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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.
    â€œLook 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?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” he said uneasily. “It hurt my eyes.” Then he had at least latent laran . Arousing it, though, might be a difficult and painful business. Perhaps a catalyst telepath could have roused it. They had been bred for that work, in the days when Comyn did complex and life-shattering work in the higher-level matrices. I’d never known one. Perhaps the set of genes was extinct.
    Just the same, as a latent, he deserved further testing. I knew he had the potential. I had known it when he was twelve years old.
    â€œDid the leronis test you with kirian ?” I asked.
    â€œShe gave me a little. A few drops.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œIt made me sick,” Regis said, “dizzy. Flashing colors in front of my eyes. She said I was probably too young for much reaction, that in some people, laran developed later.”
    I thought that over. Kirian is used to lower the resistance against telepathic contact; it’s used in treating empaths and other psi technicians who, without much natural telepathic gift, must work directly with other telepaths. It can sometimes ease fear or deliberate resistance to telepathic contact. It can also be used, with great care, to treat threshold sickness—that curious psychic upheaval which often seizes on young telepaths at adolescence.
    Well, Regis seemed young for his age. He might simply be developing the gift late. But it rarely came as late as this. Damn it, I’d been positive. Had some event at Nevarsin, some emotional shock, made him block awareness of it?
    â€œI could try that again,” I said tentatively. The kirian might actually trigger latent telepathy; or perhaps, under its influence, I could reach his mind, without hurting him too much, and find out if he was deliberately blocking awareness of laran . It did happen, sometimes.
    I didn’t like using kirian . But a small dose couldn’t do much worse than make him sick, or leave him with a bad hangover. And I had the distinct and not very pleasant feeling that if I cut off his hopes now, he might do something desperate. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, taut as a bowstring, and shaking, not much, but from head to foot. His voice cracked a little as he said, “I’ll try.” All too clearly, what I heard was, I’ll try anything .
    I went to my room for it, already berating myself for agreeing to this lunatic experiment. It simply meant too much to him. I weighed the possibility of giving him a sedative dose, one that would knock him out or keep him safely drugged and drowsy till morning. But kirian is too unpredictable. The dose which puts one person to sleep like a baby at the breast