A World Divided (39 page)

“Lose them? Give them up? I don’t understand,” Kerwin said, but Elorie only shrugged slightly and did not answer. Kerwin was not to know until a long time later just how much Elorie overestimated his telepathic abilities. She had never in her life known any man, or for that matter anyone at all, who could not read at such close quarters any thought she chose. Kerwin knew nothing, as yet, of the fantastic seclusion in which the young Keepers lived.

At last she went on. “The Keeper is always a woman—not since the Ages of Chaos have men lawfully worked as Keeper. The others—monitors, mechanics, technicians—can be men or women. Although in these days it is easier to find men for the work. But not very easy, even then. I hope that you will accept me as Keeper and that you will be able to work very closely with me.”

“That sounds like nice work,” Kerwin said, looking appreciatively at the lovely girl before him. Elorie whirled and stared at him, her mouth wide open in disbelief. Then, her eyes blazing, her cheeks aflame, she said, “Stop it!
Stop it!
There was a day on Darkover, you barbarian, when I could have had you killed for looking at me like that!”

Kerwin, dismayed and amazed, backed away a step. He said, feeling numb, “Take it easy, miss—Miss Elorie! I didn’t mean to say anything to offend you. I’m sorry—” he shook his head, not comprehending—“but remember, if I offended you, I haven’t the slightest idea how, or why!”

Her hands gripped on the rail, so hard that he could see the white knobs of her knuckles. They looked so frail, those white hands, narrow, with delicate tapered fingers. After a moment of silence, a long moment that stretched, she let go of the rail, tossing her head with a little impatient movement.

She said, “I had forgotten. I heard you insulted Mesyr, too, without the slightest idea that you had done so. If Kennard is to stand as your foster-father here, he had better teach you something of elementary courtesy! Enough of that, then. You said you didn’t even know what the Comyn were—”

“A governing body, I thought—”

She shook her head. “Only recently, and not very much; originally, the Comyn were the seven telepath families of Darkover, the Seven Domains, each holding one of the major Gifts of
laran
.”

Kerwin blurted, “I thought the whole place was crawling with telepaths!”

She shrugged that off. “Everyone alive has some small degree of
laran
. I’m speaking of special psychokinetic and psi gifts, the Comyn Gifts, bred into our families in the centuries past—in the old days it was believed that perhaps they were inherited, that the Comyn were descended from the seven children—some people say the seven sons, but personally I find that hard to believe—of Hastur and Cassilda; maybe it’s because in the old days the Comyn were known as the Hastur-kin, or the Children of Hastur. Specifically, the Gifts of
laran
center upon the ability to use a matrix. You know what a matrix is, I take it.”

“Vaguely.”

Her pale eyebrows lifted again. “I was told you had the matrix belonging to Cleindori, whose name is written here as Dorilys of Arilinn.”

“I do,” Jeff said, “but I haven’t the faintest idea what it
is
, essentially, and even less notion of what it’s good for.” He had decided, a long time ago, that the sort of thing Ragan did with his small matrix was essentially irrelevant; and these people were very serious about it.

She shook her head, almost in wonder. “And yet we found you, guided you with it!” she said. “That proved to us that you had inherited some of the—” She paused and said angrily, “I’m
not
evasive! I’m trying to put it into words you can understand, that’s all! We traced Cleindori’s matrix through the monitor banks and relays, which proved to us that you had inherited the mark of our caste. A matrix, essentially, is a crystal that receives, amplifies, and transmits thought. I could talk about space lattices, and neuro-electronic webs, and nerve channels, and kinetic energons, but I’ll let Rannirl explain all that; he’s our technician. Matrixes can be as simple as this—” she touched a tiny crystal, that, in total defiance of gravity, suspended her filmy gown from her throat—“or they can be enormous, synthetically-made screens—the technical term is
lattices
—with immensely complex man-made interior crystalline structures, each crystal of which responds to amplification from a Keeper. A matrix—or rather, the power of thought, of
laran
controlled by a skilled matrix technician or Keeper’s circle—can release pure energy from the magnetic field of a planet, and channel it, either as force or matter. Heat, light, kinetic or potential energy, the synthesis of raw materials into usable form—all those things were once done by matrix. You do know that thought rhythms, brain waves, are electrical in nature?”

Kerwin nodded. “I’ve seen them measured. We call the instrument an electro-encephalograph—” He spoke the words in Terran Standard, not knowing if the Darkovans had a word for it, and began to explain how it measured and made visible the electrical energies of the brain, but she shrugged impatiently.

“A simple and clumsy instrument. Well, in general, thought waves, even those of a telepath, can’t have much effect in the material universe. Most of them can’t move a single hair. There are exceptions, special forces—well, you’ll learn about that. But in general, the brain waves themselves can’t move a single hair. But the matrix crystals somehow act to transform force into form. That’s all.”

“And the Keepers—”

“Some matrixes are so complex that one person can’t handle them; it takes the energy of several minds, linked together and feeding through the crystal, to form a nexus of energy. A Keeper handles and coordinates the forces. That’s all I can tell you,” she said abruptly, and turned, pointing down the stairs. “Straight down that way.” She turned and walked away in a flutter of filmy draperies, and Kerwin watched her go, startled. Had he done something, again, to offend her? Or was this some childish whim? She
looked
childish enough, certainly!

He went down the stairs, finding himself again in the great firelit hall where, this morning at sunrise, they had welcomed him—welcomed him
home
? His home? The room was completely empty, and Kerwin dropped into one of the cushioned chairs, burying his head in his hands. If someone didn’t explain things fairly soon, he was going to go crazy with frustration!

Kennard found him there, that way; Kerwin looked up at the older man and said helplessly, “It’s too much. I can’t take it all in. It’s too much, coming all at once. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand any of it!

Kennard looked down at him with a curious mixture of compassion and amusement. “I can see how it would be,” he said. “I lived a few years on Terra; I know all about culture shock. Let me get off my feet.” He lowered himself, carefully, to the mass of cushions, and leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “Maybe I can clear it up for you. I owe you that.”

Kerwin had heard that the Darkovans, the nobility anyhow, had little to do with the Empire; the news that Kennard had actually lived on Terra amazed him, but no more than anything else that had happened in the last day or so, no more than his own presence here. He was all but immune to further shock. He said, “Start with this. Who am I? Why the devil am I here?”

Kennard ignored the question, staring into space over Kerwin’s head. After a while he said, “That night in the Sky Harbor Hotel; do you know what I saw?”

“Sorry. Not in the mood for guessing games.” Kerwin wanted to ask straight questions and get straight answers; he definitely didn’t want to answer more questions himself.

“Remember, I hadn’t the least notion who you were. You looked like one of us, and I knew you weren’t. I saw a Terran, but I’m an Alton, I have one of those screwy, out-of-phase time perceptors. So I looked at the Terran and I saw a child, a confused child, one who had never known who or what he was. I wish you had stayed and talked to us, then.”

“I do, too,” Kerwin said slowly.
A child who had never known who or what he was
. Kennard had put it very precisely. “I grew up, all right. But I left myself somewhere.”

“Maybe you’ll find yourself here.” Kennard got slowly to his feet, and Kerwin rose too; he held out a hand to assist the older man, but Kennard drew away; after a moment, Kennard smiled self-consciously and said, “You’re wondering why—”

“No,” said Kerwin, suddenly understanding that all of them had deftly avoided touching him. “I hate people jostling me; I’ve never gotten along with most people at close quarters. And I feel like hell in a crowd. Always have.”

Kennard nodded. “
Laran
,” he said. “You have just enough to find physical contact distasteful—”

Kerwin chuckled. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say
that
—”

Kennard said, with a sardonic shrug, “Distasteful except in circumstances of deliberate intimacy. Right?”

Kerwin nodded, thinking over the rare personal encounters of his life. He knew he had gravely distressed his Terran grandmother by his violent distaste for demonstrations of affection. And yet he had grown fond of the old lady, had loved her in his own way. His work associates—well, it occurred to him that he had treated them as Auster had treated him on the plane: violently rebuffing the slightest personal contact, shrinking physically from a random touch. It hadn’t made him particularly popular.

“You’re how old? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Of course I know how old you are, Darkovan—I was one of the first ones Cleindori told—but I never can convert that to Terran reckoning. It was too long ago I lived on Terra. Hell of a long time to live outside your proper element!”

“Proper element hell,” Kerwin retorted.” Show me where I fit into this mess, will you?”

“I’ll try.” Kennard went to a table in the corner and poured himself a drink from an assortment of bottles there; lifted his eyebrows in question at Kerwin.

“We’ll have drinks when the others come down; but I’m thirsty. You?”

“I’ll wait,” Kerwin said. He’d never been that much of a drinker. Kennard’s bad leg must be giving him considerable pain if he’d break custom this way, the thought flickered through his mind and he wondered impatiently where it had come from, as the older man came cautiously back to his seat.

Kennard drank, set the glass down, locked his fingers meditatively. “Elorie told you; there are seven families of telepaths on Darkover, a ruling family for each of the Seven Domains. The Hasturs, the Ridenow, Ardais, the Elhalyn, the Altons—my family—and the Aillard. Yours.”

Kerwin had been counting. “That’s six.”

“We don’t talk about the Aldarans. Although some of us have Aldaran blood, of course, and Aldaran gifts. And there’s been some intermarriage—well, we won’t talk about that, that’s a long story and a shameful one; but the Aldarans were exiled from the Domains a long time ago; I couldn’t tell you all about that now, even if I knew it all, and even if we had the time—which I don’t and we don’t. But, with only six main telepath families—have you any idea how inbred we are?”

“You mean that normally you marry only within your caste? Telepaths?”

“Not entirely. Not—deliberately,” Kennard said, “but, being a telepath, and being isolated in the Towers, only with others of our own kind—it’s like a drug.” His voice was not quite steady. “It completely unfits you for—for contact with outsiders. You, well, you get lost in it, and when you come up for air, as it were, you find you can’t breathe ordinary air any more. You find you can’t stand having outsiders around, people who aren’t tuned to your thoughts, people who—who jostle against your mind. You can’t come close to them; they aren’t quite real to you. Oh, it wears off, after a while, or you couldn’t live outside the Tower at all, but—but it’s a temptation. Non-telepaths feel to you like barbarians, or like strange animals, alien, wrong ...” He was staring into space, over Kerwin’s head. “It spoils you for any kind of contact with ordinary people. With women. Even at your level, I should imagine, you’ve had trouble with women who can’t—can’t share your feelings and thoughts. After ten years at Arilinn, anything else is like—like bedding with a brute beast ...”

The silence stretched while Kerwin thought about that, about the curious alienation, the sense of difference, which had come between him and every woman he had ever known. As if there had to be something more, deeper than the most intimate contact....

Abruptly with a little shiver, Kennard recalled himself, and his voice sounded harsh.

“Anyway. We’re inbred mentally, even more than physically; just because of that inability to tolerate outsiders. And the physical inbreeding is bad enough; some very strange recessives have come up. A few of the old Gifts are bred out altogether; I haven’t seen more than one or two catalyst telepaths in my lifetime That’s the old Ardais gift, but Dom Kyril didn’t have it, or if he did he never learned to use it, and he’s mad as a banshee in a Ghost Wind. In the Aillards, the Gift has become sex-linked; shows up only in the women, and the men don’t carry it. And so forth, and so on.... If you learn anything about genetics, you’ll find out what I mean. A solid outbreeding program might still save us, if we could do it; but most of us can’t. So—” he shrugged. “Every generation fewer and fewer of us are born with the old
laran
Gifts. Mesyr told you; once there were three circles here at Arilinn, each with its own Keeper. Once there were over a dozen Towers; and Arilinn was not the largest. Now—well, there are three other Towers working a mechanic’s circle; we are the only Tower with a fully qualified Keeper, which means Elorie is virtually the only Keeper on Darkover. And, within the Comyn, and the minor nobility connected to us by blood, there are hardly enough of us, in each generation to keep them alive. So there are two lines of thought within the Comyn.” He spoke briskly now, without a trace of the earlier remoteness. “One faction felt we should cling to our old ways while we could, resist every change, until we died out, as we inevitably would in a generation or two, and it didn’t matter any more; but at least we would remain what we were. Others felt that, with change inevitable, or at least the only alternative to death, we should make what changes we could tolerate, before intolerable ones were forced upon us. These people felt that matrix science could be taught to anyone with the rudiments of skill at
laran
, developed and trained to work in the same ways that a Comyn telepath could do. There were a few of this faction in power in the Comyn a generation ago, and during those few years, matrix mechanics came into being as a profession. During that time we discovered that most people have some psi power—enough to operate a matrix, anyway—and could be trained in the use of matrix sciences.”