“If it was so, why did you not neuter her, and have done with it?” She was silent. At last she said, “You speak so because you are a man, Damon, and to you a woman is nothing but a wife, an instrument to give you sons, to pass on your precious Comyn heritage. I have other purposes. Damon, I was so weary, and I felt I could not bear to spend my energy and strength, to put all my heart into her for years and years, and then watch her waken, and go from me into some man’s arms. Or, like Hilary, to sicken and suffer the tortures of a damned soul with every waxing moon. It was not selfishness, Damon! It was not only a longing to lay down my own work and have rest! I loved her as I had never loved Hilary. I knew she would not fail, but I feared she was too strong to give way, even under such suffering as Hilary’s, that she would endure it — as I did, Damon — year after long year. So I spared her this, as I had the right to do.” She added defiantly, “I was her Keeper!”
“And you removed her right to choose!” .
“No woman of the Comyn has choice,” Leonie said almost in a whisper, “not truly. I did not choose to be Keeper, or to be sent to a Tower. I was a Hastur, and it was my destiny, just as the destiny of my playmates was to marry and bear sons to their clans. And it was not irrevocable. In my own childhood I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she told me it was reversible. She told me it was lawful, where neutering was not, so that women might be reclaimed, if their parents chose, for those dynastic marriages so dear to Comyn hearts, and there was no chance of impairing the precious fertility of a Comyn daughter!” The sarcasm in her voice was so bitter that Damon quailed.
“It is reversible — how?” Damon demanded. “Callista cannot live like this, neither Keeper nor free.”
“I do not know,” Leonie said. “When it was done, I never believed it would have to be reversed, and so I made no plans for this day. But I was glad — as near as anything could make me glad — when she told me I had wrought less well than I thought.” Again he shared with Leonie the brief vision of Callista in Andrew’s arms as he carried her from Corresanti. “But it seems she was mistaken.”
Leonie looked wrung and exhausted. “Damon, Damon, let her come back to us! Is it so evil a thing, that she should be Lady of Arilinn? Why should she give that up, to be wife to some Terranan and bear his half-caste brats?”
Damon answered, and knew his voice was shaking, “If she wished to be Lady of Arilinn, I would lay down my life defending her right to remain so. But she has chosen otherwise. She is wife to an honorable man I am proud to call brother, and I do not want to see their happiness destroyed. But even if Andrew were not my friend, I would defend Callista’s right to order her life as she will. To lay down the title of Lady of Arilinn, if she so desires, to be wife to a charcoal-burner in the forest, or to take up sword like the Lady Bruna her foremother and command the Guards in her brother’s place! It is her life, Leonie, not mine or yours!”
Leonie buried her face in her hands. Her voice was sick and choked. “Be it so, then. She shall have choice, though I had none, though you had none. She shall choose what you men of Darkover have called the only fit life for a woman! And it is I who must suffer for her choice, bearing the weight of Arilinn till Janine is old enough and strong enough to bear the burden.” Her face was so old and bitter that Damon shrank from her.
But he thought that it was no true burden to her. Once, perhaps, she might have laid it down. But now she had nothing else, and it was everything to her, to have this power of life and death over them all, all the poor wretches who gave their lives for the Towers. It meant much to her, he knew, that Callista had to come to her and beg for what should be hers by right!
He said, making his voice hard, “It has always been the law. I have heard you say that the life of a Keeper is too hard to be borne unconsenting. And it has always been so, that a Keeper is freed when she can no longer do her work in safety. You said it, yes, you are a Keeper and responsible only for your own conscience. But what is it to be a Keeper, Leonie, if the conscience of a Keeper does not demand an honesty worthy of a Keeper, or of a Hastur!”
There was another long silence. At last she said, “On the word of a Hastur, Damon, I do not know how it is to be undone. All my search of the records has told me only that in the old days, when this was commonly done — it was done after the Towers had ceased to neuter their Keepers, so that the sacred fertility of a Comynara need not suffer even in theory — such Keepers were sent to Neskaya. So I sought there for the records. Theolinda, at Neskaya, told me that all the manuscripts were destroyed when Neskaya was burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos. And so, although I still feel Callista should return to us, there is only one way to rediscover what must be done for Callista. Damon, do you know what is meant by Timesearch?”
He felt a curious rippling coldness, as if the very fabric of the overworld were wavering beneath his feet. “I had heard that technique, too, was lost.”
“No, for I have done it,” said Leonie. “The course of a river had shifted, and farms and villages all along the watershed were threatened with drought or flood and famine. I did a Timesearch to discover precisely where it had run a hundred years before, so that we could divert it back into a course where it could run, and not waste energy trying to force it to flow without a natural channel. It was not easy.” Her voice was thinned and afraid. “And you would have to go further than I went. You would have to go back before the burning of Neskaya, during the Hastur rebellions. That was an evil time. Could you reach that level, do you think?”
Damon said slowly, “I can work on many levels of the overworld. There are others, of course, to which I have no access. I do not know how to reach the one where Timesearch can be done.”
“I can guide you there,” Leonie said. “You know, of course, that the overworlds are only a series of agreements. Here in the gray world it is easier to visualize your physical body moving on a plain of gray space, with thoughtforms for landmarks” — she gestured to the dimly glowing form of Arilinn behind them — “than to approach the truth, which is that your mind is a tenuous web of intangibles moving in a realm of abstractions. You learned as much, of course, during your first year in the Tower. It is possible, of course, that the over-world is nearer the objective reality of the universe than the world of form, what you call the real world. Yet even there any good technician can see, at will, bodies as webs of atoms and whirling energy and magnetic fields.”
Damon nodded, knowing this was true.
“It is not easy to get your mind far enough from the agreements of what you call the real world to be free of time as you know it. Time itself is probably no more than a way of structuring reality so that our brains can make some sense out of it,” Leonie said. “Probably in the ultimate reality of the universe, to which our experiences are approximations, there is no experience of time as a sequence, but past and present and future all exist together as one chaotic whole. On a physical level — of course that includes the level where we are now, the world of images, where our visualization constantly recreates the world we prefer to see around us — we find it easier to travel along a personal sequence from what we call past to present to future. But in reality even a physical organism probably exists in its entirety at once, and its biological development from embryo to senility and death is merely another of its dimensions, like length. Am I confusing you, Damon?”
“Not much. Go on.”
“On the level of Timesearch that whole concept of linear sequence disappears. You must create it for yourself so that you do not become lost in the chaotic reality, and you must anchor yourself somehow so that you will not regress your physical body through the resonances. It is like wandering blindfold in a mirror-maze. I would rather do anything in this universe than try it again. Yet I fear that only in such a quest into time can you find an answer for Callista. Damon, must you risk it?”