“Hours,” Andrew said. “It must be past midnight.”
Damon nodded. He knew the time-telescoping effect of such travel. Time in the overworld seemed to run on a different scale and was not even consistent, but something else entirely, so that sometimes a brief conversation would last for hours, and at other times a lengthy journey which, subjectively, seemed to endure for days, would flash by in the blink of an eye.
Ellemir appeared in the doorway, saying anxiously, “Good, you are still awake. Damon, come and look at Callista, I don’t like the way she keeps moaning in her sleep.”
Damon set the wineglass down, steadying himself against the table with both hands. He came into the inner room. Callista seemed asleep, but her eyes were half open, and when Damon touched her she winced, evidently aware of the touch, but there was no consciousness in her eyes. Andrew’s face was drawn. “What ails her now, Damon?”
“Crisis. I was afraid of this,” Damon said, “but I thought it would happen that first night.” Quickly he moved his fingertips over her body, not touching her. “Elli, help me turn her over. No, Andrew, don’t touch her, she’s aware of you even in her sleep.” Ellemir helped him turn her, sharing with him a moment of shock as they stripped the blankets from her body. How wasted she looked! Hovering jealously near as the lines of light built up in Callista’s body, Andrew saw the dull, faded currents. But Damon knew he did not completely understand.
“I knew I should have cleared her channels at once,” he said with hopeless anger. How could he make Andrew understand? He tried, without much hope, to put it into words:
“She needs some kind of… of discharge of the energy overload. Yet the channels are blocked, and the energy is backing up — leaking, if you like — into all the rest of her system, and is beginning to affect all her life functions: her heart, her circulation, her breathing. And before I could—”
Ellemir drew a harsh gasp of apprehension. Damon saw Callista’s body stiffen, go rigid, arch backward with a weird cry. For several seconds a twitching, shuddering tremor shook all her limbs, then she collapsed and lay as if lifeless.
“God!” Andrew breathed. “What was that?”
“Convulsion,” Damon said briefly. “I was afraid of that. It means we’ve really run out of time.” He bent to check her pulse, listen to her breathing.
“I knew I should have cleared her channels.”
“Why didn’t you?” Andrew demanded.
“I told you: I have no kirian for her, and without that I don’t know if she would be able to stand the pain.”
“Do it now, while she’s unconscious,” Andrew said, and Damon shook his head.
“She has to be awake and consciously cooperating with me, or I could damage her seriously. And… and she doesn’t want me to,” he said at last.
“Why not?”
Damon said it at last, reluctantly: “Because if I clear the channels, that means she goes back to the normal state for her, a normal state for a Keeper, with the channels completely separated from the normal woman’s state — cleared for psi and fixed that way. Back to the way she was before she ever left the Tower. Completely unaware of you, sexually unable to react. In effect, back to square one.”
Andrew drew a harsh breath. “What is the alternative?”
“No alternative now, I’m afraid,” Damon said soberly. “She can’t live long like this.” He touched the cold hand briefly, then went into his room where he kept the supply of herb medicines and remedies he had been using. He hesitated, but finally chose a small vial, came back, loosened the cap and poured it between Callista’s slack lips, holding her head so that it ran down her throat.
“What is that? What are you giving her, damn it?”
“It will keep her from going into another convulsion,” Damon said, “at least for the rest of the night. And tomorrow…” But he shrank from finishing the sentence. Even when he was doing this work regularly in the Tower, he had no liking for it. He shrank from the pain he must inflict, shrank, too, from the need to face Callista with the stark knowledge that she must sacrifice what little gain had been made with her maturing, and return to the state Leonie had imposed on her, unresponsive, immature, neuter. He walked away from Callista, rinsing and replacing the vial, trying to calm himself. He sat down on the other bed, looking at Callista in dismay, and Ellemir came to his side. Andrew still knelt by Callista, and Damon thought that he should send him away, because even in sleep Callista was conscious of him, her channels reacting to his physical presence even if her mind did not. For a moment it seemed as if he could see Andrew and Callista as a series of whirling, interlocking magnetic fields, reaching out toward one another, grasping, intertwining polarities. But where the energies should reinforce and strengthen one another, the forces were swirling and backing up in Callista, draining her strength, unable to flow freely. And what was this doing to Andrew? It was draining him too. By main force Damon turned off the perception, forcing himself to come back to the surface, to see Callista just as a desperately sick woman who had collapsed after a convulsion and Andrew as a concerned man, bending over her in dread and despair.
It was for this kind of thing that Leonie sent him from the Tower, he knew. She said he was too sensitive, that it would destroy him, he recalled, and then, for the first time in his life, rebellion came. It could have been a strength, not a weakness. It could have made him even more valuable to them.
Ellemir came and sat down beside him. He stretched out a hand to her, thought, with an almost anguished need, how long it had been since they had come together in love. Yet the long discipline of the matrix mechanic held firm in his mind. It did not occur to him to think of breaking it. He drew her down, kissed her gently, and said, “I have to save my strength, darling, tomorrow is going to be demanding. Otherwise…” He laid a kiss into the palm of her hand, a private memory and a promise.
Ellemir sensed that he was pretending a cheerfulness and confidence he did not feel, and for a moment she was outraged, that Damon did not believe she knew, or that he thought he could pretend or lie to her. Then she realized the hard discipline behind that optimism, the rigid courtesies of a telepath worker. To give any mental recognition to such dread would reinforce it, create a kind of positive feedback, spiraling them down into a self-perpetuating chaos of despair. She was, she reflected with a touch of cynicism, getting some hard lessons in what it was like to be bound so closely to a working telepath. But her love and concern for Damon overflowed. She knew he did not want pity, but his greatest need, just now, was to be freed of concern about whether he would have to compensate for her dread.
She must carry her own burden of fears, she cautioned herself. She could not lay them on Damon. She took his hands in hers, leaning over to return his kiss very lightly.
Gratefully, he drew her down beside him, holding her in the curve of his arm, a comforting, wholly undemanding touch.
Andrew glanced around at them, from where he knelt beside Callista, and Damon caught his emotions: fear for Callista, dread, uncertainty — can Damon really help her? — distress at what it would mean if she were to be wholly Keeper again, all her old conditioning intact with the cleared channels. And, seeing Ellemir lying close against Damon, curled up in his arm, a confused emotion that was not, really, even jealousy. Callie and he had never had even this much… Damon’s pity for Andrew went so deep he had to cut it off, stifle it lest it tear at him and lessen his strength for what he had to do tomorrow.