Thendara House (5 page)

“Ration for the day; some kind of synthetic carbo-protein, I imagine. Whatever it is, it’s supposed to be good for you.” She ate up her portion with appetite, though, and so Jaelle tried to choke some of it down.

“The food in the Main Cafeteria is better than this,” Bethany said, “this is just a quick place to eat and run. I know this was a boring morning, but it’s always like this on a new job.”

Boring
? Jaelle thought of the last job she had undertaken; with her partner Rafaella, organizing a trade caravan to Dalereuth. They had spent the first day talking to their employer, finding out what men he had and how many animals, inspecting pack-beasts and making up their loads, visiting harness-makers to have proper packs made up. While Rafi had gone off to organize the hiring of extra animals, Jaelle had questioned the men about their food preferences and gone to purchase supplies and arrange their delivery. Monotonous, perhaps, and hard work, but certainly not boring!

The food was too strange to eat much; she could not have gotten it down at all had she not been ravenous after her breakfastless morning. The textures were too smooth, the tastes too sweet or too salty, with one fiery bitterness that made her splutter. At least Bethany was trying to be friendly.

Searching her mind, she realized she was still angry about the moment when she had walked naked between the rows of machines. None of the men had been offensive, they had not noticed that she was female. But they should have noticed. Noticed; not looked at her offensively, but noticed that she
was
in fact female and would have feelings about displaying herself before strange men. Possibly they should have had the machines entirely staffed by women, just to indicate that they understood her natural feelings. She hated the idea that they considered her just a nothing, another machine that happened to be living and breathing, a machine no one would have noticed except that it was not wearing the proper uniform!
A lot of bones and organs
, Bethany had said. She felt depersonalized, as if by treating her like a machine they had made her into one.

“Don’t try to eat that stuff if you don’t like it,” Bethany said, noticing her struggle with the food. “Sooner or later, you’ll find out which things you like and which ones you don’t, and you can get native food - oh, I’m sorry, I mean naturally cooked food, things more like what you’re accustomed to eating - in quarters. Some people prefer synthetics, that’s all - the Alphans, for instance, have religious objections to eating anything that’s ever been alive or growing, so we have to provide complete synthetic diets for them, and it’s cheaper and easier to package them for the staff up here. They’re not so bad when you’re used to them,” she rattled on, while Jaelle blinked, thinking of a world where everybody ate this kind of thing, not for convenience or cheapness but because they had religious scruples about eating anything which had once contained life. She supposed it showed, after all, a very elevated ethical sense. Anyway, there was nothing she could do about it.

By now she was numb to shocks and flung her half-emptied plate into the ubiquitous disposal bins, watching it flow away into slime and swirl away down the drain. Small loss, she thought. Upstairs again, in one of the large windowless offices, she felt the unease of incipient claustrophobia - it was unsettling not to be sure whether she was on the fourth floor or the twenty-fourth. She told herself that she could not expect to have everything familiar, among Terrans, and that at least it was a new kind of experience. But the strange sounds and background machine noises scraped away at her nerves. Bethany located a desk for her.

“This is Lorne’s place; even when she’s here she doesn’t use it much, she worked mostly in Montray’s office upstairs, but when I heard you were coming in, I had it cleaned out and set up for you. You wouldn’t want to work under Montray, he’s a - ” She used an idiom Jaelle did not understand, comparing him with some unfamiliar animal, but the disapproving tone conveyed her meaning perfectly well. She remembered what she had heard in the Medic office, too… Montray, then, was the one who could not be trusted to treat Darkovans with ordinary courtesy. How, she wondered, had this man come to be in a position of authority if his character faults were so extreme that even his own staff felt free to comment on them? She resolved to ask Peter; she literally did not know how to frame the question for Bethany’s ears without implying all kinds of insulting things about Terrans in general.

Bethany was explaining, in rapid-fire, how to use the voice-scriber, the throat-mike, the clearing key for erasure, the way in which the words would print on the screen before her. “You don’t have to speak out loud, just subvocalize.” She struck a key, and said, “Here, like this - watch.”

On the screen, printed in luminous pale letters, the words appeared: HERE. LIKE THIS - WATCH. Jaelle swallowed as she slowly spelled them out.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just told this to the person who needs to know this?”

Bethany shrugged. “I suppose it could be done that way, but we need it for records - then the next Director of Operations, and the one beyond him, will be able to get it in your own words, years from now.”

“Why should anyone be interested, say, fifty years from now, when we are no longer here and Rumal di Scarp is dead?”

“Well, it goes into the record,” said Bethany, sorely puzzled herself.
That word again
. “Even by next week, your memory will have distorted what happened… you really should have been debriefed, as Magda should have been, right after it happened, though I understand why it wasn’t possible - you all spent the winter snowed in at Ardais, didn’t you? But we have to get all this into the record, as clearly as we can. Then other Heads of Departments, or even people on other Empire planets, will have access to the information, even a hundred years from now. It all goes into the permanent record.”

But that, Jaelle thought, was impossible; for anyone to report anything with that kind of permanent, frozen, once-for-all objectivity. She said, choosing her words to try and convey her distress, “But the truth I tell now about what happened at Sain Scarp is not the truth I would have told then. And what I tell now will not be the truth fifty years from now. I will have to recall all of it, fifty years from now, to see what the truth is then, because the only truth then will be what we remember - and not just me, but what Margali - Magda remembers, and what Peter remembers, and even what Lady Rohana and Rumal di Scarp himself remembers.”

Bethany shook her head, clearly not understanding what Jaelle was trying to convey. “I’m afraid that’s too complicated for me. Just tell everything you can remember, and we’ll worry about that kind of ultimate truth some other time - all right?”

“But whom am I reporting to?”

“Does it matter? Tell it just the way you’d tell it to anyone who asked you what happened out there; put in every little detail you can think of - someone else will be editing the text and if there’s anything really irrelevant, she’ll cut it out.”

“But how do I know what to say if I don’t know who I’m saying it to?” Jaelle asked, confused again. “I mean, if you asked me to tell you, I’d tell it one way, and if, say, the Comyn Council asked, I’d tell it another way - “

Bethany sighed, and Jaelle could feel her frustration. She said, “I guess my
casta
isn’t as good as I thought. It sounded as if you were saying you’d tell two different stories to us and to your own people. That’s not what you mean, is it?” At Jaelle’s vigorous headshake, she nodded and said, “I didn’t think so; you look fairly honest to me, and Magda said nice things about you; I couldn’t imagine you being that two-faced. I’ll tell you what; just tell the story into the scriber, as if you were telling it to one of your Guild people, Elders - what’s the word - ?”

“Guild Mothers?”

“I guess that’s it. Tell it as if you were telling one of your Guild Mothers, why don’t you?”

She clipped the throat-mike, with its black snakelike attachment, to the neckband of Jaelle’s tunic. “That’s another good reason for wearing uniform; the standard uniform for your sector has a pocket in the neckband for a scriber-microphone and you can just tuck it in instead of messing around with clips.” She demonstrated on her own uniform tunic. Jaelle flinched a little at the thought of being hooked up to any machine, but she supposed she would get used to it. It wasn’t dangerous and she was not the barbarian they seemed to think her. It was up to her not to panic like a fish in a tree!

“Now just talk into it softly, or even subvocalize; I won’t stand over you, it would only make you nervous, but I’ll be right over here at my desk if you need me for anything,” she said, and went away. Jaelle sat still, trying to decide what to do first. She said half aloud, “I’m still not sure I know how to handle this thing - ” and heard the small humming and rattling sound; luminous letters swam on the screen and she saw in the slightly unfamiliar letters of Standard, her words in Casta: “I’m still not sure I know…”

Chagrined, she pressed the clearing key and saw the letters disappear into flashes of light, as her paper cup and dinnerplate had vanished into nothingness.
Is anything permanent here
? she wondered; yet Bethany had been speaking of making her report accessible for all time. It was a sobering thought.

She said slowly, “I don’t know where to start…” and as the machine hummed again, she saw the words appear in light on the screen. But this time it did not trouble her. How many times, she wondered, had she started out a report to Kindra, or to one of the Guild Mothers, of some mission accomplished or failed, with those very words? As if she had been sitting in the great gathering-room in Thendara Guild House, with the Guild Mothers and her sisters waiting to be told of what she had done, she began in a composed, formal way:

“On a certain night about ten days before Midwinter, I was traveling north to Nevarsin Monastery. With me were a band of the
Comhii-Letzii
, with myself, Jaelle n’ha Melora, as elected leader, Gwennis n’ha Uriel, Sherna n’ha Lia, and Devra n’ha Rayna on their way to take the places of three of our sisters who had been living in Nevarsin to copy records there, and Camilla n’ha Kyria, my oath-sister, as escort and guard. Because of a severe oncoming storm, we camped in a travel-shelter situated half a day’s journey north of Andalune Pass. We found the place already tenanted by a band of strange men, about twelve in number; but invoking the traditional neutrality of the travel-shelters, we greeted them politely and made our camp at the opposite end of the building. Shortly after dark, a woman traveling alone, and in the ordinary dress of a Renunciate, entered the building; she identified herself as from Temora Guild House and was welcomed to our fire. This woman I learned later to be Magdalen Lorne - ” She struggled with Magda’s Terran name and was quite sure that what appeared on the screen was not what Magda’s name looked like in Terran letters. She had once seen it written. She must have mispronounced it so grossly that the machine could not compensate and was reduced to a phonetic transcription of what she had actually
said
. She hit the clearing key and, biting her lip, called Bethany to ask the proper spelling.

To her great relief Bethany showed no exasperation, no sense that she had asked anything terribly stupid; she matter-of-factly spelled it for her and went back to her own desk, and Jaelle went on.

“We did not know her to be Terran or an Agent of Intelligence. We simply made her welcome among us and shared food as was traditional when Renunciates meet on the trail. While we were all sleeping there was a disturbance - “

She went on, the words flowing smoothly now, telling how Magda had been attacked by one of the bandits, breaking the travel-shelter’s law of neutrality; when the men had been evicted from the shelter, Magda, under questioning, had been exposed as an intruder, and as the law provided, had been required to take the Oath. The next day Jaelle had turned over her leadership of the group to Camilla n’ha Kyria, in order to escort her new oath-daughter to Neskaya Guild House; when the others had gone, she and Magda had been attacked by two of the returning bandits and had fought them, in an encounter where Jaelle had been severely wounded. Magda, wounded herself, had saved Jaelle’s life; and although she could then have ridden away on her mission, had stayed to tend Jaelle’s severe and life-threatening wound. Later, Jaelle had discovered Magda’s true identity, and had gone with her to complete the ransom of Peter Haldane from Rumal di Scarp.

She went on from there, briefly sketching in the encounter with a banshee-bird in the Pass of Scaravel, the ransom exchange, and the subsequent trip - what she could remember of it, since her memory of that time was blurred by the fever in her wound, and she remembered little of the journey except that Peter had taken her on his saddle when she could no longer ride alone.

She said little about their stay in Castle Ardais, except that they had been treated with kindly courtesy by Lady Rohana and welcomed by Dom Gabriel with due and gracious hospitality, even though he did not approve of Renunciates. She mentioned very briefly that Rohana was her kinswoman, and had been her guardian in childhood; even more briefly, that she and Peter Haldane had agreed to marry, upon their return to Thendara, and had done so. If they wanted to know anything more than that, they would have to ask her. How did she know what they wanted to know, and what business of theirs was it, anyhow? She was willing to report the part she had played in Peter’s ransom - she supposed he would be reporting that from his own perspective - but while she would have gladly told her Guild Mothers how she had come to know Peter well, how she had clung to him during her illness, the growing closeness between them, and how she had first shared his bed after the Midwinter-festival, she was not going to report all that to a faceless machine, for Terrans who did not know either of them.