Thendara House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Bethany was explaining, in rapid-fire, how to use the voice-scriber, the throat-mike, the clearing key for erasure, the way in which the words would print on the screen before her. “You don’t have to speak out loud, just subvocalize.” She struck a key, and said, “Here, like this—watch.”

  On the screen, printed in luminous pale letters, the words appeared: HERE. LIKE THIS—WATCH. Jaelle swallowed as she slowly spelled them out.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just told this to the person who needs to know this?”

  Bethany shrugged. “I suppose it could be done that way, but we need it for records—then the next Director of Operations, and the one beyond him, will be able to get it in your own words, years from now.”

  “Why should anyone be interested, say, fifty years from now, when we are no longer here and Rumal di Scarp is dead?”

  “Well, it goes into the record,” said Bethany, sorely puzzled herself. That word again. “Even by next week, your memory will have distorted what happened… you really should have been debriefed, as Magda should have been, right after it happened, though I understand why it wasn’t possible—you all spent the winter snowed in at Ardais, didn’t you? But we have to get all this into the record, as clearly as we can. Then other Heads of Departments, or even people on other Empire planets, will have access to the information, even a hundred years from now. It all goes into the permanent record.”

  But that, Jaelle thought, was impossible; for anyone to report anything with that kind of permanent, frozen, once-for-all objectivity. She said, choosing her words to try and convey her distress, “But the truth I tell now about what happened at Sain Scarp is not the truth I would have told then. And what I tell now will not be the truth fifty years from now. I will have to recall all of it, fifty years from now, to see what the truth is then, because the only truth then will be what we remember—and not just me, but what Margali—Magda remembers, and what Peter remembers, and even what Lady Rohana and Rumal di Scarp himself remembers.”

  Bethany shook her head, clearly not understanding what Jaelle was trying to convey. “I’m afraid that’s too complicated for me. Just tell everything you can remember, and we’ll worry about that kind of ultimate truth some other time—all right?”

  “But whom am I reporting to?”

  “Does it matter? Tell it just the way you’d tell it to anyone who asked you what happened out there; put in every little detail you can think of—someone else will be editing the text and if there’s anything really irrelevant, she’ll cut it out.”

  “But how do I know what to say if I don’t know who I’m saying it to?” Jaelle asked, confused again. “I mean, if you asked me to tell you, I’d tell it one way, and if, say, the Comyn Council asked, I’d tell it another way—”

  Bethany sighed, and Jaelle could feel her frustration. She said, “I guess my casta isn’t as good as I thought. It sounded as if you were saying you’d tell two different stories to us and to your own people. That’s not what you mean, is it?” At Jaelle’s vigorous headshake, she nodded and said, “I didn’t think so; you look fairly honest to me, and Magda said nice things about you; I couldn’t imagine you being that two-faced. I’ll tell you what; just tell the story into the scriber, as if you were telling it to one of your Guild people, Elders—what’s the word—?”

  “Guild Mothers?”

  “I guess that’s it. Tell it as if you were telling one of your Guild Mothers, why don’t you?”

  She clipped the throat-mike, with its black snakelike attachment, to the neckband of Jaelle’s tunic. “That’s another good reason for wearing uniform; the standard uniform for your sector has a pocket in the neckband for a scriber-microphone and you can just tuck it in instead of messing around with clips.” She demonstrated on her own uniform tunic. Jaelle flinched a little at the thought of being hooked up to any machine, but she supposed she would get used to it. It wasn’t dangerous and she was not the barbarian they seemed to think her. It was up to her not to panic like a fish in a tree!

  “Now just talk into it softly, or even subvocalize; I won’t stand over you, it would only make you nervous, but I’ll be right over here at my desk if you need me for anything,” she said, and went away. Jaelle sat still, trying to decide what to do first. She said half aloud, “I’m still not sure I know how to handle this thing—” and heard the small humming and rattling sound; luminous letters swam on the screen and she saw in the slightly unfamiliar letters of Standard, her words in Casta: “I’m still not sure I know…”

  Chagrined, she pressed the clearing key and saw the letters disappear into flashes of light, as her paper cup and dinnerplate had vanished into nothingness. Is anything permanent here? she wondered; yet Bethany had been speaking of making her report accessible for all time. It was a sobering thought.

  She said slowly, “I don’t know where to start…” and as the machine hummed again, she saw the words appear in light on the screen. But this time it did not trouble her. How many times, she wondered, had she started out a report to Kindra, or to one of the Guild Mothers, of some mission accomplished or failed, with those very words? As if she had been sitting in the great gathering-room in Thendara Guild House, with the Guild Mothers and her sisters waiting to be told of what she had done, she began in a composed, formal way:

  “On a certain night about ten days before Midwinter, I was traveling north to Nevarsin Monastery. With me were a band of the Comhii-Letzii, with myself, Jaelle n’ha Melora, as elected leader, Gwennis n’ha Uriel, Sherna n’ha Lia, and Devra n’ha Rayna on their way to take the places of three of our sisters who had been living in Nevarsin to copy records there, and Camilla n’ha Kyria, my oath-sister, as escort and guard. Because of a severe oncoming storm, we camped in a travel-shelter situated half a day’s journey north of Andalune Pass. We found the place already tenanted by a band of strange men, about twelve in number; but invoking the traditional neutrality of the travel-shelters, we greeted them politely and made our camp at the opposite end of the building. Shortly after dark, a woman traveling alone, and in the ordinary dress of a Renunciate, entered the building; she identified herself as from Temora Guild House and was welcomed to our fire. This woman I learned later to be Magdalen Lorne—” She struggled with Magda’s Terran name and was quite sure that what appeared on the screen was not what Magda’s name looked like in Terran letters. She had once seen it written. She must have mispronounced it so grossly that the machine could not compensate and was reduced to a phonetic transcription of what she had actually said. She hit the clearing key and, biting her lip, called Bethany to ask the proper spelling.

  To her great relief Bethany showed no exasperation, no sense that she had asked anything terribly stupid; she matter-of-factly spelled it for her and went back to her own desk, and Jaelle went on.

  “We did not know her to be Terran or an Agent of Intelligence. We simply made her welcome among us and shared food as was traditional when Renunciates meet on the trail. While we were all sleeping there was a disturbance—”

  She went on, the words flowing smoothly now, telling how Magda had been attacked by one of the bandits, breaking the travel-shelter’s law of neutrality; when the men had been evicted from the shelter, Magda, under questioning, had been exposed as an intruder, and as the law provided, had been required to take the Oath. The next day Jaelle had turned over her leadership of the group to Camilla n’ha Kyria, in order to escort her new oath-daughter to Neskaya Guild House; when the others had gone, she and Magda had been attacked by two of the returning bandits and had fought them, in an encounter where Jaelle had been severely wounded. Magda, wounded herself, had saved Jaelle’s life; and although she could then have ridden away on her mission, had stayed to tend Jaelle’s severe and life-threatening wound. Later, Jaelle had discovered Magda’s true identity, and had gone with her to complete the ransom of Peter Haldane from Rumal di Scarp.

  She went on from there, briefly sketching in the encounter with a banshee-bird in the Pass of Sca
ravel, the ransom exchange, and the subsequent trip—what she could remember of it, since her memory of that time was blurred by the fever in her wound, and she remembered little of the journey except that Peter had taken her on his saddle when she could no longer ride alone.

  She said little about their stay in Castle Ardais, except that they had been treated with kindly courtesy by Lady Rohana and welcomed by Dom Gabriel with due and gracious hospitality, even though he did not approve of Renunciates. She mentioned very briefly that Rohana was her kinswoman, and had been her guardian in childhood; even more briefly, that she and Peter Haldane had agreed to marry, upon their return to Thendara, and had done so. If they wanted to know anything more than that, they would have to ask her. How did she know what they wanted to know, and what business of theirs was it, anyhow? She was willing to report the part she had played in Peter’s ransom—she supposed he would be reporting that from his own perspective— but while she would have gladly told her Guild Mothers how she had come to know Peter well, how she had clung to him during her illness, the growing closeness between them, and how she had first shared his bed after the Midwinter-festival, she was not going to report all that to a faceless machine, for Terrans who did not know either of them.

  Inside the windowless room she lost track of time, and only when she looked up and discovered that others were closing up their desks and stations did she realize that her stomach was reminding her fiercely of her sketchy and inedible lunch.

  When she stepped from the building into the spaceport HQ plaza, it was past sunset, and fine drizzling rain was falling. In the central cafeteria, which was at least spacious and well-windowed, she felt less claustrophobic than in the shut-in office with its clutter of desks; but everyone looked so alike in uniform that she did not see Peter until he actually touched her on the shoulder.

  “Jaelle! What are you doing-out of uniform?” But before she could explain, he went on, “I heard that somebody had tripped the monitors all over the station, but I never dreamed it was you!”

  She was astonished at the anger in his voice; she started to explain, but he was not listening.

  “Let’s get on line for dinner—there’s always a crowd about this time.”

  The food looked and smelled better than the synthetics which were all that had been provided in the other building at lunch; some of it was almost familiar, roasted meats and local grains and vegetables. She was relieved to see that Peter’s choices and her own were almost identical. Well, of course; he too had been brought up near Caer Donn and was used to Darkovan food. In every way that really mattered to her he was Darkovan, though his protective coloration was so good, here among the other Terrans. It was a disquieting thought; which one was the real Peter?

  He explained, too, why she had had to thrust her identity badge into the slot before releasing the food. “We’re entitled to a certain number of meals as an employee; extras are deducted from our pay. Let’s find a quiet corner, shall we?”

  There were no really quiet corners in the cafeteria, not as she understood the word, but they did find a table for two, and sat down together. Around them were laughing, talking workers, mostly in uniform or the white smocks with the emblem of Medic Services. There was a crew of what looked like road workers, still brushing snow from the heavy parkas they wore over their uniforms. It was not, she thought, so different from supper in the Guild House. She felt, for a moment, fiercely homesick. She thought of Magda, eating her first meal there. Then she looked across at Peter and smiled. No, she was here with Peter and it was where she wanted to be.

  But he still looked angry. “Damn it, you’ve got to wear uniform while you’re in the building, Jaelle.”

  She said stiffly, carefully, “It was explained to me that it creates a problem with the—the machinery. I will—try.”

  “What’s the problem, Jaelle?”

  She wondered if she could really make him understand.“It is—is immodest. It makes me look—too much woman.”

  Was he being deliberately obtuse? He smiled enticingly at her and said, “That’s the good part of it, isn’t it? Why don’t you want to look like a woman?”

  “That’s not what I meant—” she began, crossly, then broke off. “Why does it matter to you, Piedro? It is my problem, and I must deal with it in my own way. It you wish, I will explain that it has nothing to do with you—that you asked me to, and I refused.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said, harried. “I’m working under Montray now, and I’m in enough trouble with him without having him think—” he stopped, but to Jaelle, surprisingly, it was as if he had spoken aloud what was in his mind; think I can’t manage my wife.

  That did make her angry. She said, between clenched teeth, “Why should you think that it reflects on you?”

  “Damn it, woman,” he burst out. “You’re wearing my name! Everything you do reflects on me, whether you mean it to, or not! You’re certainly intelligent enough to understand that!”

  She stared at him in consternation, knowing that she would never understand. She wanted to get up and walk out of the cafeteria; she wanted to scream at him. She only stared at him, her hands shaking. But before she could move, a voice said behind her, “Peter? I was looking for you. And this must be Jaelle.”

  A tall, brown-skinned woman, with hair silvered white, picked up a chair and set it down at their table. “May I join you? I was talking to Magda this morning.”

  Peter’s face changed so rapidly that Jaelle began to doubt the evidence of her senses. “Cholayna? I heard on the grapevine that you were here. Jaelle, this was the head of Intelligence school when Mag and I trained there; Cholayna Ares.”

  The woman had a tray of the synthetics Jaelle had refused at lunch, but she ignored the meat and steaming vegetables on their trays. “May I join you? Or am I breaking in on a private discussion?”

  “Please do,” Jaelle said. There was nothing she wanted less than to be alone with Peter in this mood. Cholayna put her tray on the table and slid into a seat.

  “It’s nice to see someone dressed properly for this climate. I understand Magda tried to set an example by wearing clothes that fit the weather here, but those half-headed half-brains in the department couldn’t think of anything except their wretched machines. Who’s running this show, anyway? Old Russell Montray?” She made a small sound of scorn. “I wish someone in Head Center would show some intelligence and transfer him back to a Space Station; he might manage that and do it quite well. He’s not really stupid, you know, he simply has no patience with strange planets and alien customs. I thought the essence of being Coordinator on a Closed Planet was to understand the people and the native culture, so that when they got around to setting up a Legate they would know what kind of person to choose. But Montray seems to have made so many mistakes already that it will take a century or more to smooth out the troubles he has caused.I knew that before I had been on the job three days. Who sent him here? And whatever could they have been thinking?”

  “Political pull, I expect,” Peter said, “the wrong kind; not where he wanted the job and somebody with clout fixed it for him, but the kind where somebody wanted to get rid of him, pulled strings, and kicked him upstairs—and he wound up here. They may have thought it was isolated enough that he couldn’t make much trouble. Typical bureaucratic thinking—let him go make trouble somewhere else.”

  “Particularly stupid,” Cholayna confirmed with a nod. “This planet may not have a great deal of trade potential, but because of its location, it’s an important transit point; in twenty or so years, this will be one of the major intersecting spaceports anywhere in the Galaxy. If this fellow Montray has already created trouble with the locals, as it seems, it could take centuries to repair the damage. I’ve made a start, I hope, by putting Magda on detached duty, to try and analyze how we ought to be treating Darkovans, in contrast to how we are treating them. I will want information from you too on that, Jaelle. As for you, Peter, you know you really ought to be working ou
t of my office, not Montray’s; I hope he isn’t going to make it a status point to keep you there.”

  Peter muttered something Jaelle knew to be a polite noncommittal social noise, but once again her erratic laran carried his thoughts as if he had spoken them aloud.

  Not fair, dammit, I spent five years setting things up so that when Darkover got an Intelligence service I’d be at its head, and now some damned woman walks in and takes over. Bad enough playing second fiddle to Magda…

  She lost the contact then, but she had heard enough to make her look at Peter in dread and dismay. She liked Cholayna, and thought she would like working with her, in spite of the strange color of the woman’s skin and her unreadable dark eyes; but if Peter felt this way, what should she do?

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  « ^ »

  Magda

  As the doors of Thendara Guild House swung shut behind her, Magda thought, with a strange, desperate intuition, I must never look back. Whatever I was before this, I must leave it forever behind me, and look only ahead…

  Around her a great hall arose, panelled in dark woods and hung with curtains which gave an effect of space and air and light. The snub-nosed young girl had opened the door for her, directed her across the hall and said “The Guild Mother Lauria is waiting for you.” She looked curiously at Magda, but only shoved her through another door, where the Guild Mother, Lauria n’ha Andrea, head of the Independent Guild of Craftswomen in Thendara, and one of the most powerful women in the city, waited for her. Lauria was a tall, sturdy woman, her gray hair shorn close about her head, one ear bearing an earring with a carved ensign and a crimson stone. She rose and extended her hand to Magda.

  “Welcome, my child. You have been told, I know, that this will be your only home for half a year; until two moons past midsummer-day. During this time you will be instructed in our ways, and while you have the freedom of house and garden, you may not step outside the wall nor into the street, except on Midsummer-Festival when all rules are suspended, or under the direct orders of your oath-mother or one of the Guild Mothers.” She smiled at Magda and said, “You have shown us that you are willing to honor your oath, even though you took it unwilling; you will promise me to keep this rule, will you not? You are a woman grown, and not a child.”