By main force Regis held himself back from immediate apology. The smell of the porridge made him feel violently sick. He went to the stone shelf and laid himself down, wrapping himself in his riding-cloak and trying to suppress the racking shudders that shook his whole body. It seemed to him that he could hear Danilo crying, as he had done so often in the barracks, but Danilo was sitting on the bench, quietly eating his supper. Regis lay looking at the fire, until it began to flare up, flame—hallucination. Not forest fire, not Sharra. Just hallucination again. Psi out of control.
Still, it seemed that he could see Lew’s face, vividly, by firelight. Suppose, Regis thought, when I reached up toward him, drew him down beside me, he had flung me off, slapped me? Suppose he had thought the comfort I offered him a thing too shameful to endure or acknowledge?
I was only a child. I didn’t know what I was doing.
He wasn’t a child. And he knew.
Unable to endure this train of thought, he let the swaying sickness take him again. It was almost a relief to let the world slide away, go dim and thin out to nothing. Time vanished. He heard Danilo’s voice after a time, but the words no longer made sense; they were just vibration, sound without sense or relevance. He knew with the last breath of sanity that his only hope of saving himself now was to cry out, get up and move around, call out to Danilo, hang on to him as an anchor in this deadly nowhere—
He could not. He could not surrender to this; he would .rather die … and he heard some curious remote little voice in his mind say die, then, if it is so important to you. And he felt something like a giant swing to take him, toss him high, further out into nowhere with every swooping breath, seeing stars, atoms, strange vibrations, the very rhythm of the universe—or was it his own brain cells vibrating, madly out of control?
He’d done this to himself, he knew. He’d let it happen, too much of a coward to face himself.
“Call out to Dani, that inner voice said. He’ll help you, even now, if you ask him. But you’ll have to ask, you’ve made it impossible for him to come to you again unless you call him. Call quickly, quickly, while you still can!
I can’t—
He felt his breathing begin to come in gasps, as if he hung somewhere in the far spaces which were all he could see now, with every breath coming for an instant back to that struggling, dimming body lying inert on the shelf. Quickly! Call out now for help or you will die, here and now with everything left undone because of your pride…
With the last of his strength Regis fought for enough voice to shout, call aloud. It came out as the faintest of stifled whispers.
“Dani … help me …”
Too late, he thought, and felt himself slide off into noth-jingness. He wondered, with desperate regret, if he was dying … because he could not bear to be honest with himself, with his friend….
He swung in darkness, immobile, numb, paralyzed. He felt Danilo, only a dim blue haze through his closed eyes, bending over him, fumbling at his tunic-laces. He could not even feel Danilo’s hands except that they were at his throat. He thought insanely, Is he going to kill me?
Without warning his body convulsed in a spasm of the most hideous pain he had ever known. He was there again, Danilo’s face visible through a reddish blood-colored mist, standing over him, his hand just touching the matrix around Regis’ neck. Regis said hoarsely, “No. Not again—” and felt the bone-cracking spasm return. Danilo dropped the matrix as if it burned him and the hellish pain subsided. Regis lay gasping. It felt as if he had fallen into the fire.
Danilo gasped, “Forgive me—I thought you were dying! I knew no other way to reach your mind… .” Carefully, without touching it, Danilo covered the matrix again. He dropped down on the stone bed beside Regis, as if his knees were too weak to hold him upright.