A World Divided (53 page)

With the decision made, the tension relaxed and the next phase of the work began with an atmosphere that was, by contrast, almost friendly. This time they had to build a matrix lattice for the work known as “clearing”—which had not been done on this scale since the great days of the Comyn, when Towers dotted the land, giving power and technology to all the Domains.

They had located mineral and ore deposits and marked them for richness and accessibility. In the next step they would separate the deposits from the other minerals that contaminated them, so that the copper and other metals could be mined in a pure form without need for refining. Drop by drop, atom by atom, deep within the earth, by tiny shiftings of energy and force, the pure metals would be separated from the ores and the rock. Corus spent more time with his molecular models, fussing over precise weights and proportions. And this time, Elorie, with Rannirl, specially asked for Kerwin’s help in placing the crystals within their lattices. He was required to hold complex molecular patterns clearly visualized on a monitor screen, so that Elorie and Rannirl could place the blank crystals precisely inside the amorphous layers of glass. He learned things about atomic structure that even the Terran scientists did not know—his education in physics, for instance, had told him nothing about the nature of
energons.
It was wearying work, monotonous and nerve-racking rather than physically taxing, and always at the back of his mind was the knowledge of the test that would come with the trap matrix, whatever that was.

One day they were working in one of the matrix laboratories, Jeff holding the complex internal crystal structure visualized for the monitor screen, when suddenly he saw the lattice structure blur together; melt into a blue flare and streak. Pain knifed through him; hardly knowing what he did, Jeff acted on pure instinct. He swiftly cut the rapport between Rannirl and Elorie, blanked the screens, and caught Elorie’s fainting body as she fell. For a panicked moment he thought she was not breathing; then her eyelashes moved and she sighed.

“Working too hard, as usual,” said Rannirl, staring down at the lattice. “She
will
keep on, even when I beg her to rest. Good thing you caught her, Jeff, just when you did; otherwise we’d have the whole lattice to rebuild, and that would cost us a tenday. Well, Elorie?”

Elorie was crying weakly in exhaustion, lying limp in Jeff’s arms. Her face was deathly white, and her sobs shallow as if she no longer had the strength to breathe. Rannirl took her from Jeff’s arms, lifting her like a small child, and carried her out of the lab. He flung back over his shoulder, “Get Tani up here, and hurry!”

“Taniquel went with Kennard in the airlaunch,” Kerwin said.

“Then I’d better go up and try to get them in the relays,” Rannirl said, kicked the nearest door open with his foot. It was one of the unused rooms; it looked as if no one had set foot in it for decades. He laid the girl down on a couch covered with dusty tapestry, while Kerwin stood helplessly in the door. “Anything I can do?” he asked.

“You’re an empath,” Rannirl said, “and qualified as a monitor; I haven’t done it in years. I’ll go up and try to get Neyrissa, but you’d better monitor her and see if her heart’s all right.”

And suddenly Kerwin remembered what Taniquel had done for him on that first night of testing, taking his pain into herself, when he collapsed with the breaking of his barriers.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said, and came closer to her. Elorie moved her head from side to side, like a fractious child. “No,” she said irritably. “No, let me be, I’m all right.” But she had to breathe twice while she said it and her face was like scraped bone.

“She’s always like this,” Rannirl said. “Do what you can, Jeff, I’ll go and find Neyrissa.”

Jeff came and bent over Elorie.

“I don’t suppose I’m as good at it as Tani or Neyrissa,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can.” Quickly, heightening his sensitivity, he ran his fingertips along her body, an inch or two away, feeling deep into the cells. Her heart was beating, but thin, irregular, threadlike; the pulse was faint, almost unreadable. Her breathing was so faint he could hardly feel it. Cautiously, he reached for rapport, seeking, with that heightened awareness, the limits of her weakness, trying to take her exhaustion upon himself as Taniquel had taken his pain. She stirred and made a faint movement, reaching with her hands for his, and he remembered how Taniquel had taken his hands in her own. The searching movement of her hands went on, and after a moment Jeff put his own between them, feeling the faint effort she made to close hers over them. She was almost unconscious. But gradually, as he knelt there with her hands in his, he could feel her breathing steady, sensed that her heart had begun to beat smoothly again, and saw the deathly white of her face beginning to transmute into a healthy color again. He did not realize how frightened he had been until he heard her breathing, calm and steady; she opened her eyes and looked at him. She was still a little pale, her soft lips still colorless.

“Thank you, Jeff,” she whispered weakly, and her hands tightened on his; then, to his astonishment, she put out her arms, reaching up to him in appeal. Quickly responding, he gathered her close to him, sensing that she wanted the reassurance of contact; he held her for a moment, feeling her close to him, soft and limp, still weak. And then, without surprise, Kerwin felt the soft and exquisite blending of perceptions as their lips met.

He felt it with an intensely heightened dual consciousness, Elorie’s limp slight body in his arms, sensing the fragility mingled with steely strength, the childlike quality blended with the calm, ageless wisdom of her caste and her training.
(And dimly through all these things he felt what Elorie felt, her weakness and lassitude, the terror she had known when her heart faltered and she felt herself near to death, the need for the reassurance of contact, the strength of his own arms around her; he felt the lassitude and the eagerness with which she accepted his kiss, a strange and half-understood wakening in her senses; he shared with the woman her own wonder and surprise at this touch, the first touch she had ever known that was not fatherly and impersonal; shared her shy and shameless surprise at the strength of his man’s body, at the sudden rising heat in him; felt her reach out to him, unmistakably, for a deeper contact, and answered it. ...)

“Elorie,” he whispered, but it was like a triumphant shout. “Oh, Elorie—” And only to himself he whispered,
my love
, and for a moment he felt everything in the woman move toward him, felt her sudden warmth and flooding longing for his kiss....

Then there was a spasmodic moment of shattering, convulsive fear, clawing with anguish at every nerve in him; the rapport between them smashed like a breaking crystal, and Elorie, white and terrified, was straining away from him, fighting like a cat in his arms.

“No, no,” she gasped. “Jeff, let me go, let me go—don’t—”

Dazed, numb with shock, Kerwin released her; she scrambled quickly up and away from him, her hands crossed in terror over her breasts, which rose and fell with soundless, anguished sobs. Her eyes were wide with horror, but she was barriered tightly against him again. Her childish mouth moved silently, her face screwed up in a little girl’s grimace against tears.

“No,” she whispered, again, at last. “Have you forgotten—forgotten what I am? Oh, Avarra pity me,” she said in a broken gasp, covered her face with her hands and fled blindly from the room, half tripping over a stool, evading Jeff’s automatic reach to steady her, slipping through the door and running, running away down the hall. Far away, far up in the Tower, he heard the closing of a door.

 

He did not see Elorie again for three days.

For the first time, that night, she did not join them for the evening ritual of drinks in the great hall. Jeff, from the moment Elorie fled from him, felt cut off and alone, a stranger among them in a world suddenly cold and strange.

The others seemed to take Elorie’s seclusion for granted; Kennard said with a shrug that all Keepers did that now and then, it was part of being what they were. Jeff, holding his barriers firm against involuntary betrayal (of himself? Of Elorie?) said nothing. But Elorie’s eyes, luminous and haunted with dismay and that shocking, sudden fear, as well as the memory of her warmth in his arms, seemed to swim before his eyes in the darkness every night before he slept; he felt, with an almost tactile memory, her kiss on his mouth, her frail and frightened body in his arms, and the shock after she had broken away and run from him. At first he had been half angry:
She
had initiated the contact. Why now should she break away as if he had attempted rape?

Then, slowly and painfully, understanding came.

He had broken the strictest law of the Comyn. A Keeper was a pledged virgin, trained lengthily for her work, body and brain given lengthy conditioning for the most difficult task on Darkover. To every man in the Domains, Elorie was inviolate. A Keeper,
tenerésteis
, never to be touched by lust or even by the purest love.

He had heard what they said—and worse, felt what they felt—about Cleindori, who had broken this vow. (And she, too, with one of the despised Terrans.)

In his old life Kerwin might have defended himself, saying that Elorie had invited his advances. She had first touched him, first raised her lips to his. But after a time of training in the unsparing self-honesty of Arilinn, there were no such easy evasions. He had been aware of the taboo, and of Elorie’s ignorance; he was aware of the forthright way with which she showed affection to the others of her circle, completely confident in the taboo that protected her; to all of them, she was sexless and sacrosanct. She had accepted Jeff in the same way—and he had betrayed her trust!

He loved her. He knew now that he had loved her from the first time he laid eyes her; or perhaps before, when their minds touched through the matrix and he had heard her soft
I recognize you
. And now he saw nothing ahead of him but pain and renunciation.

Taniquel—his infatuation with Taniquel now seemed like a dream. He knew now that it had been gratitude for her acceptance, for her kindness and warmth; he was still fond of her, but what had been between them, for a time, could not survive any interruption of the sexual tie between them. It had never been anything like this overwhelming thing that swallowed up his whole consciousness; he knew that he would love Elorie for the rest of his life, even if he could never again touch her and she never showed the slightest sign of returning his love.

But worse than this was a terrible fear, knifing at his consciousness. Kennard had warned him of the dangers of nervous exhaustion, counseling him to remain apart from Taniquel during the days immediately before a heavy load of matrix work, to avoid depleting his energies. The Keepers, he knew, keyed themselves completely, body and mind, into the matrixes they operated; this was why they must never be touched by a hint of emotion, and far less by sexuality. His memory went back to his first night in Arilinn; Elorie’s dismay at the mildest flirtatious or gallant remark, her comment that Keepers trained lifelong for their work and sometimes lost the ability for it after a very short time. Neyrissa had underlined that there were no other Keepers, so that Elorie, unlike Keepers in the past, was not free to set aside her high office for marriage—or for love.

And now, when perhaps the very fate of Darkover rested upon the strength of the Arilinn Tower—and perhaps upon Elorie alone, when the strength of Arilinn rested upon the fortitude of their cherished Keeper—he, Jeff Kerwin, the stranger in their midst, the outsider they had taken to their hearts, had betrayed them and struck through the defenses of their Keeper.

And at this point in his thoughts Kerwin sat up and buried his head in his hands. He tried to blank out his thoughts completely. This was worse than Auster’s accusation that he was a spy, feeding information to the Empire.

Alone in the night he fought his way to the end of a hard-won battle. He loved Elorie; but his love for her could destroy her as Keeper. And without a Keeper, they would fail in the work they were doing for the Pan-Darkovan Syndicate, and the Syndicate would take that as permission to bring in the Terrans, experts in the remodeling of Darkover into the image of the Empire.

A traitor part of himself asked:
Would that be so bad?
Sooner or later, Darkover would fall into line. Every planet did.

And even for Elorie, he told himself, it would be better. No young woman should have to live like this, in seclusion, avoiding everything that made life worthwhile. No woman should have to know that her body is no more than a machine to transform the energies of matrix work! Even Rannirl had rebelled, and Rannirl was the chief technician of Arilinn. Rannirl had said that Keepers like Elorie were an anachronism in this day and age. If the Arilinn Tower and matrix technology could not survive except by the sacrifice of the lives of young women like Elorie, perhaps it did not deserve to survive at all. If their work for the Pan-Darkovan Syndicate failed, then Elorie need not be Keeper, and she was free.

Traitor!
he accused himself bitterly. The people of Arilinn had taken him in, a stranger, homeless, exile of two worlds, and accepted him as one of themselves, given him kindness and love and acceptance. And he was ready to strike at their weakest point; he was willing to destroy them!

Lying there in the night, he willed himself to give up Elorie. She was the one that mattered; and her choice was to be Keeper, and remain Keeper. At whatever cost to himself in renunciation and agony, her peace of mind must never be endangered.

On the morning of the fourth day he heard her voice on the stairs. He had fought himself to acceptance, but at the sound of her soft voice it all surged up; he went back and flung himself down blindly, willing himself to calm through the blind ache and rebellion in him.
Oh, Elorie, Elorie ...
He could not face her yet.