Men! she thought. God, I don’t mean to condemn your work, but You also made the dogs men keep, and don’t You agree they’re alike, those two breeds? Dirty, smelly, noisy, lazy, thievish, quick to attack when you aren’t watching, quick to run or cringe when you are; they’re useless, they create nothing, you have to wait on them, listen to their boastful bayings, prop up their silly little egos till they’re ready to slobber over you again…
I’m sorry. Jesus wore the shape of a man, didn’t he?
But he wore it—in pity—because we needed him—and what’ve we done with his gift?
Before her flashed the image of a Merseian Christ, armed and shining, neither compassionate nor cruel but the Messiah of a new day…She hadn’t heard of any such belief among them. Maybe they had no need of redemption; maybe they were God’s chosen…
Ydwyr caught her hands between his, which were cool and dry. “Djana, are you well?”
She shook the dizziness from her head.
Too much being shut in. Too much soaking myself in a world that can’t be mine. Nicky’s been gone too long. (I saw a greyhound once, well-trained, proud, clean and swift. Nicky’s a greyhound.) I can’t get away from my humanness. And I shouldn’t want to, should I?
“N-nothing, sir. I felt a little faint. I’ll be all right.”
“Come rest.” Stooping, he took her arm—a Terran gesture she had told him about—and led her through the inner curtain to his apartment.
The first room was what she might have expected and what officers of the base had no doubt frequently seen: emblem of the Vach Urdiolch, animation of a homeworld scene where forested hills plunged toward an ocean turbulent beneath four moons, shelves of books and mementos, racked weapons, darkly shimmering drapes; on the resilient floor, a carved and inlaid table of black wood, a stone in a shallow crystal bowl of water, an alcove shrine, and nothing else except spaciousness. One archway, half unscreened, gave on a monastic bedchamber and ’fresher cubicle.
But they passed another hanging. She stopped in the dusk beyond and exclaimed.
“Be seated if you wish.” He helped her shortness to the top of a couch upholstered in reptilian hide. The locks swirled over her shoulders as she stared about.
The mounted skulls of two animals, one horned, one fanged; convoluted tubes and flasks crowding a bench in the gloom of one corner; a monolith carved with shapes her eyes could not wholly follow, that must have required a gravsled to move; a long-beaked leathery-skinned thing, the span of its ragged wings equal to her height, that sat unblinking on its gnarled perch; and more and more, barely lit by flambeaux in curiously wrought sconces, whose restless blue glow made shadows more like demons, whose crackling was a thin song that almost meant something she had forgotten, whose smoke was pungent and soon tingled in her brain.
She looked up to the craggy highlights of Ydwyr’s countenance, tremendously above her. “Do not be afraid,” said the lion voice. “These are not instruments of the darkness, they are pathfinders to enter it.”
He sat down on his tail, bringing his ridged head level with hers. Reflections moved like flames deep within the caverns under his brow ridges. But his speech stayed gentle, even wistful.
“The Vach Urdiolch are the landless ones. So is the Law, that they may have time and impartiality to serve the Race. Our homes, where we have dwelt for centuries, we keep by leasehold. Our wealth comes less from ancient dues than from what we may win offplanet. This has put us in the forefront of the Race’s outwardness; but it has also brought us closest to the unknowns of worlds never ours.
“A witch was my nurse. She had served us since my grandfather was a cub. She had four arms and six legs, what was her face grew between her upper shoulders, she sang to me in tones I could not always hear, and she practiced magic from the remembered Ebon Mountains of her home. Withal, she was good and faithful; and in me she found a ready listener.
“I think that may be what turned me toward searching out the ways of alien folk. It helps Merseia, yes; we need to know them; but I have wanted their lore for its own sake. And Djana, I have not perpetually found mere primitive superstition. A herb, a practice, a story, a philosophy…how dare we say nothing real is in them, when we come new to a world that gave birth to those who live on it? Among folk who had no machines I saw, a few times, happenings that I do not believe any machine could bring about.
“In a sense, I became a mystic, in another sense, none, for where is the border between ‘natural’ and ‘transcendental’? Hypnosis, hysterical strength and stigmata, sensory heightening, psychosomatics, telepathy—such things are scorned in the scientific youth of civilizations, later accepted, when understanding has grown. I am simply using techniques that may, perhaps, advance comprehension where gauges and meters cannot.
“Once I got leave to visit Chereion. That is the most eldritch planet I have seen, a dominion of the Roidhunate but only, I think, because that serves the ends of its dwellers, whatever those ends are. For they are old, old. They had a civilization a million years ago that may have reached beyond this galaxy, where we have barely started to burrow about at the end of one spiral arm. It disappeared; they cannot or will not say why, and it suits a few of them to be too useful to Merseia for us to risk angering the rest. Yes, we haughty conquerors walk softly among them!
“I was received among the disciples of Aycharaych, in his castle at Raal. He has looked deeper into the mind—not the mind of his people, or yours, or any single one, but somehow into that quality of pandemic Mind which the scientists deny can exist—he has looked deeper into this, I believe, than any other being alive. He could not evoke in me what I did not have to be evoked; or else he did not choose to. But he taught me what he said I could use; and without that skill, that way of existing in the cosmos, I would never have done half what I have. Think: in a single decade, we are well on the way to full communication with both races on Talwin.
“I want, not to probe your soul, Djana, but to join with you in exploring it. I want to know the inwardness of being human; and you may see what it is to be Merseian.”
The flames danced and whispered among moving shadows; the figures on the monolith traced a path that could almost be followed; the smoke whirled in her veins; around her and through her crooned the lullaby voice of Father.
“Do not be afraid of what you see, Djana. These things are archaic, yes, they speak of pagan cults and witchcraft, but that is because they come from primeval sources, from the beast that lived before mind was kindled in it. One day those tokens may no longer be needed. Or perhaps they will be, perhaps they go deeper even than I imagine. I do not know and I want to know. It will help to mesh awarenesses with a human, Djana…no terrified captive, no lickspittle turncoat, no sniveler about peace and brotherhood, no pseudomorph grown up among us apart from his own breed…but one who has come to me freely, out of the depths of the commonalty that bred her, one who has known alike the glory and the tragedy of being human.
“These are symbols, Diana, certain objects, certain rites, which different thinking species have found will help raise buried parts of the soul. And brought forth, those parts can be understood, controlled, strengthened. Remember what the discipline of the body can do. Remember likewise the discipline of the spirit; calm, courage, capability can be learned, if the means are known; they take nothing but determination. Now ask yourself: What more remains?
“Djana, you could become strong.”
“Yes,” she said.
And she was gazing into the water, and the fire, and the crystal, and the shadows within…