"Where do you go?"
"Wheresoever I am needed. Farewell!"
The door closed behind him, and Clothilde pushed herself up from her pallet, tottered to the portal, and wrenched it open—but he was nowhere to be seen, nor was there sign of him in the falling snow.
" 'Twas a miracle," one of the nuns whispered.
"It may have been." But Mother Superior's tones were cautious. "Still, he may have been only a monk like any other. We have learned that the friars at the monastery are ever searching for new knowledge of the uses of these strange powers with which some folk are born ..."
Gwen thought of telling them that very few outside the planet of Gramarye were born with psi powers, but decided against it.
"... and he may have been one such monk, abroad on a mission for the Abbot. Surely we have found that there is naught miraculous in the cure he worked, for we have learned the manner of it ourselves; and the pot that never emptied may simply have been a large one, and the portions small."
"Yet there was the scar," one of the older ones noted.
"Aye—the mark of burning from wrist to wrist, up his arms and across his chest." Mother Superior nodded. "He may have been cruelly hurted when young, and known from his own pain the need for forgiveness of which he spoke."
"Or . . . ?" Gwen knew Mother Superior was only trying to provide a rational explanation for something her nuns saw as miraculous—and Mother didn't answer her question. She sat back and waited, and an older nun reminded Gwen, "The saintly Father Vidicon was burned in such a manner by lightning, which wrought his death."
Gwen lifted her head in surprise. Father Vidicon had taken hold of two high-voltage wires, knowing the electricity would kill him. In this culture, they would think of that as lightning.
She was about to point out that the burn would have been interior with no scars except those on his hands, but decided against it. People need their illusions. "You do, then, believe your convent was begun by a visitation of the sainted Father Vidicon himself?"
" 'Tis possible," Mother Superior allowed, "though there is no good reason to believe it, save our own desire."
Most of the nuns bowed their heads, and the few who didn't fought down smiles, but their eyes were lively.
Privately, Gwen agreed with what Mother Superior had said, though obviously did not want to believe—that the monk had been only a man, though obviously a highly skilled esper. "Do you know this monk's semblance? Is there any image of him?"
"Aye, for Meryl witnessed this conversation, nodding in and out of sleep, and was skilled with the brush." The Mother Superior rose. "An you will come to our chapel, I shall show you his portrait."
To Gwen, it seemed an odd place for a picture of the founder, but she dutifully rose with the rest of the nuns. Mother Superior bowed her head and said a short prayer before she dismissed her charges and took Gwen out through the cloister to the chapel.
"Another bite! Another! Aye, there's a man! Chew that beef! Gulp it down! Well done! Only two more bites, now! Masticate! Macerate! Chew, engorge! Finish it all!"
"Geoffrey," said Cordelia, "I think he might prove able to eat the whole steak even without such enthusiastic encouragement."
"Aye, but it is so much fun to watch him force it." Geoffrey grinned as Gregory closed his eyes and compelled himself to swallow the last bite. "Well done, my lad! How do you feel?"
"Absolutely bloated," Gregory said in a thick voice.
"Well, we cannot have that. Here, I have fetched a pillow. Lie down, my lad, and let Cordelia's mind work on your muscle cells."
Gregory lay down with a sigh of resignation. "What shall you do, sister?"
"Yes, what shall I do?" Cordelia asked, puzzled.
"Speed up his digestion, sister, and direct the protein to flow into his muscle fibers—first, his left biceps."
Cordelia frowned, concentrating. The clearing grew silent as she accelerated natural processes. Gregory studied the actions of her mind and his cells so that he might accomplish this on his own—somehow he was sure it would be a lifelong undertaking.
Then Cordelia told him, "Flex your arm."
Frowning, Gregory did, and Geoffrey deliberately pulled against the motion with his mind as Cordelia packed new muscle cells into Gregory's biceps. He cried out in surprise at the pain.
"Do you wish me to do it or not?" she challenged.
"Do ... I shall rise above it. .. ." Gregory panted.
"Then flex your leg."
Gregory did, and clenched his teeth against the agony.
Cordelia read it in his face and bit her lip, but forced herself to go on. "Your other leg . . . your left arm . .. Now sit up."
White-faced and gritting his teeth with determination, Gregory complied. His heart grew faint at the pain he sustained, but he glanced at the sleeping face of the woman he had come to know as Moraga and forced himself to sit up, straining against the load his brother dragged on him.
The chapel was very small, as churches went—at the most, it might have held a hundred people. Gwen looked around. "How have you Mass?"
"The pastor of the nearest village comes each Sunday." Mother smiled. "None has ever felt the need to say aught about us to their brethren of the monastery."
Gwen could understand how loyalty to the people nearby could prove more pressing than fidelity to an abbot far off in the south, the more so as there was a certain resentment between the parish clergy and the cloistered monks akin to the old rivalry between engineers and physicists. There was also probable recognition of the importance of the work the sisters were doing—and considerable pressure from the peasants of the countryside, perhaps even from the lords. No, quite probably from the lords.
Gwen looked around at the church, reflecting that it needed to hold no more than its hundred, for there were only a few dozen nuns. There was a large crucifix above the altar and a statue of the Blessed Virgin at one side, with one of Joseph against the other. The style of sculpture seemed quite distinct from those Gwen had seen in other churches. "Whence came these statues, Sister Testa?"
"All works you see within were made by our nuns themselves, milady." She led Gwen to the north wall. "Yon is the monk who did appear to Clothilde."
Gwen looked, and the picture slapped her in the face—at least it felt as though it had, for she recognized the visage. It was Father Marco Ricci, the Terran priest who had founded the Gramarye chapter of the Order of St. Vidicon—and one of the very few of the original colonists who had been able to keep his memories of an advanced civilization, perhaps the only one. She felt her heart twist within her and was giddy for a moment, for she had known Father Marco herself, when she and her husband had been kidnapped into the past many years before. It was a strange and disturbing sensation to look at an icon of the man she had known and confront the fact that he had been dead for four centuries and more. But when had he discovered he was an esper? And how had he come by that horrible scar?
Of course, she had never seen him unclothed; he might have had it even when she had known him—but she found room to doubt it.
"You seem disturbed." The Mother Superior's interest kindled. "Have you seen this face before?"
Gwen realized that she was in an excellent position to destroy all the Order's illusions but firmly rejected the opportunity; confronting them with reality was not her task. Instead, she "answered" a question with another. "When did Clothilde and Meryl live, Sister Paterna?"
"Four hundred fifty-six years ago, milady. Our convent has kept exacting records."
Four hundred fifty-six years! That would have made Father Marco a very old man— but it was just barely possible. Gwen determined that she would have to go to the monastery and search their records, to find out if Father Marco had gone abroad much in his later years.