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until death or age freed me from theburden. And that too seemed a good life to me. Love, marriage, children—these things were not evendaydreams to me!”
    Her voice was trembling. Ellemir got out of bed and went to sit on the edge of her sister’s, taking herhand in the darkness. Callista moved, an unconscious, automatic gesture, to draw it away, then saidruefully, more to herself than Ellemir, “I suppose I must learn not to do that.”
    Ellemir said gently, “I do not think Andrew will appreciate it.”
    She felt Callista flinch from the words. “It is a… reflex. I find it as hard to break as it was hard to learn.”
    Ellemir said impulsively, “You must have been very lonely, Callista!”
    Callista’s words seemed to come up from some barricaded depth. “Lonely? Not always. In the Towerwe are closer than you can imagine. So much a part of one another. Even so, as Keeper I was alwaysapart from them, separated by a… a barrier no one could ever cross. It would have been easier, I think,to be truly alone.” Ellemir felt that her sister was not speaking to her at all, but to remote and unsharablememories, trying to put words to something she had never been willing to speak about.
    “The others in the Tower could… could give some expression to that closeness. Could touch. Could love. A Keeper learns a double separateness. To be close, closer than any other, to each mind within the matrix circle, and yet never… never quite real to them. Never a woman, never even a living, breathing human being. Only… only part of the screens and relays.” She paused, her mind lost in that strange, barricaded, lonely life which had been hers for so many years.
    “So many women try it, and fail. They become involved, somehow, with the human side of the other men and women there. In my first year at Arilinn, I saw six young girls come there, to be trained as Keeper, and fail. And I was proud because I could endure the training. It is… not easy,” she said, knowing the words ridiculously inadequate. They gave no hint of the months of rigid physical and mental discipline, until her mind was trained to unbelievable power, until her body could endure the inhuman flows and stresses. She said at last, softly and bitterly, “Now I wish I had failed too!” and stopped, hearing her own words and horrified by them.
    Ellemir said softly, “I wish we hadn’t grown so far apart,   breda   .” Almost for the first time, she spokethe word for sister in the intimate mode; it could also mean darling. Callista responded to the tone, ratherthan the word.

    “It was never that I didn’t… didn’t love you, or remember you, Ellemir. But I was taught—oh, you can’t imagine how!—to hold myself apart from every human contact. And you were my twin sister—I had been closest to you. For my first year, I cried myself to sleep at night because I was so lonely for you. But later… later you came to seem like all the rest of my life before Arilinn, like someone I had known only in a dream. And so, later, when I was allowed to see you now and again, to visit you, I tried to keep you distant, part of the dream, so that I would not be torn apart with every new separation. Our lives lay

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    apart and I knew it must be so.”
    Her voice was sadder than tears. Impulsively, eager to comfort, Ellemir lay down beside her sister andtook her in her arms. Callista went rigid against the touch, then, sighing, lay still; but Ellemir sensed theeffort her sister was making not to pull away from her. She thought, with a violent surge of anger,   Howcould they do this to her? It’s deforming, as if they’d made her a cripple or a hunchback   !
    She hugged her and said, “I hope we can find our way back to each other!”
    Callista tolerated the gesture, though she did not return it. “So do I, Ellemir.”
    “It seems dreadful, to think you have never been in love.”
    Her sister said lightly, “Oh, it is not as bad as that.