Cassie vanished. But Damon took Cleindori gently from her mother’s arms. “Listen to me, daughter, I know you are only a very little girl, but since you have done this, we must acknowledge that you are old enough to do it. Do you know where you are, chiya?”
“It’s the gray world. I don’t know what you call it. I think it’s the place I go when I dream, isn’t it?”
“That and more, little one. Have you been here before?”
Cleindori struggled to find words. “I don’t remember when I couldn’t come here. I always came here. I think I was here with Mama and Shaya before I was born. When Auntie Ellemir told me about how babies came, before Shaya was born, I was surprised, because I thought they came from the gray world. Because I used to talk to Shaya before she was a baby. She was all grown up here, and then suddenly she was a baby and couldn’t talk to me anymore except when we were here.”
Merciful Evanda! Magda thought. In childish words, Cleindori had explicated a metaphysical theory that was beyond her, and probably beyond all of them; except perhaps, Callista and Damon, who had studied these things.
Damon certainly understood. He hugged the small girl close and said, “But in that world down there, my darling, you are only a little girl, and your body is not strong enough for you to spend much time here. Do you remember Aunt Margali telling you that Shaya could not eat nutcake till her teeth were grown? Well, your body is not grown enough for this, Dori. You must stay in it until you know just how to leave it. You must come here only in dreams, little one; and especially you must not try to bring Shaya here until she is able to come and go without your help. Remember how you watched the chickens pecking their way out of the shell, and you wanted to help?”
She nodded soberly. “I did try to help one, and it died.”
“Then you know why you must not help Shaya do anything she is too young to do. She too may stray to this level in dreams. You may ask her to try to dream with you. But no more.”
“But when we’re dreaming we can’t stay here long enough.”
“No, but you can stay here as long as you are able, and it will not harm you. But you must not come here except in dreams, my daughter. Will you promise me that?”
She looked into Damon’s eyes, and Magda, still deeply in rapport with Damon, saw the child’s eyes, and they were not like a child’s eyes at all.
Then Cleindori said with unusual meekness, “I promise, Dada.”
“Then both of you, back to sleep,” said Damon with a gently banishing gesture, and both children vanished into wisps of dream. Extending her awareness, Magda could see the children in their cots, side by side, fast asleep.
Damon sighed. “She is too precocious! I knew it must come, but I never guessed it would come so soon!”
But before either of them could see further into his thought, he enveloped them all again in his concern and kindness. “You must stay in Thendara as long as you are needed. Believe us, we have been taking better care of the children than you might think, from this!”
The gray world was breaking up now into wisps of fog. As Magda felt herself withdrawing from it, knowing that soon the overworld would merge into normal sleep, and tomorrow this whole encounter would seem hardly more than a dream. For a moment, she felt all of them close and encircling her. In the wispy grayness she saw and briefly embraced Ferrika (the midwife had been out at the far end of the estate, waking and dozing by the bed of a woman in labor, and could not withdraw her waking consciousness even to greet her sisters), and also Colin of Syrtis, Lady Hilary’s husband (a brief, sweet moment, momentarily rousing again a passion that had burnt away to embers even before Shaya was born) and then once again, for a sudden long moment, suspended between time and space, she came face to face with her daughter.
A dream…
But of course there is some reality where Shaya is not a child at all. I must always remember that—remember that she is more than just the baby I held in my arms and nursed and cherished. Mothers who forget this do dreadful things to their children, she thought. And then it was all gone into the formless grayness and she was slipping down into her empty half-frozen body.
She crawled closer to Jaelle, hugging the other woman in her arms for warmth. For a moment, roused on a level that was not physical at all, as such work often left her aroused and excited, it seemed to her that she would like to make love to her freemate, all the tender little rituals of touching and reaffirming what was so strong between them. But Jaelle was already deeply asleep.
We do not need that now, when we can have this, she thought, feeling again the exultation of the moment when they had all been around her with that closeness stronger than any other known bond.
And then, with a longing that was both sweet and sad, she wished that she could share this bond too with Camilla.
Do we make love, Camilla and I, because we cannot share this? And why has she refused this for so long? A little ruefully, she remembered what Damon had told Cleindori, and realized that it was a lesson she too must remember.
As she drifted down into sleep, real sleep, Magda thought, I hope I can remember all this when I wake up!
* * *
Chapter Six
A few days later, Cholayna asked if Magda would address a group of women recruits to HQ services. She was glad to accept: at least it gave her the illusion that she was doing something useful.
She had never been really comfortable with public speaking— few Intelligence agents were; their training essentially prepared them for work outside the public eye. The newcomers to Darkover struck her as being very young; it was hard to remember that most of them were older than she had been when she was first sent into the field with Peter Haldane.
Two of the young women recruits were from Communications; Magda had worked there for a time, while it was still too difficult for women to operate independently as intelligence agents on a world with such rigidly structured gender roles as Darkover. Two were from Spaceforce itself. She wondered if these women had known, before they came here, that they could operate only inside the HQ Sector itself. Three were from Mapping and Exploring, and three more from Intelligence, Magda’s own service.
“And now,” Cholayna said after a few preliminary remarks, “I have brought someone here to speak to you all. I’m sure you already know her by reputation; she practically wrote, single-handed, all the documentation for fieldwork on this planet. Magdalen Lorne of Terran Intelligence.”
Magda was nervous enough not to have noticed who was in the audience, but as she made her way forward through the group of women she heard a small, almost scornful sound. She wondered, with a certain resignation, why Lexie Anders had chosen to attend this session. These women knew her only in terms of the Lorne Legend, for which she was not responsible. Whatever she had done, at the time she had done it, she had only been doing what any of them might do; simply muddling her way, from day to day, as best she could, through whatever she was given to do. She wondered, a little bitterly, how many other “legends” were simply victims of luck and circumstances.
She spoke only briefly, saying she could hardly give an impersonal assessment of Darkover; it was her home world, and she had been fortunate enough to be allowed to remain. She did warn them about some of the difficulties they would encounter as women working here, and ended by inviting them to attend the meeting of the Bridge Society. She answered several questions about languages and dress from the young Intelligence workers; but when the women from Mapping and Exploring asked technical questions about the planet, she said pleasantly, “I’m sure Lieutenant Anders can tell you more about that than I. Anders is an expert in that field. Lexie—would you take over?”
She felt, as Alexis came up from the back of the room, that she had done her duty. If Lexie still held any grudge against her, it was Lexie’s own problem, not hers. There would always be people who didn’t like you and that wasn’t always your fault.
She left Lexie to answer the technical questions, and went down to
the main cafeteria for something to eat.
Every now and then she had a craving for foods she could find only in the Terran Zone. She was looking about for a seat, tray in hand, when a voice said behind her, “We don’t often see you here, Mag. You’re looking well. What brings you today?”
“Cholayna asked me to talk to a group of her young recruits,” Magda answered, turning to face the Legate. “Hello, Peter, it’s nice to see you.”
“If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have asked you to stop by my office; I’m glad I ran into you.” Peter Haldane took her tray and led the way to an isolated table for two. Magda, about to protest, shrugged and held her peace. Whatever the Legate had to say to her, better he said it here, informally, than officially in his quarters.
There was constraint in his voice as he asked, “And Jaelle—is she well?”
“Oh yes, certainly.” After her own marriage to Peter had ended. Peter and Jaelle had been married, briefly and disastrously, for half a year. For a long time after that, Magda had not felt comfortable with Peter. She and Jaelle, after all, had chosen one another in a way that excluded Peter himself, and not many men could tolerate or understand that…
But that had all been a long time ago. Peter now seemed her earliest friend, one who shared an otherwise irrecoverable childhood. Like herself, he had grown up with Darkovans before the Terran HQ had been built in Thendara. In the intervening years, she had come to feel that their early marriage had been because Peter had seemed the only person alive that she could talk to, and vice versa. Everybody else either of them knew was either Terran or Darkovan, defined by that difference.
That had not, in the end, been enough to build a marriage on. Nevertheless, she felt they should manage to remain on good terms, despite the different directions their lives had taken.
Peter, like herself, had suffered all the pains of divided loyalties. That would, she hoped, give him a greater understanding of the Terrans over whom he must now serve as Legate. He had always belonged in the career diplomatic service anyhow and never, really, in Intelligence; and Magda had known it before he had.
Like Lexie, he was always competing with me, she thought, and since no one had ever accused Peter Haldane of having any trace of laran, she was shocked when his next words were, “You know Lieutenant Anders, don’t you, Mag?”
“Certainly I do,” she said, abandoning her attempt to finish a dish of custard. “Why do you ask?”
“I suppose Cholayna’s kept you up to date on the way she set us all by the ears here, with her plane going down?”
She lifted her eyebrows at him. “Then it wasn’t your idea to have Cholayna call me in as a psi-tech for her?”
His blank look was answer enough. “You? A psi-tech? It would never have occurred to me. I gather from that, then, that you know all about it?”
“I know the plane went down and that she ended up here. Even with a mind-probe, that’s all I found out. Is there something more I should have known?”
Peter answered with another question. “Then she hasn’t come to you with her latest wild idea?”
“Peter, I’m the last person Lexie would have come to. She’s never liked me. I’ve hardly spoken to her, except that night Cholayna called me in. All I know is what I found out then.”
“Well, in a word—Anders is convinced there’s a real city out there. She’s sure what she saw before the plane went down was not a hallucination, or a radar angel or mistaken ground signal, but a real city. Why not? Every developed planet in this galaxy has an installation which TI can, if necessary, conceal from radar and sky-spies. Why not this one?”
Magda thought that over for a minute.
“I can’t imagine it,” she said. “You know, and I know, the Darkovans have nothing like that.”
“You mean, nothing like that as far as we know.”
“No, I mean nothing like that! Peter, I’ve been working in a matrix circle now for six years. If there was anything like that in the Domains, believe me, I would know.”
“What about outside the Domains?”
“Your own satellite reports tell you, that’s impossible! Ask anyone in Comm or M-and-Ex.”
He bit his lip. “Nothing, you mean, that can be detected. How do we know we can detect everything? The available technology on Cottman Four couldn’t handle it, no. But that means nothing. Unofficial sources from outside Empire Civil Service could have set up a base here for some reason—mining, perhaps, or—”
“I can’t believe it, you’re talking Space Pirates!” Magda said, almost laughing.
Predictably, he reacted with annoyance. “Must you always make fun of everything you didn’t think of?”
“If I was making fun, Peter, it wasn’t of you,” she said, now completely serious. “It’s only—I can’t believe anything like that could have been set up there without being discovered by satellite, or space sensors; it’s hard to believe it could be done at all, though I suppose nothing’s impossible. Is that what Lexie believes?”
“Yes. And she wants to mount an expedition to find it. I thought she might have come to you because you were working in Intelligence here, and because she knows your Free Amazons are the best mountain guides on the planet.”
“As I said, Peter. I’m the last person she’d come to.”
“But if she did—”
“I’d tell her the idea’s completely mad. We have years of satellite observations to tell us there’s nothing— all right, nothing observable—outside the Domains. And I’ll bet there’s nothing, period. That area must have been uninhabitable since—well, I’m no expert on geology and crustal movement, but—certainly for a geological eon. Probably since the Hellers rose out of the sea bed. As for mounting any kind of expedition, the logistics of it would be all but impossible, even with all the resources of Terran Intelligence behind it. Jaelle could tell you better than I what the difficulties would be, but I know enough to know it’s impossible, and so do you.” They had, after all, been in the field together, traveling as Darkovans. “To begin with—you’d have to cross the Hellers, and when you get beyond Nevarsin, the country’s all but unknown. We have no operatives in Intelligence who know the trails or the languages. There are catmen tribes up there, and—and God knows what else. Banshees—perhaps nonhuman cultures—I don’t think it could be done, at all. Certainly I wouldn’t try it.”
Peter looked skeptical. “If she should come to you, that’s what you’ll tell her?”
“Believe me. Peter, she won’t. Anyhow, Anders isn’t Intelligence, she’s Mapping and Exploring.” Legally, Intelligence was responsible only to the Terran Empire Head Centre, while Mapping and Exploring was under the sole authority of the Legate of the planet. “She’d have to get your permission, not Cholayna’s. Even if you thought Cholayna would do something like that behind your back, Peter, she’d send one of her own operatives, not Lexie.”
She did not know if Peter was convinced, but he had reason to know she had always told him the truth. She hoped he knew she always would. They exchanged a few more commonplaces and parted in friendly fashion. But as Magda walked across the city to the Guild-house, she wondered if that was why Lexie had chosen to attend her lecture.
A few days later, as Magda was leaving the HQ, Doria joined her at the Gates.
“Are you going to the Guild-house? I will go with you. I have a message from my mother for Jaelle n’ha Melora.”
“Let me take it for you,” Magda said, glancing at the sky. “It will save you a long walk in the rain.”
Doria colored slightly. “I am sorry—Rafaella said I was to give it only to Jaelle herself.”
Magda shrugged. There was a time when she and Rafaella had actually been friends, but she could never count on the other woman’s friendliness. She would become accustomed to thinking of her as friendly, even presume on it a little—then discover without warning that Rafi was behaving as if she disliked her. But since she genuinely respected and admired Rafaella, she accepted her
as Jaelle’s friend, if not her own.
The two women set off side by side, walking swiftly, the hoods of their capes drawn against the rain. “Are you staying much longer in the city, Margali?”
“I hope not. There is really not much for me to do here. I know Jaelle would like to go back to work with Rafi, and Rafaella would like that too, but that would have to be her own decision.”
They turned into the square where the Guild-house stood. Doria was about to ring the bell when the door opened and Keitha stormed down the steps, swearing aloud.
“Keitha, what’s the matter?”
“Doria? Oh—well—it’s not your fault, but when I see your mother again—”
“What? What is the matter, Keitha?”
“I leased a horse from Rafaella, since I have none of my own, and sometimes, when I am summoned to a confinement outside the City walls, I must have one. I wanted to make it a formal arrangement, but she said, no, she had a dozen ponies in the stable, eating their heads off, not getting enough exercise, and I was welcome to use one whenever I needed one to ride.”
“And you are angry with her for that?”
“No,” said Keitha, “but I asked her to lease me one formally, just so this wouldn’t happen! Now all her horses are gone, and I must hire one in the market or go afoot.”
“Take mine,” Magda said, “you know which it is, Keitha, the black.” It had been a gift from Shaya’s father. “I won’t be wanting it tonight.”
“Thank you, Oath-sister.” Keitha hurried back into the house, and Magda and Doria watched her run toward the back door leading to the courtyard and stables. Doria whistled in surprise.
“What, all Rafaella’s horses gone? I can’t understand this! She must have had a—a large commission, unexpectedly, if she couldn’t leave a horse for Keitha! It was really very thoughtless of her not to warn Keitha before-hand.” Frowning, Doria went in search of Jaelle, while Magda went to hang her cloak, by now thoroughly soaked, on one of the drying racks in the kitchen.
The Saga of the Renunciates Page 86
