At The Edge Of Space (Hanan Rebellion) (44 page)

Only what territory lay beyond depended entirely on the conscience of another being—on two asuthi, one of whom might be little removed from madness.

He did not touch her mind again until he had opened the door of his quarters: she was seated in his preferred chair in a relaxed attitude as if she had a perfect right to his things. When he realized she was speculating on the pictures on the bureau she pirated the knowledge of his family from his mind, ripped forth a flood of memories that in his disorganization he could not prevent. He reacted with fury, felt her retreat.

“I’m sorry,” she said smoothly, shielding her own thoughts with an expertise his most concentrated effort could not penetrate. She gestured toward the other chair and wished him seated.

“These are my quarters,” he said, still standing. “Or do they move you in with me? Do they assume that too?”

Her mind closed utterly when she felt that, and he could not reach her. He had thought her beautiful when he first saw her asleep; but now that her body moved, now that those blue eyes met his, it was with an arrogance that disturbed him even through the turmoil of his other thoughts. There was a mind behind that pretty façade, strong-willed and powerful, and that was not an impression beautiful women usually chose to send him. He was not sure he liked it.

He was less sure he liked her, despite her physical attractions.

“I have my own quarters,” she said aloud. “And don’t be self-centered. Your choices are limited, and
I
am not one of them.”

She ruffled through his thoughts with skill against which he had no defense, and met his temper with contempt. He thrust her out, but the least wavering of his determination let her slip through again; it was a continuing battle. He took the other chair, exhausted, beginning to panic, feeling that he was going to lose everything. He would even have struck her—he would have been shamed by that.

And she received that, and mentally backed off in great haste. “Well,” she conceded then, “I am sorry. I am rude. I admit that.”

“You resent me.” He spoke aloud. He was not comfortable with the
chiabres.
And what she radiated confirmed his impression: she tried to suppress it, succeeded after a moment.

“I wanted what you are assigned to do,” she said, “very badly.”

“I’ll yield you the honor.”

Her mind slammed shut, her lips set. But something escaped her barriers, some deep and private grief that touched him and damped his anger.

“Neither you nor I have that choice,” she said. “Chimele decides. There is no appeal.”

Chimele.
He recalled the Orithain’s image with hate in his mind, expected sympathy from Isande’s, and did not receive it. Other images took shape, sendings from Isande, different feelings: he flinched from them.

For nine thousand years Isande’s ancestors had served the Orithain. She took pride in that.

Iduve,
she sent, correcting him.
Chimele is
the
Orithain; the people are iduve.

The words were toneless this time, but different from his own knowledge. He tried to push them out.

The ship is
Ashanome, she continued, ignoring his awkward attempt to cast her back.
WE are
Ashanome:
five thousand iduve, seven thousand noi kame, and fifteen hundred amaut. The iduve call it a nasul, a clan. The
nasul Ashanome
is above twelve thousand years old; the ship
Ashanome
is nine thousand years from her launching, seven thousand years old in this present form. Chimele rules here. That is the law in this world of ours.

He flung himself to his feet, finding in movement, in any distraction, the power to push back Isande’s insistent thoughts. He began to panic: Isande retreated.

“You do not believe,” she said aloud, “that you can stop me. You could, if you believed you could.”

She
pitied
him. It was a mortification as great as any the iduve had set upon him. He rounded on her with anger ready to pour forth, met a frightened, defensive flutter of her hand, a sealing of her mind he could not penetrate.

“No,” she said. “Aiela—no. You will hurt us both.”

“I have had enough,” he said, “from the iduve—from noi kame in general. They are doing this to me—”

“—to us.”

“Why?”

“Sit down. Please.”

He leaned a moment against the bureau, stubborn and intractable; but she was prepared to wait. Eventually he yielded and settled on the arm of his chair, knowing well enough that she could perceive the distress that burned along his nerves, that threatened the remnant of his self control.

You fear the iduve,
she observed.
Sensible. But they do not hate; they do not love. I am Chimele’s friend. But Chimele’s language hasn’t a single word for any of those things. Don’t attribute to them motives they can’t have. There is something you must do in Chimele’s service: when you have done it, you will be let alone. Not thanked: let alone. That is the way of things.

“Is it?” he asked bitterly. “Is that all you get from them—to be left alone?”

Memory, swift and involuntary: a dark hall, an iduve face, terror. Thought caught it up, unraveled, explained.
Khasif: Chimele’s half-brother. Yes, they feel. But if you are wise, you avoid causing it.
Isande had escaped that hall; Chimele had intervened for her. It haunted her nightmares, that encounter, sent tremors over her whenever she must face that man.

To be let alone: Isande sought that diligently.

And something else had been implicit in that instant’s memory, another being’s outrage, another man’s fear for her—as close and as real as his own.

Another asuthe.

Isande shut that off from him, firmly, grieving. “Reha,” she said. “His name was Reha. You could not know me a moment without perceiving him.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.” Screening fell, mind unfolding, willfully.

Dark, and cold, and pain: a mind dying and still sending, horrified, wide open. Instruments about him, blinding light. Isande had held to him until there was an end, hurting, refusing to let go until the incredible fact of his own death swallowed him up. Aiela felt it with her, her fierce loyalty, Reha’s terror—knew vicariously what it was to die, and sat shivering and sane in his own person afterward.

It was a time before things were solid again, before his fingers found the texture of the chair, his eyes accepted the color of the room, the sober face of Isande. She had given him something so much of herself, so intensely self, that he found his own body strange to him.

Did they kill him?
he asked her: He trembled with anger, sharing with her: it was his loss too. But she refused to assign the blame to Chimele. Her enemies were not the iduve of
Ashanome.
His were.

He drew back from her, knowing with fading panic that it was less and less possible for him to dislike her, to find evil in any woman that had loved with such a strength.

It was, perhaps, the impression she meant to project. But the very suspicion embarrassed him, and became quickly impossible. She unfolded further, admitting him to her most treasured privacy, to things that she and Reha had shared once upon a time: her asuthe from childhood, Reha. They had played, conspired, shared their loves and their griefs, their total selves, closer by far than the confusion of kinswomen and kinsmen that had little meaning to a nas kame. For Isande there was only Reha: they had been the same individual compartmentalized into two discrete personalities, and half of it still wakened at night reaching for the other. They had not been lovers. It was something far closer.

Something to which Aiela had been rudely, forcibly admitted.

And he was an outsider, who hated the things she and Reha had loved most deeply.
Bear with me,
she asked of him.
Bear with me. Do not attack me. I have not accepted this entirely, but I will. There is no choice. And you are not unlike him. You are honest, whatever else. You are stubborn. I think he would have liked you. I must begin to.

“Isande,” he began, unaccountably distressed for her. “Could I possibly be worse than the human? And you insist you wanted that.”

Rid?
He tried to penetrate her meaning in that, shocked and alarmed at once; and encountered defenses, winced under her rejection, heart speeding, breath tight. She turned off her conscience where the human was concerned. He was nothing to her, this creature. Anger, revenge, Reha—the human was not the object of her intentions: he simply stood in the way, and he was alien—
alien!
—and therefore nothing. Aiela would not draw her into sympathy with that creature. She would not permit it.
NO!
She had died with one asuthe, and she was not willing to die with another.

Why is he here?
Aiela insisted.
What do the iduve want with him?

Her screening went up again, hard. The rebuff was almost physical in its strength.

He was not going to obtain that answer. He had to admit it finally. He rose from his place and walked to the bureau, came back and sprawled into the chair, shaking with anger.

There was something astir among iduve, something which he was well sure Isande knew: something that could well cost him his life, and which she chose to withhold from him. And as long as that was so there would be no peace between them, however close the bond.

In that event she would not win any help from him, nor would the iduve.

No, she urged him.
Do not be stubborn in this.

“You are Chimele’s servant. You say what you have to say. I still have a choice.”

Liar,
she judged sadly, which stung like a slap, the worse because it was true.

Images of Chimele: ancestry more ancient than civilization among iduve, founded in days of tower-holds and warriors; a companion, a child, playing at draughts, elbows-down upon an
izhkh
carpet, laughing at a
m’metane’s
cleverness; Orithain—

—isolate, powerful:
Ashanome’
s influence could move full half the
nasuli
of the iduve species to Chimele’s bidding—a power so vast there could be no occasion to invoke it.

Sole heir-descendant of a line more than twelve thousand years old.
Vaikka:
revenge; honor; dynasty.

Involving this human,
Aiela gleaned on another level.

But that was all Isande gave him, and that by way of making peace with him. She was terrified, to have given him only that much.

“Aiela,” she said, “you are involved too, because
he
is, and you were chosen for him. Even iduve die when they stand between an Orithain and necessity. So did Reha.”

“Listen to me. I have lived closer to the iduve than most kamethi ever do. If Reha had been asuthe to anyone else but me, he might be alive now, and now you are here, you are Chimele’s because of me; and I am warning you, you will need a great deal of good sense to survive that honor.”

“And you
love
a being like that.” He could not understand. He refused to understand. That in itself was a victory.

“Listen. Chimele doesn’t ask that you love her. She couldn’t understand it if you did. But she scanned your records and decided you have great
chanokhia,
great—fineness—for a
m’metane.
Being admired by any iduve is dangerous; but an Orithain does not make mistakes, Do you understand me, Aiela?”

Fear and love: noi kame lived by carefully prescribed rules and were never harmed—as long as they remembered their place, as long as they remained faceless and obscure to the iduve. The iduve did not insist they do so: on the contrary the iduve admired greatly a
m’metane
who tried to be more than
m’metane.

And killed him.

“There is no reason to be afraid on that score,” Isande assured him. “They do not harm us. That is the reason of the
idoikkhei.
You will learn what I mean.”

His backlash of resentment was so strong she visibly winced. She simply could not understand his reaction, and though he offered her his thoughts on the matter, she drew back and would not take them. Her world was enough for her.

“I have things to teach
you,
” he said, and felt her fear like a wall between them.

“You are welcome to your opinions,” she said at last.

“Thank you,” he said bitterly enough; but when she opened that wall for a moment he found behind it the sort of gentle being he had seen through Reha’s thoughts, terribly, painfully alone.

Dismayed, she slammed her screening shut with a vengeance, assumed a cynical façade and kept her mind taut, more burning than an oath. “And I will maintain my own,” she said.

3

Two days could not prepare him, not for this.

He looked on the sleeping human and still, despite the hours he had spent with Isande, observing this being by monitor, a feeling of revulsion went through him. The attendants had done their aesthetic best for the human, but the sheeted form on the bed still looked alien—pale coloring, earth-brown hair trimmed to the skull-fitting style of the noi kame, beard removed. He never shuddered at amaut: they were cheerful, comic fellows, whose peculiarities never mattered because they never competed with kallia; but this—
this
—was bound to his own mind.

And there was no Isande.

He had assumed—they had both assumed in their plans—that she would be with him. He had come to rely on her in a strange fashion that had nothing to do with duty: with her, he knew
Ashanome,
he knew the folk he met, and people deferred to his orders as if Isande had given them. She had been with him, a voice continually in his mind, a presence at his side; at times they had argued; at others they had even found reason to be awed by each other’s worlds. With her, he had begun to believe that he could succeed, that he could afterward settle into obscurity among the kamethi and survive.