Hunter Of Worlds

Chapter 6

THE ORITHAIN OF Chaganokh was a lonely man in the paredre of Ashanome. He wore the close-fitting garment common to iduve, but of startling white and complicated by overgarments and robes and a massive silver belt from which hung a ghiaka. His name was Minakh, and he was a conspicuous gleam of white and silver among so much indigo and black, with the fair colors of kallia and human an unintentional counterpoint across the room. Chimele faced him, seated, similarly robed and bearing a ghiaka with a raptor’s head, but her colors were dusky violet.

Tension was electric in the air. Daniel shivered at being thrust so prominently into the midst of them, and Aiela mentally held to him. Contact among the asuthi seemed uncertain, washed out by the miasma of terror and hostilities in the hall, which was filled with thousands of iduve. Bodies went rigid at the presence of Minakh, whiteless eyes dilated to black, breathing quickened. A dozen of the most powerful of nasul Ashanome were ranged about Chimele, behind, on either side of her: Khasif, Ashakh—great fearsome men, and two women, Tahjekh and Nophres, who were guardians of the dhis and terrible to offend.

Minakh’s eyes shifted from this side to that of the gathering. While he was still distant from Chimele he went to his knees and raised both hands. Likewise Chimele lifted her hands to salute him, but she remained seated.

“I am Orithain of the nasul Chaganokh” said Minakh. “Increase to the dhis of Ashanome. We salute you.”

“We are Ashanome. May your eye be sharp and your reach long. For what grace have you come?”

“We have come to ask the leave of the orith-nasul Ashanome to go our way. The field is yours. May your affairs prosper.”

“Honor to the vra-nasul Chaganokh for its courtesy. We have heard that the zone of Kej is uncommonly pleasant of late. May your affairs prosper there.”

Minakh inclined his body gracefully to the carpet at this order, although it must have rankled; and he sat back on his heels, hands at his thighs, elbows outward.

“We rejoice at Ashanome’s notice,” he said flatly, and again came the concentration of hostilities, scantly concealed.

“Happy are the circumstances when nasuli may pass without vaikka” said Chimele. “Honor to the wisdom of the Orithanhe which has made this possible.”

“Long life to those who respect its decrees.”

“Long life indeed, and may we remember this meeting with good pleasure. The vra-nasul Chaganokh has voyaged far and accrued honors; at its presence the Esliph shudders, and the untraveled space of the human folk has now been measured.”

“The praise of Ashanome, hunter of worlds, is praise indeed.” Minakh’s face was utterly impassive, but his eyes flashed aside to Daniel, dark and terrible.

“Indeed Chaganokh is deserving of honor. So great is our admiration for its acquisition of wisdom that we lay at Chaganokh’s feet the matter nearest our heart. We search for a man who was once of Ashanome. Perhaps this inconsequential person has crossed the affairs of Chaganokh. We should not be surprised to learn that he has attempted to shake us from his trail in the uncharted human zones. Chaganokh’s recently acquired knowledge of this region seems to us an excellent source of precise knowledge. We are of course in great haste. Our time is slipping from us, and Chaganokh in its wisdom will surely accommodate our impatience in this regard.”

There was a long and deadly silence. Minakh’s eyes rested on Daniel with such hate that it was almost tangible, and every iduve in the room bristled. The silence persisted, broken ominously by a hiss from one of the dhis-guardians.

Minakh sweated. His belly heaved with his breathing. At last he prostrated himself and sat back again on his heels, looking dispirited.

“We delight to offer our assistance. This person attached himself to us at a distance. We ceased to notice him shortly after we entered the human zones, near a world known to those creatures as Priamos. Our own affairs occupied us thereafter.”

“May your dhis ever be safe, o Chaganokh. Again let us trouble your gracious assistance. Are the humans wise to think that the amaut are the cause of their unhappy state?”

“When were the m’metanei ever wise, o Ashanome, hunter of worlds? The amaut are carrion-eaters who seek scraps where we have passed. When has it ever been otherwise?”

“The wisdom of Chaganokh is commendable. Prosperity to its affairs and grace to its offspring. Pass, o Chaganokh.”

Now Minakh arose and backed away, backed entirely out of the paredre before he turned. No one of Ashanome stirred. No one seemed to breathe until at last the voice of Rakhi from the control station announced Minakh off the ship and the hatch sealed.

“Honor to the discretion of Chaganokh” Chimele laughed softly. “Go your ways, my nasithi. Ashakh—“

“Chimele.”

“Set our course for the human zones as soon as you can make a proper determination from Chaganokh’s records. You are clear to put us underway at maximum, priority signal. Secrecy no longer applies. Either I am right, or I am wrong.”

Ashakh acknowledged the order with a nod, turned and left. Silently the iduve were dispersing, by ones and by twos, amiable now Minakh’s harachia was removed; and Chimele leaned back in her chair and looked for the first time at her kamethi.

“And you, poor m’metanei—an uncomfortable moment Did you follow what was said?”

“As far,” said Aiela, “as m’metanei are wise.”

Chimele laughed merrily and rose, a violet splendor in her robes. She put off the ghiaka and laid it aside. “The Orithain of Chaganokh will not soon forget this day: unhappy puppet. Doubtless Tashavodh thrust Tejef off upon him, so he was obliged to try, at least, although his chances were poor from the beginning.”

Does she care nothing, Daniel thrust at his asuthi, for the misery they have caused my people?

Be still, Isande returned through Aiela. You do not know Chimele.

“You look troubled, Daniel.”

“Where do my people fit in this?”

“They are not my concern.”

She means it kindly, Isande protested against his outrage. She means no harm to them.

“What happened to them was your fault,” Daniel said to Chimele. “And you owe us at least—“

Aiela saw it coming, caught his human asuthe by the arm to draw him back; but the idoikkhe pained him, a lancing hurt all the way to his side, and that arm was useless to him for the moment. He knew that Daniel felt it too, knew the human angered instead of restrained. He seized him with his other hand.

She has been in the presence of an enemy, Isande sent Daniel. Her nerves are still at raw ends. Be still, be still, o for Aiela’s sake, Daniel, be still.

Daniel’s anger flowed over them both, sorrowing at once. “I’m sorry,” he told Chimele. “but you had no business to harm him for it.”

Chimele gave a slight lift of the brows. “Indeed. But Aiela has a m’melakhia for you, m’metane-toj, and he chose. Consider that, and consider your asuthi the next time you presume upon my self-restraint. Aiela, I regret it.”

The pain had vanished. Aiela bowed, for it was great courtesy that Chimele offered regret: iduve offended her, and received less. Chimele returned him a nod of her head, well pleased. “

“Daniel,” she said then, “do you know the world of Priamos?”

Hate was in his mind, fear; but so was fear for Aiela. He abandoned his pride. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been there several times.

“Excellent. You will be provided facilities and assistance. I want maps and names. Is their language yours?”

“It is the same.” The impulse was overwhelming. “Why do you want these things? What are you about to do?”

Chimele ignored the question and turned on Aiela a direct and commanding look. “This is your problem,” she said. “See to it.”

They had come. Set on a grassy plain a hundred lioi from the river settlements, Tejef knew it, facing toward the east where the sun streamed into morning. Chaganokh had yielded and Ashanome had come.

It had been a long silence, unbearably long. Many times he had thought he would welcome any contact with his own kind, even to die. It was a loneliness no m’metane could understand, save one who had been asuthithekkhe and separated, a deep and terrible silence of the mind, a stillness where there were no brothers, no nasithi, nothing. No iduve could bear that easily, to be separated from takkhenes, the constant sense of brother-presence that never ceased, waking and sleeping, the pack-instinct that had been the driving force of his kind since the dawn of the race. From his birth he had it, seldom friendly in its messages, but there, a lodestar about which all life had its direction. It flowed through his consciousness like the blood through his veins, the unity of impulse through which he sensed every mood of his nasithi, their presence, their m’melakhia, his possession or lack of arastiethe.

Now takkhenes was back. He felt them, the Ashanome-pack, who had given him birth and decreed his death; and he knew that if they grew much closer they could sense him, weak in his own single takkhenois though he was. The fine hair at the nape of his neck bristled at that proximity; the life-instinct that had ebbed in him quickened into anger.

They were on the hunt, and he their game this time, he that had hunted with them. He could sort out two of the minds he knew best: Khasif, Ashakh, grim and deadly men. Chimele would not have descended with them to the surface of this wretched world: Ashanome would be circling in distant orbit, and Chimele would be scanning the filthy business in progress on its surface, directing the searchers. One day soon they would find him, and vaikka would be settled—their victory.

The logical faculty said that he might win something even now by surrendering, cringing at Chimele’s feet like a katasathe. She would kick him aside and the nasul would close on him and maul him senseless, but they would not likely kill him. His life thereafter would be lived from that posture, a constant terror, being forever the recipient of everyone’s temper and contempt. It would gradually take the heart from him: the takkhenes would overwhelm all his instinct to fight back and he would exist until he was finally mauled to death by some nas in katasakke, or starved, or was cast out during akkhres-nasuli because the takkhenes of neither nasul recognized him as theirs. Such were the things that awaited the outcast, and a long shiver of rage ran up the muscles of his belly, for he had his bearings again. Arastiethe forbade any yielding. He would end under their hands, literally mauled to death if they could get him within their reach, but they would feel the damage he could do them. Ironically, Tejef, who until now had lacked the will to be drawn into a confrontation with any of the wretched humans the amaut used for prey on this forsaken world, began to lay plans to work harm on Ashanome and to end his life with chanokhia.

His resources were few, a miserable and war-torn world where earth-hungry amaut plundered a dying human population, a human species that had gone mad and that now furnished mercenary troops to the brutish amaut for the final pillage of their own world. Such madness, he reflected, would have been understandable had it been a matter of nasul-loyalty among these humans, but it was not. They knew no loyalties, committed arrhei-nasul at the simple exchange of goods or silver, engaged in katasakke and then slaughtered the females, who were pathetic and ineffectual creatures. They gathered no young in this fashion, and indeed slaughtered what young they did find—comprehensible, at least, if there had been nasithi-tak in these human warbands. There were not, and the ultimate result seemed to be suicide for the entire species. Tejef had long since ceased to be amazed by the final madness of this furious people: perhaps this savagery was an instinct no longer positive for survival—it was one that the amaut had certainly turned to their own advantage. Now perhaps there was a way to turn it to the advantage of Tejef sra-Sogdrieni, a means to vaikka upon Ashanome, one that would deserve their respect when they killed him.

The night was warm. A slight breeze blew in through the protective grille of the window and rippled through the drapery behind the bed. The moonlight cast restless shadows of branches on the wall.

One of the dogs began to bark, joined by the others, and the child in the bed stirred, sat upright, eyes wide. She listened a moment, then turned on her knees so that she could lean against the headboard and the sill and look out into the dark. Now the dogs were off at the distance, perhaps chasing some night-wandering bounder through the fields. Their cries echoed among the rocks in which the house was set, secure behind its stone wall and steel gate, with the cliffs towering up on either side.

In Arle’s estimation this house was an impenetrable fortress. It had not always needed to be so. The wall and the gate were new, and when she was nine the men had not gone with guns to work the fields, and there had been no guards on the heights. But the world had changed. She was ten now, and thought it settled that she would never again walk to the neighbors’ house to play, or even go out the gates to the fields and the orchard without one of her brothers to attend her, rifle over his arm, checking with each of the sentry stations along the way. The family had not been to church in the valley in months, nor valley market, and no one mentioned school starting. This was the way the world had become. And they were fortunate—for there were rumors of burnings downland at the mouth of the Weiss, that very same sleepy river that rolled through their valley and made the crops grow, and made Upweiss the best and richest land on all Priamos.

Arle knew something of the outside, knew that they were from the Esliph, which was very far, and green and beautiful, but she was not sure in her mind whether that were real or not, or only one of the old stories her parents had told her, like faery princesses and heroes. She knew also that they were all once upon a time from a world called Earth, every human that breathed, but it was hard to imagine all the populations of all the worlds she knew of crowded onto one globe. This was too difficult a thought, and she was not sure which stories were about Earth and which were about the Esliph, or whether they were one and the same. She kept it stored up as one of those things she would understand when she was older, which was what her parents answered when her questions ran ahead of her understanding. She was content to let this be, although it seemed that there were many things of late, which she was not old enough to know, while her parents talked in secret councils with her grown brothers and with the neighbors and the younger children were sent off to play with guns to guard them.

She was aware of terrible things happening not too far away. Sometimes she heard a thing the adults said and lay awake at night sick at her stomach and wondering if really they were all going to die before she had a chance to grow up and understand it all. But then she would imagine growing up, and that convinced her that the future was still there, all waiting to be experienced; and the grownups understood matters and still planned for next year, for planting crops, hoping for better rains from the mountains, hoping the winds would not come too late in the spring or the hail ruin the grain. These were familiar enemies, and they were forever. These awful gray people that were said to be burning towns and farms and shooting people—she was not sure that they were real. When she was little, her parents had not been able to persuade her not to climb the cliffs, so they had told her about a dog that had gone mad and lived up in those rocks waiting to kill children. It had stalked her nightmares for years and she would rather anything than go up into the dark crevices of those rocks. But now she was ten and knew sensibly that there was no dog, and that it had been all for the good purpose of keeping her from having a bad fall. That was the dog in the rocks, her own curiosity; but she was not sure if the downland monsters were not something similar, so that silly children would not ask unanswerable questions.

There had been smoke on the horizon two days ago. All the sentries had reported it, and the children had thronged the big dome rock in the throat of the pass to see it. But then her father had chased them all back into the yard and told them that the strangers would get them if they did not stay where they belonged. So Arle reasoned that it was like the. dog, something for them to be afraid of while the grownups understood what it really was and knew how to deal with it. They would take care of matters, and the crops would go in come fall, and be harvested next spring, and life would go on quite normally.

She curled up again in her bed and pulled the sheet up to her chin. It made it feel like bed, and protection. Soon she shut her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Something boomed, shook the very floor and the bottles on the dresser and lit the branches in red relief on the wall. Arle scrambled for the view at the window, too sleepy and too stunned to have cried out at that overwhelming noise. Men were running everywhere. The gate was down with fire beyond and dark shapes against it, and people ran up and down the hall outside her room. Her oldest brother came bursting in with a flashlight, exclaimed that she should get out of the window and seized her by the wrist, not even waiting for her to get her feet under her. He pulled her with him at a run, taking her, she knew, to the cellar, where the children had always been told to go in an emergency. She began to cry as they hit the outside stairs, for she did not want to go down into that dark place and wait.

Suddenly light broke about them, awful heat and noise, stone chips and powder showering down upon them. Arle sprawled, hurting her hands and ribs and knees upon the steps, crawling back from the source of that light even before her mind had awakened to the fact that something had exploded. Then she saw her brother’s face, odd-tilted on the steps, his eyes with the glazed look of a dead animal’s. His hand when she took it was loose. Light flashed. Stone showered down again, choking with dust.

What she did then she only remembered later—rumbling off the side of the steps, landing in the soft earth of the flowerbed, running, lost among the dark shapes that hurtled this way and that.

She found herself crouching in the rubble at the gate, while dark bodies moved against the light a little beyond her. The yard was like that cellar, a horrible dead-end place where one could be trapped. She broke and ran away from the house, trying to go down the pass a little way to that forbidden path up the cliffs, to hide and wait above until she could come back and find her family.

It was dark among the rocks for a moment, the light of the fire cut off by the bending of the road; and then as she rounded the bend toward the narrowing of the cliffs a dark man-shape stood by the dome rock in the very narrowest part of the pass, outlined against the moon and the downslope of the road toward the valley fields. Arle saw him too late, tried to scramble aside into the rocks, but the man seized her, drew her against him with his arm, and silenced her with a hand that covered her mouth and nose and threatened to break her neck as well.

He released her when her struggles grew weak, seized the collar of her thin gown, and raised his other hand to hit her, but she whimpered and flinched down as small as she could. Instead he raised her back by both arms and shook her until her head snapped back. His shadowed face stared into hers in the moonlight. She stood still and suffered him to cup her small face between his rough hands, to smooth her tangled hair, to use his thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“Help us,” she said then, thinking this was one of the neighbor men come to aid them. “Please come and help us.”

His hands on her shoulders hurt her. He stood there for a moment, while she trembled on the verge of tears, and then he gripped her arm in one cruel hand and began to walk down the road away from the house, dragging her with him, making her legs keep his long strides.

She stumbled on the rocks as they descended from the road to the orchard and turned her ankle in the soft ground among the apple and peach trees; and there were thorns and cutting stubble on the slopes of the irrigation ditch. He strode across the water, hauling her up the other side by one arm as a careless child might handle a doll, and waited only an instant to let her gain her feet before he walked on, dragging her at a near run, until at last she did stumble and fell to her knees sobbing.

Then he drew her aside, into the shadow of the trees, set her against the low limb of an aged apple tree, and looked at her, still holding her by a firm grip on her arm. “Where were you going?” he asked her.

She did not want to tell him. The scant light there was filtering through the apple leaves showed the outline of boots, loose trousers, leather harness, clothing such as no farmer wore, and his lean, hard face was strange to her. But he shook her and repeated the question, and her lips trembled and clear sense left her.

“I was going to hide and come back.”

“Is there any help you can get to?”

She jerked her head in the direction of the Berney farm, where Rachel Berney lived, and her brother Johann and the Sullivans, who had a daughter her age.

“You mean that house five kilometers west of here?” he asked. “Forget it. Is there anywhere else?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I—could hide in the rocks.”

He took her hand again, a dry, strong grip that frightened her, for he could crush the bones if he closed down harder. “And where would you go after? There’s not going to be anything left back there.”

“I want to go home.”

“You can’t. Think. Think of some place safe I could leave you.”

“I don’t know any.”

“If I left you right here, could you walk down from the heights to the river? Could you walk that far?”

She looked at him in dismay. The river was visible from the heights, far, far down in the valley. When they went, it meant taking the truck and going a long distance down the road. She could not imagine how long it would take to walk it, and it was hot in the daytime—and there were men like him on the roads. She began to cry, not alone for that, for everything, and she cried so hard she was about to be sick. But he shook her roughly and slapped her face. The hurt was already so much inside that she hardly knew the pain, except that she was afraid of them and she was going to be sick at her stomach. Out of fear she swallowed down the tears and the sickness with them.

“You have to think of somewhere I can put you. Stop that sniffling and think.”

“I want to go home,” she cried, at which he looked at her strangely and his grip lessened on her arm. He smoothed her hair and touched her face.

“I know you do. I know. You can’t.”

“Let me go.”

“They’re dead back there, can’t you understand that? If they catch either one of us now they’ll skin us alive. I have to get rid of you.”

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Then she thought he would hit her. She screamed and flinched back. But instead he put his arms about her, picked her up, hugged her head down into his shoulder, rocking her in his arms as if she had been an infant. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Aiela took the corridor to the paredre, his mind boiling with frustration and smothered kalliran and human obscenities, and raged at Isande’s gentle presence in his thoughts until she let him alone. For fifteen precious days he had monitored Daniel’s every movement. The human language began to come more readily than the kalliran: human filth and human images poured constantly through his senses, blurring his own perception of what passed about him, cannibalizing his own life, his own separate thoughts.

Now, confronted by an iduve at the door of the paredre, he could scarcely gather enough fluency to explain his presence in any civilized language. The iduve looked at him sharply, for his behavior showed a mental disorder that was suspect, but Chimele had given standing orders and the man relented.

“Aiela?” Chimele arose from her desk across the room, her brows lifted in the iduve approximation of alarm. Aiela bowed very low. Courtesy demanded it, considering the news he bore.

“Daniel has encountered a difficulty,” he said.

“Be precise.” Chimele took a chair with a mate opposite and gestured him to sit.

“The Upweiss raid,” Aiela began hoarsely: Chimele insisted upon the chronological essentials of a thing. He forced his mind into order, screened against the random. impulses that fed from Daniel’s mind and the anxious sympathy from Isande’s. “It went as scheduled. Anderson’s unit hit the Mar estate. Daniel hung back—“

“He was not to do so,” Chimele said.

“I warned him; I warned him strongly. He knows Anderson’s suspicions of him. But Daniel can’t do the things these men do. His conscience—his honor” he amended, trying to choose words that had clear meaning for Chimele—“is offended over the killings. He had to kill a man in the last raid.”

Chimele made a dismissing move of her hand. “He was attacked.”

“I could explain the human ethical—“

“Explain what is at hand.”

‘There was a child—a girl. It was a crisis. I tried to reason with him. He shut me out and took her away. He is still going, deserting Anderson—and us.”

There were no curses in the iduve language. Possibly that contributed to their fierceness. Chimele said nothing.

“I’m trying to reason with him,” Aiela said. “He’s exhausted—drained. He hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He lay awake last night, sick over the prospect of this raid. He’s going on little sleep, no water, no food. He can’t expect to find water as he’s heading, not until the river. They can’t make it.”

“This is not a rational human response.” That was a question. Chimele’s voice had an utter calm, not a good sign in an iduve.

“It is a human response, but it is not rational.”

Chimele hissed and rose, hands on her hips. “Is it not your duty to anticipate such responses and deal with them?”

“I don’t blame him,” he said. Then, from his heart: ‘Tin only afraid I might have done otherwise.” And that thought so depressed him he felt tears rise. Chimele looked down on him in incredulity.

“Au, by what am I served? Explain. I am patient. Is this a predictable response?”

Aiela could have screamed aloud. The paredre faded. He shivered in the cold of a Priamid night, the glory of spiraling ribbons of stars overhead, the fragile sweet warmth of another being in his arms. Tears filled his eyes; his breath caught.

“Aiela,” Chimele said. The iduve could not cry; they lacked the reflex. The remembrance of that made him ashamed in her sight.

“The reaction,” he said, “is probably instinct. I—have grown so much into him I—cannot tell. I cannot judge what he does any longer. It seems right to me.”

“Is it dhis-instinct, a response to this child?”

“Something like that,” he said, grateful for her attempt at equation. Chimele considered that for a moment, her eyes more perplexed now than angry.

“It is difficult to rely on such unknown quantities. I offer my regret for what you must be feeling, though I am not sure I can comprehend it. Other humans—like Anderson—are immune to this emotion where the young are concerned. Why does Daniel succumb?”

“I don’t live inside Anderson. I don’t know what goes on in his twisted mind. I only know Daniel—this night—could not have done otherwise.”

“Kindly explain to Daniel that we have approximately three days left, his time. That Priamos itself has scarcely that long to live, and that he and the child will be among a million beings perishing if we have to resort to massive attack on this world.”

“I’ve tried. He knows these things, intellectually, but he shuts me out. He refuses to think of that.”

“Then we have wasted fifteen valuable days.”

“Is that all?”

There was hysteria in his voice; and it elicited from Chimele a curious look, the embarrassment of an observer who had no impulse to what he felt.

“You are exhausted,” she judged. “You can be sedated for the rest of the world’s night. You can do nothing more with this person and I know how long you have worked without true rest.”

“No.” He assumed a taut control of his voice and slowed his breathing. “I know Daniel. Good sense will come back to him after he has run awhile. That area is swarming with trouble in all forms. He will need me.”

“I honor your persistence. Stay in the paredre. If you are going to attempt to advise him I should prefer to know how you are faring. If you change your mind about the sedation, tell me; if we are to lose Daniel, your own knowledge of humans becomes twice valuable. I do not want to risk your health. I leave matters in your hands; rest, if you can.”

“Thank you.” He drew himself to his feet, bowed, and moved away. “Aiela.” He looked back.

“When you have found an explanation for his behavior, give it to me. I shall be interested.”

He bowed once more, struggling between loathing and love for the iduve, and decided for the moment on love. She did try. She tried with her mind where her heart was inadequate, but she wanted to know.

In the shadows of the paredre a comfortable bowl chair, such as the iduve chose when they would relax, provided a retreat. He curled into its deep embrace and leaned his head back upon the edge, slipping again into the mental rhythms of Daniel’s body, becoming human, feeling again what he felt.

In the small corner of his mind still himself, Aiela knew the answer. It had been likely from Daniel’s first step onto the surface of Priamos.

Years and a world ago, when Aiela was a boy, the staff had brought into the lodge one of the hunting birds that nested in the cliffs of the mountains, wing-broken. He had nursed it, he had been proud of it, thought it his. But the first time it felt the winds of Ryi under its wings, it was gone.