Exile's Song (10 page)

Darkover comforted her with its near-familiarity, but she found it disquieting as well. It was throwing her judgment off—that was all. One sound night’s sleep just wasn’t enough to restore her to her normal disgustingly good health, not after days of space travel and a total change of climate.

Ivor smiled at her, stretching his withered mouth across his big teeth. It looked entirely too skeletal in her present state of heightened senses, and she held back a shudder. “Are you sure you are all right? With all the shots they gave us, you shouldn’t be . . .”

“Don’t cluck over me, Magpie-girl. You go off with those young scamps and get some local togs. I know you are itching to get out of your uniform. If you see a good wool cloak—nothing fancy, mind you—that would suit me, get it. I’ll have a nap now, and by suppertime, I will be perfectly fine.” He gave another chuckle, and she knew he was remembering the black-and-white Thetis cape she had draped over her University uniform during her first lonely year there. That and her fondness for sparkling jewelry had given her the nickname, and it had stuck. Even in the hodgepodge of the academic community, she had remained different—a little strange and exotic for the hierarchies of the order that were the Terran way.

“I’m not clucking! I just can’t help worrying about you.” Margaret tried to ignore the feeling of helplessness that suddenly threatened to overwhelm her.

“What a good child you are. You have been like a daughter to me—even though the first time I saw you in Relegan garb I had several unfatherly thoughts.” Ivor smiled wistfully and sighed. “You made me wish I was fifty again.”

“Did I?” She was fascinated by this admission, because the professor had never done anything to make her feel he knew she was an adult and a woman. There was a safety in his manner toward her, something which kept her from longing for the untidiness of love affairs and broken hearts which often seemed to be the bread and butter of her classmates. Not for the first time, but with a renewed sense of surprise, Margaret realized she had achieved nearly three decades of living without becoming sexually active. She was no prude, and she had heard the woeful tales of fellow students with curiosity and interest, but without the slightest urge to leap into bed with anyone she had ever met. She kept to herself, as if she were obeying some instinct or order. It struck her now that this was rather peculiar, but it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t as if she felt she had missed anything, was it?

“My dear—I am old, but I am not dead yet! You are an extremely lovely woman. The Relegans assumed at first you were my wife, or at least my concubine, and they were very puzzled by our sleeping in separate huts. The Relegans were fascinated by our behavior, or rather the lack of it, and finally the hetman asked me if you were taboo. I told them you were as a daughter to me, which made sense to them in light of their profound incest prohibitions. Isn’t it funny how universal that one taboo is?”

“Not really; it seems to be hard-wired into our brains. With a few notable exceptions,” Margaret answered, thinking of a few cultures she had studied where it was not forbidden. She knew that Ivor and Ida treated her like their child, but to hear it expressed moved her more than she could have imagined. She was warmed by the words.

She cleared her throat, thickened with a sudden surge of emotions she did not wish to have. To cover her feelings, she asked, “Do you think Kuttner will ever finish that study of incest taboos?”

“Possibly. If he doesn’t go off the deep end and wind up living in a grass shack on some God-forsaken planet on the rim of the galaxy. Anthropologists can be a little unbalanced.”

“I know. Not like musicologists, who are entirely scientific and objective!” They laughed together at this old joke. The debate as to whether it was possible to objectively evaluate the disciplines of a non-Terran culture had been raging for centuries, and was no nearer to any solution. Margaret and Professor Davidson adhered to the belief that it was not only possible but necessary to study a culture within its own context. He had spent most of his academic career traveling to distant worlds to prove this thesis. His famous contemporary, Paul Valery, held that field work was, by definition, contaminated. Valery only stepped outside the comfortable Music Building on University to go home for meals. He had not been off-planet for decades, even to accept honors from other universities. On the rare occasions when the two men met in the corridors of the building, Valery would flare the nostrils of his narrow, aristocratic nose, as if he smelled something unpleasant and ask, “You still here, Davidson? Not off drumming with some ignorant natives?” Ivor always answered these barbed questions with a dignified silence, and swept into his own office. His reputation was excellent, and he felt no need to respond. Margaret, on the other hand, often had a desire to punch Valery on his overbred nose and leap to the defense of her mentor.

The professor pushed his bowl away. “Well, I’m off for a sleep, my dear,” he said cheerfully. “Enjoy your visit to the tailor, Maggie, and be sure to keep your ears open for anything interesting. Weavers often have loom-songs that get overlooked in favor of other sorts of music. I have long thought there was a rich area of study in . . .”

“Ivor—go to bed! You need rest, not another area of study.”

He left, laughing. The sound of his delight made her feel less anxious for several minutes, as she lingered over a hot cup of herb tea, savoring the taste of it. Margaret’s worries came hustling back as she finally emptied the cup. Ivor looked “wrong,” and it was more than just fatigue. She wished she weren’t plagued with sudden flashes of premonition, and the ridiculous idea that she could somehow hear the thoughts of others. More, she wished the dread she felt in her bones would just go away and let her be. She was in a nice house, with good food, and there was nothing at all to worry about.

Anya bustled into the dining room, bobbing a little curtsy. She was rosy-cheeked from the kitchen, and her jowls quivered with her movements.
“Domna,
the boys are here to take you to Threadneedle Street.”

“Oh, splendid! Anya, can you tell me what would be the correct amount to pay for a cloak and boots, and such garments as you and Master Everard wear? Not that the boys would mislead me . . .”

“No, they’re good, honest boys, or I would never have let them in this house, far less let a noble guest go off with them. Let me think.” While the housekeeper considered, Margaret wondered at the use of the word “noble.” Why were people acting as if she was special? Could they have guessed she was the daughter of the Cottman Senator—she hadn’t said a word, because she had found that mentioning her connections in high places made people behave oddly. She had never traded on her father’s position in the Terran government, and often didn’t think about it for months at a time. It had nothing to do with her. But “noble guest?” A political functionary was hardly nobility as she knew of it—which was nearly nothing. There weren’t many nobles on University, unless one counted department heads and professors emeritus. It was just another Darkovan mystery she could not solve because she did not know the right questions to ask.

“I believe five royals should get you a fine outfit, though things cost more than they did when I was a girl. That’s a blouse, three or four petticoats, a chemise and tunic. The underwear will be about seven sekals. A cloak of good spun wool, about three
reis,
one of leather about eight. Stockings, oh, four sekals or a bit more, unless you want spidersilk or something.”

Anya gave a sniff of disdain. “That stuff you are wearing wouldn’t keep a dog warm in the mountains. I can’t understand why the Terranan wear it—it smells funny and it never seems to warm them. I’ve seen them, standing around looking down their noses at us, and pulling their clothes closer. What’s the matter with a good wool cloak instead of those shiny things they wear? What are they afraid of—do they think that wearing stuff grown on the backs of animals will make them . . .” Anya shrugged and stopped speaking.

“There is just no accounting for taste, Anya.” Margaret was not about to try to explain the attitude common in the Terran Federation, that a civilized person was evident by his clothing, and that meant synthetics, except among the very rich, where the wearing of natural fabrics was a sign of wealth. It would have been insulting, implying that there was something less than civilized about simple Darkovan garb—which indeed was how the Terrans regarded it.

“How true! I’m an old woman, and I have seen many changes here on Darkover—not all of them for the good! The boys want to go off and be star pilots, and the girls are full of ideas that don’t include cooking and marrying. Now, let me think. Boots! Those will be two or three
reis,
high boots a few
sekals
more. You put yourself in Master MacEwan’s hands, and he will have you fitted out right and proper in no time. And, if you need credit, Master Everard will stand surety for you.”

“That’s kind of you; but Master Davidson prefers—and the University prefers—that we pay as we go. Thank you for the advice.”

She went up to her room to leave the little recorder and get her money. If she heard something worth recording in the clothing district, she would return later with Ivor. Across the hall she could hear Ivor snoring; he didn’t do that unless he was really exhausted. She fingered the coins in her hand. One was of silver, the other some base metal; she knew these were iron sekals, worth about three Empire cents; the other, a
reis
or royal, was worth about three credits last she had heard. The clerk at Rothschild and Tanaka had not been sure, and after a year on a planet without any currency at all, she was unused to thinking of it. At University, of course, she never handled such things—everything was done with credit chips.

Geremy and Ethan were hunkered down on the steps, playing some kind of game with their hands. The gestures with open hand or fist or two fingers extended, flashed rapidly back and forth. They jumped up as they saw her, bowed and smiled.

“Good day,
domna.
” said Ethan.

“Good day. What were you playing?”

It was Geremy who answered, “That was ‘Scissors, Rock, and Leaves.’ ” As they went off down the street, the boys explained the intricacies of the game. Margaret had seen a dozen similar games played on a dozen different worlds, and said so. They were fascinated. Ethan wanted to know more about space travel, but Geremy told him he was being a bore, and, remarkably, this seemed to silence the sharp-nosed boy.

The doors of the shops along Music Street were open, but what she had thought were shuttered windows the night before revealed themselves now as wide bays with counters behind them. Beyond the counters she could glimpse workmen busy at benches. The smells of wood and oil and resin rose in the air, accompanied by the sounds of chisels and files and the occasional sound of an instrument: a whistle, a drone pipe, a harp, or a fiol being played or tuned. The boys explained things to her, and the walk out of Music Street passed quickly. The ruddy sunlight fell across her cheeks, warming her. It felt good, and the nagging headache faded away slowly.

A few craftsmen stared at her, and one even left his bench and came forward to bow. Others frowned and looked away quickly, as if embarrassed. These were men close to her own age, or women younger than she was, and she began to feel self-conscious.

“Ethan, tell me the truth; am I dressed in an immodest way?” The uniform covered her body but far more tightly than the clothing commonly worn by the Darkovan women she had seen. She was sure her hair was covering her nape, remembering the Senator’s insistence on that. Her tunic came well below her waist, falling almost to her knees, and had been especially designed by the Service for planets where dress and gender were almost the same. Of course, the ideas of modesty that someone back on Terra had often were complete failures in the field—a concept Federation employees seemed unable to grasp.

“Uh, not exactly. It’s your hair, mostly.” This puzzled her and maddened her slightly. Why couldn’t the Service supply sufficient information? Why was the data on Cottman IV so patchy, so full of holes. After the decades that the Federation had been on the planet, the ethnologists and anthropologists should have published enough monographs to fill a small library! Geremy went on, “And your uniform, too. Folk in this part of Thendara don’t often see women from the Terran Sector—they keep themselves up in the buildings around the port. Black is an uncommon color here, because our dyers can’t make a good, lasting black. And since we value our craft, we don’t dye that color. Our Guardsmen wear black cloaks, but it is from wool that is naturally black. You know how people are,
domma
—they stare at anything different.” He squirmed a little and looked uncomfortable.

“You just don’t look like a Terranan somehow,” Ethan piped up, “or a thesis—what you said. The planet where you lived. You look like a lady!”

Margaret held back a broad grin, while vowing to remember to share Ethan’s mispronunciation with Ivor. In a way, all academics came by way of thesis, didn’t they? “It’s Thetis, Ethan, not thesis. But don’t the other women at the port look like ladies?”

“Lands, no,” Geremy answered. “They’re just women.” He clearly thought this was a complete explanation, so she let it drop. It amused her, as she thought it over, to realize that her own definition of what a “lady” looked like was based on appearance. Specifically, a “lady” looked like her stepmother, the Senator’s Lady. That meant blonde hair, short stature, and a generous bosom. Her red hair and yellow eyes had never pleased her. Her inches had been a trial since adolescence, being about a foot too many in the vertical direction, and four or five inches too few around the chest. She was very tall compared to Thetan natives, and even at the University, she stood out. She would have liked dark hair, like the Old Man had before he began to gray, and dark eyes like his, or gray-green eyes and golden hair like Dio. Dismissing these futile thoughts, she listened to the two boys identifying the various shops as they entered what was clearly an area devoted to the fiber arts.