I thought I had forgotten how to be happy.

And yet, that year on Vainwal, I was happy.  The planet is more than the decadent city of the pleasure world.  Perhaps we would have left it altogether - though not, perhaps to return to Darkover - but my father found the climate beneficial to his lameness, and preferred to stay in the city where he could find hot springs and mineral baths, and sometimes I suspect, companionship he could tolerate.  I've wondered sometimes, about that; but, close as we were, there are some things we could not - quite - share, and that was one area of itchy privacy I tried, hard, to stay away from.  I suppose it's hard enough with ordinary sons and their fathers.

When both father and son are telepaths, it becomes even more difficult.  During my years in Arilinn, working in the telepathic relays as a matrix mechanic, I had learned a lot about privacy, and what it has to be when all around you are closer than your own skin.  There used to be an old taboo preventing a mother and her grown son from working in the relays at the same time; or a father and his nubile daughter.  My father could mask his thoughts better than most.  Even so, I described that sort of thing, once, to somebody, as living with your skin off.  During these years of exile, we'd been so close that there were times when neither of us was sure which thought belonged to whom.  Any twto. solitary men are going to get on each other's nerves from time to time.  Add to that the fact that one of them is seriously and at least (let me not pass too lightly over this) intermittently insane, and it adds another turn of the screw.  And we were both extremely powerful telepaths, and there had been long periods of time when I had no control over what I was sending.  By the time I was even halfway sane again there were long periods of time where there was at least as much hate as there was love.  We had been too close, too long.

Not the least of what I had to be grateful to Dio for was this; that she had broken that deadlock, broken into that unhealthy over-preoccupation with one another's every hought.  If we had been mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, at least there would have been a taboo we could break.  For a father and son there was no such dramatic exit from the trap; or it seemed to us that there was not, though I cannot swear it never entered either of our minds.  We were both old enough to make such a decision, we were away from the world which had ingrained such taboos, and we were alone together in an alien universe, among the head-blind who would neither know nor care what levels of decadence we might choose to explore.  Nevertheless, we let it alone; it was, perhaps, the only thing we never tried to share, and I think it may have been the only way we kept our sanity.

My father was quickly enchanted with Dio, too, and I think he was genuinely grateful to her; not least because she had come between our unhealthy preoccupation with one another.  Yet, glad as he was to have some degree of freedom from my constant presence and to be free of fears for my continued sanity (and, though he had shielded them carefully from me, I was always aware of it, and a man watched constantly for signs of insanity will doubt his own sanity the more), the coming of Dio had left him alone.  He could not admit his helplessness; Kennard Alton never would.  Yet daily I saw him growing worse, and knew that a time would come, even if it had not come yet, when he needed me.  He had always been there when I needed him, and I would not leave him alone, a prey to age and infirmity.  So Dio and I found a home at the edge of the city, where he could call upon us when he needed us, and in the overflow of our own happiness, it was easy enough to spare him some time for companionship.