I behaved like . . . like . . .. Realization flashed over her. Not like a Terran agent. Not like a Free Amazon. Like an ordinary, conventional Darkovan girl.
The kind I’ve taught myself to be, in Thendara. The kind I was brought up to be, in Caer Donn . . ..
The short winter day was drawing to a close, and she thought, /’// camp here tonight, in the woods; I’ll let them get a good, long start. By tomorrow they’ll have gone through two or three of those little villages; and with luck they’ll think I just found a place to stay in a village, and give up.
Or, possibly, they were respectable traders on their own lawful business and in a hurry to get home to their wives and children, she considered.
She put up her small tent. It was a compromise, the maximum possible protection in bad weather combined with the minimum possible in weight and size; a combination of an undersized tent and an oversized sleeping bag. It was the standard Darkovan traveler’s model. She knew already that no sane person ever spent a night outdoors if he could possibly help it, which was why the roads were lined with the travel-shelters and huts and why they were sacred places of neutrality.
But she spent that night in the open anyway. By good fortune the weather kept fine, even the predawn snowfall unusually light; but Magda knew, as she emerged shivering, this was a bad sign. Clouds scudded thick and black, away north, and a high wind had already begun to toss the tips of the evergreens, promising a severe storm on the way.
In the lonely silence of the trail she went over and over her failure. However she rationalized it, it was a failure; she had panicked.
I’ve taught myself always to behave that way, whenever I step on the Darkovan side. It was the standard Intelligence conditioning: build yourself a persona, a character for whatever planet you’re working on, and never step out of it, even for an instant, until you’re safely back inside the Terran Zone.
But the personality I built for myself in Thendara won’t work here. Because of the particular society on Darkover, and the way women live. It was different for the men. But I was the only woman; and I never realized how jar I had come from ordinary agent’s training . . ..
She tried to think it through, to analyze just what basic changes she would have to make in her basic Darkovan persona for this assignment, but the attempt made her so overwhelmingly anxious that she had to give up the effort. The trouble if, I’ve been trained never to think of Terra outside the Zone. Now she was trying to bring a process as automatic as breathing under voluntary control; and it wasn’t working.
I can’t be a Free Amazon, I don’t know enough about them. Even Lady Rohana said she didn’t know enough about them. So I can be only my basic Darkovan persona, pretending to be a Free Amazon. Lady Rohana seemed to think it would be effective enough to fool people who didn’t have much to do with Free Amazons; but I’d just better hope I don’t meet any real ones!
This caused another of those weird small repercussions which, for years, she had thought of as “hunches” and learned to trust. Oddly, this one iced her blood; she had physically to pull her cloak tighter about her shoulders against the sudden runnel of cold down her spine. It would be just my luck, to meet a couple!
Peter always said I had a talent for bluffing. Better get used to thinking of him by his Darkovan name.
She had a sudden moment of blank terror when the name refused to come to her mind, when she wholly blanked on it. It lasted only a few seconds, and the panic ebbed away as the name came back to her. Piedro. That’s in the Hellers. In the lowlands they’d call him Pier… -why did I blank on it like that?
It was an hour past noon when she passed one of the shelter huts; it was empty, and she hesitated, tempted to stay there overnight. But she had already lost half a day, and always, at the back of her mind, was the thought of the midwinter deadline. She must not only be at Sain Scarp by midwinter, but she must leave some leeway for return to Thendara before the winter storms closed the passes. 7 can’t see us camping on Rumal di Scarp’s doorstep all winter.