And yet he was suffering, as much as I was. Would I give up laran to be legitimate, accepted, belonging?
“Lew, will you try at least?”
“Regis, if I killed you, I’d be guilty of murder.” His face turned white. “Frightened? Good. It’s an insane idea. Give it up, Regis. Only a catalyst telepath can ever do it safely and I’m not one. As far as I know, there are no catalyst telepaths alive now. Let well enough alone.”
Regis shook his head. He said, forcing the words through a dry mouth, “Lew, when I was twelve years old you called me bredu. There is no one else, no one I can ask for this. I don’t care if it kills me. I have heard”—he swallowed hard—”that bredin have an obligation, one to the other. Was it only an idle word, Lew?”
“It was no idle word, bredu” I muttered, wrung with his pain, “but we were children then. And this is no child’s play, Regis, it’s your life.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” He was stammering. “It is my life. At least it can make the difference in what my life will be.” His voice broke. “Bredu …” he said again and was silent, and I knew it was because he could not go on without weeping.
The appeal left me defenseless to him. Try as I might to stay aloof, that helpless, choked “Bredu …” had broken my last defense. I knew I was going to do what he wanted. “I can’t do what was done to me,” I told him. “That’s a specific test for the Alton gift—forcing rapport—and only a full Alton can live through it. My father tried it, just once, with my full knowledge that it might very well kill me, and only for about thirty seconds. If the gift hadn’t bred true, I’d have died. The fact that I didn’t die was the only way he could think of to prove to Council that they could not refuse to accept me.” My voice wavered. Even after almost ten years, I didn’t like thinking about it “Your blood, or your paternity, isn’t in question. You don’t need to take that kind of risk.”
“You were willing to take it.”
I had been. Time slid out of focus, and once again I stood before my father, his hands touching my temples, living again that memory of terror, that searing agony. I had been willing because I had shared my father’s anguish, the terrible need in him to know I was his true son—the knowledge that if he could not force Council to accept me as his son, life alone was worth nothing. I would rather have died, just then, than live to face the knowledge of failure.
Memory receded. I looked into Regis’ eyes.
“I’ll do what I can. I can test you, as I was tested at Arilinn. But don’t expect too much. I’m not a leronis, only a technician.”
I drew a long breath. “Show me your matrix.”
He fumbled with the strings at the neck, tipped the stone out in his palm, held it out to me. That told me as much as I needed to know. The lights in the small jewel were dim, inactive. If he had worn it for three years and his laran was active, he would have rough-keyed it even without knowing it The first test had failed, then.
As a final test, with excruciating care, I laid a fingertip against the stone; he did not flinch. I signaled to him to put it away, loosened the neck of the case of my own. I laid my matrix, still wrapped in the insulating silk, in the palm of my hand, then bared it carefully.
“Look into this. No, don’t touch it,” I warned, with a drawn breath. “Never touch a keyed matrix; you could throw me into shock. Just look into it.”
Regis bent, focused with motionless intensity on the tiny ribbons of moving light inside the jewel. At last he looked away. Another bad sign. Even a latent telepath should have had enough energon patterns disrupted inside his brain to show some reaction: sickness, nausea, causeless euphoria. I asked cautiously, not wanting to suggest anything to him, “How do you feel?”