“You are wrong from the beginning,” Niun said, cold to the heart at such thoughts in him. “There is an autopilot to bring us in. And the she’pan never lied to you, or to me. She cannot.”
Duncan’s eyes lifted suddenly to his, cynically amazed, and his hands fell idle. “Rely on that? Maybe regul automation is better than ours, but this is a human ship, and I would not trust my life to that if there were a choice. You could come down anywhere. And would you know how to engage it in the first place? Perhaps the she’pan is simply naïve. You do need me, kel Niun. You tell her that.”
It had the sound of truth. Niun had no answer for it, shaken in his own confidence. There were things Melein could not reasonably know, things involving machines not made by the regul and motives of those not born of the People. Yet she proceeded on her Sight; he wished earnestly to believe in that.
“Come,” he pleaded with Duncan.
“No,” said Duncan, and fell to work again.
Niun rested unmoving, panic stirring in him. The rhythm became louder, steel on steel, metal clenched in taut, white-edged fingers. Duncan would not look up. A body’s-length away, the dus stirred, moaned.
Niun thrust himself to his feet and stalked out of kel-hall, through the corridors, until he came again to Melein.
“He says he will not,” Niun told her, and remained veiled.
She said nothing, but sat quietly and stared at the screen. Niun settled by her side, swept off mez and zaidhe and wadded them into a knot in his lap, head bowed.
Melein had no word for him, nothing. She was, he thought, finally reckoning with what she had wrought, and that reckoning was too late.
* * *
And by the middle of the night there was no more darkness left in the screen. The world took on frightening detail, brown patched with cloud swirls.
Suddenly a siren began, different from any that had sounded before, and the screens flashed red, a pulse terrifying in its implications.
Niun gathered himself to his knees, cast an anguished look at Melein, whose calm now seemed thinly drawn.
“Go to Duncan,” she bade him. “Ask again.”
He rose and went, covered his head, but did not trouble this time to veil himself: he went to plead with their enemy, and shame seemed useless in such a gesture.
The lights in kel-hall had dimmed: the screen, pulsing between the red of alarm and the white glare of the world, provided all the light, and Duncan sat, veilless, before it. There sounded still the measured scrape of metal, as if he had never ceased. Beside him lay the mass of the two dusei, that stirred and moved aside as Niun came and knelt before Duncan.
“If you know anything to do at this point,” Niun said, “it would be well to do it. I believe we are falling quite rapidly.”
Duncan rasped the edge one long stroke, his lips clamped into a taut line. A moment he considered, then laid aside his work and wiped his hands on his knees, looked up at the world that loomed in the pulsing screen. “I can try,” he said equably enough, “from controls.”
Niun stood up, waited for Duncan, who rose stiffly, then walked in with him through the ship. The dusei started to trail them. Niun forbade them with a sharp word, sealed a section door between, and brought Duncan into that section that belonged to the she’pan.
Melein met them there, in the corridor.
“He will try,” said Niun.
She opened controls to them, and came in after, stood gravely by as Duncan settled himself into the cushion at the main panel.
Duncan paid them no further heed. He studied the screens, and touched control after control. A flood of telemetry coursed one stable screen. One after another the screens ceased their flashing and took on images of the world in garish colors.
“You are playing pointless games,” said Melein.
Duncan looked half-about, back again. “I am. I have watched this world for some few days. It is puzzling. And it is still possible that the ship’s defenses may take over when we reach the absolute limit: there are choices left, but for some reason it is not observing the safety margin, and the world’s mass has anchored us, so that jump is impossible. Here.” He took the cover off a shielded area of controls and simply pushed a button. Lights ran crazily over the boards. Immediately there was a perceptible alteration in course, the screens shifting rapidly. Duncan calmly replaced the cover. “An old ship, this, and it has run hard. A system failed. It should have reset itself now. It will avoid, then pull us back on course. I think that will solve the problem. But if there is an error in the tape that caused it to happen, why, we are dead.”
He offered that with a cynical tone, and slowly rose, still looking at the scanners. “That world is dead,” he said then. “And that is strange, given other things I read in scanning.”
“You are mistaken,” said Melein harshly. “Read your instruments again, tsi’mri. That is a world called Nhequuy and the star is Syr, and it is a spacefaring race that lives there and all about these regions, called the etrau.”
“Look at the infrared. Look at the surface. No plants. No life. It’s a dead world, she’pan, whatever your records tell you. This is a dead system. A spacefaring people would have come to investigate an intrusion this close to their homeworld. But none have. Not here, not anywhere we have been, have they? You could not have answered a challenge. You could not have reacted to their ships. You would have needed me for that, and you have not. World after world after world. And nothing. Why do you suppose, she’pan?”
Melein looked on him with shock in her unveiled face, a helpless anger. She did not answer, and Niun felt a chill creeping over his skin in her silence.
“The People are nomads,” Duncan said, “mercenaries, hiring out whatever you have been. You have gone from star to star, seeking out wars, fighting for hire. And you have forgotten. You close each chamber after you, and forbid the Kel to remember. But what became of all your former employers, she’pan? Why is there no life where you have passed?”
Niun looked at the screens, at the deadness they displayed, at instruments he could not read—and looked to Melein, to hear her deny these things.
“Leave,” she said. “Niun, take him back to kel-hall.”
Duncan thrust back from the panel, swept a glance from her to Niun, and in the instant Niun hesitated, turned on his heel and walked out, striding rapidly down the corridor in the direction of kel-hall.
Niun stared at Melein. Her skin was pale, her eyes dilated: never had she looked so afraid, not even with regul and humans closing on them.
“She’pan?” he asked, still hoping.
“I do not know,” she said. And she wept, for it was an admission a she’pan could not make. She sank down on the edge of a cushion and would not look at him.
He stayed, ventured finally to take her by the arms and draw her out of that place, back to her own hall, where the chatter of the machines could not accuse her. He settled her in her chair and knelt beside her, smoothed her golden mane as he had done when they were both only kath’dai’ein, and with his own black veil he dried her tears and saw her face restored to calm.
He knew that she was lost, that the machines were beyond her capacity; she knew that he knew; but he knelt at her knees and took her hands, and looked up at her clear-eyed, offering with all his heart.
“Rest,” he urged her. “Rest. Even your mercies were well-guided. Is it not so that even the she’panei do not always know the Sight when it moves them? So I have heard, at least. You kept Duncan, and that was right to do. And be patient with him, for my sake be patient. I will deal with him.”
“He sees what is plain to be seen. Niun, I do not know what we have done.”
He thought of the dead worlds, and pushed the thought away. “We have done nothing. We have done nothing.”
“We are heirs of the People.”
“We do not know that his reckoning is right.”
“Niun, Niun, he knows. Can you be so slow to understand what we have seen along the track of th
e People? Can there be so many worlds that have failed of themselves after we have passed?”
“I do not know,” he said desperately. “I am only kel’en, Melein.”
She touched his face, and he felt the comfort that she meant, apology for her words, and they did not speak for a time. Long ago—it seemed long ago, and impossibly far—he had sat by another she’pan. Intel of Edun Kesrithun, and leaned his head against the arm of her chair, and she had been content in her drugged dreams to touch, to know that he was there. So he did now, with Melein. Her hand restlessly stroked his mane, while she thought; and he sat still, unable to share, unable to imagine where her thoughts ran, save that they went into darkness, and into things of the Pana.
He heard her breath shudder at last between her teeth, and fore-bore to breathe, himself, fearful of her mood.
“Intel,” she said at last, “still has her hand on us. The she’pan’s kel’en: she held you by her until I wonder you did not go mad; and passed you to me—to see that her chosen successor succeeded not only to Edun Kesrithun, but to rule all the People. That Intel’s choice survive. She would have waded to her aim through the blood of any that opposed her. She was the she’pan. Old—but age did not sanctify her, did not cleanse her of ambition or make her complacent. O gods, Niun, she was hard.”
He could not answer. He remembered the scarred and gentle-eyed Mother of Kesrith, whose hands were tender and whose mind was most times fogged with drugs; but he knew that other Intel too. His stomach tightened as he recalled old angers, old resentments—Intel’s possessive, adamantine stubbornness. She was dead. It was not right to cherish resentments against the dead.
“She would have taken ship,” Melein said in a hollow voice, “and gods know what she would have done in leaving Kesrith. We no longer served regul; we were freed of our oath. She sent me to safety; I think she tried to follow. I will never know. I will never know so many things she had no time to teach me. She talked of return, of striking against the enemies of the People—ravings under the komal-dreams, when I would sit by her alone. The enemy. The enemy. She would have destroyed them, and then she would have taken us home. That was her great and improbable dream, that the Dark would be the last Dark, to take us home, for we were few already; and she was, perhaps, mad.”
Niun could not bear to look at her, for it was true, and it was painful to them both.
“What shall we do?” he asked. “May the Kel ask permission to ask? What shall we do for ourselves?”
“I have no power to stop this ship. Would that I did. Duncan says that he cannot. I think that it is true. And he—”
There was long silence. Niun did not invade it, knowing it could bring no good; and at last Melein sighed.
“Duncan,” she said heavily.
“I will keep him from your sight.”
“You have given him the means to harm us.”
“I will deal with him, she’pan.”
She shook her head again, and wiped her eyes with her fingers.
The dusei came: Niun was aware of them before they appeared, looked and saw his own great beast, and welcomed it. It drew close in the wistful, abstracted manner of dusei, and sank down at Melein’s feet, offering its mindless solace.
Afterward, when Melein breathed easier, Niun felt another presence. Astonished, he saw the lesser dus standing in the doorway. It also came, and lay down by its fellow.
Melein touched it; it offered no hostility to the hand that had caused its hurt. But somewhere else in the ship there would be pain for that touching. Niun thought on Duncan, of his bitter isolation, and wondered that his dus could have been drawn here, by her whom Duncan hated.
Unless he had brutally driven it away—or unless his thoughts had turned the dus in this direction.
“Go see to Duncan,” Melein said finally.
Niun received back his veil from her hands and flung it over his shoulder, not bothering to wear it. He rose, and when his own dus would have followed him he bade it stay, for he wanted it by Melein, for her comfort.
And he found Duncan, as he had thought he would, back in kel-hall.
* * *
Duncan sat still in the artificial dawning, hands loose in his lap. Niun settled on his knees before him, and still Duncan did not look up. The human had veiled himself; Niun did not, offering his feelings openly to him.
“You have hurt us,” Niun said. “Kel Duncan, is it not enough?”
Duncan lifted his face and stared toward the screen, where the world that had been called Nhequuy was no longer in view.
“Duncan. What else will you have of us?”
Duncan’s dus was with Melein, touched and touching; he was betrayed. When his eyes shifted toward Niun there was no defense there, nothing but pain.
“I argued,” said Duncan, “with my superiors, for your sake. I fought for you. And for what? Did she have an answer? She knew the world’s name. What happened to it?”
“We do not know.”
“And to the other worlds?”
“We do not know, Duncan.”
“Killers,” he said, his eyes fixed elsewhere. “Killers by nature.”
Niun clenched his hands, that had gone chill. “You are with us, kel Duncan.”
“I have often wondered why,” His dark eyes returned to Niun’s. Of a sudden he pulled the veil away, swept off the tasseled head-cloth, making evident his humanity. “Except that I am necessary.”
“Yes. But I did not know that. We did not know it before.”
It touched home, he thought; there was a small reaction of the eyes.
And then Duncan turned, a wild, distracted look on his face as he looked to the door.
Dus-feelings. Niun received them too, even-before he heard the click of claws on tiling. Senses blurred. It was hard to remember what bitterness they had been about.
“No!” Duncan shouted as it came in. The beast shied and lifted a paw in threat, then dropped it and edged forward, head slightly averted. By degrees it came closer, settled, edged the final distance to Duncan’s side. Duncan touched it, slid his arm about its neck. At the door appeared the other beast, that came quietly to Niun, lay down at his back. Niun soothed it with gentle touches, his heart pounding from the misery that radiated from the other—schism between man and dus: the very air ached with it.
“You are hurting it,” Niun said. “Give way to it. Give it only a little.”
“It and I have an accommodation. I do not push it and it does not push me. Only sometimes it comes too fast. It forgets where the line is.”
“Dusei have no memories. There is only now with them.”
“Fortunate animals,” Duncan said hoarsely.
“Give way to it. You lose nothing.”
Duncan shook his head. “I am not mri. And I cannot forget.”
There was weariness in his voice; it trembled. For a moment there was again the man who had been long absent from them. Niun reached out, pressed his arm in a gesture he would have offered a brother of the Kel. “Duncan, I have tried to help you. All that I could do, I have tried.”
Duncan closed his eyes, opened them again; his fingers at the dus’s neck lifted in a gesture of surrender. “I think that, at least, is the truth.”
“We do not lie,” he said. “There are the dusei. We cannot.”
“I can understand that.” Duncan pressed his lips together, a white line, relaxed again, his hand still caressing the dus.
“I would not play at shon’ai with a man in your mood,” Niun said, baiting him, searching after hidden things. They had not, in fact, played in some time.
The dus began slowly to give forth its pleasure sound, relaxed to Duncan’s fingers as Duncan eased his arm about its fat-rolled neck; it sighed, oblivious to past grief, delighting in present love.
The human pressed his brow to that thick skull, then turned his face to look at Niun. His eyes bore a bruised look, like one long without rest. “It has no happier a life than mine,” Duncan said. “I cannot let it hav
e what it wants, and it cannot make me over into a mri.”
Niun drew a deep breath, tried to keep images from his mind. “I might destroy it,” he said, hushed and quickly. The human, in contact with the beast, flinched, soothed the dus with his hands. Niun understood; he felt soiled even in offering—but sometimes it was necessary, when a dus, losing its kel’en, could not be controlled. This one had never gained the kel’en it wished.
“No,” Duncan said at last. “No.”
He pushed the animal away, and it rose and ambled over to the corner. There was peace in the feeling of the beasts. It was better than it had been.
“I would be pleased,” said Niun, “if you would send to the she’pan your apology.”
Duncan sat quietly for a moment, arms on knees. At last he nodded, changed the gesture for a mri one. “When she needs me,” he said, “I will come. Tell her so.”
“I will tell her.”
“Tell her I am sorry.”
“I will tell her that too.”
Duncan looked at him for a moment, and then gathered himself up and stood looking at the dus. He gave a low whistle to it; it whuffed in interest and heaved itself up and came, followed to the corner where the pallets were.
And for a long time the human sat and worked over the dus, grooming it and soothing it, even talking to it, which seemed to please the beast. The dus settled, slept. In time, the man did.
Three days later the siren sounded, and they left Nhequuy and its sun. The next world was also without life.