“Lew, the Alton gift is the ability to force rapport. If I do have laran, could you open it up, make it function?”

I looked at him in dismay. “You fool. Don’t you know I could kill you that way?”

“Without laran, my life doesn’t amount to much.” He was as taut as a strung bow. Try as I might, I could not shut out the terrible hunger in him to be part of the only world he knew, not to be so desperately deprived of his heritage.

It was my own hunger. I had felt it, it seemed, since my birth. Yet nine months before my birth, my father had made it impossible for me to belong wholly to his world and mine.

I faced the torture of knowing that, deeply as I loved my father, I hated him, too. Hated him for making me bastard, half-caste, alien, belonging nowhere. I clenched my fists, looking away from Regis. He had what I could never have. He belonged, full Comyn, by blood and law, legitimate—

And yet he was suffering, as much as I was. Would I give up laranto be legitimate, accepted, belonging?

“Lew, will you try at least?”

“Regis, if I killed you, I’d be guilty of murder.” His face turned white. “Frightened? Good. It’s an insane idea. Give it up, Regis. Only a catalyst telepath can ever do it safely and I’m not one. As far as I know, there are no catalyst telepaths alive now. Let well enough alone.”

Regis shook his head. He said, forcing the words through a dry mouth, “Lew, when I was twelve years old you called me bredu. There is no one else, no one I can ask for this. I don’t care if it kills me. I have heard”—he swallowed hard—“that bredinhave an obligation, one to the other. Was it only an idle word, Lew?”

“It was no idle word, bredu,” I muttered, wrung with his pain, “but we were children then. And this is no child’s play, Regis, it’s your life.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” He was stammering. “It is my life. At least it can make the difference in what my life will be.” His voice broke. “ Bredu… ” he said again and was silent, and I knew it was because he could not go on without weeping.

The appeal left me defenseless to him. Try as I might to stay aloof, that helpless, choked “ Bredu… ” had broken my last defense. I knew I was going to do what he wanted. “I can’t do what was done to me,” I told him. “That’s a specific test for the Alton gift—forcing rapport—and only a full Alton can live through it. My father tried it, just once, with my full knowledge that it might very well kill me, and only for about thirty seconds. If the gift hadn’t bred true, I’d have died. The fact that I didn’t die was the only way he could think of to prove to Council that they could not refuse to accept me.” My voice wavered. Even after almost ten years, I didn’t like thinking about it. “Your blood, or your paternity, isn’t in question. You don’t need to take that kind of risk.”

“ Youwere willing to take it.”

I had been. Time slid out of focus, and once again I stood before my father, his hands touching my temples, living again that memory of terror, that searing agony. I had been willing because I had shared my father’s anguish, the terrible need in him to know I was his true son—the knowledge that if he could not force Council to accept me as his son, life alone was worth nothing. I would rather have died, just then, than live to face the knowledge of failure.

Memory receded. I looked into Regis’ eyes.

“I’ll do what I can. I can test you, as I was tested at Arilinn. But don’t expect too much. I’m not a leronis, only a technician.”

I drew a long breath. “Show me your matrix.”

He fumbled with the strings at the neck, tipped the stone out in his palm, held it out to me. That told me as much as I needed to know. The lights in the small jewel were dim, inactive. If he had worn it for three years and his laranwas active, he would have rough-keyed it even without knowing it. The first test had failed, then.

As a final test, with excruciating care, I laid a fingertip against the stone; he did not flinch. I signaled to him to put it away, loosened the neck of the case of my own. I laid my matrix, still wrapped in the insulating silk, in the palm of my hand, then bared it carefully.

“Look into this. No, don’t touch it,” I warned, with a drawn breath. “Never touch a keyed matrix; you could throw me into shock. Just look into it.”

Regis bent, focused with motionless intensity on the tiny ribbons of moving light inside the jewel. At last he looked away. Another bad sign. Even a latent telepath should have had enough energon patterns disrupted inside his brain to show somereaction: sickness, nausea, causeless euphoria. I asked cautiously, not wanting to suggest anything to him, “How do you feel?”

“I’m not sure,” he said uneasily. “It hurt my eyes.”

Then he had at least latent laran. Arousing it, though, might be a difficult and painful business. Perhaps a catalyst telepath could have roused it. They had been bred for that work, in the days when Comyn did complex and life-shattering work in the higher-level matrices. I’d never known one. Perhaps the set of genes was extinct

Just the same, as a latent he deserved further testing. I knew he had the potential. I had known it when he was twelve years old.

“Did the leronistest you with kirian?” I asked.

“She gave me a little. A few drops.”

“What happened?”

“It made me sick,” Regis said, “dizzy. Flashing colors in front of my eyes. She said I was probably too young for much reaction, that in some people, larandeveloped later.”

I thought that over. Kirianis used to lower the resistance against telepathic contact; it’s used in treating empaths and other psi technicians who, without much natural telepathic gift, must work directly with other telepaths. It can sometimes ease fear or deliberate resistance to telepathic contact. It can also be used, with great care, to treat threshold sickness—that curious psychic upheaval which often seizes on young telepaths at adolescence.

Well, Regis seemed young for his age. He might simply be developing the gift late. But it rarely came as late as this. Damn it I’d been positive. Had some event at Nevarsin, some emotional shock, made him block awareness of it?

“I could try that again,” I said tentatively. The kirianmight actually trigger latent telepathy; or perhaps, under its influence, I could reach his mind, without hurting him too much, and find out if he was deliberately blocking awareness of laran. It did happen, sometimes.

I didn’t like using kirian. But a small dose couldn’t do much worse than make him sick, or leave him with a bad hangover. And I had the distinct and not very pleasant feeling that if I cut off his hopes now, he might do something desperate. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, taut as a bowstring, and shaking, not much, but from head to foot. His voice cracked a little as he said, “I’ll try.” All too clearly, what I heard was, I’ll try anything.

I went to my room for it, already berating myself for agreeing to this lunatic experiment. It simply meant too much to him. I weighed the possibility of giving him a sedative dose, one that would knock him out or keep him safely drugged and drowsy till morning. But kirianis too unpredictable. The dose which puts one person to sleep like a baby at the breast may turn another into a frenzied berserker, raging and hallucinating. Anyway, I’d promised; I wouldn’t deceive him now. I’d play it safe though, give him the same cautious minimal dose we used with strange psi technicians at Arilinn. This much kiriancouldn’t hurt him.

I measured him a careful few drops in a wineglass. He swallowed it, grimacing at the taste, and sat down on one of the stone benches. After a minute he covered his eyes. I watched carefully. One of the first signs was the dilation of the pupils of the eyes. After a few minutes he began to tremble, leaning against the back of the seat as if he feared he might fall. His hands were icy cold. I took his wrist lightly in my fingers. Normally I hate touching people; telepaths do, except in close intimacy. At the touch he looked up and whispered, “Why are you angry, Lew?”