He imagined Daniel’s image in the glass. The skin went shades of brown and pink, the silver hair turned dark, the eyes shadowed and hunted, his body slight with hunger, crossed with red and purple scars from untreated wounds, feet lacerated by the cruel mesh. His mind held memories of absolute horror, cages, brutality unimagined in the Halliran Idai.Even before those, there were memories of hunger, a childhood in a dark, cement-walled house beside a trickling canal, summers of sand-storms that blasted crops, dunes that year by year encroached upon fields, advanced upon the house, threatened the life-giving canal. At some time—Aiela had inherited the memories in bits and snatches—Daniel had left that world for the military, and he had served as a technician of limited skills. He had known a great many primitive human ports, until the life sickened him and he went home again, only to find his father dead, his mother remarried, his brothers gone offworld, the farm buried under dunes.
War. Shipping lanes closed, merchantmen commandeered for military service. Daniel—senior now over inexperienced recruits, wearing the crisp blue of a technician on a decent ship, well fed, with money promised to his account. That had lasted seven days, until two stunning defeats had driven the human forces into retreat and then into rout, and men were required by martial law to seek their home ports and keep order there as the panic spread.
That was the way fortune operated for Daniel. His hands had been emptied every time he had them full; but being Daniel, he would shrug perplexedly, get down on his knees and begin picking up the pieces. He was uneducated, but he had a keen intuition, an intelligence that sucked in information like a vacuum drawing air, omnivorously, taking scrap and debris along with the pure, sorting, analyzing. He had never been anyone, he had never had anything; but he was not going to stop living until he was sure there was nothing to be had. That was Daniel—a man who had always been hungry. M’melakhia,Chimele would call it.
And Daniel’s desire was the fevered dream of his half-sensible interludes in the cage, when the fields were green and the canal pure and full and orchards bloomed beside a white-walled house. He asked nothing more nor less than that—except the company of others of his kind. He had never deserved to be appropriated to Ashanome,swallowed whole by the pride of a Lyailleue and linked to a kalliran woman who had never learned to be kallia, who was more than a little iduve.
Aiela,Isande’s thought reproved him, sorrowing.
How long have you been with me?He flushed with anger, for he had been deep in his own concerns and Isande’s skill was such that he did not always perceive her touch. It was not the visual sense that embarrassed him: she knew his body as he knew hers, for that was a part of self-concept. It was his mind’s privacy that he did not like thus exposed, and he knew at once from the backspill that she had caught rather more than she thought he would like.
“Dear Aiela,” her silent voice came echoing. “No, don’t screen me out. I am sorry for quarreling. I know I offend you.”
“I am sorry,” he sent, the merest surface of his thoughts, “for a great many things.”
“You are not sure you can handle me,” she said. “That troubles you. You are not accustomed to that. You are not half so cruel or fierce as I am, I know it; but you are twice as brave—too much so, sometimes, when that terrible pride of yours is touched.”
“I have no pride,” he said. “Not since Kartos.”
She was amused, which stung. “No. No. It is there; but you have had it bruised—” the amusement faded, regretting his offense, and yet she knew herself right by his very reaction: right, and self-confident. “Chimele—the iduve in general—have touched it. You are just now realizing that this is forever, and it frightens you terribly.”
Her words stung, and a feeling wholly ikasrose up in him. “I don’t need to live on your terms. I will not.”
She was silent for a time, sifting matters. “You do not understand Ashanome.Tonight you saw the chanokhiaof Chimele, and I am afraid you have begun to love her. No—no, I know: not in that way. It is something worse. It is m’melakhia-love. It is arastietheyou want from her—iduve honor; and no m’metanecan ever have that.”
“You can’t even think like a kallia, can you?”
“Aiela, Aiela, you are dealing with an iduve. Realize it. You are reacting to her as she is.You are thinking giyre,but Chimele cannot give you what she cannot even understand. For her there is only arastiethe,and the honor of an iduve demands too much of us. It costs too much, Aiela.”
“She might be capable of understanding. Isande, she tried—”
“Avoid her!”
Screens dropped. Loneliness, a dead asuthe, years of silence. There was still loneliness, an asuthe who rejected her advice, who blindly, obstinately sought what had killed the other. Was the fault in her? Was it she that killed? She loved Chimele, and gave and gave, and the iduve knew only how to take. Reha had loved Chimele: asuthe to herself, how could he have helped it? He would be alive now, but that he had learned to love Chimele. She would not teach another.
Darkness. Cold. Screens tumbled. Aiela flinched and she snatched the memory away, recovering herself, smothering it as she had learned to do.
You denied,he reminded her gently, ThatAshanome killed him. Was Chimele responsible, after all?
The screens stayed in place. Only the words came through, carefully controlled. “She was not responsible. Honor is all she can give. To the nasithi,that is everything. But what is it worth to a m’metane?”
Yet you do love her,Aiela sent, and sad laughter bubbled back.
“Listen—she tried with all her iduvish heart to make me happy. Three times she asked me to take another asuthe. ‘He is like you,’ she said this time. ‘He is intelligent, he is of great chanokhiafor a m’metane.Can you work with this one?’ I consented. She risked a great deal to offer me that choice. You would have to know the iduve to realize how difficult that was for her—to try a thing when she has only reason to help her. She does feel—something. I am not sure what. After all these years, I am not sure what. Maybe we m’metaneitry to read into them what we wish were there. Perhaps that is why we keep giving, when we know better.”
“Let me alone,” he wished her. “If I’m to make a mistake, then let it be my mistake.”
“And when you make it,” she said, “we will both pay for it. That is the way this arrangement works, Aiela.”
It was truth; he recognized it—resented her being female. It was an unfair obligation. “I am sorry,” he said after a moment. “Then it will happen. I will not be held by you.”
“I disturb you.”
“In several senses.”
She snatched a thought half-born from his mind, the suspicion that the iduve knew enough of kalliran emotion to use it, to manipulate it at will. Isande was beautifuclass="underline" he had eyes to notice that. He kept noticing it, again and again. That she constantly knew it, embarrassed him; he knew that she was not willing to think of him in that way. But, he sent her, if she were in the un-graceful position of having to share a man’s inmost thoughts, she might receive things even more direct from time to time. Or had Reha been immune to such things?
The screen closed tightly on those memories, as it always had: the privacy she had shared with Reha was not for him. “He and I began so young we were like one mind; there could never be that between us. Asuthi ought never to share that part of their lives: some illusions have to be maintained. I am not for games, not for your amusement, nor are you for mine, dear friend. There is an end of it. You came too close to that being, you refuse my warnings about the iduve, and I see I can’t help you: you resent being advised by a woman. But I can at least exercise the good sense to keep my distance from you when it happens.”