They heard it together, an echo in Damon’s mind: In the old days the Keepers of Arilinn could not leave their posts if they would… The Keepers of Arilinn are not women but emmasca…
“Keepers aren’t neutered anymore, of course. They rely on vows of virginity, and intensive antisexual conditioning, to keep the channels totally free. But a Keeper is, after all, a woman, and if she falls in love, she is likely to begin to react sexually, because the channels have returned to normal selectivity, for psi or for sex. She has to stop functioning as a Keeper, because her channels are no longer completely clear. She could handle ordinary psi, but not the enormous stresses of a Keeper, the energon rings and relays — well, you don’t know much about that, never mind it. In practice, a Keeper whose conditioning has failed usually gives up laran work altogether. I think that’s foolish, but it’s our custom. But this is what Callista was expecting: that once she had begun to react to you, she would begin to use the channels selectively, like any normal mature telepath.”
“So why didn’t she?” Andrew demanded.
“I don’t know,” Damon said, in despair. “I have never seen anything like it before. I would not like to believe that Leonie had altered the channels so they could never function selectively, but I cannot think of anything else it could be. Since Leonie evidently altered her channels in some way, to keep her physically immature, I can only think it was that. But do you understand now why you must not touch her, Andrew? It’s not because she would blast you again — and probably kill you this time — for she would let herself die before she would do that. It would be so easy for her that it terrifies me to think about it. But it’s because the reflexes are still there, and she’s fighting them, and it’s killing her.”
Andrew covered his face with his hands. “And I begged her…” he said almost inaudibly.
“You couldn’t know,” said Damon gently. “She didn’t know either. She believed she was deconditioning normally, or she would never have risked it. She was willing to give up the psi function of the channels entirely, for you. Do you know what that meant to her?”
Andrew muttered, “I’m not worth it. All that suffering.”
“And so damned unnecessary!” Damon broke off. He was talking blasphemy. No law was stricter than that which prevented a Keeper, her oath once given back, her virginity lost or even suspect, from ever again doing any serious matrix work. “It was what she wanted, Andrew. To give up her work as Keeper, for you.”
“So what’s to be done?” Andrew demanded. “She can’t go on like this, it will kill her!”
Damon said reluctantly, “I will have to clear her channels. And this is what she does not want me to do.”
“Why not?”
Damon did not answer at once. Finally he said, “It’s usually done under kirian, and I have none to give her. Without it, it’s hellishly painful.” This made Callista sound like a simple coward, and he was reluctant to give that impression, but he did not feel capable of explaining to Andrew what Callista’s real objection was. His eyes fell with relief on the rryl in its case.
“But if she is well enough to ask for that, perhaps she is really better,” he said with a glimmer of hope. “Take it to her, Andrew. But,” and he paused, said at last, reluctantly, “don’t touch her. She’s still reacting to you.”
“But isn’t that what we want?”
“Not with the two systems overloading and jamming,” Damon said, and Andrew bent his head, saying in a low voice, “I promise.”
He went past Damon, into the room where Callista lay — and stopped in shock. Callista lay silent, unmoving, and for a dreadful moment he could not see her breathing. Her eyes were open, but she did not see him, and her eyes did not move to follow him as his shadow fell between her and the light. A terrible fear gripped him; he felt a soundless scream tightening his throat. He whirled to shout for Damon, but Damon had already picked up the telepathic impact of his panic and was running into the room. Then a great sigh of relief, almost a sob, burst from Damon.
“It’s all right,” he said, catching at Andrew as if dizzy, “she’s not dead, she’s… she’s left her body. She’s in the overworld, that’s all.”
Andrew whispered, staring at the wide-open sightless eyes, “What can we do for her?”
“In her present physical state she won’t be able to stay long,” Damon said, trouble, concern, and hope mingling in his voice. “I did not even know she was strong enough for this. But if she is…” He did not say it aloud, but they could both hear what he did not say: If she is, perhaps it is not as bad as we fear.
Moving in the gray spaces of the overworld, Callista sensed their cries and their fear, but dimly, like a dream. For the first time in an eternity, she was free from pain: she had left her racked body behind, stepping out of it like a too-large garment, slipping on to the familiar realms. She felt herself formulate in the gray spaces of the overworld, her body cool and quiet and at peace as it had been before… She saw herself wrapped in the airy translucent folds of her Keeper’s robe, a leronis, a sorceress. Do I still see myself like this? she wondered, deeply troubled. I am not a Keeper, but a wedded woman, in thought and heart if not in fact…
The emptiness of the gray world frightened her. She reached out, almost automatically, for a landmark, and saw in the gray distance faint glimmer that was the energy-net equivalent, in this world, of the Arilinn Tower.
I cannot go there, she thought, I have renounced it, yet with the thought she felt a passionate longing for the world she had left forever behind her. As if the longing had created its own answer, she saw it brighten, then, almost with the swiftness of thought, and she was there, within the Veil, in her own secret retreat, the Garden of Fragrance, the Keeper’s Garden.
Then she saw the veiled form before her, slowly taking shape. She did not need to see Leonie’s face to recognize her here.
“My darling child,” Leonie said. Callista knew it was only a tenuous contact in thought, but so real was their presence to one another in this familiar realm that Leonie’s voice sounded rich, warm, tenderer than ever in life. Only on this nonphysical plane, she knew, could Leonie risk this kind of emotion. “Why have you come to us? I had thought you gone forever beyond our reach, chiya. Or have you strayed here in a dream?”
“It is no dream, Kiya.” Anger washed through her, like a cold shock bathing every nerve. She controlled it, as she had been taught from childhood, for the anger of the Altons could kill. Her voice cold and demanding, rejecting Leonie’s tenderness, she stated, “I came to seek you, to ask you why you spoke a blessing without truth! Why did you lie to me?” Her own voice was like a scream in her ears. “Why did you bind me in bonds I could not break, so that when you gave, me in marriage it was mockery? Do you grudge me happiness, who knew none of your own?”
Leonie flinched. Her voice was filled with pain. “I had hoped you happy and already a bride, chiya.”
“You know what you had done to make that impossible! Can you swear that you have not neutered me, as was done in old days to the lady of Arilinn?”