And met a perfect, locked defense, a blank wall. After a moment, I probed sharply. The Alton gift was forced rapport, even with nontelepaths. He wanted this, and if I could give it to him, then he could probably endure being hurt. He moaned and moved his head as if I was hurting him. Probably I was. The emotions were still blurring everything. Yes, he had laran potential. But he’d blocked it. Completely.
I waited a moment and considered. It’s not so uncommon; some telepaths live all their lives that way. There’s no reason they shouldn’t Telepathy, as I told him, is far from an un-mixed blessing. But occasionally it yielded to a slow, patient unraveling. I retreated to the outer layer of his consciousness again and asked, not in words, What is it you’re afraid to know, Regis? Don’t block it. Try to remember what it is you couldn’t bear to know. There was a time when you could do this knowingly. Try to remember….
It was the wrong thing. He had received my thought; I felt the response to it—a clamshell snapping rigidly shut, a sensitive plant closing its leaves. He wrenched his hands roughly from mine, covering his eyes again. He muttered, “My head hurts. I’m sick, I’m so sick….”
I had to withdraw. He had effectively shut me out. Possibly a skilled, highly-trained Keeper could have forced her way through the resistance without killing him. But I couldn’t force it I might have battered down the barrier, forced him to face whatever it was he’d buried, but he might very well crack completely, and whether he could ever be put together again was a very doubtful point.
I wondered if he understood that he had done this to himself. Facing that kind of knowledge was a terribly painful process. At the time, building that barrier must have seemed the only way to save his sanity, even if it meant paying the agonizing price of cutting off his entire psi potential with it. My own Keeper had once explained it to me with the example of the creature who, helplessly caught in a trap, gnaws off the trapped foot, choosing maiming to death. Sometimes there were layers and layers of such barricades.
The barrier, or inhibition, might some day dissolve of itself, releasing his potential. Time and maturity could do a lot It might be that some day, in the deep intimacy of love, he would find himself free of it. Or—I faced this too—it might be that this barrier was genuinely necessary to his life and sanity, in which case it would endure forever, or, if it were somehow broken down, there would not be enough left of him to go on living.
A catalyst telepath probably could have reached him. But in these days, due to inbreeding, indiscriminate marriages with nontelepaths and the disappearance of the old means of stimulating these gifts, the various Comyn psi powers no longer bred true. I was living proof that the Alton gift did sometimes appear in pure form. But as a general thing, no one could sort out the tangle of gifts. The Hastur gift, whatever that was—even at Arilinn they didn’t tell me—is just as likely to appear in the Aillard or Elhalyn Domains. Catalyst telepathy was once an Ardais gift. Dyan certainly wasn’t one! As far as I knew, there were none left alive.
It seemed a long time later that Regis stirred again, rubbing his forehead; then he opened his eyes, still with that terrible eagerness. The drug was still in his system—it wouldn’t wear off completely for hours—but he was beginning to have brief intervals free of it. His unspoken question was perfectly clear. I had to shake my head, regretfully.
I’m sorry, Regis.”
I hope I never again see such despair in a young face. If he had been twelve years old, I would have taken him in my arms and tried to comfort him. But he was not a child now, and neither was I. His taut, desperate face kept me at arm’s length.
“Regis, listen to me,” I said quietly. “For what it’s worth, the laran is there. You have the potential, which means, at the very least, you’re carrying the gene, your children will have it.” I hesitated, not wanting to hurt him further, by telling him straightforwardly that he had made the barrier himself. Why hurt him that way?