He was isolated; no one of his fellows received his call. Nor could he escape from the
form of flesh he was then energizing. I myself saw to that.” Karen had never before felt
the Arisian display emotion, but his thought was grim and cold. “From that form, which
your father never did perceive, Gharlane of Eddore passed into the next plane of
existence.”
Karen shivered. “It served bun right . . . That clears everything up, I think. But are
you sure, Mentor”—wistfully—”that you can’t, or rather shouldn’t, teach me any more
than you have? It’s . . . I feel . . . well, ‘incompetent’ is putting it very mildly indeed.”
‘To a mind of such power and scope as yours, in its present state of
development, such a feeling is inevitable. Nor can anyone except yourself do anything
about it. Cold comfort, perhaps, but it is the stark truth that from now on your
development is your own task. Yours alone. As I have already told Christopher and
Kathryn, and will very shortly tell Camilla and Constance, you have had your last Arisian
treatment I will be on call to any of you at any instant of any day, to aid you or to guide
you or to re-enforce you at need; but of formal instruction there can be no more.”
Karen left Arisia and drove for Lyrane, her thoughts in a turmoil. The time was
too short by far; she deliberately cut her vessel’s speed and took a long detour so that
the vast and chaotic library of her mind could be reduced to some semblance of order
before she landed.
She reached Lyrane II, and there, again to all outward seeming a happy, carefree
girl, she hugged her mother rapturously.
“You’re the most wonderful thing, mums!” Karen exclaimed. “It’s simply
marvelous, seeing you again in the flesh . . .”
“Now why bring that up?” Clarrissa had—just barely— become accustomed to
working undraped, in the Lyranian fashion.
“I didn’t mean it that way at all, and you know I didn’t,” Kay snickered. “Shame on
you—fishing for compliments, and at your age, too!” Ignoring the older woman’s attempt
at protest she went on: “All kidding aside, mums, you’re a mighty smart-looking hunk of
woman. I approve of you exceedingly much. In fact, we’re a keen pair and I like both of
us. I’ve got one advantage over you, of course, in that I never did care whether I had
any clothes on or not. How are you doing?”
“Not so well—of course, though, I haven’t been here very long.” Forgetting her
undressedness, Clarrissa frowned. “I haven’t found Helen, and I haven’t found out yet
why she retired. I can’t quite decide whether to put pressure on now, or wait a while
longer. Ladora, the new Elder Person, is . . . that is, I don’t know . . . Oh, here she
comes now. I’m glad— I want you to meet her.”
If Ladora was glad to see Karen, however, she did not show it. Instead, for an
inappreciable instant of time which was nevertheless sufficient for the acquirement of
much information, each studied the other. Like Helen, the former queen, Ladora was
tall, beautifully proportioned, flawless of skin and feature, hard and fine. But so, and in
most respects even more so, to Ladora’s astonishment and quickly-mounting wrath,
was this pink-tanned stranger. Practically instantaneously, therefore, the Lyranian
hurled a vicious mental bolt; only to get the surprise of her life.
She hadn’t found out yet what this strange near-person, Clarrissa of Sol III, had
in the way of equipment, but from the meek way she acted, it couldn’t be much. So
Clarrissa’s offspring, younger and less experienced, would be easy enough prey.
But Ladora’s bolt, the heaviest she could send, did not pierce even the outermost
fringes of her intended victim’s defenses, and so vicious was the almost simultaneous
counter-thrust that it went through the Lyranian’s hard-held block in nothing flat. Inside
her brain it wrought such hellishly poignant punishment that the matriarch, forgetting
everything, tried only and madly to scream. She could not. She could not move a
muscle of her face or of her body. She could not even fall. And the one brief glimpse
she had into the stranger’s mind showed it to be such a blaze of incandescent fury that
she, who had never feared in the slightest any living creature, knew now in full measure
what fear was.
“I’d like to give that alleged brain of yours a good going over, just for fun.” Karen
forced her emotion to subside to a mere seething rage, and Ladora watched her do it.
“But since this whole stinking planet is my mother’s dish, not mine, she’d blast me to a
cinder—she’s done it before— if I dip in.” She cooled still more—visibly. “At that, I don’t
suppose you’re too bad an egg, in your own poisonous way—you just don’t know any
better. So maybe I’d better warn you, you poor fool, since you haven’t got sense enough
to see it, that you’re playing with an atomic vortex when you push her around like you’ve
been doing. Just a very little more of it and she’ll get mad, like I did a second ago except
more so, and you’ll wish to Klono you’d never been born. She won’t make a sign until
she blows her top, but I’m telling you she’s as much harder and tougher than I am as
she is older, and what she does to people she gets mad at I wouldn’t want to watch
happen again, even to a snake. She’ll pick you up, curl you into a circle, pull off your
arms, shove your feet down your throat, and roll you across that field there like a hoop.
After that I don’t know what she’ll do—depends on how much pressure she develops
before she goes off. One thing, though; she’s always sorry afterwards. Why, she even
attends the funerals, sometimes, and insists on paying all the expenses!”
With which outrageous thought she kissed Clarrissa an enthusiastic goodbye.
“Told you I couldn’t stay a minute— got to do a flit—’see a man about a dog’, you
know—came a million parsecs to squeeze you, mums, but it was worth it —clear ether!”
She was gone, and it was a dewy-eyed and rapt mother, not a Lensman, who
turned to the still completely disorganized Lyranian. Clarrissa had perceived nothing
whatever of what had happened; Karen had very carefully seen to that.
“My daughter,” Clarrissa mused, as much to herself as to Ladora. “One of four.
The four dearest, finest, sweetest girls that ever lived. I often wonder how a woman of
my limitations, of my faults, could possibly have borne such children.”
And Ladora of Lyrane, humorless and literal as all Lyranians are, took those
thoughts at their face value and correlated their every connotation and implication with
what she herself had perceived in that “dear, sweet” daughter’s mind; with what that
daughter had done and had said. The nature and quality of this hellish near-person’s
“limitations” and “faults” became eminently clear; and as she perceived what she
thought was the truth, the Lyranian literally cringed.
“As you know, I have been in doubt as to whether or not to support you actively,
as you wish,” Ladora offered, as the two walked across the field, toward the line of
ground-cars. “On the one hand, the certainty that the safety, and perhaps the very
existence, of my race will be at hazard. On the other, the possibility that you are right in
saying that the situation will continue to deteriorate if we do nothing. The decision has
not been an easy one to make.” Ladora was no longer aloof. She was just plain scared.
She had been talking against time, and hoping that the help for which she had long
since called would arrive in time. “I have touched only the outer surface of your mind.
Will you allow me, without offense, to test its inner quality before deciding definitely?” In
the instant of asking, Ladora sent out a full-driven probe.
“I will not.” Ladora’s beam struck a barrier which seemed to her exactly like
Karen’s. None of her race had developed anything like it. She had never seen . . . yes,
she had, too— years ago, when she was a child, that time in the assembly hall—that
utterly hated male, Kinnison of Tellus! Tellus— Sol III! Clarrissa of Sol III, then, wasn’t a
near-person at all, but a female—Kinnison’s kind of female—and a creature who was
physically a person, but mentally that inconceivable monstrosity, a female, might be
anything and might do anything! Ladora temporized.
“Excuse me; I did not mean to intrude against your will,” she apologized,
smoothly enough. “Since your attitude makes it extremely difficult for me to cooperate
with you, I can make no promises as yet. What is it that you wish to know first?”
“I wish to interview your predecessor, the person we called Helen.” Strangely