Dezi said, “Ferrika does not make it, and with Domenic and myself both past threshold sickness, and Valdir in Nevarsin, I do not think anyone here has had need of it.”
Andrew asked, “What’s kirian?”
“A psychoactive drug which is used in the Towers, or among telepathic families. It lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, but it can also be helpful in cases of overwork or telepathic stresses. And some developing telepaths have a lot of sickness at adolescence, physical and psychic, when all the development is taking place at once. I suppose you’re too old for threshold sickness, Dezi?”
“I should think so,” the boy said scornfully. “I had outgrown it before I was fourteen.”
“Still, being away from matrix work since you left Arilinn, you might have a touch of it when you try to go back to it,” Damon warned. “And we still don’t know how Andrew will react.” He would ask Callista to try to make kirian. There should be some kept in every household of telepaths, against emergencies.
He put aside his cup of milk, half finished. He was deathly weary. “Go and rest, Dezi lad… you are worthy of Arilinn training, believe me.” He gave the boy a brief embrace and watched him go off toward his room near Dom Esteban’s, hoping the old man would sleep through the night so the boy could rest undisturbed.
Whatever Dezi’s faults, Damon considered, at least he had nursed the old man as filially as an acknowledged son would have. Was it affection, he wondered, or self-interest?
He let himself lean on Andrew as they climbed the stairs, making a rueful apology, but Andrew brushed it aside. “Forget it. You think I don’t know you pulled the whole weight of that?” So Damon let Andrew help him up the stairs, thinking, I lean on you now as I did in the matrix.…
In the outer room of their suite he hesitated a moment. “You aren’t Tower-trained, so you should be warned of this, too: matrix work… you’ll be impotent for a day or two. Don’t worry about it, it’s temporary.”
Andrew shrugged, with a twist of wry amusement, and Damon, remembering abruptly the real state of affairs between Andrew and Callista, knew that a word of apology would only reemphasize the tactlessness of his words. He asked himself how in hell he could have been groggy enough to have forgotten that.
In their room, Ellemir lay half asleep on the bed, wrapped in a fleecy white shawl. She had taken down her braids and her hair was scattered like light on the pillow. As Damon looked down at his wife, she sat up, blinking sleepily, then, as Ellemir always did, moving- from sleep to waking without transition, she held out her arms. “Oh, Damon, you look so weary, was it very terrible?”
He sank down beside her, resting his head against her breast. “No. Only I am no longer used to this work, and there is such a need for it, such a terrible need! Elli—” He sat bolt upright, looking down at her. “So many people here on Darkover are dying, when they should not die, suffering, being crippled, dying of minor injuries. It should not be so. We do not have the kind of medical services Andrew tells me that his Terrans have. But there are so many things that a man — or a woman — with a matrix can heal. And yet how are the injured to be taken to Arilinn or Neskaya or Dalereuth or Hali, to be treated in the Towers there? What do the matrix circles in the great Towers care for a poor workman’s frostbite, or some poor hunter clawed by a hunting-beast or kicked in the head by an oudrakhi?”
“Well,” said Ellemir, puzzled, but trying to follow his vehemence, “in the Towers they have other things to do. Important things. Communications. And… and mining, and all of those things. They would have no time to look after wounds.”
“That’s true. But listen, Elli, all over Darkover there are men like Dezi, or women like Callista, or like you. Women and men who cannot, do not want to spend their lives in a Tower, away from the ordinary lives of humankind. But they could do any of these things.” He sank down on the bed beside Ellemir, realizing he was more fatigued than after any battle he had fought in the Guards. “One need not be Comyn, or have enormous skill, to do these things. Anyone with a little laran could be trained so, to help, to heal, and no one does!”
“But Damon,” she said reasonably, “I have always heard — Callista has told me — it is dangerous to use these powers outside the Towers.”
“Flummery!” Damon exclaimed. “Are you so superstitious, Elli? You yourself have been in contact with Callista. Did you find it so dangerous?”
“No,” she said uneasily, “but during the Ages of Chaos, so many terrible things were done with the great matrix screens, such terrible weapons — fire-forms, and wind-creatures to tear down castles and whole walls, and creatures from other dimensions walking abroad in the land — that they decreed in those days that all matrix work should be done only in the Towers, and only under safeguards.”
“But that time is past, Ellemir, and most of those enormous, illegal matrix weapons were destroyed during the Ages of Chaos, or in the days of Varzil the Good. Do you really think that because I healed four men’s frozen feet and restored to them the ability to use their limbs, that I am likely to send a fire-form raging in the forest, or raise a cave-thing to blight the crops?”
“No, no, of course not.” She sat up, holding out her arms to him. “Lie down, rest, my dearest, you are so weary.”
He let her help him undress, and lay down at her side, but he went on, staring stubbornly into the darkness.
“Elli, there is something very wrong with the use we are making of telepaths here on Darkover. Either they must live guarded all their lives within the Towers, hardly human — you know that it nearly destroyed me when I was sent from Arilinn — or else they must give up everything they have learned. Like Callista — Evanda pity her,” he added, a flicker of consciousness still in link with Andrew, looking down at the sleeping Callista, traces of tears still on her face. “She has had to give up everything she ever learned, everything she has ever done. She is afraid to do anything else. There ought to be a way, Elli, there ought to be a way!”
“Damon, Damon,” she entreated, holding him close, “it has always been so. The Tower-trained are wiser than we are; they must know what they are about when they ordain it so!”
“I am not so sure.”
“In any case, there is nothing we can do about it now, my dearest. You must rest now, and calm yourself, or you will disturb her,” she said, taking Damon’s hand in her own and laying it against her body. Damon, knowing he was being deliberately diverted, but willing to go along with it — after all, Ellemir was right — smiled, letting himself begin to pick up the formless, random emanations — not yet thoughts — of the unborn child. “Her, you said?”
Ellemir laughed softly in delight. “I am not sure how I know, but I am certain of it. A little Callista, perhaps?”
Damon thought, I hope her life will be happier. I would not wish to see the hand of Arilinn laid on any daughter of mine… Then he suddenly shuddered, in a flick of precognition seeing a slender red-haired woman, in the crimson robes of a Keeper in Arilinn… She tore them from neck to ankle, rending them, casting them aside… He blinked. It was gone. Precognition? Or was it a dramatization, an hallucination, born of his own disquiet? Holding his wife and child in his arms, he tried to put it all aside for the time.
Chapter Seven
The frostbitten men were recovering, but with so many men disabled, an extra share of the actual physical work fell on Andrew, and even Damon took a hand now and then. The weather had moderated, but Dom Esteban told them this was only a break before the real winter storms would sweep down from the Hellers, layering the foothills deep in snow for months.