The messenger brought them to a halt below a sign that read, INTENSIVE CARE. A young man glanced up from behind a long, curving barrier that served as counter and desk. Regis decided he must be a nurse, because his white uniform bore the staff- and-serpent emblem of the Terran Medics. A musical recording issued from the console behind the counter, a woman singing in a lilting, alien tongue, accompanied by drums and guitar. The snatch of melody reminded Regis of the sea.
Regis tried not to stare, for the nurse’s skin was a glossy blue-black and his hair a cap of fuzz. His ears were like ebony shells set on either side of his skull. Dark eyes, bright with intelligence, took in the two Darkovans, their native clothing and pale skins. But there was no judgment in that brief glance, only curiosity and good will.
How insular we are,
Regis thought,
and how little we know about the infinite variety of humankind.
“We have been expecting you,” the nurse said in a musical voice. “Please wait here while I page Dr. Allison.” He returned to his work at the computer console. Regis caught his flicker of amusement at being the object of curiosity.
He knows what it is to be set apart from his kind, to feel different, and yet he has made his peace with it.
Regis would have liked to speak further with the man, but just then Jason Allison emerged around the corner. Jason wore a white coat, unbuttoned and flowing, over ordinary Darkovan clothing.
“
Dom
Regis, Danilo, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” he said in flawless
casta
, inclining his head but making no effort to shake hands. “Come this way.”
Regis had known Jason since they had worked together on finding a vaccine for trailmen’s fever. He liked and trusted Jason, who had been born on Darkover and lived several years among the nonhuman aboriginals.
They hurried down the corridor that ran behind the nurse’s station and past three or four open doors. Regis glanced in, seeing darkened rooms and empty beds, two to a room. The next door was closed, but Jason entered without preamble.
The first impression Regis had upon entering was that he had stepped onto another planet. The chamber was saturated with light and the clutter of carts and machines. The stink of chemicals masked a miasma of emotions. Before he could raise his
laran
barriers, he caught a whiff of curdled fear from the woman on the other side of the bed. She looked up at him with frightened eyes. Regis recognized Dan Lawton’s wife.
From the patient on the single bed, surrounded by machines and a spiderweb of wires and tubing, came the flare of
laran
, wild and un-shaped. Frantic, barely contained anguish radiated from the man in the corner chair.
The intensity of the emotions and the utter strangeness of the surroundings battered at Regis. Sensations, raw and intense, flooded through him.
Memories surged up through the tumult. In the recesses of his mind, Regis was once more fifteen and wracked by threshold sickness. He remembered how visions had swept his mind like blasts of a Hellers storm. His head had throbbed, and his eyes had flickered with jags of eerie light, incomprehensible visual traceries . . .
Solid warmth steadied him. Blinking, Regis came back to himself. Danilo stood at his back, leaning into him, supporting him.
Ever there, my faithful friend. You saved me then, and you save me now.
The bizarre sensations had not been solely memories of his own struggles as his
laran
awakened. Regis had been picking them up from the boy who lay on the bed. With his own psychic senses, he tasted the drugs surging through the boy’s bloodstream, off-world medicines designed to sedate and numb. All they had accomplished, however, was to blur the boy’s mind, to deprive him of any understanding of what was happening to him.
Moved to pity, Regis reached out to touch the boy. His mother shrieked, “Stay away from him!”
At the same time, Dan Lawton, who had been sitting in the corner, leaped to his feet.
Jason ignored the woman’s outburst. “Regis, do you know what’s wrong with him? Is it threshold sickness?”
“This farce has gone on long enough!” the black- haired woman cried. Her anguish sizzled in the air, panic edged with bitterness and love for her child. “I will not have abominable, superstitious natives treating my son! Felix is critically ill. You said so yourself, Dr. Allison! I insist on proper medical care for him, do you hear?”
Jason guided her toward her husband. “Ms. Lawton, sit down now or leave the room.”
“I mean your son no harm,” Regis began. “I’m here to help, if I can.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” Violet eyes blazed at him, molten. “Nothing! Because he cannot possibly have contracted this degenerate alien threshold syndrome!” She jerked away from Jason’s hold. “Daniel,
tell them
!”
“Tiphani, we’ve been over this—” Dan protested.
“No!” Ebony tresses whirling around her pale face, Tiphani faced her husband. “This is all wrong! I will not have my own son exposed to those native—those—
perverts
!” She lunged at Regis as if she would attack him with her bare hands.
Regis recoiled, not only from her words themselves but from the burst of hatred behind them. Danilo placed himself between Regis and the near-hysterical woman. Danilo had not drawn his dagger, but Regis had no doubt that he was now fully protected.
Danilo said, in a voice all the more menacing for its calm, “No one speaks in that manner to the Heir of Hastur.
No one.
”
“That’s enough!” Jason said, with all the command of his medical rank. Two nurses, one a woman, appeared in the doorway. “Remove this lady from the room. If she resists, sedate her!”
“What, and leave my son to whatever devil-sorcery—” Tiphani shrieked.
“Go with them,” Dan begged. “I’ll stay here and make sure nothing happens. You’ve got to calm down and let the doctor do his work.
Please.
”
“It’s all your fault,” she raged at her husband. “If you hadn’t let him run wild in the gutters, he’d be fine!”
Regis reminded himself that this mother was almost beside herself with worry for her critically ill child. At such times, people often looked for someone to blame.
By this time, the nurses had taken her arms. She tensed, ready to resist. She glanced from her husband’s pleading face to Jason Allison’s stern authority, to Danilo’s poised suspicion. Regis held his silence, believing that anything he said would only provoke the woman further.
As Tiphani disappeared through the doorway, flanked by the nurses, Regis wondered at her reaction. What in Zandru’s Seven Frozen Hells was wrong with her? Surely Dan, who was devoted to Darkover, would have chosen a wife who felt the same.
Instead, Tiphani had made a poor adaptation to the world her husband loved and served. Had she been so blinded by love that she did not consider what she was committing herself to, a life on a remote, low-technology planet? Or had she thought she could persuade Dan Lawton to relocate elsewhere, perhaps her own world—what was it called, Temperance? That was obviously not a quality it bestowed upon its inhabitants.
Was happiness in marriage a matter of chance if left to the rages of infatuation? Regis could not help comparing Dan’s relationship with his own. He and Danilo were so many things to one another;
bredhin
and companions, lovers and lord and paxman. In Linnea Storn, Regis had found a woman of his own caste who was a trained and powerful telepath as well as a loving person. It was too bad things had not worked out, since he did not know if he would ever find such a good match again.
After a moment of embarrassed silence, Regis bent over the bed. The boy appeared to be eleven or twelve, with the wiry slenderness of adolescence. Reddish tints shone in his brown hair. Sweat covered his skin, which was pale from growing up beneath the crimson sun. He opened his eyes, and Regis thought he looked simultaneously terrified and unaware of his surroundings.
“Is it threshold sickness?” Dan asked.
Carefully, Regis lowered his
laran
shields and touched the boy’s mind. Regis had never studied in a Tower, but over the years he had learned not only to master his own psychic powers but to use them in ways no other living Comyn could. To the best of his knowledge, he was the only bearer of the rare and powerful Hastur Gift, that of being a living matrix in himself.
His vision shifted, and he saw not only the white-shrouded form of a pubescent boy but also a tangle of mental energies, streams of color,
laran
surging through its channels, sometimes flowing freely, sometimes pooling, stagnant and festering. The channels in the boy’s lower body, which normally carried both
laran
and awakening sexual energy, were dangerously overloaded.
“How long has he been like this?” Regis heard his own words as if whispered from far away.
“He was fine this morning,” Dan responded. “Bright, a bit rebellious, a typical adolescent. I thought the trip to the market would do him good. Could he have been made ill by something he ate there?”
Regis shook his head. “I’m not a trained monitor, but I think it’s rare for the sickness to come on so fast and strong. Danilo, what do you think?”
With a sense of inexpressible relief, Regis felt his
bredhyu’s
mind open to his, a flowing unity that he had never experienced with any other human being. Like Regis, Danilo had not trained in a Tower, and like Regis, he was the sole possessor of a rare gift, that of catalyzing telepathy, of awakening latent talent. Unlike Regis, however, his own passage through the tumult of adolescent threshold sickness had been relatively benign.
Danilo shifted, his mental touch like silk over water, and he said, in a voice that shimmered in Regis’s mind, “Where is his starstone?”
“His—you mean a matrix crystal?” Dan said. “As far as I know, he’s never had one. Where would he get it?”
Danilo looked directly at Regis. “I’d stake my life this boy has keyed into a starstone. That’s why—”
Before he could go further, Felix gave a sudden cry. His body arched upward, straining at the bandages, almost ripping out the needle taped to his arm. Jason sprang into action at the same time Regis did, Danilo a split instant later. Together, the two Darkovans managed to hold the convulsing boy. Regis felt a shock as he touched the boy’s skin with his bare hands. Energy, raw and directionless, surged just beneath the surface.
Deftly, Jason adjusted the intravenous apparatus. Regis could not see exactly what the doctor was doing, nor would he have understood if he could. Instead, he sensed a lessening of the frantic surge of
laran
power and a softening of the boy’s muscles. A shudder ran the length of Felix’s body, and he sank back on the bed.
Regis drew his hands back, frowning. This was not a natural end to the spasm. The convulsions had not run their course, nor had the cause been remedied. He glanced at Jason.
“That will hold him for the moment,” Jason said. “I’ve increased the dosage of antiseizure medication to the maximum for his body mass. I dare not give him any more.”
Regis shook his head. “It’s not over.”
“I know, I know.” Sweating visibly, Jason raked his hair back from his forehead. “I don’t know what else to do for him. God help him if he has another attack. He could suffer permanent brain damage. That’s why I sent for you.”
From outside the door came the sound of a woman’s voice, taut with strain, and Tiphani’s frantic sobs.
“You’d best see to your wife.” Regis nodded to Dan, who hurried from the room.
After a few murmured words, footsteps receded down the corridor. The room fell into a hush, the three men and the boy lying so still he seemed to be not breathing.
“Danilo—” Regis began. “You’re sure he has a starstone?”
Danilo nodded. “Can’t you feel the vibrational pattern?”
“Under all that chaotic flow, who can tell anything?” Regis frowned.
“Maybe . . . I’m not nearly as sensitive as you. If you say so, I’ll take your word on it.”
“I know what a starstone looks like,” Jason said, puzzled. “When Felix was admitted, he did not have one on his person or among his possessions. I thought that once a person had keyed into a stone, handling it or taking it away from him could kill him.”
For a long beat, neither Regis nor Danilo breathed an answer. Slowly, Jason nodded. “Oh.”
If they failed to find and restore the psychoactive gem, the boy’s convulsions would get worse. Threshold sickness could be fatal. Regis had lost one of his few remaining
nedestro
children to it.
Regis went to the door. The ebony-skinned nurse, still at his station, pointed toward a room at the end of the corridor. “They went to the chapel.”
The door opened soundlessly at a touch. Unlike the chill, antiseptic furnishings of the rest of the building, this room struck Regis as Darkovan. Panels of chestnut-brown wood alternated with hangings in soft greens and blues. At the far end, light glowed softly behind panels of tinted glass patterned like trees and mountains. Even the air smelled fresher. To one side of the glass panels, a red votive light glimmered on a table set with various articles.
Instruments of prayer,
the Father Master at St. Valentine’s monastery would have called them. Regis recognized a
cristoforo
rosary, a stack of worn prayer books, a glass vessel filled with flower petals, a bell, and a bronze bowl and stick. Dan sat beside his wife on one of the simple wooden benches, his arm around her. Her back was bowed over so that her hair fell like a cascade of glossy curls over her face.
Something in the tenderness of Dan’s posture, the way he stroked Tiphani’s hair, and the sweet rumble of his voice touched Regis unexpectedly. Beneath the fear lay a woman who was deeply loved, a mother grievously worried for her child.
Regis took a seat beside her, beyond casual touch, yet close enough to feel the shimmer of almost-
laran
emanating from her shuddering form. She was not Comyn, she was not even Darkovan. He had encountered a range of telepathic talents in off-worlders in the last decade, since he had sent out an invitation throughout the Empire as part of Project Telepath. People with true psychic abilities, not parlor-trick charlatans, were rare, often near psychotic. Tiphani seemed sane enough, just distraught as any mother in this situation might be.