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Try not to fight it, Jeff.

Abruptly, like a knife-stab, he felt the touch—indescribable, unbelievable, so alien and indefinable that itcould be interpreted only as pain… in a fractional second, he knew that this was what Kennard had donebefore, that this was what could not be borne or remembered, this intolerable touch, intrusion,violation… It was like having his skull bored open with a dentist’s drill. He stood it for about fiveseconds, then felt himself twitch convulsively all over, and heard someone scream from a million milesaway as he slid into the darkness.

When he came out of it this time he was lying on the floor of the octagonal matrix chamber, and Kennardand Neyrissa and Auster were standing and looking down at him. Somewhere he heard muffled sobbingand saw, with the fringes of his mind, young Corus hunched over, his face buried in his hands. Rannirlwas standing with his arm around Corus, holding the boy against him. Kerwin’s head was a giant balloonfilled with red-hot seething pain. It was so awful he couldn’t breathe for a second; then he felt his lungsexpand and a hoarse sound coming from him, without volition.

Kennard knelt beside him and said, “Can you sit up?”

Somehow he managed it. Auster put out a hand to help him, looking sick. He said, with an unusualfriendliness in his voice, “Jeff, we’ve all been through it, one way or the other. Here, lean on me.” Detached, surprised at himself, Kerwin accepted the other man’s hand. Kennard asked, “Corus, are youall right?”

Corus raised a blotched, tear-stained face. He looked sick, but he said, “I’ll live.”

Neyrissa said with gentle detachment, “You’re doing it to yourself, you know. You have a choice.”

Elorie said, in a taut voice, “Let’s get through it quickly. None of us can take much more.” She wasshaking, but she stretched a hand to Corus, and Kerwin felt, like a faint snap and jolt of electricity, felt itsomewhere inside his mind, the re-building of the mesh. Auster, then Rannirl, Neyrissa, dropped intoplace; Kennard, still holding Kerwin, dropped away and was gone. Elorie did not speak, but suddenlyher grey eyes filled up all the space in the room and Jeff heard her commanding whisper:

“Come.”

With a jolt, the breath crashing from his body, he felt the impact of their meshed minds as if he haddropped into one facet of the carven crystal. A pattern flamed like a giant star of fire in his mind, and hefelt himself run all around the circle, flowing like water, swirling in and out of contact; Elorie, cool, aloof,
holding him at the end of a lifeline
 
… Kennard’s gentle sureness; a feather-touch of rapport, shaky,frightened, from Corus; a sullen flare from Auster, sparks meshing, jolting apart… Neyrissa, a softsearching touch…

“Enough,” said Kennard sharply, and suddenly Kerwin was himself again, and the others were not

intangible energy-swirls in the room around him, but separate people again, standing grouped around him.

Rannirl whistled. “Zandru’s hells, what a barrier! If we ever get it all the way down, Jeff, you’ll be onehell of a technician, but we’ve got to get rid of that barrier first!”

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Corus said, “It wasn’t quite as bad the second time. He did make it, part way.”

Kerwin’s head was still one seething mass of fire. He said, “I thought, whatever it was you did to me—”

“We got rid of part of it,” Kennard said, and he went on speaking, but suddenly the words had no meaning. Elorie glanced sharply at Kerwin; she said something, but the words were just noise, static in Kerwin’s brain. He shook his head, not understanding.

Kennard said in Cahuenga, “Headache any better?”

“Yeah, sure,” Kerwin muttered; it wasn’t, if anything it was worse, but he didn’t have the energy to say so. Kennard didn’t argue. He took Kerwin firmly by the shoulders, led him into the next room and put him into a cushiony chair. Neyrissa said, “Here, this is my business,” came and put her light hands on Kerwin’s head.

Kerwin didn’t say anything. He was past that now. He was rocking in a giant swing, faster and faster, ona pendulum of dizzy pain. Elorie said something. Neyrissa spoke to him in a tone of urgent question, butnone of it made any sense to Kerwin. Even Kennard’s voice was only a blur of meaningless syllables,verbal hash, word salad. He heard Neyrissa say, “I’m not getting through to him. Get Taniquel up here,fast. Maybe she can…”

Words rose and fell around him like a song sung in a strange language. The world blurred into grey fogand he was swinging on a giant pendulum, further and further out, into darkness and pale lights,nothingness…

Then Taniquel was there, blurring before his eyes; she fell to her knees beside him with a cry of distress.

“Jeff! Oh, Jeff, can you hear me?”

How could he help it, Kerwin thought with the unreason of pain, when she was shouting right in his ear?

“Jeff, please look at me, let me help—

“No more,” he muttered. “No more of this. I’ve had enough for one night, haven’t I?”

“Please, Jeff, I can’t help you unless you let me—” Taniquel begged, and he felt her hand, hot and painful on his throbbing head. He twitched restlessly, trying to throw it off. It felt like hot iron. He wished they would all go away and let him alone.

Then slowly, slowly, as if some tense, full vein had been tapped, he felt the pain drain away. Moment bymoment it receded until at last he could see the girl clearly again. He sat up, the pain just a dim throb atthe base of his brain.

“Good enough,” Kennard said briskly. “I think you’ll work out, eventually.”

Auster muttered, “It’s not worth the trouble!”

Kerwin said, “I heard that,” and Kennard gave a slow, grimly triumphant nod.

“You see,” he said. “I told you so. I told you it was worth the risk.” He drew a long, weary sigh.

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Kerwin lurched to his feet and stood there, gripping the chair back. He felt as if he had been draggedthrough a wringer, but he was painfully at peace. Taniquel was slumped beside his chair, grey andexhausted, Neyrissa beside her, holding her head. She said, weakly, raising her eyes, “Don’t worry aboutit, Jeff. I was just—just glad I could do something for you.”

Kennard looked tired, too, but triumphant. Corus looked up and smiled at him, shakily, and it struck Kerwin, with a curious wrench, that the boy had been crying over
his
 
pain. Even Auster, biting his lip,said, “I’ve got to give you this. You’re one of us. You can’t blame me for doubting, but—well, don’thold it against me.”

Elorie came and stood on tiptoe; close enough to embrace him, though she didn’t. She raised one handand touched his cheek, just a feather-touch with the tips of her fingers. She said, “Welcome, Jeff-the-barbarian,” and smiled into his eyes.

Rannirl linked arms with him as they went down the stairs to the hall where they had met earlier thatnight. “At least, this time, we can decide for ourselves what we want to drink,” he said, laughing, and Kerwin realized that he had come through the final ordeal. Taniquel had accepted him from the beginning,but now they all accepted him with the same completeness. He, who had never belonged anywhere, wasnow overwhelmed with the knowledge of how deeply he belonged. Taniquel came and sat on the arm ofhis chair. Mesyr came and asked if he wanted something to eat or drink. Rannirl poured him a glass of acool, fragrant wine that tasted faintly of apples, and said, “I think you’ll like this; it comes from ourestates.” It was incongruously like a birthday party.

Sometime later that evening he found himself next to Kennard. Sensitized to the man’s mood, he heardhimself say, “You look happy about this. Auster isn’t pleased, but you are. Why?”

“Why isn’t Auster, or why am I?” Kennard asked with a twist of droll laughter.

“Both.”

“Because you’re part Terran,” Kennard replied somberly. “If you
 
do
 
become a working part of a matrix circle—actually inside a Tower—and the Council accepts it, then there’s a chance the Council will accept
 
my
 
sons.”

He frowned, looking over Kerwin’s head into a sad distance.

“You see,” he said at last, “I did what Cleindori did. I married outside Comyn—married a woman who was part Terran. And I have two sons. And it sets a precedent. I would like to think that one day, my sons could come here…” He fell silent. Kerwin could have asked a dozen more questions, but he sensed that this wasn’t the time. It didn’t seem to matter. He belonged.

Chapter Eight: The World Outside

«^»

The days slipped by in Arilinn and Kerwin soon began to feel as if he had been there all his life. And yet,in a curious way, he was like a man lost in an enchanted dream, as if all his old dreams and desires hadcome to life and he had stepped into them and closed a wall behind him. It was as if the Terran Zone andthe Trade City had never existed. Never, in any world, had he felt so much at home. Never had he

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belonged anywhere as he belonged here. It made him almost uneasy to be so happy; he wasn’t used to it.

Under Rannirl’s guidance, he studied matrix mechanics. He didn’t get too far with the theory; he felt thatmaybe Tani had the right idea when she called it magic. Spacemen didn’t understand the mathematics ofan interstellar drive, either, but it worked. He was quicker in learning the simpler psychokinetic feats withthe small matrix crystals; and Neyrissa, the monitor, taught him to go into his own body, searching out thepatterns of his blood flowing in his veins, to regulate, quicken or slow his heartbeats, raise or lower hisblood pressure, watch over the flows of what she called the channels, and what Kerwin suspected wouldhave been called, by Terran medics, the autonomic nervous system. It was considerably moresophisticated than any biofeedback technique he had ever known in the Terran Zone.

He made less progress in the rapport circle. He had learned to take his turn—with Corus or Neyrissa athis side—in the relays, the communication network of telepaths between the Towers, which sentmessages and news of what was happening, between Neskaya and Arilinn and Hali and faraway Dalereuth; messages that still meant little to Jeff, about a forest fire in the Kilghard Hills, an outbreak ofbandit raids far away on the fringes of the Hellers, an outbreak of a contagious fever in Dalereuth, thebirth of triplets near the Lake Country; citizens, too, came to the Stranger’s Room of the Tower andasked that messages be sent through the relays, matters of business or news of births and deaths and thearrangement of marriages.

But in the working of the circle he was less successful. He knew they were all anxiously watching hisprogress, now that they had accepted him; it seemed sometimes that they watched over him like hawks. Taniquel insisted they were pushing him too fast, while Auster glowered and accused Kennard and Elorieof coddling him. But as yet he could endure only a few minutes at a time in the matrix circle. It wasn’t,evidently, a process that could be hurried; but he gained a few seconds a day, holding out longer eachtime under the stresses of contact before he collapsed.

The headaches continued, and if anything they got worse, but for some reason it didn’t discourage any ofthem. Neyrissa taught him to control them, a little, by regulating the inner pressure of the blood vesselsaround the eye sockets and inside the skull. But there were still plenty of times when he found himselfunable to endure anything but a darkened room and silence, with his head splitting. Corus made up rudejokes about him, and Rannirl predicted pessimistically that he’d get worse before he got better, but theywere all patient with him; once, even, when he was shut up with one of the blinding headaches, he heard Mesyr—whom he had thought disliked him— remonstrating with Elorie, whom she obviously adored, formaking noise in a hallway outside the corridor of his room.

Once or twice, when it got too bad, Taniquel came unasked to his room and did the trick she had donethe first night, touching his temples with light fingers and draining the pain away as if she had tapped avalve. She didn’t like doing it, Kerwin knew; it exhausted her, and it scared Kerwin—and made himashamed, too—seeing her so grey and haggard afterward. And it infuriated Neyrissa.

“He has got to learn to do it for himself, Tani. It is not good for you, or for him either, if you do for him what he can and must learn to do for himself! And now look at you,” she scolded, “you have incapacitated yourself, too!”

Taniquel said faintly, “I can’t endure his pain. And since I have to feel it anyway, I may as well help him.”