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backgrounds.”
Jaelle wondered if the man thought she was deaf, or feebleminded; she had met Montray, and no one with a scrap of telepathic ability could possibly be in doubt that he disliked Darkover and all the Darkovans. But it was polite of the man to try and spare her feelings; the first politeness she had encountered from Terrans, who were often friendly, but seldom polite. Not, anyhow, as she understood it; they seemed to have different standards of courtesy. Only after they were in the hallway did she realize that while she had answered a great many questions about herself, no one had bothered to introduce him to her and she still did not know his name.
“Next stop, Medic,” remarked Bethany, and Jaelle, who knew the Terran word by now, after the long debates about allowing Renunciates to become Medical technicians, protested, “But I’m not sick!”
“Just routine,” said Bethany, an answer Jaelle had heard so often that day that she recognized it, though she did not yet know what it meant, as a ritual answer which was supposed to cut off discussion. Well, she had been told it was rude to inquire about the religious rituals of others, and Terrans must have some really strange ones.
They went up farther, this time, than ever before, and Jaelle catching a random glance out a window, shivered involuntarily they must be as high as they had been in the Pass of Scaravel and she clung, feeling dizzy, to a handrail. Was this some form of testing her courage? Well, a woman who had faced blizzards in the Hellers and banshees in the mountain passes would not quail at mere height. Anyhow, Bethany seemed unconcerned.
There was a different kind of uniform on this floor, and since she was to participate in whatever curious ritual was being done this time, she did not complain when they took away her woolen and leather Amazon outfit and dressed her in a white tunic made of paper. The workers here all had the same sign on their tunics, an upright staff with what looked like two snakes coiled arounc it, and she wondered if work emblems replaced clan or family blazonings here. She waited on benches for peculiar processes, was touched or prodded with strange machines, and they pricked her finger with needles. She shrank back at this, and Bethany explained, “They wish to look at your blood under a - ” she used a strange word, and at Jaelle’s blank look, elaborated, “A special glass to see the cells in your blood - to see if it is healthy blood.” They stuck a glass plate in her mouth, and draped her from breasts to knees with a metal-treated heavy cloth, then left her alone with the machine, which made a curious humming noise, at which she startled and jumped. The young technician, a girl about Jaelle’s own age with curly fair hair, swore angrily, and again Bethany explained hastily that they were only taking a picture of her teeth to see if they had holes or damaged roots.
“They could ask me,” Jaelle said crossly, but when they tried it again, she held her breath and stayed as still as she could. The technician looked at the plate with pictured teeth and said to Bethany that she had never seen anything like it.
“She says your teeth are perfect,” Bethany translated, and Jaelle said, with a sense of injury, that she could have told them that in the first place.
Then there was a room filled with machines, and the technician in charge of them, a man who spoke somewhat better Darkovan than anyone except the man who had questioned her so long in the photographing place, said, “Go in behind those curtains, and take off all your clothes. Right down to the skin.: Then come out that end, and walk directly down that line, along the painted white stripe. Understand?” tamed chervine doing tricks. “Now turn again - lower arm - see? Machine no hurt - “
When she was dressing again, she asked Bethany, “What did those machines do !”
“Pictures of your insides, I told you. Tells them you’re healthy.”
“And as I