Rid?He tried to penetrate her meaning in that, shocked and alarmed at once; and encountered defenses, winced under her rejection, heart speeding, breath tight. She turned off her conscience where the human was concerned. He was nothing to her, this creature. Anger, revenge, Reha—the human was not the object of her intentions: he simply stood in the way, and he was alien— alien!—and therefore nothing. Aiela would not draw her into sympathy with that creature. She would not permit it. NO!She had died with one asuthe, and she was not willing to die with another.
Why is he here?Aiela insisted. What do the iduve want with him?
Her screening went up again, hard. The rebuff was almost physical in its strength.
He was not going to obtain that answer. He had to admit it finally. He rose from his place and walked to the bureau, came back and sprawled into the chair, shaking with anger.
There was something astir among iduve, something which he was well sure Isande knew: something that could well cost him his life, and which she chose to withhold from him. And as long as that was so there would be no peace between them, however close the bond.
In that event she would not win any help from him, nor would the iduve.
No, she urged him. Do not be stubborn in this.
“You are Chimele’s servant. You say what you have to say. I still have a choice.”
Liar,she judged sadly, which stung like a slap, the worse because it was true.
Images of Chimele: ancestry more ancient than civilization among iduve, founded in days of tower-holds and warriors; a companion, a child, playing at draughts, elbows-down upon an izhkhcarpet, laughing at a m’metane’scleverness; Orithain—
—isolate, powerfuclass="underline" Ashanome’s influence could move full half the nasuliof the iduve species to Chimele’s bidding—a power so vast there could be no occasion to invoke it.
Sole heir-descendant of a line more than twelve thousand years old. Vaikka:revenge; honor; dynasty.
Involving this human,Aiela gleaned on another level.
But that was all Isande gave him, and that by way of making peace with him. She was terrified, to have given him only that much.
“Aiela,” she said, “you are involved too, because heis, and you were chosen for him. Even iduve die when they stand between an Orithain and necessity. So did Reha.”
I thought they didn’t kill him.
“Listen to me. I have lived closer to the iduve than most kamethi ever do. If Reha had been asuthe to anyone else but me, he might be alive now, and now you are here, you are Chimele’s because of me; and I am warning you, you will need a great deal of good sense to survive that honor.”
“And you lovea being like that.” He could not understand. He refused to understand. That in itself was a victory.
“Listen. Chimele doesn’t ask that you love her. She couldn’t understand it if you did. But she scanned your records and decided you have great chanokhia,great—fineness—for a m’metane.Being admired by any iduve is dangerous; but an Orithain does not make mistakes, Do you understand me, Aiela?”
Fear and love: noi kame lived by carefully prescribed rules and were never harmed—as long as they remembered their place, as long as they remained faceless and obscure to the iduve. The iduve did not insist they do so: on the contrary the iduve admired greatly a m’metanewho tried to be more than m’metane.
And killed him.
“There is no reason to be afraid on that score,” Isande assured him. “They do not harm us. That is the reason of the idoikkhei.You will learn what I mean.”
His backlash of resentment was so strong she visibly winced. She simply could not understand his reaction, and though he offered her his thoughts on the matter, she drew back and would not take them. Her world was enough for her.
“I have things to teach you,” he said, and felt her fear like a wall between them.
“You are welcome to your opinions,” she said at last.
“Thank you,” he said bitterly enough; but when she opened that wall for a moment he found behind it the sort of gentle being he had seen through Reha’s thoughts, terribly, painfully alone.
Dismayed, she slammed her screening shut with a vengeance, assumed a cynical façade and kept her mind taut, more burning than an oath. “And I will maintain my own,” she said.
3
Two days could not prepare him, not for this.
He looked on the sleeping human and still, despite the hours he had spent with Isande, observing this being by monitor, a feeling of revulsion went through him. The attendants had done their aesthetic best for the human, but the sheeted form on the bed still looked alien—pale coloring, earth-brown hair trimmed to the skull-fitting style of the noi kame, beard removed. He never shuddered at amaut: they were cheerful, comic fellows, whose peculiarities never mattered because they never competed with kallia; but this— this—was bound to his own mind.
And there was no Isande.
He had assumed—they had both assumed in their plans—that she would be with him. He had come to rely on her in a strange fashion that had nothing to do with duty: with her, he knew Ashanome,he knew the folk he met, and people deferred to his orders as if Isande had given them. She had been with him, a voice continually in his mind, a presence at his side; at times they had argued; at others they had even found reason to be awed by each other’s worlds. With her, he had begun to believe that he could succeed, that he could afterward settle into obscurity among the kamethi and survive.
He had in two days almost forgotten the weight of the bracelet upon his wrist, had absorbed images enough of the iduve that they became for him individual, and less terrible. He knew his way, which iduve to avoid most zealously, and which were reckoned safe and almost gentle. He knew the places open to him, and those forbidden; and if he was a prisoner, at least he owned a fellow-being who cared very much for his comfort—it was her own.
They were two: Ashanomewas vast: and it was true that kamethi were not troubled by iduve in their daily lives. He saw no cruelty, no evident fear—himself a curiosity among Isande’s acquaintances because of his origins: and no one forbade him, whatever he wished to say. But sometimes he saw in others’ eyes that they pitied him, as if some mark were on him that they could read.
It was the human.
As this went, he would live or die; and at the last moment, Chimele had recalled Isande, ordering her sedated for her own protection. I value you,Chimele had said. No. The risk is considerable. I do not permit it.
Isande had protested, furiously; and that in a kameth was great bravery and desperation. But Chimele had not used the idoikkhe;she had simply stared at Isande with that terrible fixed expression, until the wretched nas kame had gone, weeping, to surrender herself to the laboratory, there to sleep until it was clear whether he would survive. The iduve would destroy a kameth that was beyond help; she feared to wake to silence, such a silence as Reha had left. She tried to hide this from him, fearing that she would destroy him with her own fear; she feared the human, such that it would have taxed all her courage to have been in his place now—but she would have done it, for her own reasons. She would have stood by him too—that was the nature of Isande: honor impelled her to loyalty. It had touched him beyond anything she could say or do, that she had argued with Chimele for his sake; that she had lost was only expected: it was the law of her world.
“Take no chances,” she had wished him as she sank into dark. “Touch the language centers only, until I am with you again. Do not let the iduve urge you otherwise. And do not sympathize with that creature. You trust too much; it’s a disease with you. Feelings such as we understand do not reside in all sentient life. The iduve are proof enough of that. And who understands the amaut?”