The Heritage Of Hastur d-18 Read online

  He waved that away. "No, no. No formalities. I asked you to be honest with me. I can understand that. We married your father very young to a woman the Council thought suitable, and I have been told they lived together in complete harmony and total indifference for many years. But I don't

  want to wait until you've fixed your desire on someone wholly unsuitable, either. Your father married at the last to please himself and‑forgive me, Lew‑you and Marius have been suffering for it all your lives. I am sure you would rather spare your own sons that."

  "Can't you wait until I have sons? Don't you ever get tired of arranging other people's lives for them?"

  His eyes blazed at me, "I got tired of it thirty years ago but someone has to do it! I'm old enough to sit and think over my past, instead of carrying the burden of the future, but it seems to be left to me! What are you doing to arrange your life in the proper way and save me the trouble?" He took another forkful of salad and chewed it wrathfully.

  "How much do you know of the history of Comyn, Lew? In the far‑back days, we were given power and privilege because we served our .people, not because we ruled them. Then we began to believe we had these powers and privileges because of some innate superiority in ourselves, as if having laran made us so much better than other people that we could do exactly as we pleased. Our privileges are used now, not to compensate us for all the things we have given up to serve the people, but to perpetuate our own powers. You're complaining that your life isn't your own, Lew. Well, it isn't and it shouldn't be. You have certain privileges‑"

  "Privileges!" I said bitterly. "Mostly duties I don't want and responsibilities I can't handle."

  "Privileges," he repeated, "which you must earn by serving your people." He reached out and lightly touched the mark of Comyn, deeply blazed hi my flesh just above the wrist. His own arm bore its twin, whitened with age. He said, "One of the obligations which goes with that, a sacred obligation, is to make certain your gift does not die out, by fathering sons and daughters to inherit it from you, to serve the people of Darkover in their turn."

  Against my will, I was moved by his words. I had felt this way during my journey to the outlands, that my position as heir to Comyn was a serious thing, a sacred thing, that I held an important link in an endless chain of Altons, stretching from prehistory to the future. For a moment I felt that the old man followed my thoughts, as he laid his fingertip again on the mark of Comyn on my wrist. He said, "I know what this cost you, Lew. You won that gift at risk of your life. You have begun well by serving at Arilinn. What little re‑

  mains of our ancient science is preserved there against the day when it may be fully recovered or rediscovered. Do you think I don't know that you young people there are sacrificing your personal lives, giving up many things a young man, a young woman, holds dear? I never had that option, Lew, I was born with a bare minimum of laran. So I do what I can with secular powers, to lighten that burden for you others who bear the heavier ones. So far as I know, you have never misused your powers. Nor are you one of those frivolous young people who want to enjoy the privilege of rank and spend your life in amusements and folly. Why, then, do you shrink from doing this duty to your clan?"

  I suddenly wished that I could unburden my fears and misgivings to him. I could not doubt the old man's personal integrity. Yet he was so completely entangled in his single‑minded plan for political aims on Darkover that I distrusted him, too. I would not let him manipulate me to serve those aims. I felt confused, half convinced, half more defiant than ever. He was waiting for my answer; I shrank from giving it. Tele‑paths get used to facing things head‑on‑you have to, in order to stay even reasonably sane‑but you don't learn to put things easily into words. You get used, in a place like Arilinn, to knowing that everyone in your circle can share all your feelings and emotions and desires. There is no reticence there, none of the small evasions and courtesies which outsiders use in speaking of intimate things. But Hastur could not read my thoughts, and I fumbled at putting it into words that would not embarrass either of us too much.

  "Mostly I have never met a woman I wished to spend my life with . . . and, being a telepath, I am not willing to ... to gamble on someone else's choice." No. I wasn't being completely honest. I would have gambled on Linnea willingly, if I had not felt I was being manipulated, used as a helpless pawn. My anger flared again. "Hastur, if you wanted me to many simply for the sake of perpetuating my gift, of fathering a son for the Domain, you should have had me married off before I was full‑grown, before I was old enough to have any feelings about any woman, and would have wanted her just because she was a woman and available. Now it's different." I fell silent again.

  How could I tell Hastur, who was old enough to be my grandfather, and not even a telepath, that when I took a woman, all her thoughts and feelings were open to me and

  mine to her, that unless rapport was complete and sympathy almost total, it could quickly unman me? Few women could endure it. And how could I tell him about the paralyzing failures which a lack of sympathy could bring? Did he actually think I could manage to live with a woman whose only interest in me was that I might give her a laran son? I know some men in the Comyn manage it. I suppose that almost any two people with healthy bodies can give each other something in bed. But not tower‑trained telepaths, accustomed to that full sharing. ... I said, and I knew my voice was shaking uncontrollably, "Even a god cannot be constrained to love on command."

  Hastur looked at me with sympathy. That hurt, too. It would have been hard enough to strip myself this way before a man my own age. Finally he said gently, "There's never been any question of compulsion, Lew. But promise me to think about it. The Storn‑Lanart girl has applied to Neskaya Tower. We need Keepers and psi technicians. But we also need sensitive women, telepaths, to marry into our families. If you could come to like one another, we would welcome her."

  I said, drawing a deep breath, "I'll think about it." Linnea was a telepath. It might be enough. But to put it bluntly, I was afraid, Hastur gestured to a servant to take his emptied plate and my nearly untouched one. "More wine?"

  "Thank you, sir, but I have already drunk more than I usually do in a week. And I promised my foster‑sister another dance."

  Kind as he had been, I was glad to get away from him. The conversation had rubbed me raw‑edged, rousing thoughts I had learned to keep firmly below the surface of my mind.

  Love‑to put it more precisely, sex‑is never easy for a telepath. Not even when you're very young and still childishly playing around, discovering your own needs and desires, learning to know your own body and its hungers.

  I suppose, from the way other lads talk‑and there's plenty of talk in the cadets and the Guards‑for most people, at least for a time, anyone of the right sex who is accessible and not completely repulsive will do. But even during those early experiments I had always been too conscious of the other party's motives and reactions, and tbey would rarely stand up to so close an examination. And after I went to Ar‑ilinn and submerged myself in the intense sharing and

  closeness there, it had changed from merely difficult to impossible.

  Well, I had promised Linnell a dance. And what I had told Hastur was true. Linnell was not a woman to me and she would not disturb me emotionally at all.

  But Callina was alone, watching a group of classic dancers do a rhythmic dance which mimicked the leaves in a spring storm. Their draperies, gray‑green, yellow‑green, blue‑green, flickered and flowed in the lights like sunshine. Callina had thrown back her hood and, preoccupied in watching the dancers, looked rather forlorn, very small and fragile and solemn. I came and stood beside her. After a moment she turned and said, "You promised Linnell to dance again, didn't you? Well, you can save yourself the trouble, cousin, she and the Storn‑Lanart child are in the balcony, watching and chattering to one another about gowns and hair‑dressing." She smiled, a small whimsical smile which momentarily lightened her pale stern face. "It's foolish to bring little
girls that age to a formal ball, they'd be just as happy at a dancing class!"

  I said, letting out my pent‑up bitterness, "Oh, they're old enough to be up for auction to the highest bidder. It's how we make fine marriages hi the Comyn. Are you for sale too, damiselal"

  She smiled faintly. "I don't imagine you're making an offer? No, I'm not for sale this year at least. I'm Keeper at Neskaya Tower, and you know what that means."

  I knew, of course. The Keepers are no longer required to be cloistered virgins to whom no man dares raise even a careless glance. But while they are working at the center of the energon relays, they are required, by harsh necessity, to remain strictly chaste. They learned not to attract desires they dared not satisfy. Probably they learned not to feel them, either, which is a good trick if you can manage it. I wished I could.

  I relaxed. Against Callina, tower‑trained and a working Keeper, I need not be on my guard. We shared a deeper kinship than blood, the strong tie of the tower‑trained telepath,

  I've been a matrix technician long enough to know that the work uses up so much physical and nervous energy that there's not much left over for sex. The will may be there, but not the energy. The Keepers are required, for their physical and emotional safety, to remain celibate. The others in the

  circle‑technicians, mechanics, psi monitors‑are usually generous and sensitive about satisfying what little remains. In any case you get too close for playing the elaborate games of flirt and retreat that men and women elsewhere are given to playing. And Callina understood all this withoug being told, having been part of it

  She was also sensitive enough to be aware of my mood. She said, with a faint tinge of gentle malice, "I have heard Linnea will be sent to Arilinn next year, if you both choose not to marry. You'll have time for second thoughts. Shall I ask them to be sure she is not made Keeper, in case you should change your mind?"

  I felt somewhat abashed. That was an outrageous thing to say! But what would have infuriated me from an outsider did not trouble me from her. Within a tower circle such a statement would not have embarrassed me, although I would not have felt constrained to answer, either. She was simply treating me like one of our own kind. In the rapport of the tower circles, we were all very much aware of each other's needs and hungers, eager to keep them from reaching a point of frustration or pain.

  But now my circle was scattered, others serving hi my place, and somehow I had to cope with a world full of elaborate games and complex relationships. I said, as I would have said to a sister, "They're pressuring me to marry, Callina. What shall I do? It's too soon. I'm still‑" I gestured, unable to put it into words.

  She nodded gravely. "Perhaps you should take Linnea after all. It would mean they couldn't put any constraint on you for someone less suitable." She was seriously considering my problem, giving it her full attention. "I suppose, mostly, what they want is for you to father a son for Armida. If you couid do that, they wouldn't care whether you married the girl or not, would they?"

  It wouldn't have been difficult to have fathered a child on one of the women in my circle at Arilinn, even though pregnancy makes it too dangerous for a woman to remain in the tower. But the thought of that was like salt in a raw wound. I said at last, and heard my voice crack, "I am a bastard myself. Do you honestly think I would ever inflict that on any son of mine? And Linnea is very young and she was ... honest with me." This whole conversation troubled me for obscure reasons. "And how do you come to know so much

  about this? Has my love life become a subject for Council debate, Callina comynara?"

  She shook her head pityingly. "No, of course not. But Javanne and I played dolls together, and she still tells me things. Not Council gossip, Lew, just women's talk."

  I hardly heard her. Like all Altons, I sometimes have a disturbing tendency to see time out of focus, and Callina's image kept wavering and trembling, as if I saw her through running water or through flowing time. For a moment I would lose sight of her as she was now, pale and plain and crimson‑draped, as she shimmered in an ice‑blue glittering mist. Then she would seem to float, cold and aloof and beautiful, shimmering with a darkness like the midnight sky. I was tormented, struggling with mingled rage and frustration, my whole body aching with it‑

  I blinked, trying to get the world back in focus.

  "Are you ill, kinsman?"

  I realized with sheer horror that I had been, for an instant, on the very edge of taking her into my arms. Since she was not now Keeper within the circle, this was only a rudeness, not an unthinkable atrocity. Still, I must be mad! I was actually trembling. This was insane! I was still looking at Callina, reacting to her as if she were a desirable woman, not bared from me by double taboo and the oath of a tower technician.

  She met my eyes, deeply troubled. There was cool sympathy and kindliness in her glance, but no response to my surge of uncontrollable emotion. Of course not!

  "Damisela, I apologize profoundly," I said, feeling my breath raw in my throat "It's this crowd. Plays hell with my ... barriers."

  She nodded, accepting the excuse. "I hate such affairs. I try never to come to them, except when I must. Let's get into the air for a moment. Lew." She led the way out to one of the small balconies where a thin fine rain was falling. I breathed the cold dampness with relief. She was wearing a long, fine, shimmering black veil that spun out behind her like wings, gleaming in the darkness. I could not resist the impulse to seize her in my arms, crush her against me, press her lips against mine‑Again I blinked, staring at the cool rainless night, the clear stars, Callina calm in her brilliant drapery. Suddenly I felt sick and faint and clung to the balcony railing. I felt myself falling into infinite distances, a wild nowhere of empty space. . . .

  Callina said quietly, "This isn't just the crowd. Have you some kirian, Lew?"

  I shook my head, fighting to get the world in perspective. I was too old for this, damn it. Most telepaths outgrow these psychic upheavals at puberty. I hadn't had threshold sickness since before I went to Ariiinn. I had no idea why it should overcome me just now.

  Callina said gently, "I wish I could help you, Lew. You know what's really wrong with you, don't you?" She brushed past me with a feather‑light touch and left me. I stood in the cold damp air of the balcony, feeling the sting of the words. Yes, I knew what was wrong and resented it, bitterly, that she should remind me from behind the barricade of her own invulnerability. She did not share my needs, desires; it was a torment from which she, as Keeper, was free. For the moment, in my flaring anger at the girl, I forgot the cruel discipline behind her hard‑won immunity.

  Yes, I knew what was really wrong with me. At Ariiinn I had grown accustomed to women who were sensitive to my needs, who shared them. Now I had been a long time away, a long time alone. I was even barred, being what I am, from the kind of uncomplicated relief which the least of my fellow Guardsmen might find. The few tunes‑very few times‑ when, in desperation, I had been driven to seek it, it had only made me sick. Sensitive women don't take up that particular profession. Or if they do I've never met them. Leaning my head on the railing, I gave way to envy ... a bitter envy of a man who could find even temporary solace with any woman with a willing body.

  Momentarily, knowing it would make it worse in the end, I let myself think of the girl Linnea. Terran blood. A sensitive, a telepath. Perhaps I had been too hasty.

  Rage gripped me again. So Hastur and my father thought they could manipulate me no other way, now they tried to bribe me with sex. They had bribed Dyan by putting him hi charge of a barracks‑full of half‑grown boys, who at the very least would feed his ego by admiring him and flattering him. And however discreetly, he thrived on it.

  And they would bribe me, too. Differently, of course, for my needs were different, but essentially still a bribe. They would keep me in control, pliable, by dangling a young, beautiful, sexually exciting girl before me, a half‑spoken agreement.

  And my own needs, which my telepathic father knew all too well
, would do the rest. I felt sick at the knowledge of how nearly I had fallen into their trap.

  The festivities inside the ballroom were breaking up. The cadets had long gone back to barracks. A few lingerers were still drinking at the buffet, but servants were moving around, beginning to clear away. I strode through the halls toward the Alton rooms, still alive with rage.

  The central hall was deserted, but I saw a light in my father's room and went in without knocking. He was half‑dressed, looking weary and off guard.

  "I want to talk to you!"

  He said mildly, "You didn't have to charge in here like a cralmac in rut for that." He reached out briefly and touched my mind. He hasn't done that much since I was grown up, and it made me angry that he should treat me like a child after so many years. He withdrew quickly and said, "Can't it wait till morning, Lew? You're not well."

  Even his solicitude added to my wrath. "If I'm not, you know whose fault it is. What in the hell do you mean, trying to marry me off without a word of warning?"

  He met my anger head‑on. "Because, Lew, you're too proud and too damned stubborn to admit you need anything. You're ready, past ready, for marriage. Don't be like the man in the old tale, who when the devil bade him take the road to paradise, set off on the high‑road to hell!" He sounded as raw as I felt. "Damn it, do you think I don't know how you feel?"

  I thought about that for a moment. I've wondered, now and then, if my father has lived alone all these years since my mother died. He'd certainly had no acknowledged mistress. I had never tried to spy on him, or inquire even in thought about his most private life, therefore I was doubly angered that he left me no rag of privacy to cover my nakedness, had forced me to strip myself naked before Hastur and disgrace myself before my cousin Callina.