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“You knew this, and still made that choice for Callista?”

“What else could I do, Damon? Keepers we must have, or our world goes dark with the darkness of barbarism. I did what I must, and if Callista is even reasonably fair to me, she will admit it was with her consent.” And yet Damon heard, like an echo in Leonie’s mind, the bitter, despairing cry:

How could I consent? I was twelve years old!

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Damon said angrily, “Are you saying it is hopeless, then? That Callista must return to Arilinn or die ofgrief?”

Leonie’s voice was uncertain; her very image in the gray world wavered. “I know that once there was away, and the way was known. Nothing from the past can be wholly concealed. When I myself wasyoung I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she said that a way was known to reverse thisfixing of channels, but she did not tell me how and she has been dead more years than you have lived. Itwas known everywhere in the days when the Towers were as temples, and the Keepers as their priests. Ispoke truer than I knew,” she said, abruptly putting the veil back from her ravaged face. “Had you livedin those days, Damon, you would have found your own true vocation as Keeper. You were born threehundred years too late.”

“This does me little good now, kinswoman,” Damon said. He turned aside from Leonie’s face, seeing it waver and change before him, half Leonie as she had been when he was in the Tower, when he loved her, half the aging Leonie of today, as he had seen her at his wedding. He did not want to see her face, wished she would veil herself again.

“In the days of Rafael II, when the Towers of Neskaya and Tramontana were burned to the ground, all the circles died, with the Keepers. Many, many of the old techniques were lost then, and not all of them have teen remembered or rediscovered.”

“And I am supposed to rediscover them in the next few days? You have extraordinary confidence in me,

Leonie!”

“What thought has ever moved’in the mind of humankind anywhere in this universe can never be wholly

lost.”

Damon said impatiently, “I am not here to argue philosophy!”

Leonie shook her head. “This is not philosophy but fact. If any thought has ever stirred the stuff of whichthe universe is made, that thought remains, indelible, and can be recaptured. There was a time when thesethings were known, and the fabric of time itself remains…”

Her image rippled, shook like a pool into which a stone had been dropped, and was gone. Damon,alone again in the endless, formless gray world, asked,
How in the name of all the Gods at once can Ichallenge the very fabric of time
 
? And for an instant he saw, as from a great height, the image of aman wearing green and gold, the face half concealed, and nothing clear to Damon’s eyes except a greatsparkling ring on his finger. Ring or matrix? It began to move, to undulate, to give out great waves of light,and Damon felt his consciousness dimming, vanishing. He clutched at the matrix around his neck, tryingdesperately to orient himself in the gray overworld. Then it was gone, and he was alone in the blankness,the formless, featureless nothingness. Finally, dim on the horizon, he perceived the faint and stony shapeof his own landmark, what they had built there. With utter relief, he felt his thoughts drawing him towardit, and abruptly he was back in his room at Armida, Andrew bending anxiously over him.

He blinked, trying to coordinate random impressions.
 
Did you find an answer
 
? He sensed the questionin Andrew’s mind, but he did not know yet. Leonie had not pledged to help, to free Callista from thebondage, body and mind, to the Tower. She could not. In the overworld she could not lie, or conceal herintention. She wanted Callista to return to the Tower. She genuinely felt that Callista had had her chanceat freedom and failed. Yet she could not conceal it, either, that there was an answer, and that the answermust lie in the depths of time itself. Damon shivered, with the deathly cold which seemed to lie inside his

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bones, clutching his warm overtunic around his shoulders. Was that the only way?

In the overworld Leonie could not tell a direct lie. Yet she did not tell him all the truth either, he sensed,because he did not know where to look for all the truth, and there was still much she was concealing. Butwhy? Why should she need to conceal anything from him? Didn’t she know that Damon had alwaysloved her, that—the Gods help him—he loved her still, and would never do anything to harm her? Damon dropped his face in his hands, desperately trying to pull himself together. He could not face Ellemir like this. He knew that his grief and confusion were hurting Andrew too, and Andrew didn’t evenunderstand how.

One of the basic courtesies of a telepath, he reminded himself, was to manage your own misery so that itdid not make everyone else miserable… After a moment he managed to calm himself and get his barriersback in shape. He raised his face to Andrew and said, “I think I have a hint at the answer. Not all of it,but if we have enough time, I may manage it. How long was I out?” He stood up and went to the tablewhere the remnants of their supper still stood, pouring himself a glass of wine and sipping it slowly, lettingit warm him and calm him a little.

“Hours,” Andrew said. “It must be past midnight.”

Damon nodded. He knew the time-telescoping effect of such travel. Time in the overworld seemed torun on a different scale and was not even consistent, but something else entirely, so that sometimes a briefconversation would last for hours, and at other times a lengthy journey which, subjectively, seemed toendure for days, would flash by in the blink of an eye.

Ellemir appeared in the doorway, saying anxiously, “Good, you are still awake. Damon, come and lookat Callista, I don’t like the way she keeps moaning in her sleep.”

Damon set the wineglass down, steadying himself against the table with both hands. He came into theinner room. Callista seemed asleep, but her eyes were half open, and when Damon touched her shewinced, evidently aware of the touch, but there was no consciousness in her eyes. Andrew’s face wasdrawn. “What ails her now, Damon?”

“Crisis. I was afraid of this,” Damon said, “but I thought it would happen that first night.” Quickly he moved his fingertips over her body, not touching her. “Elli, help me turn her over. No, Andrew, don’t touch her, she’s aware of you even in her sleep.” Ellemir helped him turn her, sharing with him a moment of shock as they stripped the blankets from her body. How wasted she looked! Hovering jealously near as the lines of light built up in Callista’s body, Andrew saw the dull, faded currents. But Damon knew he did not completely understand.

“I knew I should have cleared her channels at once,” he said with hopeless anger. How could he make

Andrew understand? He tried, without much hope, to put it into words:

“She needs some kind of… of discharge of the energy overload. Yet the channels are blocked, and the energy is backing up—leaking, if you like—into all the rest of her system, and is beginning to affect all her life functions: her heart, her circulation, her breathing. And before I could—”

Ellemir drew a harsh gasp of apprehension. Damon saw Callista’s body stiffen, go rigid, arch backwardwith a weird cry. For several seconds a twitching, shuddering tremor shook all her limbs, then shecollapsed and lay as if lifeless.

“God!” Andrew breathed. “What was
 
that
 
?”

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“Convulsion,” Damon said briefly. “I was afraid of that. It means we’ve
 
really
 
run out of time.” He bent

to check her pulse, listen to her breathing.

“I knew I should have cleared her channels.”

“Why didn’t you?” Andrew demanded.

“I told you: I have no
 
kirian
 
for her, and without that I don’t know if she would be able to stand the

pain.”

“Do it now, while she’s unconscious,” Andrew said, and Damon shook his head.

“She has to be awake and consciously cooperating with me, or I could damage her seriously. And…

and she doesn’t want me to,” he said at last.

“Why not?”

Damon said it at last, reluctantly: “Because if I clear the channels, that means she goes back to thenormal state for
 
her
 
, a normal state for a Keeper, with the channels completely separated from thenormal woman’s state—cleared for psi and fixed that way. Back to the way she was before she ever leftthe Tower. Completely unaware of you, sexually unable to react. In effect, back to square one.”

Andrew drew a harsh breath. “What is the alternative?”

“No alternative now, I’m afraid,” Damon said soberly. “She can’t live long like this.” He touched the cold hand briefly, then went into his room where he kept the supply of herb medicines and remedies he had been using. He hesitated, but finally chose a small vial, came back, loosened the cap and poured it between Callista’s slack lips, holding her head so that it ran down her throat.

“What is that? What are you giving her, damn it?”

“It will keep her from going into another convulsion,” Damon said, “at least for the rest of the night. And tomorrow…” But he shrank from finishing the sentence. Even when he was doing this work regularly in the Tower, he had no liking for it. He shrank from the pain he must inflict, shrank, too, from the need to face Callista with the stark knowledge that she must sacrifice what little gain had been made with her maturing, and return to the state Leonie had imposed on her, unresponsive, immature, neuter. He walked away from Callista, rinsing and replacing the vial, trying to calm himself. He sat down on the other bed, looking at Callista in dismay, and Ellemir came to his side. Andrew still knelt by Callista, and Damon thought that he should send him away, because even in sleep Callista was conscious of him, her channels reacting to his physical presence even if her mind did not. For a moment it seemed as if he could see Andrew and Callista as a series of whirling, interlocking magnetic fields, reaching out toward one another, grasping, intertwining polarities. But where the energies should reinforce and strengthen one another, the forces were swirling and backing up in Callista, draining her strength, unable to flow freely. And what was this doing to Andrew? It was draining him too. By main force Damon turned off the perception, forcing himself to come back to the surface, to see Callista just as a desperately sick woman who had collapsed after a convulsion and Andrew as a concerned man, bending over her in dread and despair.

It was for this kind of thing that Leonie sent him from the Tower, he knew. She said he was toosensitive, that it would destroy him, he recalled, and then, for the first time in his life, rebellion came. Itcould have been a strength, not a weakness. It could have made him even more valuable to them.

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Ellemir came and sat down beside him. He stretched out a hand to her, thought, with an almostanguished need, how long it had been since they had come together in love. Yet the long discipline of thematrix mechanic held firm in his mind. It did not occur to him to think of breaking it. He drew her down,kissed her gently, and said, “I have to save my strength, darling, tomorrow is going to be demanding. Otherwise…” He laid a kiss into the palm of her hand, a private memory and a promise.

Ellemir sensed that he was pretending a cheerfulness and confidence he did not feel, and for a momentshe was outraged, that Damon did not believe she knew, or that he thought he could pretend or lie to her. Then she realized the hard discipline behind that optimism, the rigid courtesies of a telepath worker. Togive any mental recognition to such dread would reinforce it, create a kind of positive feedback, spiralingthem down into a self-perpetuating chaos of despair. She was, she reflected with a touch of cynicism,getting some hard lessons in what it was like to be bound so closely to a working telepath. But her loveand concern for Damon overflowed. She knew he did not want pity, but his greatest need, just now, wasto be freed of concern about whether he would have to compensate for
 
her
 
dread.

She must carry her own burden of fears, she cautioned herself. She could not lay them on Damon. Shetook his hands in hers, leaning over to return his kiss very lightly.

Gratefully, he drew her down beside him, holding her in the curve of his arm, a comforting, whollyundemanding touch.

Andrew glanced around at them, from where he knelt beside Callista, and Damon caught his emotions:fear for Callista, dread, uncertainty—
 
can Damon really help her
? —distress at what it would mean ifshe were to be wholly Keeper again, all her old conditioning intact with the cleared channels. And, seeing Ellemir lying close against Damon, curled up in his arm, a confused emotion that was not, really, evenjealousy. Callie and he had never had even this much… Damon’s pity for Andrew went so deep he hadto cut it off, stifle it lest it tear at him and lessen his strength for what he had to do tomorrow.

“You stay close to Callista. Call me if there’s any change, no matter how slight,” he said, and saw

Andrew draw a chair close to Callista, lean forward, lightly holding her limp wrist in his own.

Poor devil, Damon thought, he can’t even disturb her now. She’s too far gone for that, but he has to feelhe’s doing something for her, or he’ll crack. And the comfort he felt in Ellemir’s closeness was gone. With rigid discipline, he made himself relax, lie quietly at her side, loosen his muscles and float into thecalm state needed for what he had to do. At last, floating, he slept.