City of Sorcery Read Online Free PDF

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