“It will be necessary,” said the woman to the Master, who hovered uncertainly in the background, “for this technician to follow our instructions.”
The Master nodded to the operator, who resumed his post reluctantly and did as he was told. The Station’s records, the log and the personnel files in their entirety, the centuries of accumulated knowledge of Esliph exploration, the patterns of treaties, of lane regulation and zonal government, bled swiftly into the Orithain’s ken.
When the process was complete, the apparatus was disconnected, the case was closed, and the noi kame turned as one, facing the Master.
“There is a man on this station named Aiela Lyailleue,” said the man. “Deliver his records to us.”
“The Master made a helpless gesture. “I have no authority to do that,” he said.
“We do not operate on your authority,” said the nas kame.
The Master gave the order. A section of tape fed out of the machine.
“Dispose of the original record,” said the woman, winding the tape about her first finger. “This person Aiela will report to our dock for boarding at 0230 Station Time.”
Kallia tended to a look of innocence. Their hair was the same whatever their age, pale and silvery, individual strands as translucent as spun glass. The pale azure of their skin intensified to sapphire in the eyes, which, unlike the eyes of amaut, could look left or right without turning the whole head: it gave them a whole range of communication without words, and made it difficult for them to conceal their feelings. They were an emotional folk—not loud, like amaut, who liked disputes and noisy entertainments, but fond of social gatherings. One kallia proverbially never decided anything: it took at least three to reach a decision on the most trivial of matters. To be otherwise was ikas—presumptuous, and a kalliran gentleman was never that.
Security agent Muishiph was amaut, but he had been long enough on Kartos to know the kallia quite well, both the good and the bad in them. He watched the young officer Aiela Lyailleue react to the news—he stood at the door of the kallia’s onstation apartment—and expected some outcry of grief or anger at the order. Muishiph had already nerved himself to resist such appeals—even to defend himself; his own long arms could crush the slender limbs of a kallia, although he certainly did not want to do that.
“I?” asked the young officer, and again: “I?” as though he still could not believe it. He looked appallingly young to be a ship’s captain. The records confirmed it: twenty-six years old, son of Deian of the Lyailleue house, aristocrat. Deian was parome of Xolun arethme, and the third councilor in the High Council of Aus Qao, a great weight of power and wealth—probably the means by which young Lyailleue had achieved his premature rank. Aiela’s hands trembled. He jammed them into the pockets of his short jacket to conceal the fact and shook his head rather blankly.
“But do you have any idea why they singled me out?”
“The Master said he thought you might know,” said Muishiph, “but I doubt he wants to be told, in any case.”
The young man gazed at him with eyes so distant Muishiph knew he hardly saw him; and then intelligence returned, a troubled sadness. “May I pack?” he asked. “I suppose I may need some things. I hope that I will.”
“They did not forbid it.” Muishiph thrust his shoulder within the doorframe, for Aiela had begun to lift his hand toward the switch. “But I would not dare leave you unobserved, sir. I am sorry.”
Aiela’s eyes raked Muishiph up and down with a curiously regretful expression. At least, Muishiph thought uncomfortably, the Master might have sent a kallia to break the news and to be with him; he braced himself for argument. But Aiela backed away and cleared the doorway to let him enter. Muishiph stopped just inside the door, hands locked behind his thighs, swaying; amaut did that when they were ill at ease.
“Please sit down,” Aiela invited him, and Muishiph accepted, accepted again when Aiela poured them each a glass of pinkish marithe. Muishiph downed it all, and took his handkerchief from his belly-pocket to mop at his face. Amaut perspired a great deal and needed prodigious quantities of liquid. It was the first time Muishiph had been in a kalliran residence, and the warm, dry air was unkind to his sensitive skin, the bright light hurt his eyes. He thrust the handkerchief back into his pocket and watched Aiela. The kallia, his own drink ignored, had taken a battered spaceman’s case from the locker and was starting to pack, nervously meticulous.
Muishiph knew the records from the Master, who had sent him. The young kallia captained a small geological survey vessel named Alitaesa, just returned from the moons of Pri, far back on the Esliph fringe. That was amaut territory, but some kallia explored there, seeking mining rights with the permission of the great trading karshatu that ruled amaut commerce. Amaut, natural burrowers, would work as miners; kallia, strongly industrial, would receive the ore and turn it back again in trade—an arrangement old as the metrosi.
But it was a rare kallia who ventured deep into the Esliph. It was a wild place and wide, with a great gulf beyond. Odd things happened there, strange ships came and went, and law was a matter of local option and available firepower. The amaut karshatu took care of their own, and brooked no intrusion on karsh lanes or karsh worlds: the kallia they tolerated, reckoning them harmless, for they were above all law-loving folk, their major vice merely a desire of wealth, not land, but monetary and imaginary. Kallia worshipped order: their universe was ordered in such a way that one could not determine his own worth save in terms of the respect paid him by others—and money was somehow a measure of this, as primogeniture was among amaut in a karsh. Muishiph looked on the young man and wondered: as he reckoned kallia, they were shallow folk, never seeking power for its own sake. They had no ambitions: they hated responsibility, feeling that there was something sinister and ikas in tampering with destiny. An amaut might dream of having land, of founding a karsh, producing offspring in the dozens; but for a kallia the greatest joy seemed to be to retire into a quiet community, giving genteel parties for small gatherings of all the most honorable people, and being a man to whom others resorted for advice and influence—a safe life, and quiet, and never, never involving solitary decisions.
If Aiela Lyailleue was a curiosity to the Orithain, he was no less a puzzle to Muishiph: an untypical kallia, a wealthy parome’s son who chose the hazardous life of the military, exploring the Esliph’s backside. It was the hardest and loneliest command any officer, amaut or kallia, could have, out where there was no one to consult and no law to rely on. This was not a kalliran life at all.
Aiela had packed several changes of clothing, everything from the drawers. “Some things are on my ship,” he said. “Surely they will send my other belongings home to my family.”
“Surely,” Muishiph agreed, miserable in the lie. When a karsh outgrew its territory, the next-born were cast out to fend for themselves. Some founded karshatu of their own, some became bondservants to other karshatu or sought employment by the kallia, and some simply died of grief. What amaut literature there was sang mournfully of the misery of such outcasts, who were cut off and forgotten quickly by their own kind. The kallia talked of his house as if it still existed for him. Muishiph rolled his lips inward and refused to argue with the childish faith.
Aiela gathered his pictures off the desk last of alclass="underline" an adult-children group that must be his kin, a young girl with flowers in her silver hair—ko shenellis, the coming-of-age: Muishiph had heard of the ceremony and recognized it, wondering if the girl were kinswoman or intended mate. Aiela himself was in the third picture, a younger Aiela in civilian clothes, standing by a smiling youth his own age, the crumbling walls of some ancient kalliran building fluttering with flags in the background. They were perplexing bits and pieces of a life Muishiph could not even imagine, things and persons that had given joy to the kallia, reminders that he once had had roots—things that were important to him even lost as he was. The pictures were turned, one by one, face down on the clothing in the case. With them went a small box of tape cassettes. Aiela closed and locked the case, turned with a gesture of entreaty.