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I ca
Slowly his breathing began to come more smoothly, his laboring heart calmed. He knew with the remotest consciousness that Callista had gone into phase with him, regulating his heart and breathing, Now he could struggle upward again, although the stairs were gone. As his sense of struggling upward and upward grew more intense he began, desperately, to formulate the memory of the cliff-climbing, ice-and-rock techniques he had learned as a boy at Nevarsin, as if he were dragging himself up rough-cut hand- and footholds, fixing imaginary ropes and pitons to help him haul his reluctant body upward. Then he lost his body again, and all track of levels and effort, moving only by fierce concentration from darkness to darkness. In one of them there were strange, formless cloud masses and he seemed to wallow through bogs of cold slime. In another there were presences everywhere, crowding him, thrusting their intangible shapelessness against him, crowding… The very concept of form was lost. He could not remember what a body was, or what it felt like to have one. He was as shapeless, as everywhere-and-nowhere as they, whatever they were, everywhere interpenetrating. He felt sick and violated, but he struggled on, and after eternities this too was gone.
Finally they reached a curious, thin darkness, and Leonie, close beside him in the nowhere spaces, said, but not in words:
This is the level where we can slip loose of linear time. Try to think of moving along a river upstream. It will be easier if we find a single fixed place and move back from there. Help me find Arili
Damon thought Is Arili
Once, in his last year there, Leonie had collapsed inside the relays. He had carried her to her room and laid her on her bed. He had not at the time consciously noted a single detail of that chamber, yet he saw it now, dimly outlined on his mind and memory…
No, Damon! Avarra have pity, no!
He had had no notion of calling up that forgotten day, no desire to remember — Zandru’s hells, no! The memory had been Leonie’s, and he knew it, but he accepted blame for it and sought a more neutral memory. In the matrix chamber at Arili
Was I so harsh with her, so distant? Were you frightened of me, Callie? Zandru’s hells, why are we so harsh with these children!
Leonie’s hands touched him across Callista’s. How austere she had been, even then, how stern and lined her face had grown in a few years. But time swept backward and Callista was gone, had never been there. He stood before Leonie for the first time, a young psi monitor seeing for the first time the face of the Keeper of Arili
I can go no further, Damon. The Gods guard you, kinsman.
He reached for her in panic, but she was gone, would not be born for hundreds of years. He was alone, dazed, wearied, in a vast twinkling foggy darkness, only the shadow of Arili
Neskaya. He knew that Neskaya was the center of the secret. He let Arili
It was there again, not the sturdy cobblestone structure he had seen rising behind the walls of Neskaya City, but a tall, luminous, dim-glowing tower of pallid blue stone. Neskaya! Neskaya in the ages of its glory, before the Comyn had fallen to the poor remnant of today. He felt himself shuddering somewhere at the knowledge that he saw what no living man or woman of his time had ever seen, the Tower of Neskaya in the heyday of the Comyn.
A twinkling light began to dawn in the courtyard, and by its sparkle Damon saw a young man and remembered, in startlement and welcome, that he had seen this once before. He chose to interpret it as a sign. The young man was wearing green and gold, with a great sparkling ring on his finger — ring or matrix? Surely that delicate face, the green and gold clothing of an ancient cut, marked the young man as a Ridenow? Yes, Damon had seen him before, though briefly. He felt himself formulate with a curious emotional sense of relief. He knew that the body he wore on this complicated astral level was only an image, the shadow of a shadow. He was briefly aware of his own body, cold, comatose, cramped, a gasping tormented piece of flesh unimaginably elsewhere. The body he wore here in the higher level was unfettered, calm, easy. After such exhausting eternities of formlessness, even the shadow of form was a release of tension, almost an explosion of pleasure. A solid weight, blood he could feel pulsing in his veins, eyes that could see… The young man wavered, became firm. Yes, he was a Ridenow, a lot like Damon’s brother Kieran, the only brother Damon loved rather than tolerated with civility for their common blood.
Damon felt a rush of love for the stranger, who must have been one of his own remote forebears. He wore a long loose golden robe, cinctured with green, and surveyed Damon with a calm, kindly stare. He said, “By your face and your garments you are surely one of my own clan. Do you wander in a dream, kinsman, or do you seek me from another Tower?”
Damon said, “I am Damon Ridenow.” He began to say that he was not now a Tower worker, but it occurred to him that on this level time had no meaning. If all time co-existed — as it must — then the time when he had been psi technician was as real, as present, as the time when he lay in Armida, searching. “Damon Ridenow, Third in Arili
The young man said gently, “Surely you dream, or you are mad, or astray in time, kinsman. All the Keepers from Nevarsin to Hali are known to me, and there is no Leonie among them, nor no Hastur woman.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Shall I dismiss you to your own place, cousin, and your own time? These levels are dangerous, and no mere technician can tread them in safety. You may return when you have won the strength of Keeper, cousin, and that you have come here now shows me you have already that strength. But I can send you to a level that is safe for you, and wish for you as much caution as you have courage.”