The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Yet, when she walked that morning into Cholayna’s office, it struck her that she would very much like to confide in Cholayna.

  Yet—confide in a stranger, when she had not even told the father of her child? Was this only the habit of turning to another woman for comfort or validation? She remembered that she had sought reassurance, almost permission, of Magda, before she shared Peter’s bed, and had rationalized it by telling herself that she wished to be sure her friend would not feel jealous, because Peter had once been Magda’s husband.

  But Cholayna was her employer, not her friend or oath-sister!

  “Jaelle,” Cholayna said, “I am to talk this morning with one of the Renunciates, a—Guild Mother?” She hesitated, stumbling a little, on the title. “Her name is Lauria n’ha Andrea—did I pronounce that right? And I want you present as interpreter.”

  “It will be my pleasure,” Jaelle said formally, thinking that Mother Lauria had lost no time. “But you speak the language so well I do not think you truly need an interpreter.”

  Cholayna said with her quick smile, “I may pronounce the words properly, but I need someone to be sure I use all of them properly. Do you know what I mean by semantics? Not the meaning of the words, but the meaning of the meanings and the way different people use the same words to mean different things.”

  Jaelle repeated that she would be honored, and Cholayna started to speak into her communicator. “Ask the Darkovan lady—” and stopped herself. “No, wait. Jaelle, would you be kind enough to escort her into my office yourself? She is known to you.”

  Jaelle went to obey, thinking that Cholayna had an intuitive grasp of the right gesture, the personal touch, which would make her invaluable in dealing with Darkovans. Russell Montray did not have that intuitive sense. Yet Peter would have had it, or Magda, and she thought Monty would know, or be capable of learning it. And it was her personal responsibility to be sure that Alessandro Li learned it.

  Mother Lauria was in the waiting room, her hands composedly clasped in her lap, her clear blue eyes moving around the room, studying every detail.

  “What a pleasant place to work, Jaelle, though I suppose the yellow lights must be a little difficult to tolerate at first.” As they went into the inner office, she asked, “Is it proper courtesy to bow to your employer, as we would do to one of our own, or to clasp her hand, as Camilla has told me the Terrans do in greeting?”

  Jaelle smiled, for Cholayna had asked her the same sort of question. “For the moment, a bow will do,” she said. “She is well trained in our courtesy and knows that we do not offer our hand unless it is a sincere offer of friendship.”

  But as the two women bowed to one another, Jaelle suspected that beyond the courtesy there was, at once, a sincere liking for one another, tempered with mutual respect, as Cholayna welcomed Mother Lauria, urging her to a comfortable seat, offering her refreshment. “Can I offer you fruit juice or coffee?”

  “I would like to try your Terran coffee; I have smelled it in the Trade City,” said Mother Lauria, and as Cholayna dialled her a cup from the refreshment console, sniffed the cup appreciatively. “Thank you. An interesting mechanism; I would like to know how this arrived here. I still remember, when I was told that messages came over wires, looking up to watch for the papers to come swinging along the wire. It was not till much later that I realized that what traveled over the wire were electrical pulses. And yet the idea was logical to me at that time, though I know better now.” She took a sip of the coffee, and Cholayna briefly explained the refreshment console, that the essence of the drink was kept in stock there and immediately mixed and reconstituted with hot or cold water as the computerized combination required.

  Mother Lauria nodded, understanding. “And the yellow lights, they are normal for your home star?”

  “For the majority of the suns in the Empire,” Cholayna qualified. “It is rare for a sun to have as much red and orange light as the sun of your world, and many of the people who work here will not be here long enough to make it worth the trouble of adapting to a different light pattern. But if it is more comfortable for you, I can adjust the lights here to what you would consider normal.” She touched a control, and the lights dimmed to a familiar reddish color. At Jaelle’s look of surprise, she smiled.

  “It’s new; I had it done just the other day. It could have been installed all over the HQ if anyone had had the imagination to think of it. It occurred to me that if we are to have Darkovan women working in Medic, some compromise will have to be made between what is comfortable for natives to this planet, and career employees accustomed to a brighter sun. I, for instance, come from one of the more brilliant worlds, and I can hardly see in this light, so I must have a work area tasklighted for my own eyes. But this is restful when I am not reading.” She added, “I imagine that your eyesight is comparatively much better. On the contrary, I suppose you have less tolerance to ultraviolet—if you had sun reflecting off snow, for instance, you would need to be much more careful to guard against snowblindness.”

  “I have heard women who travel in the Hellers say that this is a problem for them,” Mother Lauria confirmed, “and I am sure you know that one of the major items of Terran trade here is sunglasses.”

  “While I can tolerate desert sunlight on my own world without any kind of eye protection,” Cholayna said, smiling, “and people from dimmer suns must safeguard themselves very carefully against sunburn or retinal burns; Magda told me that in her first week on Alpha she was nearly blinded. I have noticed that the normal lights in here are difficult for Jaelle to tolerate.”

  “I did not think you had noticed,” Jaelle confessed. “I have tried not to show discomfort.”

  “But that is foolish,” Cholayna said. “Your eyesight is valuable to us. There is no reason your quarters should not be wired for red light—Peter too was brought up on Darkover and would appreciate it, I am certain. It is only necessary to speak to the technicians. My own skin tones, too, are an adaptation by my people to a more brilliant sun,” she added.

  “That, I should think, would be one of the difficulties our people would have should they take to traveling in space.”

  “You are quite right,” Cholayna confirmed, “and if your women work among our medical technicians, we must make some kind of accommodation, for our lights, which are even brighter in Medic than up here, may make them uncomfortable or even damage their eyes. For instance,” she added to Jaelle, “I have noticed that whenever you have been in Medic, even though you have not complained, you seem to develop headaches.”

  It had not occurred to Jaelle before, but now she did realize it; that at least a part of her intense reluctance to go down to the Medic floors was an unconscious distaste for the more brilliant lights down there!

  “This is one of the reasons I came here,” Mother Lauria confessed, “I wished to see for myself the conditions under which our women, when they come to you for teaching, will be expected to work.”

  “It would not be difficult at all to arrange a tour of the Medical facility for you,” Cholayna said. “I can ask one of the Medic aides to show you around the hospital, or it can be arranged for a day when the new trainees can come with you. We have a standard orientation program in the Empire for planetary natives being given training. There are so few Darkovan employees now that it has not yet been done, and I am afraid that Jaelle, and a few of our others, have simply had to handle the cultural changes as best they can. But of course once we begin to have a number of them, such a program will have to be implemented at once—” She stopped, glanced at Mother Lauria and then at Jaelle.

  Jaelle said promptly, “I do not quite understand ‘orientation program’ myself, Cholayna, and I am sure Mother Lauria does not.”

  Cholayna explained, and Mother Lauria instantly comprehended.

  “It is like Training Session for newcomers to the Renunciates; even though they have not changed worlds, it is so different a life that they must be taught how to adapt,” she said. “I
think it would be best, then, Cholayna—” Jaelle noticed that Mother Lauria used the Empire woman’s given name easily, which she herself had not yet learned to do— “if you came to visit us in the Guild House and spoke to our young women. Then you could arrange the tour and orientation procedures. And it might be possible to arrange a similar program,” she added after a moment, “for Terran, or Empire, women who, like Magda, are to be sent into the hills and back country of our world, so that they will know how to behave, and—” her eyes twinkled—“not run the risks Margali, Miss Lor-ran, had to undergo.”

  Cholayna chuckled too. “That had occurred to me, of course. We would be very grateful to you, Lauria. It is not even a question of spying, but all of our women who work in such things as Mapping and Exploring occasionally have to take refuge, because of bad weather or something of the sort, in the outlands, and it is better if they know how to behave and do not outrage local opinions of how a lady should comport herself.”

  When Mother Lauria rose to go, they had arranged that in a tenday Cholayna should come to dine at the house, that Jaelle would accompany her, and that afterward she should talk with Marisela and the other women who had had some basic training in medical techniques. Later she would address the whole Guild House in House Meeting, and discuss the women to be given training. As Jaelle conducted her outside. Mother Lauria said, “I like her, Jaelle. I had expected a woman from another world to be more alien.”

  “I feared you would think her strange, and perhaps feel reserve or dislike, because she is so very alien,” Jaelle said, and Mother Lauria shrugged.

  “The colors of her skin and hair? I have traveled in the Dry Towns, child; I know their coloring and the bleaching of their hair are an adaptation to the desert; it is not strange to me that a woman from a brighter sun should have a different skin color. Beneath that skin she is a woman like ourselves. A roan horse and a black can travel equally far in a day’s journey, and I am not fool enough to judge her by the way the skin of her foremothers has adapted to protect her against the sun of her childhood. I was impressed, too, by the practicality of her clothing, for an active woman who must work among men.”

  Jaelle looked down self-consciously at her close-fitting Terran uniform. “That is strange, I still feel this clothing is not modest.”

  “But you were born and reared in the Dry Towns,” Mother Lauria said, smiling, “and all your childhood you knew that a woman’s garb was to make it easier for a man to see and admire her body. Beneath the Amazon, you are still a woman of the desert, Jaelle, as we are all the daughters of our childhood. I was born in the Kilghard Hills, I knew that a woman’s clothing was to keep her from the free movement of a man’s work. I admire your employer’s uniform, and what you are wearing, because they so admirably allow free movement, without false modesty. I am rebelling against one kind of restriction in women’s clothing, and you against one that is quite other.”

  Jaelle bit her lip and was silent. This was so much like what Cholayna had once said to her that she was beginning to wonder if it was really true.

  “I thought I had forgotten everything from the Dry Towns.”

  Lauria shook her head.

  “Never. Not in your lifetime. You were almost a grown woman when you left there. You can choose not to remember, as no doubt you have done; but not to remember should be choice, not failure.”

  To return to the outdoors, they had to pass through the hallway outside the Communications office, the “madhouse” as Magda had called it. As they passed, Bethany came out and almost stumbled into Jaelle.

  “Oh, Jaelle! I was coming up to Intelligence to look for you—you’re needed in Montray’s office, the Coordinator, that is. Something about a Mapping and Exploring plane down in the Kilghard Hills, and field people in to talk to the M & E people up here; Piedro’s there too, and they want you right away.”

  “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, knowi
ng 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.”