This morning Niun stared at him, veiled amber eyes frowning as he offered a cup of soi into his trembling hand, steadying him so that he could drink it. The hot, bittersweet liquid rolled like oil into Duncan’s unwilling stomach and lay there, taking some of the chill away. The tears started again, causeless. He drank slowly, holding the cup child-fashion in both hands, with tears sliding down his face. He looked into the mri’s eyes and met there a cold reserve that recognized no kinship between them.
“I will help you walk,” Niun said.
“No,” he said with such force that the mri let him alone, rose and walked away, looked back once, then left, immune to the weakness that assailed him.
In that day even the dusei radiated distrust of him: crossing the room they would shy away from him, hating his presence; and Niun when he returned sat far across the room, soothing the troubled dusei and long staring at him.
With ship’s night about them, they jumped once more, and a second time, and Duncan clung to his corner, clamped his jaws against sickness, and afterward was dazed, with vast gaps in his memory. In the morning he found the strength to stagger from his cramped refuge—to bathe, driven by self-disgust—finally to take some food into his aching stomach. But for the better part of the day he could not remember clearly.
Niun regarded him, frowning, waiting. Duncan thought distractedly, for him to die or to shake off the weakness; and Duncan felt the contempt like a tangible force, and bowed his head against his arms and brooded desperately, how he would wrest control from the tape before the malfunction killed them all, how he would take them to some random, lost refuge, where humanity could not find them.
But this he had no skill to do, and in his saner moments acknowledged it. The mri could survive, so long as the ship did. He began to think obsessively of suicide, and brooded upon it, and then remembered in his terrified and circular thoughts that the drugs were gone.
“Tsi’mri,” Niun said of him finally, after standing and staring at him for a time.
Contempt burned in the mri’s voice. The mri walked away, and the outrage of it gave Duncan strength to rise and fight his blurring senses. He was sick again immediately; he make it to the lavatory this time, blinked the tears from his eyes and washed his face and tried to control the tremor that ran through his limbs.
And came back into the living quarters and tried to walk across the naked center of it—halfway across before his senses turned inside out and he reeled off balance. He hurled himself for the wall, reaching wildly, found it and collapsed against it.
Niun stood watching. He had not known. Niun looked him up and down, face veiled.
“You were kel’en,” Niun said then. “Now what are you?”
Duncan fought for words, found none that would come out. Niun went to his own pallet and sat down there, and Duncan sat where he was on the hard floor, wanting to rise, and walk and give the lie to the mri. He could not. Niun’s contempt gnawed at him. He began to reckon time again, how many days he had lost in this fashion, mindless and disoriented.
“A question,” Duncan said in the hal’ari. “How many days—how many gone?”
He did not expect Niun to answer, was inwardly prepared for silence or spite. “Four,” said Niun quietly. “Four since your illness.”
“Help me,” Duncan asked, forcing the words between his teeth. “Help me up.”
Silently the mri arose, and came to him and took his arm, drew him to his feet and helped him walk, providing him an anchor that made it possible to move. Duncan fought his senses into order, trying to lie to them—persuaded Niun to guide him about the routines of maintenance in their sector, tried to do what he had been accustomed to do.
He rested, as best he could, muscles still taut; and began the next morning, and the next, and the next, with the determination that the next jump would not undo him.
It came, days hence; and this time Duncan stood fast by the handhold, fighting the sickness. Within a little time he tried to go to the hall, managed to walk, and returned again to his pallet, exhausted.
He might, he thought in increasing bitterness, have let the mri die; he might have had comfort, and safety; he hated Niun’s ability to endure the jumps, that set of mind that could endure the phasing in and out without unraveling.
And Niun, whether sensing his bitterness or not, deigned to speak to him again—sat near him, engaged in one-sided conversation in the hal’ari, as if it mattered. At times he spoke chants, and insisted Duncan repeat them, learn them: Duncan listlessly complied, to have peace, to be let alone eventually, endless chains of names and begettings and words that meant nothing to him. He cared little—pitied the mri, finally, who poured his history, his myths, into such a failing vessel. He felt himself on the downward side of a curve, the battle won too late. He could no longer keep food down; his limbs grew weak; he grew thin as the mri, and more fragile.
“I am dying,” he confided to Niun finally, when he had learned hal’ari enough for such a thought. Niun looked at him soberly and unveiled, as he would when he wished to speak personally; but Duncan did not drop veil, preferring its concealment.
“Do you wish to die?” Niun asked him, in a tone fully respectful of such a wish. For an instant Duncan was startled, apprehensive that the mri would help him to it on the spot: Would you like a cup of water? The tone would have been the same.
He searched up words with which to answer. “I want,” he said, “to go with you. But I cannot eat. I cannot sleep. No, I do not want to die. But I am dying.”
A frown furrowed Niun’s brow. The eyes nictitated. He put out a slim, golden hand and touched Duncan’s sleeve. It was a strange gesture, an act of pity, had he not better learned the mri.
“Do not die,” Niun wished him earnestly.
Duncan almost wept, and managed not to.
“We shall play shon’ai,” Niun said.
It was mad. Duncan would have refused, for his hands shook, and he knew that he would miss: it occurred to him that it was a way of granting him his death. But Niun’s gentility promised otherwise, promised companionship, occupation for the long hours. One could not think of anything else, and play shon’ai.
By the side of a red star, for five days without a jump, they played at shon’ai, and spoke together, unveiled. There was a chant to the Game, and a rhythm of hands that made it yet more difficult to make the catch. Duncan learned it, and it ran through his brain even, at the edge of sleep, numbing, possessing his whole mind; for the first time in uncounted nights he slept deeply, and in the morning he ate more than he had been able.
On the sixth day by that star, they played a more rapid game, and Duncan suffered a bone-bruise from a hit, and learned that Niun would not hold his hand with him any longer.
Twice more he was hit, once missing by nervousness and the second time by anger. Niun returned a cast with more skill than he could manage when he had thrown the mri a foul throw in temper for the first hit. Duncan absorbed the pain and learned that to lose concentration from fear or from anger was to suffer worse pain, and to lose the game. He cleared his mind, and played in earnest at shon’ai, still with wands, and not yet as the Kel played, with edged steel.
“Why,” he asked Niun, when he had words enough to ask, “do you play to harm your brothers?”
“One plays shon’ai,” said Niun, “to deserve to live, to feel the mind of the People. One throws. One receives. We play to deserve to live. We cast. Hands empty, we wait. And we learn to be strong.”
There was a threshold of fear in the Game, the sure knowledge that there was a danger, that there was no mercy. One could be secure in it a time, while the pace stayed within the limits of one’s skill, and then one realized that it was in earnest, and that the pace was increasing. Fear struck, and nerves failed, and the Game was lost, in pain.
Play, Niun advised him, to deserve to live. Throw your life, kel’en, and catch it in your hands.
He understood, and therein another understanding came to him, how the
mri could take great joy in such a game.
And he understood for the first time the peculiar madness in which the mri could not only survive, but revel in the unnatural feel of the jumps, by which the ship hurled herself at apparent random from star to star.
Twice more they jumped, and Duncan stood still and waited as the bell rang and the dissolution began. He watched the mri, knew the mind of the kel’en who stood opposite him—knew how to let go and cast himself utterly to the rhythm of the Game, to go with the ship, and not to fear.
A wild laugh came to him on that second emergence, for the teaching of the Service had been survive, but that of the Game was something complexly alien, that careless madness that was the courage of the mri.
Kel’en.
He had shed something, something he once had valued; and as with the other possessions that he had cast into oblivion, the sense of loss was dim and distant.
Niun gazed at him, silently estimated, and he met that look directly, loss still nagging at him. One of the dusei, the lesser one, nosed his hand. He jerked it back, turned his face from Niun’s critical stare, and went to the corner that was his—limbs steady, senses trying to deceive him and denied the power to do so.
He was not what Stavros had launched.
He sat on his pallet and stared at the scratched reckoning of days that he had begun, and that he had omitted to do. It was no longer the time that passed that mattered, but that which lay ahead, time enough that he could indeed forget.
Forget writing, forget human speech, forget Kesrith. There were gaps in his past, not alone in recent days, those fevered and terrible hours; there were others, that made strange and shifting patterns of all his memory, as if some things that he remembered were too strange to this ship, this long voyaging.
The Dark that Niun spoke of began to swallow such things up, as it lacked measure, and direction, and reason.
With the same edge of metal that had made the marks, he scratched through them, obliterating the record.
Chapter Twelve
The lost days multiplied into months. Duncan passed them in careful observance of maintenance schedules, stripped down units that did not need it and reassembled the machinery, only to keep busy—played shon’ai what time Niun would consent; memorized the meaningless chants of names, and constantly rehearsed in his mind what words he had recently gathered of the hal’ari, the while his hands found occupation in the game of knots that Niun taught him, or in the galleys, or in whatever work he could devise for the moment.
He learned metalwork, which was a craft appropriate to the Kel; and carving—made in plastic a blockish figure of a dus, for which he found no practical use in its beginning; and then purpose did come to him. “Give it to the she’pan,” he said, when he had done it as well as possible; and pushed it into Niun’s hands.
The mri had looked greatly distressed. “I will try,” he had said, with perplexing seriousness, and arose at once and went, as if it were a matter of moment instead of a casual thing.
It was late before he returned; and he settled on the floor and set the little dus-figure between them on the mat. “She would not, kel Duncan.”
No apology for the she’pan’s hatefulness; it was impossible that Niun apologize for a decision of the she’pan. Understanding came, why Niun had hesitated even to try to take the gift to her, and after a moment heat began to rise to Duncan’s face. He did not veil, but stared sullenly at the floor, at the unshapely and rejected little figure.
“So,” he said with a shrug.
“It was bu’ina’anein—you invaded,” Niun said.
“Presumptuous,” Duncan translated, and the heat did not leave his face.
“It is not the time,” said Niun.
“When will be?” Duncan asked sharply, heard the mri’s soft intake of breath. Niun veiled himself in offense and rose.
Discarded, the little figure lay there for two days before Niun, in a mild tone of voice, and after fingering it for some little time, asked if he might have it.
Duncan shrugged. “Take it,” he said, glad to have it gone.
It disappeared into the inner folds of Niun’s robes. Niun rose and withdrew from the room. The dusei went, and returned, and went again, restless.
* * *
There was a line drawn in main-corridor, an invisible one. Duncan knew the places within the ship that he could go, and those that were barred to him, and he did not attempt the forbidden ones. It was not from the ship’s workings that he was barred, so much as from Melein’s presence; and Niun came and went there, but he could not.
Duncan went now, impelled by humanish obstinacy, curious where Niun had gone with the figure; and his steps grew less quick, and finally ceased at the corridor that he had not seen in uncounted days: around the bending of the passage as it was, he had not even infringed so far as to come this way—and the sight of it now cooled his anger and gave him pause.
The lights were out here, and faintly there was the reek of something musky that the filters had not entirely dispersed. A vast brown shape, and a second, sat in the shadows before an open doorway: the dusei—Niun’s presence, he thought.
There was humanish stubbornness; and there was stubbornness mri-fashion, which he had also learned, which, in Niun, he respected.
There was the simple fact that, challenged, Niun would not back away.
But there were ways of pressing at the mri.
Silently, respectful of the barrier, Duncan gathered his robes between his knees and sank down crosslegged, there to wait. The dusei, shadows by the distant doorway, stood and snuffed the air nervously, pressing at him with their uncertainties. He would not be driven. He did not move. In time, the lesser dus came halfway and lay down facing him, head between its massive paws. When he stayed still it rose up again, and halved that distance, and finally, much against his will, came and nosed at his leg.
“Yai!” he rebuked it softly. It settled, not quite touching, sighed.
And from the doorway appeared a blacker shadow, that glittered here and there with metal.
Niun.
The mri stood still, waiting. Duncan gathered himself to his feet and stood still, carefully at the demarcation.
It was not necessary to say overmuch with Niun—the mri observed him now, and after deliberation, beckoned him to come.
Duncan walked ahead into that shadow, the dus at his heels, as Niun waited for him at the doorway; and humanwise he would have questioned Niun, what manner of thing was here, what impulse suddenly admitted him to this place. But still in silence Niun swept his hand to the left, directing his attention into the room from which he had come.
Part of the crew’s living quarters had been here. The musky smell hung thick in this shadowy place, that was draped in black cloth. The only light within was living flame, and it glistened on the ovoid that rested at the far wall of the compartment, behind a shadowed steel grating. Two conduits rose at the doorway, serving as pillars, narrowing the entry so that only one at a time might pass.
“Go in,” Niun’s voice said softly at his back.
He felt the touch of Niun’s hand between his shoulders, and went forward, not wishing to, feeling; his skin contract at the shadow, the leaping flame so dangerous on the ship; the incense was thick here, cloying. He had noticed it before, adhering to the clothing of the mri, a scent he associated with them, thought even natural to them, though he had missed it in the sterile labs.
Behind them the dusei breathed, unable to enter because of the pillars.
And there was silence for some few moments.
“You have seen such a shrine before,” Niun said in a low voice, so that the prickling of his skin became intense. Duncan looked half-about at the mri, heart pounding as he recalled Sil’athen, the betrayal he had done. For a terrible moment he thought Niun knew; and then he persuaded himself that it was the first time he had come that the mri recalled to him, when he had come with permission, in their company.
“I remember,??
? Duncan said thickly. “Is it for this you have kept me from this part of the ship? And why do you allow me here now?”
“Did I misunderstand? Did you not come seeking admittance?”
There was a stillness in Niun’s voice that chilled, even yet. Duncan did not try to answer—looked away, where the pan’en rested behind its screen, at the flickering warm light, gold on silver.
Mri.
It had no echo now, this compartment, of the human voices that had once possessed it, no memory of the coarse jokes and warmer thoughts and impulses that had once governed here. It contained the pan’en. It was a mri place. It held age, and the memory of something he had done that he could not admit to them.
“In every edun of the People,” Niun said, “has been a shrine, and the shrine is of the Pana. You see the screen. That is the place beyond which the Kel may not set foot. That which rests beyond is not for the Kel to question. It is a symbol, kel Duncan, of a truth. Understand, and remember.”
“Why do you allow me here?”
“You are kel’en. Even the least kel’en has freedom of the outer shrine. But a kel’en who has touched the pan’en—who has crossed into the Sen-shrine—he is marked, kel Duncan. Do you remember the guardian of the shrine?”
Bones and black cloth, pitiful huddle of mortality within the shrine: memory came with a cold clarity.
“The lives of kel’ein,” Niun said, “have been set to guard this; others that have carried it have died for that honor, holding secret its place, obeying the orders of a she’pan. But you did not know these things.”
Duncan’s heart sped. He looked warily at the mri. “No,” he said, and wished himself out the door.
But Niun set his hand at his shoulder and moved him forward to the screen, there knelt, and Duncan sank down beside him. The screen was a darkness that cut the light and the shape of the pan’en into diamond fragments. Behind them the dusei fretted, barred from their presence.
There was silence. Duncan slowly let go his breath, understanding finally that there was no imminent threat. A long time Niun rested there, hands in his lap, facing the screen. Duncan did not dare turn his head to look at his face.