“No,” Averson said, short of breath.
“Perhaps you have come up with some new advice. I would like to hear it.”
“A complaint. A complaint about security’s bullying tactics. I want that man taken off my door. I want access to anyone I choose. I want contact with the admiral.”
“In short, the whole ship should arrange itself and its operations to accommodate you. Dr. Averson, I have tried to be helpful.”
“You have taken away data I could use.”
“A copy will be sent you. But I have your statement that you aren’t qualified in that area. Precisely what direction are your researches taking now, Dr. Averson? The admiral will want to know.”
“I object to this intimidation and harassment.”
“Stay there, Dr. Averson.”
Panic set in. He sat still, hearing the connection broken, sat still with the realization that there was no contact he could make past this man; nowhere he might go without encountering the man in the corridor. Sensibly he suspected that no violence would be done him if he tried to leave, but he was not a physical man; he flinched from the possibility of unpleasantness and confrontations, which touched on his medical condition. He dared not, could not, would not.
He had to sit and wait.
And eventually the man arrived, closed the door and crossed the room to him, quiet and looking ever so much more conciliatory than needed be.
“We have a misunderstanding,” Degas said. “We should clear that up.”
“You should get that man off my door.”
“There is no man out there.”
Averson drew in his breath. “I object,” he said, “to being intimidated.”
“You are free to object—as I am free to state otherwise.”
“What is the matter with you?” Averson cried. “Are we on opposite sides?”
“Opposite sides of opinion, perhaps.” Degas settled again on the edge of the desk, towering over him. “We are both men of conscience, doctor. You have an opinion colored by panic. Mine rests on convictions of practicality. A pattern, you say. Have you met mri, doctor? Have you dealt with the agent who became mri?”
“We are all Haveners. All of us—remember . . . but—”
“Some interests here want to throw over alliance with the regul for protection of the mri. Do you understand that?”
He blinked, realized his mouth was open and closed it. The matter of politics began to come clear to him. “I—don’t see where it is . . . No. Breaking up the regul alliance is insanity.”
“And unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary, yes.” He lifted a hand and wiped perspiration from his upper lip, gazed up at Degas, who backed off from him a few paces.
“You do not counsel this,” Degas said.
“No. It’s possible to deal with the regul. I know this; I would never say otherwise. It is possible to deal with them. But dangerous . . . dangerous under present conditions.”
“Do you really understand the situation, doctor? Certain interests are pro-mri. Why they have taken this position . . . leave that to them to answer. It is a very dangerous position. The mission onworld, the personnel on that mission—the mission leader, your own Dr. Boaz, if you will forgive me, who is with them . . . are predisposed to find the mri nonaggressive, to counsel us into an approach to them. Regul do not threaten us; regul are not an aggressive species. Regul don’t pose the primary threat. Do you agree: they don’t pose the primary threat?”
“We’re in a dangerous position here. You yourself said—”
“But the mass of mankind, back home . . . a threat to them?”
“No. No danger from regul. No possible danger.”
“Do you see what these well-meaning influences would have you do? And what the result will be? From which species is the real threat of conflict, doctor?”
“I—see what you’re saying. But—”
“Application of humanitarian principles. But Cultures above all ought to see through our moralistic impulses. We’re talking about a species of killers, Dr. Averson, a species that lives by killing, parasites on the wars of any available power, who cultivate wars as regul cultivate trade. We may lose the regul here. And save what we’ll regret. You understand me?”
“I—”
“I suggest, Dr. Averson, that these are points worth considering. Those reports you make should be carefully considered for effect on policy at high levels. We have new data from the surface, a disturbing resurgence in the destroyed sites. The mri do not offer to contact us. So we send a peace mission stirring into the ruins. We have allies taking on independent operations thanks to these changes in our policy and the killing of their leader by a mri agent . . . You can’t interpret their intention . . . or won’t. How do we proceed? Do you have answers? Or do we let the situation go others’ way?”
Averson sat and sweated and slowly, after considering, wadded up the envelope in his hand, put it into his pocket under Degas’s stare. “You found life in the old sites and the mission went any-way.”
“We learned it this morning. We don’t have direct contact with the mission . . . can’t reach them without endangering everything.”
“Can’t call them back?”
“Officially,” Degas said in a low voice, leaning close to touch a finger before him, “not without blowing what we’re doing wide open to the regul, among other things. And how do regul take that? What reaction could we anticipate? You should appreciate the significance of your own reports, doctor. They set directions. You should understand that.”
“I do not intend to set directions.”
“You’re in that position. What do you say about the regal? I should have hoped your peculiar insights into their culture would have balanced . . . other interests in Cultures. What do you say?”
“We should not lose them, no. We should not let that happen.”
“Make it clear, then.” Degas leaned there with both hands. “We have dissenting views. We need this in writing, in recommendations with practical application, or we slip toward another line of policy. We’re sitting up here blind, over active weapons. We’re protecting mri at the expense of all we’ve gained by the treaties. We’re alienating a species from whom the gains could be enormous. I suggest, Dr. Averson, that you and I have a long conference on these matters.”
“I will—talk about it.”
“Now,” Degas said.
Chapter Eleven
Someone stirred close by; Niun drew a sudden breath, lifted his head, remembering Duncan with a slight panic . . . . He looked toward him and found him sleeping.
Kel Ras was sitting on her heels just the other side of him, veiled, staring at him in the shadow, leaning on the sword which rested across her knees. “They are out there,” she said. “Kel’anth, I really think you should come and see.”
The Kel had begun to rouse at the whispering. Hlil was there, and Seres and Desai and Merin, the youth Taz, Dias, others. A chill came over him, a profound sense of loneliness. He gazed down at Duncan, who remained oblivious to what passed, quietly disengaged himself from the dusei, a separation which had its own feeling of chill, physical and mental.
Whatever befell, they might leave Duncan in peace, at least until he was stronger; he was Kel’en and some ja’anom might take that as a matter of honor. For himself and Melein . . . .
He gathered himself to his feet, shook off the concern that urged at him, bent again to gather up his sword and slung it to his shoulder. He walked outside into the beginnings of dawn, with Ras and Hlil and Desai close to him.
“Has anyone advised the she’pan?” he asked, and when no one answered he sent Desai with a gesture in that direction. It was necessary to think of no more concerns, to settle his mind for what had to be met and what had to be done. He had no feeling of comrades at his side, rather that of witnesses at his back, and the loneliness persisted.
There was no possibility yet of seeing clearly what had come. Halflight tricked the eye, made th
e land out to be flat when it was not A thousand enemies could be hidden in that gentle rolling of the sands. They walked out to the rear of Kel, and Ras lifted her arm silently toward the northeast, where a faint hint of rocks marred the smoothness of the land.
No one was in sight now, and that was perhaps another of the land’s illusions.
Kel’ein joined them out of Kath, rousing out in some haste; and kath’ein came in haste with bowls of offering to the Kel. The word had spread through all the camp by now; sen’ein came, but the children were held in Kath, concealed.
A kath’en he knew brought a bowl to him, offered; he recalled another morning, when there had been the illusion of safety, and love with this gentle, plain-faced kath’en. “Anaras,” he murmured her name, and took the bowl from her hands, ate a very little, gave it back, lonelier than before. He was afraid; it was not an accustomed sensation.
The kath’en withdrew; all that caste did, having no place in what might come. Sen remained, and turning, he saw Melein’s pale figure among them, caught her eye. She had no word for him, only a nod of affirmation, a beckoned permission. He went to her and she touched lips to his brow, received his kiss in return; and from that dismissal he went out, past the tents, with all the Kel at his back.
They stopped after a space; and he walked as far again alone, stopped on the verge of a long slope, facing the open and seemingly empty land. It was cold in the wind, which swept unhindered across the land.
He had not been wise, after running so long, not to have spent all the night before in the indulgence of his own needs, forgetting Duncan; but he could not have done so, could not have rested—went at least with clear conscience for the things that he had done. He veiled himself, as one must facing strangers, as all the Kel was veiled. He put aside Niun s’Intel, slipped from himself into the Law, into the she’pan’s hands, and the tribe’s, and the gods’.
He waited.
* * *
The city depressed, the crumbling aisles of stone, the sad corpses, the alleys resounding to their footsteps and the rasp of the breathers, the whisper of the wind. Galey kept an eye to the buildings, the hollow shells which seemed long untouched by any living. It was such a place and such an hour as made him glad of the weapon under his hand and several armed companions about him, Boaz the only one of them who carried no weapons.
It was at once relief and discouragement, that there was no stir from the place, neither the attack they had dreaded nor the approach they had hoped. Nothing. Wind and sand and shells of ruins.
And the dead.
There were only kel’ein corpses at the first, black-robed; then others, gold-robes and blue, and children. The blues were without exception women and children, and babes in arms. Boaz stood over a cluster of sad husks and shook her head and swore. Shibo touched at a kel’en’s body with his foot, not roughly, but in distaste.
“There’s nothing alive here,” Boaz said. She was hard-breathing despite the mask, overburdened with the equipment and her own weight; she hitched the breather tank to another place on her shoulder and drew a gasping breath. “I think they’d have buried them if they could have.”
“But it was inhabited,” Galey said. “Duncan maintained the cities were empty.” The suspicion that in other particulars Duncan’s data might have inaccuracies in it . . . filled him with a whole array of apprehensions, a cowardice that wanted to go running back to the ship, pull off world and declare failure, so that guns could blast at each other at a distance where humans had advantage. Another part of him said no . . . looked at dead civs and children and turned sick inside. Kadarin, Lane, Shibo . . . what they felt he had no idea but he suspected it was something the same.
“Isn’t saying,” Boaz said, walking farther among the dead, “that the city was inhabited. Just that people were killed here. Children were killed here. Duncan’s mri. I think we’ve found them . . . just the way he said. He talked about dead cities; he’d seen one, been there . . . with the mri. He talked about a woman who died; and the children . . . he’d seen that too.”
“He talked about machines,” said the tech Lane, a young man, and worried-looking. “Live ones.”
“I don’t doubt,” said Boaz, “We’ll find that here too.” She paused again in the crossing of two alleys, with the sand skirling about her feet, looked about her, looked back, made a gesture indicating the way she wanted them to go.
“Come on,” Galey said to the others, who from time to time laid nervous hands on their weapons as they passed the darkened entries, the alien geometries of arches which led into ruin, or nowhere. Walk like mri, Boaz had advised them. Keep your hands away from guns. It was not easy, to trust to that in such a place.
* * *
A black line materialized out of the slow swell of the land opposite their own, grew distinct, stopped. Niun stood still, his legs numb with fatigue, waiting, silent declaration of the resolution of the ja’anom. The enemy had come, waited now for bright day. Sun-born, legend said of the People; the hao’nath had not chosen to move upon them by night. Neither would he, given choice. To face an enemy of one’s own inclinations . . . had an eerie, homely feeling about it.
Dus-sense played at the back of his mind. The beast was quiet, far from him . . . would stay there. It had an instinct that would not intrude on a fight on equal terms, like mri, who would not attack in masses. It knew. It drank in the whole essence of the camp and gave it to him, drank in the presence of the enemy and fed him that too, threads complex and indefinable, a second dimension of their reality, so that the world seemed the same when it stopped, only faded somewhat, less intense, less bright.
He banished it, wishing his mind to himself.
The light grew, colors became fully distinct. In the east the sun blazed full.
And with it other shapes took form, a new line of kel’ein, separate from the others, and apart from them. Niun’s heart skipped a beat in alarm. Had it been his native Kel at his back he might have turned, might have betrayed some emotion; they were not, and he did not. He moved his eyes slowly, and saw with a slight turning of his head that there were yet others, a third Kel ranged to the south.
They had been herded. Runners must have gone, signals passed, messages exchanged among she’panei. Three tribes were set against them. Three kel’anthein . . . to challenge.
One by one or all at once; he had his option. He saw the trap, and the warmth drained from his limbs as he thought on Melein, who would die when he fell . . . flooded back again with anger when he thought of all that had been sacrificed to bring them this far, and to lose . . . to lose now—
A figure separated from the others before him; he know the beginning of it then: the hao’nath came first. Another began to come out from among the tribe to the east; and another separated himself in the south. He detached his mind, drew quiet breaths, began to prepare himself.
Suddenly a line appeared at the extreme south; and another figure moved forward . . . a fourth tribe; and another at north north-east, a fifth.
They knew . . . all knew . . . that strangers had come among them, and where those strangers might be found. Niun felt again the prickling touch of his dus, the beast growing alarmed, full of blood-feelings.
No, he sent it furiously. He detached his sword, the av-kel, and held it in his hands crosswise, plain warning to those who came toward him from five directions . . . perhaps more still; he did not turn his head and utterly abandon his dignity. If they came also at his back, they must at least do him the grace of moving around to face him. Heat suffused his face, that he had let this happen and not known it; that he had run so blind persistently of outlying presence, that Duncan in his ravings had felt it, and he had not conceived the truth.
That his own kind did this to him, repudiating all that he was, all that they had come to offer, blind to all but difference . . . . There was no talking with them under these circumstances: they could read well enough that the kel’anth of this Kel stood by himself, that not a person at his back wou
ld move to assist him.
He could see the five at once now: tribal names, he thought, that he should have known, were he mri of this world . . . . Black-veiled, glittering with Honors which meant lives and challenges . . . they preserved decent interval from each other, separate in tribe, neither crossing the other’s space. Perhaps they bore instructions from their she’panei already, as he did from Melein: that would shorten matters. They risked much, all of them: absorption . . . for what tribes he took before dying himself, the kel’anth who killed him would possess, and those she’panei die . . . a measure of their desperation and their outrage, that they combined to take such risk.
Near enough now for hailing. He did not, nor go out to them; it was his option to stand still, and he had had enough of walking these last days. His back felt naked enough without separating himself so far from his own tents.
There was movement behind him. It startled him . . . one shameful instant he tensed, thinking of ultimate treachery, tsi’mri; steps approached him, solitary. Duncan, he thought, his heart pounding with despair . . . he turned his head slightly as a kel’en came to stand by him on his left.
Hlil. The shock of it destroyed his self-possession; the membrane flicked when Hlil looked at him straightly; and beyond Hlil, Seras came . . . too old, Niun thought anxiously: a Master of weapons, but too old for this. It was an act of courage more than to help to him. Steps stirred the sand on his right, and he looked that way . . . saw to his shock that it was Ras, her eyes cold as ever; suicidal, he reckoned. They were four now. Suddenly there was another, their fifth; kel Merin of the Husbands, whom he hardly knew.
That changed the complexion of the matter. He turned again toward the five who came to challenge, his heart beating faster and faster, from wild surmises that this was somehow a trap, arranged, between his own and them; to surmises that for some mad reason these kel’ein came to defend his hold on the ja’anom. He could challenge all at once, take the strongest himself, use these four at least as a delay until he could turn his hand to the next.