“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 marry 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 wasa 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 laranson? I know some men in the Comyn manage it. I suppose that almost any two people with healthy bodies can give each other somethingin 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 they would rarely stand up to so close an examination. And after I went to Arilinn 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 in the Comyn. Are you for sale too, damisela?”

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 without 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 in 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 could 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?”