I frowned. I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Had we seen Ashara at all, or only her semblance? Had Callina seen that face?
Outdoors the lights had faded; we walked through the rainy courtyard and the echoing passages without once speaking. In Callina’s matrix laboratory it was warm; I pulled off my cloak, letting the heat soak into my chilled body and aching arm, while Callina busied herself adjusting the telepathic dampers. I crossed the room to the immense screen I had seen the day before, and stared, frowning, into its cloudy depths. Transmitter.
At its side, cradled in the silk shock-absorber, was the largest matrix I had ever seen. An ordinary matrix mechanic operates the first sis. levels. A telepath can manipulate the seventh and eighth. Sharra was ninth or tenth — I had never been sure — and demanded at, least three linked minds, one of them a telepath. I could not even guess at the level of this one.
Sorcery? Unknown laws of science? They were one. But the freak Gift born in my blood, a spark in my nerves — I was Comyn, and for such things as this the Comyn had been bred.
To explain the screen fully would be impossible outside the Comyn. It captured images. It was a duplicator; a trap for a desired pattern. An automatic assembly of a set of predetermined requisites — no, I can’t explain and I won’t try.
But with my telepathic force, augmented by the matrix, I could search, without space limitation, for such a mind as we wanted. Of all the billions of human and nonhuman minds in the million worlds in spacetime, somewhere was one exactly suited to our purpose, having a certain awareness — and a certain lack of awareness.
With the screen, we could attune that mind’s vibration to this sector in spacetime; here, now, between the poles of the screen. Then, space annihilated by the matrix, we could shift the energons of mind and body and bring them here.
My brain played with words like hyperspace and dimension-travel and matter-transmitter, but those were only words.
I dropped into the chair below the screen, bending to calibrate the controls to my own cerebral pattern. I fiddled fussily with the dial, not looking up. “You’ll have to cut out the monitor screen, Callina.”
She crossed the room and touched a series of studs; the bank of lights winked out, shunting every matrix on Dark-over out of this monitor. “There’s a bypass relay through the Arilinn tower,” she explained.
A grill crackled and sent out a tiny staccato signal. Callina listened a moment, then said, “Yes, I know, Maruca. But we have cut out the main circuits. You’ll have to hold the energons in Arilinn tonight.”
She waited; then rapped out, “Put up a third-level barrier around Thendara! That is a command from Comyn; acknowledge and comply!” She turned away, sighing.
“That girl is the noisiest telepath on the planet,” she said. “I wish any other Keeper had been at Arilinn tonight. There are a few who can cut through a third-level barrier, but if I asked for a fourth—” she sighed. I understood; a fourth-level barrier would have alerted every telepath on the planet to the fact that something was going on in the Comyn Castle.
We’d chance it. She took her place before the matrix, and I blanked my mind against the screen. I shut out sense impressions, reaching to adjust the psychokinetic waves into the pattern we wanted. What sort of alien would suit us? But without volition on my part, a pattern laid itself down.
I saw, in the instant before my optic nerve overloaded and went out, the dim symbols of a pattern in the matrix; then I went blind and deaf in that instant of overload that is always terrifying.
Gradually, without external senses, I found orientation in the screen. My mind, extended to astronomical proportions, swept incredible distances; traversed, in fractional seconds, whole parsecs and galaxies of subjective spacetime. There came vague touches of consciousness, fragments of thought, emotions that floated like shadows — the flotsam of the mental universe.
Then, before I felt contact, I saw the white-hot flare in the screen. Somewhere another mind had fitted into the pattern. We had cast it out through time and space, like a net, and when we met a mind that fitted, it had been snared.
I swung out, bodiless, divided into a billion subjective fragments, extended over a vast gulf of spacetime. If anything happened, I would never get back into my body, but would float in the spacetime curve forever.
With infinite caution, I poured myself into the alien mind. There was a short but terrible struggle; it was embedded, enlaced in mine. The world was a holocaust of molten-glass fire and color. The air writhed with cold flames, and the glow on the screen was a shadow and then a clearing darkness and then an image, captive in my mind, and then-Light tore at my eyes. A ripping shock slammed through my brain, the floor seemed to rock and the walls to crash together and apart, and Callina was flung, reeling, against me as the energons seared the air and my brain.
Half stunned, but conscious, I looked up at Callina. The alien mind was torn free of mine. The screen was blank.
And in a crumpled heap on the floor, at the base of the Screen, where she had fallen, lay a slender, dark-haired girl.
CHAPTER NINE
Unsteadily, Callina knelt beside the crumpled form. I followed slowly, and bent over beside her.
“She isn’t dead?”
“Of course not.” Callina looked up. “But that was terrible, even for us. What do you think it was like for her? She’s in shock.”
The girl was lying on her side, one arm across her face.
Soft brown hair, falling forward, hid her features. I brushed it lightly back — then stopped, my hand still touching her cheek, in dazed bewilderment.
“It’s Linnell,” Callina choked. “Linnell!”
Lying on the cold floor was the girl on the spaceport; the girl I had seen in my first confused moments in Thendara.
For a moment, even knowing as I did what had happened, I thought my mind would give way. The transition had taken its toll of me, too. Every nerve in my body ached.
“What have we done?” Callina moaned. “What have we done?”
I held her tight. Of course, I thought; of course. Linnell was near; she was close to both of us; we had both been talking, and thinking of Linnell tonight. And yet…
“You know Cherillys’ two point law?” I tried to put it into simple words. “Everything, everywhere, except a matrix, exists in one exact duplicate. This chair, my cloak, the screwdriver on your table, the public fountain in Port Chicago — everything in the universe exists in one exact molecular duplicate. Nothing is unique except a matrix; but there are no three things alike in the universe.”
“Then this is — Linnell’s twin?”
“More than that. Only once in a million years or so would duplicates also be twins. This is her real twin. Same fingerprints. Same retinal eye patterns. Same betagraphs and blood type. She won’t be much like Linnell in personality, probably, because the duplicates of Linnell’s environment are scattered all over the galaxy. But in flesh and blood, they’re identical. Even her chromosomes are identical with Linnell’s.
I took up the girl’s wrist and turned it over. The curious matrix mark of the Comyn was duplicated there. “Birthmark,” I said, “but the effect is identical in her flesh. See?”
I stood up. Callina stared and stared. “Can she live in this environment, then?”
“Why not? If she’s Linnell’s duplicate, she breathes oxygen in the same ratio we do, and her internal organs are adjusted to about the same gravity.”