Forgive us, Medai, he thought Our perceptions were too dull, our minds too accustomed to serving regul or we could have understood the message you tried to send us.
He made himself look at the hateful human face that had not the decency of concealmentat the nakedness of this being that had, unknowingly perhaps, destroyed a kel'en of the People. Animal, he thought; tsi'mri animal. The regul-mri treaty was broken, from the moment this creature set foot on Kesrith; and that had been many, many days ago. For this long the People had been free and had not known it.
"There is no more war," Duncan protested, and Niun's arm tensed, and he would have hit him; but it was not honorable.
"Why do you suppose that the regul are hunting us?" he asked of Duncan, casting back his own question. "Do you not understand, human, that you have made a great mistake in leaving Hazan?"
"I am going with you," the human said, with the first semblance of dignity he had shown, "to talk to your elders, to make them understand that I had better be returned to my people."
"Ah," said Niun, almost moved to scornful mirth. "But we are mri, not regul. We care nothing for your bargains with the regul, much good they have done you."
The human stayed still and reckoned that, and there was no yielding at the implied threat. "I see," he said. And a moment later, in a quiet, restrained tone: "I left the envoy down there in townan old man, alone with regul, with this going on. I have to get back to him."
Niun considered this, understanding. It was loyalty to this sen'anth for which he endured this patiently. He gave respect to the human for that, touched his heart in token of it
"I will deliver you alive to the edun," he said, and felt compelled to add: "It is not our habit to take prisoners."
"We have learned that," Duncan said.
Therefore they understood each other as much as might be. Niun considered the flats before them, reckoning already what might have been done to familiar ground by the bombardment: what obstacles might have been created on the unstable land, where they might next find securest shelter if the regul swept back sooner than anticipated.
It was well that he and the human had come-to an understanding, that Duncan considered his best chance and most honorable course was to cooperate for the moment. A man unburdened could make the journey by morning, all things in his favor; but not with regul blasting away the route about them; and day would show them up clearly, making it next evening before they could reach the edun if things kept on as they were.
A sick dread gathered in Niun's stomach: for very little even so, he would have killed the human and run for the edun at all speed.
He cursed himself for his softness, which had put him to such a choice between butchery and stupidity, and gripped the human's arm.
"Listen to me. If you do not keep my pace, I cannot keep you; and if I cannot keep you, I will kill you. It is also," he added, "very likely that the regul will kill you to keep you from your superior."
He slipped from cover then, and drew the human with him by the arm, and Duncan came without resisting.
But the regul craft, lacing the area, swept back, and they made only a few strides before it was necessary to hurl themselves into other cover.
The barrage began again, deafening, spattering them with boiling water and gouts of mud.
The edun would be aware of this. They were doubtless doing something; perhapsNiun thoughtDuncan's sen'anth likewise knew and was doing something; and there was also Ahanal, independent of Intel.
He understood the human's helpless terror. Of all who had power on Kesrith, they two had least; and the regul, who did not fight, had taken up arms, impelled by malice or fear or whatever driving motive could span the gap between cowardice and self-interest.
Chapter SEVENTEEN
THERE WAS firing, a sound unmistakable to a man who had lived a great part of his life in war.
Stavros turned his sled to view the window and saw the lights of aircraft circling under the clouds. His fingers sought the console keyboard, adjusted screens with what had grown to be some expertise: simple controls, a phenomenal series of coded signals, each memorized. The regul had provided him the codings with an attitude of smug contempt: learn it, they challenged him with that look of theirs that rated beings of short memory with sub-sapients.
Stavros was not typical in this regard, had never been typical, not from his boyhood on remote Kiluwa, to his attachment to the Xen-Bureau to his directorate on Halley during first contact. He found nothing difficult in languages, nor in alien customs, nor in recognizing provincial shortsightedness, whether offered by humans or by others.
He was Kiluwan by allegiance, a distinction the regul and most humans did not appreciate: remote, first-stage colony, populated by religious traditionalists, among whom writing was a sin and education an obsession. He had been born there a century ago, before peaceful, eccentric Kiluwa became a casualty of the mri wars.
A number of Kiluwans had distinguished themselves in Service; they were gone now, among casualties forty years ago, retaliation for Nisren. Stavros survived. It was characteristic of his Kiluwan upbringing that he should be driven to understand the species that had ordered Kiluwa obliterated. Regul had done this, not mri. Therefore he studied the phenomenon of regulminds much like the perfection Kiluwa had sought; and they had destroyed all that Kiluwa had built. There was, as the university masters had once said, a 'rhythm of justice' in this, a joining of cancelling forces. Now a Kiluwan came to displace regul, and the rhythm continued, binding them both.
He learned regul ways, looking for resolution to this; he observed meanness and coldness and self-seeking ambition, as well as reverence for mind. He had come from fear of regul to a yearning over themnot a little of sorrow for Kiluwa, whose dream in the flesh had come to this flawed reality; and there were truths beyond what he had been able to grasp, vices and virtues inherent in the biology of regul. He saw these, began to understand, at least, constraints of species perpetuation and population control-division into hive structures, breeding-elders and younglings, the docha that answered roughly to nations: he acquired suspicions about the value of treaties, which bound and yet did not bind docha which had not been party to the agreement.
They had contracted with Holn and suddenly found themselves dealing instead with Alagn; and Alagn honored the agreement.
Outwardly.
It had come to the point of truth. He had sat the long hours through the day and into dark and covered for Duncan's absence and committed every deception but the outright lie which the regul would not forgive. In the hours' passage he had grown more and more certain, first that Duncan had found something amiss or he would have returned quickly, certainly by the time dark gave him concealmentand when the fall of night did not bring him back, he became well sure that something amiss had found Duncan.
The pretenses with the regul became charade bitterly difficult to maintain. They could murder the SurTac and blandly fail to mention it with the morning's reports. And there was not a human going to land on Kesrith without Stavros' clearance: not in peace, at least, not without removing all possible resistance.
The regul surely understood this.
He sat and listened to the firing, knowing while it continued that Duncan was likely still alive.
He had been a shaper of policy in his days, had settled a new world and founded a university; had plotted strategies of diplomacy and war, had disposed of lives in numbers in which ships and crews were reckoned expendable, in which the likes of Sten Duncan perished in their hundreds.
But he heard the firing, and clenched his right hand and agonized in a desperate attempt to move his unwilling left with any strength at all. He was held to the sled. He was constrained to be patient.