It shrilled a warning at him, anger, terror: he could not tell which. Its color went to livid pallor. “Go to quarters,” it insisted. “Past time. Go to quarters. Now!”
He moved, edged past the regul and hurried, not looking back. When he reached the sanctuary of his own doorway his hands were shaking, and he thrust himself through even while it was opening, then shut it at once, anxious until the seal had hissed into function. Then he sank down on his cot, knowing that, all too quickly, he must face Stavros and give an account of what he had done. The library materials tumbled from his cold hands and some of the papers fell on the floor. He bent and gathered them up, feeling nothing with his fingers.
He had committed a great mistake, and knew that it was not to be the end of it.
They were going to the world that was said to be the mri home-world, to Kesrith of the star Arain.
Regul claimed title to it, all the same, and the right to cede it to humans. They claimed the authority to command the mri and to sign for them.
They betrayed the mri, and yet carried a kel’en on the ship that brought the orders that turned Kesrith over to humans.
We should not have met, the mri had said.
It was obvious that the regul at least, and possibly the mri, had not intended the meeting. Someone was being deceived.
He gathered himself up and expelled a long breath, rapped on Stavros’ door and entered this time without permission.
Chapter Four
Another of the ships was leaving this evening, one of the several shuttles that ferried passengers and goods from the surface of Kesrith up to the station—and thence to starships: to freighters, liners, warships—anything that would remove panicked regul from the path of humans.
Niun watched, as he was accustomed to watch each evening, from that high rock that overlooked the sea and the flats and the city. It was true. He had accepted the fact of the war’s end at last, although a sense of unreality still possessed him as he watched the ships go—never so frequent, not in his lifetime, nor, he thought, in that of his elders. The fact was that the regul city was dying, its life ebbing with every outbound ship. He obeyed the she’pan’s order and did not go near the city or the port, but he thought if he were to go down now into the square, he would find many of the buildings empty and stripped of things of value; and day after day, by the road that wound along the seashore, the merest line visible from his vantage point, he could see traffic coming into the city, bringing regul from the outlying towns and stations; aircraft came to the city, and fewer and fewer left it again. He had a mental image of a vast heap of abandoned regul vehicles at the edge of town, of ships at the port. They would have to drag them into heaps and let them rust.
It was rumored—so Sathell had gleaned from regul communications—that the chief price of the peace the regul had bought had been the cession of every colony in the Kesrith reach.
Tsi’mri economics had finally proven more powerful than the weapons of the Kel, more important, surely, than the honor of the mri in the regul’s estimation. Kesrith was a loss to the regul, to be sure, a mining and transport site, expensively automated; doubtless to lose such a colony was embarrassing to the regul elders; doubtless it was inconvenient for their business and commerce; doubtless for the regul in those fleeing ships the inconvenience ascended to tragedy. Regul valued many peculiar objects; variance in the quality and amount of these and their clothing and their comforts betokened personal worth in their eyes; and the loss of their homes and valued objects that could not be taken onto the ships would be grievous for them; but they had no Revered Objects, nothing that could afflict them to the degree that the loss of homeworld could affect the People; and the honors they coveted could be purchased anew if they were fortunate—unlike mri honors, that had to be won.
And therein Niun did not muster any great sympathy for any of them. His personal loss was great enough: all the life he had planned and desired for himself was departing from possibility with the violence and speed of those outbound ships. The migration had become a rout, night and day; and events gave clear proof that the personal plans of Niun s’Intel Zain-Abrin were nothing to the powers that moved the worlds. But the threat to the House: that was beyond his power to imagine; and that the powers that moved the worlds had no concern for the fate of the People—that was beyond all understanding.
He had tried to adjust his mind to this change in fortunes.
Where shall we make our defense? he had asked of Eddan and the kel’ein, assuming, as he assumed that sanity rested with his people, that there was to be a defense of homeworld, of the Edun of the People.
But Eddan had turned his face from his question, gesturing his refusal to answer it; and in the failure of the Kel, he had dared ask the she’pan herself. And Intel had looked at him with a strange sorrow, as if her last son were somehow lacking in essential understanding; but gently she had spoken to him in generalities of patience and courage, and carefully she had declined to give any direct answer to his question.
And day by day the regul ships departed, without mri kel’ein aboard. The she’pan forbade.
He was watching the end. He understood that now, at least that. Of what it was an end he was not yet sure; but he knew the taste of finality, and that of the things he had desired all his life there was left him nothing. The regul departed, and hereafter came humans.
He wished now desperately that he had applied himself with even more zeal to his study of human ways, so that he could understand what the humans were likely to do. Perhaps the elder kel’ein, who had such experience with them, knew; and perhaps therefore they thought that he should know, and would not reward ignorance with explanation. Or perhaps they were as helpless as he and refused to admit the obvious to him; he could not blame them for that. It was that he simply could not admit that there was nothing to be done, that there were no preparations to be made, while the regul so desperately, so anxiously sought safety. He knew, with what faith remained to him in his diminishing store of things trustworthy, that the Kel would resist in the end; but they were to die, if that were the case. Their skill was great, greater than that of any kel’ein living, he believed; but the nine were also very old and very few to stand for long against the mass attacks of humans.
The imagination came to him over and over again, as horrid and unreal as the departure of regul from his life—of humans arriving, of human language and human tread echoing in the sanctity of the edun shrine, of fire and blood and ten desperate kel’ein trying to defend the she’pan from a horde of defiling humans.
Brothers, sister, he longed to ask the kel’ein, is it possible that there is some hope that I cannot see? And then again he thought: Or, o gods, is it possible that we have a she’pan who has gone mad? Brothers, sister, look, look, the ships!—our way off Kesrith. Make our she’pan see reason. She has forgotten that there are some here who want to live. But he could not say such things to his elders, to Eddan; and he would ultimately have to account for those words to Intel’s face, and he could not bear that. He could not reason with them, could not discuss anything as they did among themselves, in secret: they, she—all save Melein and himself—remembered Nisren’s days, the life before the war. They had taken regul help once, escaping the ruin of Nisren, and refused it now, resolved together in councils from which he, not of the Husbands, was excluded. He insisted on believing that his elders were rational. They were too calm, too sure, to be mad.
Forty-three years ago, the like had come to Nisren. A regul ship, rescuing she’pan Intel, had carried the holy Pana and the survivors of the edun to Kesrith. The elders did not speak of that day, scarcely even in songs: it was a pain written in their visible scars and in the secrecies of their silence.
Shame? he wondered, heart-torn at thinking ill of them. Shame at something they did or did not do on Nisren? Shame at living, and unwillingness to survive another fall of Homeworld? Sometimes he suspected, with dread growing and gnawing in him like some alien parasite, that such wa
s the case, that he belonged to a she’pan that had wearied of running, to an edun that had consciously made up its mind to die.
An edun which held the Pana, the Revered, the Objects of mri honor and mri history, to behold which was for the Sen alone, to touch which unbidden was to die; to lose which—
To lose the relics of the People—
It betokened the death, not alone of the edun, but of the People as a race. He held the thought a moment, turned it within his mind, then cast it aside in haste, and fearfully picked it up again.
O gods, he thought, mind numbed by the very concept, Another shuttle lifted. He saw it rise, up, up, a star that moved.
O gods, o gods.
It was shon’ai, the Passing-game. It was the flash of blades in the dark, the deadly game of rhythm and bluff and threat and reckless risk.
The Game of the People.
The blades were thrown. Existence was gambled on one’s quickness and wit and nerve, for no other reason than to deserve survival.
He felt the blood drain from his face to his belly, understanding why they had looked through him when he asked his vain questions.
Join the rhythm, child of the People: be one with it; accept, accept, accept.
Shon’ai!
He cried aloud, and understood all at once. All over known space mri would react to the throw the she’pan of Kesrith had made. They would come, they would come, from all quarters of space, to fight, to resist.
The Pana was set in the keeping of Edun Kesrithun.
The circle was wide and the blades flew at seeming random, but each game tended to develop its unique pattern, and wisest the player who did not become hypnotized by it.
Intel had cast. It was for others to return the throw.
The first of Kesrith’s twin moons had brightened to the point of visibility. The stars became a dusty belt across the sky. The air grew chill, but he felt no impulse to return to the edun, to resume the mundane routine of their existence. Not this evening. Not upon such thoughts as he carried. Eventually the kel’ein would miss him, and look out and see him in his favorite place, and let him be. He spent many evenings here. There was nothing to do in the edun of evenings, save to sleep, to eat, to study things no longer true. None of them had sung the songs since the day the news of the war’s end came. They frequently sat and talked together, excluding him. Probably, he thought, it was a relief to them to have him gone.
The geyser named Sochau belched steam far across the flats, a tall plume, predictable as the hours of any regul clock. By such rhythms the world lived, and by such rhythms it measured the days until the humans should come.
But for the first time in all the days since he had heard of the war’s ending, he felt a suspicion of gladness, a fierce sense that the People might have something yet to do, and that humans might find their victory not an accomplished fact.
A star grew in the sky as the other had departed, rapid and omen-filled. He looked up at it with quickening interest, enlivened by something, even a triviality, that was not part of the ordinary. The shuttles did not usually descend until morning.
He watched it grow, cherishing imaginings both dread and hopeful, a mere child’s game, for he did not really believe that it would be anything but a variance in regul schedules for regul reasons, as ordinary as anything could be in the organized routine of Kesrith’s dying.
He watched it descend and saw suddenly lights flare on at the port in the farthest area, realized suddenly that it was not coming down at the freighter or shuttle berths, but to the area given over to military landings, and it was no shuttle. It was a ship of size, such as the onworld port had not held in many years.
The ship was nothing in the dark and the distance but a shape of light, featureless, nameless. There was nothing to indicate what it was. Of a sudden he knew his people must have word of this—that doubtless they had already been alert to it and only he had not been.
He sprang down from his rock and began to run, swift feet changing course here and there at the outset where the fragile earth masked dangers of its own. He did not use the road, but ran crosslands, by an old mri trail, and came breathless to the door of the edun, chest aching.
There was silence in the halls. He paused only a moment, then took the stairs toward the she’pan’s tower, almost running up the first turn.
And there a shadow met him—old Dahacha coming down, Dahacha with his great, surly dus lumbering downsteps after him. Everyone brought up short, and the dus edged down a step to rumble a warning.
“Niun,” the old man said. “I was coming to look for you.”
“There is a ship,” Niun began.
“No news here,” said Dahacha. “Hazan is back. Yai! Come on up, young one. You are missed.”
Niun followed, a great joy in him: Hazan—command ship for the zone; and high time it came, among regul panicked and retreating in disorder. There was resolution in the regul after all, some authority to hold the disintegrating situation under control.
And Hazan! If Hazan came, then came Medai—cousin, fellow kel’en, home from human wars and bringing with him experience and all the common sense that belonged to the fighting Kel of the front.
He remembered other things of Medai too, things less beloved; but it made no difference after six years, with the world falling into chaos. He followed Dahacha up the winding stairs with an absolute elation flooding through him.
Another kel’en.
A man the others would listen to as they would never listen to him, who had never left the world.
Medai, who had served with the leaders of regul and knew their minds as few kel’ein had the opportunity to know them—kel’en to the ship of the bai of Kesrith zones.
Chapter Five
The door was locked, as it was at every unpermitted period. Sten Duncan tried it yet another time, knowing it was useless, pounded his fist against it and went back to the old man.
“They refused to answer,” said Stavros. He sat in the desk-chair, with the console screen at his left elbow a monotone grey. He looked uneasy, unusual for Stavros, even at the worst of times.
They were down, onworld. That was unmistakable.
“We were to dock,” said Duncan finally, voicing the merest part of the concern boiling in his mind.
Stavros did not react to that piece of observation, only stared at him dispassionately. Duncan read blame into it.
“If there’s been a change in plans, something could be wrong either on the station or onworld,” Duncan said, trying to draw the smallest reassurance from the old man, a denial of his apprehensions—even outright anger. He could deal with that.
And when Stavros gave him nothing at all in reply he sank down at the table, head bowed against his hands, exhausted with the strain of waiting. It was their night. It was halfway through that night.
“Perhaps they’re sleeping,” Stavros said unexpectedly, startling him with a tone that held nothing of rancor. “If they chose to keep ship-cycle after landing, or if we’re in local night, bai Hulagh could be asleep and his orderlies unwilling to respond to us without his authority. The regul do not inconvenience an elder of his rank.”
Duncan looked back at him not believing the explanation, but glad that Stavros had made the gesture, whether or not he had another in the back of his mind that he was not saying. It did not ease his feelings in the least that Stavros had never said anything to him in the matter of the encounter with the mri, had only asked quiet questions of what had happened there in the mainroom: no blame, no hint of what had passed in Stavros’ mind. Nor had Stavros said anything when they were shortly afterward presented with another schedule, their hours of liberty cut in half, a regul youngling constantly watching their door and following at a distance when he left the room.
The retaliation fell most heavily on himself, of course, confining him more closely, while that did not much concern Stavros; but for their safety and for the future of regul/human cooperation it augured ill enough. The regul’s of
ficial manner did not change toward them. There was still the formal manner, still the salutations in the day’s messages. Characteristic of the regul, there had been no direct mention of the incident in the hall, only the notification, without explanation, that their hours had been changed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Duncan volunteered at last, out of his own frustration.
Stavros looked for once surprised, then frowned and shrugged. “Probably just regul procedure and some minor change in plans. Don’t worry about it.” And then with a second shrug, “Get some sleep, Duncan. There’s little else to do at the moment.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, rose and went out to the anteroom, sat down on his own bunk and tucked his legs up. He set his elbows on his knees and head on his hands and massaged his aching temples.
Prisoners, thanks to him.
Stavros was worried. Stavros doubtless knew what there was to concern them and he was worried. Perhaps if the regul had accepted the offering, Stavros could have demonstrated the punishment of the human youngling who had created the difficulty. Perhaps he had not done so because, in the main, they were both human and Stavros felt an unvoiced attachment to him; or perhaps he had declined to do so because a regul elder would not have done so under the same circumstances.
But it was clear enough that they were under the heavy shadow of regul displeasure, and had been for many, many days; and that they were not now where they had been told at the outset they would land.
A sound reached him, a sound of someone passing in the corridor, one of the sleds whisking along the tracks outside. He looked up as it seemed to stop, hoping against hope that the thing had stopped to bring them news.
The door opened. He sprang up, instantly correct. The sled indeed had stopped before the doorway, and within it sat the oldest, most massive regul that he had ever seen. Roll upon roll of wrinkled flesh and crusting skin hid any hint of structure that lay within that grey-brown body, save the bony plating of the face, where eyes were sunk in circular wrinkles, black and glittering eyes; and flat nose and slit mouth gave a deceptive illusion of humanity.