The screens stayed in place. Only the words came through, carefully controlled. “She was not responsible. Honor is all she can give. To the nasithi, that is everything. But what is it worth to a m’metane?”
Yet you do love her, Aiela sent, and sad laughter bubbled back.
“Listen—she tried with all her iduvish heart to make me happy. Three times she asked me to take another asuthe. ‘He is like you,’ she said this time. ‘He is intelligent, he is of great chanokhia for a m’metane. Can you work with this one?’ I consented. She risked a great deal to offer me that choice. You would have to know the iduve to realize how difficult that was for her—to try a thing when she has only reason to help her. She does feel—something. I am not sure what. After all these years, I am not sure what. Maybe we m’metanei try to read into them what we wish were there. Perhaps that is why we keep giving, when we know better.”
“Let me alone,” he wished her. “If I’m to make a mistake, then let it be my mistake.”
“And when you make it,” she said, “we will both pay for it. That is the way this arrangement works, Aiela.”
It was truth; he recognized it—resented her being female. It was an unfair obligation. “I am sorry,” he said after a moment. “Then it will happen. I will not be held by you.”
“I disturb you.”
“In several senses.”
She snatched a thought half-born from his mind, the suspicion that the iduve knew enough of kalliran emotion to use it, to manipulate it at will. Isande was beautifuclass="underline" he had eyes to notice that. He kept noticing it, again and again. That she constantly knew it, embarrassed him; he knew that she was not willing to think of him in that way. But, he sent her, if she were in the ungraceful position of having to share a man’s inmost thoughts, she might receive things even more direct from time to time. Or had Reha been immune to such things?
The screen closed tightly on those memories, as it always had: the privacy she had shared with Reha was not for him. “He and I began so young we were like one mind; there could never be that between us. Asuthi ought never to share that part of their lives: some illusions have to be maintained. I am not for games, not for your amusement, nor are you for mine, dear friend. There is an end of it. You came too close to that being, you refuse my warnings about the iduve, and I see I can’t help you: you resent being advised by a woman. But I can at least exercise the good sense to keep my distance from you when it happens.”
Hurt feelings. Bitterly hurt feelings.
“Don’t,” he said, reaching out to her retreating mind-. And when she lingered, questioning, he searched for something to say. “If you’re not going to sleep, stay awhile. It’s miserably quiet here.”
Softness touched his mind. He had pleased her by asking. Her spirits brightened and amusement rippled from her, to think that he found in her the power to deal with the nightmares that troubled him: human ghosts and iduve went flitting into retreat at her kalliran presence.
“Go to bed,” she told him. “You need your rest. I’ll stay awhile if it pleases you.”
She hovered about his thoughts for a long time thereafter, half-asleep herself at the last and warm in her own bed, lending him the comforting trivia of pleasant memories, the distant voyagings of Ashanome, strange worlds and different suns; and she stole from his memories, filching little details of his past and embroidering them with questions until he grew too tired to answer. She, never having walked upon the face of a world, delighted in the memories of wind and rain and sunsets, the scent of green grass after a shower, and the drifting wonder of snow. There were no ill dreams. She held onto his senses and finally, mischievously, she sent him a few drowsy impressions that were less than sisterly.
He fired back indignation. “Games,” he reminded her.
Vaikka, she whispered into his consciousness. And you do not want to tell me to go away, do you?
He did not, but he screened, and headed himself deliberately toward the darkness of sleep.
Chapter 5
ISANDE WAS THERE in the morning. Her cheerful presence burst in enthusiastically while Aiela was putting his boots on, and it was as if a door had opened and someone were standing behind him—where there was neither door nor body.
“Must you be so sudden?” he asked her, and her joy plummeted. He was sorry. Isande had never been so vulnerable before. He was concerned about last night and out of sorts about time wasted and a tight schedule with Daniel.
“I would try to help,” she offered.
His screens tightened; he knew her opinion of the human, her dislike of the creature. If it were not unlike her, he would have suspected her of wishing to harm Danieclass="underline" her feelings were that strong.
What do you expect of me? she asked, offended.
Answers. What do they want with him?
And a strange uneasiness was growing in him now that Daniel was on his mind; Isande’s thoughts grew hard to unravel. Daniel was waking; Aiela’s own heart began to speed, his breathing grew constricted in sympathetic reaction.
“Calm!” he cast him. “Calm! It’s Aiela. It’s all right.”
Isande—who is Isande?
Daniel perceived her through him. Aiela’s impulse was to interrupt that link, protecting both of them; but he sensed no harm from either direction, and he hesitated, suffering a strange double-passage of investigation as they probed each other. Then he received quite an unpleasant impression as the human realized Isande was female: curiosity reached for body-sense, to know.
Violently he snapped that connection, at once prey to the outrage of them both.
“I can fend for myself,” Isande voiced to him, seething with offended pride. “He is not of our species, and I’m sure his curiosity means nothing to me.”
But Daniel was too angry to voice. He was embarrassed and furious, and for a moment his temper obscured the fact that he was not equal to a quarrel either with Aiela or with his situation.
Aiela fired back his own feelings upon the instant: frustration with the ungovernable Isande, revulsion at having been made the channel for an alien male’s obscene curiosity— male, not man, not fit to touch a kalliran woman.
Barriers went up against him, fell again. Aiela felt the human’s despair like a plunge into darkness, a hurt mingled with his own guilt. He was too disoriented to prevent its flow to Isande. Her anguish struck him from the other side, coldly doused as she flung up a screen.
“Aiela! The echo—stop it.”
He understood: mind-linked as they were, each brain reacted to the other’s emotions. It was a deadly self-accelerating process. His reaction to Daniel’s offended masculinity had lowered a screen on an ugliness he had not suspected existed in himself.
“Daniel,” he sent, and persisted until the unhappy being acknowledged his presence. It was a terrible flood he received. All screens went, asuthithekkhe, mind-link, defense abandoned. The images came so strongly they washed out vision: amaut, cages, dead faces, grief upon grief. Daniel’s mind was the last citadel and he hurled it wide open, willing to die, at the end of his resistance.
I am sorry, Aiela hurled into that churning confusion like a voice into a gale. Daniel! I was hurt too. Stop this. Please. Listen.
Gradually, gradually, sanity gathered up the pieces again, the broken screens rebuilt themselves into separate silence; and Aiela rested his head in his hands, struggling against a very physical nausea that swelled in his throat His instincts screamed wrong, his hands were cold and sweating at the proximity of a being unutterably twisted, who rejected giyre and kastien, who loathed the things most kalliran.
Aiela. Daniel reached the smallest tendril of thought toward him. He did not understand, but he would seal the memory behind a screen and not let it out again. Dying was not worse than being alone. Whatever the rules Aiela set, he would conform.