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 laranbarriers, 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 laranawakened. 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; bredhinand 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 laranshields 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, laransurging through its channels, sometimes flowing freely, sometimes pooling, stagnant and festering. The channels in the boy’s lower body, which normally carried both laranand 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’smind 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?”