I was bruised and in pain, but there was a worse ache, a great gaping emptiness torn loose, that made me deathly alone.

They didn’t have to tell me that Marius was dead.

I had concussion. Kadarin’s second bullet had knocked loose a splinter of bone; and Marius’ death had been a shattering shock to the cells of my brain. The neuronic and synaptic links so recently made had all been torn apart again when he died, and for days my life — and sanity — hung in the balance.

I remember only shattering light and cold and shock, jolting movement, the pungency of drugs. Without any apparent sense of transition, one day I opened my eyes and found myself in my old rooms in the Comyn Castle in Thendara, and Linnell Aillard was sitting beside me.

She was very like Callina, only taller, darker, somehow gentler, with a sweet and childish face — although she was not really much younger than I. I suppose she was pretty. Not that it mattered. In every man’s Me there are a few women who simply don’t register on his libido. Linnell was never a woman to me; she was my cousin. I lay contentedly watching her for some minutes, until she sensed my look and smiled.

“I thought you’d know me this time. Head ache?”

It did. I felt awkwardly at the ache, discovered bandages. Linnell caught my hand gently away.

“How long have I been here?”

“Here in Thendara? Only two days. You’ve been unconscious for days and days, though.”

“And — Marius?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “He is buried at the Hidden City: The Regent gave him full Comyn honors, Lew.”

I freed my hand gently from hers and lay for a long time staring at lie pattern of light on the translucent walls. Finally I asked, “The council?”

“They rushed it through, before we came here to Thendara. The marriage ceremony will be Festival Night.”

Life went on, I was thinking. “Yours to Derik?”

“Oh, no.” She smiled, shyly. “There’s no hurry about that. Callina’s, to Beltran of Aldaran.”

I sat bolt upright, disregarding knifing pain. “Do you mean they’re still going through with that alliance? You’re joking, Linnelll Or is everyone mad?”

She shook her head, looking troubled. “I think that’s why they rushed it through; they were afraid you’d recover, and try to block them again. Derik and the Hasturs wanted to wait for you; the others overruled them.”

I didn’t doubt that a bit. There was nothing the Comyn wanted less than a capable Alton in council. I threw back the covers. “I want to see Callina!”

“I’ll ask her to come to you; you needn’t get up.”

I vetoed that. These rooms had been assigned to the Altons, during council season, for generations; they were probably well-monitored with telepathic traps and dampers. The Comyn had never trusted the male adult Altons too much. I wanted to see Callina somewhere else.

Her servants told me where to find her. I swung back an innocent-looking panel of curtain and a flood of searing light literally exploded in my face. Swearing, I flung my hands over my tormented eyes; the closed lids dripped red and yellow after-images, and a surprised voice spoke my name. The lights died down and Callina’s face swam into focus.

“I am sorry. Can you see now? I must protect myself, you know, when I work.”

“Don’t bother apologizing.” A Keeper among the matrix screens is vulnerable in ways ordinary people know nothing about. “I should have had more sense than to come in like that.”

She smiled and held the curtain aside for me to pass through. “Yes. They told me you were a matrix worker.”

And as she let the curtain fall, I suddenly became conscious of the subtle wrongness in her beauty.

One can tell everything about a woman by the way she walks. The very step of a wanton is suggestive. Innocence proclaims itself in carefree romping. Callina was young and lovely; but she did not move like a beautiful woman. There was something both very young and very old about her movements, as if the gawkiest stage of adolescence and the staid dignity of great old age had met, with no intermediary stage in her.

She let the curtains close, and the sense of strangeness vanished. I looked around the patterned walls, feeling the soothing effect of the even, diffused sonics. I had had an old, small matrix laboratory in the old wing, but nothing like this.

There was the regular monitor system, flashing with tiny star-like glimmers, one for every licensed matrix on every level in this section of Darkover. There was a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without confusing or inhibiting ordinary thought. And there was an immense panel with a molten-glass shimmer whose uses I could only guess; it might have been one of the almost legendary psychokinetic transmitters. Curiously prosaic, an ordinary screw driver and some glittering scraps of insulating cloth lay on a table.

She said, “You know, of course, that they got away with the Sharra matrix?”

“If I’d had the brains of a mule,” I said violently, “I’d have tossed it into a converter somewhere on Terra, and been well rid of it — and Darkover well rid of it too!”

“That would have put things out of control, forever; at best, Sharra was only dormant while the matrix was off-world. Destroying the matrix would have ended any hope of putting the activated sites out of action. Sharra isn’t on the master banks, you know. It’s an illegal matrix — unmonitored. We can’t monitor it until all the loose sites, and the free energy, is located and controlled. What was the pattern?”

I let her tune out the dampers, and tried to project the pattern on a monitor screen; but only blurs swirled against the crystal surface. She was contrite; “I shouldn’t have let you try that, so soon after a head injury! Come out of here and rest!”

In a smaller room, whose open sky-wall looked down into the valley, I relaxed in a soft chair, while Callina watched me, aloof and reflective. I asked finally, “Callina, if you knew the pattern, could you duplicate the matrix and monitor the focal sites with the duplicate?”

She didn’t even have to think it over. “No. I can duplicate a first or second level matrix like this—” She touched the tiny crystals that held her blue dress together over her breast. “And I might be able to construct a matrix lattice of complexity equal to the Sharra one — although I wouldn’t care to try it alone. But two identical matrices of fourth level or higher can’t exist simultaneously, in one universe and in time, without space distortion.”

“Cherillys’ Law,” I recalled. “A matrix is the only unique thing in spacetime, and thus existing without any equilibrium point, has the power to shift energy.”

She nodded. “Any attempt to make an exact molecular duplicate of a matrix like the one commanding Sharra — is it ninth level or tenth? — would warp half the planet right out of spacetime.”

“I was afraid of that,” I said, “but I told myself only a Keeper would really know.”

“Keeper!” She gave a short, wry little laugh.

At last she said, “Linnell told you, I suppose? Lew, it isn’t Just the alliance that bothers me. If they’re determined to put me out of the way, make sure I won’t seize council power-well, they will. I can’t stand against them all, Lew. If’ they think the alliance will help the Comyn, who am I to argue? Hastur is no fool. They could be right. I don’t know anything about politics. If I weren’t a Keeper, they wouldn’t even have asked my consent as a formality; they would say marry, and I would marry! I suppose one husband is as good as another,” she said, and again I had the curious impression of extreme and naive youth, superimposed on the beautiful woman who sat watching me. She spoke of her own marriage as a passive little girl, married by proxy to a doll, might speak. Yet she was a beautiful and desirable woman. It was uncanny!