The Saga of the Renunciates (91 page)

Magda was silent for a moment, staring angrily at Cholayna. She should have expected this. It was, she thought, her own fault for not breaking a tie that had ceased to have any meaning. As Cholayna had reminded her, she had tried to resign from Terran Intelligence, and Cholayna had dissuaded her; Magda, she said, was best qualified to build closer communications, ties, a bridge between the world of Magda’s birth and the Darkovan world Magda had chosen for her own. Magda had wanted this too: the Bridge Society was living proof of her desire to strengthen that tie. Yet when Magda had left the Guild-house to become part of the only
laran
circle of trained psychics which worked its trained matrix circle outside the carefully surrounded, safeguarded precincts of a Tower, she should have known this problem would again become acute.

It was not that the Empire had no command of psi techniques. Not as common, nor as well developed as they were on Darkover. Few planets in the known universe had the displayed skill, the taken-for-granted potential of telepaths and other psi-sensitive talents which the Darkovans called
laran
. As far as was known, Darkover was unique in that respect.

But these talents, it was now known, were an ineradicable part of the human mind. Although there were still a few determined skeptics—and for some reason, determined skepticism was a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that skeptics rarely developed any psi skills of any kind— where there were humans, there were the psi skills which were part of the human mind. And so there were trained telepaths, though not many, and even a few mechanical psi-probes had been developed which could do much the same work.

“Only there are none on Darkover, none nearer than the Intelligence Academy on Alpha,” said Cholayna, “and we’ve got to know what happened to her. Don’t you understand, Magda? We’ve got to know!”

When Magda did not answer, she drew a long breath, loud in the room. “Listen, Magda, you know what this means as well as I do! You know there’s nothing out there beyond the Hellers, nothing! So she signals she’s spotted something out there, and then she goes down. Nothing on the satellite picture, no black box, no plane recorder—nothing. But if there’s nothing out there, she’s still gone down with her plane. We’ve lost planes from Map and Ex before this. We’ve lost pilots, too. But she didn’t go down. Something out there grabbed her—
and then gave her back! In this condition
!”

Magda thought this over for a moment. She said at last, “It means there has to be something out there; something outside the Wall Around the World. But that’s impossible.” She had seen the weather-satellite pictures of Cottman Four. A cold planet, a planet tilted strongly on its axis by the presence of the high himals of the Hellers, the Wall Around the World, amounting to a “third pole.” A planet inhabitable only in a relatively small part of one continent, and elsewhere a frozen wasteland with no signs of life.

“You’re beginning to see what I mean,” Cholayna said grimly. “And you’re trained in what the Darkovans call
laran
.”

“I was a fool ever to let you know that!” Magda knew it was her own fault for retaining even this fragile bond. When she had outgrown the ties of the Guild-house, she should have done what Andrew Carr had done before her, and allowed the Terrans, perhaps even the Renunciates, to think her dead.

In the Forbidden Tower, she had found a home, a world of others like herself, who belonged nowhere else in worlds that demanded they define themselves in narrow categories. Callista, Keeper, exiled from her Tower because she could give up neither her human love nor the exercise of the powerful
laran
for which she had nearly given her life. Andrew Carr, Terran, who had discovered his own powers and found a new world and a new life. Damon, exiled from a Tower, the only man who had had the courage to demand what no man had been allowed in centuries: he had become Keeper of the Tower they called Forbidden, and fought for the right to establish his Tower in the open. There were others who had come to it, outcasts from the regular Towers, or those who despite talent would never have been admitted to a Tower; and now, among them, herself and Jaelle.

And she had been foolish enough to let Cholayna know something—
anything
, of this…

“You want me to psi-probe her, Cholayna? Why can’t you get a technician out from Alpha? You could send a message and have one here in a tenday.”

“No, Magda. If she stays like this, she could drop into catatonia and we’d never know. Besides, if there is something out there, we have to know it.
Now
. We can’t send another plane up until we know what happened to that one.”

“There’s nothing out there,” Magda said, with more harshness than she intended. “Satellite pictures don’t lie.”

“That’s what I’ve always said.” Cholayna stared at the lighted panels on her desktop; when Magda said nothing, she got up and came around the desk and grabbed Magda’s shoulders. “Damn it, something happened to her! I can understand the plane going down. I’ve never tried to fly over the Hellers myself, but I’ve talked to some who have. What scares me is how she got back here, and the condition she’s in. If it could happen to Lexie, it could happen to anyone. Not a single person in Mapping and Exploring, or anywhere else outside the Trade City, is safe until we know what took her and her plane—and how, and why—
they
—sent her back. You’ve got to help us, Magda.”

Magda walked away from Cholayna, and stared out at the lights of the Spaceport below. Up here, she could see the whole of Terran HQ, and across the city to the Old Town. The contrast was definite, the glaring lights of the Terran Trade City, the dim scattered lights of the Old Town, already all but dark at this hour. Somewhere in that darkness lay the Guild-house and her friends, while out beyond the pass that was just a blacker darkness against the night sky lay the estate of Armida, a little more than a day’s ride north, where was her new world. If only she could consult with one of them, with their Keeper Damon, with Andrew, who like herself had fought the battle between his Terran self and his Darkovan world. But they were
there
, and she was
here
, and it was her own unique predicament and her own unanswerable problem.

“I’m the last person Lexie would want mucking around in her mind, believe me.”

Cholayna said, and there was no possible answer, “She wouldn’t want to stay like this forever, either. She’s down in Medic, in Isolation. We haven’t wanted anyone else to know what happened.”

Some day, Magda thought, it was going to occur to the Terran HQ personnel that there were some things even they couldn’t control. She didn’t give a fundamental damn whether the Terrans kept up their pretense of omnipotence. But there was a fellow human being, a woman, caught up in the gears. She said, more roughly than she intended, “Let’s get on with it, then. But I’m not a trained psi-technician, so don’t blame me if all I can do is make things worse. I’ll do my best. That’s all I can say.”

Magda hated to ring the night-bell at the Guild-house; it meant that someone would have to be roused, come down the stairs and open the bolted door. Yet she preferred that, inconvenient as it was, to accepting Cholayna’s offer to find her a place to stay either in Unmarried Personnel Living Quarters, or even in the Bridge Society Hostel, where some of the Darkovan nurses in training had their lodgings.

She stood shivering on the steps, for even in high summer it was chilly at this hour, listening to the clang of the bell inside. Then she heard a long scraping of the heavy bolt, and at last the door opened grudgingly, and a young woman’s voice asked, “Who is it? Do you want the midwife?”

“No, Cressa. It is I, Margali n’ha Ysabet,” Magda said, and came inside. “I am truly sorry to disturb you. I’ll just go quietly up to bed.”

“It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep. Someone came for Keitha just a little while ago. Poor girl, she was out all day, and had just gotten to sleep, and a man came for her, his wife was expecting her first, so she’ll be out all night, too. Someone suggested in House Meeting a few moons ago that the midwives should answer all the night bells, because most of the time, night calls were for them.”

“That wouldn’t really be fair,” Magda said, “they deserve to sleep when they can, if only because they lose so much sleep already. I apologize again for waking you. Do you need help with the bolt?”

“Thank you, it really is too heavy for me.”

Magda came and helped her to fasten the heavy lock. Cressa went off to the night doorkeeper’s room, and Magda went slowly up the stairs to the room she had been given to share with Jaelle during this stay in the House. She paused at the door; then turned away, went to a nearby door and knocked softly. After a moment she heard a muffled response, turned the knob and went inside.

“Camilla,” she whispered, “are you asleep?”

“Of course I am, could I talk to you if I were awake?” Camilla sat up in bed. “Margali? What is it?”

Without answering, Magda came and sat on the edge of the bed, where she slumped, letting her head fall wearily into her hands.

“What is it,
bredhiya
?” Camilla asked gently. “What did they ask of you this time?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Her sensitivity was so high—she had been using
laran
at such a level—that she could almost hear Camilla’s thoughts as if the woman had spoken them aloud:

Oh yes, of course, it is because you do not want to talk that you come and wake me instead of quietly going to sleep in your own room!

But aloud, Camilla said only, “You missed dinner here; did they at least feed you in the Terran Zone?”

“It’s my own fault. After all these years using
laran
I should have known enough to demand something to eat,” Magda said, “but I wanted to get away, I couldn’t wait to get away. Cholayna did offer—”

Camilla’s eyebrows went up in the dark. “You were using
laran
in the Terran HQ? And you don’t want to talk about it. That does not sound like what I would expect of Cholayna n’ha Chandria.” She slid out of bed and drew a heavy woolen wrapper over her warm nightgown, scuffed her long narrow feet into fur slippers. “Let’s go down to the kitchen for something hot for you.”

“I’m not hungry,” Magda said wearily.

“Nevertheless, if you have been using
laran
—you know you must eat and regain your strength—”

“What in all of Zandru’s hells do you know about it?” Magda snarled. Camilla shrugged.

“I know what all the world knows. I know what the little children in the marketplace know. I know
you
. Come downstairs; at least you can have some hot milk, after that long walk in the cold. Take your boots off, though, and put on your slippers.”

“Damnation, Camilla, don’t fuss at me.”

Again the indifferent shrug. “If you want to sit in wet clothes all night, please yourself. I suppose one of the young nursing trainees would be delighted at the chance to nurse you through lung-fever. But it is hardly fair to go clumping around through the halls after midnight in heavy boots waking everyone who sleeps on the corridor because you’re too lazy to pull them off. If you’re simply too tired, I’ll help you.”

Wearily, Magda roused herself to pull off her boots and soaked jacket. “I’ll borrow one of your nightgowns; I don’t want to wake Jaelle.” Somehow she took off the wet clothes and got herself into a heavy gown of thick flannel.

“We’d better take these down and dry them; there will be a fire in the kitchen,” Camilla said. Magda was too weary to argue; she put her wet clothes over her arm and followed Camilla.

She was still shivering as they went down the corridors and the silent stairs, but in the Guild-house kitchen, the fire was banked, and near the fireplace it was warm. A kettle of hot water was hissing softly on its crane; Camilla found mugs on a shelf while Magda raked up the fire and spread out her wet garments. Camilla poured Magda some bark-tea, then went into the pantry and cut cold meat and bread, laying them on the kitchen table next to the bowls of rolled grains and dried fruits, soaking for the breakfast porridge.

Magda sipped listlessly at the hot bitter tea, too tired to look for honey on the shelves. She did not touch the food, sitting motionless on the bench before the table. Camilla made herself some tea, but instead of drinking it, she came around behind Magda. Her strong hands kneaded the tight muscles in the younger woman’s shoulders and neck; after a long time Magda reached out and took up a piece of the buttered bread.

“I’m not really hungry, but I suppose I should eat something,” she said wearily, and put it to her lips. After a bite or two, as Camilla had expected, the ravenous hunger of anyone who has been working with
laran
took over, and she ate and drank almost mechanically. She finished the bread and meat, and got up to ransack the pantry for some leftover cakes with spice and sugar.

When her hunger was satisfied, she leaned back, turning the bench round so that she could put her feet up on the rail that guarded the fireplace. Camilla came and sat beside her, putting up her own feet— long, narrow, somehow aristocratic—on the rail beside Magda’s. They sat together, neither speaking, looking into the bed of coals. After a time, Magda got up restlessly and put more wood on the fire, causing flames to flare up so that flickering shadows played on the walls of the cavernous kitchen.

She said, at last, “I’m not really a psi-tech, not the way they think of it in the Terran Zone. I’m not a therapist. The work I do at Armida is—is different. What I had to do tonight was to go into someone’s mind, someone who’s normally head-blind, and try to—” She wet her lips with her tongue and said, “It’s not easy to explain. There aren’t words.”

She looked around hesitantly at Camilla. She had known the woman at her side for years, and had long known that Camilla had, or had once had,
laran
, though Camilla herself denied it. Magda was one of the few people living who knew all of Camilla’s story: born of Comyn blood—no trace of which was visible now except for the faded, sandy hair which had once flamed with the same Comyn red as Jaelle’s—Camilla had been kidnapped when barely out of childhood, and so savagely raped and abused that her mind had broken. Magda did not know all of the details; only that for many years, Camilla had lived as a mercenary soldier, even her closest associates unaware that she was not the rough-spoken, rough-living man she seemed. After some years of this, Camilla, wounded and near death, had revealed herself to a Renunciate: Kindra, Jaelle’s own foster-mother. She had found herself able, in the Guild of Free Amazons, to take up again, painfully and with great self-doubt, the womanhood she had tried so long and so hard to renounce or conceal.

Once or twice, when their barriers were down to one another, Magda had become certain that Camilla retained some of her family’s heritage of
laran
, whatever that family might be. She was sure that Camilla bore the blood of one of the Seven Domains, the great families of Darkover, even though she concealed her
laran
.

It was not impossible that Camilla knew, without being told, how difficult the thing was that the Terrans had asked her to do.

“Do you remember meeting Lexie Anders at the special orientation meeting they gave for the new women working in the Terran Zone?”

“I do. She was very scornful of the notion that the
Penta Cori’yo
had anything to offer Terran women. Even when the other women in the Bridge Society pointed out that, after all, Terran women could hardly go to the Spaceport bars for recreation in the City, and that this would give her friends and associates, and a place to go when she could not stand being cooped up in the HQ anymore—”

“And I know, if Lexie doesn’t, that that’s one reason women employees haven’t been very fortunate on Darkover, unless they were brought up here and feel comfortable with the language and the way women are expected to behave,” Magda said. “I remember how rude and casual Lexie was at the reception. She made us all feel like—well, like natives, crude aboriginals; that we should all have been wearing skin loincloths and bones in our hair.”

“And you had to go into
her
mind? Poor Margali,” said Camilla, “I do not imagine her mind is a pleasant place to be. Not even, I should imagine, for her. As for you—”

“It wasn’t only that,” Magda said. Briefly, she repeated to Camilla what Cholayna had told her about the lost plane, and about Lexie’s mysterious reappearance. “—So I told her, I’m not a trained psi-tech, and don’t blame me if I make things worse,” she said, “and then we went down to Isolation, in Medic, where they had been keeping her.”