“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?”
If it had been Ellemir asking this, Andrew would have felt he had scored a point, but as Callista said it there was no challenge. “Cultural prejudices aren’t rational. Ours is against sleeping with other women. Yours, against sex in pregnancy, makes no sense to me, unless a woman is really ill.”
She shrugged. “Biologically, no pregnant animal desires sex; most will not endure it. If your women have been culturally conditioned to accept it as the price of retaining a husband’s sexual interest, I can only say I am sorry for them! Would you demand it of me after I had ceased to take pleasure in it?”
Andrew suddenly found that he was laughing. “My love, of all our worries, it seems that one is the easiest to put off until it is at hand! Do you have a saying… can we cross that bridge when we come to it?”
She laughed too. “We say we will ride that colt when he has grown to bear a saddle. But truly, Andrew, do you Terran men—”
He said, “God help me, love, I don’t know what most men do. I doubt if I could ask you to do anything you didn’t want to. I’d probably… probably take the rough with the smooth. I guess some men would go elsewhere, but make damn sure their wives didn’t find it out. There’s another old saying: what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.”
“But among a family of telepaths, such deceit is simply not possible,” Callista said, “and I would rather know my husband was content in the arms of someone who gave us this out of love, a sister or a friend, than adventuring with a stranger.” But she was calmer, and Andrew sensed that removing their talk from an immediate problem to a distant one had made it less troubling to her. He said, “I’d rather die than hurt you.”
As he had done earlier, she lifted his fingertips to her lips and kissed them, very lightly. She said with a smile, “Ah, my husband, dying would hurt me worse than anything else you could possibly do.”
Chapter Thirteen
Andrew rode through melting snow, a light flurry still falling. Across the valley he could see the lights of Armida, a soft twinkle against the mountain mass. Damon said these were only foothills, but to Andrew they were mountains, and high ones, too. He heard the men talking behind him in low voices and knew that they were also looking forward to food, and fire, and home, after eight days in the far pastures, noting the damage of the great blizzard, the condition of the roads, the damage to livestock.
He had welcomed this chance to be alone with those who could not read his thoughts. He had not yet grown wholly accustomed to life within a telepathic family, and he had not, as yet, quite learned to guard himself against accidental intrusion. From the men he picked up only a small, slight background trickle of thought, surface, undisturbing, inconsequential. But he was glad to be coming home. He rode through the courtyard gates and servants came to take his horse’s bridle. He accepted this now without thought, though there were times when, stopping to think, it still disturbed him somewhat. Callista ran down the steps toward him. He bent to kiss her lightly on the cheek, then discovered, though it was too dark in the courtyard, that it was Ellemir he held. Laughing, sharing her amusement at his mistake, he hugged her hard and felt her mouth under his, warm and familiar. They went up the steps holding hands.