Thendara House (36 page)

“Still feeling faint, love? We’d better stop by the cafeteria and feed you.” She demurred - they were already late in the Coordinator’s office - but he insisted on taking her down to the dining building and getting her a quick meal. She didn’t want it, but thought, it serves me right for lying, and forced the stuff down, hoping it wouldn’t come right up again. He had gone to great pains to fetch her things, from the limited lunch selection of synthetics, that he had seen her eat, and she was touched, but again she found herself carefully evading his fingertips, and after a moment she realized why.

Do I really think that if I touch him he will be able to read my mind? Where did I get that idea? Or is it that I do not want to know for certain that he cannot?

Still, it seemed his instinct had been right. The food seemed somehow to block the enormous overload of sensation and reduce it to manageable proportions. Had she been under less tension, she might have enjoyed the visit to the Coordinator’s office, high above the port with a vast view reaching from the Venza Mountains high above the city, and the Comyn Castle, at one edge of the sky, and at the other, a vast expanse stretching halfway to the plains of Valeron, dim and blue at the edge of an indistinguishable horizon. The Coordinator was there, with his son and Cholayna Ares and many people Jaelle did not know, admiring the view.

Alessandro Li was speaking of it as they came in: “Grand view you have up here, Russ!”

The Coordinator turned his back on it, shrugging. “Not my type of scenery and the sun’s the wrong color,” he said. “Can’t see worth a damn.”
I should imagine the natives would go blind
. It was a moment before Jaelle realized that he had not said that aloud. Damn it, if she was going to be hearing both what people would say and what they did
not
say, it was going to be an uneasy conference! It also occurred to her that he had been here quite long enough for his eyes to be as well adapted to the light as Magda’s or Piedro’s except that he had so carefully insulated himself from that light. She tried, as she found she could, to draw within herself and avoid the contact, and the effort turned her pale.

“We might as well get down to business,” Montray said, “Some of our field men came in last night with a report of a downed plane out in the Kilghard Hills. I think they’ve finally found Mattingly and Carr.”

“Remember, I’m new here,” Li said, “Who are Mattingly and Carr?”

It was Wade Montray, Monty, who answered.

“Mapping and Exploring,” he said. “About three, four years ago. Plane went down in the Kilghard Hills somewhere in a freak storm, and although we sent our airsearch people, we never saw a sign of it; we imagined it must have been buried in the snow somewhere in the wild country. Now some of our field people have spotted it -

“I can show you exactly where,” said one of the men, and unrolled a huge sheet of paper with markings on it which Jaelle did not understand, but his words told her it was intended for a map, a sort of aerial picture of the Kilghard Hills - or, rather, a symbolic representation of the Hills as they might look from high above. He pointed. “We have to get back the downed plane before the locals start salvage work - “

“Why would they do a thing like that?” someone asked.

It was Peter who answered

“This is a metal-poor planet,” he said, “the metal of the hull would make anyone who found it rich. Not that we’d normally begrudge the salvage. But the plane’s instrumentation - we don’t want them knowing what kind of surveillance we’ve been running on them.”

Li asked “They have no aircraft at all?”

“None to speak of. They do use gliders in the mountains, mostly as a recreational item, though I heard once that they were used for messages and fast relay in firefighting. As I said, we don’t want them to know how closely we’ve been studying their countryside outside the Trade Zone - treaty restricts where we can and can’t go, though they aren’t stupid and they must know we have some field people out. But I think we ought to hear whatever it was they said,” Peter added, and the man from Mapping and Exploring nodded. “Bring the people in.”

Cholayna said, “This is the sort of thing I am beginning to hope we can do openly with the new Darkovan employees. If their surveying techniques are primitive, they might find it useful, and good for trade relations as well.”

“You’d think so,” the Coordinator grumbled, “but they don’t seem to have invented it in all the years they’ve been here. If ever there was an example of a planet regressing to the primitive -

“I’m not so sure,” Cholayna dissented, but Alessandro Li said quietly, “Let’s hear the report first. We can argue about cultural acceptance later.”

The men who came in were apparently ordinary Darkovans, but they spoke flawless Terran, and Jaelle, curious about who they might be, without any attempt to reach for the information, found the awareness she needed. They were all the sons of Terran spaceport personnel from the old days at Caer Donn, mostly by Darkovan women of the lowest class from the spaceport bars and wineshops; they had been given Terran education, then sent back into fieldwork from Intelligence. Cholayna was thinking that this was all wrong, but that nothing could be done as long as the families of Darkovan women were adamant in rejecting the children of such mixtures. With irritation Jaelle switched off the knowledge and tried to follow what was going on.

The men had snapshots, too, which were passed around, and when they came to Jaelle she said, “I know this area. I have traveled near it - ” and pointed to the peculiar configuration of one of the hills, like a falcon’s beak. “It is not too far from Armida - the Great House of Alton,” she added at a curious look from Cholayna. “Rafaella and I have escorted caravans past there.”

“Do you know the people at - what was it, Armida?” asked Li, and she shook her head ruefully.

“No indeed! I saw the old
Dom
Esteban, before he was lamed, once in the City, and once when I was a young girl I rode to Arilinn City and saw Lady Callista, who was Keeper there, riding out with a hawk. But know them? No indeed. They are the highest of Comyn nobility, folk of the Hastur-kind - ” She chuckled. “To them, a Renunciate would be among the lowest of the low!”

“Yet you do have relatives among them,” Piedro said, “Lady Rohana at Ardais was hospitable to all of us for your sake, Jaelle.”

Li’s eyes were sharp on her, but Jaelle only said, “Oh, Rohana is a rare soul - she has no prejudice against Free Amazons and other low forms of life! Besides, my mother was her first cousin and I think they had been lovers when they were young girls in the Tower. Some of them are my kinfolk, but I assure you,” she added, laughing, “none of them would be proud to claim the relationship!”

“However that may be,” Russ Montray said dryly, “You do believe that you could find the place where this picture was taken, Mrs. Haldane?”

She took the rough aerial photograph and studied it.

“Unless a blizzard should cover it again,” she said, “which is not at all unlikely. But it is a difficult place to get into. I cannot imagine how a plane could have fallen so far. But then I do not understand how your planes stay up, so perhaps it is not surprising that I do not understand it when they do not. But we do not have to worry about finding it,” she added, “They will bring it to us.”

Russ Montray scowled at her and asked, “What did you say?”

Russ Montray jerked his head toward her, in sharp disapproval. “What was that you said?” he demanded, and Jaelle felt again that fuzzy consternation, she had spoken out of a certainty that even now was ebbing away like the tides.

Montray said, his lips pressed together tightly in scorn, “I don’t know where you got your information, Mrs. Haldane, but the facts are, shortly after we received this news from our men in the field, we had a message from the - ” he frowned, fumbled, Monty filled in for him quickly.

“From one of the aides of the Regent, Lord Hastur, in the City. They also have located our plane and they have offered to retrieve the bodies of the men in return for a share of the salvage in the metal.”

Jaelle pressed her hand against her head. This was absurd, she never got headaches! Well, she had never been pregnant before either; she supposed it was natural enough.

The Coordinator said, “I think we should tell them, hands off! It’s our ship and our metal and what the hell do these Darkovans think they are anyhow? Just another Terran colony like any other -

“I venture to remind you,” Peter said softly, “of the Bentigne Agreement, that a Lost Colony which established its own culture is not subject to automatic attachment by parent stock in the absence of cultural continuity. And in the case of Darkover there is less cultural continuity than in any other planet I studied in the Intelligence School.”

Monty said, “It seems a fair enough arrangement. Mounting a full-scale salvage operation into the Kilghard Hills would be expensive - even if we could get permission to do it, which isn’t by any means certain - “

“It’s our plane,” his father insisted. “We certainly have a right to recover it, and we don’t want the natives mucking around with the machinery - they’d probably be dumb enough to melt it down for the metal!”

“The operation would belong to Intelligence,” Cholayna said quietly, “though certainly the Coordinator’s office has some interest in the matter. What’s the problem, Russ? Didn’t you bother to get permission for the Mapping and Exploring Flights, and are you afraid you’ll have to answer for illegal surveillance outside the Trade Zone?”

Typical Montray trick
, Jaelle found herself picking up the thought, and realized her arm was linked with Peter’s and she was once again reading his thoughts. Certainly Russell Montray was incompetent, if even his own subordinates felt this way about him!
Possibly the whole history of the Empire on Darkover has been bungled because some damned bureaucrat wanted to get rid of Russ Montray and pushed him out here
. It was hard to believe that a civilization spanning the stars could have made a mistake as petty as this - wouldn’t a stellar empire make mistakes only on the grand scale?

“Whatever the case may be,” Montray said, frowning, “we have been summoned to speak with the Regent, and you, Mrs. Haldane, are familiar with their protocol; you are our choice for interpreter. Can you be ready to go in an hour?” His chilly eyes rested on her, but it was over her head that he spoke to Cholayna Ares. “I’m trusting you to find the leak in Intelligence Services; Mrs. Haldane shouldn’t have found out about it before I saw fit to release it. You ought to check your people, Ares.”

“I’ll let you go in a few minutes to be ready for the trip into the City,” Cholayna said. “I wish I could go with you; perhaps some day I’ll have a chance.” Jaelle heard;
some day when this planet isn’t quite so xenophobic; visiting the Guild House will be a good start
. “But before you go, Jaelle, just how
did
you hear about the envoy from the Hasturs? I know I didn’t leak it to you - couldn’t, I didn’t know it myself. You’re on good terms with Sandro - Aleki, I mean. I won’t let it get back to him, but was he talking when he shouldn’t?”

Jaelle shook her head. “Peter didn’t know either,” she said. “That’s the truth, Cholayna, I don’t know where I picked it up. Somewhere - someone in that room knew and I must have read it in his mind and thought it was something everybody knew. I don’t know how I did it…”

Cholayna laid a light hand on her arm. “I believe you, Jaelle. I’ve heard something about the ESP that’s common on this planet. The earliest reports spoke of it, then everything closed down. I’ve suspected before this that you were psychic. Don’t worry about Montray. I’ll smooth him down.” Jaelle read in the woman’s mind an uncomplimentary epithet she did not understand. “Go and get ready for the trip, and be sure to dress warmly; it’s a beautiful day, but my own ESP, such as it is, tells me there’s a storm coming up.”

But she did not even glance toward the window, and Jaelle was sure she was not speaking of bad weather.

Jaelle was ready, even eager, for the trip into the City, but Peter spoilt her enthusiasm at once; he was furious when he saw she was wearing Darkovan clothing.

“What are you trying to do to me, dammit?”

She realized now she would never understand him. “What has it to do with you? We are going over to my side of the wall this time! And you should know how our people - ” she said
our
people deliberately, trying to remind him, “react to Terran uniform; not even a prostitute would dress this way in Thendara. Why, Magda was intelligent enough to know that - ” she stopped herself before she said something unforgivable.