"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 a particle whether I ever had a stitch of clothes on or not, anywhere, and you still do, a little. But what I was going to ask, though, was how are you doing?" "Not so well--of course, though, I haven't been here very long." Clarrissa, forgetting her undressedness, 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 meet Karen, however, she did not show it. Instead, for an inappreciable instant of time which was nevertheless sufficient for the acquirement of full information, each studied the other. Like Helen--the former Queen of the matriarchy of Lyrane II--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, she hurled a vicious mental bolt--only to get the surprise of her life. She had not yet crossed wills in a serious enough way with this strange person, Clarrissa, to find out what she had in the way of equipment, but it certainly couldn't be much. She had never tried to do her harm, nor ever seemed to resent her studied and arrogant aloofness; and therefore her daughter, younger and less experienced, of course, 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 counterthrust 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.