Thendara House (4 page)

Bethany was a slight woman, with medium brown hair, brown eyes -
like an animal’s eyes
. Jaelle thought - and she looked pretty and rounded in the Terran uniform which seemed so immodestly cut. How could the woman display herself like that, in an office composed of men and women together? Perhaps, if only women were nearby, it would not seem so - so - Jaelle fumbled for the concept; so deliberately enticing. Yet these women worked with men on easy terms and no one seemed to notice. She filed that away for later thought as they passed the uniformed men at a succession of doors and Bethany, taking her scribbled pass, got them through various tunnels and elevators through what seemed to Jaelle like miles and miles of corridor. Her sandalled feet, accustomed to stoutly laced boots, were aching by the time they reached their goal. She put aside her theory that Terrans were lazy; with this much racing about, perhaps they needed their elevators and escalators.

The next hours were the most confusing of her life. There was a place with lights flashing and glaring into her eyes, and a moment later a small, laminated card slid out of a slot, with a picture Jaelle, for a moment, did not recognize as herself; a small serious-looking red-haired woman with slightly frightened eyes. Bethany saw her grimace at the picture and chuckled.

“Oh, we all look like that in ID pictures. As if we were being lined up and photographed for a prison sentence; something about the lights and the pose. You should see mine!” But, though Jaelle expected her to offer it, she did not, and she supposed it must be some form of figurative speech, social noise. Then an elderly gentleman, round and good-natured, who spoke excellent Darkovan, questioned her at length about her place of birth (“Shainsa? Where exactly is that?” and finally managed to get her to sketch a rough map of the road between the Dry Towns and Thendara) her age, the date of her birth, and asked her to pronounce her name again and again while he scribbled it down in precise markings which, he said, might help others to pronounce it very accurately; Jaelle wondered why he could not simply tell them, or use one of the omnipresent voice recorders - at one point she had been startled to hear her own voice coming from one of them. But she had known there would be many unfamiliar things. At one point he called her “Mrs. Haldane,” and when she corrected him, smiled gently and said, “The custom of the country, my dear girl.” He used the phrase, which in Darkovan could have become an offensive intimacy, in such a fatherly fashion that Jaelle was warmed instead of offended. “Remember, young woman, you’re among Terran barbarians now and you have to allow us our tribal customs. It makes record-keeping simpler that way. You’re sharing quarters with Haldane, aren’t you? Well, there you are.”

“Yes, but I am a Renunciate, and it is not the custom to bear the husband’s name - “

“As I say, it’s our custom,” said the man. “Do you have any proverb which says, When in Rome, do as the Romans do?”

“Who were the Romans?”

“God knows; I don’t. Some old territorial people, I imagine. One could translate; when living among barbarians, follow their customs as well as you can.”

Jaelle thought it over, felt her face crinkling in a smile. “Yes; we say, When in Temora, eat fish.”

“Temora, as I recall, being a seacoast town,” he mused. Then he began tapping on the odd keyboard with remarkably nimble fingers - she hoped they wouldn’t ask her to use any machine demanding that much dexterity - and silent lights streamed across a glass plate before him. There was a beep, and he raised his eyes at the series of letter-lights on the glass.

“I forgot. Get her prints, will you, Beth?”

“Finger or eye, or both?”

“Both, I think.”

Bethany led Jaelle to another machine and guided her hand against a curious flat glass plate; it flared lights, and Bethany guided her face against another with a place for her chin to rest. She jerked back, startled, as lights hurt her eyes, and Beth said soothingly “No, hold your head still and keep your eyes open; we’re taking retina prints for positive identification. Fingerprints can sometimes be faked, but eyeprints never.”

It took two more tries before she could conquer the involuntary response, twitching back and her eyes squeezing shut. Finally they clipped a laminated card to her tunic, with her picture in one corner and the odd squiggles which were, they told her, coded prints. Bethany said, “You really have to wear the uniform, you know. Twice already today you tripped the monitors with an intruder-alert - they’re programmed to ignore anyone wearing uniform, because of the codes inside the tunic patch.” She guided Jaelle’s fingers to examine a roughness as of metal between the thickness of her uniform neck’s cloth; Jaelle thought it had been torn and repaired, but it was evidently intended that way.

“Fortunately, the man on the main gate saw your pass and warned us that you were out of uniform today. But wear it tomorrow, won’t you, like a good girl? Makes everything so much simpler.”

Simpler; to have everyone looking just alike, like so many painted toy soldiers from a box!

“I know you’re working under Lorne,” the man went on, “but she got away with it because, working in the Boss’s office as much as she did, she could pull rank.” Lorne, of course, was the name Magda used in the HQ, she knew, but none of the rest of it was intelligible except that for some strange reason, perhaps a superstitious ritual, she must wear the uniform to keep from touching off alarms within the building. It probably wasn’t worth arguing about.

“It’s all right for today, your first day,” the man added, “but tomorrow, show up in uniform, all right? And wear the badge at all times. It identifies your department and your face.”

Jaelle asked, “Why should I have to wear my face, when I am already wearing my face?”

“So that we can see that your badge matches your face, and no unauthorized person gets into Security areas,” the man said, and Jaelle, who was already confused, decided it was not worthwhile to go on asking why should anyone want to go where they had no business? It wasn’t as if there was anything interesting in here to see.

“Take her on up to Medic, Beth, we’re finished with her,” said the man. “Good luck, Mrs. Haldane - Jaelle, I mean. Where are they going to put her, Beth? They can’t put her in the Boss’s office. He tends to make - ” the man hesitated, “rude remarks. About certain people’s - backgrounds.”

Jaelle wondered if the man thought she was deaf, or feebleminded; she had met Montray, and no one with a scrap of telepathic ability could possibly be in doubt that he disliked Darkover and all the Darkovans. But it was polite of the man to try and spare her feelings; the first politeness she had encountered from Terrans, who were often friendly, but seldom polite. Not, anyhow, as she understood it; they seemed to have different standards of courtesy. Only after they were in the hallway did she realize that while she had answered a great many questions about herself, no one had bothered to introduce him to her and she still did not know his name.

“Next stop, Medic,” remarked Bethany, and Jaelle, who knew the Terran word by now, after the long debates about allowing Renunciates to become Medical technicians, protested, “But I’m not sick!”

“Just routine,” said Bethany, an answer Jaelle had heard so often that day that she recognized it, though she did not yet know what it meant, as a ritual answer which was supposed to cut off discussion. Well, she had been told it was rude to inquire about the religious rituals of others, and Terrans must have some really strange ones.

They went up farther, this time, than ever before, and Jaelle catching a random glance out a window, shivered involuntarily they must be as high as they had been in the Pass of Scaravel and she clung, feeling dizzy, to a handrail. Was this some form of testing her courage? Well, a woman who had faced blizzards in the Hellers and banshees in the mountain passes would not quail at mere height. Anyhow, Bethany seemed unconcerned.

There was a different kind of uniform on this floor, and since she was to participate in whatever curious ritual was being done this time, she did not complain when they took away her woolen and leather Amazon outfit and dressed her in a white tunic made of paper. The workers here all had the same sign on their tunics, an upright staff with what looked like two snakes coiled arounc it, and she wondered if work emblems replaced clan or family blazonings here. She waited on benches for peculiar processes, was touched or prodded with strange machines, and they pricked her finger with needles. She shrank back at this, and Bethany explained, “They wish to look at your blood under a - ” she used a strange word, and at Jaelle’s blank look, elaborated, “A special glass to see the cells in your blood - to see if it is healthy blood.” They stuck a glass plate in her mouth, and draped her from breasts to knees with a metal-treated heavy cloth, then left her alone with the machine, which made a curious humming noise, at which she startled and jumped. The young technician, a girl about Jaelle’s own age with curly fair hair, swore angrily, and again Bethany explained hastily that they were only taking a picture of her teeth to see if they had holes or damaged roots.

“They could ask me,” Jaelle said crossly, but when they tried it again, she held her breath and stayed as still as she could. The technician looked at the plate with pictured teeth and said to Bethany that she had never seen anything like it.

“She says your teeth are perfect,” Bethany translated, and Jaelle said, with a sense of injury, that she could have told them that in the first place.

Then there was a room filled with machines, and the technician in charge of them, a man who spoke somewhat better Darkovan than anyone except the man who had questioned her so long in the photographing place, said, “Go in behind those curtains, and take off all your clothes. Right down to the skin.: Then come out that end, and walk directly down that line, along the painted white stripe. Understand?” tamed chervine doing tricks. “Now turn again - lower arm - see? Machine no hurt - “

When she was dressing again, she asked Bethany, “What did those machines
do
!”

“Pictures of your insides, I told you. Tells them you’re healthy.”

“And as I told
you
, I could have told them that already,” said Jaelle. Except for one or two wounds in battle - during her first years as an Amazon, she had fought as a mercenary at Kindra’s side - and a broken wrist when she had fallen from a horse at sixteen, she had always been perfectly healthy.

Then they took her and put her into a contoured lounge and pasted gooey flat plates to her head, and pushed her down in the chair. She must have fallen asleep, and when she woke up she had a splitting headache, not unlike the headache she had had when Lady Alida had forced her, at fifteen, to look into a matrix jewel.

“She’s very resistant,” said one man, as she woke up, and another man answered, “That’s normal for the indigenous population. Not used to technological environment. Beth said she spooked at the fluoroscopy machines. Hey - pipe down, she’s awake already. Can you understand us, Miss?”

“Yes, perfectly - oh, I see. A language-teaching machine.” That was nothing; the Comyn could have done that with a matrix and a well-trained telepath.

“Head ache?” Without waiting for her answer, the Medic handed her a small paper cup with a spoonful or so of pale green liquid in the bottom. “Drink this.”

She did. He took the cup from her, crushed it in his hand and tossed it into a waste collector. She watched in amazement as it turned into pale slime and flowed out the drain. One moment it had been a cup; then, the next instant, without transition, it was a bit of pale slimy stuff, deliberately discarded and destroyed. Yet it was not old, or outworn, the new crisp feel of it was still in her hand, the
reality
of it. She could still feel it, but the thing itself was gone.
Why
? A few minutes later, changing back into her own clothes, Bethany told her to throw her paper tunic into the same kind of collector. It confused her still, to see the things dissolve and flow down the drain and exist no longer. The man who had worked the language machine - she heard him call it a D-Alpha corticator, which left her no wiser than before - handed her a neat packet of disks.

“Here are your language lessons in Standard for the rest of the week,” he said. “Tell your husband to show you how to use the sleep-learner, and you can go ahead on your own.”

Another machine
! This man had not been introduced to her either, but she was accustomed to rudeness by now, and was not surprised when Bethany told her to hurry or they would be late to lunch. She had been hurrying all morning, but Terrans were always in a hurry, driven by the chronometer faces she saw everywhere, and she supposed there were some good reasons to serve meals on time; it was rude to keep the cooks waiting. There were no cooks visible, only machines, and it confused her to have to press buttons to get food, but she did what Bethany did. The food was all unfamiliar anyhow, thick porridges and hot drinks and bland textured messes. Sticking a fork in one peculiarly colored red mess, she asked what it was, and Bethany shrugged.