Perhaps Callina knew I was coming; she met me and beckoned me softly through the relay chamber—I noted that there was a young girl at the screen, but I did not recognize her— and through an inner chamber into what must have been the ancient matrix laboratory—at least that is what we would have called it at Arilinn. I could believe it had been built long before that, in the Ages of Chaos or before; there were matrix monitor screens, and other equipment the use of which I had not the foggiest notion. I found I did not like to think of the level of matrix it would have taken to use some of these things. I could feel the soothing vibrations of a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without inhibiting ordinary thought. There was an immense panel about whose molten-glass shimmer I could not even make guesses; it might have been one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic screens. Among all these things were the ordinary prosaic tools of the matrix mechanic’s art; cradles, lattices, blank crystals, a glass-blower’s pipe, screwdrivers and soldering irons, odd scraps of insulating cloth. Beyond them she motioned me to a seat.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, “ever since I heard that they got away with the Sharra matrix. I suppose it was Kadarin?”
“I didn’t see him,” I said, “but no one else could have touched it without killing me. I’m still here—worse luck!”
“You’re still keyed into it, then? It’s an illegal matrix, isn’t it?”
“It’s not on the screens at Arilinn,” I said. They had found that out when Marjorie died. But this was an older Tower; some memory of it might linger here. She said, “If you can give me the pattern, I’ll try to find it.” She led me to the monitor screen, flashing with small glimmers, one for every known and licensed matrix on Darkover. She made a gesture I remembered; I fumbled one-handed with the strings of the matrix crystal around my neck, averted my eyes as it dropped into her hand, seeing the crimson fires within…It still resonated to the Sharra matrix; it was no good to me.
And while I bore it, anyone with the Sharra matrix could find me… and it seemed, though it could have been my imagination, that I could feel Kadarin, watching me through it…
She took it from me, matching resonances so carefully that there was no shock or pain, and laid it in a cradle before the screen. The lights on the screen began to wink slowly; Callina leaned forward, silent, intent, her face shut-in and plain. At last she sighed. “It’s not a monitored matrix. If we could monitor and locate it, we might even destroy it—though destroying a ninth-level matrix is not a task I am eager to attempt, certainly not alone. Perhaps Regis—” she looked thoughtfully at my matrix, but she did not explain and I wondered what Regis had to do with it. “Can you give me the pattern? If the others—Kadarin, Thyra—were using matrixes which resonated to Sharra—”
“Thyra, at least, was a wild telepath. I don’t know where she got her matrix, but I’m sure it’s not a monitored one,” I said. I supposed she had it from old Kermiac of Aldaran; he had been training telepaths back in those hills since before my father was born. If he had lived, the whole story of the Sharra circle would have been different. I tried to show her the pattern against the blank screen, but only blurs swirled against the blue surface, and she gestured me to take up my own matrix and put it away.
“I shouldn’t have let you try that, so soon after a head injury. Come through here.”
In a smaller, sky-walled room, I relaxed, in a soft chair, while Callina watched me, aloof and reflective. She said at last, “Why did you come here, Lew? What did you want from me?”
I wasn’t sure. I did not know what, if anything, she could do about the ghost-voice in my mind, my father’s voice. Whether a true ghost or a reverberation from brain-cells injured in his dying grip on my mind, it would fade away at last; of that I was certain. Nor could she do anything much about the fact that the Sharra matrix was in the hands of Kadarin and Thyra, and that they were here in Thendara. I said harshly, “I should never have brought it back to Darkover!”
“I don’t know what choice you had,” she pointed out reasonably. “If you are keyed into it—”
“Then I shouldn’t have come back!”
And this time she did not argue with me, only shrugged a little. I was here on Darkover and so was the matrix. I said, “Do you suppose Ashara knows anything about it? She goes back a long way…” and paused, hesitant. Callina’s voice rebuked: “No one asks to see Ashara!”
“Then maybe it’s time they did.”
Her voice was still, stony and remote. “Perhaps she would consent to see you. I will inquire.” For a moment she was nothing like the girl I had known, my cousin and kinswoman. I was almost afraid of her.
“There must have been a time when telepaths knew how to handle things like the Sharra matrix. I know it was used by the forge-folk to bring metal to their forges; and it was used as a weapon. If the weapon wasn’t destroyed, why would they have destroyed the defenses against it?”
Callina started a little, as if she had been very far away and the sound of my voice had brought her back from whatever distance she had inhabited. I remembered that look on Marjorie’s face, the heart-breaking isolation of a Keeper, alone even at the center of a great circle. Somehow it made me lonely for my days at Arilinn. Callina and I had not been there at the same time, but she was part of it, she remembered, we were comfortable together.
“What can Kadarin do with the matrix?” she asked.
“Nothing, himself,” I said, “but he has Thyra to control it.” Even at the beginning, he had wanted Thyra to control the matrix; she was more pliant to his will than Marjorie, who had, at the last, rebelled and tried to close the gate into that other world or dimension from which Sharra came into this world in raging fire… I said, “If he wanted to, he could burn Thendara around the heads of the Comyn, or go to the Trade City and bring one of their damned spaceships down out of the sky! The matrix is that powerful; and the thing is, he doesn’t have enough telepaths to control it as if it were a proper ninth-level matrix. Which it isn’t: it’s something unholy, a weapon, a force—” I stopped myself. Like Callina I had been Tower-trained, I should know better. Old tales made matrixes magical, called them gates to sorcery and alien magic. I knew the science of which they were a part. A matrix is a tool, no more good or evil than the one who uses it; a device to amplify and direct the laran, the special hyper-developed psychic powers of the Comyn and those of their blood. The superstitious might speak of Gods and magical powers. I knew better. And yet the form of fire blazed in my mind, a woman, tall and imposing, overshadowing… and now she bore Marjorie’s face. Marjorie, competent and unafraid in the midst of the rising illusion-flames of Sharra, and then—then crumpling, screaming in agony as the flames struck inward—my hand burning like a torch beneath the matrix—
Callina reached out one hand, lightly touched my forehead, where Jeff had stitched the sword cut. Under her touch the fire went out. I found that I was kneeling at her feet, my head bent under the weight of it.
She said “But would he dare? Surely no sane man—”
I said, hearing the bitterness in my own voice, “I’m not sure he’s a man—and I’m even less sure he is sane.”
“But what could he hope to accomplish, unless he is simply mad for destruction?” she asked. “Surely he would not risk the woman—Thyra, you called her?—She was his—” she hesitated, and I shook my head. I had never understood the relationship between Kadarin and Thyra. It was not the ordinary relationship of lovers, but something at once less and more. I bent my head; I too had been glamored by the dark, glowing beauty of Thyra, so like and so unlike Marjorie. I had chosen. And Marjorie had been destroyed…I turned on her in rage. She said softly, “I know, Lew. I know.”