IT WAS a game, shon’ai, the passing-game, Kel-style, in the dim round hall of the Kel, the middle tower of the House— black-robed men and a black-robed woman, a circle of ten. Warriors, they played the round not like children, with a pair of stones, but with the spinning blades of the as’ei, that could wound or kill. On the name-beat, the snap of fingers, the as’ei flew across the seated circle of players, and skilled hands seized the hilts in mid-turn, to beat the time and hurl the blades on in the next name-beat.
Fire-child, star-child, what is Kel?
Sword-bearers, song-weavers, that is Kel.
They played without words, with only the rhythm of their hands and the weapons, flesh and steel. The rhythm was as old as time and as familiar as childhood. The game had more meaning than the act, more than the simplicity of the words. The Game of the People, it was called.
Dawn-child, earth-child, what is Sen?
Rune-makers, home-leaders, that is Sen.
A kel’en who flinched, whose eye failed or whose wits wandered, had no value in the House. The boys and girls and women of the Kath played with stones to learn their skill. Those who became kel’ein played thereafter with edged steel. The Kel, like the mothers and children of the gentle Kath, laughed as they played. They of Kel-caste were brief and bright as moths. They enjoyed life, because they knew this.
Then-child, now-child, what are we?
Dream-seekers, life-bearers, we are 
A door opened, echoing, the sound rolling through the hollows and depths of the tower. Sen Sathell broke in upon them, suddenly and without warning or courtesies.
The rhythm ceased The blades rested in the hands of Niun, the youngest kel’en. The Kel as a whole inclined their heads in respect to Sathell s’Delas, chief of Sen-caste, the scholars. Gold-robed he was, like light breaking into the dark hall of the martial Kel, and he was very old—the oldest man of all in the House.
“Kel’anth, ” he said quietly, addressing Eddan, his counterpart in the Kel, “—kel’ein—news has come. The rumor is the war has ended. The regul have asked the humans for peace. “
There was utter silence.
An abrupt move. The as’ei whirred and buried points in the painted plaster of the far wall.
The youngest kel’en rose and veiled himself, and stalked from the gathering, leaving shock in his wake.
The sen’anth and the kel’anth looked at each other, old men and kinsmen, helpless in their distress.
And from the deepest shadows one of the dusei, a brown, slope-shouldered mass larger than a man, stirred and rose, ambling forth into the light in that mournful, abstracted manner of dusei. It pushed its way irreverently between the two elders, thrusting its massive head at the kel’anth, who was its master, seeking comfort.
Kel’anth Eddan patted the beast with age-smooth fingers and looked up at the old scholar who, outside the divisions of caste and duty, was his half-brother. “Is the news beyond any doubt?” he asked, the least trace of hope yet remaining in his voice.
“Yes. The source is regul official communications, no city rumor. It seems completely reliable. ” Sathell gathered his robes about him and, tucking them between his knees, settled on the carpeted floor among the kel’ein, who eased aside to make room for him in their circle.
They were, these ten, the elders of the House, save one.
They were mri.
In their tongue, when they made this statement, they were merely saying that they were of the People. Their word for other species was tsi’mri, which meant not-people, and summed up mri philosophy, religion, and the personal attitudes of the elders at once.
They were, as a species, golden-toned. Mri legends said that the People were born of the sun: skin, eyes, coarse shoulder-length manes, all were bronze or gold. Their hands and feet were narrow and long, and they were a tall, slender race. Their senses, even in great age, were very keen, their hearing in particular most sensitive. Their golden eyes were lid-folded, double-lidded as well, for a nictitating membrane acted on reflex to protect their vision against blowing dust.
They were, as outsiders believed, a species of warriors, of mercenaries—for outsiders saw the Kel, and rarely the Sen, and never the Kath. Mri served outsiders for hire—served the regul, the massive tsi’mri merchants native to Nurag of the star Mab. For many centuries, mri kel’ein had hired out to protect regul commerce between-worlds, generally hired by one regul company as defense against the ambitions and ruthlessness of some business rival, and mri had therefore fought against mri. Those years and that service had been good for the People, this trying of one kel’en of a certain service against the kel’en of another, in proper and traditional combat, as it had always been. Such trials-at-arms refined the strength of the People, eliminating the weak and unfit and giving honor to the strong. In those days the tsi’mri regul had recognized themselves to be incapable of fighting and unskilled in planning strategies, and sensibly left all matters of conflict to the mri Kel to settle in the mri fashion.
But for the last forty years, mri had served all regul combined against all humans, a bitter and ugly conflict, lacking honor and lacking any satisfactions from the enemy. The mri elders were old enough to remember the life before, and knew therefore what changes had been wrought by the war; and they were not pleased with them. Humans were mass-fighters, animals of the herd, and simply understood no other way of war. Mri, who fought singly, had early suspected this, tested it with their lives, found it bitterly true. Humans rejected a’ani, honorable combat, would not respect challenge, understood nothing but their own way, which was widespread destruction.
Mri had bent themselves to learn humanity, the way of the enemy, and had begun to adjust their operations and their manner of service to the regul accordingly. Mri were professionals when it came to combat. Innovation in the yin’ein, the ancient weapons that were used in a’ani, was dishonorable and unthinkable; but innovation in the zahen’ein, in modern arms, was a simple matter of retooling and adjusting methods, a matter of competency in the profession they followed for a livelihood.
Regul, unfortunately, were not as capable of adapting to new tactics. Regul had vast and accurate memories. They could not forget what had always occurred, but conversely they could hardly conceive at all of what had not yet happened, and did not make plans against it happening. Hitherto the regul had depended on mri entirely in the matter of their personal safety, and mri foresight ? for mri could imagine ? had shielded them and compensated for that regul blindness to the unexpected; but in latter days, when the war began to take regul lives and threaten regul properties, regul took matters into their own unskilled hands. Regul issued orders, prudent in their own estimation, for actions which were militarily impossible.
The mri had attempted to obey, for honor’s sake.
Mri had died in their thousands, for honor’s sake.
In the House, on this world, there lived only thirteen mri. Two were young. The rest were the makers of policy, a council of the old, the veteran. Long centuries ago the House had numbered more than two thousand in the Kel alone. In this present age all but these few had gone their way to the war, to die.
And their war had been lost, by regul, who asked the humans for peace.
Sathell looked about him and considered these old ones, kel’ein who had lived beyond their own years of service, whose memories gave them in some matters the perspective of sen’ein. They were Husbands to the she’pan, masters-of-arms while there had been Kath children to teach; and there was Pasev, the only surviving kel’e’en of the House, she most skilled in the yin’ein next Eddan himself. There were Dahacha and Sirain of Nisren; Palazi and Quaras and Lieth of Guragen, itself a dead House, taking refuge with the Mother of this one and adopted by her as Husbands. And from yet another dead House were Liran and Debas, truebrothers. These were part of an age that had already vanished, a time the People would not see again. Sathell felt their sadness, sensed it reflected in the beasts that huddled together in the shadows. Eddan’s dus, whose species was reputedly never friendly with any caste but the warrior Kel, sniffed critically at the scholar’s gold robes and suffered himself to be touched, then heaved his great bulk a little closer, wrinkled rolls of down-furred flesh, shamelessly accepting affection where it was offered.
“Eddan,” said Sathell, stroking the beast’s warm shoulder,”I must tell you also: it is very likely that the masters will cede this world if the humans should demand it as part of the peace.”
“That would be,” said Eddan,”a very large settlement.”
“Not according to what we have just heard. It is rumored that the humans have secured the whole front, that the regul lords are in complete withdrawal, that the humans are in such a position now that they can touch all the contested areas. They have taken Elag.”
There was silence. Elsewhere in the tower a door closed. At last Eddan shrugged, a move of his slender fingers.”Then the humans will surely demand this world. There is very little that they will miss in their desire for revenge. And the regul have left us open to it.”
“It is incredible,” said Pasev.”Gods! there was no need, no need at all for the regul to have abandoned Elag. The People could have held there — could have turned the humans, if they had been given the equipment.”
Sathell made a helpless gesture. “Perhaps. But held for whom? The regul withdrew, took everything that was needed there for the defense, pulled ships from under their control. Now we — Kesrith — have become the border. You are right. It is very likely that the regul will not resist here either; in fact, it is not reasonable for them to do so. So we have done all that we could do. We have advised, we have warned — and if our employers refused to take that advice, then there is little we can do but cover their retreat, since we cannot restrain them from it. They took the war into their own management against our advice. Now they have lost their war; we have not. The war ceased to be ours some years ago. Now you are guiltless, kel’ein. You may justly reckon so. There is simply nothing further that can be done.”
“There was something once that might have been done,” Pasev insisted.
“The Sen attempted many times to reason with the masters. We offered our services and our advice according to the ancient treaty. We could not—” Sathell heard the footsteps of the youth downstairs as he spoke, and the disturbance disrupted his train of thought. He glanced hallward involuntarily as the door downstairs slammed with great violence. The sound echoed throughout all the House. He cast the Kel a look of distress. “Should not one of you at least go speak with him?”
Eddan shrugged, embarrassed in his authority. Sathell knew it. He presumed on kinship and friendship and stepped far out of bounds with Eddan when he made that protest. He loved Niun; they all did. But the autonomy of the Kel, even misguided, was sacred regarding the discipline of its members. Only the Mother could interfere within Eddan’s province.
“Niun has some small cause, do you not think?” asked Eddan quietly.”He has trained all his life toward this war. He is not a child of the old way, as we are; and now he cannot enter into the new either. You have taken something from him. What do you expect him to do, sen Sathell?”
Sathell bowed his head, unable to dispute with Eddan in the matter, recognizing the truth in it, trying to see things as a young kel’en might see them. One could not explain to the Kel, could not refute them in debate nor expect foresight of them: children of a day, the kel’ein, brief and passionate, without yesterday and without tomorrow. Their ignorance was the price they paid for their freedom to leave the House and go among tsi’mri; and they knew their place. If a sen’en challenged them to reason, they must simply bow the head in their turn and retreat into silence: they had nothing with which to answer. And to destroy their peace of mind was unconscionable; knowledge without power was the most bitter condition of all.
“I think I have told you,” said Sathell at last,”all that I know to tell you at the moment. I will advise you immediately if there is any further news.” He arose in that silence and smoothed his robes into order, gingerly avoiding the reflexive grasp of the dus. The beast reached at his ankle, harmless in intent, but not in potential. The dusei were not to be treated with familiarity by any but a kel’en. He stopped and looked at Eddan, who with a touch rebuked the beast and freed him.
He edged round the massive paw, cast a final look at Eddan; but Eddan looked away, affecting not to be interested any further in his departure. Sathell was not willing to press the matter publicly. He knew his half-brother, and knew that the hurt was precisely because there was affection between them. There was a careful line drawn between them in public. When caste divided kinsmen, there had to be that, to save the pride of the lesser.
He gave a formal courtesy to the others and withdrew, and was glad to be out of that grim hall, heavy as the air was with the angers of frustrated men, and of the dusei, whose rage was slower but more violent. He was relieved, nonetheless, that they had listened to all that he had said. There would be no violence, no irrational action, which was the worst thing that needed be feared from the Kel. They were old. The old might reason together in groups, might consult together. The kel’en was, in youth, a solitary warrior and reckless, and without perspective.
He thought of going after Niun, and did not know what to say to him if he should find him. His duty was to report elsewhere.
And when the door closed, aged Pasev, kel’e’en, veteran of Nisren and Elag’s first taking, pulled the as’ei from the shattered plaster and merely shrugged off the sen’anth. She had seen more years and more of war than any living warrior but Eddan himself. She played the Game all the same, as did they all, including Eddan. It was a death as honorable as one in war.
“Let us play it out,” she said.
“No,” said Eddan firmly.”No. Not yet.”
He caught her eyes as he spoke. She looked at him plainly, aged lover, aged rival, aged friend. Her slim fingers brushed the fine edge of the steel, but she understood the order.
“Aye,” she said, and the as’ei spun past Eddan’s shoulder to bury themselves in the painted map of Kesrith that decorated the east wall.
“The Kel bore the news,” said sen Sathell,”with more restraint than I expected of them. But it was not welcome, all the same. They feel cheated. They conceive it as an affront against their honor. And Niun left. He would not even hear it out. I do not know where he went. I am concerned.”
She’pan Intel, the Lady Mother of the House and of the People, leaned back on her many cushions, ignoring a twinge of pain. The pain was an old companion. She had had it forty-three years, since she lost her strength and her beauty at once in the fires of burning Nisren. Even then she had not been young. Even then she had been she’pan of homeworld, ruler over all three castes of the People. She was of the first rank of the Sen, passing Sathell himself; she was above other she’panei as well, the few that still lived. She knew the Mysteries that were closed to others; she knew the name and nature of the Holy, and of the Gods; and the Pana, the Revered Objects, were in her keeping. She knew her nation to its depth and its width, its birth and its destiny.
She was she’pan of a dying House, eldest Mother of a dying species. The Kath, the caste of child-bearers and children, was dead, its tower dark and closed twelve years ago: the last of the kath’ein was long buried in the cliffs of Sil’athen, and the last children, motherless save for herself, had gone to their destinies outside. Her Kel had declined to ten, and the Sen—
The Sen was before her: Sathell, the eldest, the sen’anth, whose weak heart poised him constantly a beat removed from the Dark; and the girl who sat presently at her feet. They were the gold-robes, the light-bearers, high-caste. Her own robes were white, untainted by the edgings of black and blue and gold worn by the she’panei of lesser degree. Their knowledge was almost complete, but her own was entire. If her own heart should stop beating this moment, so much, so incalculably much could be lost to the People. It was a fearful thing, to consider how much rested on her each pulse and breath amid such pain.
That the House and the People not die.
The girl Melein looked up at her—last of all the children, Melein s’Intel Zain-Abrin, who had once been kel’e’en. At times the kel-fierceness was still in Melein, although she had assumed outwardly the robes and the chaste serenity of the scholarly Sen—although the years had given her different skills, and her mind had advanced far beyond the simplicity of a kel’e’en. Intel brushed at Melein’s shoulder, a caress. “Patience,” she advised, seeing Melein’s anxiety; and she knew that the advice would be discarded in all respects.
“Let me go find Niun and talk to him,” she asked.
Brother and sister, Niun and Melein—and close, despite that they had been separated by law and she’pan’s decree and caste and custom. Kel’en and sen’e’en, dark and bright, Hand and Mind; but the heart in them was the same and the blood was the same. She remembered the pair that had given them life, her youngest and most beloved Husband and a kel’e’en of Guragen, both lost now. His face, his eyes, that had made her regret a she’pan’s chastity, gazed back at her through Melein’s and Niun’s; and she remembered that he also had been strong-willed and hot-tempered and clever. Perhaps Melein hated her; she had not willingly received the command to leave the Kel and enter the Sen. But there was no defiance there now, though the she’pan searched for it. There was only anxiety, only a natural grief for her brother’s pain.
“No,” said Intel sharply.”I tell you to let him alone.”
“He may harm himself, she’pan.”
“He will not. You underestimate him. He does not need you now. You are no longer of the Kel, and I doubt that he wants to be faced by one of the Sen at this moment. What could you tell him? What could you answer if he asked you questions? Could you be silent?”
This struck home. “He wanted to leave Kesrith six years ago,” said Melein, her eyes bright with unshed tears; and possibly it was not only her brother’s case she pleaded now, but her own. “You would not let him go. Now it is too late, she’pan. It is forever too late for him, and what can he imagine for himself? What is there for him?”
“Meditate upon these things,” said Intel,”and tell me your conclusions, sen Melein s’Intel, after you have thought a day and a night on this matter. But do not intrude your advice into the private affairs of a kel’en. And do not regard him as your brother. A sen’e’en has no kin but the whole House, and the People.”
Melein rose, and stared down at her, breast heaving with her struggle for breath. Beautiful, this daughter of hers: Intel saw her in this instant and was amazed how much Melein, who was not of her blood, had become the things her own youth had once promised—saw mirrored her own self, before Nisren’s fall, before the ruin of the House and of her own hopes. The sight wounded her. In this moment she saw clearly, and knew the sen’e’en as she was, and feared her and loved her at once.
Melein, who would hardly mourn her passing.
So she had created her, deliberately, event by event, choice by choice, her daughter-not-of-the-flesh, her child, her Chosen, formed in Kath and Kel and Sen, partaker of the Mysteries of all castes of the People.
Hating her.
“Learn restraint,” she earnestly wished Melein, in a still, soft voice that thrust with difficulty into Melein’s anger.”Learn to be sen’e’en, Melein, above all else that you desire to have.”
The young sen’e’en let go a shuddering breath, and the tears in her eyes spilled over. Thwarted for now, the sen’e’en for a moment being child again: but this child was dangerous.
Intel shivered, foreknowing that Melein would outlive her and impose her own imprint on the world.
Chapter TWO
THERE WAS a division in the world, marked by a causeway of white rock. On the one side, and at the lower end, lay the regul of Kesrith—city-folk, slow-moving, long-remembering. The lowland city was entirely theirs: flat, sprawling buildings, a port, commerce with the stars, mining that scarred the earth, a plant that extracted water from the Alkaline Sea. The land had been called the Dus plain before there were regul on Kesrith: the mri remembered. For this reason the mri had avoided the plain, in respect of the dusei; but the . regul had insisted on setting their city there, and the dusei left it
Uplands, in the rugged hills at the other end of the causeway, was the tower of the mri. It appeared as four truncated cones arising from the corners of a trapezoidal ground floor—slanted walls made of the pale earth of the lowlands, treated and hardened. This was the Edun Kesrithun, the House of Kesrith, the home of the mri of Kesrith, and, because of Intel, the home of all mri in the wide universe.
One could see most of Kesrithi civilization from the vantage point Niun occupied in his solitary anger. He came here often, to this highest part of the causeway, to this stubborn outcrop of rock that had defeated the regul road and made the regul think otherwise about their plans to extend it into the high hills, invading the sanctity of Sil’athen. He liked it for what it was as well as for the view. Below him lay the regul city and the mri edun, two very small scars on the body of the white earth. Above him, in the hills, and beyond and beyond, there were only regul automatons, that drew minerals from the earth and provided regul Kesrith its reason for existence; and wild things that had owned the world before the coming of regul or of mri; and the slow-moving dusei that had once been Kesrith’s highest form of life.
Niun sat, brooding, on the rock that overlooked the world, hating tsi’mri with more than the ordinary hatred of mri for aliens, which was considerable. He was twenty-six years old as the People reckoned years, which was not by Kesrith’s orbit around Arain, nor by the standard of Nisren, nor by that of either of the two other worlds the People had designated homeworld in the span of time remembered by Kel songs.
He was tall, even of his kind. His high cheekbones bore the seta’al, the triple scars of his caste, blue-stained and indelible; this meant that he was a full-fledged member of the Kel, the hand of the People. Being of the Kel, he went robed from collar to boot-tops in unrelieved black; and black veil and tasseled headcloth, met and zaidhe, concealed all but his brow and his eyes from the gaze of outsiders when he chose to meet them; and the zaidhe further had a dark transparent visor that could meet the veil when dust blew or red Arain reached its unpleasant zenith. He was a man: his face, like his thoughts, was considered a private identity, one indecent to reveal to strangers. The veils enveloped him as did the robes, a distinguishing mark of the only caste of the People that might deal with outsiders. The black robes, the siga, were held about the waist and chest with belts that bore his weapons, which were several; and also they should have held j’tai, medallions, honors won for his services to the People: they held none, and this lack of status would have been obvious to any mri that beheld him.
Being of the Kel, he could neither read nor write, save that he could use a numbered keyboard and knew mathematics, both regul and mri. He knew by heart the complicated genealogies of his House, which had been that of Nisren. The name-chants filled him with melancholy when he sang them: it was difficult to do so and then to look about the cracking walls of Edun Kesrithun and behold only so few people as now lived, and not realize that decline was taking place, that it was real and threatening. He knew all the songs. He could foresee begetting no child of his own who would sing them, not on Kesrith. He learned the songs; he learned languages, which were part of the Kel-lore. He spoke four languages fluently, two of which were his own, one of which was the regul’s, and the fourth of which was the enemy’s. He was expert in weapons, both the yin’ein and the zahen’ein; he was taught of nine masters-of-arms; he knew that his skill was great in all these things.
And wasted, all wasted.
Regul.
Tsi’mri.
Niun flung a rock downslope, which splashed into a hot pool and disturbed the vapors.
Peace.
Peace on human terms, it would be. Regul had disregarded mri strategists at every crucial moment of the war. Regul would spend mri lives without stinting and they would pay the bloodprice to edunei that lost sons and daughters of the Kel, all because some regul colonial official panicked and ordered suicidal attack by the handful of mri serving him personally to cover his retreat and that of his younglings; but far less willingly would that same regul risk regul lives or properties. To lose regul lives would mean loss of status; it would have brought that regul instant censure by regul authorities, recall to homeworld, sifting of his knowledge, death of himself and his young in all probability.
It was inevitable that humans should have realized this essential weakness of the regul-mri partnership, that humans should have learned that inflicting casualties on regul would have far more effect than inflicting those same casualties on mri.
It was predictable then that the regul should have panicked under that pressure, that they would have reacted by retreat, precipitous, against all mri counsel to the contrary, exposing world after world to attack in their haste to withdraw to absolute security. Consequently that absolute security could not exist.
And that regul would afterwards compound their stupidity by dealing directly with the humans—this too was credible, in the regul, to buy and sell war, and to sell out quickly when threatened rather than to risk losing overmuch of their necessary possessions.
The regul language contained no word for courage.
Neither had it one for imagination.
The war was ending and Niun remained worldbound, never having put to use the things that he had learned. The gods knew what manner of trading the merchants were doing, what disposition was being made of his life. He foresaw that things might revert to what they had been before the war, that mri might again serve individual regul—that mri would fight mri again, in combat where experience mattered.
And gods knew how long it would be possible to find a regul to serve, when the war was ending and things were entering a period of flux. Gods knew how likely a regul was to take on an inexperienced kel’en to guard his ship, when others, war-wise, were available.
He had trained all his life to fight humans, and the policies of three species conspired to keep him from it.
He rose up of a sudden, mind set on an idea that had been seething there for more than this day alone, and he leaped to the ground and started walking down the road. He did not look back when he had passed the edun, unchallenged, unnoticed. He owned nothing. He needed nothing. What he wore and what he carried as his weapons were his to take; he had this by law and custom, and he could ask nothing more of his edun even were he leaving with their blessing and help, which he was not.
In the edun, Melein would surely grieve at such a silent desertion, but she had been kel’e’en herself long enough to be glad for his sake too, that he went to a service. A kel’en in an edun was as impermanent as the wind itself, and ought to own no close ties past childhood, save to the she’pan and to the People and to him or her that hired him.
He did feel a certain guilt toward the she’pan too, to her who had mothered him with a closeness much beyond what a she’pan owed a son of her Husbands. He knew that she had particularly favored Zain his father, and still mourned his death; and she would neither approve nor allow the journey he made now.
It was, in fact, Intel’s stubborn, possessive will that had held him this long on Kesrith, kept him at her side long past the years that he decently should have left her authority and that of his teachers. He had once loved Intel, deeply, reverently. Even that love, in the slow years since he should have followed the other kel’ein of the edun and left her, had begun to turn to bitterness.
Thanks to her, his skills were untried, his life unused and now perhaps altogether useless. Nine years had passed since the seta’al of the Kel had been cut and stained into his face, nine years that he had sat in heart-pounding longing whenever a regul master would come up the road to the edun and seek a kel’en to guard a ship, be it for the war or even for commerce. Fewer and fewer of these requests came in the passing years, and now there came no more requests to the edun at all. He was the last of all his brothers and sisters of the Kel, last of all the children of the edun save Melein. The others had all found their service, and most were dead; but Niun s’Intel, nine years a kel’en, had yet to leave the she’pan’s protective embrace.
Mother, let me go! he had begged of her six years ago, when his cousin Medai’s ship had left—the ultimate, the crushing shame, that Medai, swaggering, boastful Medai, should be chosen for the greatest honor of all, and he be left behind in disgrace.
No, the she’pan had said in the absolute, invoking her authority, and to his repeated pleading for her understanding, for his freedom: No. You are the last of all my sons, the last, the last I shall ever have. Zain’s child. And if I will you to stay with me, that is my right, and that is my final decision. No. No.
He had fled to the high hills that day, watching and not wishing to watch, as the ship of the regul high command, Hazan, that ruled the zone in which Kesrith lay, bore Medai s’Intel Sov-Nelan into manhood, into service, into the highest honor that had yet befallen a kel’en of Edun Kesrithun.
That day Niun had wept, though kel’ein could not weep. And then in shame at this weakness, he had scoured his face with the harsh powdery sand and stayed fasting in the hills another day and two nights, until he had to come down and face the other kel’ein and the Mother’s anxious and possessive love.
Old, all of them. There was not a kel’en left now save himself that could even take a service if it were offered. They were all greatly skilled. He suspected that they were the greatest masters of the yin’ein in all the People, although they did not boast anything but considerable competency; but the years had done their subtle robbery and left them no strength to use their arts in war. It was a Kel of eight men and one woman past their reason for living, without strength to fight or—after him—children to teach: old ones whose dreams must now be all backward.
Nine years they had stolen from him, entombing him with them, living their vicarious lives through his youth.
He walked the road down to the lowlands, letting the causeway take him to regul, since regul would not come to the edun in these days. It was not the most direct route, but it was the easiest, and he walked it insolently secure, since the old ones of the Kel could not possibly overtake him on so long a walk. He did not mean to go to the port, which was directly crosslands, but to what lay at the causeway’s end, the very center of regul authority, the Norn, that two-storied building that was the highest structure in Kesrith’s only city.
He felt uneasy when his boots trod concrete and he found all about him the ugly flat buildings of regul. Here was a different world from the cleanliness of the high hills, even a different smell in the air, a blunting of the acrid flavor of Kesrith’s chill winds, a subtle effluvium of oil and machinery and musky regul bodies.
Regul younglings watched him—the mobile ones, the young of regul. Their squat bodies would thicken further in adulthood, greyish-brown skin darken, loosen—fat accumulate until they found themselves enveloped in weight almost too great for their atrophying muscles to lift. Mri seldom saw elder regul; Niun himself had never seen an elder in the flesh, only heard them described by his teachers of the Kel. Adult regul kept to their city, surrounded by machines that carried them, that purified their air; they were attended by younglings that must wait on them constantly, who themselves lived precarious lives until they chanced to reach maturity. The only violence regul perpetrated was against their own young.
The younglings on the square looked at him now in sidelong glances and talked in secretive tones that carried to his sensitive hearing, more clearly surely than they realized it could. Ordinarily this spitefulness would not have troubled him in the least: he had been taught less liking for them, and despised them and all their breed. But here he was the petitioner, desperately anxious, and they held what he wanted and had the power to deny it to him. Their hate breathed about him like the tainted city atmosphere. He had veiled himself long before he entered the town; but with a little more encouragement he would have dropped the visor of the zaidhe also. He had done so on his last visit to this city, being a very young kel’en and uncertain of the proprieties of conduct between regul and mri. But now, older, a man in his own right, he had the face to leave the visor up and glare back at the younglings who stared too boldly; and most could not bear the direct contact of his eyes and flinched from meeting them. A few, older and braver than the others, hissed soft displeasure, warning. He ignored them. He was not a regul youngling, to fear their violence.
He knew his way. He knew the Norn’s proper entrance, fronting the great square around which the city was built in concentric squares. It faced the rising sun, as main entrances of central regul buildings must. He remembered this. He had been here as escort to his father, who was about to take his last service; but he had not been inside. Now he came to the door before which he had waited on that day, and at his presence the regul youngling on duty in the vestibule arose in alarm.
“Go away, ” said the youngling flatly; but he paid no attention to it, and walked into the main foyer of the echoing place, at once stifled by the heat and the musky flavor of the air. He found himself in a great place surrounded by doors and windowed offices, all with titles written on them; he was quickly sick and dizzy from the air and he stood confused and ashamed in the middle of the hall, for here it was a matter of reading to know where he must go next, and he could not read.
It was the regul youngling from the vestibule desk that came to him in his distress, stumping across the floor in short, scuffing steps. The youngling was flushed dark with anger or with the heat, and breathing heavily from the exertion of overtaking him. “Go away,” the youngling repeated. “By treaty and by law you have no business coming here.”
“I will speak to your elders,” he told the youngling, which he had been taught was the ultimate and unanswerable appeal among regul: no youngling could make an ultimate decision. “Tell them that a kel’en is here to speak with them.”
The youngling blew air, fluttering, through its nostrils. “Come with me, then,” it said, and cast him a disapproving glance, a flash of white, red-veined, from the corner of a rolling eye. It was—it, for regul could not determine their own gender until maturity—like all regul, a squat figure, body almost touching the floor even while it was standing. It was also a very young regul to have been given the (among regul) considerable honor of tending the Nom door. It still bore itself erect, bones showing through the skin, the brown, pebbly hide fine-grained yet and delicate with beige tones and a casting of metallic highlights. It walked beside him, a rolling gait that needed considerable leeway.”I am Hada Surag-gi,” it said,”secretary, guardian to the door. You are doubtless one of Intel’s lot.”
Niun simply did not answer this rudeness on the part of the tsi’mri guard, naming the she’pan by her name with such insolent familiarity. Among regul, elders would be the reverence, or the honorable, or the lord…, and he reckoned the familiarity for calculated insult, marking it down for a later date, if so happened he found himself holding what Hada Surag-gi desired. The youngling at present was doing what he wanted it to do, and this, between mri and tsi’mri, was sufficient.
Steel tracks ran the bowed edges of the walls, and a vehicle whispered past them at a speed so great the presence was only an instant. The tracks went everywhere, on the wall opposite the doors, and another and another vehicle passed, missing one another by a hand’s breadth. He did not let himself appear amazed at such things.
And neither did he thank the youngling when it had shown him through a door and into a waiting room where another, seeming adult, kept a metal desk; he simply turned his back on the youngling when it had ceased to be of use, and heard it leave.
The official leaned back from its desk, cradling its body in the mobile chair that—amazingly—moved under power: another such vehicle, a gleaming steel device such as he had heard the adult regul used to move about without rising.
“We know you,” the regul said.”You are Niun, from the Hill. Your elders have contacted us. You are ordered to return to your people immediately.”
Heat rushed to his face. Of course they would have done this, forestalling him. He had not even thought of it.
“That does not matter,” he said, carefully formal.”I am asking service with your ships. I renounce my edun.”
The regul, a brown mass, folded and over-folded, its face a surprising bony smoothness within this weight, sighed and regarded him with small, wrinkle-edged eyes. “We hear what you say,” it said. “But our treaty with your folk does not permit us to accept you with your elders protesting. Please return to them at once. We do not want to quarrel with your elders.”
“Do you have a superior?” Niun asked harshly, out of patience and fast losing hope as well. “Let me speak to someone of higher authority.”
“You ask to see the Director?”
“Yes.”
The regul sighed again and made the request of an intercom: a grating voice refused, flatly. The regul looked up, rolling its eyes in an expression that was more satisfied and smug than apologetic. “You see,” it said.
Niun turned on his heel and strode out of the office and out of the foyer, ignoring the amused eyes of the youngling Hada Surag-gi. He felt his face burning, his breath short as he exited the warm interior of the Nom and walked onto the public square, where the cold wind swept through the city.
He walked swiftly, as if he had a place to go and went there of his own will. He imagined that every regul on the street knew his shame and was laughing secretly. This was not beyond all possibility, for regul tended to know everyone’s business.
He did not slow his pace until he was walking the long causeway back from the city’s edge to the edun, and then indeed he walked slowly, and cared little for what passed his eyes or his hearing on the road. The open land, even on the causeway, was not a place where it was safe to go inattentive to surroundings, but he did so, tempting the Gods and the she’pan’s anger. He was sorry that nothing did befall him and that, after all, he found himself walking the familiar earthen track to the entrance of the edun and entering its shadows and its echoes. He was sullen still as he walked to the stairs of the Kel tower and ascended, pushing open the door of the hall, reporting to kel’anth Eddan, dutiful prisoner.
“I am back,” he said, and did not unveil.
Eddan had the rank and the self-righteousness to turn a naked face to his anger, and the self-possession to remain unstirred. Old man, old man, Niun could not help thinking, the seta’al are one with the wrinkles on your face and your eyes are dimmed so that they already look into the Dark. You will keep me here until I am like you. Nine years, nine years, Eddan, and you have made me lose my dignity. What can you take from me in nine more?
“You are back,” echoed Eddan, who had been his principal teacher-in-arms, and who adopted that master/student manner with him.”What of it?”
Niun carefully unveiled, settled crosslegged to the floor near the warmth of the dus that slept in the corner. It eased aside, murmured a rumbling complaint at the disturbance of its sleep.”I would have gone,” he said.
“You distressed the she’pan,” Eddan said.”You will not go down to the city again. She forbids it.”
He looked up, outraged.
“You embarrassed the House,” Eddan said.”Consider that.”
“Consider me,” Niun exclaimed, exhausted. He saw the shock his outburst created in Eddan and cast the words out in reckless satisfaction.”It is unnatural, what you have done, keeping me here, I am due something in my life—something of my own, at least.”
“Are you?” Eddan’s soft voice was edged.”Who taught you that? Some regul in the city?”
Eddan stood still, hands within his belt, old master of the yin’ein, in that posture that chilled a man who knew its meaning: here is challenge, if you want it. He loved Eddan. That Eddan looked at him this way frightened him, made him reckon his skill against Eddan’s; made him remember that Eddan could still humble him. There was a difference between him and the old master, that if Eddan’s bluff were called, blood would flow for it.
And Eddan knew that difference in them. Heat rose to his face.
“I never asked to be treated differently from all the others,” Niun declared, averting his face from Eddan’s challenge.
“What do you think you are due?” Eddan asked him.
He could not answer.
“You have a soft spot in your defense,” said Eddan.”A gaping hole. Go and consider that, Niun s’Intel, and when you have made up your mind what it is the People owe you, come and tell me and we will go to the Mother and present your case to her.”
Eddan mocked him. The bitter thing was that he deserved it. He saw that this over-anxiousness was what had shamed him before the regul. He resumed the veil and gathered himself to his feet, to go outside.
“You have duties that are waiting,” Eddan said sharply. “Dinner was held without you. Go and assist Liran at cleaning up. Tend to your own obligations before you consider what is owed to you.”
“Sir,” he said quietly, averted his face again and went his way below.
Chapter THREE
THE SHIP, a long voyage out from Elag/Haven, had shifted to the tedium that had possessed it before transition. Sten Duncan took a second look at the mainroom display and was disappointed to discover it had not yet noted the change. They had spent the longest normal-space passage he had ever endured getting out of Haven’s militarily sensitive vicinity, blind and under tedious escort. That was suddenly gone. It was replaced likely by another passage as tedious. He shrugged and kept walking. The place smelled of regul. He held his breath as he passed the galley-automat, the door of which was open. He kept to the center of the corridor, scarcely noticing as a sled whisked past him; the corridors were built wide, high in the center and low on the sides, with gleaming rails recessed into the flooring to guide the conveyance sleds that the regul used to get about the long corridors of their ship.
It was not possible to forget for an instant that this ship was regul. The corridors did not angle or bow as they would in a human-made vessel; they wound, spiraled, amenable to the gliding course of the sleds that hugged the walls, and only a few of them could be walked. In those designed for walking, there was headroom in their center for humans—or for mri, who were the ordinary tenants of regul ships, but tracks ran the sides, for regul.
And about the whole ship there were strange scents, strange aromas of unpalatable food and spices, strange sounds, the rumbling tones of regul language that neither humans nor probably even mri had ever pronounced as regul might.
He loathed it. He loathed the regul utterly, and knowing that that reaction was neither wise nor helpful in his position, he constantly fought against his instincts. It was clear enough that the reaction was mutual with the regul; they restricted their human guests to six hours in which they were supposedly free to roam the personnel areas to their hearts’ content; and after that came a twenty-two-hour period of confinement.
Sten Duncan, aide to the honorable George Stavros, governor-to-be in the new territories and presently liaison between regul and humanity, regularly availed himself of that six-hour liberty; the Hon. Mr. Stavros did not—did not, in fact, venture from his own room. Duncan walked the corridors and gathered the appropriate materials and releases from the library for the honorable gentleman to read, and carried to the pneumatic dispatch whatever communications flowed from Stavros to Stavros’ regul counterpart bai Hulagh Alagn-ni.
Regul protocol. No regul elder of dignity performed his own errands. Only a condemned incompetent lacked youngling servitors. Therefore no human of Stavros’ rank would do so; and therefore Stavros had chosen an aide of apparent youth and fairly advanced rank, criteria that regul would use in selecting their own personal attendants.
He was, in effect, a servant. He provided Stavros a certain prestige. He ran errands. Back in the action that had taken Haven, he had held military rank. The regul knew this, which further enhanced Stavros’ prestige.
Duncan gathered up the day’s communications, laid others from Stavros down on the appropriate table, and delivered the food order to the slot that ultimately would find its way to the correct department, and bring an automated carrier to their door with the requested meal, at least as regul construed it, out of human-supplied foodstuffs that had come with them.
Like exotic pets, Duncan reflected with annoyance, with the regul trying, as far as convenient, to maintain an authentic environment. As in most wild-animal displays, the staging was transparently artificial.
He retraced his way down the hall, through the mainroom recreation area and library. He had never set eyes on any of the regul save the younglings that frequented this central personnel relaxation area. Curiously enough, neither had Stavros encountered Hulagh. Protocol again. It was likely that, in all the time they had yet to spend among regul, they would never meet the honorable, the reverence bai Hulagh Alagn-ni, only the younglings that served him as crew and aides and messengers.
Regul elders were virtually immobile; this was certain; and Hulagh was said to be of very extreme age. Duncan privately surmised that this helplessness was a source of embarrassment to the elderly regul in dealing face-to-face with non-regul, and that therefore they arranged to keep themselves in such total seclusion from outsiders.
Or perhaps they judged humans and mri unbearably ugly. It was certain that there was little that humans could find beautiful in the regul.
He opened the unlocked door that let him into the double suite he shared with Stavros. The anteroom was his, serving as sleeping quarters and all else he was supposed to desire during the long passage: regul revenge, he thought sourly, for human insistence on the long, slow escort. The reception salon and proper bedroom both belonged to Stavros. So did the sanitary facilities, which were in the adjoining bedroom and likewise not designed for human comfort: he wondered how Stavros, elderly as he was, coped with that. But it had not been deemed wise to make an issue of regul-human differences even in that detail. The theory was that the regul were honoring their guests by treating them precisely as if they were regul, down to the tradition of dealing only through youngling intermediaries, and the tradition that placed Duncan’s own quarters uncomfortably in the tiny anteroom, between Stavros and the outer corridor.
Precious encouragement for confidence in regul civilization, Duncan thought sourly, when he thought about it: he was to defend the honorable human gentleman from harm, from contact with rude outsiders, from all unpleasantness. It seemed no insult to regul hospitality to assume that such rudenesses might be anticipated.
And Stavros remained a virtual prisoner of his exalted rank, pent within one room, without any contact with the outside save himself.
Duncan sealed the outer door and knocked on the inner, a formality preserved necessarily?first because listening regul (assuming regul listened, which they firmly believed) would not understand any informality between elder and youngling; and second, because they had been at close quarters too long, and both of them cherished what privacy they could obtain from each other.
The door opened, controlled by Stavros’ remote devices— incongruous to see a human, especially a frail and slight one, sitting in the massive chair-sled designed for regul elders. Desk, control center, mode of transportation: Stavros disdained to propel it across the room. Duncan went to him, presented the tapes and papers, and Stavros took them from him and began to deal with them at once, all without a smile or word of greeting or even a dismissal. Stavros had smiled a few times at the beginning of their association; he did not now. They lived under the continual witness of the regul. He was treated, he suspected, as if he were in truth a regul youngling, without courtesy and without consideration of himself as an individual: he hoped, at least, that this was the source of Stavros’ coldness to him.
He knew that he was far from understanding such a man. He saw some qualities in Stavros that he respected: courage, for one. He thought that it must have taken a great deal of that to enter on such a mission at Stavros’ age. An elderly human had been wanted, a diplomat who, aside from his duties as administrator of the new territories, could obtain greater respect from the regul that would be neighbors to humanity. Stavros had come out of retirement to take the assignment, not a strong man, or an imposing one physically. He was, Duncan had learned in their only intimate conversation, and that before boarding, a native of Kiluwa, one of the several casualties of the war in its earliest years; and that might explain something. Kiluwans were legendarily eccentric, of a fringe-area colony left too long on its own, peculiar in religion, in philosophy, in manners: like the regul, they had not believed in writing. For the years after Kiluwa’s fall, Stavros had been in the XenBureau—retired to university life of late. He had children, had lost a grandson to the war at Elag/Haven. If Stavros hated regul either for Kiluwa or for the grandson’s sake, he had never betrayed it. He seldom betrayed any emotion beyond a certain obsessive interest in the regul. Everything in Stavros was quiet; and there were depths and depths beneath that placidity.
The old man’s pale eyes flashed up.”Good morning, Duncan,” he said, and instantly returned to his studies.”Sit,” he added.”Wait.”
Duncan sat down, disappointed, and waited. He had nothing else to do. He would have gone mad already if he had not had the ability to bear long silence and inactivity. He watched Stavros work, wondering over again why the old man had so determined to learn the regul tongue, which occupied his many hours. There were regul who spoke perfectly idiomatic Basic. There always would be. But Stavros had succeeded well enough on their voyage that now he could listen to the tape from the regul master of the ship, outlining the day’s schedules and information, and needed to glance only occasionally at the supplied written translation—regul propaganda, praising the elders of homeworld, Nurag, praising the correct management of the director of the ship— Duncan found it all very dry, save for the small hints of the progress the ship was making.
But from such things Stavros learned, and became fluent at least in trivial courtesies—learned at a rate that began to amaze Duncan. He could actually understand that confusion of sound, that remained only confusion to Duncan.
Such a man, a scholar, an intelligent man, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, had left everything human and familiar, everything his long life had produced, and now took a voyage with the enemy, into unknown space. Although a governorship was a considerable inducement, the hazards for Stavros were more than considerable. Duncan did not know how old the man was: there had been rumors at Haven verging on the incredible. He did know that one of the greatgrandchildren was entering the military.
If Duncan had enjoyed any intimacy with Stavros he would have been moved to ask him why he had come; he dared not. But every time he was tempted to give way to the pressures of their confinement, his own fear of the strangeness about them, he thought of the old man patiently at his lessons and resigned himself to last it out.
He did not think that he contributed anything to Stavros, be it companionship or service, only the necessary appearance of propriety in the regul’s eyes. Stavros could have done without him, for all the notice he paid him. Personnel had chosen half a dozen men for interview, and he, one of the Surface Tactical officers at Haven, had been the choice. He still did not know why. He had admitted to his lack of qualifications for such a post: Then he’ll know that he has to take orders, Stavros had concluded in his presence. Volunteer? Stavros had asked him then, as if this were a point of suspected insanity. No, sir, he had answered, the truth: they called in every SurTac in the Haven reach. —Pilot’s rating? Stavros had asked. —Yes, he had said. —Hold any grudge against the regul? Stavros asked. No, he had answered simply, which was again the truth: he did not like them, but it was not a grudge, it was war; it was all he knew. And Stavros had read his record a second time in his presence and accepted him.
It had sounded good at the time, fantastically desirable: . from a war where life expectancy was rated in missions flown, and where he was reaching his statistical limit, to an easy berth on a diplomatic flight under escort, with guaranteed retirement home and discharge in five years; discharge at less than thirty on a pension larger than any SurTac could reasonably dream of, or—and this was the thing that Duncan pondered with most interest—permanent attachment to a new colonial directorate, permanent assignment to Stavros’ territories, wealth and prominence on a developing world. It was a prize for which men would kill or die. He had only to endure regul company for a while in either case, and to win Stavros’ approval by his service. He had five years to accomplish the latter. He meant to do it.
He had not been much frightened when he stepped aboard the regul ship: he had read the data known on the regul, knew them for noncombative, nonviolent by preference, a basically timid species. The warrior mri had done their fighting for them, and provoked further conflicts, and finally the regul had called the mri into retreat, gotten them under firm control. New regul were in power on their homeworld now, a pacifist party, which also controlled the ship on which they were travelling and the world to which they were bound.
But he had learned a different kind of fear over the long slow voyage, a sullen, biding sort of fear; and he began to suspect why they had wanted a SurTac as Stavros’ companion: he was trained for alien environment, inured to solitude and uncertainties, and above all he was ignorant of higher policies. If something went wrong, and he began to appreciate ways in which it could, then Stavros was the only considerable expenditure; but Sten Duncan was nothing, military personnel, without kin to notify, a loss that could be written off without worry. His low classification number signified that he could spill everything he knew to an enemy without damage to any essential installations; and Stavros himself had been long secluded in the university community of New Kiluwa.
Perhaps—the thought occurred to him—Stavros himself was capable of expending him promptly if he proved inconvenient. Stavros was a diplomat, of that breed that Duncan instinctively mistrusted, that disposed of the likes of Sten Duncan by their hundreds and thousands in war. Perhaps it was that which had stolen away Stavros’ inclination to talk to him as if he were anything more than the furnishings. Regul dealt with rebellious younglings, even with inconvenient younglings, instantly and without mercy, as if they were an easily replaceable commodity.
It was a nightborn fear, the kind that grew in the dark, in those too-long hours when he lay on his bed and considered that beyond the one door was an alien guard whose very life processes he did not understand; and beyond the other was a human whose mind he did not understand, an old man who was learning to think like the regul, whose elders were a terror to the young.
But when they were in day-cycle, together, when he considered Stavros face to face, he could not believe seriously such things as he thought and imagined at night. So long pent up, so long under such stress, it was no strange thing that his mind should turn to nameless and irrational apprehensions.
He only wished that he knew what Stavros hoped he was doing, or what Stavros expected him to do.
The tape loop cycled its third time through. Duncan knew its salutation, at least, the few words in the regul language he knew. Stavros was listening and memorizing. Shortly he would be able to recite the whole thing from memory.
“Sir,” he interrupted Stavros’ thoughts cautiously,”sir, our—” the tape went off,”our allotted liberty is just about up if you want anything else from the library or the dispensary.”
He wished Stavros would think of something he needed. He longed to enjoy that precious time outside their quarters, to walk, to move; but Stavros had forbidden him to loiter anywhere in regul view, or to attempt any exchange with any of the crew. Duncan understood the reasoning behind that prohibition, a sensible precaution, a preservation of human mystique as far as regul were concerned: Let them wonder what we think, Stavros would say to many a situation. But it was unbearable to sit here while the liberty ran out, with the ship newly arrived in regul space.
“No,” said Stavros, dashing his hopes. Then, perhaps an afterthought, he handed him one of the tapes.”Here. An excuse. Look like you have important business and stay to it Find me the next in sequence and bring both back. Enjoy your walk.”
“Yes, sir.” He rose, moved to thank the old man, to appreciate his understanding of his misery; but Stavros started the tape again, looked elsewhere, making it awkward. He hesitated, then left, through his own room, to the outside.
He drew a few deep breaths to accustom himself to the taint of the air, felt less confined at once, even faced with the narrow halls. Regul living spaces were small, barren places, accommodating only space for a sled’s operation; most things were grouped within reach of someone sitting. He suppressed the desire to stretch, settled himself into a sedate walk, and headed for mainroom through a corridor that was utterly empty of regul.
Mainroom served all personnel for recreation and study; it was the library terminal also. Simpler, Duncan thought, to have included a library linkup to the console already in their quarters and obviate the need for them coming out at all, but he was desperately glad that they had not. It provided an excuse, as Stavros had said. And perhaps there were restrictions on some passengers who could read and understand more than they. He did not know. He studied the twisting regul numbers on the cartridge he carried and carefully punched the keys next in sequence.
Machinery clicked, the least delay, and the desired cartridge shot into position. He provided the library with their special code, which changed the alphabet module, and, notified that humans desired the cartridge in question, the library flurried through authorizations, probably went through another process to decide that printout was supposed to accompany the cartridge—actually three forms of printout, literal, transliterated and translated came with each—and finally from its microstorage it began to produce the printouts.
Duncan paced the room while the machine processed the print sheet by sheet and checked the time: close. He walked back to the machine and it was still working, slower than any human-made processing system he had used. It had reactions like those of the regul themselves, sluggish. To fill the seconds he counted the changes in the viewscreen mockup that was the center of the library wall. It showed their course through human space, curiously never once acknowledging the presence of the armed escort vessels that had been the source of so much controversy. It was out of date as of this morning. At every pulse it cycled through to other views, to landscapes fascinating in their alien character (carefully censored, he was sure, lest they learn too much of regul; there were no living things and no cities and structures in the views) to star-fields, back to the progress mockup. It dominated the room. He had watched it change day by slow day during their approach to jump. He had ceased to think of the voyage as one with a particular destination. Their peculiar isolation had become an environment in itself that could not be mentally connected to the life he had lived before and from which it was impossible to imagine the life he would live after. They had only the regul’s word for where they were going.
He watched through three such cyclings and turned back to the machine, which had stopped in the middle of its printing, flashing the Priority signal. Someone of authority had interrupted it to obtain something more important. His materials were frozen in the machine’s grip. He pushed the cancel button to retrieve the cartridge, and nothing happened. The Priority was still flashing, while the library did what it was commanded to do from some other source.
He swore and looked again at the time. The printout was half in the tray, the tail of it still in the machine. He could go and keep scrupulously to the schedule or he could wait the little time it would take for the machine to clear. He decided to wait. Probably the stall was because of the printout, an unwieldy and awkward operation, printout surely a rare function of their library apparatus, inefficiently done. The rumor used to be that regul themselves did not write at all, which was not, as they had discovered, true. They had an elaborate and intricate written language. But the library was designed for audio replication. The majority of regul materials were oral-aural. It was said, and this seemed true according to their own observations, that the regul did not need to hear any tape more than once.
Instant and total recall. Eidetic memory. The word lie was, he remembered Stavros telling him, fraught with associate concepts of perversion and murder.
A species that could neither forget nor unlearn.
If this were so, it was possible that they could depend on the exact truth from the regul at all times.
It was also possible that a species that could not lie might have learned ways of deception without it.
He did not need to wonder how regul regarded humans, who placed great emphasis on the written word, who had to be provided special and separate materials to comprehend slowly what regul absorbed at a single hearing; who could not learn the regul language, while regul learned human speech as rapidly as they could be provided words, and never needed to be told twice.
When he thought of this, and of the regul younglings, so helplessly slow, so ponderous in their movements, and yet the piggish little eyes glittering with some emotion that wrinkled the corners when they beheld a human, he grew uneasy, remembering that these same younglings, unless murdered by their own parent, would live through several human lifetimes and remember every instant of it; and that bai Hulagh, who commanded them and the ship and the zone where they were bound, had done so.
He resented both their long lives and their exact memories. He resented the obstinacy of their ubiquitous machines, the bigotry and insolence that kept them confined and tightly scheduled as they were, surrounded by automation that made their regul hosts more than the physical equals of humans; and with all the accumulating frustration of long imprisonment, he resented most of all the petty irritations that were constantly placed in their way by their regul hosts, who clearly despised humans for their mental shortcomings.
Stavros was headed for failure if he sought accommodation with such neighbors. It was a mortal mistake to think that a human could become regul, that he won anything at all by slavishly imitating the manners of beings that despised them.
That was the worm that had eaten at his gut ever since the first days of this chromium-plated, silken-soft imprisonment.
All about them were regul and regul machines, hulking beasts helpless but for that automation, like great shapeless parasites living attached to appliances of steel and chromium; and Stavros was utterly, dangerously wrong if he thought he became esteemed of regul by giving up the few advantages that humans had. The regul looked with contempt on the species whose minds forgot, whose knowledge was on film and paper.
He sought to say this to Stavros, but he could not come close enough to the man to advise him. Stavros was an educated man; he was not: he was only an experienced one, and experience cried out that they were in a dangerous situation.
He struck the library panel a blow with his hand, for the time was out and he was defeated by the monstrosity—incredible that the thing could be so slow. It was as futile and thoughtless as jostling any human-made machine; but he knew in the second after that he should not have done it, and when the Priority signal at once went off, he was for an instant terrified, believing that he had caused it somehow, antagonizing some high-ranking regul.
But the machine started to feed out the rest of the paper and shot the cartridge out in good order after, and he paused to gather them up. And when, in turning to leave, he looked up at the panel, he saw that the whole display had changed, and that they had before them the visual of a star system with seven planets, with their ship plotted in toward the second.
Their final destination.
As he watched, he saw another ship indicated on the simulation, moving outward on a nonintersecting course. They were in-system, in inhabited, trafficked regions, nearing Kesrith. Time began to move again. His heart quickened with the elating surety that they had indeed arrived where they were supposed to, that they were near their new world. Coming in to dock at Kesrith’s station would be a process of more than a week, by that diagram, but they were coming in.
The imprisonment was almost over.
A step sounded in the corridor to his left. For an instant he ignored it, knowing that he was overtime and expecting a surly rebuke from a youngling; and the ominous character of it had not registered. Then it struck him that it did not belong here, the measured tread of boots on the flooring, not the slow scuffing of the regul nor even Stavros’ fragile tread.
He turned, frightened even before he looked, by a presence that was not of them nor of the regul.
And he faced a figure that had likewise stopped still, one robed in black, the robes glittering with many small discs. Mri. Kel’en. The golden eyes above the veil were astonished. A slim bronze hand went to the knife at his belt and hesitated there.
For a moment yet neither moved, and it was possible to hear only the slow changes of the projector.
The enemy. The destroyers of Kiluwa and Talos and As-gard. He had never seen one in the flesh at this range. Only the eyes, the hands were uncovered. The tall figure remained utterly still, wrapped in menace and in anger.
“I am Sten Duncan,” he found courage to say, doubting that the mri could understand a word, but reckoning it time words intervened before weapons did.”I’m the assistant to the Federations envoy.”
“I am kel Medai,” said the other in excellent Basic,”and we should not have met.”
And with that the mri turned on his heel and stalked off in the direction from which he had come, a black figure that vanished into shadows at the turning of the corridor. Duncan found himself trembling in every muscle. He had seen mri that close only in photographs, and all of those were dead.
Beautiful, was the strange descriptive that came to his mind, seeing the mri warrior: he would have thought it of an animal, splendid of its kind, and deadly.
He turned, and the blood that had resumed somewhat its normal circulation drained a second time, for a regul youngling stood in the mainroom, its nostrils flaring and shutting in rapid agitation.
It shrilled a warning at him, anger, terror: he could not tell which. Its color went to livid pallor.”Go to quarters,” it insisted.”Past time. Go to quarters. Now!”
He moved, edged past the regul and hurried, not looking back. When he reached the sanctuary of his own doorway his hands were shaking, and he thrust himself through even while it was opening, then shut it at once, anxious until the seal had hissed into function. Then he sank down on his cot, knowing that, all too quickly, he must face Stavros and give an account of what he had done. The library materials tumbled from his cold hands and some of the papers fell on the floor. He bent and gathered them up, feeling nothing with his fingers.
He had committed a great mistake, and knew that it was not to be the end of it.
They were going to the world that was said to be the mri homeworld, to Kesrith of the star Arain.
Regul claimed title to it, all the same, and the right to cede it to humans. They claimed the authority to command the mri and to sign for them.
They betrayed the mri, and yet carried a kel’en on the ship that brought the orders that turned Kesrith over to humans.
We should not have met, the mri had said.
It was obvious that the regul at least, and possibly the mri, had not intended the meeting. Someone was being deceived.
He gathered himself up and expelled a long breath, rapped on Stavros’ door and entered this time without permission.
Chapter FOUR
ANOTHER of the ships was leaving this evening, one of the several shuttles that ferried passengers and goods from the surface of Kesrith up to the station—and thence to starships: to freighters, liners, warships—anything that would remove panicked regul from the path of humans.
Niun watched, as he was accustomed to watch each evening, from that high rock that overlooked the sea and the flats and the city. It was true. He had accepted the fact of the war’s end at last, although a sense of unreality still possessed him as he watched the ships go—never so frequent, not in his lifetime, nor, he thought, in that of his elders. The fact was that the regul city was dying, its life ebbing with every outbound ship. He obeyed the she’pan’s order and did not go near the city or the port, but he thought if he were to go down now into the square, he would find many of the buildings empty and stripped of things of value; and day after day, by the road that wound along the seashore, the merest line visible from his vantage point, he could see traffic coming into the city, bringing regul from the outlying towns and stations; aircraft came to the city, and fewer and fewer left it again. He had a mental image of a vast heap of abandoned regul vehicles at the edge of town, of ships at the port. They would have to drag them into heaps and let them rust.
It was rumored—so Sathell had gleaned from regul communications—that the chief price of the peace the regul had bought had been the cession of every colony in the Kesrith reach.
Tsi’mri economics had finally proven more powerful than the weapons of the Kel, more important, surely, than the honor of the mri in the regul’s estimation. Kesrith was a loss to the regul, to be sure, a mining and transport site, expensively automated; doubtless to lose such a colony was embarrassing to the regul elders; doubtless it was inconvenient for their business and commerce; doubtless for the regul in those fleeing ships the inconvenience ascended to tragedy. Regul valued many peculiar objects; variance in the quality and amount of these and their clothing and their comforts betokened personal worth in their eyes; and the loss of their homes and valued objects that could not be taken onto the ships would be grievous for them; but they had no Revered Objects, nothing that could afflict them to the degree that the loss of homeworld could affect the People; and the honors they coveted could be purchased anew if they were fortunate—unlike mri honors, that had to be won.
And therein Niun did not muster any great sympathy for any of them. His personal loss was great enough: all the life he had planned and desired for himself was departing from possibility with the violence and speed of those outbound ships. The migration had become a rout, night and day; and events gave clear proof that the personal plans of Niun s’Intel Zain-Abrin were nothing to the powers that moved the worlds. But the threat to the House: that was beyond his power to imagine; and that the powers that moved the worlds had no concern for the fate of the People—that was beyond all understanding.
He had tried to adjust his mind to this change in fortunes.
Where shall we make our defense? he had asked of Eddan and the kel’ein, assuming, as he assumed that sanity rested with his people, that there was to be a defense of homeworld, of the Edun of the People.
But Eddan had turned his face from his question, gesturing his refusal to answer it; and in the failure of the Kel, he had dared ask the she’pan herself. And Intel had looked at him with a strange sorrow, as if her last son were somehow lacking in essential understanding; but gently she had spoken to him in generalities of patience and courage, and carefully she had declined to give any direct answer to his question.
And day by day the regul ships departed, without mri kel’ein aboard. The she’pan forbade.
He was watching the end. He understood that now, at least that. Of what it was an end he was not yet sure; but he knew the taste of finality, and that of the things he had desired all his life there was left him nothing. The regul departed, and hereafter came humans.
He wished now desperately that he had applied himself with even more zeal to his study of human ways, so that he could understand what the humans were likely to do. Perhaps the elder kel’ein, who had such experience with them, knew; and perhaps therefore they thought that he should know, and would not reward ignorance with explanation. Or perhaps they were as helpless as he and refused to admit the obvious to him; he could not blame them for that. It was that he simply could not admit that there was nothing to be done, that there were no preparations to be made, while the regul so desperately, so anxiously sought safety. He knew, with what faith remained to him in his diminishing store of things trustworthy, that the Kel would resist in the end; but they were to die, if that were the case. Their skill was great, greater than that of any kel’ein living, he believed; but the nine were also very old and very few to stand for long against the mass attacks of humans.
The imagination came to him over and over again, as horrid and unreal as the departure of regul from his life—of humans arriving, of human language and human tread echoing in the sanctity of the edun shrine, of fire and blood and ten desperate kel’ein trying to defend the she’pan from a horde of defiling humans.
Brothers, sister, he longed to ask the kel’ein, is it possible that there is some hope that I cannot see? And then again he thought: Or, o gods, is it possible that we have a she’pan who has gone mad? Brothers, sister, look, look, the ships!—our way off Kesrith. Make our she’pan see reason. She has forgotten that there are some here who want to live. But he could not say such things to his elders, to Eddan; and he would ultimately have to account for those words to Intel’s face, and he could not bear that. He could not reason with them, could not discuss anything as they did among themselves, in secret: they, she—all save Melein and himself— remembered Nisren’s days, the life before the war. They had taken regul help once, escaping the ruin of Nisren, and refused it now, resolved together in councils from which he, not of the Husbands, was excluded. He insisted on believing that his elders were rational. They were too calm, too sure, to be mad.
Forty-three years ago, the like had come to Nisren. A regul ship, rescuing she’pan Intel, had carried the holy Pana and the survivors of the edun to Kesrith. The elders did not speak of that day, scarcely even in songs: it was a pain written in their visible scars and in the secrecies of their silence.
Shame? he wondered, heart-torn at thinking ill of them. Shame at something they did or did not do on Nisren? Shame at living, and unwillingness to survive another fall of Home-world? Sometimes he suspected, with dread growing and gnawing in him like some alien parasite, that such was the case, that he belonged to a she’pan that had wearied of running, to an edun that had consciously made up its mind to die.
An edun which held the Pana, the Revered, the Objects of mri honor and mri history, to behold which was for the Sen alone, to touch which unbidden was to die; to lose which—
To lose the relics of the People—
It betokened the death, not alone of the edun, but of the People as a race. He held the thought a moment, turned it within his mind, then cast it aside in haste, and fearfully picked it up again.
O gods, he thought, mind numbed by the very concept, Another shuttle lifted. He saw it rise, up, up, a star that moved.
O gods, o gods.
It was shonai, the Passing-game. It was the flash of blades in the dark, the deadly game of rhythm and bluff and threat and reckless risk.
The Game of the People.
The blades were thrown. Existence was gambled on one’s quickness and wit and nerve, for no other reason than to deserve survival.
He felt the blood drain from his face to his belly, understanding why they had looked through him when he asked his vain questions.
Join the rhythm, child of the People: be one with it; accept, accept, accept
Shon’ai!
He cried aloud, and understood all at once. All over known space mri would react to the throw the she’pan of Kesrith had made. They would come, they would come, from all quarters of space, to fight, to resist.
The Pana was set in the keeping of Edun Kesrithun.
The circle was wide and the blades flew at seeming random, but each game tended to develop its unique pattern, and wisest the player who did not become hypnotized by it.
Intel had cast. It was for others to return the throw.
The first of Kesrith’s twin moons had brightened to the point of visibility. The stars became a dusty belt across the sky. The air grew chill, but he felt no impulse to return to the edun, to resume the mundane routine of their existence. Not this evening. Not upon such thoughts as he carried. Eventually the kel’ein would miss him, and look out and see him in his favorite place, and let him be. He spent many evenings here. There was nothing to do in the edun of evenings, save to sleep, to eat, to study things no longer true. None of them had sung the songs since the day the news of the war’s end came. They frequently sat and talked together, excluding him. Probably, he thought, it was a relief to them to have him gone.
The geyser named Sochau belched steam far across the flats, a tall plume, predictable as the hours of any regul clock. By such rhythms the world lived, and by such rhythms it measured the days until the humans should come.
But for the first time in all the days since he had heard of the war’s ending, he felt a suspicion of gladness, a fierce sense that the People might have something yet to do, and that humans might find their victory not an accomplished fact.
A star grew in the sky as the other had departed, rapid and omen-filled. He looked up at it with quickening interest, enlivened by something, even a triviality, that was not part of the ordinary. The shuttles did not usually descend until morning.
He watched it grow, cherishing imaginings both dread and hopeful, a mere child’s game, for he did not really believe that it would be anything but a variance in regul schedules for regul reasons, as ordinary as anything could be in the organized routine of Kesrith’s dying.
He watched it descend and saw suddenly lights flare on at the port in the farthest area, realized suddenly that it was not coming down at the freighter or shuttle berths, but to the area given over to military landings, and it was no shuttle. It was a ship of size, such as the onworld port had not held in many years.
The ship was nothing in the dark and the distance but a shape of light, featureless, nameless. There was nothing to indicate what it was. Of a sudden he knew his people must have word of this—that doubtless they had already been alert to it and only he had not been.
He sprang down from his rock and began to run, swift feet changing course here and there at the outset where the fragile earth masked dangers of its own. He did not use the road, but ran crosslands, by an old mri trail, and came breathless to the door of the edun, chest aching.
There was silence in the halls. He paused only a moment, then took the stairs toward the she’pan’s tower, almost running up the first turn.
And there a shadow met him—old Dahacha coming down, Dahacha with his great, surly dus lumbering downsteps after him. Everyone brought up short, and the dus edged down a step to rumble a warning.
“Niun,” the old man said.”I was coming to look for you.”
“There is a ship,” Niun began.
“No news here,” said Dahacha.”Hazan is back. Yai! Come on up, young one. You are missed.”
Niun followed, a great joy in him: Hazan—command ship for the zone; and high time it came, among regul panicked and retreating in disorder. There was resolution in the regul after all, some authority to hold the disintegrating situation under control.
And Hazan! If Hazan came, then came Medai—cousin, fellow kel’en, home from human wars and bringing with him experience and all the common sense that belonged to the fighting Kel of the front.
He remembered other things of Medai too, things less beloved; but it made no difference after six years, with the world falling into chaos. He followed Dahacha up the winding stairs with an absolute elation flooding through him.
Another kel’en.
A man the others would listen to as they would never listen to him, who had never left the world.
Medai, who had served with the leaders of regul and knew their minds as few kel’ein had the opportunity to know them—kel’en to the ship of the bai of Kesrith zones.
Chapter FIVE
THE DOOR was locked, as it was at every unpermitted period. Sten Duncan tried it yet another time, knowing it was useless, pounded his fist against it and went back to the old man.
“They refused to answer,” said Stavros. He sat in the desk-chair, with the console screen at his left elbow a monotone grey. He looked uneasy, unusual for Stavros, even at the worst of times.
They were down, onworld. That was unmistakable.
“We were to dock,” said Duncan finally, voicing the merest part of the concern boiling in his mind.
Stavros did not react to that piece of observation, only stared at him dispassionately. Duncan read blame into it
“If there’s been a change in plans, something could be wrong either on the station or onworld,” Duncan said, trying to draw the smallest reassurance from the old man, a denial of his apprehensions—even outright anger. He could deal with that.
And when Stavros gave him nothing at all in reply he sank down at the table, head bowed against his hands, exhausted with the strain of waiting. It was then: night. It was halfway through that night.
“Perhaps they’re sleeping,” Stavros said unexpectedly, startling him with a tone that held nothing of rancor.”If they chose to keep ship-cycle after landing, or if we’re in local night, bai Hulagh could be asleep and his orderlies unwilling to respond to us without his authority. The regul do not inconvenience an elder of his rank.”
Duncan looked back at him, not believing the explanation, but glad that Stavros had made the gesture, whether or not he had another in the back of his mind that he was not saying. It did not ease his feelings in the least that Stavros had never said anything to him in the matter of the encounter with the mri, had only asked quiet questions of what had happened there in the mainroom: no blame, no hint of what had passed in Stavros’ mind. Nor had Stavros said anything when they were shortly afterward presented with another schedule, their hours of liberty cut in half, a regul youngling constantly watching their door and following at a distance when he left the room.
The retaliation fell most heavily on himself, of course, confining him more closely, while that did not much concern Stavros; but for their safety and for the future of regul/human cooperation it augured ill enough. The regul’s official manner did not change toward them. There was still the formal manner, still the salutations in the day’s messages. Characteristic of the regul, there had been no direct mention of the incident in the hall, only the notification, without explanation, that their hours had been changed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Duncan volunteered at last, out of his own frustration.
Stavros looked for once surprised, then frowned and shrugged.”Probably just regul procedure and some minor change in plans. Don’t worry about it.” And then with a second shrug,”Get some sleep, Duncan. There’s little else to do at the moment.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, rose and went out to the anteroom, sat down on his own bunk and tucked his legs up. He set his elbows on his knees, and head on his hands and massaged his aching temples.
Prisoners, thanks to him.
Stavros was worried. Stavros doubtless knew what there was to concern them and he was worried. Perhaps if the regul had accepted the offering, Stavros could have demonstrated the punishment of the human youngling who had created the difficulty. Perhaps he had not done so because, in the main, they were both human and Stavros felt an unvoiced attachment to him; or perhaps he had declined to do so because a regul elder would not have done so under the same circumstances.
But it was clear enough that they were under the heavy shadow of regul displeasure, and had been for many, many days; and that they were not now where they had been told at the outset they would land.
A sound reached him, a sound of someone passing in the corridor, one of the sleds whisking along the tracks outside. He looked up as it seemed to stop, hoping against hope that the thing had stopped to bring them news.
The door opened. He sprang up, instantly correct. The sled indeed had stopped before the doorway, and within it sat the oldest, most massive regul that he had ever seen. Roll upon roll of wrinkled flesh and crusting skin hid any hint of structure that lay within that grey-brown body, save the bony plating of the face, where eyes were sunk in circular wrinkles, black and glittering eyes; and flat nose and slit mouth gave a deceptive illusion of humanity.
It was the face of a man within the body of a beast, and that body was lapped in brown robes, silver-edged and shimmering, gossamer enfolding a gross and wrinkle-crossed skin. The nostrils were slanted, slits that could flare and close. He knew this movement for an indication of emotion in the younglings, one of the few expressions of which their bone-shielded faces were capable—a roll of the eyes, an opening or closing of the lips, a flutter of the nostrils. But had he not known that this being was of precisely the same species as the younglings, he would have doubted it.
Incredibly the elder arose, heaving his body upright, then standing, on bowed and almost invisible legs, within the sled.
“Stavros,” it—he—said, a basso rumble.
Humans could not imitate regul expression: the regul perhaps could not read courtesy or lack of it among humans, but Duncan knew that courtesy was called for now. He made a bow.”Favor,” he said in the regul tongue,”I am the youngling Sten Duncan.”
“Call Stavros.”
But the door was open. Duncan turned, about to comply with the order, and saw of a sudden Stavros in the doorway, standing, coming no farther.
There was a rumbling exchange of regul politenesses, and Duncan took himself to the side of the room against the wall, bewildered in the flow of language. He realized what he had suspected already, that this was the bai himself who had come to call on them, bai Hulagh Alagn-ni, high commander of the ship Hazan, successor to the Holn, and provisional governor of Kesrith’s zones during the transfer of powers from regul to human.
He made himself unnoticed; he would not offend a second time against regul manners, complicating things which he could not understand.
The exchange was brief. It was concluded with a series of courtesies and gestures, and the bai subsided into his sled and vanished, and Stavros closed the door for himself, before Duncan could free himself of his confusion and do so.
“Sir?” Duncan ventured then.
Stavros took his time answering. He looked around finally, with a sober and uneasy expression.”We are grounded on Kesrith,” he said.”The bai assures us this is quite a natural choice for a ship of this sort, landing directly at the port— that it was a last-moment decision and without reason for concern to us. But I also gather that there is some instability here, which I do not understand. The bai wants us to remain on the ship. Temporary, he says.”
“Is it,” Duncan asked,”trouble over that business with the mri?”
Stavros shook his head.”I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that the whole crew is expected to remain aboard until things sort themselves out. This, at least—” Stavros’ eyes went to the ceiling, toward venting, toward lighting, toward installations they did not understand and did not trust. The glance warned, said nothing, carried some misgiving that perhaps he would have voiced if he were safe to do so.”The bai assures us that we will be taken to the central headquarters in the morning. It is planetary night at the moment; we are already on Kesrith main time, and he advises us that the weather is fair and the inconvenience minor and we are expected to enjoy our night’s rest and rise late, with the anticipation of a pleasant advent to Kesrith.”
The bai is being courteous and formal, Stavros’ expression thrust through the words themselves. There was no credibility there. Duncan nodded understanding.
“Good night, then,” said Stavros, as if the exchange had been aloud.”I think we may trust that we are delayed aboard for some considerable number of hours, and there is probably time to get a night’s sleep.”
“Good night, sir,” said Duncan, and watched as the old man went back to his quarters and the door closed.
He wished, not for the first time, that he could ask the old man plainly what he thought of matters, and that he could reckon how much the honorable Stavros believed of what he had been told.
In the time that they had been on scant favor among regul, Duncan had begun to apply himself to learning the regul tongue with the same fervent, desperate application he had once applied to SurTac arms and survival skills. He had begun with rote phrases and proceeded to structure with a facility far above what he had ever imagined he could achieve. He was not a scholar; he was a frightened man. He began to think, with the nightmare concentration that fears acquired in their solitude, that Stavros was indeed very old, and the time before humans would arrive was considerable, and that regul, who disposed of their own younglings so readily, would think nothing of killing a human youngling that had survived his elder, if that human youngling seemed useless to them.
Stavros’ age, that had been the reason for his being assigned this mission, was also against its success. If something should befall the Hon. Mr. Stavros, it would leave Duncan himself helpless, unable to communicate with the general run of younglings, and, as Stavros had once pointed out, regul younglings would not admit him to contact with the likes of bai Hulagh, who were the only regul capable of fluent human speech.
It was not a possibility he cared to contemplate, the day that he should be left alone to deal with regul.
With hours left before debarkation on Kesrith, and with his nerves too taut to allow sleep, he gathered up his notes and started to study with an application that had his gut in knots.
Dag—Favor, please, attention. The same syllable, pronounced instead with the timbre of a steam whistle, meant: honorable; and in shrill tone: blood. Dag su-gl’inh-an-ant pru nnugk—May I have indirect contact with the reverence…. Dag nuc-ci: Favor, sir.
He studied until he found the notes falling from his nerveless hands, and collapsed to sleep for a precious time, before regul orderlies opened the door without warning and began shrilling orders at him, rudely snatching up their baggage without a prior courtesy.
None of the courtesies did these youngling regul use with him, even when he protested their rough handling of their belongings; they maintained a surly silence toward him, a fevered haste, interspersed with a chittering among themselves as they loaded baggage on the transport sled that was to carry it away; another vehicle waited, a passenger sled.
“Now, now,” one said, probably the extent of the human vocabulary he had troubled to hear, urging their haste; and only when Stavros himself appeared did the younglings assume decorum.
Even an elder human had his honor from the regul: they seemed to regard Stavros with a healthy fear.
But Duncan, when he looked back as they were boarding, chanced to look directly into the face of one of the younglings that bent, assisting them into the sled, and nostrils snapped shut and lips clamped, a look of hate that transcended species.
They were on Kesrith, among regul, who would be their companions and counselors in dealing with the evacuation of other regul who had made their homes here for centuries. They had come to take this world as conquerors, conquerors who, at least for thirty days, were only two, and vulnerable. The world had belonged to regul and to mri; and it was likely that certain of the crew of Hazan had called Kesrith their home.
It dawned upon him with immediacy that there could be more than simple racial or political hatred among regul toward their presence on Kesrith.
And perhaps there were many residents on Kesrith who had never consented to the treaty that disposed of their world and brought humans to it.
The inconvenience is minor, Stavros had translated the bai’s assurance. Perhaps in the bai’s eyes it was minor: the regul were not supposed to be able to lie; but in the eyes of the regul younglings that attended them there was no lie either, and it told a different story.
While they were on Kesrith, they would be housed in a building called the Nom, in the center of the chief city of Kesrith, and they would be thus protected for the first and most critical days against the irritations of Kesrith’s natural atmosphere and the other minor inconveniences of the local climate: they would be expected to adapt.
And he saw Stavros’ face when they first broke out of the ship’s warmth into the wide world, and had their first sight of the place: hills, mountains, white plains, strangely lit by a ruddy pink sun.
For Stavros this was home, forever. His assignment was to prepare for other humans, to direct them after they had come, to build civilization again; and already Duncan was considering that five years here might be a very long time.
Regul, and alkali flats, and geysers, dust and mines and a sun that looked sickly and too large in the sky. He had been on half a score of worlds in his travels in the service, from bare balls of rock to flowering wildernesses, but he had never been on one so immediately alien as Kesrith.
Forbidding, unfriendly to humans. The very air smelled poisonous, laden with irritants.
If Stavros felt regret, he did not show it. He let himself be handled like a regul elder, already playing the part, and the younglings handed him down to the land sled that waited below. It was well after dawn, the sun a quarter of the way up the sky. There was, instead of the welcome they had expected—like most regul courtesies, carefully controlled and managed—a still and ghostly quiet about the port, as if they and the younglings were the only living things about the premises.
And far away, on the heights, was visible something that set Duncan’s heart to beating more rapidly, a clutch of fear at the stomach that had nothing to do with reason, for there was the peculiar silhouette of four slanted towers that formed a flat-topped, irregular pyramid.
A mri edun. He had known there was one onworld. He had seen pictures of the ruins of Nisren. He was unprepared for it to be here, so close. It overlooked the city in such a way that nothing that was done on the plains could be hidden from it.
It brooded, an ominous and alien presence, reminding them all that there was a third party to the transaction that promised peace.
“Now. Now!” the regul repeated, impatient of the delay or at the object of his attention, it was unsure; but Duncan did not want to contest the matter, and he lowered his head and entered the sled, where the air was filtered and cleaned of the acrid biting taste that contaminated the air of Kesrith.
The sled lumbered off toward the city on pavement made rough by inroads of sand from the flats, taking them to what he thought with increasing conviction was a confinement only wider in space than their last.
Chapter SIX
THE SUN was climbing the east, and on another day Niun would have been out about the hills, walking, hunting, practicing at arms, all other such things as he used to fill the solitary hours and relieve the sameness of his days.
But on this day nothing could have persuaded him from the vicinity of the edun. He haunted the communications station in the top of the Sen tower, where, in an edun grown informal by reason of its small size, he was permitted to be on occasion; he hovered about the main entrance; and finally, consumed by his impatience, he went to the rock at the top of the causeway, to stare into the growing glare off the white flats and strain his eyes for any movement from the direction of the port.
He had for so very, very long had nothing good to anticipate. Now he savored the feeling, hating the waiting, and yet relishing the feeling of waiting: with mixed feelings about the meeting, and yet longing desperately for the comradeship it promised. He had not loved Medai. He remembered the rivalry with his cousin, his—he could be honest with himself after so many years—jealousy of his cousin; and he strove to forget any such feelings he had ever cherished: he wanted Medai’s presence, wanted it desperately, fervently. Anything was better than this long loneliness, this knowledge that the edun was slowly, irrevocably perishing.
And there was, at the foundation of all the thoughts, the least stirring of hope, the suspicion that Medai had been summoned, that he was the first of many to come—that the she’pan had stirred to action, and that something was moving in the future of the People.
On a thousand previous days, he had sat as he sat now, seeking any tiny deviation in events to occupy him, the struggles of an insect, the slow, perilous blooming of a wind-flower, the rise or descent of ships at the port—ill-wishing such ships, imagining disasters, imagining important arrivals that would somehow change the pattern of his existence. He had done this so often that it was hard to realize that this time it was real, that the game was substance on this morning so like a thousand other mornings. The very air seemed alive. His heart beat so strongly, his muscles were so taut that his chest and stomach hurt, and he almost forgot to breathe whenever his eyes would deceive him into believing that he had seen movement below.
But in the full light of noon, there was a plume of dust on the flats, at the beginning of the causeway, a line of dark figures moving slowly upward. He sat upon his rock at the top of the causeway and lowered his visor to remove the haze of daylight, trying to discern the figures individually.
He had seen vehicles come up the road years before. Judging the distance and the size of the objects and the amount of dust, that was what it looked to be. A sense of wrongness grew in him, a weight in his stomach counterpoised against the beating of his heart. He clenched his limbs together, long arms wrapped about his knees, and watched, unwilling to run and tell the others. Regul. Regul were coming up.
Once he would have been delighted at such an unaccustomed visitation; but he was not so on this morning of all mornings. Not now. Not with mri business afoot that was more important than regul.
Not with mri business in the working, in which regul might seek to interfere.
Of a sudden he realized that the she’pan desperately needed to know what was coming up the hill: he made them out—six vehicles and a moving dot further back that his eyes could not resolve; but it looked to be a seventh.
No such number of regul had ever called on the edun in his memory.
He slid down from his rock and started downhill, his long strides carrying him at what swiftly became an uncontrollable run, undignified, but he was too alarmed to care for appearances. He raced toward the edun, breathless.
Others were coming out the doorway even before he arrived with his warning—black-robes of the Kel, and none of gold: he slowed his pace and came to them, out of breath and trying to conceal his pain. Sweat filmed his skin, quickly dried as the moisture-hungry air stole it. One did not run on Kesrith: a hundred times he had been taught so, the sober necessities of the world imposed over the nature of youth. His lungs burned; there was the sharp edge of blood in the air he breathed. None of the Kel rebuked him for his rashness; and he felt the mood of them, saw it in the attitude of the attendant dusei that had come out of the edun with them. One of the dusei reared up, towering, snuffing the wind. It came down heavily on all fours again, an action that stirred the white dust, and blew a snort of distress.
“Yai, yai!” kel Dahacha rebuked the lot of the dusei, that meaningless word that had a thousand meanings between dus and kel’en. They shied away, the nine of them, dismissed, hovering in a knot near the edun, ears pricked. Some sat. Now and then one would rise and walk the circuit of the group of dusei, a different one each time, and constantly that one would eye the advancing caravan of regul vehicles and utter small whuffs of warning.
The Kel was veiled, for meeting outsiders. Niun secured the mez a proper degree higher, and took his place in their black rank, one among others; but kel’anth Eddan took him by the elbow and drew him to the front of the group.
“Here,” said Eddan, and no more. A man would not jabber questions with the Kel in such a mood. Niun held himself silent, his heart constricted with panic at Eddan’s gesture. He was a novice, even at his age; he did not belong in the fore of question-and-answer with regul, here between Eddan and kel Pasev, oldest masters of the Kel.
Unless it involved him personally.
Or a kinsman.
Of a sudden he knew a message must have been passed to the edun through the Sen-tower, some intelligence of events that the edun possessed and that he had missed, sitting alone, vainly anticipating pleasure in this day.
Something was fearfully amiss, that regul had intervened between mri kinsmen.
The regul caravan ground its slow way upward, the sound of its motors audible now. The sun beat down, wanly red. Out on the flats a geyser spouted: Elu, one of the dangerous random ones, that kept no schedule. The plume continued a time, ten times the height of a man, and with its characteristic slant. Then it quickly dissipated. It was possible to recognize each of the geysers of the flats by its characteristic pattern and location. Niun reckoned that if Elu had erupted, Uchan would not be long after. It was a precious moment of distraction, in which it was not necessary to consider the sinister line of dark vehicles laboring their way upslope.
Six landsleds. No more than two had ever come to the edun at once. He did not make this observation aloud. The Kel about him stood utterly rigid, like images against which black robes fluttered in the strong wind. Each kel’en’s right hand was at the belt where the as’ei were sheathed, fingers slipped within the belt. This was a warning, to another kel’en. The regul, being mere tsi’mri, had likely not the sense to recognize it; but it was courtesy all the same, to advise intruders that they were not wanted, whether or not the intruder had the wit to recognize a warning.
The sleds bounced over the final ruts in the ascending road, came at last to a dusty halt even with the front entry to the edun, fronting the Kel. Motors were cut off, leaving sudden silence. Regul opened doors and began laboriously to disembark: a full ten of regul younglings, sober and joyless, without even visible arrogance. One of them was the Nom-guard, Hada Surag-gi: Niun recognized that one by the badges and the robes, which was the best way to recognize any individual regul. It was also likely, he reflected bitterly, that the regul Hada Surag-gi recognized him by his distinctive lack of badges; but the youngling came forward to face Eddan, and consequently himself, and gave no sign of recognizing him. Hada’s eyes did not even linger. There was no hint of insolence. Hada Surag-gi sucked air and rocked forward, a regul courtesy.
There was a proper mri response to this, a gesture of reciprocal goodwill. Eddan did not make it, and therefore no mri moved. Hands stayed by the as’ei.
“Favor,” said Hada Surag-gi.”We bring most tragic news.”
“We are prepared to hear what you say,” said Eddan.
“We trust that our elder informed you?”
“Do you bring us Medai?” asked Eddan harshly.
Hada turned, an awkward motion for a regul, a shifting of feet. It closed its hands and made the gesture that wished its assistants to perform their duties. They shuffled about the second sled and opened its storage, lifted out a white, plastic-encased form on a litter. They bore it forward and carefully set it down at the feet of Hada Surag-gi, before the Kel.
“We have brought the remains of Medai,” said Hada.
Niun knew, already, had known from Hada’s first words; he did not move, nor even lower his visor. This steadiness might be mistaken by some of his brothers for self-control. It was numbness. He heard their movings, their stirrings about the scene as if they and he were in different places, as if, divorced from the scene, he watched from elsewhere, leaving the flesh of Niun s’Intel, like that of Medai s’Intel, senseless and unparticipant.
“Are the humans then that close?” asked Eddan, for it was the custom to give the dead of the People who had died in the war, to cold space where they had died, or, better still, to the fires of suns, recalling the birth of the People, rather than to make a long and inconvenient journey from the fighting front to inter them in earth. All the People would choose, if they had the choice, to avoid earth-burial. It was strange that regul, knowing mri even slightly as they did, could have misunderstood this and made the mistake of returning a dead mri to his edun.
The regul younglings—no arrogance at all in their manner now—let air flutter their nostrils and by other signs looked uncomfortable in their mission.
Guilty, was the bitter thought that came to Niun, watching them. He came back to his own body and fixed his eyes on the eyes of Hada Surag-gi, willing that youngling to meet his gaze directly. For an instant Hada did so, and flinched.
Guilty and uncomfortable in this whole meeting, and trying not to say the half of what they knew. Niun trembled with anger. He found his breath short. There was no move from the Kel. They stood absolutely still, one with the mind of Eddan, who led them, who with a word could lead them to a thing no mri had ever done.
Hada Surag-gi shifted weight on bowed legs and backed a little from the shrouded corpse between them. “Kel’anth Eddan,” Hada said,”be gracious. This kel’en wounded himself and would not have the help of our medical facilities, although we might perhaps have saved him. We regret this, but we have never attempted to violate your beliefs. We bring you the regrets also of bai Hulagh, in whose service this kel’en gained great distinction. It is bai Hulagh’s profound regret—his most profound regret, that this meeting is an inauspicious one, and that he makes the acquaintance of the People in such a sad moment. He sends his condolences and offers his extreme personal distress at this most unhappy event—”
“Bai Hulagh is then the new commander of this zone. What of bai Solgah? What of the Holn?”
“Gone.” The word was almost swallowed, momentum quickly resumed.”And the bai wishes, kel’anth, to assure you—”
“I surmise,” said Eddan,”that the death of kel Medai is very recent.”
“Yes,” said Hada, deterred from the prepared speech: Hada’s mouth worked, seeming to search for words.
“Suicide.” Eddan used the vulgar regul word, although regul knew the meaning of the mri word ika’al, where it regarded the ritual death of a kel’en.
“We protest—” In gazing directly at the kel’anth, the youngling seemed to lose its thread of thought, which was an impossibility with the eidetic regul. “We protest vehemently, kel’anth, that this kel’en was in deep melancholy that had nothing to do with the accession of bai Hulagh to command or the fall from power of the Holn. We fear that you are drawing the wrong inference. If you suppose that—”
“I did not advance any statement of inference,” said Eddan.”Do you suggest that one might be made?”
The regul, interrupted more than once, confounded by argument that was no argument, confused as regul easily were when dealing with mri, blinked rapidly and tried to regroup.”Kel’anth, I protest, be gracious, we only stated that this kel’en was in deep melancholy prior to his act, that he had been confined in his quarters by his own choice, refusing all attempts to inquire into his needs, and this had nothing to do with the accession of bai Hulagh, in no wise, sir, in no wise. Bai Hulagh became employer to this kel’en and this kel’en served him with great distinction in several actions. There was nothing amiss. But after the peace was announced, kel Medai evinced an increasing melancholy.”
“You are of the Nom,” Niun interrupted, unable to bear it longer, and Hada Surag-gi looked in his direction, black eyes wide, showing whites in amazement. “How is it that you report accurately on the state of mind of a kel’en who was on a ship far removed from you?”
It was not his place to have spoken. From a kel’en youth before strangers, it was an outburst, not an acceptable behavior; but the Kel stood firm, and as for Hada Surag-gi, its mouth flew open and shut again in a taut line.
“Elder,” it protested to Eddan.
“Can the bai’s spokesman answer the question?” asked Eddan, a vindication that sent a flood of fierce gratitude through Niun.
“Most gladly,” said Hada.”I know these things to be fact because they are exactly as given to me by the bai himself, face to face, by his word. We had no idea that the kel’en contemplated such an action. It was not due to any animosity toward his service.”
“Yet it is abundantly evident,” said Eddan,”that kel Medai considered that he had sufficient reason to quit your service, such strong reason that he chose ika’al to be free of you.”
“This was doubtless because of the end of the war, which this kel’en did not desire.”
“It is,” said Eddan, “curious that he would have elected ika’al when he knew that he was returning to homeworld.”
“He was despondent,” said Hada Surag-gi, illogicality that the regul did not seem to comprehend as illogical. “He was not responsible for his actions.”
“You are speaking before his kinsman,” said Eddan sharply. “This was a kel’en, not a dus, to go mad. He was bound for homeworld. What you say he did is not reasonable unless the bai offended against his honor. Is it possible that this was what happened?”
The regul, under the sting of Eddan’s harsh voice, began to retreat slightly, a sidling backward by the hindmost.
“We are not done with questions,” Eddan said, fixing Hada Surag-gi with his stare. “Tell us where and when kel Medai died.”
The regul did not want to answer at all. It sucked air and visibly changed color.”Favor, kel’anth. He died during the previous evening on the ship of the bai.”
“On the ship of bai Hulagh.”
“Kel’anth, the bai protests—”
“Was there any manner of discussion passed between the bai and the kel’en?”
“Be gracious. The kel’en was despondent. The end of the war—”
“The bai made this mri despondent,” Eddan said, discomfiting the youngling utterly.
“The bai,” said Hada, nostrils dilating and contracting in rapid breaths, “requested of this mri that he remain in the ship and remain in service; the kel’en refused, wishing to leave at once, a privilege the bai had denied to everyone, even himself. There were matters of business to attend. It is possible—” the skin of the youngling went paler and paler as it spoke: its lips faltered upon the words. “Kel’anth, I realize that there is possible blame in your eyes; yet we do not understand the actions of this kel’en. The bai commanded him to wait. Yet the kel’en found fault with the order sufficient that he committed this act. We do not know why. We assure you we are greatly distressed by this sad event. It is an hour of crisis for Kesrith, in which this kel’en would have been of great service to the bai and to yourselves, surely. The bai valued the service of kel Medai. We protest again that we do not understand the source of his bitterness with us.”
“Perhaps you did not inquire or listen,” said kel’anth Eddan.
“Be gracious. Kesrith has been ceded to humans. We are in the process of the evacuation of all residents of Kesrith. Arrangements are being made also for the mri of Kesrith. The bai wishes his ship manned at all hours, and he wishes the crew, naturally—” The youngling moved uneasily, looking at Eddan, who did not move. “These are affairs over which we have no control. If the kel’en had only informed the bai of his extreme desire to have an exception granted in his case—”
“Kel Medai chose to leave his service,” said Eddan. “It was well done. We do not want to talk to youngling regul on this subject any longer. Go away now.”
And this was plainly put, and the regul, degree by degree, retreated, more rapidly as they neared their sleds. Hada was neither the first nor the last seated. Hatches were closed, engines started; the landsleds lumbered clumsily into a turn on the narrow and rutted roadway and retreated down the long slope as slowly as they had come.
No one moved. There was a numbness in the air now that the regul had gone, leaving them alone with their dead.
And suddenly in the doorway, gold-robes and white, the sen’anth and Melein, and the she’pan herself, on their arms.
“Medai is dead,” said Eddan,”and the world is going to humans soon, as we suspected.” He lifted his robed arms to shield the she’pan from the sight; and Melein started forward a step, only a step: it was forbidden her. She veiled herself and turned her face away, bowing her head; and likewise the she’pan and the sen’anth veiled, which they did not do save in the presence of the unacceptable.
They went away into the edun. Death was the peculiar domain of the Kel, either in inflicting it or mourning it; and it was for them to attend to the proprieties.
For a kinsman within the Kel it was a personal obligation.
Niun knew that he was expected in this to take charge; and he saw that the others longed to help, to do something, and he opened his hands, gave them leave. He had only heard the rites, had never done them, and he did not wish to shame himself or Medai by his ignorance. They gathered up the litter, he and all who could find space to help, and passed within the doors of the edun, toward the Pana’drin, the Shrine, to present Medai at his homecoming, where he would have presented himself first if he had lived.
Niun’s hands felt the warm metal of the litter frame; he looked down on the object in white that had been his cousin, and the shock that had held him numb until now began to meld into other feelings, into a deep and helpless rage.
It was not right that this had happened. There was no justice in things if this could happen. He found himself almost trembling with anger, a violence in which he could kill, if there were anyone or anything against which to direct that rage.
There was no one. He tried to feel nothing; that was easier, than to try to find a direction for the resentment that boiled in him. He had hoped: he schooled himself not to hope, henceforth. The world was mad, and Medai had added himself to the madness.
My last son, the she’pan had called him. Now it was true.
Chapter SEVEN
THERE WAS a screen in the Shrine of the Edun of the People, worked in metals and precious stones and over-written with ancient things. It was old beyond reckoning, and in every Shrine that had ever existed, this very screen had stood, between the lamps of bronze that were of equal age with it. In life it marked the division between the Kel and the Sen, the point past which the Kel might not tread: in death it was no more crossable.
Before the screen, at its very base, they laid the white-shrouded body of Medai s’Intel Sov-Nelan, as close to the dividing line as a kel’en could ever come. Incense curled up from burners on either side of the screen, heavy and cloying, overhanging the room and obscuring the ceiling like an immaterial canopy.
For Niun, attendant to his cousin, that scent of incense held its own memories, of being in the Kath and of watching holy rites from that least, outermost room, when he had been a child with Melein and Medai beside him, and others now gone, whose deaths he knew: from that outer room the small shrine of the Kel had seemed mysterious and glorious, a territory where they might not yet venture, where warriors in their sigai might move, disdaining the Kath.
His mind ran to a later day, when they three had been taken among the black-robes, one with the Kel, and had been allowed for the first time to enter the middle shrine, and to realize that yet another barrier lay between them and the Pana, the Mysteries; and a day later yet, that they had prayed the welfare of Medai, who was leaving the edun for service, greatly honored—and Niun had died inwardly that night with jealousy and bitterness, his prayers insincere and hating and mingled with thoughts that came back now like guilty ghosts.
He felt no differently now than then. Medai had taken another departure, leaving him the ugliness, the loneliness of Kesrith.
Medai had never endured the things he had endured, left here, last guard to the House, servant to the others. Medai was counted a great kel’en for what he had done. There was a whisper of robes in the holiness dimly visible beyond the screen, where the Sen met and tended the Holy Objects. Melein would be there, with Sathell.
Three children an age ago had stood within the outer Kath-hall, and longed for honor; and they had gotten their prayers in strange and twisted ways: Niun within Kel-shrine, where they had all longed to go; Medai possessing the honors of a warrior, newly wandering the Dark; and Melein, Melein the light-hearted, had passed through Kel-shrine to the place beyond, to the Mysteries that were never for a kel’en to see.
He bowed down, shaking with rage and frustration, and remained so for a time, trying to take his breath back again and compose himself.
A hand touched his shoulder. A dark robe brushed him with shadow as Eddan sank down beside him. “Niun,” the kel’anth said in a soft voice. “The she’pan calls you. She does not want you to have to sit this watch. She says that she wants you to come and sit with her this night, and not to go to the burial.”
It took him a moment to be sure of his voice. “I do not believe it,” he said after a moment, “that she will not loose me even for this. What did she say? Did she give no reason?” “She wishes you to come, now.”
He was stunned by such an attitude. There had been no love between himself and Medai: the she’pan knew that well enough; but there was no decency in what she asked him to do, publicly. “No,” he said. “No, I will not go to her.”
The fingers dug into his shoulder. He expected rebuke when he looked up. But the old man unveiled to him, showing his naked face, and there was no anger there. “I thought you would say so,” Eddan said, which was incredible, for he had not known himself: it was impulse. But the old man knew him that well. “Do as you think right,” Eddan said further. “Stay. I will not forbid you.”
And the old man rose and ordered the others, who moved about their separate tasks. One brought the vessels of ritual, given by the Sen, that were for burying, and set them at Medai’s feet; Pasev brought water; and Dahacha, cloths for washing; and Palazi filled the lamps for the long vigil; and Debas whistled softly to the dusei and took them from the outer hall, herding them away into the tower of the Kel so that they should not disturb the solemnities. In the midst of the activity Niun sat, conscious finally that he had torn his robe in his haste for descending from the hills, and that he was dusty and his hands were foul with dirt. Feet pattered about him. Sirain came, half-blind Sirain, and gave him a damp cloth, and Niun unveiled and washed his face and veiled again, grateful for his thoughtfulness. Liran brought a robe for him, and he changed his siga in the very Shrine, for it was not respect to sit the watch in disorder. He sat down again, and began to be calmer at their quiet, efficient ministering.
Then at Eddan’s whispered word, they began to take the ugly white shroud from Medai, and patiently, patiently the fingers of one and the other of them tore the webbing that was as close-spun as a cocoon and well-nigh impenetrable— like cho-silk it was, having to be unravelled with the fingers. But Pasev knew to touch the regul fiber with a burning wick, and so to part the strange web. The material burned sullenly, but it gave way, shedding its chemical smell into sickening union with the incense that lowered overhead.
It was something on which they all silently agreed, that they would not give to burial a kel’en in a regul shroud, whatever the inconvenience; and gradually they recovered Medai from the web, a face that they remembered, a countenance still and pale. The body was small and thin in death, pitifully so; it weighed very little, and Medai had been a strong man. The honors that they found laced to his belts were many, and the seta’al were weathered to pale blue on his face. He had been a handsome youth, had Medai s’Intel, full of the life and the hope of the edun in brighter days. Even now he was very fine to see. The only marring of him was the blood that stained the fiber under his central ribs, where he had dealt himself his death wound.
Suicide.
Niun worked, not looking at Medal’s face, trying not to think what his hands did, lest they tremble and betray him. He was trying to remember better days, could not. He knew Medai too well. His cousin was in his dying as he had been in life: selfish, arrogant to match regul arrogance, and stubborn with it all. It was wrong to hold anger with the dead, impious. But in the end Medai had been as useless to his kin-folk as he had always been. Medai had lived for himself and died for his own reasons, nothing regarding what others might need of him; and there was precious little honor for a cold corpse, whatever the high traditions of the Kel.
They had parted in anger. He remembered, each day of his life for six years he had remembered, and he knew why the she’pan had wanted him upstairs, and what was surely in the minds of his brother kel’ein who sat with him. There had been a quarrel, the av’ein-kel, the long blades drawn; it had been his own fault, drawing first, in the Shrine hall, outside. It was the day that Medai had laid hand on Melein.
And Melein had not objected.
The she’pan herself had put an end to that quarrel—abler in those days six years gone—had descended the tower stairs and intervened. Had called him eshai’i, lack-honor, and tsi’daith’, un-son, and because then he had loved her, it had crushed him.
But not a word, never a word of rebuke to Medai
And for Medai within a hand of days came the honor of service to the bai of the regul, an honor that might have gone to one of the Husbands; and for Melein came the chastity of the Sen.
And for Niun s’Intel came nothing, only a return to study, a long, long waiting, crushed to the Mother’s side and held from any hope of leaving Kesrith.
There had never been a way to undo that one evil day. Intel would not let him go. He had hoped for peace with Medai, for a change in the affairs of the People.
But Medai had robbed him of that too. It was on him alone, the service of homeworld, and there had never been any justice in it.
When you have made up your mind what it is the People owe you, Eddan had said, come and tell me. He would have settled for half of what Medai had had.
But then, beginning with Eddan, the Kel spoke of Medai, each praising him: ritual, the lij’aiia, beginning the Watch of the Dead; and the voices of the old kel’ein shook in the telling of it.
“It is hardest,” said Liran,”that the old bury the young.”
And last of all but himself, Pasev: “It is certain,” she said, touching the medallions, the j’tai that glittered in the lamps’ golden light, the honors that Medai had won in his services, “that though he was young, he has travelled very far and seen a great deal of war. I see here the service of Shoa, of Elag, of Soghrune, of Gezen and Segur and Hadriu; and it is certain that he has served the People. Surely, surely he has done enough, this brother of ours, this child of our house; I think that surely he was very tired. I think he must have been very weary of service to the regul, and he would have come home as best he could, with what of his strength he had left I understand this. I am also very tired of the service of regul; and if I knew my service was at an end, I would go the road he took.”
And then it should have been Niun’s time to speak, praising Medai, his cousin. He had gathered angry words, but he could not, after that, speak them or contradict the feelings of Pasev, whom he loved with a deep love. He sank down and lowered his head into his crossed arms, shaking with reaction.
And the Kel allowed him this, which they seemed to take for a kinsman’s grief. But theirs was a true, unselfish sorrow for a child they had loved. His was for himself.
In this he found the measure of himself, that he was capable of meanness and great selfishness, and that he was not, even now, the equal of Medai.
The others talked around him, whispering, after such a time as it became clear that he would not choose to speak in the ritual. They began finally to speak of the high hills, the burial that they must accomplish, and woven into their speech and their plans was a quiet desperation, a shame, for they were old and the hills were very far and the trail very steep. They wondered unhappily among themselves whether the regul might not, at their request, give them motorized transport; but they felt at heart that they dishonored Medai by asking such help of the regul. They would not, therefore, ask. They began to consider how they might contrive to carry him.
“Do not worry,” said Niun, breaking his long silence.”I can manage it myself.”
And he saw in their faces doubt, and when he thought of the steep trails and the high desert he himself doubted it.
“The she’pan will not allow it,” said Eddan.”Niun,. we might bury him close at hand.”
“No,” said Niun, and again, thinking of the she’pan,”no.” And after that there were no more suggestions to him. Eddan quietly signed at the others to let be.
And they left him, when he asked of them quietly and with propriety to be left alone. They filed out with robes rustling and the measured ring of honors on their garments. The tiny high sound of it drew at Niun’s heart. He considered his own selfishness, lately measured, and the courage of his elders, who had done so much in their lives, and was mortally ashamed.
But he began to think, in the long beginning of his nightlong watch, in the silences of the edun, where elsewhere others were in private mourning—and knew that he was not willing to die, whatever the traditions of his caste, that he did not want to die as Medai had died, above all else; and this ate at him, for it was contrary to all that he was supposed to be.
Medai had been able to accept such things, and the she’pan had accepted Medai. And this was what it had won him.
It was blasphemy to entertain such thoughts before the Shrine, in the presence of the gods and of the dead. For himself he was ashamed, and he longed to run away, as he had done when he was a child, going into the hills to think alone, to try himself against the elements until he could forget again the pettinesses of men, and of himself.
But he was reckoned a man now, and it had been long since he had had that freedom. Dangerous times were on the edun, hard times, and it was not an hour that Niun s’Intel could afford to play the child.
There was a matter of duty, of decencies. Medai had lived and died by that law. He could not manage the inner part of him, but he could at the least see to it that the outer man did what was dutiful to those who had to depend on him.
Even if it were totally a lie.
“Niun.”
The stir, the whisper from beyond the screen he had taken for the wind that blew constantly through the shrine. He looked up now and saw a hazed golden figure through the intricate design, and knew his sister’s voice. She crossed the floor as far as the screen that divided them, religiously, though they could meet face-to-face elsewhere in the edun and outside its limits.
“Go back,” he wished Melein, for she violated the law of her caste by being in the presence of the dead, even a dead kinsman. Her caste had no debts of kinship; they renounced them, and all such obligations. But she did not leave. He rose up, stiff from kneeling on the cold floor, and came to the grillwork. He could not see her distinctly. He saw only the shadow of her hand on the lacery of the screen and matched it with his own larger one in sympathy, unable to touch her. He was unclean and in the presence of the dead, and would remain unapproachable until he had buried his kinsman.
“I am permitted to come,” she said. “The she’pan gave me leave.”
“We have done everything,” he assured her, struck to the heart remembering that there had been affection between Melein and Medai, cousinwise, and at the last, perhaps more than cousinly.”We are going to take him to Sil’athen— everything that we can do we will do.”
“I had not thought you would watch here,” she said. And then, with an edge of utter bitterness.”Or is it only because you were directly ordered not to?”
Her attack confused him. He took a moment to answer, not knowing clearly against what manner of assumption he was answering.”He is kin to me,” he said.”Whatever else— is no matter now.”
“You would have killed him yourself once.”
It was the truth. He tried to see Melein’s face through the screen; he could only see the outline, golden shadow behind gold metal. He did not know how to answer her.”That was long ago,” he said.”And I would have made my peace with him if he were alive. I had wanted that. I had wanted that very much.”
“I believe you,” she said finally.
She left silence then. He felt it on him, an awkward weight. “It was jealousy,” he admitted to her. The thing that he had pondered took shape and had birth, painfully, but it was not as painful as he had thought it would be, brought to light. Melein was his other self. He had been as close as thought to her once, could still imagine that closeness between them. “Melein, when there are only two young men within a Kel, it is impossible that they not compare themselves and be compared by others. He had first all the things I wanted to excel in. And I was jealous and resentful. I interfered between you. It was the most petty thing I have ever done. I have paid for it, for six years.
She did not speak for a moment. He became sure that she had loved Medai, only daughter of an edun otherwise fading into old age, it was inevitable that she and Medai should once have seemed a natural pairing, kel’en and kel’e’en, in those days when she had also been of the Kel.
Perhaps—it was a thought that had long tormented him— she would have been happier had she remained in the Kel.
“The she’pan sent me,” she said finally, without answering his offering to her. “She has heard of the intention of the Kel. She does not want you to go. There is disturbance in the city. There is uncertainty. This is her firmest wish, Niun: stay. Others will see to Medai.”
“No.”
“I cannot give her that answer.”
“Tell her that I did not listen. Tell her that she owes Medai better than a hole in the sand and that these old men cannot get him to Sil’athen without killing themselves in the effort.”
“I cannot say that to her!” Melein hissed back, fear in her voice, and that fear made him certain in his intentions.
It made no more rational sense than the other desires of Intel, this she’pan that could gamble with the lives of the People, that could bend and break the lives of her children in such utter disregard of their desires and hopes. She has given me her virtues, he thought, with a sudden and bitter insight: jealousy, selfishness, possessiveness,… ah, possessive, of myself, of Melein, the children of Zain. She sent Melein to the Sen and Medai to the regul when she saw how things were drifting with them. She has ruined us. A great she’pan, a great one, but flawed, and she is strangling us, clenching us against her until she breaks our bones and melts our flesh and breathes her breath into us.
Until there is nothing left of us.
“Do as you have to do,” he said. “As for me, I will do him a kinsman’s duty, truesister. But then you are sen’e’en and you do not have kinsmen anymore. Go back and say what you like to the she’pan.”
He had hoped, desperately, to anger her, to pierce through her dread of Intel. He had meant it to sting, just enough. But her hand withdrew from the screen and her shadow moved away from him, becoming one with the light on the other side.
“Melein,” he whispered. And aloud: “Melein!”
“Do not reproach me with lack of duty,” her voice came back to him, distant, disembodied.”While he lived, I was a kinswoman to him and you were grudging of everything he had. Now I have other obligations. Say over him that the she’pan is well pleased with his death. That is her word on the matter. As for me, I have no control over what you do. Bury him. Do as you choose.”
“Melein,” he said.”Melein, come back.”
But he heard her footsteps retreat up hidden stairs, heard doors close one after another. He stayed as he was, one hand against the screen, thinking until the last that she would change her mind and come back, denying that answer she had made him; but she left. He could not even be angry, for it was what he had challenged her to do.
Intel’s creation. His too.
He hoped that somewhere in Sen-tower Melein would lay down her pride and weep over Medai; but he doubted it. The coldness, the careful coldness that had been in her voice was beyond all repentance, the schooled detachment of the Sen.
He left the screen finally, and sat down by the corpse of Medai. He locked his hands behind his neck, head bowed on his knees, twice desolate.
The lamps snapped and the fires leaped, the door of the edun having been left open this night, an ancient tradition, a respect to the dead. Shadows leaped and made the writings on the walls seem to writhe with independent life, writings that the she’pan said contained the history and wisdom of the People. All his life he had been surrounded by such things: writings covered every wall of the main hall and the Shrine and the she’pan’s tower, and the accesses of Kath and Kel— writings that the she’pan said were duplicated in every edun of the People that had ever existed, exact and unvaried. Through such writings the sen’ein learned. The kel’ein could not. He knew only what had happened within his own life and within his sight, or those things he heard his elders recall.
But Melein could read the writings, and knew what truth was, as did the she’pan, and grew cold and strange in that knowledge. He had asked once, when Melein was taken into the Sen, if he could not be taken too: they had never in their lives been separated. But the she’pan had only taken his hands into hers, and turned the calloused palms upward. Not the hands of a scholar, she had said, and dismissed his appeal.
Something stirred out in the hall, a slow shuffling, a click of claws on stone—one of the dusei that had strayed from the Kel-tower. They generally went where they chose, none forbidding them, even when they were inconvenient or destructive. It was not even certain that one could forbid them, for they were so strong that there could be no coercion. They sensed, in the peculiar way of dusei, when they were wanted and when not, and rarely would they stay where they were not desired.
They understood the kel’ein, the belief was, whose thoughts were unfearing and uncomplex, and for this reason each dus chose a kel’en or kel’e’en and stayed lifelong. One had never set affection on Niun s’Intel, though once he had tried— shamefully desperate—to trap a young one and to coerce it. It had fled his childish scheme, smashing the trap, knocking him unconscious.
And never after that had he found any skill to draw one after him, as if that one, betrayed, had warned all its, kind of the nature of Niun s’Intel.
The elder kel’ein said that it was because he had never truly opened his heart to one, that he was too sealed up in himself.
He thought this false, for he had tried; but he also thought that the sensitive dusei had found him bitter and discontent and could not bear it.
He believed so, hoping that this would change; but in the depth of his heart he wondered if it were possibly because he was not a natural kel’en. For a woman of the People all castes were open; for a man, there were only Kel-caste and Sen; and he had been both deprived in one sense and overindulged in others, simply because he was the last son of the House. It had meant that he received the concentrated efforts of all his teachers, that they had worked with him until he had understood, until his skill was acceptable. But in an edun full of sons and daughters, he thought that he might have failed to survive; his stubbornness would have brought him early challenge, and the People might then have been rid of his irritance in the House. He thought that he might have been a better kel’en if not for the Mother’s interference; but then many things might have been different if he were not the last; and so might she.
Medai had pleased the Mother; and Medai was dead; but he sat here living, a rebel son to the Mother. She would have somewhat to say to him after Medai’s burying in the hills, when he must come back and face her. Thereafter would be bitter, bitter words, and himself without argument, and Melein on the she’pan’s side in it. He shrank from what the she’pan might say to him.
But she would have to say it. He would not unsay what he had said.
Again the scrape of claws. It was a dus. The explosive sough of breath and the heavy tread made it clear that the intruder was coming closer, and Niun willed it away from the Shrine, for dusei were not welcome here. Yet it came. He heard it enter the outer room, and turned and saw it in the dark, a great slope-shouldered shadow. It made that peculiar lost sound again, and slowly edged closer.
“Yai!” he said, turning on one knee, furiously willing it out.
And then he saw that the dus was dusty and that its coat was patched with crusted sores, and his heart froze in his chest and his breath caught, for he realized then that it was not one of their own tame beasts, but a stranger.
Sometimes wild dusei would come down off the high plains to hover round the lands of the edun and create havoc among the tame ones; in his own memory kel’ein had died, trying to approach such an animal, even armed. Dusei sensed intentions, uncannily prescient: there were few animals more dangerous to stalk.
This one stood, head lowered, massive shoulders filling the doorway, and rocking back and forth, uttering that plaintive sound. It forced its way in, making the plaster crumble here and there, though the door was purposely made small and inconvenient for them, to protect the Mysteries from their mindless irreverence.
It came, irresistible, thinner than the well-fed dusei of the edun. Niun edged aside, one of the lamps crashing down as the dus shouldered it. It whined and whuffed and fortunately the spilled fire went out, though the hot oil stung its foot and made it shy aside. Then it approached the body of Medai and pawed at it with claws as long as a man’s hand—poisonous, the dewclaw possessing venom ducts, the casual swipe of them capable of disemboweling mri or regul. Niun crouched in the shadow by the overturned lamp, as immobile as the furniture. The beast’s body filled much of the room and blocked the doorway. It had a fearsome, sickly stench that overrode even the incense; and when it turned its massive head to stare at the frail mri huddled in the corner, its eyes showed, running, dripping rheum onto the hallowed floor.
Miuk! The Madness was on him. The secretions of his body were out of balance and the miuk, the Madness of his kind, was to blame for his behavior, sending him into a mri dwelling. There was nothing Niun knew, neither beast nor man, more to be feared than this: if the dusei of the edun had not been locked upstairs this night, they would never have let a miuk’ko dus come near the edun; they would have died in defense of that outer doorway, rather than let that beast in.
And Niun s’Intel prepared himself to die, most horribly, in a space so small that the dus could not even cast his body from underfoot; his brothers would find him in shreds. It prodded at the body of Medai, as if in prelude to this, but it hesitated. Grotesque, horrid, the beast rocked to and fro, straddling the corpse, its eyes streaming fluid that blinded it. From some far place in the Kel-tower there was a deep moan, a dus fretting at its unaccustomed confinement, at the mood of the mourning Kel—or sensing invasion downstairs, trying desperately to get out. Others joined in, then fell abruptly silent, hushed perhaps by the order of the kel’ein.
Niun held his breath while the rogue lifted his rheum-blinded eyes toward that sound, mobile lips working nervously. It rocked. It gave another explosive snort and shifted its weight, easing aside. The shoulder hit the screen. It toppled with a brazen crash, and the beast whirled, bathed in the glow from the inner shrine. Niun flung his arm over his eyes in horror lest he see the Forbidden, and then, surety in his heart, he reached for his gun, futile against a dus.
He must attack whatever threatened the Forbidden, to prevent, if he could, the invasion of the Sen-shrine. He sighted for the brain, the first of the two brains, knowing full well the following convulsions would destroy him with the dus.
But the dus did not take that step beyond. It lowered its weeping head and nosed at the corpse, disarranging the veil; and when it had done so, it moaned and slowly, almost distractedly, swung its head about, putting its shoulder between its head and the gun, and began to withdraw from the Shrine.
And when it had done so, when it walked the hall outside, still giving that lost-infant sound, for the first time Niun clearly knew it.
Medai’s dus.
There was no mri who could claim, other clues removed, to know any dus but his own, and not even that one, given much passage of time. Dusei were too similar and too mutable, and one could only say that this one was like the dus he knew.
But that this particular one had not killed him, that it had been primarily interested in the body, and departed unsatisfied—that action he understood. Dusei were troubled at death. Other animals ignored the dead, but dusei did not understand, did not accept it. They grieved and searched and fretted, and eventually died themselves, more often than not. They rarely outlived their masters, pining away in their search.
And this one was hunting something it had not found.
Medai’s dus, come looking for him.
A dus that was sickly and covered with sores and deep in the throes of a madness that did not come on swiftly, although regul said that Medai had died but a night ago.
A dus that was thin and starved as its dead master.
A chill feeling grew in Niun, until he was physically shivering, not alone from dread of the dus. He bolstered his gun and glanced fearfully at the nakedness of the inner shrine, on which he ought never to have looked.
It should not have happened. He washed his hands with the water of the offerings, and without setting foot across the forbidden line, he set the screen in place again, his fingers reverent on the inanimate metal. He had lived. The gods, like men, could forgive the irreverence of dusei; and he had looked within the Sen shrine, and felt shaken, but not to the death. He had seen brightness, but nothing of the Objects, or nothing that he could identify as the Holy. He tried to put this from his mind. It was not for a kel’en to have seen. He did not want to remember it.
And Medai?
He set up the lamp again, and refilled it, and lighted it, restoring its comforting glow. Then on his knees he mopped up the spilled oil that by the mercy of the gods had not kept burning; and all the while he worked, exhausted and trembling from his vigil, he thought, and nursed that cold feeling that lodged under his heart.
At last he washed his hands for respect and laid hands on Medai for the irreverence he had to commit: the thought borning in his mind gave him no peace otherwise. He did it quickly, once he had gathered his courage, carefully unfastened the clothing and examined the wound, and found it— shaming his suspicion and his act—as the regul had said.
Ika’al.
“Forgive me,” he said to the spirit of Medai; and reverently reclosed the robes and washed the face and replaced the veils. Then he cast himself on his face before the shrine and made the proper prayers to the several ancestor-gods of his caste for rest for the soul of Medai, with more sincerity than he had ever used on his cousin when he was living.
This should have absolved him and given him peace, having surrendered to that which was proper and honest, but it did not.
He had in him a gathering certainty that, whatever the evidence of his eyes and the testimony of the regul, Medai had not laid down his life willingly.
The dus, so close to a kel’en’s mind, was miuk’ko and grown so thin that it could pass shrine doors; and the body of Medai, once solid with muscle, was thin as the mummified dead.
Kel-quarters were independent units within the regul ship plan, because of the dusei, which the regul feared beyond all logic; and because of the stringent caste laws that a kel’en must observe with respect to contact with outsiders.
But essentially that kel’en was always at the mercy of the regul, who supplied that unit with food, water, even the air he breathed. All that a kel’en could do to assert his independence was lock the door.
Had they wanted him dead, they could have stopped the air and cast him into cold space afterward. But these were tsi’mri, and more than that, they were strangers to the People, a strange new branch of regul; and they might not have known enough to deal with a kel’en. Regul were not fighters.
Not directly.
Consumed by the thought that took shape in him, he rose up and left the Shrine, took an offering vessel of water and a pannikin, and went out to the outer hall, to the door, where the mad dus still crouched before the edun.
He had known it must be there, waiting. It was near what it desired, but could not find it He had been as sure of its lingering there as he was sure how it had been driven mad. It was no less dangerous for its once having been tame; it could still rise up and kill on impulse. But when he set the water before it, it sniffed at the offering curiously and at last bestirred itself, nosing down into the water. The contents of the pannikin disappeared. Niun filled it a second and a third and a fourth time, and only at the fourth did the beast suddenly avert its head in refusal.
He sank down on his heels and studied the creature, thin as it was and its fur gone in patches. A great open wound was fresh on its side.
Medai’s dus, come from regul care, from violence, from starvation. It would not have left Medai of choice even after he was dead.
Regul would not act as mri would act They were capable of collusion, of bribery, of deceit, of slaughter of their own young, but never of murder of an adult, never of that. They could neither kill nor lie in cold blood; they hired mri to attend to their enemies.
So he had always been taught, by those who knew the regul better than he, by those who had dealt with regul lifelong.
So he had implicitly believed.
As had Medai.
He rose and walked inside, back to the Shrine, and sat down beside the body of his cousin, arms locked about him, staring without comprehension at the serpentine writings that recorded and concealed the history of the People.
Murder had been done, in one manner or another, whatever name the regul gave it. A kel’en had been killed by his own employers, and his dus weakened to the point that they could drive it out to die naturally—one body to return to the Kel, the act of ignorant regul; another disposed of by predators and scavengers, or at best those incapable of betraying what had happened. Regul hands and regul conscience were doubtless clean. Medai had finally done as they had wished.
He wished desperately to go upstairs and tell someone. He wished to run to Eddan for counsel, to alert the she’pan. But he had nothing for proof but a beast that lay outside the door. He had nothing on which to hang such an accusation, no shape to his suspicion, no motive he could reckon which would have driven the regul to compel a kel’en to such an action.
It was irony of a kind, he thought, that of all whom Medai might have trusted to see to his avenging, he had come to the hands of his oldest rival; and the only likely witness of the truth was a miuk’ko.
Dusei, it was said, lived in the present; they had no memories for what had happened, only for persons and places. It had sought home, the House where it had first lived; it had sought Medai; it had found the one, and not the other.
Chapter EIGHT
NIUN HAD BEGUN, before the others had even stirred, to prepare for the journey to Sil’athen. There was the water drawn, and the ritual store of food, a token only, and the real provisions that were for the living.
With much effort he took the body of Medai from the small Shrine and bound it with cords to the regul litter on which it had come. The dus that waited by the doorway saw, but paid no heed to what he did.
Then the others began to come: Eddan and Pasev and Da-hacha and the rest of the Kel. The dusei came down too, and the miuk’ko by the door withdrew a space. There in the sunlight it subsided, massive head between its paws, sides heaving. It was deep in shock.
“Miuk,” murmured Debas, horrified to see what sat at their gates.
