City of Sorcery (11 page)

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.”