“I hope that she will approach
Mijanothe
and that they will see fit to take her. I am relieved to be rid of her, and anxious at once that she may attempt some private
vaikka
on Tejef. But to destroy her without Khasif’s consent would have provoked difficulty with him and weakened the
nasul.
My alternatives were limited. She made herself
e-takkhe.
What else could I have done?”
Of course there was nothing else. The
nasithi
were both uncomfortable and unhappy, but they put forward no opposition.
“
Mijanothe
and
Tashavodh
have been advised of Mejakh’s irresponsible condition,” Chimele continued, “and I have warned Khasif. Rakhi, I want her position constantly monitored. Apply what encouragement you may toward her joining
Mijanothe
or departing this star altogether.”
“Be assured I shall,” said Rakhi.
“We have bitter choices ahead in the matter of Tejef. You know that Daniel has been lost. Against the
arastiethe
of
Ashanome,
Khasif himself has now become expendable.”
“Have you something in mind, Chimele,” asked Ashakh, frowning, “or are you finally asking advice?”
“I have something in mind, but it is not a pleasant choice. You are all, like Khasif, expendable.”
“And shall we die?” asked Rakhi somewhat wryly. “Chimele, I am a lazy fellow, I admit it. I have little
m’melakhia
and the pursuit of
vaikka
is too much excitement for my tastes—”
The
nasithi
smiled gently, for it was high exaggeration, and Rakhi was exceedingly
takkhe.
“—so, well, but if we are doomed,” Rakhi said, “need we be uncomfortable in the process? Perhaps a transfer earthward at the moment of oblivion would suffice. Or if not, perhaps Chimele will honor us with her confidence.”
“No,” said Chimele, “no, Rakhi, a warning is all you are due at the moment. But”—her face became quite earnest—“I regret it. What I must do, I will do, even to the last of you.”
“Then I will go down first,” said Ashakh, “because I know that Rakhi would indeed be miserable; and because I do not want Chaikhe to go at all. Omit her from your reckoning, Chimele. She is
katasathe
and carries a life;
Ashanome
has single lives enough for you to spend.”
“Inconvenient as this condition is,” said Chimele, “still Chaikhe will serve me when I require; but your request to go first I will gladly honor, and I will not treat Chaikhe recklessly.”
“It is not my wish,” said poor Chaikhe, “but I will give up my child to the
dhis
this day if it will advantage
Ashanome.
”
Chimele leaned over to take the
nasith’s
hand and pressed it gently. “Hail Chaikhe, brave Chaikhe. I am not of a disposition ever to become
dhisais.
I shall bear my children for
Ashanome’
s sake as I do other things, of
sorithias.
Yet I know how strong must be your
m’melakhia
for the child: you are born for it, your nature yearns for it as mine does toward
Ashanome
itself. I am disadvantaged before the enormity of your gift, and I mean to refuse it. I think you may serve me best as you are.”
“The sight of me is not abhorrent to you?”
“Chaikhe,” said Chimele with gentle laughter, “you are a great artist and your perception of
chanokhia
is usually unerring; but I find nothing abhorrent in your happiness, nor in your person. Now it is a bittersweet honor I pay you,” she added soberly, “but Tejef has always honored you greatly, and so,
katasathe,
once desired of him, you now become a weapon in my hands. How is your heart, Chaikhe? How far can you serve me?”
“Chimele,” Ashakh began to protest, but her displeasure silenced him and Chaikhe’s rejection of his defense finished the matter. He stretched his long legs out before him and studied the floor in grim silence.
“Once,” said Chaikhe, “indeed I was drawn to Tejef, but I am
takkhe
with
Ashanome
and I would see him die by any means at all rather than see him take our
arastiethe
from us.”
“Where Chaikhe is,” murmured Chimele, “I trust that all
Ashanome
’s affairs will be managed with
chanokhia.
”
9
“My lord nas kame.”
Aiela came awake looking into the mottled gray face of an amaut, feeling the cold touch of broad fingertips on his face, and lurched backward with a shudder. There was the yielding surface of a bed under his back. He looked to one side and the other. Isande lay beside him. They were in a plaster-walled room with paned doors open on a balcony and the outside air.
He probed at Daniel’s mind and found the contact dark. Fear clawed at him. He attempted to rise, falling on the amaut’s arms and still fighting to find the floor with his feet.
“O sir,” the amaut pleaded with him, and resorted at last to the strength of his long arms to force him back again. Aiela struggled blindly until the gentle touch of Isande’s returning consciousness reminded him that he had another asuthe. She felt his panic, read his fear that Daniel was dead, and thrust a probe past him to the human.
Not dead,
her incoherent consciousness judged.
Let go, Aiela.
He obeyed, trusting her good sense, and blinked sanely up at the amaut.
“Are you all right now, my lord nas kame?”
“Yes,” Aiela said. Released, he sat on the edge of the bed holding his head in his hands. “What time is it?”
“Why, about nine of the clock,” said the amaut. That was near evening. The amaut used the iduve’s ten-hour system, and day began at dawn.
That surprised him. It ought to be dark in Weissmouth, which was far to the east of Daniel and Tejef’s ship. Aiela tried to calculate what should have happened, and uneasily asked the date.
“Why, the nineteenth of Dushaph, the hundred and twenty-first of our colony’s—”
Aiela’s explosive oath made the amaut gulp rapidly and blink his saucer eyes. A day lost, a precious day lost with Chimele’s insistence on sedation; and Daniel’s mind remained silent in daylight, when the world should be awake.
“And who are you?” Aiela demanded.
The amaut backed a pace and bowed several times in nervous politeness. “I, most honorable sir? I am Kleph son of Kesht son of Griyash son of Kleph son of Oushuph son of Melkuash of
karsh
Melkuash of the colony of the third of Suphrush, earnestly at your service, sir.”
“Honored, Kleph son of Kesht,” Aiela murmured, trying to stand. He looked about the room of peeling plaster and worn furniture. Kleph in nervous attendance, hands ready should he fall. On Kleph’s shoulder was the insignia of high rank: Aiela found it at odds with the amaut’s manner, which was more appropriate to a backworld dockhand than a high colonial official. Part of the impression was conveyed by appearance, for Kleph was unhappily ugly even by amaut standards. Gray-green eyes stared up at him under a heavy brow ridge and the brow wrinkled into nothing beneath the dead-gray fringe of hair. Most amauts’ hair was straight and neat, cut bowl-fashion; Kleph’s flew out here and there in rebel tufts. The average amaut reached at least to the middle of Aiela’s chest. Kleph’s head came only scantly above Aiela’s waist, but his arms had the growth of a larger man’s and hung nearly past his knees. As for mottles, the most undesirable feature of amaut complexion, Kleph’s face was a patchwork of varishaded gray.
“May I help you, sir?”
“No.” Aiela shook off his hands and went out onto the balcony, Kleph hovering still at his elbow.
Weissmouth lay in ruins before them. Almost all the city had been reduced to burned-out shells, from just two streets beyond to the Weiss river, that rolled its green waters through the midst of the city to the salt waters of the landlocked sea. Only this sector preserved the human city as it had been, but there had never been beauty in the red clay brick and the squat square architecture, the concrete-and-glass buildings that crowded so closely on treeless streets. It had a sordid quaintness, alien in its concept, the sole city of an impoverished and failing world. Under amaut care the ravaged land might flourish again: they had skill with the most stubborn ground and their endurance in physical labor could irrigate the land and coax lush growth even upon rocky hillsides, hauling precious water by hand-powered machines as old as civilization in the zones of Kesuat, digging their settlements in under the earth with shovels and baskets where advanced machinery was economically ruinous, breeding until the settlement reached its limit and then launching forth new colonies until the world of Priamos could support no more. Then by instinct or by conscious design the birthrate would decline sharply, and those born in excess would be thrust offworld to find their own way. This was always the pattern.
But, Aiela remembered with a coldness at his belly, in less than two days neither human nor amautish skill would suffice to save the land: there would be only slag and cinders, and the green-flowing Weiss and the salt sea itself would have boiled into steam.
“What do you want here?” Aiela asked of Kleph. “Who sent you?”
Again a profusion of bows. “Lord nas kame, I am
bnesych
Gerlach’s Master of Accounts. Also it is my great honor to serve the
bnesych
by communicating with the starlord in the port.”
“Khasif, you mean.”
Terror shone in the round face. Lips trembled. All at once Aiela realized himself as the object of that terror: found himself the stranger in the outside, and saw Kleph’s eyes flinch from his. “Lord—they use no names with us. Please. To the ship in the port of Weissmouth, if that is the one you mean.”
“And who assigned you here?”
“
Bnesych
Gerlach, honorable lord. To guard your sleep.”
“Well, I give you permission to wait outside.”
Kleph looked up and blinked several times, then comprehended the order and bowed and bobbed his way to the door. It closed after, and Aiela imagined the fellow would be close by it outside.
The sun was fast declining to the horizon. Aiela leaned upon the railing with his eyes unfocused on the golding clouds, reaching again for Daniel—not dead, not dead, Isande assured him. So inevitably Daniel would wake and he would be wrenched across dimensionless space to empathy with the human, in whatever condition his body survived. His screening felt increasingly unreliable. Sweat broke out upon him. He perceived himself drawn toward Daniel’s private oblivion and fought back; the railing seemed insubstantial.
Isande perceived his trouble. She arose and hurried out to reach him. At her second step from the bed, mind-touch screamed panic. Her hurtling body fell through the door, her hands clutching for the rail. Aiela seized her, straining her stiff body to him. Her eyes stared upward into the sky, her mind hurtling up into the horrifying depth of heaven, a blue-gold chasm that yawned without limit.
He covered her eyes and hugged her face against him, dizzied by the vertigo she felt, the utter terror of sky above that alternately gaped into infinity and constricted into a weight she could not bear. Proud Isande, so capable in the world of
Ashanome:
to lift her head again and confront the sky was an act of bravery that sent her senses reeling.
Nine thousand years of voyaging—and world-sense was no longer in her. “It is one thing to have seen the sky through your eyes,” she said, “but I feel it, Aiela, I feel it. Oh, this is wretched. I think I am going to be sick.”
He helped her walk inside and sat with her on the bed, holding her until the chill passed from her limbs. She was not sick; pride would not let her be, and with native stubbornness she tore herself free and staggered toward the balcony to do battle with her weakness. He caught her before she could fall, held her with the same gentle force she had lent him so often at need. Her arms were about him and for a brief moment she picked up his steadiness and was content just to breathe.
The feeling of wrongness persisted. Her world had been perceptibly concave, revolving in perceptible cycles, millennium upon millennium. The great convexity of Priamos seemed terrifyingly stationary, defying reason and gravity at once, and science and her senses warred.
“How can I be of use,” she cried, “when all my mind can give yours is vertigo? O Aiela, Aiela, it happens to some of us, it happens—but oh, why me? Of all people, why me?”
“Hush.” He brought her again to the bed and let her down upon it, propping her with pillows. He sat beside her, her small waist under the bridge of his arm. In deep tenderness he touched her face and wiped her angry tears and let his hand trail to her shoulder, feeling again an old familiar longing for this woman, muted by circumstances and their own distress; but he would hurt with her pain and be glad of her comfort for a reason in which the
chiabres
was only incidental.
My
selfishness,
he thought bitterly,
my cursed selfishness in bringing you here;
and he felt her mind open as it had never opened, reaching at him, terrified—she would not be put away, would not be forgotten while he chased after human phantoms, would not find him dying and unreachable again.
He sealed against her. It took great effort.
Daniel,
she read in tearful fury, jealousy:
Daniel, Daniel, his thoughts, he—
Human beings: human ethics, human foulness—the experience of an alien being who had known the worst of his own species and of the amaut, things she had known of, but that only he had owned: the attitudes, the habits, the
feeling
of being human.
Asuthithekkhe
with Daniel had been too long, too deep; with all the darknesses left, the secrets—to a devastating degree he
was
human.
“Aiela,” she pleaded, put her arms about his neck and touched face to face, one side and the other. Humans showed tenderness for each other differently. Even at such a moment he had to be aware of it, and took her hands from him—too forcefully: he touched his fingers to her cheek, trembling.