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may turn another into a frenzied berserker, raging and hallucinating. Anyway, I’d promised; I wouldn’t deceive him now. I’d play it safe though, give him the same cautious minimal dose we used with strange psi technicians at Arilinn. This much kirian couldn’t hurt him.
    I measured him a careful few drops in a wineglass. He swallowed it, grimacing at the taste, and sat down on one of the stone benches. After a minute he covered his eyes. I watched carefully. One of the first signs was the dilation of the pupils of the eyes. After a few minutes he began to tremble, leaning against the back of the seat as if he feared he might fall. His hands were icy cold. I took his wrist lightly in my fingers. Normally I hate touching people; telepaths do, except in close intimacy. At the touch he looked up and whispered, “Why are you angry, Lew?”
    Angry? Did he interpret my fear for him as anger? I said, “Not angry, only worried about you. Kirian isn’t anything to play with. I’m going to try and touch you now. Don’t fight me if you can help it.”
    I gently reached for contact with his mind. I wouldn’t use the matrix for this; under kirian I might probe too far and damage him. I first sensed sickness and confusion—that was the drug, no more—then a deathly weariness and physical tension, probably from the long ride, and finally an overwhelming sense of desolation and loneliness, which made me want to turn away from his despair. Hesitantly, I risked a somewhat deeper contact.
    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 unmixed 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