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?”
“I must, Leonie. I made Callista a promise.” He would not tell Leonie of the extremity in which the promise had been made, or of the agony she had endured, when it would have been easier to die, because she trusted that promise. “I am not a Hastur, but I will not forswear my word.”
Leonie sighed deeply. She said, “I am a Hastur, and a Keeper, responsible for everyone who has given me an oath, man or woman. I feel now that if it were for me to choose, no woman would be trained as Keeper unless she first consented to be neutered, as was done in the ancient days. But the world will go as it will, and not as I would have it. I will take responsibility, Damon, yet I cannot take all the responsibility. I am the only surviving Keeper at Arilinn. Neskaya is often out of the relays because Theolinda is not strong enough even now, and Dalereuth is using a mechanic’s circle with no Keeper, so that I feel guilty keeping Janine at my side in Arilinn. We cannot train enough Keepers as it is now, Damon, and those we train often lose their powers while still young. Do you see why we need Callista so terribly, Damon?”
It was a problem with no answer, but Damon would not have Callista made a pawn, and Leonie knew it. She said at last, in wonder, “How you must love her, Damon! Perhaps it is to you I should have given her.”
Damon replied, “Love? Not in that sense, Leonie. Though she is dear to me, and I who have so little courage admire it above all else in anyone.”
“You have little courage, Damon?” Leonie was silent for a long time and he saw her image ripple and waver like heat waves in the desert beyond the Dry Towns. “Damon, oh, Damon, have I destroyed everyone I love? Only now do I see that I broke you, as I broke Callista…”
The sound of that rang, timeless, like an echo, in Damon. Have I destroyed everyone I love? Everyone I love, everyone I — everyone I love?
“You said it was for my own good that you sent me from Arilinn, Leonie, that I was too sensitive, that the work would destroy me.” He had lived with those words for years, had choked on them, swallowed them in bitterness, hating himself for living to hear them or repeat them. He never thought to doubt them, not for an instant… the word of a Keeper, a Hastur.
Trapped, she cried out, “What could I possibly have said to you?” Then, in a great cry of agony: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with our whole system of training psi workers! How can it possibly be right to sacrifice lives wholesale this way? Callista’s, Hilary’s, yours!” She added, with indescribable bitterness, “My own.”
If she had had the courage, Damon thought, bitterly or the honesty, to tell him the truth, to say to him, “one of us must go, and I am Keeper, and cannot be spared,” then he would have lost to Arilinn, yes, but he would not have been lost to himself.
But now he had recovered something lost when he was sent from the Towers. He was whole again, not broken as he was when Leonie cast him out, thinking of himself as weak, useless, not strong enough for the work he had chosen.
Something was desperately wrong with the system of training psi workers. Now even Leonie knew it.
He was shocked by the tragedy in Leonie’s eyes. She whispered, “What do you want of me, Damon? Because I came near to destroying your life in my weakness, does the honor of a Hastur demand I must stand unflinching and let you destroy mine in turn?”
Damon bowed his head. His long love, the suffering he had mastered, the love he had thought burned out years ago, lent him compassion. Here in the overworld, where no hint of physical passion could lend danger to the gesture or the thought, he reached for Leonie, and as he had longed to do through many hoepless years, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It did not matter that only images met, that they were, in the real world, a tenday ride apart, that no more than Callista could she ever have responded to his passion. None of this mattered. It was a kiss of such despairing love as he had never given, would never again give to any living woman. For a moment Leonie’s image wavered, flowed, until she was again the younger Leonie, radiant, chaste, untouchable, the Leonie for whose very presence he had hungered for so many anguished, lonely years, and tormented himself with guilt for the longing.
Then she was the Leonie of today, faded, worn, ravaged by time, weeping with a helpless sound he thought would break his heart. She whispered, “Go now, Damon. Return after Midwinter, and I will guide you to where you may seek in time for Callista’s destiny and your own. But for now, if there is any pity left in you, go!”