Sharra's Exile (11 page)

I started to refuse. But it meant so much to her. And I was free now, free of it for months at a time; surely a time would come when I was wholly free. And this was such a simple thing.

And what the Terran medic had said made me uneasy, too. Twins; that was the simplest answer, but when he had asked about congenital deformities, I knew I was uneasy, had been uneasy since the child was conceived.

“I’ll try, love. I’d have to try sometime—”

One more thing, perhaps, to rediscover with Dio; one more healing, one more freedom, like the

manhood I had rediscovered in her arms. I rumbled one-handed with the little leather bag around my neck, where the blue crystal hung in its shielded wrapping of pale insulating silks.

The crystal dropped into my hand. It felt warm and alive, a good sign, without the instant flare, blaze, fire. I cupped the blue stone in my palm, trying not to remember the last time I had done this.

It had been the other hand, the stone had burned
through
my hand… not my own matrix, but the Sharra matrix…
enough
! I forced the memories away, closing my eyes for a moment, trying to settle myself down to the smooth resting rhythm of the stone. It had been so long since I had touched the matrix.

Finally I sensed that I had keyed into the stone, opening my eyes, glancing dispassionately into the blue depths where small lights flickered and curled like live things. Maybe they were.

I had not done monitoring for many years. It is the first task given to young apprentices in the Towers; to sit outside a matrix circle, and through the powers of the starstone, amplifying your own gifts, to keep watch on the bodies of the workers while their minds are elsewhere, doing the work of the linked matrix circles. Sometimes matrix workers, deep in rapport with one another through the starstones, forget to breathe, or lose track of things which should be under the control of their autonomic nervous systems, and it is the monitor’s work to make sure all is well. Later, the monitor learns more difficult techniques of medical diagnosis, going
into
the complex cells of the human body… it had been a long time. Slowly, carefully, I made the beginning scan; heart and lungs were doing their work of bringing oxygen to the cells, the eyelids blinked automatically to keep the eye surfaces lubricated, there was stress on the back muscles because of the weight of pregnancy… I was running through surface things, superficial things. She sensed the touch; though her eyes were closed, I felt her smile at me.

I hardly believed this; that, once again, slowly, stumbling like a novice, I was making contact with the matrix stone after six years, though I had, as yet, barely touched the surface. I dared a deeper touch—

Fire. Blazing through my hand. Pain… outrageous, burning agony
—
in a hand that was not there to
burn. I heard myself cry out
… or
was it the sound of Marjorie screaming… before my locked eyes the
fire-form rose high, locks tossing in the firestorm wind, like a woman, tall and chained, her body and
limbs and hair all on fire
—

Sharra!

I let the matrix stone drop as if it had burned through my good hand; felt the pain of having it away from my body, tried to scrabble for it with a hand that was no longer part of my arm..
. I felt it there, felt
the burning pain through every finger, pain in the lines of the palm, in the nails burning
… Sobbing with pain, I fumbled the matrix into its sheath around my neck and wrenched my mind away from the fire-image, feeling it slowly burn down and subside. Dio was staring at me in horror.

I said, my mouth stiff and fumbling on the words, “I’m— I’m sorry,
bredhiya
, I—I didn’t mean to frighten you—”

She caught me close to her, and I buried my head in her breast. She whispered, “Lew, it is I should beg forgiveness— I did not know that would happen—I would never have asked—Avarra’s mercy, what

was that?”

I drew a deep breath, feeling the pain tearing at the hand that was not there. I could not speak the words aloud. The fire-form was still behind my eyes, blazing. I blinked, trying to make it go away, and said,

“You know.”

She whispered, “But how…”

“Somehow, the damned thing is keyed into my own matrix. Whenever I try to use it, I see… only
that
.”

I swallowed and said thickly, “I thought I was free. I thought I was—was healed, and free of
that
…”

“Why don’t you destroy it?”

My smile was only a painful grimace. “That would probably be the best answer. Because I am sure I would die with it… very quickly and not at all pleasantly. But I was too cowardly for that.”

“Oh, no, no, no—” She held me close, hugging me desperately. I swallowed, drew several deep

breaths, knowing this was hurting her more than me; Ridenow, empath, Dio could not bear any

suffering… there were times when I wondered whether what she felt for me had been love, or whether she had given me her body, her heart, her comfort, as one soothes a screaming baby because one cannot bear his crying and will do anything, anything to shut him up—

But it had helped me, to know my pain hurt Dio and I must somehow try and control it. “Get me a drink, will you?” When she brought it, calming herself a little by the need to collect her thoughts and look for something, I sipped, trying to quiet my mind. “I am sorry, I thought I was free of that.”

“I can’t bear it,” she said fiercely. “I can’t bear it, that
you
think you should apologize to
me
—” She was crying, too. She laid her hand over the baby and said, trying to make a joke of it, “Already he is troubled when he hears his mother and father yelling at each other!”

I picked up on it at once and made a joke of it too, saying with exaggerated humor, “Well, we must be very quiet and not wake up the baby!”

She came and curled up next to me on the couch, leaning against my breast. She said seriously, “Lew, on Darkover— there are matrix technicians who could free you—aren’t there?”

“Do you think my father hasn’t done his best? And he was First at Arilinn for almost ten years. If he can’t do it, it probably can’t be done.”

“No,” she said, “but you
are
better; it doesn’t happen now as often as it did in the first years—does it?

Maybe, now, they could find a way—”

The communicator jangled and I went to answer it. I might have known it would be my father’s voice.

“Lew, are you all right? I felt uneasy—”

I wasn’t surprised. Every telepath on this planet, if there were any others, must have felt that shock.

Even the distant voice of my father tried to reassure me. “It hasn’t happened for a long time, has it?

Don’t get discouraged, Lew, give yourself time to heal…”

Time? The rest of my life
, I thought, holding the voice-piece of the communicator under my chin with the stump of my left hand, the fingers of my remaining hand nervously smoothing the insulating silks over my matrix. Never again. I would never touch the matrix again, not when—this—was waiting for me. What I said to my father was surface noise, mouthed platitudes of reassurance, and he must have known it, but he did not press me; he probably knew I would have slammed down the communicator and refused to answer it again. All he said was, “In ten days there is a ship which will touch at Darkover. I have booked a double passage; and a reservation on the ship which leaves ten days after
that
, so that if something should prevent my taking ship on the first, I will be on the second, and your place is reserved too. I think you should come; has this, tonight, not proved it to you, that you must face it soon or late?”

I managed not to shout at him the furious refusal storming in my mind. The distance, and the

mechanical communicator, blocked out thoughts; this was the best way to talk to my father, after all. I even managed to thank him for his attempt at kindness. But after I had refused him again and replaced the communicator set, Dio said, “He’s right, you know. You can’t live the rest of your life with this. It started on Darkover and it should end there. You can’t go through your life dragging that—that horrible link behind you. And I understand—you said something, once—that you cannot leave it…”

I shook my head. “No. It—it
nags
me. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

I had tried to abandon it, when we left the lake cabin on Terra where we had been living while my hand healed after the final failure and the amputation. I had gone halfway round the world and then… the fire-form behind my eyes, blurring out all sight and sense— I had had to return, to pack it among our luggage… to carry it with me, a monstrous incubus, a demon haunting me; like my father’s presence within my mind, something of which I would never be free.

“The question’s academic,” I said, “You can’t go, and I won’t leave you. That’s what my father wanted.”

“The baby might not be born for forty days, at least… you could go and return—”

“I don’t know about babies,” I said, “but I do know they come when they will and not when we expect them.” But why did the thought bring such anguish and fear? Surely it was only the aftermath of Sharra’s impact on my shattered nerves.

“What about the others? You were a whole matrix circle, linked to the Sharra matrix—weren’t you?

Why didn’t they die?”

“Maybe they did,” I said. “Marjorie did. She was our— you’d have to say, our Keeper. And I took it from her when she—when she burned out.” I could talk about it, now, almost dispassionately, as if I were talking of something that had happened a long time ago to someone else. “The others were not linked quite so tight to Sharra. Rafe was only a child. Beltran of Aldaran—my cousin—he was outside the circle. I don’t think they would die when they lost contact with the matrix, or even when it went offworld. The link was made
through
me.” In a matrix circle, where there is a high-level matrix, it is the Keeper who links with the matrix, and then with the individual matrix stones of the telepaths in her circle. I was a high-level matrix mechanic; I had taught Marjorie to make that link, so that in a very real sense, I had been Keeper to the Keeper…

“And the others?” Dio persisted. I resented her dragging it out of me this way, but I supposed I would have to think of this sooner or later, or she would never believe I had really explored all avenues to be free. And I owed her this; Sharra had touched her too, now, although at a safe remove, and even touched our child.

I said, “The others? Kadarin and Thyra? I don’t know; I don’t know what happened to them, or where they were when—when everything went up.”

She persisted. “If you couldn’t leave the matrix behind, wouldn’t they have died when the matrix went offworld?”

Again I grimaced when I tried to smile. I said, “I hope so,” and even as I spoke, knew it was not true.

Kadarin. We had been friends, brothers, kinsmen, united in a shared dream which would bring

Darkover and Terra close together, heal our shattered heritage… at least, that had been what we shared at first. Without knowing I was doing it, I fingered the scars on my face. He had given me those scars.

And Thyra. Marjorie’s half-sister; Kadarin’s woman. I had loved her, hated her, desired her… I could not think that she was dead. Somewhere, somehow, I knew she lived, and that Kadarin lived. I could not explain it; but I knew.

Reason beyond all reasons, the thousandth reason I could never return to Darkover…

After Dio was asleep I sat long in the outer room of the apartment, looking down at the lights of the city below me, the lights which were never extinguished, far into the night. On Vainwal the pursuit of pleasure goes on, deepening and growing more frantic as the day’s rhythms subside, when other people are sleeping. Down there, perhaps, I could find some kind of forgetfulness. Wasn’t that, after all, why I had come to Vainwal, to forget duty and responsibility? But now I had a wife and a child, and I owed them something. Die’s little finger meant more to me than all the unexplored pleasures of Vainwal.

And my son…I had been angry when my father said it.

But it was true. He should be born at Armida; when he was five years old I would take him out, as my father had taken me riding on his shoulder, to see the great river of wild horses flowing down through the valley…

No; that was gone, renounced. There would be other worlds for my son. Dozens, hundreds of them, an Empire of them, and beyond. I went and laid myself down beside my sleeping wife and slept. But even through my sleep, uneasy dreams moved, I saw my hand again, the horror that had grown there… and it reached out, reached
into
Dio’s body, clawing at the child, pulling it forth bloody, dripping, dying… I woke with my own shriek in my ears, and Dio staring at me in shock. I covered her carefully, kissed her and went to sleep in the other room where my nightmares would not disturb her dreams.

This time I slept peacefully without nightmares; it was Dio who woke me in the graying dawn, saying hesitantly “Lew, I feel so strange—I think the baby’s coming. It’s early—but I think I should go and be certain.”

It was far too early; but the Terrans have made something of a specialty of this, artificial wombs for babes cast from their mothers too young, and most of them, in that artificial life-support, do quite well, though they are beyond the thoughts and tenderness of their mothers; I have wondered, sometimes, if this is why so many Terrans are headblind, without any traceable
laran
, the distance from that most intimate of contacts, where the mother teaches the little heart to beat, and all things in the unborn body to function as they should… the body can grow, artificially supported and nourished, but what of the mind and
laran
?

Well, if this should damage the unborn child’s
laran
, so be it, if it saved his life… my own
laran
had done me little good. And surely it would not hurt this child to be away from our troubled thoughts and fears, and such torment as it had certainly overheard during my ill-fated attempt to monitor. That attempt had certainly brought on this premature labor, and Dio must have known it, but she did not reproach me, and once, when I spoke of it, she hushed me, saying, “I wanted it, too.”