This title would only appeal to a reader who already had a strong idea what the story was about. It was one of Marion Zimmer Bradley's last few Darkover novels. And one of her best.
The central character of the two-part story (the second part is titled Shadow Matrix) is a girl called Margaret Alton, one of my all time favorite characters. She's a girl who was born on the planet Darkover, which is very strange; its sun is blood-red, their culture is medieval, the people are pre-literate, and there's a sizable minority of people who are psychic, who are the nobility of that society. Lewis, Margaret's father, and his wife Diotima, Margaret's step-mother, are taken off-planet, and Margaret with them. But both Lewis and the child have psychic ability, and for years the little kid is tortured by the mental turbulence of her father.
Once she gets into her teens, Margaret escapes to University, which is a whole planet that functions as an academic center, and is finally taken into the home of a music professor. She settles into a career in music (specifically ethnomusicology,) and never goes home. She and her advisor travel to various planets, studying the primitive music of backward societies, until, unplanned, they're sent to Darkover, which certainly has what would be considered a typical backward society.
Well, the personality MZB gives Margaret is interesting. Margaret gradually discovers that she can read minds, and worse: she can mind-speak—very loudly—to others! She learns to moderate and control her voice. She's about 26, BTW.
The point is, the personality I have given Helen, is distressing similar to that of Margaret Alton! I had read the book when I was a teenager, and evidently was so impressed by the character of Margaret, that I borrowed it for my own story!
The MZB Darkover stories are—necessarily—on the border between SciFi and fantasy, because of the theme of psychic talent. In the earlier stories, set in the Darkover of thousands of years in the past, people with psychic talents could even fly; MZB gradually moved away from that idea, and towards more moderate abilities for the psychics. Margaret and her father, and her beloved, are able to 'talk' silently, but not a lot more than that. Well, actually, the story gets pretty wild in the second part, but to find out exactly in what way, you'll have to read the books yourself!
