And I began to believe that she was immortal indeed, as they whispered; that she had lived on Darkover since before the coming of the Sons of Light.
She said softly, “So you have been beyond the stars, Lew Alton?”
It would not be fair to say the voice was unkind. It was not human enough for that. It only sounded as if the effort of conversing with actual, living persons, was too much for her; as if our life disturbed the cool crystalline peace that should always reign here. Callina, accustomed to this — or so I suppose — answered gently.
“You see all things, Mother. You know what we have seen.”
A flicker of life crossed the ancient face. “No, not even I can see all things. And you refused my only chance to aid you, Callina. You know I have no power now, outside this place.” Her voice had more vitality now, as if she were wakening to our living presence.
Callina’s head bowed low. “Yet aid me with your wisdom, Ashara,” she whispered. The ancient sorceress smiled remotely.
“Tell me,” she said.
We sat together on a carven glass bench at Ashara’s feet, and told her of the events of the last few days. I asked her at last, “Can you duplicate the Sharra matrix?”
“Even I cannot alter the laws of matter and energy,” she said. “Yet, I wish you knew less Terran science, Lew.”
“Why?”
“Because, knowing, you look for explanations. Your mind would be steadier if you could call them Gods, demons, sacred talismans, as the Comyn did long ago. Sharra — a demon? No more than Aldones is a God,” she said, and smiled. “Yet they are living entities, of a kind. Nor are they good or evil, though they may seem so in their contacts with men. What says the old legend?”
Callina whispered, “Sharra was bound in chains, by the Son of Hastur, who was the Son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light…”
“Ritual,” I said impatiently. “Superstition!”
The still old face turned to me. “You think so? What do you know of the Sword of Aldones?”
I swallowed. “It is — the weapon against Sharra,” I said. “I suppose it’s a matrix, and, like the Sharra one, it’s set in a sword for camouflage.”
It was a hypothetical discussion anyhow, and I -said so. The Sword of Aldones was in the rhu fead, the holy place of the Comyn, and might as well have been in another Galaxy.
There are things like that on Darkover. They can’t be destroyed; but they are so powerful, and so deadly dangerous, even the Comyn, or the Keepers, can’t be trusted with them.
The rhu fead was so keyed and so activated by matrices that no one can enter it but the Comyn who have been sealed into council. It is physically impossible for an outsider to get inside without stripping his mind bare. By the time he got through the force-layer, he would be an imbecile without enough directive power to know why he had come.
But inside — the Comyn of a thousand years ago had put them out of our own reach. They are guarded in the opposite fashion. No Comyn can touch them. An outsider could have picked them up freely, but no Comyn can come near the force-field surrounding them.
I said, “Every unscrupulous Comyn for three hundred generations has been trying to figure that one out.”
“But none of them have had a Keeper on their side,” Callina said. She looked at Ashara. “A Terran?”
“Perhaps,” Ashara said. “At least, an outsider. Not a Terran born on Darkover, with a mind adjusted to the forces here, but a real alien. Such a one would pass where we never could. His mind would be locked off and sealed against those forces, because he wouldn’t even know they were there.”
“Fine,” I said. “All I have to do is go some fifty light years, and bring one back, without telling him anything about this planet, or what we want him for, and hope he has enough telepathic talent to co-operate with us.”
Ashara’s colorless eyes held a flicker of scorn. “You are a matrix technician. What about the screen?”
Abruptly, I remembered the strange, shimmering screen I had seen in Callina’s matrix laboratory. So it was one of the legendary psychokinetic transmitters, then? Vaguely, I began to see what they were aiming at. To transmit matter, animate or inanimate, instantaneously through space —
“That hasn’t been done for hundreds of years!”
“I know what Callina can do,” Ashara said with her strange smile. “Now. You and Callina touched minds, at the council—”
“Surface contact. It exhausted us both.”
Ashara nodded. “Because all your energy — and hers — went into maintaining the contact. But I could put the two of you into focus as you and Marius were linked.”
I whistled soundlessly. That was drastic; normally only the Altons can endure that deep focus.
“The Altons — and the Keepers.”
I looked dubiously at Callina, but her eyes were averted. I understood; that sort of rapport is the ultimate intimacy. I wasn’t any too eager myself. I had my own private hell that would not bear the light of day; could I open it for Callina’s clear seeing?
Callina’s hand twitched in a shuddering denial.
“No!”
The refusal hurt. If I could steel myself to this, why should she refuse?
“I will not!” There was anger in her voice, but terror, too. “I am mine — I belong to myself — No one, no one, least of all you, shall violate that!”
I was not sure whether she spoke to me or to Ashara,, but I tried to calm her with tenderness. “Callina, do this for me? We can’t be lovers yet, but you can belong to me this way—”
I needed her so, why did she go rigid in my arms as if my touch were shameful? She sobbed wildly, stormily. “I can’t, I won’t, I can’t! I thought I could, but I cannot!” She faced Ashara at last, her face white, burning. “You made me so — I’d give my life if I had never seen you, I’d die to be free of you, but you made me so, and I cannot change!”
“Callina—”
“No!” Her voice vibrated with passionate refusal. “You don’t know everything! You wouldn’t want it, either, if you knew!”
“Enough!” Ashara’s voice was a cold bell, recalling us to the silence in the tower; it seemed that even the flame in Callina’s eyes died. “Be it so, then; I cannot force it. I will do what I can.”
She rose from the glass throne. Her tiny, blue-ice form hardly reached to Callina’s shoulder. She looked up and met my eyes for the first time; and that icy, compelling stare swallowed me…
The room vanished. For a moment I looked on blank emptiness, like the starless chasms past the rim of the universe; a shadow among shadows, I drifted in tingling mist. Then a stream of force pulsed in me; deep in my brain a spark, a core waked to life, charging me with power that stung through my whole being. I could feel myself as a network of live nerves, a sort of lacework of living force.
Then, suddenly, a face sketched itself on my mind.
I cannot describe that face, although I know, now, what it was. I saw it three time, but there are no human words to describe it. It was beautiful beyond imagining; and it was terrible beyond all conception. It was not even evil. But it was damnable and damned. Only a fraction of a second it swam in my eyes, then it burned out in the darkness. But in that instant, I looked straight in at the gates of hell.
I struggled back to reality. I was in Ashara’s blue-ice tower room again. Again? Had I left it? I felt giddy and confused, disoriented; but Callina threw herself at me, and the convulsive pressure of her arms, the damp fragrance of her hair and her wet face against mine, brought me back to sanity.