Hunter Of Worlds

Chapter 4

CHIMELE WAS PERTURBED. It was evident in her brooding expression and her attitude as she leaned in the corner of her chair; she was not pleased; and she was not alone for this audience: four other iduve were with her, and with that curious sense of deja vu Isande’s instruction imparted, Aiela knew them. They were Chimele’s nasithi-katasakke, her half-brothers and -sister by common-mating.

The woman Chaikhe was youngest: an Artist, a singer of songs; by kalliran standards Chaikhe was too thin to be beautiful, but she was gentle and thoughtful toward the kamethi. She had also thought of him with interest: Isande had warned him of it; but Chimele had said no, and that ended it. Chaikhe was becoming interested in katasakke, in common-mating, the presumable cause of restlessness; but an iduve with that urge would rapidly lose all interest in m’metanei. Beside Chaikhe, eyeing him fixedly, sat her full brother Ashakh, a long-faced man, exceedingly tall and thin. Ashakh was renowned for intelligence and coldness to emotion even among iduve. He was Ashanome’s chief Navigator and master of much of the ship’s actual operation, from its terrible armament to the computers that were the heart of the ship’s machinery and memory. He did not impress one as a man who made mistakes, nor as one to be crossed with impunity. And next to Ashakh, leaning on one arm of the chair, sat Rakhi, the brother that Chimele most regarded. Rakhi was of no great beauty, and for an iduve he was a little plump. Also he had a shameful bent toward kutikkase—a taste for physical comfort too great to be honorable among iduve. But he was devoted to Chimele, and he was extraordinarily kind to the noi kame and even to the seldom-noticed amaut, who adored him as their personal patron. Besides, at the heart of this soft, often-smiling fellow was a heart of greater bravery than most suspected.

The third of the brothers was eldest: Khasif, a giant of a man, strikingly handsome, sullen-eyed—older than Chimele, but under her authority. He was of the order of Scientists, a xenoarchaeologist. He had a keen m’melakhia—an impelling hunger for new experience—and noi kame made themselves scarce when he was about, for he had killed on two occasions. This was the man Isande so feared, although—she had admitted—she did not think he was consciously cruel. Khasif was impatient and energetic in his solutions, a trait much honored among iduve, as long as it was tempered with refinement, with chanokhia. He had the reputation of being a very dangerous man, but in Isande’s memory he had never been a petty one.

“How fares Daniel?” asked Chimele. “Why did you ask sedation so early? Who gave you leave for this?”

“We were tiring,” said Aiela. “You gave me leave to order what I thought best, and we were tired, we—“

“Aiela-kameth,” Chaikhe intervened gently. “Is there progress?”

“Yes.”

“Will complete asuthithekkhe be possible with this being? Can you reach that state with him, that you can be one with him?”

“I don’t—I don’t think it is safe. No. I don’t want that.”

“Is this yours to decide?” Ashakh’s tones were like icewater on the silken voice of Chaikhe. “Kameth—you were instructed.”

He wanted to tell them. The memory of that contact was still vivid in his mind, such that he still shuddered. But there was no patience in Ashakh’s thin-lipped face, neither patience nor mercy nor understanding of weakness. “We are different,” he found himself saying, to fill the silence. Ashakh only stared. “Give me time,” he said again.

“We are on a schedule,” Ashakh said. “This should have been made clear to you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Specify the points of difference.”

“Ethics, experience. He isn’t hostile, not yet. He mistrusts—he mistrusts me, this place, all things alien.”

“Is it not your burden to reconcile these differences?”

“Sir.” Aiela’s hands sweated and he folded his arms, pressing his palms against his sides. He did not like to look Ashakh in the face, but the iduve stared at him unblinkingly. “Sir, we are able to communicate. But he is not gullible, and I’m running out of answers that will satisfy him. That was why I resorted to the sedative. He’s beginning to ask questions. I had no more easy answers. What am I supposed to tell him?”

“Aiela.” Khasif drew his attention to the left. “What is your personal reaction to the being?”

“I don’t know.” His mouth was dry. He looked into Khasif s face, that was the substance of Isande’s nightmares, perfect and cold. “I try—I try to avoid offending him—“

“What is the ethical pattern, the social structure? Does he recognize kalliran patterns?”

“Close to kallia. But not the same. I can’t tell you: not the same at all.”

“Be more precise.”

“Am I supposed to have learned something in particular?” Aiela burst out, harried and regretting his tone at once. The idoikkhe pulsed painlessly, once, twice: he looked from one to the other of them, not knowing who had done it, knowing it for a warning. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I was primed to study this man, but no one will tell me just what I was looking for. Now you’ve taken Isande away from me too. How am I to know what questions to start with?”

His answer caused a little ruffling among the iduve, and merry Rakhi laughed outright and looked sidelong at Chimele. “Au, this one has a sting, Chimele.” He looked back at Aiela. “And what have you learned, thus ignorant of your purpose, o m’metane?”

“That the amaut have intruded into human space, which they swore in a treaty with the Halliran Idai they would never do. This man came from human space. They lost most of his shipment because these humans weren’t acclimated to the kind of abuse they received. Is that what you want to hear? Until you tell me what you mean to do with him, I’m afraid I can’t do much more.”

Chimele had not been amused. She frowned and stirred in her chair, placing her hands on its arms. “Can you, Aiela, prepare this human for our own examination by tomorrow?”

“That’s impossible. No. And what kind of—?”

“By tomorrow evening.”

“If you want something, then make it clear what it is and maybe I can learn it. But he wants answers. He has questions, and I can’t keep putting him off, not without creating you an enemy—or do you care?”

“You will have to—put him off, as you express it.”

“I’m not going to lie to him, even by omission. What are you going to do with him?”

“I prefer that this human not be admitted to our presence with the promise of anything. Do you understand me, Aiela? If you promise this being anything, it will be the burden of your honor to pay for it; make sure your resources are adequate. I will not consider myself or the nasul bound by your ignorant and unauthorized generosity. Go back to your quarters.”

“I will not lie to him for you.”

“Go back to your quarters. You are not noticed.” This time there was no softness at all in her tone, and he knew he dared not dispute with her further. Even Rakhi took the smile from his face and straightened in his chair. Aiela omitted the bow of courtesy, turned on his heel and walked out.

He had ruined matters. When he was stressed his voice rose, and he had let it happen, had lost his case for it. He had felt when he walked in that Chimele was not in a mood for patience; and he realized in hindsight that the nasithi had tried to avert disaster: Rakhi, he thought, Rakhi, who had always been kind to Isande, had wished to stop him.

He returned to the kamethi level in utmost dejection, realized the late hour and considered returning to the lab and requesting to have a sedative for himself. His nerves could bear no more. But he had never liked such things, liked less to deal with Ghiavre, the iduve first Surgeon; and it occurred to him that Daniel might wake prematurely and need him. He decided against it.

He went to his quarters and prepared for bed, settled in with notebook and pen and diverted his thoughts to record-keeping on Daniel, then, upon the sudden cold thought that the iduve might not respect the sanctity of his belongings, he tore up everything and threw it into the disposal. The suspicion distressed him. As a kallia he had never thought of such things; he had never needed to suspect such ikastien on the part of his superiors.

Daniel had learned such suspicion. It was human.

With that distressing thought he turned out the lights and lay still until his muddled thoughts drifted into sleep.

The idoikkhe jolted him, brutally, so that he woke with an outcry and clawed his way up to the nearest chair.

Isande, he had cast, the reflex of two days of dependency; and to his surprised relief there was a response, albeit a muzzy one.

Aiela, she responded, remembered Daniel, instantly tried to learn his health and began to pick up the immediate present: Chimele, summoning him, angry; and Daniel—What have you done? she sent back, shivering with fear; but he prodded her toward the moment, thrusting through the flutter of her drug-hazed thoughts.

“This is Chimele’s sleep cycle too,” he sent. “Does she always exercise her tempers in the middle of the night?”

The idoikkhe stung him again, momentarily disrupting their communication. Aiela reached for his clothes and pulled them on, while Isande’s thoughts threaded back into his mind. She scanned enough to blame him for matters, and she was distressed enough to let it seep through; but she had the grace to keep that feeling down. Now was important. He was important. He had to take her advice now; he could be hurt, badly.

“Chimele’s hours are seldom predictable,” she informed him, her outermost thoughts calm and ordered. But what lay under it was a peculiar physical fear that unstrung his nerves.

He looked at the time: it was well past midnight, and Chimele, like Ashakh, did not impress him as one who took the leisure for whimsy. He pulled his sweater over his head, started for the door, but he paused to hurl at Isande the demand that she drop her screening, guide him. He felt her reticence; when it melted, he almost wished otherwise.

Fear came, nightmares of Khasif, chilling and sexual at once. Few things could cause an iduve to act irrationally,- but there was one outstanding exception, and iduve when irritated with kamethi were prone to it.

He stopped square in the doorway, blood leaving his face and returning in a hot rush. Her urgency prodded him into motion again, her anger and her terror like ice in his belly. No, he insisted again and again. Isande had been terrified once and long ago: she was scarred by the experience and dwelled on it excessively—it embarrassed him, that he had to express that thought: he knew it for truth. He wished her still.

“It happens,” Isande insisted, with such firmness that it shook his conviction. “It is katasukke—pleasure-mating.” And quickly, without preface, apology, or overmuch delicacy, she fed across what she knew or guessed of the iduve’s intimate habits—alienness only remotely communicated in katasukke with noi kame, a union between iduve in katasakke that was fraught with violence and shielded in ritual and secrecy. Katasukke was gentler: sensible noi kame were treated with casual indulgence or casual negligence according to the mood of the iduve in question; but cruelty was e-chanokhia, highly improper, whatever unknown and violent things they did among themselves. But both katasakke and katasukke triggered dangerous emotions in the ordinarily dispassionate iduve. Vaikka was somehow involved in mating, and it was not uncommon that someone was killed. In Isande’s mind any irrationality in the iduve emanated from that one urge: it was the one thing that could undo their common sense, and when it was undone, it was a madness as alien as their normal calm.

He shook off these things, hurried through the corridors while Isande’s anxious presence thrust into his mind behaviors and apologies, fawning kameth graces meant to appease Chimele. Vaikka with a nas kame had this for an expected result, and if he provoked her further now he would be lucky to escape with his life.

He rejected Isande and her opinions, prideful and offended, and knew that Isande was crying, and frustrated with him and furious. Her anger grew so desperate that he had to screen against her, and bade her leave him alone. He was ashamed enough at this disgraceful situation without having her lodged as resident observer in his mind. He knew her hysterical upon the subject, and even so could not help fearing he was walking into something he did not want to contemplate.

With Isande aware, mind-bound to him.

Leave me alone! he raged at her..

She went; and then he was sorry for the silence.

Chimele was waiting for him, seated in her accustomed chair as a tape unreeled on the wall screen with dizzying rapidity: the day’s reports, quite probably. She cut it off, using a manual control instead of the mental ones of which the iduve were capable—a choice, he had learned, which betokened an iduve with mind already occupied.

“You took an unseemly amount of time responding,” she said.

“I was asleep.” Fear added, shaming him: “I’m sorry.”

“You did not expect, then, to be called?”

“No,” he said: and doubled over as the idoikkhe hit him with overwhelming pain. He was surprised into an outcry, but bit it off and straightened, furious.

“Well, consider it settled, then,” she said, “and cheaply so. Be wiser in the future. Return to your quarters.”

“All of you are demented,” he cried, and it struck, this time enough to gray the senses, and the pain quite washed his mind of everything. When it stopped he was on his face on the floor, and to his horror he felt Isande’s hurt presence in him, holding to him, trying to absorb the pain and reason with him to stay down.

“Aiela,” said Chimele, “you clearly fail to understand me.”

“I don’t want—“ the idoikkhe stung him again, a gentle reproof compared with what had touched him a moment before. It jolted raw nerves and made him cringe physically in dread: the cowardice it instilled made him both ashamed and angry; and there was Isande’s anxious intrusion again. The two-sided assault was too much. He clutched his head and begged his asuthe to leave him, even while he stumbled to his feet, unwilling to be treated so.

She can destroy you, Isande sent him hysterically. She has her honor to think of. Vaikka, Aiela, vaikka!

“Is it Isande?” asked Chimele. “Is it she that troubles you?”

“She’s being hurt. She won’t go away. Please stop it.”

And then he knew that Isande’s idoikkhe had pained her, once, twice, with increasing severity, and the mournful and loyal presence fled.

“Aiela,” said Chimele, “all my life I have dealt gently with my kamethi. Why will you persist in provoking me? Is it ignorance or is it design?”

“It’s my nature,” he said, which further offended her; but this time she only scowled and regarded him with deep dissatisfaction.

“Your ignorance of us has not been noticed: the nearest equivalent is ‘forgiven.’ It will be a serious error on your part to assume this will continue without limit.”

“I honestly,” he insisted, “do not understand you.”

“We are not in the habit of patience with metane-tekasu-phre. Nor do we make evident our discomforts. Au, m’metane, I should have the hide from you.” There was self-control; and under it there was a rage that made his skin cold: run now, he thought, and become like the others—no. She would deal with him, explaining matters; he would stand there until she did so.

For a long moment he stood still, expected the touch of the idoikkhe for it; she did not move either.

“Aiela,” she said then, in a greatly controlled voice, “I was disadvantaged before my nasithi-katasakke.” And when he only stared at her, helplessly unenlightened: “For three thousand years Ashanome has taken no outsider-m’metane aboard,” she said. “I have never dealt with the likes of you.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“You disputed with my nasithi. Then you turned the same discourtesy on me. Had you no perception?”

“I had cause,” he declared in temper too deep-running to reckon of her anger, and his hand went to the idoikkhe on reflex. “This doesn’t turn off my mind or my conscience, and I still want to know what you intend with the man Daniel.”

Chimele literally trembled with rage. He had never seen so dangerous a look on any sane and sentient face, but the pain he expected did not come. She stilled her anger with an evident effort.

“Nas-suphres,” she said in a tone of cosmic contempt. “You are hopeless, m’metane”

“How so?” he responded. “How so—ignorant?”

“Because you provoke me and trust my forbearance. This is the act of a stupid or an ignorant being. And did I truly believe you capable of vaikka, you would find yourself woefully outmatched. You are not irreplaceable, m’metane, and you are perilously close to extinction at this moment.”

“I have no confidence at all in your forbearance, and I well know you mean your threats.”

“The clumsiness of your language makes rational conversation impossible. You are nothing, and I could wipe you out with a thought. I should think the reputedly ordered processes of the kalliran mind would dictate caution. I fail to perceive why you attack me.”

Mad, he thought in panic, remembering at the same time that she had mental control of the idoikkhe. He wanted to leave. He could not think how. “I have not attacked you,” he said in a quiet, reasoning voice, as one would talk to the insane. “I know better.”

She arose and moved away from him in great vexation, then looked back with some semblance of control restored. “I warned you once, Aiela, do not play at vaikka with us. You are incredibly ignorant, but you have a courage which I respect above all metane-traits. Do you not understand I must maintain sorithias—that I have the dignity of my office to consider?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Au, this is impossible. Perhaps Isande can make it clear.”

“No! No, let her alone. I want none of her explanations. I have my mind clear enough without need of her rationalizations.”

“You are incredible,” Chimele exclaimed indignantly, and returned to him, seized both his hands, and made him sit down opposite her, a contact he hated, and she seemed to realize it. “Aiela. Do not press me. I must retaliate. We delight to be generous to our kamethi, but we will not have gifts demanded of us. We will not be pressed and not retaliate, we will not be affronted and do nothing. It is physically impossible. Can you not comprehend that?”

Her hands trembled. He felt it and remembered Isande’s warning of iduve violence, the irrational and uncontrollable rages of which these cold beings were capable. But Chimele seemed yet in control, and her amethyst eyes locked with his in deep earnest, so plain a look it was almost like the touch of his asuthi. She let him go.

“I cannot protect you, poor m’metane, if you will persist in playing games of anger with us, if you persist in incurring punishment and fighting back when you receive the consequences of your impudence. You do not want to live under our law; you are not capable of it. And if you were wise, you would have left when I told you to go.”

“I do not understand,” he said. “I simply do not understand.”

“Aiela—“ Her indigo face showed stress. His hand still rested across his knee as he leaned forward, too tense to move. Now she took it back into hers, her slim fingers moving lightly across the back of it as if she found its color or the texture of his skin something remarkably fascinating. Pride and anger notwithstanding, he sensed nothing insulting in that touch, rather that Chimele drew a certain calm from that contact, that her mood shifted back to reason, and that it would be a perilous move if he jerked his hand away. He sweated with fear, not of iduve science or power—his rational faculty feared that; but something else worked in him, something subconscious that recognized Chimele and shuddered instinctively. He wished himself out that door with many doors between them; but her hand still moved over his, and her violet eyes stared into him.

“If you had been born among the kamethi,” said Chimele softly, “you would never have run afoul of me, for no nas kame would ever have provoked me so far. He would have had the sense to run away and wait until I had called him again. You are different, and I have allowed for that—this far. And so that you will understand, ignorant kameth: you were impertinent with others and impertinent exceedingly with me—and being Orithain, I dispense judgments to the nasithi. How then shall I descend to publicly chastise a nas kame? They wished to persuade me to be patient; and I chose to be patient, remembering what you are; but then, au, after trading words with my nasithi, you must ignore my direct order and debate me what disposition I am to make of this human.” She drew breath: when she went on it was in a calmer voice. “Rakhi could not reprimand my kameth in my presence; I could not do so in theirs. And there you stood, gambling with five of us in the mistaken confidence that your life was too valuable for me to waste. Were you iduve, I should say that were an extremely hazardous form of vaikka. Were you iduve, you would have lost that game. But because you are m’metane, you were allowed to do what an iduve would have died for doing.”

“And is iduve pride that vulnerable, then?”

“Stop challenging me!”

It was a cry of anguish. Chimele herself looked terrified, reminding him for all the world of an essentially friendly animal being provoked beyond endurance, a creature teased to the point of madness by some child it loved, shivering with taut nerves and repressed instincts. She could not help it, as an animal could not resist a move from its prey.

Vaikka.

He grasped it then—a game that was indeed for iduve only, a name that shielded a most terrifying instinct, one that the iduve themselves must fear, for it tore apart all their careful rationality. The compulsion must indeed be involved in their matings—intricate, unkalliran instinct. It was reasonable that the noi kame feared above all the iduve’s affections, feared closeness. A kallia quite literally did not have a nervous system attuned to that kind of contest. A kallia would want to play the game part of the way and then quit before someone was hurt; but there was a point past which the iduve could not quit.

“It is possible,” he said carefully, “that I did not use good judgment.”

She grew perceptibly calmer at that slight retreat, slowed her breathing, patted his arm with the thoughtless affection one might show a pet, and then drew back her hand as if mindful of his inward shudder. “Surely then,” she said, “understanding your nature and ours, you need not stand so straight or stare so insolently when that irrepressible tongue of yours brings you afoul of our tempers.”

“I was not educated as kameth.”

“I perceive your difficulty. But do not seek to live by our law. You cannot. And it is not reasonable for you to expect us to bear all the burden of self-restraint. I thrust you into close contact with us, a contact most kameth-born scarcely know. It cannot be remedied. I trusted your common sense and forgot kalliran—I know not whether to say obstinacy or elethia, an admirable trait—but that and our aggressiveness, our m’melakhia, is a very volatile combination.”

“I begin to see that.”

“Go back to your quarters this night, for your safety’s sake. I will respect your m’melakhia, your—protection—of your human asuthe as much as I can, and I will not remember this conversation to your hurt. You are wiser than you were. I advise you to make it apparent to my nasithi-ka-tasakke that vaikka has been settled.”

“How?”

“By your amended attitude and increased discretion in our presence.”

“I understand,” he said, hesitated awkwardly until an impatient gesture made clear his dismissal. Almost he delayed to thank her, but looking again into her eyes chilled the impulse into silence: he bowed, turned, felt her eyes on his back the whole long distance to the door.

The safety of the hall, the sealing of the door behind him, brought a physical relief. He lowered his eyes and flinched past an iduve who was passing, secured the lift alone, and was glad to find the kamethi level, where kallia thronged the concourse—the alternate day-cycle, whose waking was his night.

He knew the iduve finally.

Predators.

Outsiders had never understood the end of the Domination, the Sundering of the iduve empire. He began to.

They were hunters from their very origins—a species for whom all else that moved was prey, for whom others of their own kind were intolerable. They had hunted the metrosi to exhaustion and drifted elsewhere. Now they were back. The enormity of the surmise grew in him like a sickly chill.

The nasul—jealously controlling its territory.

Perhaps even the iduve themselves had forgotten what they were; the pride of ritual and ceremony shielded their instincts, civilized them, as civilization had dealt with the instincts of kallia, who had been the natural prey of other hunters in packs, on the plains of prehistoric Aus Qao. Subtle reactions, a tensing of muscles, an interchange of movements, the steadiness of the eyes—these defined hunter and hunted. That was the thing he had looked in the face when he had stared into Chimele’s at close range. He had wished to run and had instinctively known better—that if he stayed very, very still, it might pad softly away.

He shivered, the hair rising at the nape of his neck as if she still watched him. When he felt Isande’s frightened presence beginning to creep back into his mind, he screened heavily, for he still was shaken, and he was ashamed for her to know the extent of it.

You nearly killed yourself, she accused him. I warned you, I warned you—

“Not well enough,” he returned. “You have a blind spot. Or you do not understand them.”

“I have lived my whole life among them,” she retorted, “and I have never seen what you saw tonight—not even from Khasif.”

He accepted that for truth. Likely kamethi had been taught never to draw such responses. But he was world-born; he himself had sat by fires at night in the wilds of Lelle, with a ring of light to guard his sleep, and he knew Chimele in all the atavistic fears of his species.

A predator who had assumed civilization.

Who had touched him gently and refrained, despite his best attempt to provoke her—ignorant, she had called him, and justly.

“Chimele is iduve,” Isande hurled against the warmth of that thought, forcefully, for she hated worse than anything to have her advice ignored. “And you will live longer if you remember that we are only kamethi, and avoid provoking her and avoid attracting her notice to yourself.”

This from Isande, Isande who loved Chimele, who willingly served the iduve: who trembled in her heart each time she dealt with Chimele’s temper. It was a sorrowful life she had accepted: he let that slip and was sorry, for Isande flared, hot and unshielded.

Am I nothing, she fired at him, because I was born kameth? My world-born friend, I have been places you have not dreamed of, and seen things you cannot understand. And as it regards the iduve, my friend, I have lived among them, and what of their language you know, you lifted from my mind, what of their customs you understand you have learned from me, and what consideration you had from Chimele you have because of me, so do not lecture me as an expert on the iduve. If you were not so ikas, you would not have had so dangerous an experience.

Well, he returned, I hardly seem to have a monopoly on vanity or selfishness or arrogance, do I?

And the resentments that echoed back and forth, too much truth, sent both personalities reeling apart, hurt.

Isande was first to touch again, grieving. “Aiela,” she pleaded, “Asuthi must not quarrel. Please, Aiela.”

“I am vain and arrogant,” he admitted, “and I have had almost all the damage my sanity can stand tonight, Isande. I’m tired. Go away.”

Daniel, she remembered, dismay and regret sharp in her; she remembered other things she had gleaned of his mind, and riffled through all the memory he left unscreened, gathering this and that with a rising feeling of distress, of outrage. He felt her, poised to blame him for everything, to accuse him of things the worse because they were just.

And she did not. He was so tired his legs shook under him, and he felt himself very lonely, even in her presence: he had disregarded everything she had meant to protect them both, and now that she had utmost cause to rage against him she pitied him too much to accuse him. She knew his nature and his incapacity, and she pitied him.

Leave me alone, he wished her. And then furiously: Leave me alone, will you?

She fled.

He undressed, washed, went through all the ritual of preparing for bed, and tried to sleep. It was impossible. Reaction still had his muscles in knots. When he closed his eyes he saw the paredre, Chimele—cages.

He arose and walked the floor, tried listening to his old tapes, that he had brought from Kartos. It was worse than the silence. He cut off the sound, idly cut in on the monitor that was preset for Daniel’s next-door apartment. The human was still blissfully unconscious.

And the memory returned, how it had felt to live in that envelope of alien flesh. He broke the connection, dizzied and disoriented, wandered back to the bath, drifting as he had a dozen times, to the full-length mirror. It contained all in Ashanome that was familiar, that was known.

His image stared back at him, naked of everything but the idoikkhe that circled his wrist like some bizarre barbaric ornament. His silver hair was beginning a slow recovery from the surgeons’ unimaginative barbering, and he had grown accustomed to the change. His features among kallia were considered proper: straight silver brows, a straight nose with a little flare to the nostrils, a mouth wide enough to show generosity, a chin prominent as with all the Lyailleues. He fingered the high prominence of his cheekbone and the hollow beneath, staring into his own eyes closely in the mirror, wondering how much of the iduve eye was iris. Was it all? And could they see color as kallia could? Humans did. He knew that. He considered the rest of himself, 7.8 meis in stature, a little taller than the average, broad-shouldered and slim at the hips, with the slender, well-muscled limbs of an athlete, the flat belly and muscular girdle of a runner, a hard-trained body that had no particular faults. He had never known serious illness, had suffered no wounds, had never known privation that was not his own choice. He was parome Deian’s only son; if he had had any faults at birth, no money would have been spared to mend them. If he had lacked any in wit, parome Deian’s money would have purchased every known aid to teach him and improve his mind. When he grew bored, there had instantly been toys and games and hunts and athletics, and when he became a young man, there had been all the loveliest and most proper girls, the most exclusive parties. There were private instructors, the most proper and demanding schools; and there had been family despair when he insisted on pursuing athletics to the detriment of his studies, on risking his life in hunts, on turning down a career in district politics that was calculated to lead to the highest levels of government—a lack of family and filial giyre that his father refused to understand (“Ikas,” Deian had said, “and ungrateful.” “Am I ikas,” he had answered, eighteen and all-knowing, “because it is not my pattern to be like you?” “There have been Lyailleues on the High Council for two hundred years, honoring Xolun and this house. My son will not take it on himself to end that tradition.”)

Once that year he had thought of hurling his plane (a luxury model) in a pyrotechnic finish at Mount Ryi, in full view of all the fashionable estates and the Xolun zone capitol. The news services would be buzzing with wonder for days: Son of Deian, Suicide; and people would be shaking their heads and making small noises of despair and secretly hating him, thinking if only they had had his advantages they would not have thrown them away. When he was nineteen he had quit school so that his father Deian would disinherit him and his mother and sister would give him up; but he also saw it broke their hearts, and his few passages with the pleasures of the metrosi’s darker side left him disgusted and embarrassed, for these things were also available in the estates in the shadow of Ryi—without the filth and the fear. In the end he had surrendered and returned home to the respectability planned for him, to learn the business of government.

(“Son, it is always necessary to compromise. That’s how things are done.” “Even when one is right, sir?” “Right— right; you always assume you know exactly where that is, don’t you? I’m sure I don’t. If you go on like that, no one could ever agree. Compromise. Sometimes you have to yield a little to win a little later on.”)

He had tried.

A year later he had sought the anonymity of the service, and even that had proved no refuge secure from Deian’s money and influence. Perhaps, he thought, it was his father’s way of setting him free; or perhaps Deian still believed he would have come home, older, wiser. He would have come home, sooner or later. He had spent his life pursuing the elusive hope of adequacy, a constant struggle for breath in the rarified atmosphere of his father’s ambitions and the giyre of his ancient family.

(“I would have come home someday,” he had written in that final letter. “I have gained the good sense to honor your wisdom and experience, Father, and I have gained enough wisdom of my own to have kept on in my own path. What giyre I had of my crew, I earned; and that is important to me. What giyre I gave, I chose to give, and that was important too. I honor you, very much; but I would not have left the service.”)

It was irony. He closed his hand about the idoikkhe and reminded himself what he was worth at the end of all his father’s planning and his resisting: a being scantly adequate to serve the iduve, equal to a gracious (if vain) young woman and a battered bit of human freight off an amaut transport. He had lived with the sky overhead to be reached, whether or not he chose to try, and whether or not he had realized it before, he had been an arrogant and a stubborn man. Now he had been shown where the sky stopped, and it was a shattering experience.

He imagined Daniel’s image in the glass. The skin went shades of brown and pink, the silver hair turned dark, the eyes shadowed and hunted, his body slight with hunger, crossed with red and purple scars from untreated wounds, feet lacerated by the cruel mesh. His mind held memories of absolute horror, cages, brutality unimagined in the Halliran Idai. Even before those, there were memories of hunger, a childhood in a dark, cement-walled house beside a trickling canal, summers of sandstorms that blasted crops, dunes that year by year encroached upon fields, advanced upon the house, threatened the life-giving canal. At some time—Aiela had inherited the memories in bits and .snatches—Daniel had left that world for the military, and he had served as a technician of limited skills. He had known a great many primitive human ports, until the life sickened him and he went home again, only to find his father dead, his mother remarried, his brothers gone offworld, the farm buried under dunes.

War. Shipping lanes closed, merchantmen commandeered for military service. Daniel—senior now over inexperienced recruits, wearing the crisp blue of a technician on a decent ship, well fed, with money promised to his account. That had lasted seven days, until two stunning defeats had driven the human forces into retreat and then into rout, and men were required by martial law to seek their home ports and keep order there as the panic spread.

That was the way fortune operated for Daniel. His hands had been emptied every time he had them full; but being Daniel, he would shrug perplexedly, get down on his knees and begin picking up the pieces. He was uneducated, but he had a keen intuition, an intelligence that sucked in information like a vacuum drawing air, omnivorously, taking scrap and debris along with the pure, sorting, analyzing. He had never been anyone, he had never had anything; but he was not going to stop living until he was sure there was nothing to be had. That was Daniel—a man who had always been hungry. M’melakhia, Chimele would call it.

And Daniel’s desire was the fevered dream of his half-sensible interludes in the cage, when the fields were green and the canal pure and full and orchards bloomed beside a white-walled house. He asked nothing more nor less than that—except the company of others of his kind. He had never deserved to be appropriated to Ashanome, swallowed whole by the pride of a Lyailleue and linked to a kalliran woman who had never learned to be kallia, who was more than a little iduve.

Aiela, Isande’s thought reproved him, sorrowing.

How long have you been with me? He flushed with anger, for he had been deep in his own concerns and Isande’s skill was such that he did not always perceive her touch. It was not the visual sense that embarrassed him: she knew his body as he knew hers, for that was a part of self-concept. It was his mind’s privacy that he did not like thus exposed, and he knew at once from the backspill that she had caught rather more than she thought he would like.

“Dear Aiela,” her silent voice came echoing. “No, don’t screen me out. I am sorry for quarreling. I know I offend you.”

“I am sorry,” he sent, the merest surface of his thoughts, “for a great many things.”

“You are not sure you can handle me,” she said. “That troubles you. You are not accustomed to that. You are not half so cruel or fierce as I am, I know it; but you are twice as brave—too much so, sometimes, when that terrible pride of yours is touched.”

“I have no pride,” he said. “Not since Kartos.”

She was amused, which stung. “No. No. It is there; but you have had it bruised—“ the amusement faded, regretting his offense, and yet she knew herself right by his very reaction: right, and self-confident. “Chimele—the iduve in general—have touched it. You are just now realizing that this is forever, and it frightens you terribly.”

Her words stung, and a feeling wholly ikas rose up in him. “I don’t need to live on your terms. I will not.”

She was silent for a time, sifting matters. “You do not understand Ashanome. Tonight you saw the chanokhia of Chimele, and I am afraid you have begun to love her. No— no, I know: not in that way. It is something worse. It is m’melakhia-love. It is arastiethe you want from her—iduve honor; and no m’metane can ever have that”

“You can’t even think like a kallia, can you?”

“Aiela, Aiela, you are dealing with an iduve. Realize it. You are reacting to her as she is. You are thinking giyre, but Chimele cannot give you what she cannot even understand. For her there is only arastiethe, and the honor of an iduve demands too much of us. It costs too much, Aiela.”

“She might be capable of understanding. Isande, she tried—“

“Avoid her!”

Screens dropped. Loneliness, a dead asuthe, years of silence. There was still loneliness, an asuthe who rejected her advice, who blindly, obstinately sought what had killed the other. Was the fault in her? Was it she that killed? She loved Chimele, and gave and gave, and the iduve knew only how to take. Reha had loved Chimele: asuthe to herself, how could he have helped it? He would be alive now, but that he had learned to love Chimele. She would not teach another.

Darkness. Cold. Screens tumbled. Aiela flinched and she snatched the memory away, recovering herself, smothering it as she had learned to do.

You denied, he reminded her gently, That Ashanome killed him. Was Chimele responsible, after all?

The screens stayed in place. Only the words came through, carefully controlled. “She was not responsible. Honor is all she can give. To the nasithi, that is everything. But what is it worth to a m’metane?”

Yet you do love her, Aiela sent, and sad laughter bubbled back.

“Listen—she tried with all her iduvish heart to make me happy. Three times she asked me to take another asuthe. ‘He is like you,’ she said this time. ‘He is intelligent, he is of great chanokhia for a m’metane. Can you work with this one?’ I consented. She risked a great deal to offer me that choice. You would have to know the iduve to realize how difficult that was for her—to try a thing when she has only reason to help her. She does feel—something. I am not sure what. After all these years, I am not sure what. Maybe we m’metanei try to read into them what we wish were there. Perhaps that is why we keep giving, when we know better.”

“Let me alone,” he wished her. “If I’m to make a mistake, then let it be my mistake.”

“And when you make it,” she said, “we will both pay for it. That is the way this arrangement works, Aiela.”

It was truth; he recognized it—resented her being female. It was an unfair obligation. “I am sorry,” he said after a moment. “Then it will happen. I will not be held by you.”

“I disturb you.”

“In several senses.”

She snatched a thought half-born from his mind, the suspicion that the iduve knew enough of kalliran emotion to use it, to manipulate it at will. Isande was beautiful: he had eyes to notice that. He kept noticing it, again and again. That she constantly knew it, embarrassed him; he knew that she was not willing to think of him in that way. But, he sent her, if she were in the ungraceful position of having to share a man’s inmost thoughts, she might receive things even more direct from time to time. Or had Reha been immune to such things?

The screen closed tightly on those memories, as it always had: the privacy she had shared with Reha was not for him. “He and I began so young we were like one mind; there could never be that between us. Asuthi ought never to share that part of their lives: some illusions have to be maintained. I am not for games, not for your amusement, nor are you for mine, dear friend. There is an end of it. You came too close to that being, you refuse my warnings about the iduve, and I see I can’t help you: you resent being advised by a woman. But I can at least exercise the good sense to keep my distance from you when it happens.”

Hurt feelings. Bitterly hurt feelings.

“Don’t,” he said, reaching out to her retreating mind-. And when she lingered, questioning, he searched for something to say. “If you’re not going to sleep, stay awhile. It’s miserably quiet here.”

Softness touched his mind. He had pleased her by asking. Her spirits brightened and amusement rippled from her, to think that he found in her the power to deal with the nightmares that troubled him: human ghosts and iduve went flitting into retreat at her kalliran presence.

“Go to bed,” she told him. “You need your rest. I’ll stay awhile if it pleases you.”

She hovered about his thoughts for a long time thereafter, half-asleep herself at the last and warm in her own bed, lending him the comforting trivia of pleasant memories, the distant voyagings of Ashanome, strange worlds and different suns; and she stole from his memories, filching little details of his past and embroidering them with questions until he grew too tired to answer. She, never having walked upon the face of a world, delighted in the memories of wind and rain and sunsets, the scent of green grass after a shower, and the drifting wonder of snow. There were no ill dreams. She held onto his senses and finally, mischievously, she sent him a few drowsy impressions that were less than sisterly.

He fired back indignation. “Games,” he reminded her.

Vaikka, she whispered into his consciousness. And you do not want to tell me to go away, do you?

He did not, but he screened, and headed himself deliberately toward the darkness of sleep.