The Saga of the Renunciates (62 page)

“I will go as soon as I have escorted Mother Lauria to the gates,” Jaelle said in
casta
, which she knew Bethany spoke well, and introduced the woman to Margali. Mother Lauria greeted her kindly and added, “I wished to add; we would welcome some of your associates when you come to visit the Guild House. It is not right that women should be separated by language and customs. That is the kind of difference that matters more to men.”

Jaelle thanked her, but really she couldn’t see Bethany in a Guild House, even as a visitor. She called over her shoulder to Bethany. “Talk to Cholayna on the intercom; tell her I’ll go right down to Mapping and Exploring.”

“Right,” Bethany replied, and Jaelle, frowning, went down the escalators with Mother Lauria. The old woman, frowning, said, “I can well see that ordinary women in ordinary skirts would be endangered on a device like this! Truly, your uniforms are more sensible. But, Shaya, my dear, if you are wanted you must go at once to your work; I am neither so old nor so crippled that I cannot find my way out, even from this labyrinth!”

Jaelle gave the old woman an affectionate hug for goodbye. “It is only that I am reluctant to say goodbye to you—I miss all of you more than I thought I would,” she confessed.

“Then the remedy is simple, you must come back to us more often,” Mother Lauria said. Jaelle stood at the foot of the stairs, watching the small, sturdy, determined woman walk away through the uniformed people on the base. She was so much herself, Jaelle thought, and here everyone seemed all alike, as if they had put on the same face with their uniforms. Yet, as she stood watching Mother Lauria, she felt, suddenly, a little dizzy at the realization…

Every one of the Terrans here on this base, space workers around the big ships out there, technicians down in Medic or up in Mapping or Communications, the port workers who looked like thronging ants from the view station high above the Port where Peter had taken her one day to watch one of the ships taking off, the men and women who repaired machines or kept track of traffic on computer monitor screens, the Spaceforce men who guarded the port gates or kept order in the big buildings, even those who supervised laundry or cleaning machines or cleaned tables in the cafeteria—every one of these many people, more here on this small base than in the city of Thendara, every one of them was like Mother Lauria, a separate person with feelings and different ideas of his or her own, and perhaps if she knew and understood them as well as she knew Peter or Mother Lauria or Cholayna, she would understand that person and like or dislike him or her for what he was, not just as a “Terranan.” But of course, why have I never thought of this before? She stood without moving on the escalator until a uniformed Spaceforce woman in black leathers, hurrying down the escalator, pushed her gently aside as she ran.

Jaelle looked after her. She thought,
she is a fighting woman, she would appreciate knowing about us, the Amazons, how do I seek her out and make friends with her? What kind of training would make a woman choose that life among the Terrans
? She watched the leather-clad woman out of sight, and suddenly she knew that this woman was someone she would like, wished that she could follow her on her work… and at that moment it seemed that she heard an enormous babble of voices, disjoined fragments of thought, here, there, from the woman in leather, from the guard standing quiet at the gates, even though she could not see him it seemed that she looked through his eyes as he let Mother Lauria out of the gates, and at the same time she heard Piedro demanding to know where she was, she should hurry… he was up in the Coordinator’s office, pacing, and for the first time she saw Piedro through Russ Montray’s eyes, envy for the younger man’s freedom of movement, he had the work he wanted on the planet he wanted, and I am stuck here on this frozen lump of a world hanging over a desk… what the Coordinator wanted, she suddenly knew, was shining in her mind then, a glowing world of water and rainbows shining, and little shimmering gliders skimming over the water, and he saw his own son choosing a world where dressing like an animal in fur was real, and she looked down through strange eyes into the glare of a welding arc on some unimaginable part from the inside of one of the spaceships, and worked the arc with skilled fingers, knowing that the part was a Jeffrey coil and that metal fatigue would cause it to part in some strange stress… all this flared and blazed through her mind in a single instant, too much for any one to tolerate at once, and the stress from high in a Tower above the port where a woman’s hand hesitated over a communications device, bring the ship down now, or wait, no, half a second more, and someone scalding himself with a kettle of boiling soup up in the kitchen…

Then it all overloaded and Jaelle slid to the surface of the stair, collapsed and fell down half a dozen steps, jarring, unconscious, to the ground. Dimly she heard voices, concerned questions, someone pulling at her identification badge to see who she was, for the first time she understood through the eyes of the technician what the badges were for, and she saw someone hurrying down from Medic, and the immediate jangle of thoughts here, has she broken that wrist? She landed pretty hard…

No! No! It’s too much
!—Jaelle tried to scream but her voice was only a whimper, her hands went up to cover her ears but it was not sound and there was no way to shut it out. Then she overloaded and as she slid down into welcome unconsciousness she wondered what a fetal position was and why it should surprise them.

Piedro’s face wavered above her as she opened her eyes. A Medic pulled him away. “Just a minute. Mrs. Haldane, do you know where you are?”

She blinked and decided she did. “Medic—Section Eight, right?” Too late she realized that he had called her Mrs. Haldane and she had decided not to answer to that name.

“Do you remember what happened?”

She took a tiny mental peek at it, and decided she did not want to talk about it—
blazing stars, the battering of ten thousand thoughts, a Medic stitching up a torn eyelid, arclight flare, murder in an angry mind
—she slammed the doors of her mind on panic and confusion. “I think I must have fainted. I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.”

“That would explain it.” the Medic said, “Nothing much wrong, Haldane, if she wants to go back to work it’s all right—if she feels like it. If not, I’ll write her a half-day clearance.”

“God, I was scared,” Peter said, squeezing her hand, “when Spaceforce called that they’d found you unconscious on the stairway—you shouldn’t go around skipping meals, love.”

“I was late,” she evaded, and inside, irritation flared,
It doesn’t matter to him except that it made him late for that meeting with the Coordinator! He didn’t even think about what every Darkovan man would be eager to know about his wife
. And then she was confused, when he had made it clear that he cared about having a child she was angry and now when he seemed not to care she was angry again! She leaned on his shoulder, for a moment, but at the touch it came flooding back again and she straightened and drew away. He misinterpreted the gesture.

“Still feeling faint, love? We’d better stop by the cafeteria and feed you.” She demurred—they were already late in the Coordinator’s office—but he insisted on taking her down to the dining building and getting her a quick meal. She didn’t want it, but thought, it serves me right for lying, and forced the stuff down, hoping it wouldn’t come right up again. He had gone to great pains to fetch her things, from the limited lunch selection of synthetics, that he had seen her eat, and she was touched, but again she found herself carefully evading his fingertips, and after a moment she realized why.

Do I really think that if I touch him he will be able to read my mind? Where did I get that idea? Or is it that I do not want to know for certain that he cannot?

Still, it seemed his instinct had been right. The food seemed somehow to block the enormous overload of sensation and reduce it to manageable proportions. Had she been under less tension, she might have enjoyed the visit to the Coordinator’s office, high above the port with a vast view reaching from the Venza Mountains high above the city, and the Comyn Castle, at one edge of the sky, and at the other, a vast expanse stretching halfway to the plains of Valeron, dim and blue at the edge of an indistinguishable horizon. The Coordinator was there, with his son and Cholayna Ares and many people Jaelle did not know, admiring the view.

Alessandro Li was speaking of it as they came in: “Grand view you have up here, Russ!”

The Coordinator turned his back on it, shrugging. “Not my type of scenery and the sun’s the wrong color,” he said. “Can’t see worth a damn.”
I should imagine the natives would go blind
. It was a moment before Jaelle realized that he had not said that aloud. Damn it, if she was going to be hearing both what people would say and what they did
not
say, it was going to be an uneasy conference! It also occurred to her that he had been here quite long enough for his eyes to be as well adapted to the light as Magda’s or Piedro’s except that he had so carefully insulated himself from that light. She tried, as she found she could, to draw within herself and avoid the contact, and the effort turned her pale.

“We might as well get down to business,” Montray said, “Some of our field men came in last night with a report of a downed plane out in the Kilghard Hills. I think they’ve finally found Mattingly and Carr.”

“Remember, I’m new here,” Li said, “Who are Mattingly and Carr?”

It was Wade Montray, Monty, who answered.

“Mapping and Exploring,” he said. “About three, four years ago. Plane went down in the Kilghard Hills somewhere in a freak storm, and although we sent our airsearch people, we never saw a sign of it; we imagined it must have been buried in the snow somewhere in the wild country. Now some of our field people have spotted it—

“I can show you exactly where,” said one of the men, and unrolled a huge sheet of paper with markings on it which Jaelle did not understand, but his words told her it was intended for a map, a sort of aerial picture of the Kilghard Hills—or, rather, a symbolic representation of the Hills as they might look from high above. He pointed. “We have to get back the downed plane before the locals start salvage work—”

“Why would they do a thing like that?” someone asked.

It was Peter who answered

“This is a metal-poor planet,” he said, “the metal of the hull would make anyone who found it rich. Not that we’d normally begrudge the salvage. But the plane’s instrumentation—we don’t want them knowing what kind of surveillance we’ve been running on them.”

Li asked “They have no aircraft at all?”

“None to speak of. They do use gliders in the mountains, mostly as a recreational item, though I heard once that they were used for messages and fast relay in firefighting. As I said, we don’t want them to know how closely we’ve been studying their countryside outside the Trade Zone—treaty restricts where we can and can’t go, though they aren’t stupid and they must know we have some field people out. But I think we ought to hear whatever it was they said,” Peter added, and the man from Mapping and Exploring nodded. “Bring the people in.”

Cholayna said, “This is the sort of thing I am beginning to hope we can do openly with the new Darkovan employees. If their surveying techniques are primitive, they might find it useful, and good for trade relations as well.”

“You’d think so,” the Coordinator grumbled, “but they don’t seem to have invented it in all the years they’ve been here. If ever there was an example of a planet regressing to the primitive—

“I’m not so sure,” Cholayna dissented, but Alessandro Li said quietly, “Let’s hear the report first. We can argue about cultural acceptance later.”

The men who came in were apparently ordinary Darkovans, but they spoke flawless Terran, and Jaelle, curious about who they might be, without any attempt to reach for the information, found the awareness she needed. They were all the sons of Terran spaceport personnel from the old days at Caer Donn, mostly by Darkovan women of the lowest class from the spaceport bars and wineshops; they had been given Terran education, then sent back into fieldwork from Intelligence. Cholayna was thinking that this was all wrong, but that nothing could be done as long as the families of Darkovan women were adamant in rejecting the children of such mixtures. With irritation Jaelle switched off the knowledge and tried to follow what was going on.

The men had snapshots, too, which were passed around, and when they came to Jaelle she said, “I know this area. I have traveled near it—” and pointed to the peculiar configuration of one of the hills, like a falcon’s beak. “It is not too far from Armida—the Great House of Alton,” she added at a curious look from Cholayna. “Rafaella and I have escorted caravans past there.”

“Do you know the people at—what was it, Armida?” asked Li, and she shook her head ruefully.

“No indeed! I saw the old
Dom
Esteban, before he was lamed, once in the City, and once when I was a young girl I rode to Arilinn City and saw Lady Callista, who was Keeper there, riding out with a hawk. But know them? No indeed. They are the highest of Comyn nobility, folk of the Hastur-kind—” She chuckled. “To them, a Renunciate would be among the lowest of the low!”

“Yet you do have relatives among them,” Piedro said, “Lady Rohana at Ardais was hospitable to all of us for your sake, Jaelle.”

Li’s eyes were sharp on her, but Jaelle only said, “Oh, Rohana is a rare soul—she has no prejudice against Free Amazons and other low forms of life! Besides, my mother was her first cousin and I think they had been lovers when they were young girls in the Tower. Some of them are my kinfolk, but I assure you,” she added, laughing, “none of them would be proud to claim the relationship!”

“However that may be,” Russ Montray said dryly, “You do believe that you could find the place where this picture was taken, Mrs. Haldane?”

She took the rough aerial photograph and studied it.

“Unless a blizzard should cover it again,” she said, “which is not at all unlikely. But it is a difficult place to get into. I cannot imagine how a plane could have fallen so far. But then I do not understand how your planes stay up, so perhaps it is not surprising that I do not understand it when they do not. But we do not have to worry about finding it,” she added, “They will bring it to us.”