“I’m sorry,” she said smoothly, shielding her own thoughts with an expertise his most concentrated effort could not penetrate. She gestured toward the other chair and wished him seated.
“These are my quarters,” he said, still standing. “Or do they move you in with me? Do they assume that too?”
Her mind closed utterly when she felt that, and he could not reach her. He had thought her beautiful when he first saw her asleep; but now that her body moved, now that those blue eyes met his, it was with an arrogance that disturbed him even through the turmoil of his other thoughts. There was a mind behind that pretty façade, strong-willed and powerful, and that was not an impression beautiful women usually chose to send him. He was not sure he liked it.
He was less sure he liked her, despite her physical attractions.
“I have my own quarters,” she said aloud. “And don’t be self-centered. Your choices are limited, and Iam not one of them.”
She ruffled through his thoughts with skill against which he had no defense, and met his temper with contempt. He thrust her out, but the least wavering of his determination let her slip through again; it was a continuing battle. He took the other chair, exhausted, beginning to panic, feeling that he was going to lose everything. He would even have struck her—he would have been shamed by that.
And she received that, and mentally backed off in great haste. “Well,” she conceded then, “I am sorry. I am rude. I admit that.”
“You resent me.” He spoke aloud. He was not comfortable with the chiabres.And what she radiated confirmed his impression: she tried to suppress it, succeeded after a moment.
“I wanted what you are assigned to do,” she said, “very badly.”
“I’ll yield you the honor.”
Her mind slammed shut, her lips set. But something escaped her barriers, some deep and private grief that touched him and damped his anger.
“Neither you nor I have that choice,” she said. “Chimele decides. There is no appeal.”
Chimele.He recalled the Orithain’s image with hate in his mind, expected sympathy from Isande’s, and did not receive it. Other images took shape, sendings from Isande, different feelings: he flinched from them.
For nine thousand years Isande’s ancestors had served the Orithain. She took pride in that.
Iduve,she sent, correcting him. Chimele isthe Orithain; the people are iduve.
The words were toneless this time, but different from his own knowledge. He tried to push them out.
The ship isAshanome, she continued, ignoring his awkward attempt to cast her back. WE areAshanome: five thousand iduve, seven thousand noi kame, and fifteen hundred amaut. The iduve call it a nasul, a clan. Thenasul Ashanome is above twelve thousand years old; the shipAshanome is nine thousand years from her launching, seven thousand years old in this present form. Chimele rules here. That is the law in this world of ours.
He flung himself to his feet, finding in movement, in any distraction, the power to push back Isande’s insistent thoughts. He began to panic: Isande retreated.
“You do not believe,” she said aloud, “that you can stop me. You could, if you believed you could.”
She pitiedhim. It was a mortification as great as any the iduve had set upon him. He rounded on her with anger ready to pour forth, met a frightened, defensive flutter of her hand, a sealing of her mind he could not penetrate.
“No,” she said. “Aiela—no. You will hurt us both.”
“I have had enough,” he said, “from the iduve—from noi kame in general. They are doing this to me—”
“—to us.”
“Why?”
“Sit down. Please.”
He leaned a moment against the bureau, stubborn and intractable; but she was prepared to wait. Eventually he yielded and settled on the arm of his chair, knowing well enough that she could perceive the distress that burned along his nerves, that threatened the remnant of his self control.
You fear the iduve,she observed. Sensible. But they do not hate; they do not love. I am Chimele’s friend. But Chimele’s language hasn’t a single word for any of those things. Don’t attribute to them motives they can’t have. There is something you must do in Chimele’s service: when you have done it, you will be let alone. Not thanked: let alone. That is the way of things.
“Is it?” he asked bitterly. “Is that all you get from them—to be left alone?”
Memory, swift and involuntary: a dark hall, an iduve face, terror. Thought caught it up, unraveled, explained. Khasif: Chimele’s half-brother. Yes, they feel. But if you are wise, you avoid causing it.Isande had escaped that hall; Chimele had intervened for her. It haunted her nightmares, that encounter, sent tremors over her whenever she must face that man.
To be let alone: Isande sought that diligently.
And something else had been implicit in that instant’s memory, another being’s outrage, another man’s fear for her—as close and as real as his own.
Another asuthe.
Isande shut that off from him, firmly, grieving. “Reha,” she said. “His name was Reha. You could not know me a moment without perceiving him.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.” Screening fell, mind unfolding, willfully.
Dark, and cold, and pain: a mind dying and still sending, horrified, wide open. Instruments about him, blinding light. Isande had held to him until there was an end, hurting, refusing to let go until the incredible fact of his own death swallowed him up. Aiela felt it with her, her fierce loyalty, Reha’s terror—knew vicariously what it was to die, and sat shivering and sane in his own person afterward.
It was a time before things were solid again, before his fingers found the texture of the chair, his eyes accepted the color of the room, the sober face of Isande. She had given him something so much of herself, so intensely self, that he found his own body strange to him.
Did they kill him?he asked her: He trembled with anger, sharing with her: it was his loss too. But she refused to assign the blame to Chimele. Her enemies were not the iduve of Ashanome.His were.
He drew back from her, knowing with fading panic that it was less and less possible for him to dislike her, to find evil in any woman that had loved with such a strength.
It was, perhaps, the impression she meant to project. But the very suspicion embarrassed him, and became quickly impossible. She unfolded further, admitting him to her most treasured privacy, to things that she and Reha had shared once upon a time: her asuthe from childhood, Reha. They had played, conspired, shared their loves and their griefs, their total selves, closer by far than the confusion of kinswomen and kinsmen that had little meaning to a nas kame. For Isande there was only Reha: they had been the same individual compartmentalized into two discrete personalities, and half of it still wakened at night reaching for the other. They had not been lovers. It was something far closer.
Something to which Aiela had been rudely, forcibly admitted.
And he was an outsider, who hated the things she and Reha had loved most deeply. Bear with me,she asked of him. Bear with me. Do not attack me. I have not accepted this entirely, but I will. There is no choice. And you are not unlike him. You are honest, whatever else. You are stubborn. I think he would have liked you. I must begin to.
“Isande,” he began, unaccountably distressed for her. “Could I possibly be worse than the human? And you insist you wanted that.”
I could shield myself from that—far more skillfully than you can possibly learn to do to two days. And then I would be rid of him. But you—