HH_mirror

"Oh, we have not gotten nearly so far as that," said Renata ruefully, buttering a slice of some manner of sweet bread as she spoke. (It was banana nut bread. There are no bananas on Darkover.) "We are at work on the building of barriers. I shudder to think what it must have been like for her, reading others' thoughts, unable to shut them out completely or consistently. It would drive any telepath mad. The barrage of outside feelings and thoughts is part of what makes threshold sickness such a terrible thing. Evanda be thanked, the girl is at least past that age, though how she weathered it I cannot say. Any road, she overhears things, you might say; few of them things the persons whose thoughts they are would care to have shared. When she is with me there is quiet, of course, because I have been trained and can keep from broadcasting my thoughts. A good thing it is, too," she added, looking at him sideways, with a little smile.