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all of the details; only that for many years, Camilla had lived as a mercenary soldier, even her closest associates unaware that she was not the rough-spoken, rough-living man she seemed. After some years of this, Camilla, wounded and near death, had revealed herself to a Renunciate: Kindra, Jaelle’s own foster-mother. She had found herself able, in the Guild of Free Amazons, to take up again, painfully and with great self-doubt, the womanhood she had tried so long and so hard to renounce or conceal.
Once or twice, when their barriers were down to one another, Magda had become certain that Camilla retained some of her family’s heritage of laran , whatever that family might be. She was sure that Camilla bore the blood of one of the Seven Domains, the great families of Darkover, even though she concealed her laran .
It was not impossible that Camilla knew, without being told, how difficult the thing was that the Terrans had asked her to do.
“Do you remember meeting Lexie Anders at the special orientation meeting they gave for the new women working in the Terran Zone?”
“I do. She was very scornful of the notion that the Penta Cori’yo had anything to offer Terran women. Even when the other women in the Bridge Society pointed out that, after all, Terran women could hardly go to the Spaceport bars for recreation in the City, and that this would give her friends and associates, and a place to go when she could not stand being cooped up in the HQ anymore - “
“And I know, if Lexie doesn’t, that that’s one reason women employees haven’t been very fortunate on Darkover, unless they were brought up here and feel comfortable with the language and the way women are expected to behave,” Magda said. “I remember how rude and casual Lexie was at the reception. She made us all feel like - well, like natives, crude aboriginals; that we should all have been wearing skin loincloths and bones in our hair.”
“And you had to go into her mind? Poor Margali,” said Camilla, “I do not imagine her mind is a pleasant place to be. Not even, I should imagine, for her. As for you - “
“It wasn’t only that,” Magda said. Briefly, she repeated to Camilla what Cholayna had told her about the lost plane, and about Lexie’s mysterious reappearance. ” - So I told her, I’m not a trained psi-tech, and don’t blame me if I make things worse,” she said, “and then we went down to Isolation, in Medic, where they had been keeping her.”
 
Magda had not remembered that Lexie Anders was such a little woman. She was loud-voiced and definite, with such an assertive stance and manner that it was shocking to see her lying flat against her cot, pale and scrubbed like a sick child. Her hair was fair, cut short and curly; her face looked almost bruised, the blue veins showing through the skin. More distressing than this was the emptiness in her face; Magda felt that even Lexie’s aggressive rudeness was preferable to this passive, childish pliancy.
Magda had learned a little of the dialect of Vainwal during her years in training on Planet Alpha, in the Intelligence Academy. “How are you feeling, Lieutenant Anders?”
“My name’s Lexie. I don’t know why they’re keeping me here, I’m not sick,” Lexie said, in a childish, complaining tone. “Are you going to stick more needles in me?”
“No, I promise I won’t stick you with any needles.” Magda lifted a questioning eyebrow at Cholayna, who said in an undertone, “The Medics tried pentothal; they thought if this was simply emotional shock, it might help her to relive it and talk about it. No result.”
Magda thought about that for a moment. If Lexie Anders had been, at one moment, in a plane about to crash in the frozen wastelands surrounding the Wall Around the World, and in the next moment, was outside the Spaceport gates of Thendara HQ, the emotional shock alone could have reduced her to this condition.
“Do you know where you are, Lexie?”
“Hospital. They