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 in two days. And then I would be rid of him. But you—
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 izhkh carpet, laughing at a m’metane’s cleverness; Orithain—
isolate, powerfuclass="underline" Ashanome’s influence could move full half the nasuli of the induve 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 he is, 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 love a 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’metane who 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 facade and kept her mind taut, more burning than an oath. “And I will maintain my own,” she said.
Chapter 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.