“He is Daniel,” said Chimele. “We think this is a name. That is all we have been able to obtain from him.”
Aiela looked at the hair-matted face in revulsion, heart beating in panic as the human stretched out his hands. The human’s dark eyes stared, white around the edges, but when his hands could not grasp them he collapsed into a knot, arms clenched, sobbing with a very manlike sound.
“This,” said Chimele, “is your other asuthe.”
Aiela had seen it coming. When he looked at Chimele it was without the shock that would have pleased her. He hardened his face against her.
“And you know now,” she continued, unmoved, “how it feels to experience the chiabreswithout understanding what it is. This will be of use to you with him.”
“I thought,” he recalled, “that you had regard for Isande.”
“Precisely. Asuthithekkhebetween species has always failed. I am not willing to risk the honor of Ashanomeby endangering one of my most valued kamethi. You are presently expendable. Surgery will be performed on this being in two days. You had that interval to learn to handle the chiabres.Try to approach the human. Perhaps he will respond to you. Amaut are best able to quiet him, but I do not think he finds pleasure in their company or they in his. Those two species demonstrate a strong mutual aversion.”
Aiela nerved himself to take a step toward the being, and another. He went down on one knee and extended his hand.
The creature gave a shuddering sob and scrambled back from any contact, wild eyes locked on his. Of a sudden it sprang for his throat.
The cell vanished, and Aiela had sprung erect in the safety of the Orithain’s own shadowed hall. He still trembled, in his mind unconvinced that the hands that had reached for his throat were insubstantial.
“You are dismissed,” said Chimele.
The nas kame who escorted him simply abandoned him on the concourse and advised him to ask someone if he lost his way again. There was no mention of any threat, as if they judged a man who wore the idoikkheincapable of any further trouble to anyone.
In effect, he knew, they were right.
He walked away to stand by the immense viewport, watching the stars sweep past, now and again the awesome view of the afterstructure of the ship as the rotation of the saucer carried them under the holding arm, alternate oblivion and rebirth from the dark, rotation after slow rotation, the blaze of Ashanome’srunning lights, the dark beneath, the lights, the star-scattered fabric of infinity, a ceaseless rhythm.
Likely none of the thousands of kallia that came and went on the concourse knew much of Aus Qao. They had been born on the ship, would live their lives, bear their children, and die on the ship. Possibly they were even happy. Children came, their bright faces and shrill voices and the rhymes of the games they played the same as generations before had sung, the same as kalliran children everywhere. They flitted off again, their glad voices trailing away into the echoing immensities of the pillared hall. Aiela kept his face toward the viewport, struggling with the tightness in his throat.
Kartos Station would be about business as usual by now, and its people would have cleansed him from their thoughts and their conscience. Aus Qao would do the same; even his family must pick up the threads of their lives, as they would do if he were dead. His reflection stared back out of starry space, beige-clad, slender, crop-headed—indistinguishable from a thousand others that had been born to serve the ship.
He could not blame Kartos. It was a fact as old as civilization in the metrosi,a deep knowledge of helplessness. It was that which had compelled him to take the idoikkhe.Kallia were above all peaceful, patiently stubborn, and knew better how to outwait an enemy that how to fight.
To wait.
There was an Order of things, and it was reasonable and productive. For one nas kame to defy the Orithain and die would accomplish nothing. An unproductive action was not a reasonable action, and an unreasonable action was not virtue, was not kastien.
Should he have died for nothing?
But all reasonable action on Ashanomeoperated in favor of the Orithain, who understood nothing of kastien.
Until the idoikkhehad locked upon his wrist, he had been a person of some elethia.He had been a man able to walk calmly through Kartos Station under the witness of others. He had even imagined the moment he had just passed, in a hundred different manners. But he had expected oblivion, a canceling of self—a state in which he was innocent.
He had accepted it. He would continue to accept it, every day of his life, and by its weight, that metal now warmed to the temperature of his own body, he would remember what it cost to say no.
He had despised the noi kame. But doubtless their ancestors had resolved the same as he, to live, to wait their chance, which only hid their fear; waiting, they had served the Orithain, and they died, and their children’s children knew nothing else.
Something stabbed at him behind his eyes. He caught at his face and reached for the support of the viewport. Waking. Conscious.
Isande.
It stopped. His vision cleared.
But it was coming. He stood still, waiting—impulses to flight, even to suicide beat along his nerves; but these things were futile, ikas.It was possible—he thought blasphemously—that kastiendemanded this patience of kallia because they were otherwise defenseless.
Slowly, slowly, something touched him, became pressure in that zone of his mind that had been opened. He shut his eyes tightly, feeling more secure as long as outside stimuli were limited. This was a being of his own kind, he reminded himself, a being who surely was in no happier state than himself.
It built in strength.
Different:that was the overwhelming impression, a force that ran over his nerves without his willing it, callous and unfamiliar. It invaded the various centers of his brain, probing one and another with painful rapidity. Light blazed and faded, equilibrium wavered, sounds roared in his ears, hot and cold affected his skin.
Then it invaded his thoughts, his memories, his inmost privacy.
O God!he thought he cried, like a man dying. There was a silence so dark and sudden it was like falling. He was leaning against the viewport, chilled by it. People were staring at him. Some even looked concerned. He straightened and shifted his eyes from the reflection to the stars beyond, to the dark.
“I am Isande.” There grew a voice in his mind that had tone without sound, as a man could imagine the sound of his own voice when it was silent. A flawed dim image of the concourse filled his eyes. He saw the viewport at a distance, marked a slender man who seemed tiny against it—all this overlaid upon his own view of space. He recognized the man for himself, and turned, seeing things from two sides at once. Imposed on his own self now was a distant figure he knew for Isande: he felt her exhaustion, her impatience.
“I’ll meet you in your quarters,” she sent.
Her turning shifted his vision, causing him to stagger off-balance; reflex stopped the image, screened her out. He suddenly realized he had that defense, tried it again—he could not cope with the double vision while either of them was moving. He shut it down, an irregular flutter of on-off. It was hard to will a thing that decisively, that strongly, but it could be done.
And he began to suspect Chimele had been honest when she told him that kamethi found the chiabresno terror. It was a power, a compensation for the idoikkhe,a door one could fling wide or close at will.
Only what territory lay beyond depended entirely on the conscience of another being—on two asuthi, one of whom might be little removed from madness.
He did not touch her mind again until he had opened the door of his quarters: she was seated in his preferred chair in a relaxed attitude as if she had a perfect right to his things. When he realized she was speculating on the pictures on the bureau she pirated the knowledge of his family from his mind, ripped forth a flood of memories that in his disorganization he could not prevent. He reacted with fury, felt her retreat.