wish we hadn’t grown so far apart, breda.” Almost for the first time, she spoke the word for sister in the intimate mode; it could also mean darling. Callista responded to the tone, rather than the word.
“It was never that I didn’t… didn’t love you, or remember you, Ellemir. But I was taught — oh, you can’t imagine how! — to hold myself apart from every human contact. And you were my twin sister — I had been closest to you. For my first year, I cried myself to sleep at night because I was so lonely for you. But later… later you came to seem like all the rest of my life before Arilinn, like someone I had known only in a dream. And so, later, when I was allowed to see you now and again, to visit you, I tried to keep you distant, part of the dream, so that I would not be torn apart with every new separation. Our lives lay apart and I knew it must be so.”
Her voice was sadder than tears. Impulsively, eager to comfort, Ellemir lay down beside her sister and took her in her arms. Callista went rigid against the touch, then, sighing, lay still; but Ellemir sensed the effort her sister was making not to pull away from her. She thought, with a violent surge of anger, How could they do this to her? It’s deforming, as if they’d made her a cripple or a hunchback!
She hugged her and said, “I hope we can find our way back to each other!”
Callista tolerated the gesture, though she did not return it. “So do I, Ellemir.”
“It seems dreadful, to think you have never been in love.”
Her sister said lightly, “Oh, it is not as bad as that. We were so close in the Towers that I suppose, in one way or another, we were always in love.” It was too dark to see Callista’s face, but Ellemir sensed the smile as she added. “What if I should tell you that when I first came to Arilinn, Damon was still there, and for a little I fancied myself in love with him? Are you very jealous, Ellemir?”
Ellemir laughed. “No, not very.”
“He was a senior technician, he taught me monitoring. Of course, I was not a woman to him, just one of the little girls in training. Of course for him there was no woman alive, save for Leonie—” She stopped herself and said quickly, “That is long over, of course.”
Ellemir laughed aloud. “I know Damon’s heart is all mine. How could I be jealous of such love as a man can give a Keeper, a pledged virgin?” Ellemir heard her own words and broke off in consternation. “Oh, Callista, I did not mean—”
“I think you did,” Callista said gently, “but love is love, even without any hint of the physical. If I had not known that before, I would have learned it in the caves of Corresanti, when I came to love Andrew. It is love, and it was real, and if I were you I would not smile at it, nor scorn Damon’s love for Leonie, as if it were a boy’s green fancy.” She thought, but did not say, that it had been real enough to disturb Leonie’s peace, even if no one but Callista herself had ever guessed it.
She did right to send Damon away…
“It seems strange to me to love without desire,” Ellemir said, “and not quite real, whatever you say.”
“Men have desired me,” Callista said quietly, “in spite of the taboo. It happens. Most of the time it aroused nothing in me, it only made me feel as if… as if dirty insects were crawling on my body. But there were other times when I almost wished I knew how to desire them in return.”
Suddenly her voice broke. Ellemir heard a wild note in it, very like terror. “Oh, Ellemir, Elli, if I shrink even from your touch — if I shrink from the touch of my twin-born sister — what will I do to Andrew? Oh, merciful Avarra, how much will I have to hurt him?”
“Breda, Andrew loves you, surely he will understand—”
“But it may not be enough to understand! Oh, Elli, even if it were someone like Damon, who knows the ways of the Towers, knows what a Keeper is, I would be afraid! And Andrew does not know, or understand, and there are no words to tell him! And he too has abandoned the only world he has ever known, and what can I give him in return?”
Ellemir said gently, “But you have been freed from a Keeper’s oath.” The habit of many years, she knew, could not be broken in a day, but once Callista freed herself from her fears, surely all would be well! She held Callista close, saying with quiet tenderness, “Love is nothing to fear, breda, even if it seems strange to you, or frightful.”
“I knew you did not understand,” Callista said, sighing. “There were other women in the Towers, women who did not live by a Keeper’s laws, who were free to share the closeness we all shared. There was so much… so much love among us, and I knew how happy it made them, to love, or even to satisfy desire, when there was not love but only… need, and kindness.” She sighed again. “I am not ignorant, Ellemir,” she said with a curious, forlorn dignity, “inexperienced, yes, because of what I am, but not ignorant. I have learned ways to… not to be much aware of it. It was easier that way, but I knew, oh, yes, I knew. Just as I knew, for instance, that you had lovers before Damon.”
Ellemir laughed. “I never made any secret of it. If I did not speak of it to you, it was because I knew the laws under which you lived — or knew as much as any outsider can know — and that seemed a barrier between us.”
“But you must surely have known that I envied you that,” Callista said, and Ellemir sat up in bed, looking at her twin in surprise and shock. They could see one another only dimly; a small green moon, the dimmest of crescents, hung outside their window. At last Ellemir said, hesitating, “Envy… me? I had thought… thought surely… that a Keeper, pledged so, would surely despise me, or think it shameful, that I — that a comynara should be no different than a peasant woman, or some female animal in heat.”
“Despise you? Never,” Callista said. “If we do not talk much about it, it is for fear we would not be able to endure our differences. Even the other women in the Towers, who do not share our isolation, look on us as alien, almost inhuman… Separateness, pride, become our only defense, pride, as if to conceal a wound, conceal our own… our own incompletion.”