0744530001414191175 marion zimmer bradley - darkover worlds divided 03 by the blo

Author:the blo
Language: eng
Format: epub

They sent for him at moonrise. The Arilinn Tower felt strange and still in the deep night, and the matrix chamber was filled with the strange resonating quiet. They gathered, speaking in hushed voices, feeling the stillness as a living thing around them, a very real presence they hated to disturb. Kerwin felt slack, empty, exhausted. He noticed that Kennard was limping more than usual; Elorie looked sleepy and cross, and Neyrissa spoke sharply when Rannirl made some jocular remark.

Taniquel touched Kerwin’s forehead, and he felt the faint feather-touch of her thoughts, the swift sure rapport. He did not flinch away from it now. “He’s all right, Elorie.”

Elorie glanced from Taniquel to Neyrissa. “You monitor, Tani. We need Neyrissa in the circle,” she explained, at Neyrissa’s injured glance. “She’s stronger; and she’s been working longer.” To Kerwin, she explained, “When we’re working in a circle like this, we need a monitor outside the circle, and Taniquel’s the best empath we have; she’ll stay in rapport with all of us, so if one of us forgets to breathe, or gets a muscle cramp, she’ll know it before we do, and keep us from being too depleted or damaged. Auster, you hold the barriers,” she directed, adding, for the benefit of the newcomer, “we all drop our individual barriers, and he puts up a group barrier which keeps out telepathic eavesdropping; and he’ll sense it if anyone tries to interfere with us. In the old days there were alien forces on Darkover; perhaps, for all we know, there still are. The barrier around the gestalt formed by our minds will protect us.”

Kennard was holding a smaller matrix lattice— one of the glass-surfaced screens like the one they had constructed. He was turning it this way and that, toward each of them, frowning and making some small adjustments on a calibrated dial. Lights glowed here and there in its depth. He said, absentmindedly, “Auster’s barrier should hold, but just for safety’s sake I’ll put a damper on, and focus it around the Tower. Second level, Rannirl?”

“Third, I think,” Elorie said.

Kennard raised his eyebrows. “Everyone in the Domains will know that something’s going on in Arilinn tonight!”

“Let them,” Elorie said indifferently. “I already asked them to take Arilinn out of the relay net tonight.

It’s our affair.”

Kennard finished what he was doing with the damper, and began to lay the maps out on the table in front of them; and with them a large number of colored crayons. He asked, “Do you want me to mark the maps? Or shall we have Kerwin do it?”

“You mark them,” Elorie said. “I want Corus and Jeff in the outer circle. Corus has enough PK that sooner or later we’ll be able to do mining with him, and Jeff has a fabulous sense of structural perception. Jeff— ” She placed him just beyond Rannirl. “And Corus here.”

The great matrix lattice lay in its cradle before her.

Auster said, “Ready here.”

To Kerwin the moonlit silence in the room seemed to

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