Shon'jir

Chapter Ten

THE HUMAN slept.

Niun, warm against the bodies of the dusei, his mind filled with the animal's peace, watched Duncan in the half-light of the star-screen, content to wait. There was in Duncan's quar­ters a second bed; he refused it, preferring the carpeted floor, the nearness of the dusei, the things that he had known in the Kel. He had slept enough; he was no more than drowsy now in the long twilit waiting, and he fought the impulse to slip back into half-sleep, for the first time finding acute pleasure in waking to this new world. He had his weapons again; he had the dusei for his strength; and most of all Melein was safe, and in possession of the pan'en and the ship.

Their ship.

He suspected they owed much to this human, shamefully much; but he was glad that Melein elected to take it, and to live. It was a measure of Melein's own gratitude that she bent somewhat, that she left the times of things in Niun's own hands; when you think him fit, she had said, and even permit­ted the ship's schedule to be adjusted so that they might enter a premature night cycle, which they themselves did not need: but Duncan needed the sleep, which he had denied himself in caring for them.

Elsewhere Melein surely rested, or worked quietly. The ship proceeded, needing nothing from them. They had far, impossibly far to travel. The reference star that shone wan and distant in the center of the screen was not their destina­tion. They had only entered the fringe of the system, and would skim outward again, into transit. And stars after stars there would be: so Melein had said.

They had made a second transit during the night, a space in which they were, and were not, and were again, and sub­stances flowed like water. Niun had not panicked, neither this time nor the first, even though Duncan himself, experienced in such things, had wakened with a wild outcry and was sick after, sweating profusely and scarcely able to walk to the lab where he found the drugs that calmed him: they had thrown him into sleep at last; that still continued. And this, troubling as it was, Niun had tried not to see: this once, he allotted to the human's distraught condition. It was possible, he thought, that mri had some natural advantage in this state; or perhaps it was shame that kept a mri from yielding to such weakness. He did not know. Other shames he had suffered, at the hands of humans and regul, inflicted upon him; but this was his own body, his own senses, and of them he had control.

Their ship, their voyage, and the pan'en to guide them: it was the only condition under which living was worthwhile, that they ruled themselves, much as the fact of it still dazed him. He had not expected it, not though Melein had foreseen, had told him it would be so. He had not believed: Melein, who had been only sen Melein, his true sister that was all that he had trusted in her: poor, houseless she'pan, he had thought of her, lost and powerless, and he had done, what he could to fend for her.

But she had seen.

The greatest she'panei were said to have been foresighted, the greatest and holiest that had ever guided the People; and a feeling of awe possessed him when he realized that such was Melein, of one blood with him. Such kinship frightened him, to reckon that her heredity was also his, that there rested within himself something he did not understand, over which he had no power.

She was guiding them home.

The very concept was foreign to him: home efai sa-mri, the beginnings of the People. He knew, as surely all mri had always known, that once there must have been a world other than the several home-worlds-of-convenience despite that it was sung that the People were born of the Sun. All his life he had looked up only at the red disc of Arain, and, in the disci­pline of the Kel, in the concerns of his former life, he had never let his curiosity stray beyond that barrier of his child born belief. It was a Mystery; and it was not pertinent to his caste.

Born of the Sun. Golden-skinned, the mri, bronze-haired and golden-eyed: it had never before occurred to him that within that song lay the intimation of a sun of a different hue, and that it explained more than the custom of the Kel, who were spacefarers by preference, who cast their dead into the fires of stars, that no dark earth might possess them.

He stared at the star that lay before them, wondering where they were, whether within regul space still or else­where. It was a place known to generations before Kesrith, to hands that had set the record of it within the pan'en; and here too the People had seen service. Regul space or not, it must have been so: the Kel would have hired to fight, as it had always been mercenaries, by whose gold the People lived. He could not imagine anything else.

Stars beyond stars.

And from each in turn the People would have departed: so it was, in the Darks; it was unthinkable that they would have fragmented. All, all would have gone and what might move them was beyond his imagining, save only that the vision of a she'pan would have led them. They either moved to another and nearby world, or they had entered a Dark; and in the Dark, in that voyage, they would have forgotten all that per­tained to that abandoned star, to that former service; they had come to the next Sun, and another service; and therafter returned to the Dark, and another forgetting, a cycle without end.

Until Kesrith, until they two began to come home, a voy­age in which the era of service to regul, the two thousand years that he had believed for all of recorded time, became merely interlude.

From Dark beginning To Dark at ending,

So the People sang, in the holiest of songs.

Between them a Sun, But after comes Dark, And in that Dark, One ending. Tens of times he had sung the ritual, the Shon'jir, the Song of Passings, chanted at births and deaths and beginnings and endings. To a kel'en, it had sung only of birth and death of individuals.

Understanding opened before him, dizzying in perspective. More stars awaited them, each considered by the kel-'ein of its age to be the Sun… each era considered the whole of recorded time… until they should come in their own back­ward voyaging home, to the Sun itself.

To the beginning of the People.

To the hope, the faintest of hopes, that there others might remain: Niun took to him that hope, knowing that it would surely prove false that after so many misfortunes that had befallen them, it was impossible that such good could re­main: they two were the last children of the People, born to see the end of everything, ath-ma'ai, tomb-guardians not only to a she'pan, but to the species.

And yet they were free, and possessed a ship.

And perhaps a religious feeling stirred in him, and a great fear it was for something else that they had been born.

Niun caressed the dus' velvet-furred shoulder, gazing at the human whose face was touched by the white light of the screen. In drugged abandonment the man slept, after giving them the ship, and his life, and his person. Niun puzzled over this, troubled, reckoned all the words and acts that had ever passed between them, that he could have moved the human to such a desperate act. Against the wisdom of the People, he had taken a prisoner; and this was the result of it that Duncan had become attached to them, stubborn as the dusei, who simply chose a mri and settled with him or died of grief.

Human instincts surely did not run in that direction. For forty years the People had struggled to deal with humans, and suffered murder for it, kel'ein butchered by this species that fought only in masses and with distance-weapons. Forty years and at the last, in human victory came Duncan, who, ill-treated, brought the whole machinery of human mercy down upon them, who cast himself and his freedom into their hands for good measure.

Tsi'mri stupidity, Niun raged in his mind, wishing that he could separate himself from tsi'mri altogether.

Yet he remembered a long and terrible dream, in which Duncan had been a faithful presence in which he had fought for his sanity along with his life, and Duncan had stayed by him.

Atonement?

Perhaps, Niun thought, what had possessed Duncan had seized on the rest of his kind; perhaps, after all, there was some strange tsi'mri sense of honor that could not abide what the regul had done as if humans would not take a victory so ill-won; as if the ruin of the People made a diminution in the universe that even humans felt, and in fear for themselves they tried to make restitution.

Not for tsi'mri, such a voyage as they made: and yet if such ever had a claim on the mri, inextricably entangled with the affairs of the People, such was Duncan from the time that he, himself, had held the human's life and missed the chance to take it.

Niun, he is tsi'mri, Melein had argued, and whatever he has done, he does not belong, not in the Dark.

Yet we take the dusei, he had said, and they are of the Be­tween, too; and shall we kill them, that trust us?

Melein had frowned at that; the very thought was terrible, for the partnership between mri and dus was old as Kesrith. And at last she had turned her face'away and yielded. You cannot make a dus into a mri, she had said last, and I do not think you will succeed with a human either. You will only delay matters painfully; you will arm him against us and en­danger us. But try, if your mind is set; make him mri, make him mri, or we must someday do a cruel and terrible thing.

"Duncan," Niun said into the dark, saw Duncan's light-bathed face contract in reaction. "Duncan.”

Eyes opened, wells of shadow in the dim light of the screen. Slowly, as if the drug still clouded his senses, the hu­man sat up. He was naked to the waist, his strange furriness at odd contrast with his complexion. He bowed his head against his knee and ran his hand through his disordered hair, then looked at Niun.

"It is a reasonable hour," said Niun. "You do not look well, Duncan.”

The human shrugged, by which Niun understood that his ill was of the heart as much as of the body; and this he could well understand. "There are things to be done," Niun said. "You have said that there are trade supplies aboard.”

"Yes," Duncan said, a marginal lifting of his spirits, as if he had dreaded something more distasteful. "Food, clothing, metals, all that there was at the station, that was intended for mri trade. I figured it properly belonged to you.”

"You most of all have need of clothing.”

Duncan considered, and nodded in consent. He had been long enough with them to know that his naked face was an offense, and perhaps long enough to feel a decent shame. "I will see to it," he agreed.

"Do that first," said Niun. "Then bring food for the dusei, and for us both; but I will take the she'pan's to her.”

"All right," Duncan said. Niun watched as the human gathered himself up and wrapped a robe about himself blue, that was kath-color, and inappropriate for a man. Niun con­sidered the incongruity of that what vast and innocent dif­ferences lay between mri and human, and what a thing he had undertaken. He did not protest Duncan's dress, not now; there were other and more grievous matters.

Niun did not attempt to rise, not until Duncan had left the room, for he knew that it would be difficult, and shaming. With the dusei's help he managed it, and stood against the wall, hard-breathing, until his legs would bear him. He could not fight against the human and win, not yet; and Duncan knew it, knew and still declined to risk the dusei's anger, or to dispute against him, or to use his knowledge of the ship to trap them and regain control.

And he had undertaken to destroy the human.

When he has forgotten that he is human, Melein had said, when he is mri, then I will see his face.

Duncan had consented to it. Niun was dismayed by this, knew of a certainty that he himself would have died before accepting such conditions of humans. When other things had failed to kill him, this would have done so, from the heart outward.

And someday, when Duncan had become mri, then he would not be capable of bending again. This acquiescence of his was tsi'mri, and must be shed along with all the rest: the naive, childlike man who had attached himself to them would no longer exist.

Niun thought to himself that he would miss that man that they had known; and the very realization made him uneasy, that a tsi'mri should so have softened his mind and his heart.

The worst acts, he told himself, must surely proceed from ir­resolution, from half-measures. Melein had feared what he proposed, had spoken against it with what he desperately hoped was not foresight. She had not forbidden him.

He went gingerly, on exhausted legs, into the bath, and looked pn what things were there that belonged to Duncan. These must go, the clothing, the personal items, everything: when he was no longer reminded of humans by the things that surrounded him, then neither would Duncan be remind­ed.

And if change was impossible to the human, then best to know it soon: it was one thing to reshape, and another to destroy and leave nothing in its place. Mri that he was, Niufl had not learned of his masters to be cruel, only to be pitiless, and to desire no pity.

He gathered up what of Duncan's belongings he could find and bore them into the lab, where he knew there was a dis­posal chute: he thrust them in, and felt a pang of shame for what he did, but it seemed wrong to compel Duncan to do this himself, surrendering what he had prized, a lessening of the man and that he would not do.

And when that was done, Niun looked about him at the lab, at the cabinet from which Duncan had obtained his med­icines, and resolved on other things.

The door would not yield to his hand: he drew his pistol and ruined the lock, and it yielded easily thereafter. Load af­ter load of tsi'mri medicines and equipage he carried to the chute, and cast it out, while the dusei sat and watched with grave and glittering eyes.

And suddenly the beasts arose in alarm shied aside from. Duncan's presence in the doorway.

Niun, his hands full of the last of the medicines, thrust them within the chute and only then faced Duncan's anger, that had the dusei distraught and bristling.

"There is no need of such things," he said to Duncan.

Duncan had attempted to robe himself as mri: the boots and the e'esin he had managed, the inner robe; but the siga, the outer, he wore loose; and the veil he carried in his "hand he had never found the arranging of it easy. Face-naked, he showed his anguish, a despair that wounded.

"You have killed me," he said in a thin voice, and Niun felt he sting of that less than certain, in that moment, of the honesty of what he had done, trusting that the human would not challenge, could not. The dusei moaned, crowding into the corner. A container crashed from a table under their weight.

"If your life is those medicines," said Niun, "then you can­not survive with us. You will survive. We do not need such things: you do not.”

Duncan cursed him. Niun stiffened, set his face against such tsi'mri rage, and refused to be provoked.

"Understand," said Niun, "that you agreed. This is a mri ship, kel Duncan. You will learn to be mri, as a child of the Kath learns. I do not know any other way, only to teach you as I was taught. If you will not, then I will fight you. But un­derstand, as all mri understand who enter the Kel, that kel-law works from the elder to the lesser to the least. You will hurt before you are done; so, once did I. And if you have it in you to be kel'en, you will survive. That is what my masters in the Kel once said to me, when I was of an age to enter the Kel. I saw twelve of my Kel who did not survive, who never took the seta'al, the scars of caste. It is possible that you will not survive. It is possible that you cannot become what I am. If I were convinced that you cannot, then I would not do what I have done.”

The human quieted; the dusei snuffed loudly and rocked, still uneasy. But Duncan's naked face assumed a calm, untrou­bled look that was more the man they knew. "All right," he said. "But, Niun, I needed those medicines. I needed them.”

Fear. Niun still felt it in the room.

And he was troubled after Duncan had gone away, whether he had in fact done murder. He had thought as mri, forgetting that alien flesh might indeed be incapable of what mri found possible.

And was it then wrong that aliens needed what mri law forbade?

It was not a kel-thought, not right for his caste to think or to wonder. He dared not even bring it to Melein in secret, knowing the thought beyond him and disrespectful to a young and less than certain she'pan, even from her kel'anth, senior of the Kel such of a Kel as she possessed.

He hoped desperately that he had not killed Duncan.

And in that thought he realized clearly that he wanted Duncan to live, not alone for Tightness' sake, but because jwo were a desolate sort of House, and because the silence in kel-hall could become very deep and very long. He called the dusei to him, soothed them with his hands and his voice, and went to find where Duncan had gone.