“You have done nothing wrong,” said Isande. “You have not hurt your people.”
Silence.
Daniel, Aiela sent, I could not lie to you; you would know it.
I hate the sight of you, Daniel’s subconscious fired out at him; but his upper mind suppressed that behind a confused feeling of shame. “That is not really true,” he said aloud, and again, forcefully: “That is not true. I’m sorry.”
Aiela cast him a feeling of total sympathy, for proximity still triggered a scream of alarm over his nerves and unsettled his stomach; but the reaction was already becoming less and less. Someday he would shudder no longer, and they would have become one monstrous hybrid, neither kalliran nor human. And now it was Isande who recoiled, having caught that thought. She rejected it in horror.
“I don’t blame you,” Daniel answered: somehow it did not seem unnatural that he should respond instead, so deeply was he in link with Aiela. He dropped the contact then, grieving, knowing Isande’s loathing for him.
“We have not used you,” Isande protested.
Daniel touched Aiela’s mind again, reading to a depth Aiela did not like. “And haven’t we all done a little of that?” Daniel wondered bitterly. “And isn’t it only natural, after all?”-Was this the beaten, uneducated creature about whose sentience they had wondered? Aiela looked upon him in uncomfortable surmise, all three minds suddenly touching again. From Daniel came a bitter mirth.
You’ve taught me worlds of things I didn’t know. 1 don’t even remember learning most of it; I just touch your minds and I know. And I suppose you could pass for humans if it weren’t for your looks. But what use do they have for me on Ashanome? Teach me that if you can.
“Our life is a pleasant one,” said Isande.
“With the iduve?” Daniel swung his legs off the couch to sit upright. “They aren’t human, they aren’t even as human as you are, and I believe you when you say they don’t have feelings like we do. It agrees with what I saw in there tonight.”
“They have feelings,” said Isande, letting pass his remark about the humanity of kallia. “Daniel, Chimele wishes you no harm.”
“Prove it.”
She met his challenge with an opening of the mind, from which he retreated in sudden apprehension. Strange, iduve things lay beyond that gate. She remained intent upon it even while she rose and poured them each a glass of marithe, pressing it at both of them. She was seated again, and stared at Daniel.
All right, Daniel sent finally. It was difficult for him, but to please Aiela, desperate to please someone in this strange place, he yielded down all his barriers.
Isande sent, with that rough impatience she knew how to use and Daniel did only by instinct, such a flood of images that for a time here and now did not exist. Even Aiela flinched from it, and then resolved to himself that he would let Isande have her way, trusting her nature if not her present mood.
There were things incredibly ancient, gleaned of tapes, of records inaccessible to outsiders. There was Kej IV under its amber sun, its plains and sullen-hued rivers; tower-holds and warriors of millennia ago, when each nasul had its dhis, its nest-tower, and ghiaka-wielding defenders and attackers raged in battles beyond number—vaikka-dhis, nest-raid, when an invading nasul sought to capture young for its own dhis, sought prisoners of either sex for katasakke, though prisoners often suicided.
Red-robed dhisaisei, females-with-young, kept the inner sanctity of the dhis. Most females gave birth and ignored their offspring, but within the nasul there were always certain maternal females of enormous ferocity who claimed all the young, and guarded and reared them until on a day their dhisais-madness should pass and leave them ready to mate again. Before them even the largest males gave way in terror.
The dhis was the heart and soul of the nasul, and within it was a society no adult male ever saw again—a society rigid in its ranks and privileges. Highest of rank were the orithaikhti, her-children to the Orithain; and lowest in the order, the off-spring-without-a-name: no male could claim parentage without the female’s confirmation, and should she declare of her offspring: Taphrek nasiqh—“I do not know this child”—it went nameless to the lowest rank of the dhis. Such usually perished, either in the dhis, or more cruelly, in adulthood.
It was the object of all conflict, the motive of all existence, the dhis—and yet forbidden to all that had once passed its doors, save for the Guardians, for the dhisaisei, and for the green-robed katasathei—pregnant ones, whose time was near. The katasathe were for the rest of the nasul the most visible symbol of the adored dhis: males full-sra to a katasathei drove her recent mate and all other males from her presence; females of the nasul gave her gifts, and forlorn non-sra males would often leave them where she could find them. Her only possible danger came from a female Orithain who also chanced to be katasathe. Then it was possible that she could be driven out, forbidden the dhis altogether, and her protective sra endangered: the ferocity of an Orithain was terrible where it regarded rival offspring, and even other nasuli gave way before a nasul whose Orithain was katasathe, knowing madness ruled there.
That was the ancient way. Then Cheltaris began to rise, city of the many towers, city of paradox. There had never been government or law; nasuli clustered, co-existed by means of ritual, stabilized, progressed. It was dimly remembered—Cheltaris: empty now, deserted nasul by nasul as the akitomei launched forth; and what curious logic had convinced the nasuli their survival lay starward was something doubtless reasonable to iduve, though to no one else.
Where each dhis was, there was home; and yet, shielded as the dhis had become within each powerful, star-wandering akites, without vaikka-dhis and the captures, inbreeding threatened the nasuli. So there developed the custom of akkhres-nasuli, a union of two akitomei for the sharing of katasakke.
It was, for the two nasuli involved, potentially the most hazardous of all ventures, civilized by oaths, by elaborate ritual, by most strict formalities—and when all else proved vain, by the power and good sense of the two orithainei. Chaxal. Dead now. Father to Chimele.
In his time, far the other side of the metrosi, by a star called Niloqhatas, there had been akkhres-nasuli.
Such a union was rare for Ashanome; it was occasioned by something rarer still—a ceremony of kataberihe. The Orithain Sogdrieni of nasul Tashavodh had chosen Mejakh sra-Narach of Ashanome to become his heir-mate and bear him a child to inherit Tashavodh. The bond between Tashavodh and Ashanome disturbed the iduve, for these were two of the oldest and most fearsome of the nasuli and the exchange they contemplated would make profound changes in status and balance of power among the iduve. Tensions ran abnormally high.
And trouble began with a kameth of Tashavodh who chanced to cross the well-known temper of Mejakh sra-Narach. She killed him.
Mejakh was already aboard Tashavodh in the long purifications before kataberihe. But in rage over the matter Sogdrieni burst into her chambers, drove out her own kamethi, and assaulted her. Perhaps when tempers cooled he would have allowed her to begin purifications again, vaikka having been settled; but it was a tangled situation: Mejakh was almost certainly now with child, conception being almost infallible with a mating. But he misjudged the arastiethe of Mejakh: she killed him and fled the ship.
In confusion, Ashanome and Tashavodh broke apart, Tashavodh stunned by the death of their Orithain, Ashanome satisfied that they had come off to the better in the matter of vaikka. It was in effect a vaikka-dhis, the stealing of young; and to add chanokhia to the vaikka, in the very hour that Mejakh returned to Ashanome she entered katasakke with an iduve of nameless birth.