City of Sorcery Read online

  “So she’s presumed dead, then? Too bad.” Anything further would be hypocrisy. Lexie had disliked Magda quite as much as Magda had disliked Lexie.

  “No,” said Cholayna, “she’s down in Medic.”

  “You recovered the plane? But—”

  “No, we didn’t recover the plane, do you think I would have brought you across the city in a rush like this for a routine rescue or debriefing?”

  “You keep telling me what it isn’t,” Magda said, “but you haven’t given me any idea, yet, what this is… ”

  Still, Cholayna hesitated. At last, she said, quite formally, “Magda, I remind you that you are still a sworn Intelligence Agent, and are covered by the Official Secrets Provision of Civil Service—”

  “Cholayna, I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” Magda began, and now she was seriously annoyed. What was all this rigmarole? She had never questioned her Oath to Intelligence, except during the painful identity crisis of her first half-year among the Renunciates. There had then been no Bridge Society to help in this kind of transition. She had been the first.

  “You know, I fought to keep you on inactive duty status, instead of accepting your resignation,” Cholayna said deliberately. “One of the tenets of intelligence work, and this applies to all Empire planets, incidentally, not just Darkover, is this: when one of ours goes over the wall—goes native, acquires a native spouse and children—the rule of thumb is that it makes him a better agent. Although there is always a question in the record about any decision he might make which could possibly create a conflict as to where his personal interest lies. I’m sure you know that.”

  “I could quote you pages of regulations about it,” Magda said dryly. “I was prepared for this. I assume it applies to me because I’ve had a child, though as far as you know I’m not married. Right? Well, you’re wrong.”

  “Are you married, then?”

  “Not in any way you’d recognize under Terran law. But I have sworn the Oath of Freemates with Jaelle n’ha Melora: by Darkovan law, that creates an analogy to marriage. Specifically, it means that if either of us should die, the other has both a legal right and a legal obligation to foster and act as guardian of the other’s child or children, exactly as a wife or husband would do. Specifically this oath overrides, by law, any claim of the children’s fathers. So for all practical purposes, the situation is identical with marriage. Is that clear?”

  Cholayna said, her voice hard, “I’m sure Xenoanthropology will find it fascinating. I’ll make sure they get it from the records. But I wasn’t inquiring into the details of your private life.”

  “I wasn’t giving them.” Magda’s voice was equally unyielding, although in fact Cholayna was one of the few people alive to whom she might have given such details if asked. “I was apprising you of the legal situation. I assume, then, that those standard assumptions about Empire men with a native wife and children apply to me, and I am expected to behave accordingly.”

  “You assume wrongly, Magda. Yes, on the books, it’s true; but in actual practice—and this is classified information I’m giving you—on the occasions, and incidentally they are very rare, when a woman goes over the wall—classified practice is to deactivate her intelligence rating immediately. The reasons given for this are numerous, but they all boil down to the same thing. Official Intelligence policy assumes that a man can maintain an objective detachment from his wife and children, more easily than you or I could, because of—Magda, remember I’m quoting, this isn’t my personal belief—because of her deeper involvement. Presumably, a husband can detach himself from a wife easier than vice versa, and the children are, again supposedly, closer to the woman who bore them than they are to the man who fathered them.”

  Magda swore. “I should have expected something like this. Do I have to tell you what I think of the reish?” The Darkovan word was a childish vulgarity, which meant literally stable-sweepings, but her face twisted in real anger as she said it.

  “Of course you don’t. What you think of it and what I think of it are very much the same, but what either of us thinks, is completely beside the point. I’m talking about official policy. I was supposed to accept your resignation the first time you handed it in.”

  “I suppose it’s also in those extremely confidential and classified private files that I am reputed to be a lover of women?” Magda asked with a wry twist of her mouth. “I know the classified policy regarding lovers of men, among Terrans—legally they’re protected by official policies of non-discrimination. Practically, you know and I know that they’re hassled on any pretext anyone can find.”

  “You’re wrong,” Cholayna said, “or at least it’s not true in every case. There’s a legal loophole: a man who is living with a wife and children, no matter what his private preference, cannot officially be classified homosexual. In practice, he’s covered, and can fight any such action. You covered yourself against any such action when your child was born, Magda. Nobody really cares whether you married the father or not. But by immunizing yourself from that kind of persecution, you invoked the other one: now it’s assumed that you are completely unsuited to Intelligence work because your loyalty would be to your child or children, and to the man who fathered them. I should, according to the Code, have accepted your resignation the first time you handed it in.”

  “I would have been perfectly agreeable to that,” said Magda.

  “I know. Goodness knows, you’ve given me opportunities enough,” Cholayna said. “You’ve handed it in so regularly every season that I’ve wondered if it’s just your way of celebrating Midsummer and Midwinter! But I still think I’m seeing a little farther than you do. We can’t afford to lose qualified women this way.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “By way of explaining to you why this request is unofficial, and why, just the same, you have to listen to me, and help me. Magda, you have the ultimate weapon over me; you can tell me where to go and what to do when I get there, and according to regulations I have no recourse at all. The legal situation is, you’ve gone over the wall, and I have no right to call you in. But I’m bucking regulations because you are the one person who might be able to make sense of what’s happening now.”

  “And so, finally, we come around to it,” Magda said, “the reason you hauled me out on a rainy night—”

  “All nights here are rainy, but that’s beside the point, too.”

  “Lexie Anders?”

  “Ten minutes or so before her plane went down, she transmitted a message via satellite; she was approaching the Wall Around the World, and was preparing to turn back. Her final message said she’d spotted something, like a city, which she had not found on the radar map. She was descending to five thousand meters to investigate. Then we lost her, and the plane. Nothing more. Not even the black box, as I said. As far as HQ or the satellites know, the plane vanished, black box and all, right out of the atmosphere of the planet. But Lexie Anders appeared this morning at the gates of the HQ, out of uniform, without her identity cards. And her mind had been wiped. Wiped clean. Complete amnesia. Magda, she can hardly speak Terran Standard! She speaks the native language of her home planet— Vainwal—but on the baby-talk level. So obviously, we can’t ask her what happened.”

  “But—all this is impossible, Cholayna! I don’t understand—”

  “Neither do we. And that’s an understatement. And it’s no use questioning Anders, in her condition.”

  “So why did you send for me?” Magda asked. But she was afraid she knew, and it made her angry. Although as far as Magda had ever known Cholayna had no laran, the woman seemed to sense her annoyance and hesitated; then, as Magda had known she would, she said it anyhow.

  “You’re a psi-technician, Magda. The nearest one we have, the only properly trained one this side of the Alpha colony. You can find out what really happened.”

  Magda was silent for a moment, staring angrily at Cholayna. She should have expected this. It was, she thought
, her own fault for not breaking a tie that had ceased to have any meaning. As Cholayna had reminded her, she had tried to resign from Terran Intelligence, and Cholayna had dissuaded her; Magda, she said, was best qualified to build closer communications, ties, a bridge between the world of Magda’s birth and the Darkovan world Magda had chosen for her own. Magda had wanted this too: the Bridge Society was living proof of her desire to strengthen that tie. Yet when Magda had left the Guild-house to become part of the only laran circle of trained psychics which worked its trained matrix circle outside the carefully surrounded, safeguarded precincts of a Tower, she should have known this problem would again become acute.

  It was not that the Empire had no command of psi techniques. Not as common, nor as well developed as they were on Darkover. Few planets in the known universe had the displayed skill, the taken-for-granted potential of telepaths and other psi-sensitive talents which the Darkovans called laran. As far as was known, Darkover was unique in that respect.

  But these talents, it was now known, were an ineradicable part of the human mind. Although there were still a few determined skeptics—and for some reason, determined skepticism was a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that skeptics rarely developed any psi skills of any kind— where there were humans, there were the psi skills which were part of the human mind. And so there were trained telepaths, though not many, and even a few mechanical psi-probes had been developed which could do much the same work.

  “Only there are none on Darkover, none nearer than the Intelligence Academy on Alpha,” said Cholayna, “and we’ve got to know what happened to her. Don’t you understand, Magda? We’ve got to know!”

  When Magda did not answer, she drew a long breath, loud in the room. “Listen, Magda, you know what this means as well as I do! You know there’s nothing out there beyond the Hellers, nothing! So she signals she’s spotted something out there, and then she goes down. Nothing on the satellite picture, no black box, no plane recorder—nothing. But if there’s nothing out there, she’s still gone down with her plane. We’ve lost planes from Map and Ex before this. We’ve lost pilots, too. But she didn’t go down. Something out there grabbed her—and then gave her back! In this condition!”

  Magda thought this over for a moment. She said at last, “It means there has to be something out there; something outside the Wall Around the World. But that’s impossible.” She had seen the weather-satellite pictures of Cottman Four. A cold planet, a planet tilted strongly on its axis by the presence of the high himals of the Hellers, the Wall Around the World, amounting to a “third pole.” A planet inhabitable only in a relatively small part of one continent, and elsewhere a frozen wasteland with no signs of life.

  “You’re beginning to see what I mean,” Cholayna said grimly. “And you’re trained in what the Darkovans call laran.”

  “I was a fool ever to let you know that!” Magda knew it was her own fault for retaining even this fragile bond. When she had outgrown the ties of the Guild-house, she should have done what Andrew Carr had done before her, and allowed the Terrans, perhaps even the Renunciates, to think her dead.

  In the Forbidden Tower, she had found a home, a world of others like herself, who belonged nowhere else in worlds that demanded they define themselves in narrow categories. Callista, Keeper, exiled from her Tower because she could give up neither her human love nor the exercise of the powerful laran for which she had nearly given her life. Andrew Carr, Terran, who had discovered his own powers and found a new world and a new life. Damon, exiled from a Tower, the only man who had had the courage to demand what no man had been allowed in centuries: he had become Keeper of the Tower they called Forbidden, and fought for the right to establish his Tower in the open. There were others who had come to it, outcasts from the regular Towers, or those who despite talent would never have been admitted to a Tower; and now, among them, herself and Jaelle.

  And she had been foolish enough to let Cholayna know something—anything, of this…

  “You want me to psi-probe her, Cholayna? Why can’t you get a technician out from Alpha? You could send a message and have one here in a tenday.”

  “No, Magda. If she stays like this, she could drop into catatonia and we’d never know. Besides, if there is something out there, we have to know it. Now. We can’t send another plane up until we know what happened to that one.”

  “There’s nothing out there,” Magda said, with more harshness than she intended. “Satellite pictures don’t lie.”

  “That’s what I’ve always said.” Cholayna stared at the lighted panels on her desktop; when Magda said nothing, she got up and came around the desk and grabbed Magda’s shoulders. “Damn it, something happened to her! I can understand the plane going down. I’ve never tried to fly over the Hellers myself, but I’ve talked to some who have. What scares me is how she got back here, and the condition she’s in. If it could happen to Lexie, it could happen to anyone. Not a single person in Mapping and Exploring, or anywhere else outside the Trade City, is safe until we know what took her and her plane—and how, and why—they—sent her back. You’ve got to help us, Magda.”

  Magda walked away from Cholayna, and stared out at the lights of the Spaceport below. Up here, she could see the whole of Terran HQ, and across the city to the Old Town. The contrast was definite, the glaring lights of the Terran Trade City, the dim scattered lights of the Old Town, already all but dark at this hour. Somewhere in that darkness lay the Guild-house and her friends, while out beyond the pass that was just a blacker darkness against the night sky lay the estate of Armida, a little more than a day’s ride north, where was her new world. If only she could consult with one of them, with their Keeper Damon, with Andrew, who like herself had fought the battle between his Terran self and his Darkovan world. But they were there, and she was here, and it was her own unique predicament and her own unanswerable problem.

  “I’m the last person Lexie would want mucking around in her mind, believe me.”

  Cholayna said, and there was no possible answer, “She wouldn’t want to stay like this forever, either. She’s down in Medic, in Isolation. We haven’t wanted anyone else to know what happened.”

  Some day, Magda thought, it was going to occur to the Terran HQ personnel that there were some things even they couldn’t control. She didn’t give a fundamental damn whether the Terrans kept up their pretense of omnipotence. But there was a fellow human being, a woman, caught up in the gears. She said, more roughly than she intended, “Let’s get on with it, then. But I’m not a trained psi-technician, so don’t blame me if all I can do is make things worse. I’ll do my best. That’s all I can say.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  « ^ »

  Magda hated to ring the night-bell at the Guild-house; it meant that someone would have to be roused, come down the stairs and open the bolted door. Yet she preferred that, inconvenient as it was, to accepting Cholayna’s offer to find her a place to stay either in Unmarried Personnel Living Quarters, or even in the Bridge Society Hostel, where some of the Darkovan nurses in training had their lodgings.

  She stood shivering on the steps, for even in high summer it was chilly at this hour, listening to the clang of the bell inside. Then she heard a long scraping of the heavy bolt, and at last the door opened grudgingly, and a young woman’s voice asked, “Who is it? Do you want the midwife?”

  “No, Cressa. It is I, Margali n’ha Ysabet,” Magda said, and came inside. “I am truly sorry to disturb you. I’ll just go quietly up to bed.”

  “It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep. Someone came for Keitha just a little while ago. Poor girl, she was out all day, and had just gotten to sleep, and a man came for her, his wife was expecting her first, so she’ll be out all night, too. Someone suggested in House Meeting a few moons ago that the midwives should answer all the night bells, because most of the time, night calls were for them.”

  “That wouldn’t really be fair,” Magda said, “they deserve to sleep when they can, if
only because they lose so much sleep already. I apologize again for waking you. Do you need help with the bolt?”

  “Thank you, it really is too heavy for me.”

  Magda came and helped her to fasten the heavy lock. Cressa went off to the night doorkeeper’s room, and Magda went slowly up the stairs to the room she had been given to share with Jaelle during this stay in the House. She paused at the door; then turned away, went to a nearby door and knocked softly. After a moment she heard a muffled response, turned the knob and went inside.

  “Camilla,” she whispered, “are you asleep?”

  “Of course I am, could I talk to you if I were awake?” Camilla sat up in bed. “Margali? What is it?”

  Without answering, Magda came and sat on the edge of the bed, where she slumped, letting her head fall wearily into her hands.

  “What is it, bredhiya?” Camilla asked gently. “What did they ask of you this time?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Her sensitivity was so high—she had been using laran at such a level—that she could almost hear Camilla’s thoughts as if the woman had spoken them aloud:

  Oh yes, of course, it is because you do not want to talk that you come and wake me instead of quietly going to sleep in your own room!

  But aloud, Camilla said only, “You missed dinner here; did they at least feed you in the Terran Zone?”