“M’metane,” Chimele said, labored patience in her voice, “m’metane, what is the difficulty?”
“I—“ Daniel shared a moment into Chimele’s violet eyes and tore his glance away, fixing it unfocused on the panel just beyond her shoulder. “I have no way to know that we are not still in human space, or that this is not the upper part of the ship where I was a prisoner. I have seen amaut on my world. I don’t know who sent them. Perhaps they brought themselves, but on this ship they take your orders.”
There was a great shifting of bodies among the iduve, a dangerous and unpredictable tension; but Chimele leaned her chin on her hand and studied Daniel with heightened interest Of a sudden she smiled, showing her teeth. “Indeed. I hope you have not seen much similarity between the decks of Ashanome and that pestiferous freighter, m’metane. Yet your caution I find admirable. Amaut on your world? And where is your world, Daniel? Surely not in the Esliph.”
“Why?” Daniel asked, though Isande tried to prevent him. “What exactly do you want to know?”
“M’metane, I am informed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that your people have been attacked. If this is so, we did not order it. We pursue our own business, and your asuthi will advise you that I am being extraordinarily courteous. Now as you hope for the survival of your species, I advise you not to insult that courtesy by being slow in your answers.”
Does she mean that against all humanity—a threat? Daniel asked them, shaken. Would they declare war? Have they?
In the name of reason don’t try to bargain with her, Aiela flung back. Iduve don’t bluff.
Daniel folded, sick inside, a simple man out of his depth and fearing both alternatives. He took the one advised and began to tell them the things they wanted to know, his origin on a world named Konig, beyond the Esliph, his life there, his brief service in the military, his world’s fall to the amaut The iduve listened with unnerving patience even interrupting him to ask more detail of the history of his people, particularly as it regarded the Esliph frontier.
“We never consented, sir,” he told Rakhi, who had asked about the human retreat from the Esliph worlds. “Those were our farms, our cities. The amaut drove us out with better weapons and we went back to safe worlds across the Belt.”
Rakhi frowned. “Most unfortunate, this human problem,” he said to his nasithi. “Our departure from the metrosi seems to have thrown the amaut and kalliran powers into considerable turmoil. We appear to have served some economic purpose for them. When we withdrew, the amaut seem to have found themselves in particular difficulty. They drew back and abandoned the Esliph. Then the humans discovered it. And, under renewed population pressures, the amaut return, reclaim the Esliph—it is altogether logical for them to use force to take land they already considered theirs, or to use force in meeting competitors. But m’metane, were there not agreements, accommodations?”
“Only that we were let off with our lives,” said Daniel. Of iduve that questioned him, Rakhi drew the most honest responses; and upon this question, centuries ago as the event was, Daniel allowed anger to move him. Amaut, iduve, even kallia blurred into one polity in his image of the forced evacuation of his people, for the invaders had been faceless beings in ships, giving orders; and to the human mind, all nonhumans tended to assume one character. “We were pushed off before we could be properly evacuated, crowded onto inadequate ships. Some refused to board and commit themselves to that; they stayed to fight, and I suppose I know what became of them. The ones that migrated and survived to reach the other side of the belt were about twenty out of a hundred. We landed without enough equipment, hardly with the means to survive the winter. The worlds were undeveloped, bypassed in our first colonization, undesirable. We scratched a living out of sand and rock and lost it to the weather more often than not. Now they’ve come after us there.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Khasif, “as the abandoned humans did not fit the amaut social pattern, indenture became the amaut’s solution for the humans. Beings that cannot interbreed with amaut could not exit indenture by normal legal process, so the humans remain in this status perpetually.”
“Yet,” objected another of Khasifs order, “one wonders why the other humans did not eventually seek better territories, if the worlds in question were so entirely undesirable.”
Answer, Isande flashed, for that was a question to Daniel, stated in the often oblique manner of iduve courtesy. “The Esliph was ours,” Daniel replied, “and we always meant to come and take it back.”
“Prha,” said Chaikhe to that person, “vaikka/tomes-me-lakhia-sa, ekutikkase.”
“We did not so much want revenge,” Daniel responded to the comment, for he had caught the gist of it through Isande, “as we wanted justice, our own land back. Now the amaut have come looking for us, even across the Belt. They’re murdering my people.”
“Why?” asked Chimele.
The sudden harshness of her tone panicked the human; his own murder flashed to mind—the easy, gentle manner of the others’ questions some game they played with him. No! Isande sent him. Stay absolutely still. Don’t move. Answer her.
“I don’t know why. They came—they came. Unprovoked.”
“Human ships had not crossed to the Esliph?”
“No,” he said quickly, surprised by the accusation. “No.”
“How do you know this?”
He did not. He was no one. He had no perfect knowledge of his people’s actions. Aiela sent him an urging to keep still, for Chimele frowned.
“M’metane,” said Chimele, “disputing another’s experience is most difficult. Yet there remains the possibility that the amaut responded to a human intrusion into Esliph space. They are not prone to act recklessly where there is an absence of threat to their own territory, and they are not prone to aggression without the certainty of profit. When there is either motivation, then they move most suddenly and decisively. Our acquaintance with the amaut is long, but I am not satisfied that you know them as well as you believe. Consider every detail of your acquaintance with these uncommon amaut, from the beginning. Let Isande have these thoughts.”
He did so, the image of a ship, of amaut faces, another ship, a city, fire—he flashed backward, seeking the origin, the first intimation of danger to human worlds. Merchant ship, military ship—vanished, only gaseous clouds to mark their passing. Ships grounded. Another vessel. Alien. A human war fleet, drawn from worlds to the interior of human space: this the real defense of their perimeters, large, ships technologically not far from par with the metrosi. Demolished, traceless. Mindless panic among human colonies, wild rumors of landings in the system. A second, local fleet gone, thirty ships at once.
Daniel still sent, but Isande had glanced sharply at Chimele, and Aiela did not need her interpretation to understand. Amaut karshatu maintained weapons on their merchantmen, but they were not capable of disposing of whole warfleets: the karshatu never combined. In that respect they were as solitary as the iduve.
Amaut, Daniel insisted, and there were amautish ships in his mind, such as he had seen onworld, great hulking transports, hardly capable of fighting: carriers of equipment and indentured personnel; smaller ships, trade ships that plied the high-speed supply runs, taking back the only export these raw new worlds would supply as yet, not to make an empty run on either direction: human cargo, profitably removed from a place where their numbers made them a threat to places where they were a commodity. But these amaut were not fighters either. Daniel, confused, searched into dimmer memories.
Darkness, images on a viewing screen, a silver shape in hazy resolution, lost to view almost instantly, pursued in vain. Isande caught at the memory eagerly, drawing more and more detail from Daniel, making him hold the image, concentrate upon it, focus it.