THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR by Marion Zimmer Bradley

A savage animal, dark, sinuous, prowling an unexplored jungle. A smell of musk … claws at my throat …

Was this her idea of a joke? I broke the budding rapport, saying tersely, “This is no game, Thyra. I hope you never find that out the hard way.”

She looked bewildered. Unconscious, then. It was just the inner image she projected. Somehow I’d have to learn to live with it. I had no idea how she perceived me. That’s one thing you can never know. You try, of course, at first. One girl in my Arilinn circle had simply said I felt “steady.” Another tried, confusedly, to explain how I “felt” to her mind and wound up saying I felt like the smell of saddle-leather. You’re trying, after all, to put into words an experience that has nothing to do with verbal ideas.

I reached out for Marjorie and sensed her in the fragmentary circle … a falling swirl of golden snowflakes, silk rustling, like her hand on my cheek. I didn’t need to look at her. I broke the tentative four-way contact and said, “Basically, that’s it. Once we learn to match resonances.”

“If it’s so simple, why could we never do it before?” Thyra demanded.

I tried to explain that the art of making a link with more than one other mind, more than one other matrix, is the most difficult of the basic skills taught at Arilinn. I felt her fumbling to reach out, to make contact, and I dropped my barriers and allowed her to touch me. Again the dark beast, the sense of claws … Rafe gasped and cried out in pain and I reached out to knock Thyra loose. “Not until you know how,” I said. “I’ll try to teach you, but you have to learn the precise knack of matching resonance before you reach out. Promise me not to try it on your own, Thyra, and I’ll promise to teach you. Agreed?”

She promised, badly shaken by the failure. I felt depressed. Four of us, then, and Rafe only a child. Beltran unable to make rapport at all, and Kadarin an unknown quantity. Not enough for Beltran’s plans. Not nearly enough.

We needed a catalyst telepath. Otherwise, that was as far as I could go.

Rafe’s attempts to lower the fire and our experiments with water-drops had made the hearth smolder; Marjorie began to cough. Any of us could have brought it back to brightness, but I welcomed the chance to get out of the room. I said, “Let’s go into the garden.”

The afternoon sunshine was brilliant, melting the snow. The plants which had just this morning been thrusting up spikes through snow were already budding. I asked, “Will Kermiac be angry if we destroy a few of his flowers?”

“Flowers? No, take what you need, but what will you do with them?”

“Flowers are ideal test and practice material,” I said. “It would be dangerous to experiment with most living tissue; with flowers you can learn a very delicate control, and they live such a short time that you are not interfering with the balance of nature very much. For instance.” Cupping matrix in hand, I focused my attention on a bud full-formed but not yet opened, exerting the faintest of mental pressures. Slowly, while I held my breath, the bud uncurled, thrusting forth slender stamens. The petals unfolded, one by one, until it stood full-blown before us. Marjorie drew a soft breath of excitement and surprise.

“But you didn’t destroy it!”

“In a way I did; the bud isn’t fully mature and may never mature enough to be pollinated. I didn’t try; maturing a plant like that takes deep intercellular control. I simply manipulated the petals.” I made contact with Marjorie. Try it with me. Try first to see deep into the cell structure of the flower, to see exactly how each layer of petals is folded….

The first time she lost control and the petals crushed into an amorphous, colorless mass. The second time she did it almost as perfectly as I had done. Thyra, too, quickly mastered the trick, and Rafe, after a few tries. Beltran had to struggle to achieve the delicate control it demanded, but he did it. Perhaps he would make a psi monitor. Nontelepaths sometimes made good ones.