The safety of the hall, the sealing of the door behind him, brought a physical relief. He lowered his eyes and flinched past an iduve who was passing, secured the lift alone, and was glad to find the kamethi level, where kallia thronged the concourse—the alternate day-cycle, whose waking was his night.
He knew the iduve finally.
Predators.
Outsiders had never understood the end of the Domination, the Sundering of the iduve empire. He began to.
They were hunters from their very origins—a species for whom all else that moved was prey, for whom others of their own kind were intolerable. They had hunted the metrosi to exhaustion and drifted elsewhere. Now they were back. The enormity of the surmise grew in him like a sickly chill.
The nasul—jealously controlling its territory.
Perhaps even the iduve themselves had forgotten what they were; the pride of ritual and ceremony shielded their instincts, civilized them, as civilization had dealt with the instincts of kallia, who had been the natural prey of other hunters in packs, on the plains of prehistoric Aus Qao. Subtle reactions, a tensing of muscles, an interchange of movements, the steadiness of the eyes—these defined hunter and hunted. That was the thing he had looked in the face when he had stared into Chimele’s at close range. He had wished to run and had instinctively known better—that if he stayed very, very still, it might pad softly away.
He shivered, the hair rising at the nape of his neck as if she still watched him. When he felt Isande’s frightened presence beginning to creep back into his mind, he screened heavily, for he still was shaken, and he was ashamed for her to know the extent of it.
You nearly killed yourself, she accused him. I warned you, I warned you—
“Not well enough,” he returned. “You have a blind spot. Or you do not understand them.”
“I have lived my whole life among them,” she retorted, “and I have never seen what you saw tonight—not even from Khasif.”
He accepted that for truth. Likely kamethi had been taught never to draw such responses. But he was world-born; he himself had sat by fires at night in the wilds of Lelle, with a ring of light to guard his sleep, and he knew Chimele in all the atavistic fears of his species.
A predator who had assumed civilization.
Who had touched him gently and refrained, despite his best attempt to provoke her—ignorant, she had called him, and justly.
“Chimele is iduve,” Isande hurled against the warmth of that thought, forcefully, for she hated worse than anything to have her advice ignored. “And you will live longer if you remember that we are only kamethi, and avoid provoking her and avoid attracting her notice to yourself.”
This from Isande, Isande who loved Chimele, who willingly served the iduve: who trembled in her heart each time she dealt with Chimele’s temper. It was a sorrowful life she had accepted: he let that slip and was sorry, for Isande flared, hot and unshielded.
Am I nothing, she fired at him, because I was born kameth? My world-born friend, I have been places you have not dreamed of, and seen things you cannot understand. And as it regards the iduve, my friend, I have lived among them, and what of their language you know, you lifted from my mind, what of their customs you understand you have learned from me, and what consideration you had from Chimele you have because of me, so do not lecture me as an expert on the iduve. If you were not so ikas, you would not have had so dangerous an experience.
Well, he returned, I hardly seem to have a monopoly on vanity or selfishness or arrogance, do I?
And the resentments that echoed back and forth, too much truth, sent both personalities reeling apart, hurt.
Isande was first to touch again, grieving. “Aiela,” she pleaded, “Asuthi must not quarrel. Please, Aiela.”
“I am vain and arrogant,” he admitted, “and I have had almost all the damage my sanity can stand tonight, Isande. I’m tired. Go away.”
Daniel, she remembered, dismay and regret sharp in her; she remembered other things she had gleaned of his mind, and riffled through all the memory he left unscreened, gathering this and that with a rising feeling of distress, of outrage. He felt her, poised to blame him for everything, to accuse him of things the worse because they were just.
And she did not. He was so tired his legs shook under him, and he felt himself very lonely, even in her presence: he had disregarded everything she had meant to protect them both, and now that she had utmost cause to rage against him she pitied him too much to accuse him. She knew his nature and his incapacity, and she pitied him.
Leave me alone, he wished her. And then furiously: Leave me alone, will you?
She fled.
He undressed, washed, went through all the ritual of preparing for bed, and tried to sleep. It was impossible. Reaction still had his muscles in knots. When he closed his eyes he saw the paredre, Chimele—cages.
He arose and walked the floor, tried listening to his old tapes, that he had brought from Kartos. It was worse than the silence. He cut off the sound, idly cut in on the monitor that was preset for Daniel’s next-door apartment. The human was still blissfully unconscious.
And the memory returned, how it had felt to live in that envelope of alien flesh. He broke the connection, dizzied and disoriented, wandered back to the bath, drifting as he had a dozen times, to the full-length mirror. It contained all in Ashanome that was familiar, that was known.
His image stared back at him, naked of everything but the idoikkhe that circled his wrist like some bizarre barbaric ornament. His silver hair was beginning a slow recovery from the surgeons’ unimaginative barbering, and he had grown accustomed to the change. His features among kallia were considered proper: straight silver brows, a straight nose with a little flare to the nostrils, a mouth wide enough to show generosity, a chin prominent as with all the Lyailleues. He fingered the high prominence of his cheekbone and the hollow beneath, staring into his own eyes closely in the mirror, wondering how much of the iduve eye was iris. Was it all? And could they see color as kallia could? Humans did. He knew that. He considered the rest of himself, 7.8 meis in stature, a little taller than the average, broad-shouldered and slim at the hips, with the slender, well-muscled limbs of an athlete, the flat belly and muscular girdle of a runner, a hard-trained body that had no particular faults. He had never known serious illness, had suffered no wounds, had never known privation that was not his own choice. He was parome Deian’s only son; if he had had any faults at birth, no money would have been spared to mend them. If he had lacked any in wit, parome Deian’s money would have purchased every known aid to teach him and improve his mind. When he grew bored, there had instantly been toys and games and hunts and athletics, and when he became a young man, there had been all the loveliest and most proper girls, the most exclusive parties. There were private instructors, the most proper and demanding schools; and there had been family despair when he insisted on pursuing athletics to the detriment of his studies, on risking his life in hunts, on turning down a career in district politics that was calculated to lead to the highest levels of government—a lack of family and filial giyre that his father refused to understand (“Ikas,” Deian had said, “and ungrateful.” “Am I ikas,” he had answered, eighteen and all-knowing, “because it is not my pattern to be like you?” “There have been Lyailleues on the High Council for two hundred years, honoring Xolun and this house. My son will not take it on himself to end that tradition.”)
Once that year he had thought of hurling his plane (a luxury model) in a pyrotechnic finish at Mount Ryi, in full view of all the fashionable estates and the Xolun zone capitol. The news services would be buzzing with wonder for days: Son of Deian, Suicide; and people would be shaking their heads and making small noises of despair and secretly hating him, thinking if only they had had his advantages they would not have thrown them away. When he was nineteen he had quit school so that his father Deian would disinherit him and his mother and sister would give him up; but he also saw it broke their hearts, and his few passages with the pleasures of the metrosi’s darker side left him disgusted and embarrassed, for these things were also available in the estates in the shadow of Ryi—without the filth and the fear. In the end he had surrendered and returned home to the respectability planned for him, to learn the business of government.