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“And you made sure
she
 
would not fail,” Damon said, enraged, “by altering her channels so she
 
could

not mature!”

“I am a Keeper,” Leonie said angrily, “and responsible only to my own conscience! And she consented to what was done. Could I foresee that her fancy would light on this
 
Terranan
 
, and her oath would be as nothing to her?”

Before Damon’s accusing silence she added, defensively, “And even so, Damon, I love her, I could not

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bear her unhappiness! Had I believed it only a childish fancy, I would have brought her back here to Arilinn with me. I would have showered her with so much love and tenderness that she would never regret her Terran lover. And yet… and yet she made me believe…” In the fluid levels of the overworld, Damon could see and share with Leonie the image Leonie had seen in Callista’s mind: Callista lying in Andrew’s arms, spent and vulnerable, as he carried her from the caves of Corresanti.

Now that he had seen her, if only reflected in Leonie’s mind, as she might have been, undamaged,unchanged—having once seen Callista like that—he knew he would never be content until he had seenher so again. He said quietly, “I cannot believe you would have done this if you did not believe it could beundone.”

“I am a Keeper,” she repeated indomitably, “and responsible only to my own conscience.”

This was true. By the law of the Towers, a Keeper was infallible, her lightest word law where everymember of her circle was concerned. Yet Damon persisted.

“If it was so, why did you not neuter her, and have done with it?” She was silent. At last she said, “You speak so because you are a man, Damon, and to you a woman is nothing but a wife, an instrument to give you sons, to pass on your precious Comyn heritage. I have other purposes. Damon, I was so weary, and I felt I could not bear to spend my energy and strength, to put all my heart into her for years and years, and then watch her waken, and go from me into some man’s arms. Or, like Hilary, to sicken and suffer the tortures of a damned soul with every waxing moon. It was not selfishness, Damon! It was not only a longing to lay down my own work and have rest! I loved her as I had never loved Hilary. I knew she would not fail, but I feared she was too strong to give way, even under such suffering as Hilary’s, that she would endure it—as I did, Damon—year after long year. So I spared her this, as I had the right to do.” She added defiantly, “I was her Keeper!”

“And you removed her right to choose!” .

“No woman of the Comyn has choice,” Leonie said almost in a whisper, “not truly. I did not choose to be Keeper, or to be sent to a Tower. I was a Hastur, and it was my destiny, just as the destiny of my playmates was to marry and bear sons to their clans. And it was not irrevocable. In my own childhood I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she told me it was reversible. She told me it was lawful, where neutering was not, so that women might be reclaimed, if their parents chose, for those dynastic marriages so dear to Comyn hearts, and there was no chance of impairing the precious fertility of a Comyn daughter!” The sarcasm in her voice was so bitter that Damon quailed.

“It is reversible—how?” Damon demanded. “Callista cannot live like this, neither Keeper nor free.”

“I do not know,” Leonie said. “When it was done, I never believed it would have to be reversed, and so I made no plans for this day. But I was glad—as near as anything could make me glad—when she told me I had wrought less well than I thought.” Again he shared with Leonie the brief vision of Callista in Andrew’s arms as he carried her from Corresanti. “But it seems she was mistaken.”

Leonie looked wrung and exhausted. “Damon, Damon, let her come back to us! Is it so evil a thing, thatshe should be Lady of Arilinn? Why should she give that up, to be wife to some
 
Terranan
 
and bear hishalf-caste brats?”

Damon answered, and knew his voice was shaking, “If she wished to be Lady of Arilinn, I would laydown my life defending her right to remain so. But she has chosen otherwise. She is wife to an honorableman I am proud to call brother, and I do not want to see their happiness destroyed. But even if Andrew

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were not my friend, I would defend Callista’s right to order her life as she will. To lay down the title of Lady of Arilinn, if she so desires, to be wife to a charcoal-burner in the forest, or to take up sword like the Lady Bruna her foremother and command the Guards in her brother’s place! It is
 
her
 
life, Leonie, not mine or yours!”

Leonie buried her face in her hands. Her voice was sick and choked. “Be it so, then. She shall havechoice, though I had none, though you had none. She shall choose what you men of Darkover havecalled the only fit life for a woman! And it is I who must suffer for her choice, bearing the weight of

Arilinn till Janine is old enough and strong enough to bear the burden.” Her face was so old and bitter that

Damon shrank from her.

But he thought that it was no true burden to her. Once, perhaps, she might have laid it down. But nowshe had nothing else, and it was everything to her, to have this power of life and death over them all, allthe poor wretches who gave their lives for the Towers. It meant much to her, he knew, that Callista hadto come to her and beg for what should be hers by right!

He said, making his voice hard, “It has always been the law. I have heard you say that the life of a

Keeper is too hard to be borne unconsenting. And it has always been so, that a Keeper is freed whenshe can no longer do her work in safety. You said it, yes, you are a Keeper and responsible only for yourown conscience. But what is it to be a Keeper, Leonie, if the conscience of a Keeper does not demandan honesty worthy of a Keeper, or of a Hastur!”

There was another long silence. At last she said, “On the word of a Hastur, Damon, I do not know howit is to be undone. All my search of the records has told me only that in the old days, when this wascommonly done—it was done after the Towers had ceased to neuter their Keepers, so that the sacredfertility of a
 
Comynara
 
need not suffer even in theory —such Keepers were sent to Neskaya. So Isought there for the records. Theolinda, at Neskaya, told me that all the manuscripts were destroyedwhen Neskaya was burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos. And so, although I still feel Callistashould return to us, there is only one way to rediscover what must be done for Callista. Damon, do youknow what is meant by Timesearch?”

He felt a curious rippling coldness, as if the very fabric of the overworld were wavering beneath his feet.

“I had heard that technique, too, was lost.”

“No, for I have done it,” said Leonie. “The course of a river had shifted, and farms and villages all along the watershed were threatened with drought or flood and famine. I did a Timesearch to discover precisely where it had run a hundred years before, so that we could divert it back into a course where it could run, and not waste energy trying to force it to flow without a natural channel. It was not easy.” Her voice was thinned and afraid. “And you would have to go further than I went. You would have to go back before the burning of Neskaya, during the Hastur rebellions. That was an evil time. Could you reach that level, do you think?”

Damon said slowly, “I can work on many levels of the overworld. There are others, of course, to which

I have no access. I do not know how to reach the one where Timesearch can be done.”

“I can guide you there,” Leonie said. “You know, of course, that the overworlds are only a series of agreements. Here in the gray world it is easier to visualize your physical body moving on a plain of gray space, with thoughtforms for landmarks”—she gestured to the dimly glowing form of Arilinn behind them—“than to approach the truth, which is that your mind is a tenuous web of intangibles moving in a realm of abstractions. You learned as much, of course, during your first year in the Tower. It is possible, of course, that the over-world is nearer the objective reality of the universe than the world of form, what

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you call the real world. Yet even there any good technician can see, at will, bodies as webs of atoms and

whirling energy and magnetic fields.”

Damon nodded, knowing this was true.

“It is not easy to get your mind far enough from the agreements of what you call the real world to be free of time as you know it. Time itself is probably no more than a way of structuring reality so that our brains can make some sense out of it,” Leonie said. “Probably in the ultimate reality of the universe, to which our experiences are approximations, there is no experience of time as a sequence, but past and present and future all exist together as one chaotic whole. On a physical level—of course that includes the level where we are now, the world of images, where our visualization constantly recreates the world we prefer to see around us—we find it easier to travel along a personal sequence from what we call past to present to future. But in reality even a physical organism probably exists in its entirety at once, and its biological development from embryo to senility and death is merely another of its dimensions, like length. Am I confusing you, Damon?”

“Not much. Go on.”

“On the level of Timesearch that whole concept of linear sequence disappears. You must create it for yourself so that you do not become lost in the chaotic reality, and you must anchor yourself somehow so that you will not regress your physical body through the resonances. It is like wandering blindfold in a mirror-maze. I would rather do anything in this universe than try it again. Yet I fear that only in such a quest into time can you find an answer for Callista. Damon,
 
must
 
you risk it?”

“I must, Leonie. I made Callista a promise.” He would not tell Leonie of the extremity in which the promise had been made, or of the agony she had endured, when it would have been easier to die, because she trusted that promise. “I am not a Hastur, but I will not forswear my word.”

Leonie sighed deeply. She said, “I am a Hastur, and a Keeper, responsible for everyone who has givenme an oath, man or woman. I feel now that if it were for me to choose, no woman would be trained as Keeper unless she first consented to be neutered, as was done in the ancient days. But the world will goas it will, and not as I would have it. I will take responsibility, Damon, yet I cannot take all theresponsibility. I am the only surviving Keeper at Arilinn. Neskaya is often out of the relays because Theolinda is not strong enough even now, and Dalereuth is using a mechanic’s circle with no Keeper, sothat I feel guilty keeping Janine at my side in Arilinn. We cannot train enough Keepers as it is now, Damon, and those we train often lose their powers while still young. Do you see why we need Callista soterribly, Damon?”

It was a problem with no answer, but Damon would not have Callista made a pawn, and Leonie knewit. She said at last, in wonder, “How you must love her, Damon! Perhaps it is to you I should have givenher.”

Damon replied, “Love? Not in that sense, Leonie. Though she is dear to me, and I who have so littlecourage admire it above all else in anyone.”

“You have little courage, Damon?” Leonie was silent for a long time and he saw her image ripple and waver like heat waves in the desert beyond the Dry Towns. “Damon, oh, Damon, have I destroyed everyone I love? Only now do I see that I broke you, as I broke Callista…”

The sound of that rang, timeless, like an echo, in Damon.
 
Have I destroyed everyone I love?

Everyone I love, everyone I
—
 
everyone I love
?

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“You said it was for my own good that you sent me from Arilinn, Leonie, that I was too sensitive, that the work would destroy me.” He had lived with those words for years, had choked on them, swallowed them in bitterness, hating himself for living to hear them or repeat them. He never thought to doubt them, not for an instant… the word of a Keeper, a Hastur.

Trapped, she cried out, “What could I possibly have said to you?” Then, in a great cry of agony: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with our whole system of training psi workers! How can it possiblybe right to sacrifice lives wholesale this way? Callista’s, Hilary’s, yours!” She added, with indescribablebitterness, “My own.”

If she had had the courage, Damon thought, bitterly or the honesty, to tell him the truth, to say to him, “one of us must go, and I am Keeper, and cannot be spared,” then he would have lost to Arilinn, yes, buthe would not have been lost to himself.

But now he had recovered something lost when he was sent from the Towers. He was whole again, notbroken as he was when Leonie cast him out, thinking of himself as weak, useless, not strong enough forthe work he had chosen.

Something was desperately wrong with the system of training psi workers. Now even Leonie knew it.

He was shocked by the tragedy in Leonie’s eyes. She whispered, “What do you want of me, Damon? Because I came near to destroying your life in my weakness, does the honor of a Hastur demand I muststand unflinching and let you destroy mine in turn?”

Damon bowed his head. His long love, the suffering he had mastered, the love he had thought burnedout years ago, lent him compassion. Here in the overworld, where no hint of physical passion could lenddanger to the gesture or the thought, he reached for Leonie, and as he had longed to do through manyhoepless years, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It did not matter that only images met, that theywere, in the real world, a tenday ride apart, that no more than Callista could she ever have responded tohis passion. None of this mattered. It was a kiss of such despairing love as he had never given, wouldnever again give to any living woman. For a moment Leonie’s image wavered, flowed, until she was againthe younger Leonie, radiant, chaste, untouchable, the Leonie for whose very presence he had hungeredfor so many anguished, lonely years, and tormented himself with guilt for the longing.