"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.
"I'd like to give that alleged brain of yours a real massage, 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 further—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 a live fuse when you push my mother around like you've been doing. About one more millimeter of it and she'll get mad—like I did a second ago except more so—and you'll wish to Klono you had never been born. She'll never make a sign until she blows up, but I'm telling you that she's as much harder and tougher than I am as she is older, and what she always does to people who cross her I wouldn't want to watch happen again, even to a snake. Want to know what she'll do to you first? She'll pick you up, curl you into a perfect circle, pull off your arms, shove both your legs down your throat to the knees, and roll you down that chute there into the ocean. After that I don't know what she'll do—depends on how much pressure she develops before she blows up. One thing, though, she's always sorry afterward—why, she even attends the funeral, sometimes, and insists on paying the expenses!"
With which outrageous thought she kissed Clarrissa an enthusiastic good-by. "Told you I couldn't stay a minute. Got to do a flit—'see a man about a dog.' 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."