Thendara House (49 page)

“Now where can I talk to you?”

“What is this all about?”

“You know that perfectly well,” he said, exasperated. “I need a report from you - I told you that when I came there before. We’re going to have eight of them down in Medic - Cholayna told me the other day. We need to know more about what makes them tick. You’re the only expert we have on Darkovan women.”

“Ask Jaelle,” Magda said, and he laughed.

“I’m afraid she’s a little too prickly for me. In a society like this one, I can see how women who
had
gotten out of it would be a little bit on the defensive - what I can’t imagine is how she came to marry Haldane. Can you explain it?”

“Since I think you know that he and I were married once, I suppose that question is purely rhetorical.”

“No,” Monty said, suddenly serious. “Not at all. Working in the field and seeing the different way men treat women in the Darkovan culture has caused me to re-examine some of my own values. I wonder, sometimes, if perhaps women really prefer a culture where they’re looked after. Cared about. Cherished and protected. We make such a big thing of equality, but the women here seem happy enough Oh, there are exceptions, but seriously, Magda - ” he had spoken her Terran name, but she did not correct him, since no one was near enough to hear, “it seems to make sense, to give women supremacy in their own sphere, and not bring them into direct competition; let them have one place where they can be really superior, and keep it separate. Lots of societies work that way… hell, you had anthropology and sociology of culture on Alpha, you know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t like the assumptions behind that kind of culture,” Magda said sharply. “Why should everything be divided up into what women do and what men do?”

“Well why
shouldn’t
they? It happens anyway; it’s just that some societies admit it, and others try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Most
women are less competitive, less athletic - why should a society be based on the exceptions? I don’t see anything wrong with a man spending his life in, for instance, dress, but I wouldn’t force all men to wear dresses, for instance, so that the few who want to won’t feel conspicuous. I remember one nursery school I was in where they wouldn’t let the boys play with trucks and spaceships because they said we shouldn’t get stereotyped. There were a couple of little girls there who really wanted to play dolls and the nurses kept shoving them at the spaceships and trying to get them to play football.”

“So you’d give the girls the dolls and the boys the spaceships, and leave it at that?”

Monty shrugged. “Why not, as long as the girls who want the spaceships and toy trucks get a chance to try them out now and then? But I never got up the slightest interest in playing dolls, no matter how many they shoved into my little hands. At least on Darkover they would have taken it for granted that since I was a boy, I had a right to act like one.”

Magda chuckled. “Well, I never had to fight for my chance at a doll
or
a toy truck. I usually spent my time with paints and listening to my mother play the harp. And dancing. Remember I grew up in Caer Donn.”

“I envy you,” he said seriously. “A wonderful chance, to grow up in the world you really live in… you know my father. He has lived thirty years on Darkover and still can’t tolerate the light of the red sun because he lives all the time under Terran-style lights.”

“Don’t envy me, Monty,” she said, matching his seriousness. “It’s not an enviable option, to grow up never knowing where you belong, not - not knowing the recognition signals. I was never really Darkovan, and my young friends knew it. And I knew it. Oh, God, I knew it! And when I went to the Terrans it was worse… how the devil did I get into all this?”

He smiled. He had, she realized, a nice smile. “I admit I led you into it,” he said, “I wanted to hear what made
you
tick. You’re
the
expert, you know, on Darkovan culture and language, That doesn’t surprise me, I don’t think any man has the power of observation about details that a good woman can have.”

“I’m glad you admit us to that competence,” she said dryly. “I wondered if perhaps you thought my proper sphere of influence was judging suitable clothing.”

“Well, that’s one of them,” he said equably, “and you’re living proof that a woman can pass better than a man.”

“Well, in a Guild House, anyway,” she said, losing the impulse to argue with him.

“Look, you keep saying you want better understanding between Darkover and the Empire. Start contributing to it, then. Help me understand.”

That sounded reasonable. While she was thinking it over, he said, “You have two or three hours to kill, anyhow, while your boots are getting ready. We won’t make it a formal report. Just come back to HQ with me, and we can have a drink in my quarters while you put some basic reports on file for me. And show me how to access your other reports, or how to get clearance to work with them, okay? Good God, girl, don’t you even know your work is posted as
the
standard of excellence not only here, but all over the Empire? Even when I was still on Alpha I heard about Lorne’s work on Cottman Four, and I was hoping I’d be put on assignment with you!”

Flattery
, Magda thought;
he’s trying to get what he wants. That’s all
. But after the discouragement and self-doubt of the last weeks it touched something so deep in her that she could not help feeling warmed and satisfied by the words.

“All right. If I can have a few minutes to get down to the credit transfer department…”

“All the time you want,” he said amiably, having made his point.

Going in through the Spaceforce-guarded gate, it felt like the times she had come back with Peter from a field assignment, still in field clothes, but ready to take off her Darkovan
persona
and return to her true self.
I believed then that it was my true self and the Darkovan Margali only a mask. What is the truth
? She was no longer sure.

His quarters were in Unmarried Personnel, not too far from her own old rooms; he found her a seat, asked what she would have to drink.

“Coffee,” she said without a moment’s hesitation, “if you had to ask me what one thing I missed most, that would be it… that, and a hot shower in the morning.”

He went to dial it from the comsole. “Pretty primitive in the Guild House?”

“Oh, no,” she said, flicked again on the raw by that assumption. “They have hot baths, hot tubs to soak in, everything… it’s just that they have a different lifestyle and a different set of priorities. Some things you have to be brought up to; they take it for granted that a nice cold bath is just what you need to wake up in the morning, and hot water is a nighttime indulgence. And I’ve had to adapt.” She laughed, turning the coffee cup between her hands. “I never realized how Terran I was until I
had
to be Darkovan 28 hours a day, ten days a week.” She sipped the coffee; it still tasted good to her, despite the sudden strangeness; she wondered if the caffeine in it, now that she was unaccustomed to it, would give her some unexpected high.

“Well, now. What do you need to know? Languages? That’s simple - sleep with the corticator tape for at least seven days. Too many people here try to cheat - they can get along after one or two days so they never go back, and that takes time; I grew up on the language, of course, in fact I probably made the tapes you’re using, but when I learned the Dry-Town language I slept with it for two full tendays. You have to know it, not on the surface, but where it counts, down in your guts. There was some excuse when we didn’t
have
the tapes in full, but now we do. Program the subconscious all the way, not just the superficial language course. You have clearance to use a Braniff-Alpha level corticator, don’t you?”

“I’ve always been nervous about it. I don’t like the idea of anything mucking around with my very nerve synapses!”

“It’s the only way you can get it on the same level you’d have gotten it when you were a child,” she said. “And it’s better than being deaf and dumb!”

“That’s for sure,” Monty laughed. “Now can you put in a report on the Free Amazons - oh, pardon me, Renunciates - “

She corrected his pronunciation slightly, knowing it was temporizing. But a dozen of her sisters would be working here in Medic. She was, in a sense, doing this for the Guild. Monty found her a scribing machine, and Magda sat down to her work.

“The name Guild of Free Amazons, commonly used by Terrans and in the Empire,” she began, “is a romantic misconception, based on a Terran legend of a tribe of independent women. The true name of the Guild in their language could be better translated as the Order of Oath-Bound Renunciates,” and went on from there, explaining what she knew about the history and original charter of the Amazon movement, which had begun formally in Thendara only about 300 years ago, and for almost half of that time had been a highly secret movement, operating underground, with only a single concealed Guild House which operated almost like a cloistered convent; only recently, in the last hundred years, had the Amazons begun to operate openly and build other Houses of Refuge.

She heard, for a while, Monty moving around the quarters, then lost consciousness of him as she went on making her report; she translated the text of the oath and explained some of its more obscure provisions, mentioned some of the taboos and courtesies of the Amazons among themselves and those observed by the common people toward them, including the incredible hostility toward Free Amazons found among the commoner women in the Kilghard Hills. But when it came to speaking of the common accusation that they were haters of men and lovers of women, she found it difficult to keep the detachment of the trained anthropologist. She welcomed, in a sense, the ability to recapture her Terran self, to remain an outsider; but when she began to speak of this she hesitated, played back what she had said, then wiped the last ten minutes and substituted some vague generalities about relationships of the Amazons with men on the fire lines. Monty came in again while she was finishing this up, and said, “Now I understand how your boots got in such a mess. Tell me - you were out in the edge of the Kilghard Hills, then, as the fire was coming down toward Thendara?”

Magda nodded. He said, “I ordered us up some lunch; dictating is hungry work and your throat must be dry, at least.” He set a tray in front of her, and she smelled it appreciatively.
Terran food
… she told herself defensively that she had been brought up on Darkovan foods and liked them but that she was enjoying the change, it was nice to have something different. She had forgotten the completely different textures of synthetic foods, and tasted them exploringly.

He drew up a chair, digging into his own meal, looking appreciatively at the pile of narrow spindles she had piled up. “That’s
marvelous
,” he said fervently, “You’ll get a footnote in history or something, and I won’t deny that I’ll get a footnote to the footnote for talking you into it!”

She chuckled, shoving aside a tube of apple-flavored synthetic. The stuff, she decided, was as bland and flavorless as she remembered it. “You ought to have a footnote on your own. Or aren’t you planning to follow in the Old Man’s footsteps?”

Monty’s laugh created sudden intimacy between them. “You know, and I know, that my father is no more fit to be Coordinator on a planet like Darkover than that donkey in one of your folk tales - Duran, was it?”

“Durraman,” she said. “The one who starved to death between two bales of hay because he couldn’t decide which one to bite into first…”

“Seriously, it’s not his fault, Magda; he wanted to command a space station, it was what he was trained for; he got in with the wrong political crowd,” Monty said. “My good fortune, of course, this was my world from the moment I could decide… more coffee?”

She shook her head, pushing the tray away. “That
was
good,” she admitted, “for a change, anyway.”

He glanced at his chronometer, which kept Empire time. “You don’t need to hurry; your boots won’t be ready for another hour,” he said, “but I hate to ask you to do any more dictating; you’ve done a heroic job already. I can’t thank you enough, but you’ll find a bonus on your credit when you get back… by the way, when
are
you coming back? The Old Man was talking about a special liaison post created just for you…”