Heritage and Exile (18 page)

“Just like that,” I said, “and I'm not to be consulted?”

“I thought we were consulting you,” Hastur said, taking a forkful of some kind of shredded seafood mixed with greens. “We did not, after all, summon you to the chapel at a few hours' notice, to be married on the spot, as was done only a few years ago. I was given no chance even to see my dear wife's face until a few minutes before the bracelets were locked on our wrists, yet we lived together in harmony for forty years.”

My father, speaking of his first years on Terra and being plunged abruptly into their alien customs, had once used a phrase for the way I felt now:
culture shock
. “With all deference, Lord Hastur, times have changed too much for that to be a suitable way of making marriages. Why is there such a hurry?”

Hastur's face suddenly hardened. “Lew, do you really understand that if your father had broken his neck on those damnable stairs, instead of a few ribs and his collarbone, you would now be Lord Alton of Armida, with all that implies? My own son never lived to see his son. With our world in the shape it's in, none of us can afford to take chances with the heirship of a Domain. What is your specific objection to marriage? Are you a lover of men?” He used the very polite
casta
phrase and I, used to the much coarser one customary in the Guards, was not for a moment quite certain what he meant. Then I grinned without amusement. “
That
arrow went wide of the mark, my lord. Even as a boy I had small taste for such games. I may be young, but that young I am not.”

“Then what can it possibly be?” He seemed honestly bewildered. “Is it Linnell you wish to marry? We had other marriage-plans for her, but if both of you really wish—”

I said in honest outrage, “Evanda protect us both! Lord Hastur, Linnell is my
sister
!”

“Not blood-kin,” he said, “or not so close as to be a grave risk to your children. It might be a suitable match after all.”

I took a spoonful of the food on my plate. It tasted revolting and I swallowed and set the plate down. “Sir, I love Linnell dearly. We were children together. If it were only to share my life, I could think of no happier person to spend it with. But,” I fumbled to explain, a little embarrassed, “after you've slapped a girl for breaking your toys, taken her into bed with you when she had a nightmare or was crying with a toothache, pinned up her skirts so she could wade in a brook, or dressed her, or brushed her hair—it's almost impossible to think of her as a—a bed-mate, Lord Hastur. Forgive this plain speaking.”

He waved that away. “No, no. No formalities. I asked you to be honest with me. I can understand that. We married your father very young to a woman the Council thought suitable, and I have been told they lived together in complete harmony and total indifference for many years. But I don't want to wait until you've fixed your desire on someone wholly unsuitable, either. Your father married at the last to please himself and—forgive me, Lew—you and Marius have been suffering for it all your lives. I am sure you would rather spare your own sons that.”

“Can't you wait until I
have
sons? Don't you
ever
get tired of arranging other people's lives for them?”

His eyes blazed at me. “I got tired of it thirty years ago but someone has to do it! I'm old enough to sit and think over my past, instead of carrying the burden of the future, but it seems to be left to me! What are
you
doing to arrange your life in the proper way and save me the trouble?” He took another forkful of salad and chewed it wrathfully.

“How much do you know of the history of Comyn, Lew? In far-back days, we were given power and privilege because we
served
our people, not because we ruled them. Then we began to believe we had these powers and privileges because of some innate superiority in ourselves, as if having
laran
made us so much better than other people that we could do exactly as we pleased. Our privileges are used now, not to compensate us for all the things we have given up to serve the people, but to perpetuate our own powers. You're complaining that your life isn't your own, Lew. Well, it isn't and it shouldn't be. You have certain privileges—”

“Privileges!” I said bitterly. “Mostly duties I don't want and responsibilities I can't handle.”

“Privileges,” he repeated, “which you must earn by serving your people.” He reached out and lightly touched the mark of Comyn, deeply blazed in my flesh just above the wrist. His own arm bore its twin, whitened with age. He said, “One of the obligations which goes with that, a sacred obligation, is to make certain your gift does not die out, by fathering sons and daughters to inherit it from you, to serve the people of Darkover in their turn.”

Against my will, I was moved by his words. I had felt this way during my journey to the outlands, that my position as heir to Comyn was a serious thing, a sacred thing, that I held an important link in an endless chain of Altons, stretching from prehistory to the future. For a moment I felt that the old man followed my thoughts, as he laid his fingertip again on the mark of Comyn on my wrist. He said, “I know what this cost you, Lew. You won that gift at risk of your life. You have begun well by serving at Arilinn. What little remains of our ancient science is preserved there against the day when it may be fully recovered or rediscovered. Do you think I don't know that you young people there are sacrificing your personal lives, giving up many things a young man, a young woman, holds dear? I never had that option, Lew, I was born with a bare minimum of
laran
. So I do what I can with secular powers, to lighten that burden for you others who bear the heavier ones. So far as I know, you have never misused your powers. Nor are you one of those frivolous young people who want to enjoy the privilege of rank and spend your life in amusements and folly. Why, then, do you shrink from doing this duty to your clan?”

I suddenly wished that I could unburden my fears and misgivings to him. I could not doubt the old man's personal integrity. Yet he was so completely entangled in his single-minded plan for political aims on Darkover that I distrusted him, too. I would not let him manipulate me to serve those aims. I felt confused, half convinced, half more defiant than ever. He was waiting for my answer; I shrank from giving it. Telepaths get used to facing things head-on—you have to, in order to stay even reasonably sane—but you don't learn to put things easily into words. You get used, in a place like Arilinn, to knowing that everyone in your circle can share all your feelings and emotions and desires. There is no reticence there, none of the small evasions and courtesies which outsiders use in speaking of intimate things. But Hastur could not read my thoughts, and I fumbled at putting it into words that would not embarrass either of us too much.

“Mostly I have never met a woman I wished to spend my life with . . . and, being a telepath, I am not willing to . . . to gamble on someone else's choice.” No. I wasn't being completely honest. I would have gambled on Linnea willingly, if I had not felt I was being manipulated, used as a helpless pawn. My anger flared again. “Hastur, if you wanted me to marry simply for the sake of perpetuating my gift, of fathering a son for the Domain, you should have had me married off before I was full-grown, before I was old enough to have any feelings about any woman, and would have wanted her just because she
was
a woman and available. Now it's different.” I fell silent again.

How could I tell Hastur, who was old enough to be my grandfather, and not even a telepath, that when I took a woman, all her thoughts and feelings were open to me and mine to her, that unless rapport was complete and sympathy almost total, it could quickly unman me? Few women could endure it. And how could I tell him about the paralyzing failures which a lack of sympathy could bring? Did he actually think I could manage to live with a woman whose only interest in me was that I might give her a
laran
son? I know some men in the Comyn manage it. I suppose that almost any two people with healthy bodies can give each other
something
in bed. But not tower-trained telepaths, accustomed to that full sharing. . . . I said, and I knew my voice was shaking uncontrollably, “Even a god cannot be constrained to love on command.”

Hastur looked at me with sympathy. That hurt, too. It would have been hard enough to strip myself this way before a man my own age. Finally he said gently, “There's never been any question of compulsion, Lew. But promise me to think about it. The Storn-Lanart girl has applied to Neskaya Tower. We need Keepers and psi technicians. But we also need sensitive women, telepaths, to marry into our families. If you could come to like one another, we would welcome her.”

I said, drawing a deep breath, “I'll think about it.” Linnea was a telepath. It might be enough. But to put it bluntly, I was afraid. Hastur gestured to a servant to take his emptied plate and my nearly untouched one. “More wine?”

“Thank you, sir, but I have already drunk more than I usually do in a week. And I promised my foster-sister another dance.”

Kind as he had been, I was glad to get away from him. The conversation had rubbed me raw-edged, rousing thoughts I had learned to keep firmly below the surface of my mind.

Love—to put it more precisely, sex—is never easy for a telepath. Not even when you're very young and still childishly playing around, discovering your own needs and desires, learning to know your own body and its hungers.

I suppose, from the way other lads talk—and there's plenty of talk in the cadets and the Guards—for most people, at least for a time, anyone of the right sex who is accessible and not completely repulsive will do. But even during those early experiments I had always been too conscious of the other party's motives and reactions, and they would rarely stand up to so close an examination. And after I went to Arilinn and submerged myself in the intense sharing and closeness there, it had changed from merely difficult to impossible.

Well, I had promised Linnell a dance. And what I had told Hastur was true. Linnell was not a woman to me and she would not disturb me emotionally at all.

But Callina was alone, watching a group of classic dancers do a rhythmic dance which mimicked the leaves in a spring storm. Their draperies, gray-green, yellow-green, blue-green, flickered and flowed in the lights like sunshine. Callina had thrown back her hood and, preoccupied in watching the dancers, looked rather forlorn, very small and fragile and solemn. I came and stood beside her. After a moment she turned and said, “You promised Linnell to dance again, didn't you? Well, you can save yourself the trouble, cousin, she and the Storn-Lanart child are in the balcony, watching and chattering to one another about gowns and hair-dressing.” She smiled, a small whimsical smile which momentarily lightened her pale stern face. “It's foolish to bring little girls that age to a formal ball, they'd be just as happy at a dancing class!”

I said, letting out my pent-up bitterness, “Oh, they're old enough to be up for auction to the highest bidder. It's how we make fine marriages in the Comyn. Are you for sale too,
damisela
?”

She smiled faintly. “I don't imagine you're making an offer? No, I'm not for sale this year at least. I'm Keeper at Neskaya Tower, and you know what that means.”

I knew, of course. The Keepers are no longer required to be cloistered virgins to whom no man dares raise even a careless glance. But while they are working at the center of the energon relays, they are required, by harsh necessity, to remain strictly chaste. They learned not to attract desires they dared not satisfy. Probably they learned not to feel them, either, which is a good trick if you can manage it. I wished I could.

I relaxed. Against Callina, tower-trained and a working Keeper, I need not be on my guard. We shared a deeper kinship than blood, the strong tie of the tower-trained telepath.

I've been a matrix technician long enough to know that the work uses up so much physical and nervous energy that there's not much left over for sex. The will may be there, but not the energy. The Keepers are required, for their physical and emotional safety, to remain celibate. The others in the circle—technicians, mechanics, psi monitors—are usually generous and sensitive about satisfying what little remains. In any case you get too close for playing the elaborate games of flirt and retreat that men and women elsewhere are given to playing. And Callina understood all this without being told, having been part of it.

She was also sensitive enough to be aware of my mood. She said, with a faint tinge of gentle malice, “I have heard Linnea will be sent to Arilinn next year, if you both choose not to marry. You'll have time for second thoughts. Shall I ask them to be sure she is not made Keeper, in case you should change your mind?”

I felt somewhat abashed. That was an outrageous thing to say! But what would have infuriated me from an outsider did not trouble me from her. Within a tower circle such a statement would not have embarrassed me, although I would not have felt constrained to answer, either. She was simply treating me like one of our own kind. In the rapport of the tower circles, we were all very much aware of each other's needs and hungers, eager to keep them from reaching a point of frustration or pain.

But now my circle was scattered, others serving in my place, and somehow I had to cope with a world full of elaborate games and complex relationships. I said, as I would have said to a sister, “They're pressuring me to marry, Callina. What shall I do? It's too soon. I'm still—” I gestured, unable to put it into words.

She nodded gravely. “Perhaps you should take Linnea after all. It would mean they couldn't put any constraint on you for someone less suitable.” She was seriously considering my problem, giving it her full attention. “I suppose, mostly, what they want is for you to father a son for Armida. If you could do
that,
they wouldn't care whether you married the girl or not, would they?”