(“Son, it is always necessary to compromise. That’s how things are done.” “Even when one is right, sir?” “Right— right; you always assume you know exactly where that is, don’t you? I’m sure I don’t. If you go on like that, no one could ever agree. Compromise. Sometimes you have to yield a little to win a little later on.”)
He had tried.
A year later he had sought the anonymity of the service, and even that had proved no refuge secure from Deian’s money and influence. Perhaps, he thought, it was his father’s way of setting him free; or perhaps Deian still believed he would have come home, older, wiser. He would have come home, sooner or later. He had spent his life pursuing the elusive hope of adequacy, a constant struggle for breath in the rarified atmosphere of his father’s ambitions and the giyre of his ancient family.
(“I would have come home someday,” he had written in that final letter. “I have gained the good sense to honor your wisdom and experience, Father, and I have gained enough wisdom of my own to have kept on in my own path. What giyre I had of my crew, I earned; and that is important to me. What giyre I gave, I chose to give, and that was important too. I honor you, very much; but I would not have left the service.”)
It was irony. He closed his hand about the idoikkhe and reminded himself what he was worth at the end of all his father’s planning and his resisting: a being scantly adequate to serve the iduve, equal to a gracious (if vain) young woman and a battered bit of human freight off an amaut transport. He had lived with the sky overhead to be reached, whether or not he chose to try, and whether or not he had realized it before, he had been an arrogant and a stubborn man. Now he had been shown where the sky stopped, and it was a shattering experience.
He imagined Daniel’s image in the glass. The skin went shades of brown and pink, the silver hair turned dark, the eyes shadowed and hunted, his body slight with hunger, crossed with red and purple scars from untreated wounds, feet lacerated by the cruel mesh. His mind held memories of absolute horror, cages, brutality unimagined in the Halliran Idai. Even before those, there were memories of hunger, a childhood in a dark, cement-walled house beside a trickling canal, summers of sandstorms that blasted crops, dunes that year by year encroached upon fields, advanced upon the house, threatened the life-giving canal. At some time—Aiela had inherited the memories in bits and .snatches—Daniel had left that world for the military, and he had served as a technician of limited skills. He had known a great many primitive human ports, until the life sickened him and he went home again, only to find his father dead, his mother remarried, his brothers gone offworld, the farm buried under dunes.
War. Shipping lanes closed, merchantmen commandeered for military service. Daniel—senior now over inexperienced recruits, wearing the crisp blue of a technician on a decent ship, well fed, with money promised to his account. That had lasted seven days, until two stunning defeats had driven the human forces into retreat and then into rout, and men were required by martial law to seek their home ports and keep order there as the panic spread.
That was the way fortune operated for Daniel. His hands had been emptied every time he had them full; but being Daniel, he would shrug perplexedly, get down on his knees and begin picking up the pieces. He was uneducated, but he had a keen intuition, an intelligence that sucked in information like a vacuum drawing air, omnivorously, taking scrap and debris along with the pure, sorting, analyzing. He had never been anyone, he had never had anything; but he was not going to stop living until he was sure there was nothing to be had. That was Daniel—a man who had always been hungry. M’melakhia, Chimele would call it.
And Daniel’s desire was the fevered dream of his half-sensible interludes in the cage, when the fields were green and the canal pure and full and orchards bloomed beside a white-walled house. He asked nothing more nor less than that—except the company of others of his kind. He had never deserved to be appropriated to Ashanome, swallowed whole by the pride of a Lyailleue and linked to a kalliran woman who had never learned to be kallia, who was more than a little iduve.
Aiela, Isande’s thought reproved him, sorrowing.
How long have you been with me? He flushed with anger, for he had been deep in his own concerns and Isande’s skill was such that he did not always perceive her touch. It was not the visual sense that embarrassed him: she knew his body as he knew hers, for that was a part of self-concept. It was his mind’s privacy that he did not like thus exposed, and he knew at once from the backspill that she had caught rather more than she thought he would like.
“Dear Aiela,” her silent voice came echoing. “No, don’t screen me out. I am sorry for quarreling. I know I offend you.”
“I am sorry,” he sent, the merest surface of his thoughts, “for a great many things.”
“You are not sure you can handle me,” she said. “That troubles you. You are not accustomed to that. You are not half so cruel or fierce as I am, I know it; but you are twice as brave—too much so, sometimes, when that terrible pride of yours is touched.”
“I have no pride,” he said. “Not since Kartos.”
She was amused, which stung. “No. No. It is there; but you have had it bruised—“ the amusement faded, regretting his offense, and yet she knew herself right by his very reaction: right, and self-confident. “Chimele—the iduve in general—have touched it. You are just now realizing that this is forever, and it frightens you terribly.”
Her words stung, and a feeling wholly ikas rose up in him. “I don’t need to live on your terms. I will not.”
She was silent for a time, sifting matters. “You do not understand Ashanome. Tonight you saw the chanokhia of Chimele, and I am afraid you have begun to love her. No— no, I know: not in that way. It is something worse. It is m’melakhia-love. It is arastiethe you want from her—iduve honor; and no m’metane can ever have that”
“You can’t even think like a kallia, can you?”
“Aiela, Aiela, you are dealing with an iduve. Realize it. You are reacting to her as she is. You are thinking giyre, but Chimele cannot give you what she cannot even understand. For her there is only arastiethe, and the honor of an iduve demands too much of us. It costs too much, Aiela.”
“She might be capable of understanding. Isande, she tried—“
“Avoid her!”
Screens dropped. Loneliness, a dead asuthe, years of silence. There was still loneliness, an asuthe who rejected her advice, who blindly, obstinately sought what had killed the other. Was the fault in her? Was it she that killed? She loved Chimele, and gave and gave, and the iduve knew only how to take. Reha had loved Chimele: asuthe to herself, how could he have helped it? He would be alive now, but that he had learned to love Chimele. She would not teach another.
Darkness. Cold. Screens tumbled. Aiela flinched and she snatched the memory away, recovering herself, smothering it as she had learned to do.
You denied, he reminded her gently, That Ashanome killed him. Was Chimele responsible, after all?