I said harshly, “I found out what I wanted to know.”
He muttered, “You did.”
Then, his eyes blazing but his voice unsteady, he said, “That’s what scared me. That’s why I came to you. You’re an Alton, I thought you’d know. At the council, something hit me. I — I don’t know anything about matrix mechanics, surely you must know that now? I don’t know how I did it, or why. I just bridged the gap and threw the sign. I thought I could tell you — ask you—” His voice broke, on the ragged edge of hysteria; I heard him swear, chokingly, like a child trying not to cry. He was shaking all over.
At last he said, “All right. I’m still scared. And I could kill you for what you did. But there’s no one else to ask for help.” He swallowed. “What you did, you did openly. I can stand that. What I can’t stand is not knowing what I might do next.”
Shamed and unnerved, I walked away from him. Regis, who had tried to befriend me, had received the same treatment I’d given my worst enemy. I couldn’t face him.
After a minute he followed me. “Lew. I said, we’ll have to forget it. We can’t afford to fight. Did it occur to you?
We’re both in the same fix, we’re both doing things we’d never do in our right mind,”
He knew, and I knew, it wasn’t the same; but it made me able to look round and face him.
“Why did I do it, Lew? How, why?”
“Steady,” I said. “Don’t lose your head. We’re all scared. I’m scared, too. But there must be a reason.” I paused, trying to muster my memory of the Comyn Gifts. They are mostly recessive now, bred out by intermarriage with outsiders, but Regis was physically atavistic, a throwback to the pure Comyn type; he might also be a mental throwback. “The Hastur Gift, whatever that is, is latent in you,” I said. “Perhaps, unconsciously, you knew the council should be broken up, and took that drastic way of doing it. I added, diffidently, “If what had happened — hadn’t happened, I’d offer to go into your mind and sift it. But — well, I don’t think you’d trust me now.
“Probably not. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said roughly. “I don’t even trust myself, after that. But Ashara or Callina, for that matter, either of the Keepers, could deep-probe and find out for you.”
“Ashara—” He looked up thoughtfully toward the Keeper’s Tower. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
We leaned across the railing, looking down into the valley, dulled now and darkened by the falling night. A baritone thunder suddenly shook the castle, and a silver dart sped bullet-wise across the sky, trailing a comet’s tail of crimson, and was lost.
“Mail-rocket,” I said, “from the Terran Zone.”
“Terra and Darkover,” said a voice behind us, “the irresistible force, and the immovable object.”
Old Hastur came out on the balcony. “I know, I know,” he said, “you young Altons don’t like being ordered around here and there. Frankly, I don’t enjoy doing it; I’m too old.” He smiled at Regis. “I sent you out to keep you from jumping into the mess along with Lew. But I wish you’d managed to keep your temper, Lew Alton!”
“My temper!” The unfairness of that left me speechless. “I know. You had provocation. But if you had controlled your righteous wrath—” he spoke the words with a flavor of sour irony — “Dyan would have been clearly in the wrong. As it is — well, you broke Comyn immunity — first, and that’s serious. Dyan swears he’ll write a writ of exile on you.”
I said, almost indulgently, “He can’t. The law requires at least one laran heir from every Domain — or why did you go to such trouble to have me recalled? I am the last living Alton, and childless. Even Dyan can’t break up the Comyn that way.”
Hastur scowled. “So you think you can break all our laws — being irreplaceable? Think again, Lew. Dyan swears he’s found a child of yours.”
“Mine? It’s a stinking, sneaking lie,” I said angrily. “I’ve lived off-world for six years. And I’m a matrix mech. You know what that means. And it’s common knowledge I’ve lived celibate.” Mentally I absolved myself for the single exception. If Dio had borne my child, after that summer on Vainwal, I would have known. Known? I’d have been murdered for it!
The Regent looked at me skeptically. “Yes, yes, I know. But before that? You weren’t too young to be physically capable of fathering a child, were you? The child is an Alton, Lew.”
Regis said slowly, “Your father wasn’t exactly a recluse. And I suppose — how old was Marius? He might have fathered a chance-child somewhere.”
I thought it over. It seemed unlikely that I should have a son. Not impossible, certainly, remembering certain adventures of my early manhood, but improbable. On the other hand, no Darkovan woman would dare swear me, or my dead kinsmen, father to her child unless she were sure past all human doubts. It takes more courage than most women have, to lie about a telepath.
“And suppose I call Dyan’s bluff? To produce this alleged child, prove his paternity, set him up where I am now, write his writ of exile and be damned\to him? I never wanted to come back anyhow. Suppose I say go right ahead?”
“Then,” said Hastur, gravely, “we’d be right back where we started.” He laid his lined old hand on my arm. “Lew, I fought to have you recalled, because your father was my friend and because we Hasturs were pretty desperately outnumbered in council. I thought the Comyn needed you. Downstairs just now, when you were raking them out for their squabbles — like children in a playground, you said — I had high hopes. Don’t make a fool of me by breaking the peace at every turn!”
I bent my head, feeling grieved and unhappy. “I’ll try,” I said at last, bleakly, “but by the sword of Aldones, I wish you’d left me out in space.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the Hasturs left me, I went back to my rooms and thought over what I’d learned.
I had walked into Dyan’s trap and it had snapped shut on me. I had Hastur to thank if I hadn’t been already exiled. All along — I could see now — they had been goading me into open defiance. Then there was this child of mine, or my father’s or Marius’, a docile puppet; not a grown man with power in his own hands.
And Callina. That idea that a Keeper must be a virgin-superstitious drivel, but there must be some grain of scientific truth behind it, as with all other fables and Comyn traditions.
The superstitious could believe what they liked. But out of my own experience I knew this; any telepath working among the monitor screens will discover that his nervous and physical reflexes are all keyed into the matrix patterns. A matrix technician undergoes some prolonged periods of celibacy — strictly involuntary. This impotence is nature’s safeguard. A matrix mech who upsets his nerve reactions, or through physical or emotional excesses, upsets his endocrine balance, pays for it. He can overload his nervous system to the point where he will short-circuit and blow out like a fuse; nervous depletion, exhaustion and usually death.
A woman does not have the physical safeguard of impotence. The Keepers have always been severely cloistered. Once a girl has been aroused, once that first sensual response is awakened, so disastrously physical in its effect on nerves and brain, there is no way to determine the limit of safety. For a woman the picture is black or white. Absolute chastity, or giving up her work in the screens.
I, too, must be careful; I exposed Callina to a terrible danger.
I turned around to see old Andres scowling at me; a squat, ugly Terran, fierce and surly; but I knew him too well to be deceived by his fierce looks.
I never knew how a Terran ex-spaceman had won his way into my father’s confidence, but Andres Ramirez had been part of our home since I could remember. He’d taught me to ride, made toys for Marius, spanked us when we punched each other’s heads or raced at too breakneck a pace, and told us endless lying tales which gave no hint about his true history. I never knew whether he could not return to Terra, or whether he would not; but twenty years dropped from my age as he growled, “What are you standing there sulking about?”