Cover art by John Pound. Frontispiece sketch by the
author.
To my mother, to my father, and to David.
FIRST DAW PRINTING, AUGUST 1977 3456789
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S PAT.OFF. MARCA
REGISTRADA. HECHO EN U.S.A. PRINTED IN U.S.A.
Chapter 1
HALFWAY THROUGH the second watch the ship put into
Kartos Station-the largest thing ever seen in the zone, a
gleaming silver agglomeration of vanes cradling an immense
saucer body. It was an Orithain craft, with no markings of
nationality or identification: the Orithain disdained such
conventions.
It nestled in belly-on, larger than the station itself,
positioned beside an amaut freighter off Isthe II that was
completely dwarfed by its bulk. The umbilical of the tube,
the conveyor-connection, went out to it, scarcely long
enough to reach, although the Orithain’s grapples had
drawn herself and the Station into relative proximity.
As soon as that connection was secure, five members of
the crew disembarked, four men and a woman. They were
kallia, like many of the Station personnel-a race that
belonged to Qao V, a tall graceful folk, azure-skinned and
silver-haired; but these had never seen the surface of Aus
Qao: each bore on the right wrist the platinum bracelet
that marked a nas kame, a servant of the Orithain.
The visitors moved at will through the market, where
amaut and kalliran commerce linked the civilized worlds,
the metrosi, with the Esliph stars. They spoke not at all
to each other, but paused together and occasionally
designated purchases-lots that depleted whole sections of
the market, to be delivered immediately.
The moment the Orithain had entered the zone, the
Station office had moved into frantic activity. Station
security personnel, both kallia and amaut, were scattered
among the regular dock crews in diverse uniforms-not to
stop the starlords; that was impossible. They were instead
to restrain the Station folk from any unintended offense
against them, for the whole of Kartos Station was in
jeopardy as long as that silver dread-naught was anywhere
in the zone; an Orithain-lord minutely displeased was a bad
enemy for a planet, let alone a man-made bubble like
Kartos.
And the commanders of Kartos kept otherwise still, and
sent no messages of alarm, either inside or outside the
Station. There was a hush everywhere. Those that must move,
moved quietly.
Ages ago the Orithain had first contacted the kallia,
wrenching the folk of Aus Qao out of feudalism and abruptly
into star-spanning civilization. Eight thousand years ago
the Orithain had reached out to Kesuat, the home star of
the amaut-podgy little gray-skinned farmers, broad-bellied
and large-eyed, unlikely starfarers; but amaut were
scattered now from Kesuat to the Esliph. The metrosi itself
was an Orithain creation, modern technology an Orithain
gift-but one that came at fearful price, a tyranny
unimaginably cruel and irrational.
Then for five hundred years, as inexplicably as they did
everything, the Orithain had vanished, even from their home
star Kej. Ship-dwellers that they were, they began to
voyage outward and elsewhere, and ceased to be seen in the
range of kalliran ships or amaut. Some even dared to hope
them dead-until seven years ago.
Suddenly Orithain were massing again near Kej. Ship by
ship, they were reported coming in, gathering like great
birds to the smell of death. The outmost worlds knew it,
though the metrosi refused to admit it for fact. There was
no defense possible: kallia knew this; no weapon would
avail against Orithain ships, and the pride that the
Orithain took in inventive cruelty was legendary. It was
more comfortable not to acknowledge their existence.
But at Kartos, bordering the Esliph, the Orithain made
their return to the metrosi clear beyond doubt.
At the end of the new-station docks the noi kame
separated. Two, one carrying a small gray case, went up
toward the Station office. The other three descended toward
the old docks, that place notorious as the Blind Market,
where berths and facilities were cheap and crowded, where
goods were often traded unobserved by the overworked
Station authorities: little freighters, small cargoes,
often shoddy goods, damaged lots, pirated merchandise. Most
of the ships docked here came from the Esliph, bearing raw
materials and buying up necessities and a few civilized
vices for the poorer, outermost worlds.
The security personnel who maintained their discreet
watcn were alarmed when the noi kame unexpectedly entered
that tangle of small berths, and they were perplexed when
the noi kame immediately sought the Konut, an ancient
freighter from the Esliph fringe. Fat little amaut ran
about in its open hold in an agony of panic at their
coming, and the captain came waddling up on his short legs,
working his wide mouth in an expression of extreme
unease.
At the noi kame’s order the amaut produced the
manifest, which the noi kame scanned as they walked with
the captain deep into the hold. Incredibly filthy
compartments lined this aisle, a stench of unwashed amaut
bodies heavy in the air, for the Konut trafficked in
indentured labor, ignorant laborers contracted to the
purchasing company for the usual ten years on a colonial
world in exchange for land there-land, which they desired
more than they feared the rigors of the journey. Amaut were
at heart farmers and diggers in the earth, and the hope of
these forlorn, untidy little folk was a small parcel of
land somewhere-anywhere. Most would never achieve it: debt
to the company would keep them forever tenant farmers.
And to the rear of the Konut’s second hold was a
matter which the captain neglected to report to Station
customs: a wire enclosure where humans were transported.
Kalliran law forbade traffic in human labor: the creatures
were wild and illiterate, unable to make any valid
contract-the dregs of the stubborn population left behind
when the humans abandoned the Esliph stars and retreated to
home space. Their ancestors might have been capable of
starflight, but these were not even capable of coherent
speech. They were sectioned off from the other hold because
the amaut would not abide proximity to them: humans were
notorious carriers of disease. One of them at the moment
lay stiff and unnatural on the wire mesh flooring, dead
perhaps from chill, perhaps from something imported from
whatever Esliph world had sent him. Another sat staring,
eyes dark and mad.
This was the place that interested the noi kame. They
stopped, consulted the manifest, conferred with the
captain. The one human still stared, crouched up very small
as if he sought obscurity; but when the others suddenly
rushed to the far corner, shrieking and clawing and
climbing over one another in their witless panic, this one
sat still, eyes following every movement outside the
cage.
When at last the amaut captain turned and pointed at
him, that human froze into absolute immobility, resisting
the captain’s beckoning.
The sweating captain beckoned at the other humans then,
spoke one word several times: chaju-liquor. Suddenly the
humans were listening, faces eager; and when the amaut
pointed at the human that crouched at the center of the
cage, the others shrieked in excitement and descended on
the unfortunate creature, dragging him to the side of the
cage despite his struggling and his cries of rage. They
pressed him against the mesh until an attendant could
administer an injection: his nails raked the attendant, who
hit his arm and spat a curse, but already the human was
sinking: the curiously alert eyes glazed, and he slumped
down to the mesh flooring.
With no further difficulty the attendant entered the
cage and dragged the unconscious human out, rewarding the
others with a large flask of chaju that was instantly the
cause of a fight.
The noi kame distastefully ignored these proceedings.
They paid the price of the indenture in silver-weight,
named a time for delivery, and walked back the way they had
come.
The remaining noi kame, a man and a woman, had entered
Station control without a glance at the frightened security
personnel or a gesture of courtesy toward the Master. They
went to the records center, dislodged the technician from
his post, and connected the apparatus in the gray case to
the machine.
“It will be necessary,” said the woman to the
Master, who hovered uncertainly in the background,
“for this technician to follow our
instructions.”
The Master nodded to the operator, who resumed his post
reluctantly and did as he was told. The Station’s
records, the log and the personnel files in their entirety,
the centuries of accumulated knowledge of Esliph
exploration, the patterns of treaties, of lane regulation
and zonal government, bled swiftly into the Orithain’s
ken.
When the process was complete, the apparatus was
disconnected, the case was closed, and the noi kame turned
as one, facing the Master.
“There is a man on this station named Aiela
Lyailleue,” said the man. “Deliver his records to
us.”
“The Master made a helpless gesture. “I have
no authority to do that,” he said.
“We do not operate on your authority,” said
the nas kame.
The Master gave the order. A section of tape fed out of
the machine.
“Dispose of the original record,” said the
woman, winding the tape about her first finger. “This
person Aiela will report to our dock for boarding at 0230
Station Time.”
Kallia tended to a look of innocence. Their hair was the
same whatever their age, pale and silvery, individual
strands as translucent as spun glass. The pale azure of
their skin intensified to sapphire in the eyes, which,
unlike the eyes of amaut, could look left or right without
turning the whole head: it gave them a whole range of
communication without words, and made it difficult for them
to conceal their feelings. They were an emotional folk-not
loud, like amaut, who liked disputes and noisy
entertainments, but fond of social gatherings. One kallia
proverbially never decided anything: it took at least three
to reach a decision on the most trivial of matters. To be
otherwise was ikas-presumptuous, and a kalliran gentleman
was never that.
Security agent Muishiph was amaut, but he had been long
enough on Kartos to know the kallia quite well, both the
good and the bad in them. He watched the young officer
Aiela Lyailleue react to the news-he stood at the door of
the kallia’s onstation apartment-and expected some
outcry of grief or anger at the order. Muishiph had already
nerved himself to resist such appeals-even to defend
himself; his own long arms could crush the slender limbs of
a kallia, although he certainly did not want to do
that.
“I?” asked the young officer, and again:
“I?” as though he still could not believe it. He
looked appallingly young to be a ship’s captain. The
records confirmed it: twenty-six years old, son of Deian of
the Lyailleue house, aristocrat. Deian was parome of Xolun
arethme, and the third councilor in the High Council of Aus
Qao, a great weight of power and wealth-probably the means
by which young Lyailleue had achieved his premature rank.
Aiela’s hands trembled. He jammed them into the pockets
of his short jacket to conceal the fact and shook his head
rather blankly.
“But do you have any idea why they singled me
out?”
“The Master said he thought you might know,”
said Muishiph, “but I doubt he wants to be told, in
any case.”
The young man gazed at him with eyes so distant Muishiph
knew he hardly saw him; and then intelligence returned, a
troubled sadness. “May I pack?” he asked. “I
suppose I may need some things. I hope that I
will.”
“They did not forbid it.” Muishiph thrust his
shoulder within the doorframe, for Aiela had begun to lift
his hand toward the switch. “But I would not dare
leave you unobserved, sir. I am sorry.”
Aiela’s eyes raked Muishiph up and down with a
curiously regretful expression. At least, Muishiph thought
uncomfortably, the Master might have sent a kallia to break
the news and to be with him; he braced himself for
argument. But Aiela backed away and cleared the doorway to
let him enter. Muishiph stopped just inside the door, hands
locked behind his thighs, swaying; amaut did that when they
were ill at ease.
“Please sit down,” Aiela invited him, and
Muishiph accepted, accepted again when Aiela poured them
each a glass of pinkish marithe. Muishiph downed it all,
and took his handkerchief from his belly-pocket to mop at
his face. Amaut perspired a great deal and needed
prodigious quantities of liquid. It was the first time
Muishiph had been in a kalliran residence, and the warm,
dry air was unkind to his sensitive skin, the bright light
hurt his eyes. He thrust the handkerchief back into his
pocket and watched Aiela. The kallia, his own drink
ignored, had taken a battered spaceman’s case from the
locker and was starting to pack, nervously meticulous.
Muishiph knew the records from the Master, who had sent
him. The young kallia captained a small geological survey
vessel named Alitaesa, just returned from the moons of Pri,
far back on the Esliph fringe. That was amaut territory,
but some kallia explored there, seeking mining rights with
the permission of the great trading karshatu that ruled
amaut commerce. Amaut, natural burrowers, would work as
miners; kallia, strongly industrial, would receive the ore
and turn it back again in trade-an arrangement old as the
metrosi.
But it was a rare kallia who ventured deep into the
Esliph. It was a wild place and wide, with a great gulf
beyond. Odd things happened there, strange ships came and
went, and law was a matter of local option and available
firepower. The amaut karshatu took care of their own, and
brooked no intrusion on karsh lanes or karsh worlds: the
kallia they tolerated, reckoning them harmless, for they
were above all law-loving folk, their major vice merely a
desire of wealth, not land, but monetary and imaginary.
Kallia worshipped order: their universe was ordered in such
a way that one could not determine his own worth save in
terms of the respect paid him by others-and money was
somehow a measure of this, as primogeniture was among amaut
in a karsh. Muishiph looked on the young man and wondered:
as he reckoned kallia, they were shallow folk, never
seeking power for its own sake. They had no ambitions: they
hated responsibility, feeling that there was something
sinister and ikas in tampering with destiny. An amaut might
dream of having land, of founding a karsh, producing
offspring in the dozens; but for a kallia the greatest joy
seemed to be to retire into a quiet community, giving
genteel parties for small gatherings of all the most
honorable people, and being a man to whom others resorted
for advice and influence-a safe life, and quiet, and never,
never involving solitary decisions.
If Aiela Lyailleue was a curiosity to the Orithain, he
was no less a puzzle to Muishiph: an untypical kallia, a
wealthy parome’s son who chose the hazardous life of
the military, exploring the Esliph’s backside. It was
the hardest and loneliest command any officer, amaut or
kallia, could have, out where there was no one to consult
and no law to rely on. This was not a kalliran life at
all.
Aiela had packed several changes of clothing, everything
from the drawers. “Some things are on my ship,”
he said. “Surely they will send my other belongings
home to my family.”
“Surely,” Muishiph agreed, miserable in the
lie. When a karsh outgrew its territory, the next-born were
cast out to fend for themselves. Some founded karshatu of
their own, some became bondservants to other karshatu or
sought employment by the kallia, and some simply died of
grief. What amaut literature there was sang mournfully of
the misery of such outcasts, who were cut off and forgotten
quickly by their own kind. The kallia talked of his house
as if it still existed for him. Muishiph rolled his lips
inward and refused to argue with the childish faith.
Aiela gathered his pictures off the desk last of all: an
adult-children group that must be his kin, a young girl
with flowers in her silver hair-ko shenellis, the
coming-of-age: Muishiph had heard of the ceremony and
recognized it, wondering if the girl were kinswoman or
intended mate. Aiela himself was in the third picture, a
younger Aiela in civilian clothes, standing by a smiling
youth his own age, the crumbling walls of some ancient
kalliran building fluttering with flags in the background.
They were perplexing bits and pieces of a life Muishiph
could not even imagine, things and persons that had given
joy to the kallia, reminders that he once had had
roots-things that were important to him even lost as he
was. The pictures were turned, one by one, face down on the
clothing in the case. With them went a small box of tape
cassettes. Aiela closed and locked the case, turned with a
gesture of entreaty.
“Do you suppose,” he asked, “that there
is time to write a letter?”
Muishiph doubtfully consulted his watch. “If you
do, you must hurry about it.”
Aiela bowed his gratitude, a courtesy Muishiph returned
on reflex; and he waited on his feet while Aiela opened the
desk and sat down, using some of the Station’s
paper.
After a time Muishiph consulted his watch again and
coughed delicately. Aiela hastened his writing, working
feverishly until a second apologetic cough advised him of
Muishiph’s impatience. Then he arose and unfastened his
collar, drawing over his head a metal seal on a chain: its
embossed impression sealed the message-a house crest.
Kalliran aristocrats clung to such symbols, prized relics
of the feudal culture that had been theirs before the
starlords found them.
And before Muishiph realized his intention, Aiela had
thrust the seal into the disposal chute. It would end
floating in space, disassociated atoms of precious metals.
Muishiph gaped in shock; kalliran matters, those seals, but
they were ancient, and the destruction of something so old
and familial struck Muishiph’s heart with a physical
sickness.
“Sir,” he objected, and met sudden coldness in
the kallia’s eyes.
“If I had sent it home,” said Aiela, “and
it had been lost, it would have been a shame on my family;
and it is not right to take it as a prisoner
either.”
“Yes, sir,” Muishiph agreed, embarrassed,
uneasy at knowing Aiela doubted Kartos’ intentions of
his property. There was more sense to the kallia than he
had reckoned. He became the more perturbed when Aiela
thrust the letter into his hands.
“Send it,” said Aiela. “Private mails. I
know it costs-” He took out his wallet and pressed
that too into Muishiph’s hand. “There’s more
than enough. Please. Keep the rest. You’ll have earned
it.”
Muishiph stared from the wallet and the letter to
Aiela’s anxious face. “Sir, I protest I am an
officer of-“
“I know. Break the seal, read it-copy it, I
don’t care. Only get it to Aus Qao. My family can
reward you. I want them to know what happened to
me.”
Muishiph considered a moment, his mouth working in
distress. Then he slipped the letter into his belly-pocket
and patted it flat. But he kept only two of the larger
bills from the wallet and cast the wallet down on the
table.
“Take it all,” said Aiela. “Someone else
will, that’s certain.”
“I don’t dare, sir,” said Muishiph,
looking at it a second time regretfully. He put it from his
mind once for all with a glance at his watch. “Come,
bring your baggage. We have orders to anticipate that
deadline. The Station is taking no chances of offending
them.”
“I am sure they would not.” For a moment his
odd kalliran eyes fixed painfully on Muishiph, asking
something; but Muishiph hurriedly shrugged and showed Aiela
out the door, walking beside him as soon as they were in
the broad hall. Another security guard, a kallia, met them
at the turning: he carried a sheaf of documents and a
tape-case.
“My records?” Aiela surmised, at which the
kalliran guard looked embarrassed.
“Yes, sir,” he admitted. “They are being
turned over. Everything is.”
Aiela kept his eyes forward and did not look at that man
after that, nor the man at him.
Muishiph fingered the outline of the letter in his
belly-pocket, and carefully extracted his handkerchief and
mopped at his face. It was too much to ask. To deceive the
lords of karshatu and to cross the Qao High Council were
both perilous undertakings, but the starlords were an
ancient terror and their reach was long and their knowledge
thorough beyond belief. The letter burned like guilt
against Muishiph’s belly. Already he began to imagine
his position should anyone guess what he had agreed to
do.
And then it occurred to him to wonder if Aiela had told
the truth of what it contained.
The Orithain vessel itself was not visible from the
dock. There was only the entry tube and its conveyor,
disappearing constantly upward as the supplies flooded
toward the unseen maw of the ship. Aiela stopped with his
escort and set his case beside him on the tiled flooring,
the three of them conspicuous in an area where no
spectators would dare to be. Aiela shivered; his knees felt
loose. He hoped it was not evident to those with him.
Courage to cross that small area without faltering: that
was all he begged of himself.
He was not, he had assured his family in the letter,
expecting to die; execution could be accomplished with far
more effect in public. He did not know what had drawn the
Orithain’s attention to him: he had touched nothing and
done nothing that could have accounted for it, to his own
knowledge, and what they intended with him he only
surmised. He would not return. No one had ever been
appropriated by the Orithain and walked out again free; but
it would please him if his family would think of him as
alive and well. He had saved five thousand lives on Kartos
by his compliance with orders: he was well sure of this;
there was cause for pride in that fact.
Empty canisters clanged on the dock, the horrid crash
rumbling through his senses, dislodging him from his
privacy. He looked and saw a frightened amaut crew trying
to stop machinery. An amaut had been injured. The minute
tragedy occupied him for the moment. None of the bystanders
would help. They only stared. Finally the amaut was allowed
to lie alone. The others worked feverishly with the lading
of canisters, trying to make their deadline. The machinery
started again.
His father would understand, between the lines of what
he had written. Parome Deian was on the High Council, and
knew the reports that never went to earthsiders. There was
an understanding as old as the kallia’s first meeting
with the Orithain: their eccentricities were not for
comment and their names were not to be uttered; the
Orithain homeworld at Kej still lay deserted, legendary
cities full of supposed treasure- but metrosi ships avoided
that star; for nine thousand years the Orithain had been
the central fact of metrosi civilization, but no research
delved into their origins, few books so much as mentioned
them save in oblique reference to the Domination, and
nothing but legend reported their appearance. But they were
remembered. In the independence of space the old tales
continued to be told, and legends were amplified now with
new horrors of Orithain cruelty. Deian was one of nine men
on all Aus Qao who received across his desk all the
statistics and the rumors.
And if the statistics preceded his letter, Aiela
reflected sorrowfully, his father would receive that cold
message first. It would be the final cruelty of so many
that had passed between them.
If that were to go first, witnesses would at least say
that he had gone with dignity.
At the end, he could give nothing else to his
family.
The lefthand ramp had been clear of traffic for several
moments. Now it reversed, and one of the noi kame
descended. Aiela bent and picked up his case when the man
came toward them; and when they met, the kalliran agent
gave into the nas kame’s hands the documents and the
tape case-the sum of all records in the zone regarding
Aiela and his existence. It was terrible to believe so, but
even Qao might follow suit, erasing all records even to his
certificate of birth, forbidding mention of him even by his
family. Fear of the Orithain was that powerful. Aiela was
suddenly bitterly ashamed for his people, for what the
starlords had made them be and do. He began to be angry,
when before he had felt only grief.
“Come,” said the nas kame, accepting the sheaf
of documents and the case under his arm. But he looked down
in some surprise as the amaut agent suddenly pushed
forward, proffering a letter in his trembling hand.
“His too, lord, his too,” said the amaut.
The nas kame took the letter and put it among the
documents; and Aiela looked toward the amaut reproachfully,
but the amaut bowed his head and stood rocking back and
forth, refusing to look up at him.
Aiela turned his face instead toward the nas kame,
appalled that there was no shame there-eyes as kalliran as
his that held no recognition of him and cared nothing for
his misery.
The nas kame brought him to the moving ramp and preceded
him up, looking back once casually at the scene below,
ignoring Aiela. Then the belt set them both into the
ship’s hold.
Aiela’s eyes were drawn up by the sheer echoing
immensity of the place. This hold, as was usual with supply
holds, was filled with frames and canisters of goods, row
on row, dated, stamped to be listed in the computer’s
memory. But it could have contained an entire ship the size
of the one Aiela had lately commanded-without the frames
and the clutter. No doubt there were other holds that did
hold such things as transfer ships and shuttles available
at need. It staggered the mind.
The nas kame took his case from him and handed it to an
amaut, who waddled ahead of them to a counter and had it
stamped and listed and thrust up a conveyor to disappear.
Aiela looked after it with a sinking heart, for among his
folded clothing he had put his service pistol-nonlethal,
like all the weapons of the kalliran service. He had
debated it; he had done it, terrified in the act and
terrified to go defenseless, without it. But there were no
defenses. Standing where he was now, with all Kartos so
small and fragile a place beneath them, he realized it for
a selfish and cowardly thing to do.
“There was a weapon in that,” he said to the
nas kame. •
The nas kame took notice of him directly for the first
time, regarding him with mild surprise. He had just put the
documents and the tape case on the counter to be similarly
stamped and sent up the conveyor. Then he shrugged.
“Security will deal with it,” he said, and took
Aiela’s arm and held his hand on the counter,
compelling him to accept a stamp on the back of his hand,
like the other baggage.
Aiela received it with so deep a confusion that he
failed to protest; but afterward, with the nas kame holding
his arm and guiding him rapidly through the echoing hold, a
wave of such shame and outrage came over him that he was
almost shaking. He should have said something; he should
have done something. He worked his fingers, staring at the
purple symbols that rippled across the bones of his hand,
and was only gathering the words to object to the indignity
when the nas kame roughly turned him and thrust him toward
a personnel lift. He went, turned once inside, and expected
the nas kame to step in too; but the door slid shut and he
was hurtled elsewhere on his own. The controls resisted his
attempt to regain the loading deck.
In an instant the lift came to a cushioned halt and
opened on a cargo area adapted to the reception of live
goods; there were a score or more individual cells and
animal pens, some with bare flooring and some padded on all
surfaces. Gray-smocked noi kame and amaut in green were
waiting for him, took charge of him as he stepped out. One
noted the number from his hand onto a slate, then gestured
him to move.
As he walked the aisle of compartments he saw one
lighted, its facing wall transparent; and his flesh crawled
at the sight of the naked pink-brown tangle of limbs that
crouched at the rear of it. It looked moribund, whatever it
had been-the Orithain ranged far: perhaps it was only one
of the forgotten humans of the Esliph; perhaps it was some
more dangerous and exotic specimen from the other end of
the galaxy, where no metrosi ship had ever gone. He
delayed, looked more closely; a nas kame pushed him between
the shoulders and moved him on, and by now he was
completely overwhelmed, dazed and beyond any understanding
of what to do. He walked. No one spoke to him. He might
have been a nonsentient they were handling.
Physicians took him-at least so he reckoned them-kallia
and amaut, who ordered him to strip, and examined him until
he was exhausted by their thoroughness, the cold, and the
endless waiting. He was beyond shame. When at last they
thrust his wadded clothing at him and put him into one of
the padded cells to wait, he stood there blankly for some
few moments before the cold finally urged him to dress.
He shivered convulsively afterward, walking to lean
against one and another of the walls. Finally he knelt down
on the floor to rest, limbs tucked up for warmth, his
muscles still racked with shivers. There was no view, only
white walls and a blank, padded door-cold, white light. He
heard nothing to tell him what passed outside until the
gentle shock of uncoupling threw him off-balance: they were
moving, Kartos would be dropping astern at ever-increasing
speed.
It was irrevocable.
He was dead, so far as his own species was concerned, so
far as anything he had known was concerned. There were no
more familiar reference points.
He was only beginning to come to grips with that, when
the room vanished.
He was suddenly kneeling on a carpeted floor that still
felt strangely like the padded plastics of the cell. The
lights were dim, the walls expanded into an immense dark
chamber of carven screens and panels of alien design. A
woman in black and diaphanous violet stood before him, a
woman of the Orithain, of the indigo-skinned iduve race.
Her hair was black: it hung like fine silk, thick and even
at the level of her shapely jaw. Her brows were dark, her
eyes amethyst-hued, without whites, and rimmed with dark
along the edge of the lid. Her nose was arched but
delicate, her mouth sensuous, frosted with lavender, the
whole of her face framed with the absolute darkness of her
hair. The draperies hinted at a slim and female body; her
complexion, though dusky from the kalliran view, had a
lustrous sheen, as though dust of violet glistened there,
as if she walked in another light than ordinary mortals, a
universe where suns were violet and skies were of shadowy
hue.
He rose and, because it was elethia, he gave her a
proper bow for meeting despite their races: she was female,
though she was an enemy. She smiled and gave a nod of her
graceful head.
“Be welcome, m’metane,” she said.
“Who was it who had me brought here?” he
demanded, anger springing out of his voice to cover his
fear. “And why did you ask for me?”
“Vaikka,” she said, and when he did not
understand, she shrugged and seemed amused. “Au,
m’metane, you are ignorant and anoikhte, two conditions
impossible to maintain aboard Ashanome. We carry no
passengers. You will be in my service.”
“No.” The answer burst out of him before he
even reckoned the consequences, but she shrugged again and
smiled.
“We might return to Kartos,” she said.
“You might be set off there to advise them of your
objections.”
“And what then?”
“I would prefer otherwise.”,
He drew a long breath, let it go again. “I see. So
why do you come offering me choices? Noi kame can’t
make any, can they?”
“I have scanned your records. I find your decision
expected. And as for your assumption of noi kame-no:
kamethi have considerable initiative; they would be useless
otherwise.”
“Would you have destroyed Kartos?”
His angry question seemed for the first time to perplex
the Orithain, whose gentle manner persisted. “When we
threaten, m’metane, we do so because of another’s
weakness, never of our own. It was highly likely that you
would choose to come: elethia forbids you should refuse. If
you would not, surely fear would compel them to bring you.
Likewise it is certain that I would have destroyed Kartos
had it refused. Any other basis for making the statement
would have been highly unreasonable.”
“Was it you?” he asked. “Why did you
choose me?”
“Vaikka-a matter of honor. You are of birth such
that your loss will be noticed among kallia: that has a
certain incidental value. And I have use for such as you:
world-born, but experienced of outer worlds.”
He hated her, hated her quiet voice and her evident
delight in his misery. “Well,” he said,
“you’ll regret that particular choice.”
Her amethyst eyes darkened perceptibly. There was no
longer a smile on her face. “Kutikkase-metane,”
she said. “At the moment you are no more than sentient
raw material, and it is useless to attempt rational
conversation with you.”
And with blinding swiftness the white light of the cell
was about him again, yielding white plastic on all sides,
narrow walls, white glare. He flinched and covered his
eyes, and fell to his knees again in the loneliness of that
cubicle.
Then, not for the first time in the recent hour, he
thought of self-destruction; but he had no convenient
means, and he had still to fear her retaliation against
Kartos. He slowly realized how ridiculous he had made
himself with his threat against her, and was ashamed. His
entire species was powerless against the likes of her,
powerless because, like Kartos, like him, they would always
find the alternative unthinkably costly.
He came docilely enough when they brought him out into
the laboratory, expecting that they would simply lock about
his wrist the idoikkhe, such as they themselves wore-that
ornate platinum band that observers long ago theorized
provided the Orithain their means of control over the noi
kame.
Such was not the case. They had him dress in a white
wrap about his waist and lie down again on the table, after
which they forcibly administered a drug that made his
senses swim, dispersing his panic to a vague,
all-encompassing uneasiness.
He realized by now that becoming nas kame involved more
than accepting that piece of jewelry-that he was going
under and that he would not wake the same man. In his
drugged despair he begged, he invoked deity, he pleaded
with them as fellow kallia to consider what they were doing
to him.
But they ignored his raving and with an economy of
effort, slipped him to a movable table and put him under
restraint. From that point his perceptions underwent a
rapid deterioration. He was conscious, but he could not
tell what he was seeing or hearing, and eventually passed
over the brink.
Chapter 2
THE DAZED STATE gave way to consciousness in the same
tentative manner. Aiela was aware of the limits of his own
body, of a pain localized in the roof of his mouth and
behind his eyes. There was a bitter chemical taste and his
brow itched. He could not raise his hand to scratch it. The
itch spread to his nose and was utter misery. When he
grimaced to relieve it, the effort hurt his head.
He slept again, and wakened a second time enough to try
to move, remembering the bracelet that ought to be locked
about his wrist. There was none. He lifted his hand-free
now-and saw the numbers still stamped there, but faded. His
head hurt. He touched his temple and felt a thin rough
seam. There was the salt of blood in his mouth toward the
back of his palate; his throat was raw. He felt along the
length of the incision at his temple and panic began to
spread through him like icev
He hated them. He could still hate; but the
concentration it took was tiring-even fear was tiring. He
wept, great tears rolling from his eyes, and even then he
was fading. Drugs, he thought dimly. He shut his eyes.
A raw soreness persisted, not of the body, but of the
mind, a perception, a part of him that could not sleep,
like an inner eye that had no power to blink. It burned
like a white light at the edge of his awareness, an
unfocused field of vision where shadows and colors moved
undefined. Then he knew what they had done to him, although
he did not know the name of it.
“No!” he screamed, and screamed again and
again until his voice was gone. No one came. His senses
slipped from him again.
At the third waking he was stronger, breathing normally,
and aware of his surroundings. The sore spot was there;
when he worried at it the place grew wider and brighter,
but when he forced himself to move and think of other
things, the color of the wall, anything at all, it ebbed
down to a memory, an imagination of presence. He could
control it. Whatever had been done to his brain, he
remembered, he knew himself. He tested the place nervously,
like probing a sore tooth; it reacted predictably, grew and
diminished. It had depth, a void that drew at his senses.
He pulled his mind from it, crawled from bed and leaned
against a chair, fighting to clear his senses.
The room had the look of a comfortable hotel suite, all
in blue tones, the lighted white doorway of a tiled bath at
the rear-luxury indeed for a starship. His disreputable
serviceman’s case rested on the bureau. A bench near
the bed had clothing-beige-laid out across it.
His first move was for the case. He leaned on the bureau
and opened it. Everything was there but the gun. In its
place Was a small card: We regret we cannot permit personal
arms without special clearance. It is in storage. For
convenience in claiming your property at some later date,
please retain this card, 509-3899-345:
He read it several times, numb to what he felt must be a
certain grim humor. He wiped at his blurring vision with
his fingers and leaned there, absently beginning to unpack,
one-handed at first, then with both. His beloved pictures
went there, so, facing the chair which he thought he would
prefer. He put things in the drawer, arranged clothing,
going through motions familiar to a hundred unfamiliar
places, years of small outstations, hardrock
worlds-occupying his mind and keeping it from horrid
reality. He was alive. He could remember. He could resent
his situation. And this place, this room, was known,
already measured, momentarily safe: it was his, so long as
he opened no doors.
When he felt steady on his feet he bathed, dressed in
the clothes provided him, paused at the mirror in the bath
to look a second time at his reflection, when earlier he
had not been able to face it. His silver hair was cropped
short; his own face shocked him, marred with the
finger-length scar at his temple, but the incision was
sealed with plasm and would go away in a few days,
traceless. He touched it, wondered, ripped his thoughts
back in terror; light flashed in his mind, pain. He
stumbled, and came to himself with his face pressed to the
cold glass of the mirror and his hands spread on its
surface to hold him up.
“Attention please.” The silken voice of the
intercom startled him, “Attention. Aiela Lyailleue,
you are wanted in the paredre. Kindly wait for one of the
staff to guide you.”
He remembered an intercom screen in the main room, and
he pushed himself square on his feet and went to it,
pressed what he judged was the call button, several times,
in increasing anger. A glowing dot raced from one side of
the screen to the other, but there was no response.
He struck the plate to open the door, not expecting that
to work for him either, but it did; and instead of an
ordinary corridor, he faced a concourse as wide as a
station dock.
At the far side, stars spun past a wide viewport in the
stately procession of the saucer’s rotation. Kallia in
beige and other colors came and went here, and but for the
luxury of that incredible viewport and the alien design of
the shining metal pillars that spread ornate flanged arches
across the entire overhead, it might have been an
immaculately modern port on Aus Qao. Amaut technicians
waddled along at their rolling pace, looking prosperous and
happy; a young kalliran couple walked hand in hand;
children played. A man of the iduve crossed the concourse,
eliciting not a ripple of notice among the noi kame-a tall
slim man in black, he demanded and received no special
homage. Only one amaut struggling along under the weight of
several massive coils of hose brought up short and ducked
his head apologetically rather than contest right of
way.
At the other end of the concourse an abstract artwork of
metal over metal, the pieces of which were many times the
size of a man, closed off the columned expanse in high
walls. At their inner base and on an upper level, corridors
led off into distance so great that the inner curvature of
the ship played visual havoc with the senses, door after
door of what Aiela judged to be other apartments stretching
away into brightly lit sameness.
The iduve was coming toward him.
Panic constricted his heart. He looked to one side and
the other, finding no other cause for the iduve’s
interest. And then a resolution wholly reckless settled
into him. He turned and began at first simply to walk away;
but when he looked back, panic won: he gathered his
strength and started to run.
Noi kame stared, shocked at the disorder. He shouldered
past and broke into a corridor, not knowing where it
led-the ship, vast beyond belief, tempted him to believe he
could lose himself, find its inward parts, at least
understand the sense of things before they found him again
and forced then- purposes upon him.
Then the section doors sealed, at either end of the
hall.
Noi kame stared at him, dismayed.
“Stand still,” one said to him.
Aiela glanced that way: hands took his arms and he
twisted out and ran, but they closed and held him. The
first man rash enough to come at him from the front flew
backward under the impact of his thin-soled boot; but he
could not free himself. An amaut took his arms, a grip he
could not break, struggle as he would; and then the doors
parted and the iduve arrived with a companion, frowning and
businesslike. When Aiela attempted to kick at them, that
iduve’s backhand exploded across his face with force
enough to black him out: a hypospray against his arm
finished his resistance.
He was not entirely unconscious. He tried to walk
because the grip on his arms hurt less when he carried his
own weight, but it was some little distance before he even
cared where they were taking him. For a dizzying moment
they rode a lift, and stepped off into another corridor,
and then came into a hall. On the left a screen of
translucent blue stone carved in scenes of reeds and birds
separated a vast dim hall from this narrower chamber.
Then he remembered this place, this hall like a museum,
with its beautiful fretted panels and lacquered ceiling,
its cases for display, its ornate and alien furnishings. He
had stood here once before from the vantage point of his
cell, but this was reality. The carpets he walked gave
under his boots, and the woman that awaited them was not
projection, but flesh and blood.
“Aiela,” she said in her accented voice,
“Aiela Lyailleue: I am Chimele, Orithain of Ashanome.
And such action is hardly an auspicious introduction, nor
at all wise. Takkh-ar-rhei, nasithi.”
Aiela found himself free-dizzied, bruised, thoroughly
dispossessed of the recklessness to chance another
chastisement at their hands. He moved a step-the iduve
behind him moved him back precisely where he had stood.
She spoke to her people, frowning: they answered. Aiela
waited, with such a physical terror mounting in him as he
had never felt in any circumstances. He could not even
shape it in his thoughts. He felt disconnected, smothered,
wished at once to run and feared the least movement.
And now Chimele turned from him and returned with the
wide band of an idoikkhe open in her indigo fingers-a band
of three fingers’ width, with a patchwork of many
colors of metal on its inner surface, a thread of black
weaving through it all. She held it out for him, expecting
him to offer his wrist for it, and now, now was the time if
ever he would refuse anything again: He could not breathe,
and he felt strongly the threat of violence at his back;
his battered nerves refused to carry the right impulses. He
saw himself raise an arm that seemed part of another body,
heard a sharp click as the cold band locked, felt a weight
that was more than he had expected as she took her hands
away.
A jewel of milk and fire shone on its face. The
asymmetry of iduve artistry flashed in metal worth a
man’s life in the darker places of the Esliph. He
stared at it, realizing beyond doubt that he had accepted
its limits, that no foreign thing in his skull had
compelled the lifting of his arm; there was a weakness in
Aiela Lyailleue that he had never found before, a shameful,
unmanning terror.
It was as if something essential in him had torn away,
left behind in Kartos. He feared. For the first tune he
knew himself less than other beings. Without dignity he
tore at the band, but of the closure no trace remained save
a fault diffraction of light-no clasp and no yielding.
“No,” she said, “you cannot remove
it.”
And with a gesture she dismissed the others, so that
they stood alone in the hall. He was tempted then to
murder, the first time he had ever felt a hate so ikas-and
then he knew that it was out of fear, female that she was.
He gained control of himself with that thought, gathered
enough courage to plainly defy her: he spun on his heel to
stalk out, to make them use force if they would. That much
resolve he still possessed.
The idoikkhe stung him, a dart of pain from his
fingertips to his ribs. At the next step it hurt; and he
paused, measuring the long distance to the door against the
pain that lanced in rising pulses up his arm. A greater
shock hit him, waves enough to jolt his heart and shorten
his breath.
He jerked about and faced her-not to attack: if he had
any thought then it was to stand absolutely still,
anything, anything to stop it. The pulse vanished as he did
what she wanted, and the ache faded slowly.
“Do not fear the idoikkhe,” said Chimele.
“We use it primarily for coded communication, and it
will not greatly inconvenience you.”
He was shamed; he jerked aside, hurt at once as the
idoikkhe activated, faced her and felt it fade again.
“I do not often resort to that,” said Chimele,
who had not yet appeared to do anything. “But there is
a fine line between humor and impertinence with us which
few m’metanei can safely tread. Come, m’metane-toj,
use your intelligence.”
She allowed him time, at least: he recovered his
composure and caught his breath, rebuilding the courage it
took to anger her.
“So what is the law here?” he asked.
“Do not play the game of vaikka with an
iduve.” He tried to outface her with his anger, but
Chimele’s whiteless eyes locked on his with an invading
directness he did not like. “You are bound to find the
wager higher than you are willing to pay. You have not been
much harmed, and I have extended you an extraordinary
courtesy.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and knew what
to expect for it, knew and waited until his nerves were
drawn taut. But Chimele broke from his eyes with a shrug,
gestured toward a chair.
“Sit and listen, kameth. Sit and listen. I do not
notice your attitude. You are only ignorant. We are using
valuable time.”
He hesitated, weighed matters; but the change in her
manner was as complete as it was abrupt, almost as if she
regretted her anger. He still thought of going for the
door; then common sense reasserted itself, and he settled
on the chair opposite the one she chose.
Pain hit him, excruciating, lancing through his eyes and
the back of his skull at once. He bent over, holding his
face, unable to breathe. That sensation passed quickly,
leaving a throbbing ache behind his eyes.
“Be quiet,” she said. “Anger is the worst
possible response.”
And she brought him a tiny glass of clear liquid. He
drank, too shaken to argue, set the empty crystal vessel on
the table. He missed the edge with his distorted vision: it
toppled off and she imperturbably picked it up off the
costly rug and set it securely on the table.
“I am not responsible,” she said when he
looked hate at her.
There was something at the edge of his mind, the void
now full of something dark that reached up at him, and he
fought to shut it out, losing the battle as long as he
panicked. Then it ceased, firmly, outside his will.
“What was done to me?” he cried. “What
was it?”
“The chiabres, the implant: I would surmise, though
I do not do so from experience, that you reacted on a
subconscious level and triggered defenses, contacting what
was not prepared to receive you. This chiabres of yours has
two contacts, mind-links to your asuthi-your companions.
One is probably in the process of waking, and I assure you
that fighting an asuthe is not profitable.”
“I had rather be dead,” he said. “I would
rather die.”
“Tekasuphre. Do not try my patience. I called you
here precisely to explain matters to you. I have great
personal regard for your asuthe. Do I make myself
clear?”
“Am I joined to one of you?”
“No,” she said, suddenly laughing-a merry,
gentle sound, but her teeth were white and sharp.
“Nature provided for us in our own fashion,
m’metane. Kallia and even amaut find asuthithekkhe
pleasant, but we would not.”
And the walls closed about them. Aiela sprang to his
feet in alarm, while Chimele arose more gracefully. The
light had brightened, and beside them was a bed whereon lay
a kalliran woman of great beauty. She stirred in her sleep,
silvery head turning on the pillow, one azure hand coming
to her breast. There was the faint seam of a new scar at
her temple.
“She is Isande,” said Chimele. “Your
asuthe.”
“Is it-usual-that different sexes-“
Chimele shrugged. “We have not found it of
concern.”
“Was she the one I felt a moment ago?”
“It is not reasonable to ask me to venture an
opinion on something I have never experienced. But it seems
quite possible.”
He looked from Chimele to the sweet-faced being who lay
on the bed, the worst of his fears leaving him at once. He
felt even an urge to be sorry for Isande, no less than for
himself; he wondered if she had consented to this unhappy
situation, and -was about to ask Chimele that question.
The walls blinked smaller still, and they stood in a
room of padded white, a cell. At their left, leaning
against the transparent face of the cell, was that same
naked pink-brown creature Aiela remembered lying inert in
the corner on his entry into the lab. Now it turned in the
rapid dawning of terror: one of the humans of the Esliph,
beyond doubt, and as stunned as he had been that day-how
long ago?-that Chimele had appeared in his cell. The human
stumbled back, hit the wall where there was no wall in his
illusion, and pressed himself there because there was no
further retreat.
“He is Daniel,” said Chimele. “We think
this is a name. That is all we have been able to obtain
from him.”
Aiela looked at the hair-matted face in revulsion, heart
beating in panic as the human stretched out his hands. The
human’s dark eyes stared, white around the edges, but
when his hands could not grasp them he collapsed into a
knot, arms clenched, sobbing with a very manlike sound.
“This,” said Chimele, “is your other
asuthe.”
Aiela had seen it coming. When he looked at Chimele it
was without the shock that would have pleased her. He
hardened his face against her.
“And you know now,” she continued, unmoved,
“how it feels to experience the chiabres without
understanding what it is. This will be of use to you with
him.”
“I thought,” he recalled, “that you had
regard for Isande.”
“Precisely. Asuthithekkhe between species has
always failed. I am not willing to risk the honor of
Ashanome by endangering one of my most valued kamethi. You
are presently expendable. Surgery will be performed on this
being in two days. You had that interval to learn to handle
the chiabres. Try to approach the human. Perhaps he will
respond to you. Amaut are best able to quiet him, but I do
not think he finds pleasure in their company or they in
his. Those two species demonstrate a strong mutual
aversion.”
Aiela nerved himself to take a step toward the being,
and another. He went down on one knee and extended his
hand.
The creature gave a shuddering sob and scrambled back
from any contact, wild eyes locked on his. Of a sudden it
sprang for his throat.
The cell vanished, and Aiela had sprung erect in the
safety of the Orithain’s own shadowed hall. He still
trembled, in his mind unconvinced that the hands that had
reached for his throat were insubstantial.
“You are dismissed,” said Chimele.
The nas kame who escorted him simply abandoned him on
the concourse and advised him to ask someone if he lost his
way again. There was no mention of any threat, as if they
judged a man who wore the idoikkhe incapable of any further
trouble to anyone.
In effect, he knew, they were right.
He walked away to stand by the immense viewport,
watching the stars sweep past, now and again the awesome
view of the afterstructure of the ship as the rotation of
the saucer carried them under the holding arm, alternate
oblivion and rebirth from the dark, rotation after slow
rotation, the blaze of Ashanome’s running lights, the
dark beneath, the lights, the star-scattered fabric of
infinity, a ceaseless rhythm.
Likely none of the thousands of kallia that came and
went on the concourse knew much of Aus Qao. They had been
born on the ship, would live their lives, bear their
children, and die on the ship. Possibly they were even
happy. Children came, their bright faces and shrill voices
and the rhymes of the games they played the same as
generations before had sung, the same as kalliran children
everywhere. They flitted off again, their glad voices
trailing away into the echoing immensities of the pillared
hall. Aiela kept his face toward the viewport, struggling
with the tightness in his throat.
Kartos Station would be about business as usual by now,
and its people would have cleansed him from their thoughts
and their conscience. Aus Qao would do the same; even his
family must pick up the threads of their lives, as they
would do if he were dead. His reflection stared back out of
starry space, beige-clad, slender,
crop-headed-indistinguishable from a thousand others that
had been born to serve the ship.
He could not blame Kartos. It was a fact as old as
civilization in the metrosi, a deep knowledge of
helplessness. It was that which had compelled him to take
the idoikkhe. Kallia were above all peaceful, patiently
stubborn, and knew better how to outwait an enemy that how
to fight
To wait.
There was an Order of things, and it was reasonable and
productive. For one nas kame to defy the Orithain and die
would accomplish nothing. An unproductive action was not a
reasonable action, and an unreasonable action was not
virtue, was not kastien.
Should he have died for nothing?
But all reasonable action on Ashanome operated in favor
of the Orithain, who understood nothing of kastien.
Until the idoikkhe had locked upon his wrist, he had
been a person of some elethia. He had been a man able to
walk calmly through Kartos Station under the witness of
others. He had even imagined the moment he had just passed,
in a hundred different manners. But he had expected
oblivion, a canceling of self-a state in which he was
innocent.
He had accepted it. He would continue to accept it,
every day of his life, and by its weight, that metal now
warmed to the temperature of his own body, he would
remember what it cost to say no.
He had despised the noi kame. But doubtless their
ancestors had resolved the same as he, to live, to wait
their chance, which only hid their fear; waiting, they had
served the Orithain, and they died, and their
children’s children knew nothing else.
Something stabbed at him behind his eyes. He caught at
his face and reached for the support of the viewport.
Waking. Conscious.
Isande.
It stopped. His vision cleared.
But it was coming. He stood still, waiting-impulses to
flight, even to suicide beat along his nerves; but these
things were futile, ikas. It was possible-he thought
blasphemously-that kastien demanded this patience of kallia
because they were otherwise defenseless.
Slowly, slowly, something touched him, became pressure
in that zone of his mind that had been opened. He shut his
eyes tightly, feeling more secure as long as outside
stimuli were limited. This was a being of his own kind, he
reminded him-self, a being who surely was in no happier
state than himself.
It built in strength.
Different: that was the overwhelming impression, a force
that ran over his nerves without his willing it, callous
and unfamiliar. It invaded the various centers of his
brain, probing one and another with painful rapidity. Light
blazed and faded, equilibrium wavered, sounds roared in his
ears, hot and cold affected his skin.
Then it invaded his thoughts, his memories, his inmost
privacy.
O God! he thought he cried, like a man dying. There was
a silence so dark and sudden it was like falling. He was
leaning against the viewport, chilled by it. People were
staring at him. Some even looked concerned. He straightened
and shifted his eyes from the reflection to the stars
beyond, to the dark.
“I am Isande.” There grew a voice in his mind
that had tone without sound, as a man could imagine the
sound of his own voice when it was silent. A flawed dim
image of the concourse filled his eyes. He saw the viewport
at a distance, marked a slender man who seemed tiny against
it-all this overlaid upon his own view of space. He
recognized the man for himself, and turned, seeing things
from two sides at once. Imposed on his own self now was a
distant figure he knew for Isande: he felt her exhaustion,
her impatience.
“I’ll meet you in your quarters,” she
sent.
Her turning shifted his vision, causing him to stagger
off-balance; reflex stopped the image, screened her out. He
suddenly realized he had that defense, tried it again-he
could not cope with the double vision while either of them
was moving. He shut it down, an irregular flutter of
on-off. It was hard to will a thing that decisively, that
strongly, but it could be done.
And he began to suspect Chimele had been honest when she
told him that kamethi found the chiabres no terror. It was
a power, a compensation for the idoikkhe, a door one could
fling wide or close at will.
Only what territory lay beyond depended entirely on the
conscience of another being-on two asuthi, one of whom
might be little removed from madness.
He did not touch her mind again until he had opened the
door of his quarters: she was seated in his preferred chair
in a relaxed attitude as if she had a perfect right to his
things. When he realized she was speculating on the
pictures on the bureau she pirated the knowledge of his
family from his mind, ripped forth a flood of memories that
in his disorganization he could not prevent. He reacted
with fury, felt her retreat.
“I’m sorry,” she said smoothly, shielding
her own thoughts with an expertise his most concentrated
effort could not penetrate. She gestured toward the other
chair and wished him seated.
“These are my quarters,” he said, still
standing. “Or do they move you in with me? Do they
assume that too?”
Her mind closed utterly when she felt that, and he could
not reach her. He had thought her beautiful when he first
saw her asleep; but now that her body moved, now that those
blue eyes met his, it was with an arrogance that disturbed
him even through the turmoil of his other thoughts. There
was a mind behind that pretty facade, strong-willed and
powerful, and that was not an impression beautiful women
usually chose to send him. He was not sure he liked it.
He was less sure he liked her, despite her physical
attractions.
“I have my own quarters,” she said aloud.
“And don’t be self-centered. Your choices are
limited, and I am not one of them.”
She ruffled through his thoughts with skill against
which he had no defense, and met his temper with contempt.
He thrust her out, but the least wavering of his
determination let her slip through again; it was a
continuing battle. He took the other chair, exhausted,
beginning to panic, feeling that he was going to lose
everything. He would even have struck her-he would have
been shamed by that.
And she received that, and mentally backed off in great
haste. “Well,” she conceded then, “I am
sorry. I am rude. I admit that.”
“You resent me.” He spoke aloud. He was not
comfortable with the chiabres. And what she radiated
confirmed his impression: she tried to suppress it,
succeeded after a moment.
“I wanted what you are assigned to do,” she
said, “very badly.”
“I’ll yield you the honor.”
Her mind slammed shut, her lips set. But something
escaped her barriers, some deep and private grief that
touched him and damped his anger.
“Neither you nor I have that choice,” she
said. “Chimele decides. There is no appeal.”
Chimele. He recalled the Orithain’s image with hate
in his mind, expected sympathy from Isande’s, and did
not receive it. Other images took shape, sendings from
Isande, different feelings: he flinched from them.
For nine thousand years Isande’s ancestors had
served the Orithain. She took pride in that.
Iduve, she sent, correcting him. Chimele is the
Orithain; the people are iduve.
The words were toneless this time, but different from
his own knowledge. He tried to push them out
The ship is Ashanome, she continued, ignoring his
awkward attempt to cast her back. WE are Ashanome: five
thousand iduve, seven thousand noi kame, and fifteen
hundred amaut. The iduve call it a nasul, a clan. The nasul
Ashanome is above twelve thousand years old; the ship
Ashanome is nine thousand years from her launching, seven
thousand years old in this present form. Chimele rules
here. That is the law in this world of ours.
He flung himself to his feet, finding in movement, in
any distraction, the power to push back Isande’s
insistent thoughts. He began to panic: Isande
retreated.
“You do not believe,” she said aloud,
“that you can stop me. You could, if you believed you
could.”
She pitied him. It was a mortification as great as any
the iduve had set upon him. He rounded on her with anger
ready to pour forth, met a frightened, defensive flutter of
her hand, a sealing of her mind he could not penetrate.
“No,” she said. “Aiela-no. You will hurt
us both.”
“I have had enough,” he said, “from the
iduve-from noi kame in general. They are doing this to
me-“
“-to us.”
“Why?”
“Sit down. Please.”
He leaned a moment against the bureau, stubborn and
intractable; but she was prepared to wait. Eventually he
yielded and settled on the arm of his chair, knowing well
enough that she could perceive the distress that burned
along his nerves, that threatened the remnant of his self
control.
You fear the iduve, she observed. Sensible. But they do
not hate; they do not love. I am Chimele’s friend. But
Chimele’s language hasn’t a single word for any of
those things. Don’t attribute to them motives they
can’t have. There is something you must do in
Chimele’s service: when you have done it, you will be
let alone. Not thanked: let alone. That is the way of
things.
“Is it?” he asked bitterly. “Is that all
you get from them- to be left alone?”
Memory, swift and involuntary: a dark hall, an iduve
face, terror. Thought caught it up, unraveled, explained.
Khasif: Chimele’s half-brother. Yes, they feel. But if
you are wise, you avoid causing it. Isande had escaped that
hall; Chimele had intervened for her. It haunted her
nightmares, that encounter, sent tremors over her whenever
she must face that man.
To be let alone: Isande sought that diligently.
And something else had been implicit in that
instant’s memory, another being’s outrage, another
man’s fear for her-as close and as real as his own.
Another asuthe.
Isande shut that off from him, firmly, grieving.
“Reha,” she said. “His name was Reha. You
could not know me a moment without perceiving
him.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.” Screening fell, mind unfolding,
willfully.
Dark, and cold, and pain: a mind dying and still
sending, horrified, wide open. Instruments about him,
blinding light. Isande had held to him until there was an
end, hurting, refusing to let go until the incredible fact
of his own death swallowed him up. Aiela felt it with her,
her fierce loyalty, Reha’s terror-knew vicariously what
it was to die, and sat shivering and sane in his own person
afterward.
It was a time before things were solid again, before his
fingers found the texture of the chair, his eyes accepted
the color of the room, the sober face of Isande. She had
given him something so much of herself, so intensely self,
that he found his own body strange to him.
Did they kill him? he asked her. He trembled with anger,
sharing with her: it was his loss too. But she refused to
assign the blame to Chimele. Her enemies were not the iduve
of Ashanome. His were.
He drew back from her, knowing with fading panic that it
was less and less possible for him to dislike her, to find
evil in any woman that had loved with such a strength.
It was, perhaps, the impression she meant to project.
But the very suspicion embarrassed him, and became quickly
impossible. She unfolded further, admitting him to her most
treasured privacy,- to things that she and Reha had shared
once upon a time: her asuthe from childhood, Reha. They had
played, conspired, shared their loves and their griefs,
their total selves, closer by far than the confusion of
kinswomen and kinsmen that had little meaning to a nas
kame. For Isande there was only Reha: they had been the
same individual compartmentalized into two discrete
personalities, and half of it still wakened at night
reaching for the other. They had not been lovers. It was
something far closer.
Something to which Aiela had been rudely, forcibly
admitted.
And he was an outsider, who hated the things she and
Reha had loved most deeply. Bear with me, she asked of him.
Bear with me. Do not attack me. I have not accepted this
entirely, but I will. There is no choice. And you are not
unlike him. You are honest, whatever else. You are
stubborn. I think he would have liked you. I must begin
to.
“Isande,” he began, unaccountably distressed
for her. “Could I possibly be worse than the human?
And you insist you wanted that”
I could shield myself from that-far more skillfully than
you can possibly learn to do in two days. And then I would
be rid of him. But you-
Rid? He tried to penetrate her meaning in that, shocked
and alarmed at once; and encountered defenses, winced under
her rejection, heart speeding, breath tight. She turned off
her conscience where the human was concerned. He was
nothing to her, this creature. Anger, revenge, Reha-the
human was not the object of her intentions: he simply stood
in the way, and he was alien-alien!-and therefore nothing.
Aiela would not draw her into sympathy with that creature.
She would not permit it. NO! She had died with one asuthe,
and she was not willing to die with another.
Why is he here? Aiela insisted. What do the iduve want
with him?
Her screening went up again, hard. The rebuff was almost
physical in its strength.
He was not going to obtain that answer. He had to admit
it finally. He rose from his place and walked to the
bureau, came back and sprawled into the chair, shaking with
anger.
There was something astir among iduve, something which
he was well sure Isande knew: something that could well
cost him his life, and which she chose to withhold from
him. And as long as that was so there would be no peace
between them, however close the bond.
In that event she would not win any help from him, nor
would the iduve.
No, she urged him. Do not be stubborn in this.
“You are Chimele’s servant. You say what you
have to say. I still have a choice.”
Liar, she judged sadly, which stung like a slap, the
worse because it was true.
Images of Chimele: ancestry more ancient than
civilization among iduve, founded in days of tower-holds
and warriors; a companion, a child, playing at draughts,
elbows-down upon an izhkh carpet, laughing at a
m’metane’s cleverness; Orithain-
-isolate, powerful: Ashanome’s influence could move
full half the nasuli of the induve species to Chimele’s
bidding- a power so vast there could be no occasion to
invoke it.
Sole heir-descendant of a line more than twelve thousand
years old. Vaikka: revenge; honor; dynasty.
Involving this human, Aiela gleaned on another
level.
But that was all Isande gave him, and that by way of
making peace with him. She was terrified, to have given him
only that much.
“Aiela,” she said, “you are involved too,
because he is, and you were chosen for him. Even iduve die
when they stand between an Orithain and necessity. So did
Reha.”
I thought they didn’t kill him.
“Listen to me. I have lived closer to the iduve
than most kamethi ever do. If Reha had been asuthe to
anyone else but me, he might be alive now, and now you are
here, you are Chimele’s because of me; and I am warning
you, you will need a great deal of good sense to survive
that honor.”
“And you love a being like that.” He could not
understand. He refused to understand. That in itself was a
victory.
“Listen. Chimele doesn’t ask that you love her.
She couldn’t understand it if you did. But she scanned
your records and decided you have great chanokhia,
great-fineness- for a m’metane. Being admired by any
iduve is dangerous; but an Orithain does not make mistakes.
Do you understand me, Aiela?”
Fear and love: noi kame lived by carefully prescribed
rules and were never harmed-as long as they remembered
their place, as long as they remained faceless and obscure
to the iduve. The iduve did not insist they do so: on the
contrary the iduve admired greatly a m’metane who tried
to be more than m’metane.
And killed him.
“There is no reason to be afraid on that
score,” Isande assured him. “They do not harm us.
That is the reason of the idoikkhei. You will learn what I
mean.”
His backlash of resentment was so strong she visibly
winced. She simply could not understand his reaction, and
though he offered her his thoughts on the matter, she drew
back and would not take them. Her world was enough for
her.
“I have things to teach you,” he said, and
felt her fear like a wall between them.
“You are welcome to your opinions,” she said
at last
“Thank you,” he said bitterly enough; but when
she opened that wall for a moment he found behind it the
sort of gentle being he had seen through Reha’s
thoughts, terribly, painfully alone.
Dismayed, she slammed her screening shut with a
vengeance, assumed a cynical facade and kept her mind taut,
more burning than an oath. “And I will maintain my
own,” she said.
Chapter 3
TWO DAYS COULD not prepare him, not for this.
He looked on the sleeping human and still, despite the
hours he had spent with Isande, observing this being by
monitor, a feeling of revulsion went through him. The
attendants had done their aesthetic best for the human, but
the sheeted form on the bed still looked alien-pale
coloring, earth-brown hair trimmed to the skull-fitting
style of the noi kame, beard removed. He never shuddered at
amaut: they were cheerful, comic fellows, whose
peculiarities never mattered because they never competed
with kallia; but this-this-was bound to his own mind.
And there was no Isande.
He had assumed-they had both assumed in their plans-
that she would be with him. He had come to rely on her in a
strange fashion that had nothing to do with duty: with her,
he knew Ashanome, he knew the folk he met, and people
deferred to his orders as if Isande had given them. She had
been with him, a voice continually in his mind, a presence
at his side; at times they had argued; at others they had
even found reason to be awed by each other’s worlds.
With her, he had begun to believe that he could succeed,
that he could afterward settle into obscurity among the
kamethi and survive.
He had in two days almost forgotten the weight of the
bracelet upon his wrist, had absorbed images enough of the
iduve that they became for him individual, and less
terrible. He knew his way, which iduve to avoid most
zealously, and which were reckoned safe and almost gentle.
He knew the places open to him, and those forbidden; and if
he was a prisoner, at least he owned a fellow-being who
cared very much for his comfort-it was her own.
They were two: Ashanome was vast: and it was true that
kamethi were not troubled by iduve in their daily lives. He
saw no cruelty, no evident fear-himself a curiosity among
Isande’s acquaintances because of his origins: and no
one forbade him, whatever he wished to say. But sometimes
he saw in others’ eyes that they pitied him, as if some
mark were on him that they could read.
It was the human.
As this went, he would live or die; and at the last
moment, Chimele had recalled Isande, ordering her sedated
for her own protection. I value you, Chimele had said. No.
The risk is considerable. I do not permit it.
Isande had protested, furiously; and that in a kameth
was great bravery and desperation. But Chimele had not used
the idoikkhe; she had simply stared at Isande with that
terrible fixed expression, until the wretched nas kame had
gone, weeping, to surrender herself to the laboratory,
there to sleep until it was clear whether he would survive.
The iduve would destroy a kameth that was beyond help; she
feared to wake to silence, such a silence as Reha had left.
She tried to hide this from him, fearing that she would
destroy him with her own fear; she feared the human, such
that it would have taxed all her courage to have been in
his place now-but she would have done it, for her own
reasons. She would have stood by him too-that was the
nature of Isande: honor impelled her to loyalty. It had
touched him beyond anything she could say or do, that she
had argued with Chimele for his sake; that she had lost was
only expected: it was the law of her world.
“Take no chances,” she had wished him as she
sank into dark. “Touch the language centers only,
until I am with you again. Do not let the iduve urge you
otherwise. And do not sympathize with that creature. You
trust too much; it’s a disease with you. Feelings such
as we understand do not reside in all sentient life. The
iduve are proof enough of that. And who understands the
amaut?”
What do they want of him? he had tried to ask. But she
had left him then, and in that place that was hers there
was quiet
Now something else stirred.
He felt it beginning, harshly ordered medical attendants
out: they obeyed. He closed the door. There was only the
rush of air whispering in the ducts, all other sound
muffled.
The darkness spotted across his vision, dimming
senses.
The human stirred, and light hazed where the dark had
been. Then he discovered the restraints and panicked.
Aiela flung up barriers quickly. His heart was pounding
against his ribs from the mere touch of that communication.
He bent over the human, seized his straining shoulders and
held him.
“Be still! Daniel, Daniel-be still.”
The human’s gasps for breath ebbed down to a series
of panting sobs. The dark eyes cleared and focused on his.
Because touch was the only safe communication he had, Aiela
relaxed his grip and patted the human’s shoulder. The
human endured it: he reminded Aiela of an animal soothed
against its will, a wild thing that would kill, given the
chance.
Aiela settled on the edge of the cot, feeling the human
flinch. He spoke softly, tried amautish and kalliran words
with him without success, and when he at last thought the
human calm again, he ventured a mind-touch.
A miasma of undefined feeling came back:
pain-panic-confusion. The human whimpered in fright and
moved, and Aiela snatched his mind back. His own hands were
trembling, It was several moments before the human’s
breathing rate returned to normal.
He tried talking to him once more, for a long time
nothing more than that. The human’s eyes continually
locked on his, animal and intense; at times emotion went
through them visibly-a look of anxiety, of perplexity.
At last the being seemed calmer, closed his eyes for a
few moments and seemed to slip away, exhausted. Aiela let
him. In a little time more the brown eyes opened again,
fixed upon his: the human’s face contracted a little in
pain-his hand: tensed against the
restraints. Then he grew quiet
again, breathing almost normally; he suffered the situation
with a tranquillity that tempted Aiela to try mind-touch
again, but he refrained, instead left the bedside and
returned with a cup of water.
The human lifted his head, trusted himself to
Aiela’s arm for support while he drained the cup, and
.then sank back with a shortness of breath that had no
connection with the effort. He wanted something. His lips
contracted to a white line. He babbled something that had
to do with amaut.
He did speak, then. Aiela set the cup down and looked
down on him with some relief. “Is there pain?” he
asked in the amautish tongue, as nearly as kalliran lips
could shape the sounds. There was no evidence of
comprehension. He sat down again on the edge.
The human stared at him, still breathing hard. Then a
glance flicked down to the restraints, up again,
pleading-repeated the gesture. When Aiela did nothing, the
human’s eyes slid away from him, toward the wall. That
was clear enough too.
It was madness to take such a chance. He knew that it
was. The human could injure himself and kill him, quite
easily.-
He grew like Isande, who hated the creature, who would
deal with him harshly; like the iduve, who created the
idoikkhei and maintained matters on their terms, who could
see something suffer and remain unmoved.
Better to die than yield to such logic. Better to admit
that there was little difference between this wretched
creature that at least tried to maintain its dignity, and a
kalliran officer who walked about carrying iduve ownership
locked upon his wrist.
“Come,” he said, loosed one restraint and the
others in quick succession, dismissing iduve, dismissing
Isande’s distress for his sake. He chose, he chose for
himself what he would do, and if he would die it was easier
than carrying out iduve orders, terrifying this unhappy
being. He lifted the human to sit, steadied him on the
edge, found those pale strong hands locked on his arms and
the human staring into his face in confusion.
Terror.
Daniel winced, grimaced and clutched at his head,
discovered the incision and panicked. He hurled himself up,
sprawled on the tiles, and lay there clutching his head and
moaning, sobbing words of nonsense.
“Daniel.” Aiela caught his own breath,
-screening heavily: he knew well enough what the human was
experiencing, that first horrible realization of the
chiabres, the knowledge that his very self had been
tampered with, that there was something else with him in
his skull. Aiela felt pressure at his defenses, a dark
force that clawed blindly at the edges of his mind,
helpless and monstrous and utterly vulnerable at this
moment, like something newborn.
He let the human explore that for himself, measure it,
discover at last that it was partially responsive to his
will. Aiela sat still, tautly screened, sweat coursing over
his ribs; he would not admit it, he would not admit it-it
was dangerous, unformed as it was. It moved all about the
walls of his mind, sensing something, seeking, aggressive
and frightened at once. It acquired nightmare shape. Aiela
snapped his vision back to now and destroyed the image,
refusing it admittance, saw the human wince and
collapse.
He was not unconscious. Aiela knew it as he knew his own
waking. He simply lay still, waiting, waiting-perhaps
gathering his abused senses into some kind of order.
Perhaps he was wishing to die. Aiela understood such a
reaction.
Several times more the ugliness activated itself to
prowl the edges of his mind. Each time it fled back, as if
it had learned caution.
“Are you all right?” Aiela asked aloud. He
used the tone, not the words. He put concern into it.
“I will not touch you. Are you all right?”
The human made a sound like a sob, rolled onto an arm,
and then, as if he suddenly realized his lack of elethia
before a man who was still calmly seated and waiting for
him, he made several awkward moves and dragged himself to a
seated posture, dropped his head onto his arms for a
moment, and then gathered himself to try to rise.
Aiela moved to help him. It was a mistake. The human
flinched and stumbled into the wall, into the corner, very
like the attitude he had maintained in the cell.
“I am sorry.” Aiela bowed and retreated back
to his seat on the edge of the bed.
The human straightened then, stood upright, released a
shaken breath. He reached again for the scar on his temple:
Aiela felt the pressure at once, felt it stop as Daniel
pulled his mind back.
“Daniel,” he said; and when Daniel looked at
him curiously, suspiciously, he turned his head to the side
and let Daniel see the scar that faintly showed on his own
temple.
Then he opened a contact from his own direction,
intending the slightest touch.
Daniel’s eyes widened. The ugliness reared up,
terrible in its shape, Vision went. He screamed, battered
himself against the door, then hurled himself at Aiela, mad
with fear. Aiela seized him by the wrists, pressing at his
mind, trying to ignore the terror that was feeding back
into him. One of them knew how to control the chiabres:
uncontrolled, it could do unthinkable harm. Aiela fought,
losing contact with his own body: sweat poured over him,
making his grip slide; his muscles began to shake, so that
he could not maintain his hold at all; he knew himself in
physical danger, but that inside was worse. He hurled sense
after sense into play, seeking what he wanted, reading the
result in pain that fed back into him, nightmare
shapes.
And suddenly the necessary barrier crashed between them,
so painful that he cried out: in instinctive reaction, the
human had screened. There was separation. There was
self-distinction.
He slowly disengaged himself from the human’s grip;
the human, capable of attack, did not move, only stared at
him, as injured as he. Perhaps the outcry had shocked him.
Aiela felt after the human’s wrist, gripped it not
threateningly, but as a gesture of comfort.
He forced a smile, a nod of satisfaction, and
uncertainly Daniel’s hand closed-of a sudden the human
gave a puzzled look, a half-laugh, half-sob.
He understood.
“Yes,” Aiela answered, almost laughed himself
from sheer relief. It opened barriers, that sharing.
And he cried out in pain from what force the human sent
He caught at his head, signed that he was hurt.
Daniel tried to stop. The mental pressure came in spurts
and silences, flashes of light and floods of emotion. The
darkness sorted itself into less horrid form. It was not an
attack. The human wanted; so long alone, so long helpless
to tell-he wanted. He wept hysterically and held his hands
back, trembling in dread and desire to touch, to lay hold
on anyone who offered help.
Barriers tumbled.
Aiela ceased trying to resist. Exhaustion claimed him.
Like a man rushing downhill against his will he dared not
risk trying to stop; he concentrated only on preserving his
balance, threading his way through half-explored contacts,
unfamiliar patterns at too great a speed. Contacts
multiplied, wove into pattern; sensations began to sort
themselves into order, perceptions to arrange themselves
into comprehensible form: body-sense, touch, equilibrium,
vision-the room writhed out of darkness and took form about
them.
Suddenly deeper senses were seeking structure. Aiela
surrendered himself to Daniel’s frame of reference,
where right was human-hued and wrong was different, where
morality and normality took shapes he could hardly bear
without a shudder. He reached desperately for the speech
centers for wider patterns, establishing a contact
desperately needed.
“I,” he said silently in human speech.
“Aiela-I. Stop. Stop. Think slowly. Think of now. Hold
back your thoughts to the pace of your words. Think the
words, Daniel: my language, yours, no difference.”
“What-” the first response attempted. Apart
from Aiela’s mind the sound had no meaning for the
human.
“Go on. You understand me. You can use my language
as I use yours. Our symbolizing facility is
merged.”
“What-” Death was in his mind, gnawing doubt
that almost forced them apart. “What is going to
happen to me? What are you?”
His communication was a babble of kalliran and human
language, amaut mixed in, voiced and thought, echoes upon
echoes. He was sending on at least three levels at once and
unaware which was dominant. Home, help, home kept running
beneath everything.
“Be calm,” Aiela said. “You’re all
right. You’re not hurt.”
“I have-come a long way, a very long way from home.
I don’t even know where I am or why. I know-” No,
no, not accusation; soft with him, soft, don’t make him
angry. “I know that you are being kind, that I-am
being treated well-” Cages were in his mind; he
thought them only out of sight on the other side of the
wall, shrieks and hideous noise and darkness. At least he
looks human, the second level ran. Looks. Looks. Seems.
Isn’t. God, help me.” Aiela, I-understand. I am
grateful, Aiela-“
Daniel tried desperately to screen in his fear. It was a
terrible effort. Under it all, nonverbal, there was fear of
a horrible kind, fear of oblivion, fear of losing his mind
altogether; but he would yield, he would merge, anything,
anything but lose this chance. It was dangerous. It pulled
at both of them. Aiela screened briefly, stopping it.
“I don’t know how to help you,” Aiela told
him gently.
“But I assure you I don’t want to harm you. You
are safe. Be calm.”
Information-they want-home came to mind, far distant, a
world of red stone and blue skies. The memory met
Aiela’s surmise, the burrows of amaut worlds, human
laborers, and confused Daniel greatly. Past or future,
Daniel wondered. Mine? Is this mine? Is this what I’m
going to?
Aiela drew back, trying to sort the human thoughts from
his own. Nausea assailed him. The human’s terrors began
to seem his, sinister things, alien; and the amaut were at
the center of all the nightmares.
“How did you come here, then?” Aiela asked.
“Where did you come from, if not from the amaut
worlds?”
And where is here and what are you? the human responded
inwardly; but in the lightning-sequencing of memory,
answers came, random at first, then deliberate-remembrances
of that little world that had been home: poverty, other
humans, anger, a displaced folk yearning toward a green and
beautiful home that had no resemblance to the red
desolation in which they now lived: an urge toward ships,
and voyaging, homecoming and revenge.
Years reeled backward and forward again: strange suns,
worlds, service in many ships, machinery appallingly
primitive, backbreaking labor-but among humans, human
ships, human ports, scant resources, sordid pleasures.
Above all a regret for that sandy homeland, and finally a
homecoming- to a home dissolved, a farm gone to dust; more
port cities, more misery, a life without ties and without
purpose. The thoughts ran aimlessly into places so alien
they were madness.
These were not the Esliph worlds. Amaut did not belong
there. Human space, then, human worlds, where kalliran and
amaut trade had never gone.
Amaut. Daniel’s mind seized on the memory with hate.
Horrible images of death, bodies twisted, stacked in heaps-
prisoners-humans-gathered into camps, half-starved and
dying, others hunted, slaughtered horribly and hung up for
warnings, the hunters humankind too; but among them moved
dark, large-eyed shapes with shambling gait and leering
faces-amaut seen through human eyes. Events tumbled one
over the other, and Aiela resisted, unknowing what terrible
place he was being led next; but Daniel sent, forcefully,
no random images now-hate, hate of aliens, of him, who was
part of this.
Himself. A city’s dark streets, a deserted way,
night, fire leaping up against the horizon, strange hulking
shapes looming above the crumbling buildings-a game of
hunter and hunted, himself the quarry, and those same dread
shapes loping, ungainly behind him.
Ambush-unconsciousness-death?-smothered and torn by a
press of bodies, alien smells, the cutting discomfort of
wire mesh under his naked body, echoing crashes of
machinery in great vastness, cold and glaring light. Others
like himself, humans, frightened, silent for days and
nights of cold and misery and sinister amaut moving
saucer-eyed beyond the perimeter of the lights-cold and
hunger, until in increasing numbers the others ended as
stiff corpses on the mesh.
More crashes of machinery, panic, spurts of memory
interspersed with nightmare and strangely tranquil dreams
of childhood: drugs and pain, now gabbling faces thrust
close to his, shaggy, different humans incapable of speech
as he knew it, overwhelming stench, dirty-nailed fingers
tearing at him.
Aiela jerked back from the contact and bowed his head
into his hands, nauseated; but worse seeped in after:
cages, transfer to another ship, being herded into yet
filthier confinement, the horror of seeing fellow beings
reduced to mouthing animals, constant fear and frequent
abuse-himself the victim almost always, because he was
different, because he could not speak, because he did not
react as they did-the cunning humor of the savages, who
would wait until he slept and then spring on him, who would
goad him into a rage and then press him into a corner of
that cage, tormenting him for their amusement until his
screams brought the attendants running to break it up.
At last, strangers, kallia; his transfer, drugged, to
yet another wakening and another prison. Aiela saw himself
and Chimele as alien and shadowy beings invading the cell:
Daniel’s distorted memory did not even recognize him
until he met the answering memory in Aiela’s mind.
Enemy. Enemy. Interrogator. Part of him, enemy. The
terror boiled into the poor human’s brain and created
panic, violence echoing and re-echoing in their joined
mind, division that went suicidal, multiplying by the
second.
Aiela broke contact, sick and trembling with reaction.
Daniel was similarly affected, and for a moment neither of
them moved.
No matter, no matter, came into Daniel’s mind,
remembrance of kindness, reception of Aiela’s pity for
him. Any conditions, anything. He realized that Aiela was
receiving that thought, and hurt pride screened it in.
“I am sorry,” he concentrated the words. “I
don’t hate you. Aiela, help me. I want to go
home.”
“From what I have seen, Daniel, I much fear there
is no home for you to return to.”
Am I alone? Am I the only human here?
The thought terrified Daniel; and yet it promised no
more of the human cages; held out other images, himself
alone forever, victim to strangers-amaut, kallia, aliens
muddled together in his mind.
“You are safe,” Aiela assured him; and was
immediately conscious it was a forgetful lie. In that
instant memory escaped its confinement.
They. They-Daniel snatched a thought and an image of the
iduve, darkly beautiful, ancient and evil, and all the fear
that was bound up in kalliran legend. He associated it with
the shadowy figure he had seen in the cell, doubly panicked
as Aiela tried to screen. No! What have you agreed to do
for them? Aiela!
“No.” Aiela fought against the currents of
terror. “No. Quiet. I’m going to have you
sedated-No! Stop that!-so that your mind can rest. I’m
tired. So are you. You will be safe, and I’ll come back
later when you’ve rested.”
You’re going to report to them-and to lie there-The
human remembered other wakings, strangers’ hands on
him, his fellow humans’ cruel humor. Nausea hit his
stomach, fear so deep there was no reasoning. There were
amaut on the ship: he dreaded them touching him while he
was unconscious.
“You will be moved,” Aiela persisted.
“You’ll wake in a comfortable place next to my
rooms, and you’ll be free when you wake, completely
safe, I promise it. I’ll have the amaut stay completely
away from you if that will make you feel any
better.”
Daniel listened, wanting to believe, but he could not.
Mercifully the attendant on duty was both kalliran and
gentle of manner, and soon the human was settled into bed
again, sliding down the mental brink of unconsciousness. He
still stretched out his thoughts to Aiela, wanting to trust
him, fearing he would wake in some more incredible
nightmare.
“I will be close by,” Aiela assured him, but
he was not sure the human received that, for the contact
went dark and numb like Isande’s.
He felt strangely amputated then, utterly on his own
and-a thing he would never have credited-wishing for the
touch of his asuthe, her familiar, kalliran mind, her
capacity to make light of his worst fears. If he were
severed from the human this moment and never needed touch
that mind again, he knew that he would remember to the end
of his days that he had for a few moments been human.
He had harmed himself. He knew it, desperately wished it
undone, and feared not even Isande’s experience could
help him. She had tried to warn him. In defiance of her
advice he had extended himself to the human, reckoning no
dangers but the obvious, doing things his own way, with
kastien toward a hurt and desolate creature.
He had chosen. He could no more bear harm to Isande than
he could prefer pain for himself: iduvish as she was, he
knew her to the depth of her stubborn heart, knew the
elethia of her and her loyalty, and she in no wise deserved
harm from anyone.
Neither did the human. Someone meant to use him, .to
wring some use from him, and discard him or destroy him
afterward-be rid of him, Isande had said, even she callous
toward him-and there was in that alien shell a being that
had not deserved either fate.
It is not reasonable to ask me to venture an opinion on
something I have never experienced, Chimele had told him at
the outset. She did not understand kalliran emotion and she
had never felt the chiabres. Of a sudden he feared not even
Chimele might have anticipated what she was creating of
them, and that she would deal ruthlessly with the result-a
kameth whose loyalty was half-human.
He was kallia, kallia!-and of a sudden he felt his hold
on that claim becoming tenuous. It was not right, what he
had done-even to the human.
Isande, he pleaded, hoping against all knowledge to the
contrary for a response from that other, that blessedly
kalliran mind. Isande, Isande.
“But his senses perceived only darkness from that
quarter.
In the next moment he felt a mild pulse from the
idoikkhe, the coded flutter that meant paredre.
Chimele was sending for him.
There was the matter of an accounting.
Chapter 4
CHIMELE WAS PERTURBED. It was evident in her brooding
expression and her attitude as she leaned in the corner of
her chair; she was not pleased; and she was not alone for
this audience: four other iduve were with her, and with
that curious sense of deja vu Isande’s instruction
imparted, Aiela knew them. They were Chimele’s
nasithi-katasakke, her half-brothers and -sister by
common-mating.
The woman Chaikhe was youngest: an Artist, a singer of
songs; by kalliran standards Chaikhe was too thin to be
beautiful, but she was gentle and thoughtful toward the
kamethi. She had also thought of him with interest: Isande
had warned him of it; but Chimele had said no, and that
ended it. Chaikhe was becoming interested in katasakke, in
common-mating, the presumable cause of restlessness; but an
iduve with that urge would rapidly lose all interest in
m’metanei. Beside Chaikhe, eyeing him fixedly, sat her
full brother Ashakh, a long-faced man, exceedingly tall and
thin. Ashakh was renowned for intelligence and coldness to
emotion even among iduve. He was Ashanome’s chief
Navigator and master of much of the ship’s actual
operation, from its terrible armament to the computers that
were the heart of the ship’s machinery and memory. He
did not impress one as a man who made mistakes, nor as one
to be crossed with impunity. And next to Ashakh, leaning on
one arm of the chair, sat Rakhi, the brother that Chimele
most regarded. Rakhi was of no great beauty, and for an
iduve he was a little plump. Also he had a shameful bent
toward kutikkase-a taste for physical comfort too great to
be honorable among iduve. But he was devoted to Chimele,
and he was extraordinarily kind to the noi kame and even to
the seldom-noticed amaut, who adored him as their personal
patron. Besides, at the heart of this soft, often-smiling
fellow was a heart of greater bravery than most
suspected.
The third of the brothers was eldest: Khasif, a giant of
a man, strikingly handsome, sullen-eyed-older than Chimele,
but under her authority. He was of the order of Scientists,
a xenoarchaeologist. He had a keen m’melakhia-an
impelling hunger for new experience-and noi kame made
themselves scarce when he was about, for he had killed on
two occasions. This was the man Isande so feared,
although-she had admitted-she did not think he was
consciously cruel. Khasif was impatient and energetic in
his solutions, a trait much honored among iduve, as long as
it was tempered with refinement, with chanokhia. He had the
reputation of being a very dangerous man, but in
Isande’s memory he had never been a petty one.
“How fares Daniel?” asked Chimele. “Why
did you ask sedation so early? Who gave you leave for
this?”
“We were tiring,” said Aiela. “You gave
me leave to order what I thought best, and we were tired,
we-“
“Aiela-kameth,” Chaikhe intervened gently.
“Is there progress?”
“Yes.”
“Will complete asuthithekkhe be possible with this
being? Can you reach that state with him, that you can be
one with him?”
“I don’t-I don’t think it is safe. No. I
don’t want that.”
“Is this yours to decide?” Ashakh’s tones
were like icewater on the silken voice of Chaikhe.
“Kameth-you were instructed.”
He wanted to tell them. The memory of that contact was
still vivid in his mind, such that he still shuddered. But
there was no patience in Ashakh’s thin-lipped face,
neither patience nor mercy nor understanding of weakness.
“We are different,” he found himself saying, to
fill the silence. Ashakh only stared. “Give me
time,” he said again.
“We are on a schedule,” Ashakh said.
“This should have been made clear to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Specify the points of difference.”
“Ethics, experience. He isn’t hostile, not yet.
He mistrusts-he mistrusts me, this place, all things
alien.”
“Is it not your burden to reconcile these
differences?”
“Sir.” Aiela’s hands sweated and he folded
his arms, pressing his palms against his sides. He did not
like to look Ashakh in the face, but the iduve stared at
him unblinkingly. “Sir, we are able to communicate.
But he is not gullible, and I’m running out of answers
that will satisfy him. That was why I resorted to the
sedative. He’s beginning to ask questions. I had no
more easy answers. What am I supposed to tell
him?”
“Aiela.” Khasif drew his attention to the
left. “What is your personal reaction to the
being?”
“I don’t know.” His mouth was dry. He
looked into Khasif s face, that was the substance of
Isande’s nightmares, perfect and cold. “I try-I
try to avoid offending him-“
“What is the ethical pattern, the social structure?
Does he recognize kalliran patterns?”
“Close to kallia. But not the same. I can’t
tell you: not the same at all.”
“Be more precise.”
“Am I supposed to have learned something in
particular?” Aiela burst out, harried and regretting
his tone at once. The idoikkhe pulsed painlessly, once,
twice: he looked from one to the other of them, not knowing
who had done it, knowing it for a warning. “I’m
sorry, but I don’t understand. I was primed to study
this man, but no one will tell me just what I was looking
for. Now you’ve taken Isande away from me too. How am I
to know what questions to start with?”
His answer caused a little ruffling among the iduve, and
merry Rakhi laughed outright and looked sidelong at
Chimele. “Au, this one has a sting, Chimele.” He
looked back at Aiela. “And what have you learned, thus
ignorant of your purpose, o m’metane?”
“That the amaut have intruded into human space,
which they swore in a treaty with the Halliran Idai they
would never do. This man came from human space. They lost
most of his shipment because these humans weren’t
acclimated to the kind of abuse they received. Is that what
you want to hear? Until you tell me what you mean to do
with him, I’m afraid I can’t do much
more.”
Chimele had not been amused. She frowned and stirred in
her chair, placing her hands on its arms. “Can you,
Aiela, prepare this human for our own examination by
tomorrow?”
“That’s impossible. No. And what kind
of-?”
“By tomorrow evening.”
“If you want something, then make it clear what it
is and maybe I can learn it. But he wants answers. He has
questions, and I can’t keep putting him off, not
without creating you an enemy-or do you care?”
“You will have to-put him off, as you express
it.”
“I’m not going to lie to him, even by omission.
What are you going to do with him?”
“I prefer that this human not be admitted to our
presence with the promise of anything. Do you understand
me, Aiela? If you promise this being anything, it will be
the burden of your honor to pay for it; make sure your
resources are adequate. I will not consider myself or the
nasul bound by your ignorant and unauthorized generosity.
Go back to your quarters.”
“I will not lie to him for you.”
“Go back to your quarters. You are not
noticed.” This time there was no softness at all in
her tone, and he knew he dared not dispute with her
further. Even Rakhi took the smile from his face and
straightened in his chair. Aiela omitted the bow of
courtesy, turned on his heel and walked out.
He had ruined matters. When he was stressed his voice
rose, and he had let it happen, had lost his case for it.
He had felt when he walked in that Chimele was not in a
mood for patience; and he realized in hindsight that the
nasithi had tried to avert disaster: Rakhi, he thought,
Rakhi, who had always been kind to Isande, had wished to
stop him.
He returned to the kamethi level in utmost dejection,
realized the late hour and considered returning to the lab
and requesting to have a sedative for himself. His nerves
could bear no more. But he had never liked such things,
liked less to deal with Ghiavre, the iduve first Surgeon;
and it occurred to him that Daniel might wake prematurely
and need him. He decided against it.
He went to his quarters and prepared for bed, settled in
with notebook and pen and diverted his thoughts to
record-keeping on Daniel, then, upon the sudden cold
thought that the iduve might not respect the sanctity of
his belongings, he tore up everything and threw it into the
disposal. The suspicion distressed him. As a kallia he had
never thought of such things; he had never needed to
suspect such ikastien on the part of his superiors.
Daniel had learned such suspicion. It was human.
With that distressing thought he turned out the lights
and lay still until his muddled thoughts drifted into
sleep.
The idoikkhe jolted him, brutally, so that he woke with
an outcry and clawed his way up to the nearest chair.
Isande, he had cast, the reflex of two days of
dependency; and to his surprised relief there was a
response, albeit a muzzy one.
Aiela, she responded, remembered Daniel, instantly tried
to learn his health and began to pick up the immediate
present: Chimele, summoning him, angry; and Daniel-What
have you done? she sent back, shivering with fear; but he
prodded her toward the moment, thrusting through the
flutter of her drug-hazed thoughts.
“This is Chimele’s sleep cycle too,” he
sent. “Does she always exercise her tempers in the
middle of the night?”
The idoikkhe stung him again, momentarily disrupting
their communication. Aiela reached for his clothes and
pulled them on, while Isande’s thoughts threaded back
into his mind. She scanned enough to blame him for matters,
and she was distressed enough to let it seep through; but
she had the grace to keep that feeling down. Now was
important. He was important. He had to take her advice now;
he could be hurt, badly.
“Chimele’s hours are seldom predictable,”
she informed him, her outermost thoughts calm and ordered.
But what lay under it was a peculiar physical fear that
unstrung his nerves.
He looked at the time: it was well past midnight, and
Chimele, like Ashakh, did not impress him as one who took
the leisure for whimsy. He pulled his sweater over his
head, started for the door, but he paused to hurl at Isande
the demand that she drop her screening, guide him. He felt
her reticence; when it melted, he almost wished
otherwise.
Fear came, nightmares of Khasif, chilling and sexual at
once. Few things could cause an iduve to act irrationally,-
but there was one outstanding exception, and iduve when
irritated with kamethi were prone to it.
He stopped square in the doorway, blood leaving his face
and returning in a hot rush. Her urgency prodded him into
motion again, her anger and her terror like ice in his
belly. No, he insisted again and again. Isande had been
terrified once and long ago: she was scarred by the
experience and dwelled on it excessively-it embarrassed
him, that he had to express that thought: he knew it for
truth. He wished her still.
“It happens,” Isande insisted, with such
firmness that it shook his conviction. “It is
katasukke-pleasure-mating.” And quickly, without
preface, apology, or overmuch delicacy, she fed across what
she knew or guessed of the iduve’s intimate
habits-alienness only remotely communicated in katasukke
with noi kame, a union between iduve in katasakke that was
fraught with violence and shielded in ritual and secrecy.
Katasukke was gentler: sensible noi kame were treated with
casual indulgence or casual negligence according to the
mood of the iduve in question; but cruelty was e-chanokhia,
highly improper, whatever unknown and violent things they
did among themselves. But both katasakke and katasukke
triggered dangerous emotions in the ordinarily
dispassionate iduve. Vaikka was somehow involved in mating,
and it was not uncommon that someone was killed. In
Isande’s mind any irrationality in the iduve emanated
from that one urge: it was the one thing that could undo
their common sense, and when it was undone, it was a
madness as alien as their normal calm.
He shook off these things, hurried through the corridors
while Isande’s anxious presence thrust into his mind
behaviors and apologies, fawning kameth graces meant to
appease Chimele. Vaikka with a nas kame had this for an
expected result, and if he provoked her further now he
would be lucky to escape with his life.
He rejected Isande and her opinions, prideful and
offended, and knew that Isande was crying, and frustrated
with him and furious. Her anger grew so desperate that he
had to screen against her, and bade her leave him alone. He
was ashamed enough at this disgraceful situation without
having her lodged as resident observer in his mind. He knew
her hysterical upon the subject, and even so could not help
fearing he was walking into something he did not want to
contemplate.
With Isande aware, mind-bound to him.
Leave me alone! he raged at her..
She went; and then he was sorry for the silence.
Chimele was waiting for him, seated in her accustomed
chair as a tape unreeled on the wall screen with dizzying
rapidity: the day’s reports, quite probably. She cut it
off, using a manual control instead of the mental ones of
which the iduve were capable-a choice, he had learned,
which betokened an iduve with mind already occupied.
“You took an unseemly amount of time
responding,” she said.
“I was asleep.” Fear added, shaming him:
“I’m sorry.”
“You did not expect, then, to be called?”
“No,” he said: and doubled over as the
idoikkhe hit him with overwhelming pain. He was surprised
into an outcry, but bit it off and straightened,
furious.
“Well, consider it settled, then,” she said,
“and cheaply so. Be wiser in the future. Return to
your quarters.”
“All of you are demented,” he cried, and it
struck, this time enough to gray the senses, and the pain
quite washed his mind of everything. When it stopped he was
on his face on the floor, and to his horror he felt
Isande’s hurt presence in him, holding to him, trying
to absorb the pain and reason with him to stay down.
“Aiela,” said Chimele, “you clearly fail
to understand me.”
“I don’t want-” the idoikkhe stung him
again, a gentle reproof compared with what had touched him
a moment before. It jolted raw nerves and made him cringe
physically in dread: the cowardice it instilled made him
both ashamed and angry; and there was Isande’s anxious
intrusion again. The two-sided assault was too much. He
clutched his head and begged his asuthe to leave him, even
while he stumbled to his feet, unwilling to be treated
so.
She can destroy you, Isande sent him hysterically. She
has her honor to think of. Vaikka, Aiela, vaikka!
“Is it Isande?” asked Chimele. “Is it she
that troubles you?”
“She’s being hurt. She won’t go away.
Please stop it.”
And then he knew that Isande’s idoikkhe had pained
her, once, twice, with increasing severity, and the
mournful and loyal presence fled.
“Aiela,” said Chimele, “all my life I
have dealt gently with my kamethi. Why will you persist in
provoking me? Is it ignorance or is it design?”
“It’s my nature,” he said, which further
offended her; but this time she only scowled and regarded
him with deep dissatisfaction.
“Your ignorance of us has not been noticed: the
nearest equivalent is ‘forgiven.’ It will be a
serious error on your part to assume this will continue
without limit.”
“I honestly,” he insisted, “do not
understand you.”
“We are not in the habit of patience with
metane-tekasu-phre. Nor do we make evident our discomforts.
Au, m’metane, I should have the hide from you.”
There was self-control; and under it there was a rage that
made his skin cold: run now, he thought, and become like
the others-no. She would deal with him, explaining matters;
he would stand there until she did so.
For a long moment he stood still, expected the touch of
the idoikkhe for it; she did not move either.
“Aiela,” she said then, in a greatly
controlled voice, “I was disadvantaged before my
nasithi-katasakke.” And when he only stared at her,
helplessly unenlightened: “For three thousand years
Ashanome has taken no outsider-m’metane aboard,”
she said. “I have never dealt with the likes of
you.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“You disputed with my nasithi. Then you turned the
same discourtesy on me. Had you no perception?”
“I had cause,” he declared in temper too
deep-running to reckon of her anger, and his hand went to
the idoikkhe on reflex. “This doesn’t turn off my
mind or my conscience, and I still want to know what you
intend with the man Daniel.”
Chimele literally trembled with rage. He had never seen
so dangerous a look on any sane and sentient face, but the
pain he expected did not come. She stilled her anger with
an evident effort.
“Nas-suphres,” she said in a tone of cosmic
contempt. “You are hopeless, m’metane”
“How so?” he responded. “How
so-ignorant?”
“Because you provoke me and trust my forbearance.
This is the act of a stupid or an ignorant being. And did I
truly believe you capable of vaikka, you would find
yourself woefully outmatched. You are not irreplaceable,
m’metane, and you are perilously close to extinction at
this moment.”
“I have no confidence at all in your forbearance,
and I well know you mean your threats.”
“The clumsiness of your language makes rational
conversation impossible. You are nothing, and I could wipe
you out with a thought. I should think the reputedly
ordered processes of the kalliran mind would dictate
caution. I fail to perceive why you attack me.”
Mad, he thought in panic, remembering at the same time
that she had mental control of the idoikkhe. He wanted to
leave. He could not think how. “I have not attacked
you,” he said in a quiet, reasoning voice, as one
would talk to the insane. “I know better.”
She arose and moved away from him in great vexation,
then looked back with some semblance of control restored.
“I warned you once, Aiela, do not play at vaikka with
us. You are incredibly ignorant, but you have a courage
which I respect above all metane-traits. Do you not
understand I must maintain sorithias-that I have the
dignity of my office to consider?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Au, this is impossible. Perhaps Isande can make it
clear.”
“No! No, let her alone. I want none of her
explanations. I have my mind clear enough without need of
her rationalizations.”
“You are incredible,” Chimele exclaimed
indignantly, and returned to him, seized both his hands,
and made him sit down opposite her, a contact he hated, and
she seemed to realize it. “Aiela. Do not press me. I
must retaliate. We delight to be generous to our kamethi,
but we will not have gifts demanded of us. We will not be
pressed and not retaliate, we will not be affronted and do
nothing. It is physically impossible. Can you not
comprehend that?”
Her hands trembled. He felt it and remembered
Isande’s warning of iduve violence, the irrational and
uncontrollable rages of which these cold beings were
capable. But Chimele seemed yet in control, and her
amethyst eyes locked with his in deep earnest, so plain a
look it was almost like the touch of his asuthi. She let
him go.
“I cannot protect you, poor m’metane, if you
will persist in playing games of anger with us, if you
persist in incurring punishment and fighting back when you
receive the consequences of your impudence. You do not want
to live under our law; you are not capable of it. And if
you were wise, you would have left when I told you to
go.”
“I do not understand,” he said. “I simply
do not understand.”
“Aiela-” Her indigo face showed stress. His
hand still rested across his knee as he leaned forward, too
tense to move. Now she took it back into hers, her slim
fingers moving lightly across the back of it as if she
found its color or the texture of his skin something
remarkably fascinating. Pride and anger notwithstanding, he
sensed nothing insulting in that touch, rather that Chimele
drew a certain calm from that contact, that her mood
shifted back to reason, and that it would be a perilous
move if he jerked his hand away. He sweated with fear, not
of iduve science or power-his rational faculty feared that;
but something else worked in him, something subconscious
that recognized Chimele and shuddered instinctively. He
wished himself out that door with many doors between them;
but her hand still moved over his, and her violet eyes
stared into him.
“If you had been born among the kamethi,” said
Chimele softly, “you would never have run afoul of me,
for no nas kame would ever have provoked me so far. He
would have had the sense to run away and wait until I had
called him again. You are different, and I have allowed for
that-this far. And so that you will understand, ignorant
kameth: you were impertinent with others and impertinent
exceedingly with me-and being Orithain, I dispense
judgments to the nasithi. How then shall I descend to
publicly chastise a nas kame? They wished to persuade me to
be patient; and I chose to be patient, remembering what you
are; but then, au, after trading words with my nasithi, you
must ignore my direct order and debate me what disposition
I am to make of this human.” She drew breath: when she
went on it was in a calmer voice. “Rakhi could not
reprimand my kameth in my presence; I could not do so in
theirs. And there you stood, gambling with five of us in
the mistaken confidence that your life was too valuable for
me to waste. Were you iduve, I should say that were an
extremely hazardous form of vaikka. Were you iduve, you
would have lost that game. But because you are
m’metane, you were allowed to do what an iduve would
have died for doing.”
“And is iduve pride that vulnerable,
then?”
“Stop challenging me!”
It was a cry of anguish. Chimele herself looked
terrified, reminding him for all the world of an
essentially friendly animal being provoked beyond
endurance, a creature teased to the point of madness by
some child it loved, shivering with taut nerves and
repressed instincts. She could not help it, as an animal
could not resist a move from its prey.
Vaikka.
He grasped it then-a game that was indeed for iduve
only, a name that shielded a most terrifying instinct, one
that the iduve themselves must fear, for it tore apart all
their careful rationality. The compulsion must indeed be
involved in their matings-intricate, unkalliran instinct.
It was reasonable that the noi kame feared above all the
iduve’s affections, feared closeness. A kallia quite
literally did not have a nervous system attuned to that
kind of contest. A kallia would want to play the game part
of the way and then quit before someone was hurt; but there
was a point past which the iduve could not quit.
“It is possible,” he said carefully,
“that I did not use good judgment.”
She grew perceptibly calmer at that slight retreat,
slowed her breathing, patted his arm with the thoughtless
affection one might show a pet, and then drew back her hand
as if mindful of his inward shudder. “Surely
then,” she said, “understanding your nature and
ours, you need not stand so straight or stare so insolently
when that irrepressible tongue of yours brings you afoul of
our tempers.”
“I was not educated as kameth.”
“I perceive your difficulty. But do not seek to
live by our law. You cannot. And it is not reasonable for
you to expect us to bear all the burden of self-restraint.
I thrust you into close contact with us, a contact most
kameth-born scarcely know. It cannot be remedied. I trusted
your common sense and forgot kalliran-I know not whether to
say obstinacy or elethia, an admirable trait-but that and
our aggressiveness, our m’melakhia, is a very volatile
combination.”
“I begin to see that.”
“Go back to your quarters this night, for your
safety’s sake. I will respect your m’melakhia,
your-protection-of your human asuthe as much as I can, and
I will not remember this conversation to your hurt. You are
wiser than you were. I advise you to make it apparent to my
nasithi-ka-tasakke that vaikka has been settled.”
“How?”
“By your amended attitude and increased discretion
in our presence.”
“I understand,” he said, hesitated awkwardly
until an impatient gesture made clear his dismissal. Almost
he delayed to thank her, but looking again into her eyes
chilled the impulse into silence: he bowed, turned, felt
her eyes on his back the whole long distance to the
door.
The safety of the hall, the sealing of the door behind
him, brought a physical relief. He lowered his eyes and
flinched past an iduve who was passing, secured the lift
alone, and was glad to find the kamethi level, where kallia
thronged the concourse-the alternate day-cycle, whose
waking was his night.
He knew the iduve finally.
Predators.
Outsiders had never understood the end of the
Domination, the Sundering of the iduve empire. He began
to.
They were hunters from their very origins-a species for
whom all else that moved was prey, for whom others of their
own kind were intolerable. They had hunted the metrosi to
exhaustion and drifted elsewhere. Now they were back. The
enormity of the surmise grew in him like a sickly
chill.
The nasul-jealously controlling its territory.
Perhaps even the iduve themselves had forgotten what
they were; the pride of ritual and ceremony shielded their
instincts, civilized them, as civilization had dealt with
the instincts of kallia, who had been the natural prey of
other hunters in packs, on the plains of prehistoric Aus
Qao. Subtle reactions, a tensing of muscles, an interchange
of movements, the steadiness of the eyes-these defined
hunter and hunted. That was the thing he had looked in the
face when he had stared into Chimele’s at close range.
He had wished to run and had instinctively known
better-that if he stayed very, very still, it might pad
softly away.
He shivered, the hair rising at the nape of his neck as
if she still watched him. When he felt Isande’s
frightened presence beginning to creep back into his mind,
he screened heavily, for he still was shaken, and he was
ashamed for her to know the extent of it.
You nearly killed yourself, she accused him. I warned
you, I warned you-
“Not well enough,” he returned. “You have
a blind spot. Or you do not understand them.”
“I have lived my whole life among them,” she
retorted, “and I have never seen what you saw
tonight-not even from Khasif.”
He accepted that for truth. Likely kamethi had been
taught never to draw such responses. But he was world-born;
he himself had sat by fires at night in the wilds of Lelle,
with a ring of light to guard his sleep, and he knew
Chimele in all the atavistic fears of his species.
A predator who had assumed civilization.
Who had touched him gently and refrained, despite his
best attempt to provoke her-ignorant, she had called him,
and justly.
“Chimele is iduve,” Isande hurled against the
warmth of that thought, forcefully, for she hated worse
than anything to have her advice ignored. “And you
will live longer if you remember that we are only kamethi,
and avoid provoking her and avoid attracting her notice to
yourself.”
This from Isande, Isande who loved Chimele, who
willingly served the iduve: who trembled in her heart each
time she dealt with Chimele’s temper. It was a
sorrowful life she had accepted: he let that slip and was
sorry, for Isande flared, hot and unshielded.
Am I nothing, she fired at him, because I was born
kameth? My world-born friend, I have been places you have
not dreamed of, and seen things you cannot understand. And
as it regards the iduve, my friend, I have lived among
them, and what of their language you know, you lifted from
my mind, what of their customs you understand you have
learned from me, and what consideration you had from
Chimele you have because of me, so do not lecture me as an
expert on the iduve. If you were not so ikas, you would not
have had so dangerous an experience.
Well, he returned, I hardly seem to have a monopoly on
vanity or selfishness or arrogance, do I?
And the resentments that echoed back and forth, too much
truth, sent both personalities reeling apart, hurt.
Isande was first to touch again, grieving.
“Aiela,” she pleaded, “Asuthi must not
quarrel. Please, Aiela.”
“I am vain and arrogant,” he admitted,
“and I have had almost all the damage my sanity can
stand tonight, Isande. I’m tired. Go away.”
Daniel, she remembered, dismay and regret sharp in her;
she remembered other things she had gleaned of his mind,
and riffled through all the memory he left unscreened,
gathering this and that with a rising feeling of distress,
of outrage. He felt her, poised to blame him for
everything, to accuse him of things the worse because they
were just.
And she did not. He was so tired his legs shook under
him, and he felt himself very lonely, even in her presence:
he had disregarded everything she had meant to protect them
both, and now that she had utmost cause to rage against him
she pitied him too much to accuse him. She knew his nature
and his incapacity, and she pitied him.
Leave me alone, he wished her. And then furiously: Leave
me alone, will you?
She fled.
He undressed, washed, went through all the ritual of
preparing for bed, and tried to sleep. It was impossible.
Reaction still had his muscles in knots. When he closed his
eyes he saw the paredre, Chimele-cages.
He arose and walked the floor, tried listening to his
old tapes, that he had brought from Kartos. It was worse
than the silence. He cut off the sound, idly cut in on the
monitor that was preset for Daniel’s next-door
apartment. The human was still blissfully unconscious.
And the memory returned, how it had felt to live in that
envelope of alien flesh. He broke the connection, dizzied
and disoriented, wandered back to the bath, drifting as he
had a dozen times, to the full-length mirror. It contained
all in Ashanome that was familiar, that was known.
His image stared back at him, naked of everything but
the idoikkhe that circled his wrist like some bizarre
barbaric ornament. His silver hair was beginning a slow
recovery from the surgeons’ unimaginative barbering,
and he had grown accustomed to the change. His features
among kallia were considered proper: straight silver brows,
a straight nose with a little flare to the nostrils, a
mouth wide enough to show generosity, a chin prominent as
with all the Lyailleues. He fingered the high prominence of
his cheekbone and the hollow beneath, staring into his own
eyes closely in the mirror, wondering how much of the iduve
eye was iris. Was it all? And could.they see color as
kallia could? Humans did. He knew that. He considered the
rest of himself, 7.8 meis in stature, a little taller than
the average, broad-shouldered and slim at the hips, with
the slender, well-muscled limbs of an athlete, the flat
belly and muscular girdle of a runner, a hard-trained body
that had no particular faults. He had never known serious
illness, had suffered no wounds, had never known privation
that was not his own choice. He was parome Deian’s only
son; if he had had any faults at birth, no money would have
been spared to mend them. If he had lacked any in wit,
parome Deian’s money would have purchased every known
aid to teach him and improve his mind. When he grew bored,
there had instantly been toys and games and hunts and
athletics, and when he became a young man, there had been
all the loveliest and most proper girls, the most exclusive
parties. There were private instructors, the most proper
and demanding schools; and there had been family despair
when he insisted on pursuing athletics to the detriment of
his studies, on risking his life in hunts, on turning down
a career in district politics that was calculated to lead
to the highest levels of government-a lack of family and
filial giyre that his father refused to understand
(“Ikas,” Deian had said, “and
ungrateful.” “Am I ikas,” he had answered,
eighteen and all-knowing, “because it is not my
pattern to be like you?” “There have been
Lyailleues on the High Council for two hundred years,
honoring Xolun and this house. My son will not take it on
himself to end that tradition.”)
Once that year he had thought of hurling his plane (a
luxury model) in a pyrotechnic finish at Mount Ryi, in full
view of all the fashionable estates and the Xolun zone
capitol. The news services would be buzzing with wonder for
days: Son of Deian, Suicide; and people would be shaking
their heads and making small noises of despair and secretly
hating him, thinking if only they had had his advantages
they would not have thrown them away. When he was nineteen
he had quit school so that his father Deian would
disinherit him and his mother and sister would give him up;
but he also saw it broke their hearts, and his few passages
with the pleasures of the metrosi’s darker side left
him disgusted and embarrassed, for these things were also
available in the estates in the shadow of Ryi-without the
filth and the fear. In the end he had surrendered and
returned home to the respectability planned for him, to
learn the business of government.
(“Son, it is always necessary to compromise.
That’s how things are done.” “Even when one
is right, sir?” “Right- right; you always assume
you know exactly where that is, don’t you? I’m sure
I don’t. If you go on like that, no one could ever
agree. Compromise. Sometimes you have to yield a little to
win a little later on.”)
He had tried.
A year later he had sought the anonymity of the service,
and even that had proved no refuge secure from Deian’s
money and influence. Perhaps, he thought, it was his
father’s way of setting him free; or perhaps Deian
still believed he would have come home, older, wiser. He
would have come home, sooner or later. He had spent his
life pursuing the elusive hope of adequacy, a constant
struggle for breath in the rarified atmosphere of his
father’s ambitions and the giyre of his ancient
family.
(“I would have come home someday,” he had
written in that final letter. “I have gained the good
sense to honor your wisdom and experience, Father, and I
have gained enough wisdom of my own to have kept on in my
own path. What giyre I had of my crew, I earned; and that
is important to me. What giyre I gave, I chose to give, and
that was important too. I honor you, very much; but I would
not have left the service.”)
It was irony. He closed his hand about the idoikkhe and
reminded himself what he was worth at the end of all his
father’s planning and his resisting: a being scantly
adequate to serve the iduve, equal to a gracious (if vain)
young woman and a battered bit of human freight off an
amaut transport. He had lived with the sky overhead to be
reached, whether or not he chose to try, and whether or not
he had realized it before, he had been an arrogant and a
stubborn man. Now he had been shown where the sky stopped,
and it was a shattering experience.
He imagined Daniel’s image in the glass. The skin
went shades of brown and pink, the silver hair turned dark,
the eyes shadowed and hunted, his body slight with hunger,
crossed with red and purple scars from untreated wounds,
feet lacerated by the cruel mesh. His mind held memories of
absolute horror, cages, brutality unimagined in the
Halliran Idai. Even before those, there were memories of
hunger, a childhood in a dark, cement-walled house beside a
trickling canal, summers of sandstorms that blasted crops,
dunes that year by year encroached upon fields, advanced
upon the house, threatened the life-giving canal. At some
time-Aiela had inherited the memories in bits and
.snatches-Daniel had left that world for the military, and
he had served as a technician of limited skills. He had
known a great many primitive human ports, until the life
sickened him and he went home again, only to find his
father dead, his mother remarried, his brothers gone
offworld, the farm buried under dunes.
War. Shipping lanes closed, merchantmen commandeered for
military service. Daniel-senior now over inexperienced
recruits, wearing the crisp blue of a technician on a
decent ship, well fed, with money promised to his account.
That had lasted seven days, until two stunning defeats had
driven the human forces into retreat and then into rout,
and men were required by martial law to seek their home
ports and keep order there as the panic spread.
That was the way fortune operated for Daniel. His hands
had been emptied every time he had them full; but being
Daniel, he would shrug perplexedly, get down on his knees
and begin picking up the pieces. He was uneducated, but he
had a keen intuition, an intelligence that sucked in
information like a vacuum drawing air, omnivorously, taking
scrap and debris along with the pure, sorting, analyzing.
He had never been anyone, he had never had anything; but he
was not going to stop living until he was sure there was
nothing to be had. That was Daniel-a man who had always
been hungry. M’melakhia, Chimele would call it.
And Daniel’s desire was the fevered dream of his
half-sensible interludes in the cage, when the fields were
green and the canal pure and full and orchards bloomed
beside a white-walled house. He asked nothing more nor less
than that-except the company of others of his kind. He had
never deserved to be appropriated to Ashanome, swallowed
whole by the pride of a Lyailleue and linked to a kalliran
woman who had never learned to be kallia, who was more than
a little iduve.
Aiela, Isande’s thought reproved him, sorrowing.
How long have you been with me? He flushed with anger,
for he had been deep in his own concerns and Isande’s
skill was such that he did not always perceive her touch.
It was not the visual sense that embarrassed him: she knew
his body as he knew hers, for that was a part of
self-concept. It was his mind’s privacy that he did not
like thus exposed, and he knew at once from the backspill
that she had caught rather more than she thought he would
like.
“Dear Aiela,” her silent voice came echoing.
“No, don’t screen me out. I am sorry for
quarreling. I know I offend you.”
“I am sorry,” he sent, the merest surface of
his thoughts, “for a great many things.”
“You are not sure you can handle me,” she
said. “That troubles you. You are not accustomed to
that. You are not half so cruel or fierce as I am, I know
it; but you are twice as brave-too much so, sometimes, when
that terrible pride of yours is touched.”
“I have no pride,” he said. “Not since
Kartos.”
She was amused, which stung. “No. No. It is there;
but you have had it bruised-” the amusement faded,
regretting his offense, and yet she knew herself right by
his very reaction: right, and self-confident.
“Chimele-the iduve in general-have touched it. You are
just now realizing that this is forever, and it frightens
you terribly.”
Her words stung, and a feeling wholly ikas rose up in
him. “I don’t need to live on your terms. I will
not.”
She was silent for a time, sifting matters. “You do
not understand Ashanome. Tonight you saw the chanokhia of
Chimele, and I am afraid you have begun to love her. No-
no, I know: not in that way. It is something worse. It is
m’melakhia-love. It is arastiethe you want from
her-iduve honor; and no m’metane can ever have
that”
“You can’t even think like a kallia, can
you?”
“Aiela, Aiela, you are dealing with an iduve.
Realize it. You are reacting to her as she is. You are
thinking giyre, but Chimele cannot give you what she cannot
even understand. For her there is only arastiethe, and the
honor of an iduve demands too much of us. It costs too
much, Aiela.”
“She might be capable of understanding. Isande, she
tried-“
“Avoid her!”
Screens dropped. Loneliness, a dead asuthe, years of
silence. There was still loneliness, an asuthe who rejected
her advice, who blindly, obstinately sought what had killed
the other. Was the fault in her? Was it she that killed?
She loved Chimele, and gave and gave, and the iduve knew
only how to take. Reha had loved Chimele: asuthe to
herself, how could he have helped it? He would be alive
now, but that he had learned to love Chimele. She would not
teach another.
Darkness. Cold. Screens tumbled. Aiela flinched and she
snatched the memory away, recovering herself, smothering it
as she had learned to do.
You denied, he reminded her gently, That Ashanome killed
him. Was Chimele responsible, after all?
The screens stayed in place. Only the words came
through, carefully controlled. “She was not
responsible. Honor is all she can give. To the nasithi,
that is everything. But what is it worth to a
m’metane?”
Yet you do love her, Aiela sent, and sad laughter
bubbled back.
“Listen-she tried with all her iduvish heart to
make me happy. Three times she asked me to take another
asuthe. ‘He is like you,’ she said this time.
‘He is intelligent, he is of great chanokhia for a
m’metane. Can you work with this one?’ I consented.
She risked a great deal to offer me that choice. You would
have to know the iduve to realize how difficult that was
for her-to try a thing when she has only reason to help
her. She does feel-something. I am not sure what. After all
these years, I am not sure what. Maybe we m’metanei try
to read into them what we wish were there. Perhaps that is
why we keep giving, when we know better.”
“Let me alone,” he wished her. “If
I’m to make a mistake, then let it be my
mistake.”
“And when you make it,” she said, “we
will both pay for it. That is the way this arrangement
works, Aiela.”
It was truth; he recognized it-resented her being
female. It was an unfair obligation. “I am
sorry,” he said after a moment. “Then it will
happen. I will not be held by you.”
“I disturb you.”
“In several senses.”
She snatched a thought half-born from his mind, the
suspicion that the iduve knew enough of kalliran emotion to
use it, to manipulate it at will. Isande was beautiful: he
had eyes to notice that. He kept noticing it, again and
again. That she constantly knew it, embarrassed him; he
knew that she was not willing to think of him in that way.
But, he sent her, if she were in the ungraceful position of
having to share a man’s inmost thoughts, she might
receive things even more direct from time to time. Or had
Reha been immune to such things?
The screen closed tightly on those memories, as it
always had: the privacy she had shared with Reha was not
for him. “He and I began so young we were like one
mind; there could never be that between us. Asuthi ought
never to share that part of their lives: some illusions
have to be maintained. I am not for games, not for your
amusement, nor are you for mine, dear friend. There is an
end of it. You came too close to that being, you refuse my
warnings about the iduve, and I see I can’t help you:
you resent being advised by a woman. But I can at least
exercise the good sense to keep my distance from you when
it happens.”
Hurt feelings. Bitterly hurt feelings.
“Don’t,” he said, reaching out to her
retreating mind-. And when she lingered, questioning, he
searched for something to say. “If you’re not
going to sleep, stay awhile. It’s miserably quiet
here.”
Softness touched his mind. He had pleased her by asking.
Her spirits brightened and amusement rippled from her, to
think that he found in her the power to deal with the
nightmares that troubled him: human ghosts and iduve went
flitting into retreat at her kalliran presence.
