At home, she had been able to call an attendant whenever she needed something she could not do for herself; even in the Guild House, where none was servant to another, women did for each other these sisterly services. It was never hard to find some sister who would help you to lace your dress, curl your hair or cut it, lend cosmetics or clothing. Here everything was done by machines, it seemed. At length another sign flashed, YOU MAY GO IN NOW. and she took her courage in her hands and went into the pink room; and stopped cold in the doorway.
Racks that tilted every which way, chairs that tilted and turned to the tables, clamps to hold the head, straps to hold the victim in place… the darkness reeled around her for a moment and she had literally to hold to the door. For a moment she was a child again, back in the insane years before her real life had begun, a child who had secretly crept to the door of a hidden room to steal a glance, not knowing it was her father’s torture chamber…
Mother! Mother! For a moment she wanted to run, shrieking, as she had done then, to hide her head in her mother’s lap—
Then, abruptly, it was just another room, a Terran room filled with machinery, that did with metal fingers what flesh and blood could have done better. She could even make out, now, robot machines for cutting hair, for curling it, for soothing cosmetics… perfumed sprays. The room smelled and looked calm and soothing, but Jaelle could not force herself to step inside; finally she managed to free her feet, which seemed, as they had seemed then, rooted to the ground. She fled down the corridor, through the cafeteria, out the heavy doors and across the hard paving, forgetting to use the underground tunnel, never seeing the Terran eyes that turned to watch her fleeing form, stare at her. She threw herself, gasping, on her bed and buried her face in the pillows, glad beyond belief that Piedro was not there to demand explanation of her curious behavior. Had she disgraced him again? She no longer knew or cared.
It seemed only moments later—had she slept for a few minutes, an hour?—when the door chimed softly. A visitor at this hour? Or had Piedro forgotten his key-card again? Keys and locked doors, for her, belonged to matrix laboratories, dungeons—torture chambers!
Braced to welcome Peter, she was amazed to find Bethany Kane standing in her door.
“Jaelle, honey—are you all right? I saw you running across the court as if the devil was after you! Listen, is that bigwig from the Senate bothering you? He has no right to do that! I dropped in, but his secretary said you’d gone down to get your hair done—can I come in? People are sleeping on this corridor and I don’t want to wake them up.” She came in, as Jaelle gestured, then suddenly took in Jaelle’s disheveled appearance.
“What’s the matter? Not going to the reception? I was going down to have my hair done, too, I thought we could go together—”
Bethany went and stood before Jaelle’s dressing-table, running her fingers through her own hair. “I’m a mess, and Montray will expect everyone on the staff to look their best. Do you have some extra curlers? Or are you going down to the beauty shop—?”
She was looking expectantly at Jaelle, and Jaelle said woodenly, “I did go down. But I—I decided not to go in.”
“Honey, was somebody down there nasty to you? If they were, you ought to put them on report. They’re there to wait on people, and if anybody made a single nasty remark—”
“Oh, no.” Jaelle smiled faintly. “I didn’t see any people down there at all—I thought it was all done by machines!”
Bethany chuckled. “Well, most of it is, but there are people there to make sure the machines do what they’re expected to do,” she said. “You’ve let your hair grow lately, haven’t you? What are you going to do with it tonight?”
Jaelle shrugged. “It’s not long enough to braid; what is there to do with it?”
Bethany surveyed her with consternation. “You’re not going like that, are you? Honey, Peter would die! Here, sit down, let me see what I can do. Why, you’ve never even used the cosmetic console in the dressing room, have you? Show me what dress you’re going to wear, and I’ll figure out something.”
Bethany managed, in the next twenty minutes, to show her several features of the bath and dressing table that she had not known existed. She was creamed, curled, elaborately made up, her hair elegantly fluffed into reddish-gold curls. For a little while it felt as if Bethany was indeed one of her Guild-sisters, and she was readying herself for Festival in the streets of Thendara at Midsummer. It was certainly easier than the strange, terrifying room full of machinery would have been, and at last she surveyed herself in the mirror with a certain pleasure; the new Jaelle who looked out at her would hardly have been recognized by the Guild-sisters. Bethany’s deft fingers had arranged her hair into a soft halo, deftly accented her high cheekbones and the green glint of her eyes, softened her freckles to a gilt blur, and done something to her eyes so that they looked deep-set and mysterious.
“You look marvelous,” Bethany said. “You’re going to be the hit of the reception! I didn’t realize you were a beauty, Jaelle!”
Somehow she felt disloyal to the Guild House. Dressing and preening herself like this, for a group of Terranan! Well, she rationalized, it was part of the job, to look her best—even Bethany had said so. Impulsively she hugged her.
“Thank you, Beth,” she said, and Bethany yipped, “Look at the time! I’ve got to get down and change my own dress, or I’ll be late! Anyhow, Peter will be coming in pretty soon—”
Bethany had hardly gone when he came in, breathless.
“Sweetheart, you look wonderful—you’ve done something to your hair, haven’t you? I came to pick up my dress outfit—I’ll have to dress over there. Do you know what they’ve had me doing, the last three days?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, “You’ve hardly seen me, you haven’t told me anything.”
“Don’t nag, love, I’m in a real hurry. They’ve had me crawling around in the dust of the old Records section, trying to clear space for a new model corticator programmer. The place is filled up with old file boxes and books, for God’s sake, I didn’t know we still had any, and look at the dust!” He held out filthy hands. “I haven’t seen the light of day this week! I should be getting hazard pay, all the germs in there—anyhow, Montray wants me in his office in ten minutes.” He flung the suit over his arm. “Where are my dress shoes?”
“In the closet, I suppose.” She was pleased that Peter had noticed the pains she had taken with her appearance, but he had so quickly taken it for granted.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, get them for me, will you? I’m late, and I’ve got to do something about this damned beard—” he vanished into the bath, and Jaelle, fuming, went to pull out his shoes. She had performed many jobs in her life, but that of valet was new, and she didn’t see why she had to perform as his body-servant; if he needed that kind of personal servant, why didn’t he hire one for himself? Inside the bath Peter bellowed out a gutter curse and something metal crashed against the wall. He stormed out, raging.
“Jaelle! I hear so much about how great you are down in the office, keeping the desks stocked and doing all the little chores Mag used to do, and now I find you’ve let me run out of depilatory! Hellfire, girl, do you think I can go to the Legate’s reception looking like a spaceport tramp?” He rubbed his beard. “Now somehow I’ve got to make time to hit the barbershop! Here, give me those!” He grabbed the shoes she was holding. “Don’t be late to the reception, hear me?” And he was gone, without a word, without a kiss, without really looking at her at all.
Jaelle sank down, shaking, the ache inside her so enormous and empty that she could hardly breathe. Somehow, the slam of the door behind him had broken something in her, a self she had created here, the reflection of herself in Piedro’s eyes. As it broke, she felt her teeth clench, the soft beauty Bethany had painted on her face suddenly vanishing into the cold, tough-minded Amazon Kindra had trained.
She was tempted not to go to the reception at all. But it was part of her job… obey
any lawful command of my employer… and Magda would have turned herself out stunningly because, if Magda had been doing the work she was doing, Magda would have seen herself as the appointed assistant of the Guest of Honor and known she must do him credit.
The cafeteria level had been rearranged into a gala banqueting hall, already filling with brilliant uniforms, costumes from a dozen different worlds. There was a bar at one end, dispensing drinks which looked delicious, brightly colored and cool. Waiters were carrying trays of little tidbits, and the cafeteria tables had been moved, combined into formal patterns, draped with linen and adorned with flowers. Real flowers. Well, thanks to Lady Rohana, she knew how to behave at a formal banquet. A man she knew slightly from Communications offered her a drink from the bar and she accepted it, saying a few formal words of small talk without hearing herself. She looked around for Peter, but he had not yet appeared. She thought of him in the clutches of the curious beauty-shop machines, having his hair and beard attended to, and cringed.
“Jaelle?” It was Wade Montray, bowing to her. “You look very beautiful tonight.” She accepted the compliment as the social noise it was, hardly personal at all. “Sandro Li is looking for you. See—over there by the head table, next to the Legate.”
She made her way through the crowd toward him, brushing aside greetings. Crowds had never bothered her before this, and certainly this was not as crowded as Midsummer in Thendara, but for some reason she felt strange, taut, and it seemed to her that too many people were looking at her, there’s that Darkovan girl, the one Haldane married, some sort of Darkovan nobility, no I heard she was a free Amazon, a soldier, a fighter, look at the knife scar on her cheek…
Aleki bowed to her. He was wearing some sort of formal clothing strange to her, dark-red, with gold lace and decorations on his breast; she supposed it was suggestive of his Imperial rank. He was very unlike the informally dressed man she knew from the office.
“I told you to make yourself beautiful for tonight, but I did not realize that you would dazzle us all,” he said, smiling at her, and for a moment it seemed that he was ready to seize her, to grasp at her… no; he was smiling courteously, he had not touched her, why was she so intensely, painfully aware that he desired her, that he had not touched a woman for a long time and that he wanted her? The Amazon in Jaelle cringed, but he had said nothing, his manner was perfectly correct, why was she so open to him just now? She felt as if the room were full of a ringing silence.
His voice seemed to reverberate from very far away. For an instant it seemed that the few sips she had had of her drink were nauseating her and that she would disgrace herself by vomiting here before the whole assembly. She grabbed at vanishing self-control and said as calmly as she could, “I didn’t hear you, sir. It’s a little noisy in here.”
He looked around cheerfully. “We are a noisy crowd tonight, aren’t we? I asked if you could hunt up Peter Haldane for me.”
She had had no chance to warn Peter against this man, who was so alert to find out what she had no wish to let him know about Darkover. Her eyes searched the crowd for Peter’s familiar shape, and she braced herself to cross the crowded room through the onslaught of mental voices.
How do the Comyn who have full laran, like Lady Rohana, ever manage to appear anywhere in a crowd? For the first time in her life, she wished she had had some of the training given routinely to the telepaths of the Comyn, to control her laran. … but then, it had never seemed to her that she had enough laran to be worth training! She moved through the crowd, carefully keeping her face blank, she would not stare about her in panic like a mushroom-farmer in the big city for his first Festival!
She knew Peter would be wearing gray, the steel-gray which was so becoming to his red hair and gray-green eyes. She looked through the crowd and finally saw a red head. She made her way to his side and touched his arm.
“Alessandro Li wishes to speak with you,” she said formally.
“Let’s not keep him waiting, then,” he said, and took her arm. She pulled upright, bracing herself.
“I can walk by myself,” she said stiffly.
“Honey, are you still mad at me? Let’s not fight, not here at a party!”
She drew a long breath. She said, “Piedro, listen to me, please. Li is very curious about the Comyn; he’s determined to find out what lies behind it. For three days he has been after me with his questions; don’t underestimate him. I did. And I don’t know what he wants, but I am not sure it is good for Darkover. I may have told him too much already; be careful what you say to him.”
Peter grimaced He said “I can’t afford to play games with an Imperial bigwig. I’ve got to cooperate. Montray—the Coordinator, not Monty, Monty’s a decent sort—old Montray just threatened me—he wants to send me offworld.”
“Peter!” Suddenly she forgot her quarrel with him, at the shocking thought that she might somehow lose him. “What? Why?”
“They’ve located a planet something like Darkover—feudal setup, low technology, all that—and he says with my experience here, I’d be a good one to send there. Personally, I think he’s afraid I’ll have his job if I stay here, I know twice as much, ten times as much, about Darkover as he does and he’s afraid somebody will find it out. And if I can convince Sandro Li that I’m really needed here to unravel this mystery—do you see?” He swung around and caught her wrist. “Jaelle, I’m fighting for my life, as much as you were when you and Mag met the banshee on the trail. Won’t you back me up? I want to stay on Darkover—with you. Help me, don’t fight me, beloved!”
People slid by, on either side of them. In this crowd, so filled with voices she did not really hear, voices that penetrated her mind brutally, she could not think clearly. She swallowed hard and said “Come along; just—just be careful what you say, or even what you hint, or he’ll get it out of me.”
Li greeted Peter with great cordiality, indicating, as people began to move toward the banquet tables, that Peter and Jaelle were to be seated near him at the head table.
She was aware, at least partly from the subliminal chatter of telepathic sound, that the Terrans here in Thendara Spaceport regarded Li much as the common people of Thendara would have regarded the Heir to Hastur; here to judge them, in authority over them. Peter was talking to Li with all the charm of which he was capable, emphasizing to the Imperial investigator that he knew more about Darkover than any other man working here. She could tell that Aleki was impressed. She also realized what neither Montray nor Peter had bothered to tell her; that on Li’s report depended, not only the future status of Darkover in the Empire, but the future of the Terran installation. He had the power to withdraw the Empire entirely, except for a few officials to tend the spaceport; or to increase the HQ staff until it was a full colony administration; he could open the world to trade, or close it completely.
The fate of Darkover in relation to the Empire is in this man’s hands. Even the Hasturs have little to say about it. This is too much of a responsibility for me! It is too great a responsibility for anyone!
At one point in the dinner, when the main course had been finished and they were lingering over sweets and tiny, delicious glasses of variously-scented and colored cordials, Aleki said, “In your work I have found frequent mention of Miss Lorne’s work. Why is she not on the station? Is she on leave offworld? I found her name on the inactive roster.”
Cholayna Ares, tall and elegant in low-cut draperies of fire-red which accented her smooth dark skin and frost-white hair, leaned across to them and said, “She is on detached duty in Thendara, Sandro; she is in the Renunciate Guild House.”
“I am extremely eager to meet her,” Li said. “Do you suppose that I could request her to come in for an interview?”
“I doubt it,” Jaelle said, “she is serving her housebound time among the Amazons; she is not allowed to leave the House for that period—
“But that is barbarous!” Li said. “To imprison an Empire citizen—”
“Hardly im
prisonment,” Jaelle said calmly, “since it is voluntary.”
Peter leaned forward. He had, Jaelle suspected, drunk a little too much. He said “I can tell you anything Magda could tell you, Sandro. Most of the places she went, she managed to go while she was under my protection. You don’t realize yet how many doors are closed, here, to any woman. Magda’s a fine agent; If she’d been born a man, she’d be the Legate by now! But here on Darkover, no woman could be accepted that way. And now she’s gone over the wall, gone native. I can fill in most of Magda’s reports for you.”
“Can you really?” Li’s face was sharp, and intent.
“I can and I will.” Peter reached for another drink.
“I’ll take you up on that,” Sandro Li said, and turned to listen to the speaker at the head of the table.
An hour later, Jaelle faced Peter across the small room they shared. She knew he had drunk too much; his face was flushed, his speech incoherent, but he was not so drunk he could disclaim responsibility for what he had done.
“Peter, don’t you realize? That man is out to destroy Darkover— the Darkover we know—to turn it into another Terran colony! And you’re helping him!”
“I think you’re exaggerating. In any case, what does it matter? He’s only here to investigate how well the HQ is doing its job on Darkover. I owe him cooperation; so do you and so does Magda. If it weren’t for men like him, there would be no Empire.”
“Would that be such a misfortune?”
He took her shoulders and turned her toward him. She permitted it, not sure why she didn’t kick him away.
“There’s no reason Darkover can’t accept what’s good about the Empire while keeping what’s good in its own way of life. It’s not wrong to hate ignorance and poverty. Look, chiya, I was born on Darkover, it’s my home too, I love it—I want to stay here, be part of it.” He bent to kiss her, burying his face in her scented hair. “I was fighting—I am fighting—for the right to stay here, as any man would fight for his land, his home, his wife. I do it with words instead of a sword, that’s all. But I am Darkovan. You heard what Cholayna said when she heard about our wedding?”