“Do you suppose,” he asked, “that there is time to write a letter?”
Muishiph doubtfully consulted his watch. “If you do, you must hurry about it.”
Aiela bowed his gratitude, a courtesy Muishiph returned on reflex; and he waited on his feet while Aiela opened the desk and sat down, using some of the Station’s paper.
After a time Muishiph consulted his watch again and coughed delicately. Aiela hastened his writing, working feverishly until a second apologetic cough advised him of Muishiph’s impatience. Then he arose and unfastened his collar, drawing over his head a metal seal on a chain: its embossed impression sealed the message—a house crest. Kalliran aristocrats clung to such symbols, prized relics of the feudal culture that had been theirs before the starlords found them.
And before Muishiph realized his intention, Aiela had thrust the seal into the disposal chute. It would end floating in space, disassociated atoms of precious metals. Muishiph gaped in shock; kalliran matters, those seals, but they were ancient, and the destruction of something so old and familial struck Muishiph’s heart with a physical sickness.
“Sir,” he objected, and met sudden coldness in the kallia’s eyes.
“If I had sent it home,” said Aiela, “and it had been lost, it would have been a shame on my family; and it is not right to take it as a prisoner either.”
“Yes, sir,” Muishiph agreed, embarrassed, uneasy at knowing Aiela doubted Kartos’ intentions of his property. There was more sense to the kallia than he had reckoned. He became the more perturbed when Aiela thrust the letter into his hands.
“Send it,” said Aiela. “Private mails. I know it costs—“ He took out his wallet and pressed that too into Muishiph’s hand. “There’s more than enough. Please. Keep the rest. You’ll have earned it.”
Muishiph stared from the wallet and the letter to Aiela’s anxious face. “Sir, I protest I am an officer of—“
“I know. Break the seal, read it—copy it, I don’t care. Only get it to Aus Qao. My family can reward you. I want them to know what happened to me.”
Muishiph considered a moment, his mouth working in distress. Then he slipped the letter into his belly-pocket and patted it flat. But he kept only two of the larger bills from the wallet and cast the wallet down on the table.
“Take it all,” said Aiela. “Someone else will, that’s certain.”
“I don’t dare, sir,” said Muishiph, looking at it a second time regretfully. He put it from his mind once for all with a glance at his watch. “Come, bring your baggage. We have orders to anticipate that deadline. The Station is taking no chances of offending them.”
“I am sure they would not.” For a moment his odd kalliran eyes fixed painfully on Muishiph, asking something; but Muishiph hurriedly shrugged and showed Aiela out the door, walking beside him as soon as they were in the broad hall. Another security guard, a kallia, met them at the turning: he carried a sheaf of documents and a tape-case.
“My records?” Aiela surmised, at which the kalliran guard looked embarrassed.
“Yes, sir,” he admitted. “They are being turned over. Everything is.”
Aiela kept his eyes forward and did not look at that man after that, nor the man at him.
Muishiph fingered the outline of the letter in his belly-pocket, and carefully extracted his handkerchief and mopped at his face. It was too much to ask. To deceive the lords of karshatu and to cross the Qao High Council were both perilous undertakings, but the starlords were an ancient terror and their reach was long and their knowledge thorough beyond belief. The letter burned like guilt against Muishiph’s belly. Already he began to imagine his position should anyone guess what he had agreed to do.
And then it occurred to him to wonder if Aiela had told the truth of what it contained.
The Orithain vessel itself was not visible from the dock. There was only the entry tube and its conveyor, disappearing constantly upward as the supplies flooded toward the unseen maw of the ship. Aiela stopped with his escort and set his case beside him on the tiled flooring, the three of them conspicuous in an area where no spectators would dare to be. Aiela shivered; his knees felt loose. He hoped it was not evident to those with him. Courage to cross that small area without faltering: that was all he begged of himself.
He was not, he had assured his family in the letter, expecting to die; execution could be accomplished with far more effect in public. He did not know what had drawn the Orithain’s attention to him: he had touched nothing and done nothing that could have accounted for it, to his own knowledge, and what they intended with him he only surmised. He would not return. No one had ever been appropriated by the Orithain and walked out again free; but it would please him if his family would think of him as alive and well. He had saved five thousand lives on Kartos by his compliance with orders: he was well sure of this; there was cause for pride in that fact.
Empty canisters clanged on the dock, the horrid crash rumbling through his senses, dislodging him from his privacy. He looked and saw a frightened amaut crew trying to stop machinery. An amaut had been injured. The minute tragedy occupied him for the moment. None of the bystanders would help. They only stared. Finally the amaut was allowed to lie alone. The others worked feverishly with the lading of canisters, trying to make their deadline. The machinery started again.
His father would understand, between the lines of what he had written. Parome Deian was on the High Council, and knew the reports that never went to earthsiders. There was an understanding as old as the kallia’s first meeting with the Orithain: their eccentricities were not for comment and their names were not to be uttered; the Orithain homeworld at Kej still lay deserted, legendary cities full of supposed treasure— but metrosi ships avoided that star; for nine thousand years the Orithain had been the central fact of metrosi civilization, but no research delved into their origins, few books so much as mentioned them save in oblique reference to the Domination, and nothing but legend reported their appearance. But they were remembered. In the independence of space the old tales continued to be told, and legends were amplified now with new horrors of Orithain cruelty. Deian was one of nine men on all Aus Qao who received across his desk all the statistics and the rumors.
And if the statistics preceded his letter, Aiela reflected sorrowfully, his father would receive that cold message first. It would be the final cruelty of so many that had passed between them.
If that were to go first, witnesses would at least say that he had gone with dignity.
At the end, he could give nothing else to his family.
The lefthand ramp had been clear of traffic for several moments. Now it reversed, and one of the noi kame descended. Aiela bent and picked up his case when the man came toward them; and when they met, the kalliran agent gave into the nas kame’s hands the documents and the tape case—the sum of all records in the zone regarding Aiela and his existence. It was terrible to believe so, but even Qao might follow suit, erasing all records even to his certificate of birth, forbidding mention of him even by his family. Fear of the Orithain was that powerful. Aiela was suddenly bitterly ashamed for his people, for what the starlords had made them be and do. He began to be angry, when before he had felt only grief.