It was quiet in the barrack room, with more than an hour to go before daybreak. He was no longer drunk or fuzzy-headed, but there was a pounding pain behind his eyes.
Slowly he became aware that Danilo was crying in the next bed, crying helplessly, desperately, with a kind of hopeless pain. He remembered the crying in his dream. Had he heard the sound, woven it into nightmare?
Then, in a sort of slow amazement and wonder, he realized that Danilo was not crying.
He could see, by the dimmed moonlight, that Danilo was in fact motionless and deeply asleep. He could hear his breath coming softly, evenly, see his turned-away shoulder moving gently with his breathing. The weeping was not a sound at all, but a sort of intangible pattern of vibrating misery and despair, like the lost little crying in his dream, but soundless.
Regis put his hands over his eyes in the darkness and thought, with rising wonder, that he hadn’t heard the crying, but knew it just the same.
It was true, then. laran. Not randomly picked up from another telepath, but his.
The shock of that thought drove everything else from his mind. How did it happen? When? And formulating the question brought its own answer: that first day in barracks, when Dani had touched him. He had dreamed about that conversation tonight, dreaming he was his father for a moment Again he felt that surge of closeness, of emotion so intense that there was a lump in his throat. Danilo slept quietly now, even the telepathic impression of noiseless weeping having died away. Regis worried, troubled and torn with even the backwash of his friend’s grief, wondering what was wrong.
Quickly he shut off the curiosity. Lew had said that you learned to keep your distance, in order to survive. It was a strange, sad thought. He could not spy on his friend’s privacy, yet he was still near to tears at the awareness of Dani’s misery. He had sensed it, earlier that day, when Lew talked to them. Had someone hurt him, ill-treated him?
Or was it simply that Danilo was lonely, homesick, wanting his family? Regis knew so little about him.
He recalled his own early days at Nevarsin. Cold and lonely, heartsick, friendless, hating his family for sending him here, only a fierce remnant of Hastur pride had kept him from crying himself to sleep every night for a long time.
For some reason that thought filled him again with an almost unendurable sense of anxiety, fear, restlessness. He looked across at Danilo and wished he could talk to him about this. Dani had been through it; he would know. Regis knew he would have to tell someone soon. But who should he tell? His grandfather? The sudden realization of his own laran had left Regis strangely vulnerable, shaken again and again by waves of emotion; again he was at the edge of tears, this time for his grandfather, reliving that fierce, searing moment of anguish of his only son’s terrible death.
And, still vulnerable, he swung from grief to rebellion. He was sure his grandfather would force him to walk the path ready-made for a Hastur heir with laran. He would never be free! Again he saw the great ship taking off for the stars, and his whole heart, his body, his mind, strained to follow it outward into the unknown. If he cherished that dream, he could never tell his grandfather at all.
But he could share it with Dani. He literally ached to step across the brief space between their beds, slip into bed beside him, share with him this incredible dual experience of grief and tremendous joy. But he held himself back, recalling with an imperative strange sharpness what Lew had said; it was like living with your skin off. How could he impose this burden of his own emotions on Dani, who was himself so burdened with unknown sorrow, so troubled and nightmare-driven that his unshed tears penetrated even into Regis’ dreams as a sound of weeping? If he was to have the telepathic gift, Regis thought sadly, he had to learn to live by the rules of the telepath. He realized that he was cold and cramped, and crawled under his blankets again. He huddled them around him, feeling lonely and sad. He felt curiously unfocused again, drifting in anxious search, but in answer to his questioning mind he saw only flimsy pictures in imagination, men and strange nonhumans fighting along a narrow rock-ledge; the faces of two little children fair and delicate and baby-blurred in sleep, then cold in death with a grief almost too terrible to be borne; dancing figures whirling, whirling like wind-blown leaves in a mad ecstasy; a great towering form, blazing with fire …