“How long,” Damon said evenly, “has she been like this?”
“Only a few minutes. We were talking,” Andrew said defensively.
Damon sighed. He said, “I thought I could trust you, I thought you understood!”
“She is not afraid of me, Damon, she wanted me to hold her!”
Callista’s eyes flickered open. In the room’s pale snowlight they looked colorless. “Don’t scold him, Damon, I was weary of lying in bed. Truly, I am better. I thought tonight I would send for my harp and play a little. I am so tired of having nothing to do.”
Damon looked at her skeptically. But he said, “I will send for it, if you ask.”
“Let me go for it,” Andrew said. Surely, if she felt well enough to play her harp, she must be better indeed! He went down into the Great Hall, found a steward and asked for the Lady Callista’s harp. The man brought the small instrument, not much larger than a Terran guitar, in its carved wood case.
“Shall I carry it up for you, Dom Ann’dra?”
“No, I will take it”
One of the woman servants, behind the steward, said, “Bear our congratulations to the lady, and say that we hope she will soon be well enough to accept them in person.”
Andrew swore, unable to stop himself. Quickly he apologized — the woman had meant no harm. And what else could they have thought? She had been abed for ten days, and no one had been asked to come and nurse her, only her twin sister being allowed near. Could anyone blame them if they thought that Callista was pregnant, and that her sister and her husband were taking great care that her child did not meet the fate of Ellemir’s? At last he said, and knew his voice was unsteady, “I thank you for your… your kind wishes, but my wife has no such good fortune…” and he couldn’t go on. He accepted their murmured sympathy, and escaped quickly upstairs.
In the outer room of the suite, he stopped, hearing Damon’s voice raised in anger.
“It’s no good, Callista, and you know it. You can’t eat, you don’t sleep unless I drug you. I hoped it would all sort itself out, after your cycles came on of their own accord. But look at you!”
Callista murmured something Andrew could not hear the words, only the protest in them.
“Be honest, Callista. You were leronis at Arilinn. If someone had been brought to you in this state, what would you do?” A brief pause. “Then you know what I must do, and quickly.”
“Damon, no!” It was a cry of despair.
“Breda, I promise you, I will try—”
“Oh, Damon, give me a little more time!” Andrew heard her sobbing. “I’ll try to eat, I promise you. I am feeling better, I sat up today for more than an hour, ask Ellemir. Damon, can’t you give me a little more time?”
A long silence, then Damon swore and came out of the room. He started to stride past Andrew without speaking, but the Terran grasped his arm.
“What’s wrong? What were you saying to get her so upset?”
Damon stared past him and Andrew had the unsettling thought that to Damon he was not really there at all. “She doesn’t want me to do what I have to do.” He caught sight of the harp in the case and said scornfully, “Do you really think she is well enough for that?”
“I don’t know,” Andew said angrily. “I only know that she asked me for it.” Abruptly, remembering what the servants had said, he felt he could endure no more.
“Damon, what is wrong with her? Every time I have asked, you have evaded me.”
Damon sighed and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. “I doubt if I can explain. You’re not matrix-trained, you haven’t the language, you don’t even have the concepts.”
Andrew said grimly, “Just put it in words of one syllable.”
“There aren’t any.” Damon sighed and was silent, thinking. Finally he said, “I showed you the channels, in Callista and in Ellemir.”
Andrew nodded, remembering those glowing lines of light and their pulsing centers, so clear in Ellemir, so inflamed and sluggish in Callista.
“Basically, what ails her is overload of the nerve channels.” He saw that Andrew did not understand. “I told you how the same channels carry sexual energies and psi forces, not at the same time, of course. When she was trained as Keeper, Callista was taught techniques which prevented her from being capable of — or even aware of — the slightest sexual response. Is that clear so far?”
“I think so.” He pictured her whole sexual system made nonfunctional so that she could use her whole body as an energy-transformer. God, what a thing to do to a woman!
“Well, then. In the normal adult the channels function selectively. Turning off the psi forces when the channels are needed for sexual energies, turning off sexual impulses when psi is being used. After matrix work you were impotent for a few days, remember? Normally, when a Keeper gives up her work, it is because the channels have reverted to normal levels, and normal selectivity. Then she is no longer able, as a Keeper must be able, to remain totally and completely free of the slightest trace of sexual energy remaining in the channels. Evidently Callista must have thought this had already happened in her channels, because she could feel herself reacting to you. She did for a moment, you know,” he said, looking at Andrew hesitantly, and Andrew, unwilling to remember that fourfold moment of contact, to acknowledge that Damon could have been part of it, could not raise his eyes. He only nodded, without looking up.
“Well, then, if an ordinary Keeper — a fully functioning Keeper, with conditioning intact and channels clear — is attacked, she can protect herself. If, for instance, you had not been Callista’s husband, someone to whom she had given the right, if you had been a stranger attempting rape, she would have blasted straight through you. And you would have been very, very dead, and Callista would have been… well, I suppose she would have been shocked and sick, but after a good meal and some sleep she would not have been much the worse. But that didn’t happen.”
Andrew said numbly “God!”
It isn’t you I don’t trust, my husband…
“She must have believed she was ready, or she would never have risked it. And when she realized she was not ready — in that split second before she blasted you with the reflex she couldn’t control — she took a backflow through her own body. And that saved your life. If that whole flow of energy had gone through you, can you imagine what would have happened?”
Andrew could, but discovered he would much rather not.
“It must have been that shock which brought on her menstruation. I watched her carefully until I knew she wasn’t going into crisis, but after that I thought the bleeding, and the normal energy drain of that time in women, would carry off the overloading and clear the channels. But it hasn’t.” He frowned. “I wish I knew precisely what Leonie had done to her. Meanwhile, I asked you not to touch her. And you must not.”
“Are you afraid she will blast me again?”
Damon shook his head. “I don’t think she has the strength for that now. In a way it’s worse. She is reacting to you physically, but the channels are not clear so there is no way to carry off the sexual energies through the channels in the normal way. There are two sets of reflexes operating at once, each jamming the other, inhibiting either of the normal functions.”
“I feel more muddled than ever,” Andrew said, dropping his head in his hands, and Damon set to work to simplify further.
“A woman trained as Keeper sometimes has to coordinate eight or ten telepaths. Working in the energon rings, she has to channel all that force through her own body. They handle such enormous psi stresses, like” — he picked up the analogy neatly from Andrew’s mind — “an energy-transformer. So they can’t, they dare not, rely on the normal selectivity of the ordinary adult. They have to keep those channels totally, completely, and permanently cleared for the psi forces. Do you remember what my sister Marisela said?”