Thendara House (10 page)

Or pride… or pride… or pride…

And at the very moment when she was ready to rip herself from his arms, tear herself away from what had once been the greatest delight in the world, something within her body, deep in a part not subject to conscious will, told her,
no, not now, nothing will happen
…

She did not move or draw away from him; she simply lay quietly, not responding, yet too well bred to rouse a man and leave him unsatisfied. But whatever had been binding them together had withdrawn; he was still holding her, caressing her, but slowly, the desire in him ebbed as her own had done, and he lay looking at her, baffled and dismayed. She felt herself hurting inside at the trouble in his eyes.

“Oh, Piedro, I’m sorry!” she cried, at the very moment he released her, murmuring “Jaelle, I’m sorry - “

She drew a long breath, burying her head in his bare shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. I guess it’s just not - not the right time.”

“And you were already feeling rotten, with all the nightmares,” he said, generously ready to make for her the excuses she could not offer for herself; she knew it, and pain stabbed at her again. He got up, and went to fetch a couple of self-heating containers. “Look what I got for us; I know a fellow on the kitchen staff. Coffee; just what you need at this hour.” He pulled the tab for hers, and handed it to her, steaming. It was hot, anyhow, and the taste didn’t seem to matter. As she sipped it, he nuzzled her neck.

“You’re so beautiful. I love your hair when it’s this long. Don’t ever cut it again, all right?”

She smiled and patted his cheek, still rough where he had not yet shaved. “How would you feel if I asked you to wear a beard?”

“Oh, come on,” he said, appalled, “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

She laughed softly. “I only meant I wouldn’t ask it, love, it’s your face. And it’s
my
hair.”

“Oh, hell!” He rolled away from her, looking stubborn. “Don’t I have any rights, woman?”

“Rights? In
my
hair?” It touched the same raw nerve that the moment of deep seeing into his pride had touched; she set her lips and pushed the coffee away. She looked deliberately at the clock face and asked “Do you want to shower first?”

He rolled out and headed toward the bath, while she sat holding her head, trying to focus her eyes on the coffee containers and the wisps of steam that still leaked from them.

The room seemed to be pulsing, getting smaller and larger, higher now, then pressing down on her head.
Something
, she thought,
is wrong with me
. Peter, coming from the shower, saw her bending over, holding her head, fighting the compelling sickness to which she refused to give way.

“Honey, are you all right?” And then, with a smile of concerned pleasure, “Jaelle, you don’t suppose - are you pregnant?”

No
. It was like a message from deep within her body. She snapped “Of course not,” and went to dress. But he hovered near, saying “You can’t be sure - hadn’t you better check with the Medic anyhow?” and she thought,
how am I so sure
?

I refuse to be sick today, I simply won’t give in to it.

She said, “I have a report to finish,” and got out of bed. As she forced herself to move, the dizziness receded, and the world became solid again. She was accustomed, by now, to the Terran uniform, the long tights which were astonishingly warm for such thin material, the close-cut tunic. Peter, smelling of soap and the fresh uniform cloth, came to hug her, murmur something reassuring, and dash off.

He wasn’t like this at Ardais
, she thought fuzzily, and put that away in her mind to think about when it would be less disturbing.

She had long finished the reporting of her trip to Ardais and was working now in Magda’s old office in Communications, doing work she considered pointless, upgrading a standard dictionary - that was what Bethany called it - of Darkovan idioms. At least she wasn’t working with the damnable sleep-learner-tapes, though she imagined that the work would be transferred eventually to such a tape.

I wonder if the sleep-learner
-
what did Peter call it, D-alpha corticator
-
is what’s giving me these nightmares? Even he suggested that was a possibility! I’m never going to use it again
-
I’ll sleep on the floor if I have to
!

But she worked on conscientiously, upgrading outdated idioms and slang popular in her own childhood, recalling commonplace terms and vulgar language more common than the extremely polite ones. Well, this dictionary had been compiled - she remembered - by Magda’s father, years ago in Caer Donn. No one would have used vulgar idiom in front of a learned scholar who was, moreover, an alien. But there were phrases she knew that she would blush to include on a language program to be used before men; furthermore, she was a little doubtful if these particular idioms were ever used among women, except in the Guild Houses.

The fact is
, she thought, and wondered why it depressed her,
I do not really know how ordinary women talk, except for Lady Rohana. I went so young to the Guild House as Kindra’s fosterling
!

Well, she would do what she could, as well as she could, and that was all they could rationally expect of her. She was not fully aware that she was stiff with resentment at the unaccustomed uniform, the collar-tab which held the throat-microphone so that she was, for all practical purposes, wired into their machines, the tights which made her legs feel naked. Nakedness would not have bothered her at all, inside the Guild House with her sisters, but in an office where men came through now and again - though, admittedly, not very often - she felt exposed, and tried to pretend that her desk and consoles could conceal her from them. Once a man walked past her desk - not anyone she knew, an anonymous technician who had come to do something mysterious at Bethany’s terminal, pulling out wires and odd-looking slats and peculiar things.

So that’s Haldane’s Darkovan squaw. Lucky man. What legs…

She looked up and gave the man a blistering glare before she realized that he had said nothing aloud. Her face burning, she lowered her eyes and pretended that he wasn’t there at all. All her life she had been plagued with this intermittent
laran
that came and went with no control, forcing itself into her consciousness when she had no wish or will to know what was in another’s mind, and often as not, failing her when it would have been priceless. An unwelcome thought intruded on her now, but it was one of her own:

Was I truly reading Peter’s mind this morning, is that how he sees me?

No. I was sick, hallucinating. I promised him I’d see the Medic. I’d better go now and arrange it
. When the technician had gone, she asked Bethany:

“How do I arrange to see someone in Medic?”

“Just go up there, on your meal break, or after work,” Bethany told her. “Someone will make time to see you. What’s the matter? Sick?”

“I’m not sure,” Jaelle said, “Maybe it’s the - the corticator; Peter said it could give me nightmares like that.”

Bethany nodded without interest. “If it’s not adjusted properly it can do that. Don’t bother Medic with it; take the unit up to Psych and they’ll adjust it. But if the headaches or nightmares keep up, you probably ought to see a Medic. Or if you’re pregnant or something like that.”

“Oh, no,” said Jaelle promptly, then wondered,
how did she know, why was she so sure
? Maybe she had better check out the Medic after all. She would go on her meal break - she wasn’t hungry and the kind of food she could get at the cafeteria at lunchtime wasn’t the kind she would regret missing.

But shortly before the time when they left their desks for the meal, there was a curious beeping noise from her desk console.

She stared, wondering if she had broken something, if she would have to summon back that technician who had looked at her so offensively.

“Bethany - “

“Answer your page call, Jaelle - ” she saw that Jaelle did not understand, and said, “My fault, I forgot to show you. Push that button there - that round white thing that’s blinking.”

Wondering why they called it a button - it would certainly be hard to sew it on a coat or tunic - Jaelle gingerly touched the pulsing light.

“Mrs. Haldane?” The voice was unfamiliar and quite formal. “Cholayna Ares, Intelligence. Could you come up to my office? Perhaps you would be willing to have lunch with me; I would like to talk with you.”

Jaelle already knew enough about Terran speech patterns to know that the words, framed as a polite request, were actually a command, and that there was no question of refusal. She was in Magda’s place; the woman she had met last night in Peter’s company was Magda’s superior officer - at least that was one way of describing it - and therefore Jaelle’s as well. She said, trying to tailor her words to Terran forms of politeness, “I should be pleased; I’ll be there at once.”

“Thank you,” said Cholayna’s voice, and the light blinked off.

Bethany raised her eyebrows.

“Wonder what
she
wants? I’d surely like to know how she wangled this post out of Head Center! Intelligence, for heaven’s sake, when she couldn’t go into the field anywhere on this planet! Of course, all she has to do is sit in her office and boss everybody around like a spider in the middle of her web, but an Intelligence officer ought to be able to blend into the scenery, and she’ll never be able to do that here! Of course, Head Center may have forgotten what a freak this planet is, and I’ll bet anything Cholayna didn’t know when she put in for transfer here - “

“I don’t think I quite understand,” Jaelle said, wondering if she ought to be offended, “Why is this planet such a freak?”

“It’s one of the half-dozen or so Empire planets which were settled entirely by a homogeneous group, colonists from one ethnic area,” Bethany said. “And though there may have been a few blacks, orientals or what have you on the original ship’s crew, genetic drift and interbreeding lost those traits a thousand years before the Empire rediscovered you. A planet with 100 percent white population is rarer than a hen hatched out with teeth!”

Jaelle thought about that for a moment. Yes, she had noticed Cholayna’s bark-brown skin and bright brown eyes, but she had simply believed that perhaps the woman had nonhuman blood; there were tales in the mountain of crossbreeds with trailmen or even catmen now and then, though the
kyrri
and
cralmacs
did not, of course, interbreed with humans. “But in the Ages of Chaos,” she added, explaining this, “humans were often artificially interbred with
cralmacs;
I simply thought she was only part human, that’s all.”

“Don’t let Cholayna hear you say that,” Bethany said, with a shocked grimace. “In the Empire, calling someone half-human is the dirtiest - not the second dirtiest - thing you can say to them, believe me.”

Jaelle started to express her shock - what disgusting prejudice! - but then she remembered that among ignorant peoples, even here, there were certain prejudices against nonhumans, and there was no accounting for custom and taboo.
Don’t try to buy fish in the Dry Towns
. She held her peace, wondering why, with the vaunted Empire medical technology, they had not discovered or rediscovered this technique and why they did not make use of it.

She said “I had better go up to the Intelligence Office. No, thank you, I can find the way myself.”

Cholayna made Jaelle comfortable in a soft chair, and ordered up lunch for her from the console, which seemed to have more choices than the lunch cafeteria.

“I haven’t had much chance to talk to anyone Darkovan,” she said frankly, “and I know that on this planet I won’t be able to do field work; so I have to depend on my field agents. I’m here to organize an Intelligence department, not to work in it. I’ll have to depend on you, and on anyone else here who knows the planet and grew up in the field. I didn’t want to lose Magda Lorne, but I wasn’t given the choice. I want to feel I can rely on you, Mrs Haldane, as I would have relied on Magda. I hope we can be friends.”