Downstairs, in the stone-floored still-room, Damon began to look through Callista’s supply of herbs, essences, distilling equipment. Andrew, looking at the oddly shaped flasks, the mortars and pestles and the bottles ranged on shelves, the bunches of dried herbs, leaves, stalks, pods, flowers, seeds, asked, “Are these all drugs and medicines?”
“Oh, no,” Damon said absently, pulling a drawer open. “These” — he gestured to some crushed seeds — “are cooking spices, and she makes incense to sweeten the air, and some cosmetic lotions and perfumes. None of the stuff you can buy in the towns is half as good as what’s made here by the old recipes.”
“What was that stuff Ellemir gave her?”
Damon shrugged. “Golden-flower? It’s a smooth muscle tonic, good for cramps and spasms of all kinds. It can’t hurt her; they give it to pregnant women and to babies with the colic too.” But, he wondered, frowning, if it could help Callista. Such serious interference with the physical processes… how could Leonie have done such a thing?
Andrew picked up the thought, as clearly as if Damon had spoken it aloud. “I knew Keepers underwent some physical changes. But this?”
“I am shocked too,” said Damon, turning a bunch of white thornleaf in his hands. “It’s certainly not customary these days. I had believed it was against the laws. Of course Leonie’s intentions couldn’t have been better. You saw the alterations in the nerve currents. Some of the girls do have a dreadful time with their woman’s cycles, and Leonie probably could not bear to see her suffering. But what a price to pay!” He scowled and began opening drawers again. “If Callista had freely chosen… but Leonie didn’t tell her! That is what I find hard to understand, or to forgive!”
Andrew felt an insidious dismay, a physical horror. Why should it, after all, shock him so much? Physical modification was not, after all, anything so unheard of. Most of the women who crewed Empire starships — they were made sterile by deep space radiations anyway — were spared the nuisance of menstruation. Hormone treatments made it unnecessary for women not actively engaged in childbearing. Why should it shock him so? It wasn’t shocking, except that Damon found it so! Would he ever get used to this goldfish-bowl life? Couldn’t he even think his own thoughts?
Damon was turning over bunches of herbs. He said, “You must understand. Callista is past twenty. She’s a grown woman who has been doing difficult, highly technical work as a matrix mechanic for years. She’s an experienced professional in the most demanding work on Darkover. Now none of her previous training, none of her skills, nothing is any good to her at all. She’s struggling with deconditioning, and with sexual awakening, and she has all the emotional problems of any bride. And now, on top of all that, I discover that physically she’s been held in the state of a girl of twelve or thirteen! Evanda! If I had only known…”
Andrew looked at the floor. More than once, since the terrible fiasco of last night, he had felt as he imagined a rapist must feel. If Callista was, physically, an unawakened girl in her early teens — He felt a spasm of horror.
Damon said gently, “Don’t! Callista didn’t know it herself. Remember, for six years she’s been functioning as an adult, experienced professional.” Yet he knew this was not entirely true, either. Callista must have been aware of the enormous and ineradicable gulf between her and the other women. Leonie might have spared her protegeé some physical suffering, but at what price?
Well, it was a good sign that the menstrual cycle had spontaneously reinstated itself. Perhaps other barriers would disappear with nothing more than time and patience. He picked up a bunch of dried blossoms and cautiously sniffed. “Good, here we are. Kireseth — no, don’t smell it, Andrew, it does funny things to the human brain.” He felt the faint guilt of memory. The taboo against the kireseth, among psi workers, was absolute, and he felt as if he had committed a crime in handling it. He said, speaking more to himself than Andrew, “I can make kirian from this. I don’t know how to distill it as they do in Arilinn, but I can make a tincture…” His mind was busy with possibilities: a strong solution of the resins dissolved out in alcohol. Perhaps with Ferrika’s help he could make a single distillation. He put the stuff down, fancying that the smell of it was going to the roots of his brain, destroying controls, breaking barriers between mind and body…
Andrew paced restlessly in the still-room. His own mind was filled with horrors. “Damon, Callista must have known what could happen.”
“Of course she knew,” said Damon, not really listening to him. “She learned that before she was fifteen years old, that no man can touch a Keeper.”
“And if I could hurt or frighten her so terribly — Damon!” Suddenly he was overcome by the horror and revulsion which had gripped him last night. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what she wanted me to do? She asked me to… to knock her unconscious and rape her when she… when she could not resist.” He tried to convey some of the horror that had awakened in him; but Damon only looked thoughtful.
“It just might have worked, at that,” he said. “It was intelligent of Callista to think of it. It shows she has some grasp of the problems involved.”
Andrew could not keep back a horrified “Good God! And you can say it like that, so calmly.”
Damon, turning, suddenly realized that the younger man was at the edge of his endurance. He said gently, “Andrew, you do know what saved you from being killed, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything any more. And what I do know doesn’t help much!” He felt ragged despair. “Do you really think I could have—”
“No, no, of course not, bredu. I understand why you couldn’t. I don’t think any decent man could!” Gently, he laid a hand on Andrew’s wrist. “Andrew, what saved you — saved you both — was the fact that she wasn’t afraid. That she loved you, wanted you. So all she hit you with was the physical reflex she couldn’t control. She didn’t even knock you out; it was hitting your head on the furniture that did that. If she had been terrified and fighting you, if you had really been trying to take her unwilling, can you imagine what she would have thrown at you?” he demanded. “Callista is one of the most powerful telepaths on Darkover, and trained as a Keeper in Arilinn! If she had hated it, if she had thought of it as rape, if she had felt any… any fear or revulsion against your desire, you’d have been dead!” He repeated for emphasis, “You’d be dead, dead, dead!”
But she was afraid, Andrew thought, until Damon and Ellemir made contact… It was the awareness of Ellemir’s pleasure that made her want to share it! Even more disturbing was the thought of Damon, aware of Callista as he had been aware of Ellemir. Damon, sensing his distress, was for a moment shocked, experiencing it as a rebuff. They had all been so close, didn’t Andrew want to be part of what they were? He laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, a rare touch for a telepath, natural enough at this moment in the awareness of the intimacy they had shared. Andrew shrank from it, and Damon withdrew, troubled and a little saddened. Must he stay at such a distance? How long? How long? Was he brother or stranger?
But he said gently, “I know it’s new to you, Andrew. I keep forgetting that I grew up as a telepath, taking this sort of thing for granted. It will be all right, you’ll see.”
All right? Andrew asked himself. To know that only the fact that he had become an involuntary voyeur kept his wife from killing him? To know that Damon — and Ellemir — both took this kind of thing for granted, expected it, welcomed it? Did Damon resent his wanting Callista all to himself? He remembered the suggestion that Callista had made, remembered the feel of Ellemir in his arms, warm, responsive — as Callista could not be. Shocked, in desperate confusion, he turned away from Damon, blundering with horror to get out of the room. He was overloaded with shame and horror. He wanted — needed — to get away, anywhere, anywhere out of here, away from Damon’s too revealing touch, from the man who could read his most intimate thoughts. He did not know that he was virtually ill, with a very real illness known as culture shock. He only knew he felt sick, and the sickness took the form of furious rage against Damon. The heavy scent of the herbs made him afraid he would vomit. He said thickly, “I’ve got to get some air,” and pushed the door open, stumbling through the deserted kitchens and into the yard. He stood with the heavy snow falling all around him, and damned the planet where he had come and the chances that had brought him here.