She said, lowering her eyes and looking away from him, “I cannot think it is so hard for you. Ellemir—” But she stopped there, and Andrew, overcome with all the old tenderness, reached out for the deeper contact, wanting to reassure her, and himself, that it was still there, that it could endure through the separation. It occurred to him that because of their deep-rooted cultural differences, even telepathy was no guarantee against misunderstanding. But the closeness was there.
They must start from that. Understanding could come later.
He said gently, “You look tired, Callie. You mustn’t overdo on your first day out of bed. Let me take you upstairs.” And when they were alone in their room, he asked gently, “Are you reproaching me for Ellemir, Callista? I thought it was what you wanted.”
“It was,” she said, stammering. “It was only… only… it should make it easier for you to wait. Do we have to talk about it, Andrew?”
He said soberly, “I think we do. That night—” And again she knew just what he meant. For all four of them, for a long time, “that night” would have only one meaning. “Damon said something to me that stuck. All four of us telepaths, he said, and not one of us with enough sense to sit down and make sure we understood each other. Ellemir and I managed to talk about it,” he said, adding with a faint smile, “even though she had to get me half drunk before I could manage to break down and talk honestly to her.”
She said, not looking at him, “It has made it easier for you. Hasn’t it?”
He said quietly, “In a way. But it’s not worth it if it’s made you ashamed to look at me, Callista.”
“Not ashamed.” She managed to raise her eyes. “Not ashamed, no, it is only… I was taught to turn my thoughts elsewhere, so that I would not be… vulnerable. If you want to talk about it” — Evanda and Avarra forbid she should be less honest with him than Ellemir — “I will try. But I am not… not used to such talk or such thoughts and I may not… may not find words easily. If you will… will bear with that… then I will try.”
He saw that she was biting her lip, struggling to force her words through the barrier of her inarticulateness, and felt a deep pity. He considered sparing her this, but he knew that a barrier of silence was the only barrier they might never be able to cross. At all costs — looking at her flushed cheeks and trembling mouth, he knew the cost would be heavy — they must manage to keep a line of communication open.
“Damon said you must never be allowed to feel yourself alone, or think yourself abandoned. I can only wonder, does this hurt you? Or make you feel… abandoned?”
She said, twisting her slender fingers in her lap. “Only if you had truly… truly abandoned me. Stopped caring. Stopped loving me.”
He thought that it was such an intimate thing, it could not help but bring him closer to Ellemir, make even more distance between Callista and himself.
His barriers were down, and Callista, following the thought, flared up in outrage. “Do you want me only because you thought I would give you more pleasure in our bed than my sister?”
He turned a dull red. Well, he had wanted directness; he had it. “God forbid! I never thought of it that way at all. It’s only… if you think I am going to be wanting you any less, I would rather forget the whole thing. Do you really think that because I sleep with Ellemir I have stopped wanting you?”
“No more than I have stopped wanting you, Andrew. But… but now we are equal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Now your need of me is like mine for you.” Her eyes were level and tearless, but he sensed that inside she was weeping. “A… a thing of the mind and heart, a grief like mine, but not a… a torment of the body. I wanted you to be content, because” — she wet her lips, struggling against inhibitions which had lasted for years — “that was so terrible to me, to feel your need, your hunger, your loneliness. And so I tried to… to share it and I… I nearly killed you.” The tears spilled over, but she did not cry, flicked the tears away angrily. “Do you understand? It is easier for me when I need not feel that in you, so I would do anything, risk anything to quiet it…”
The desolation in her face made him want to weep too. He ached to take her in his arms and comfort her, though he knew he could not risk anything but the lightest touch. Gently, almost respectfully, he lifted her slender hand to his lips and laid the lightest breath of a kiss on the fingertips. “You are so generous you put me to shame, Callista. But there is no woman in the world who can give me what I want from you. I am willing to… to share your suffering, my darling.”
This was such a strange thought that she stopped and looked at him in amazement. He meant that, she thought with a queer excitement. His world’s ways were different, she knew, but in their terms he was really trying to be unselfish. It was the first awareness she had ever had of his total alienness, and it came as a deep, wrenching shock. She had always seen only their similarities; now she was faced, shockingly, with their differences.
He was trying to say, she realized, that because he loved her, he was willing to suffer all that pain of deprivation… Perhaps he did not even know, that night, how much his need had tormented her, could still torment her.
She tightened her fingers on his hand, remembering in despair that for a little while she had known what it was to desire him, but now she could not even remember what it had been like. She spoke, trying to match his gentleness: “Andrew, my husband, my love, if you saw me bearing a heavy burden, would you weigh me down with your own burden as well? It will not lighten my suffering if I must endure yours too.”
Again the shock, strangeness, amazement, and Andrew realized, with sudden insight that in a telepathic culture, it meant something different, to share suffering.
She said, with a quick smile, “And don’t you realize that Damon and Ellemir are part of this too, and that they will also be miserable, if they have to share your misery?”
He was slowly making his way through that, like a labyrinth. It wasn’t easy. He had thought he had shed a great deal of his cultural prejudice. Now, like an onion, stripping off one layer seemed only to reveal a deeper layer, thick and impregnable.
He remembered waking in Ellemir’s bed to find Damon standing over him, had expected, almost craved Damon’s reproaches. Perhaps he wanted Damon to be angry because a man of his own world would have been angry, and he wanted to feel something familiar. Even guilt would have been welcome…
“But Ellemir. You simply expected this of her. No one consulted her, or asked if she was willing.”
“Has Ellemir complained?” Callista asked, smiling.
Hell, no, he thought. She seemed to enjoy it. And that bothered him too. If she and Damon were all that happily married, how could she seem to get so much pleasure — damn it, so much fun — out of going to bed with him? He felt angry and guilty, and it was all the worse because he knew Callista didn’t understand that either.
Callista said, “But of course, when Elli and I married and agreed to live under one roof, we took that for granted. Certainly you know that if either of us had married a man the other could not… could not accept, we would have made certain—”
Somehow that rang a warning bell in Andrew. He did not want to think about the obvious implications of that.
She went on. “Until a few hundred years ago, marriage as we know it now simply did not exist. And it was not considered right for a woman to have more than one or two children by the same man. Do the words genetic pool mean anything to you? There was a period in our history when some very valuable gifts, hereditary traits, were almost lost. It was thought best for children to have as many different genetic combinations as possible, to guard against the accidental loss of important genes. Bearing children to only one man can be a form of selfishness. And so we didn’t have marriage then, in the sense that we do now. We do not, as the Dry-Towners do, force our wives to harbor our concubines, but there are always other women to share. What do you Terrans do when your wives are pregnant, if a woman is too far advanced in pregnancy, too heavy, or weary, or ill? Would you demand that a woman violate her instincts for your comfort?”