Damon was turning over bunches of herbs. He said, “You must understand. Callista is past twenty. She’s a grown woman who has been doing difficult, highly technical work as a matrix mechanic for years. She’s an experienced professional in the most demanding work on Darkover. Now none of her previous training, none of her skills, nothing is any good to her at all. She’s struggling with deconditioning, and with sexual awakening, and she has all the emotional problems of any bride. And now, on top of all that, I discover that physically she’s been held in the state of a girl of twelve or thirteen! Evanda! If I had only known…”

Andrew looked at the floor. More than once, since the terrible fiasco of last night, he had felt as he imagined a rapist must feel. If Callista was, physically, an unawakened girl in her early teens — He felt a spasm of horror.

Damon said gently, “Don’t! Callista didn’t know it herself. Remember, for six years she’s been functioning as an adult, experienced professional.” Yet he knew this was not entirely true, either. Callista must have been aware of the enormous and ineradicable gulf between her and the other women. Leonie might have spared her protegeé some physical suffering, but at what price?

Well, it was a good sign that the menstrual cycle had spontaneously reinstated itself. Perhaps other barriers would disappear with nothing more than time and patience. He picked up a bunch of dried blossoms and cautiously sniffed. “Good, here we are. Kireseth — no, don’t smell it, Andrew, it does funny things to the human brain.” He felt the faint guilt of memory. The taboo against the kireseth, among psi workers, was absolute, and he felt as if he had committed a crime in handling it. He said, speaking more to himself than Andrew, “I can make kirian from this. I don’t know how to distill it as they do in Arilinn, but I can make a tincture…” His mind was busy with possibilities: a strong solution of the resins dissolved out in alcohol. Perhaps with Ferrika’s help he could make a single distillation. He put the stuff down, fancying that the smell of it was going to the roots of his brain, destroying controls, breaking barriers between mind and body…

Andrew paced restlessly in the still-room. His own mind was filled with horrors. “Damon, Callista must have known what could happen.”

“Of course she knew,” said Damon, not really listening to him. “She learned that before she was fifteen years old, that no man can touch a Keeper.”

“And if I could hurt or frighten her so terribly — Damon!” Suddenly he was overcome by the horror and revulsion which had gripped him last night. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what she wanted me to do? She asked me to… to knock her unconscious and rape her when she… when she could not resist.” He tried to convey some of the horror that had awakened in him; but Damon only looked thoughtful.

“It just might have worked, at that,” he said. “It was intelligent of Callista to think of it. It shows she has some grasp of the problems involved.”

Andrew could not keep back a horrified “Good God! And you can say it like that, so calmly.”

Damon, turning, suddenly realized that the younger man was at the edge of his endurance. He said gently, “Andrew, you do know what saved you from being killed, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything any more. And what I do know doesn’t help much!” He felt ragged despair. “Do you really think I could have—”

“No, no, of course not, bredu. I understand why you couldn’t. I don’t think any decent man could!” Gently, he laid a hand on Andrew’s wrist. “Andrew, what saved you — saved you both — was the fact that she wasn’t afraid. That she loved you, wanted you. So all she hit you with was the physical reflex she couldn’t control. She didn’t even knock you out; it was hitting your head on the furniture that did that. If she had been terrified and fighting you, if you had really been trying to take her unwilling, can you imagine what she would have thrown at you?” he demanded. “Callista is one of the most powerful telepaths on Darkover, and trained as a Keeper in Arilinn! If she had hated it, if she had thought of it as rape, if she had felt any… any fear or revulsion against your desire, you’d have been dead!” He repeated for emphasis, “You’d be dead, dead, dead!”

But she was afraid, Andrew thought, until Damon and Ellemir made contact… It was the awareness of Ellemir’s pleasure that made her want to share it! Even more disturbing was the thought of Damon, aware of Callista as he had been aware of Ellemir. Damon, sensing his distress, was for a moment shocked, experiencing it as a rebuff. They had all been so close, didn’t Andrew want to be part of what they were? He laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, a rare touch for a telepath, natural enough at this moment in the awareness of the intimacy they had shared. Andrew shrank from it, and Damon withdrew, troubled and a little saddened. Must he stay at such a distance? How long? How long? Was he brother or stranger?

But he said gently, “I know it’s new to you, Andrew. I keep forgetting that I grew up as a telepath, taking this sort of thing for granted. It will be all right, you’ll see.”

All right? Andrew asked himself. To know that only the fact that he had become an involuntary voyeur kept his wife from killing him? To know that Damon — and Ellemir — both took this kind of thing for granted, expected it, welcomed it? Did Damon resent his wanting Callista all to himself? He remembered the suggestion that Callista had made, remembered the feel of Ellemir in his arms, warm, responsive — as Callista could not be. Shocked, in desperate confusion, he turned away from Damon, blundering with horror to get out of the room. He was overloaded with shame and horror. He wanted — needed — to get away, anywhere, anywhere out of here, away from Damon’s too revealing touch, from the man who could read his most intimate thoughts. He did not know that he was virtually ill, with a very real illness known as culture shock. He only knew he felt sick, and the sickness took the form of furious rage against Damon. The heavy scent of the herbs made him afraid he would vomit. He said thickly, “I’ve got to get some air,” and pushed the door open, stumbling through the deserted kitchens and into the yard. He stood with the heavy snow falling all around him, and damned the planet where he had come and the chances that had brought him here.

I should have died when the plane went down. Callie doesn’t need me… I’m never going to do anything but hurt her.

Damon said behind him, “Andrew, come and talk to me. Don’t go off like this alone and try to shut it all out.”

“Oh, God,” Andrew said, drawing a breath like a sob, “I have to. I can’t talk any more. I can’t take it any more. Let me alone, damn it, can’t you just let me alone for a little while?”

He felt Damon’s presence like a sharp physical pain, a pressure, a compulsion. He knew he was hurting Damon; refused to know, to turn, to look… Finally Damon said very gently, “All right, Ann’dra. I know you’ve had all you can take. A little while, then. But not too long.” And Andrew knew without turning that Damon was gone. No, he thought with a shudder of horror, Damon had never been there at all, was still back in the little stone-floored still-room.

He stood in the courtyard, heavy snow blowing around him, its fury only a little abated by the enclosing walls. Callista. He reached for the reassurance of her touch, but she was not there, only a faint pulse, restless, and he dared not disturb her drugged sleep.

What can I do? What can I do? To his dismay and horror he began to weep, alone in the wilderness of snow. He had never felt so alone in his life, not even when the plane went down and he found himself alone on a strange planet, beneath a strange sun, in trackless unmapped mountains…