Play, Niun advised him, to deserve to live. Throw your life, kel'en, and catch it in your hands.
He understood, and therein another understanding came to him, how the mri could take great joy in such a game.
And he understood for the first time the peculiar madness in which the mri could not only survive, but revel in the unnatural feel of the jumps, by which the ship hurled herself at apparent random from star to star.
Twice more they jumped, and Duncan stood still and waited as the bell rang and the dissolution began. He watched the mri, knew the mind of the kel'en who stood opposite him knew how to let go and cast himself utterly to the rhythm of the Game, to go with the ship, and not to fear.
A wild laugh came to him on that second emergence, for the teaching of the Service had been survive, but that of the Game was something complexly alien, that careless madness that was the courage of the mri.
Kel'en.
He had shed something, something he once had valued; and as with the other possessions that he had cast into oblivion, the sense of loss was dim and distant.
Niun gazed at him, silently estimated, and he met that look directly, loss still nagging at him. One of the dusei, the lesser one, nosed his hand. He jerked it back, turned his face from Niun's critical stare, and went to the corner that was his limbs steady, senses trying to deceive him and denied the power to do so.
He was not what Stavros had launched.
He sat on his pallet and stared at the scratched reckoning of days that he had begun, and that he had omitted to do. It was no longer the time that passed that mattered, but that which lay ahead, time enough that he could indeed forget.
Forget writing, forget human speech, forget Kesrith. There were gaps in his past, not alone in recent days, those fevered and terrible hours; there were others, that made strange and shifting patterns of all his memory, as if some things that he remembered were too strange to this ship, this long voyaging.
The Dark that Niun spoke of began to swallow such things up, as it lacked measure, and direction, and reason.
With the same edge of metal that had made the marks, he scratched through them, obliterating the record.
Chapter Twelve
THE LOST days multiplied into months. Duncan passed them in careful observance of maintenance schedules, stripped down units that did not need it and reassembled the machinery, only to keep busy played shon'ai what time Niun would consent; memorized the meaningless chants of names, and constantly rehearsed in his mind what words he had recently gathered of the hal'ari, the while his hands found occupation in the game of knots that Niun taught him, or in the galleys, or in whatever work he could devise for the moment.
He learned metalwork, which was a craft appropriate to the Kel; and carving made in plastic a blockish figure of a dus, for which he found no practical use in its beginning; and then purpose did come to him. "Give it to the she'pan," he said, when he had done it as well as possible; and pushed it into Niun's hands.
The mri had looked greatly distressed. "I will try," he had said, with perplexing seriousness, and arose at once and went, as if it were a matter of moment instead of a casual thing.
It was late before he returned; and he settled en the floor and set the little dus-figure between them on the mat. "She would not, kel Duncan.
No apology for the she'pan's hatefulness; it was impossible that Niun apologize for a decision of the she'pan. Understanding came, why Niun had hesitated even to try to take the gift to her, and after a moment heat began to rise to Duncan's face. He did not veil, but stared sullenly at the floor, at the unshapely and rejected little figure.
"So," he said with a shrug.
"It was bu'ina'anein you invaded," Niun said.
"Presumptuous," Duncan translated, and the heat did not leave his face.
"It is not the time," said Niun.
"When will be?" Duncan asked sharply, heard the mri's soft intake of breath. Niun veiled himself in offense and rose.
Discarded, the little figure lay there for two days before Niun, in a mild tone of voice, and after fingering it for some little time, asked if he might have it.
Duncan shrugged. "Take it," he said, glad to have it gone.
It disappeared into the inner folds of Niun's robes. Niun rose and withdrew from the room. The dusei went, and returned, and went again, restless.
There was a line drawn in main-corridor, an invisible one. Duncan knew the places within the ship that he could go, and those that were barred to him, and he did not attempt the forbidden ones. It was not from the ship's workings that he was barred, so much as from Melein's presence; and Niun came and went there, but he could not.
Duncan went now, impelled by humanish obstinacy, curious where Niun had gone with the figure; and his steps grew less quick, and finally ceased at the corridor that he had not seen in uncounted days: around the bending of the passage as it was, he had not even infringed so far as to come this way and the sight of it now cooled his anger and gave him pause.
The lights were out here, and faintly there was the reek of something musky that the filters had not entirely dispersed. A vast brown shape, and a second, sat in the shadows before an open doorway: the dusei Niun's presence, he thought.
There was humanish stubbornness; and there was stubbornness mri-fashion, which he had also learned, which, in Niun, he respected.
There was the simple fact that, challenged, Niun would not back away.
But there were ways of pressing at the mri.
Silently, respectful of the barrier, Duncan gathered his robes between his knees and sank down crosslegged, there to wait. The dusei, shadows by the distant doorway, stood and snuffed the air nervously, pressing at him with their uncertainties. He would not be driven. He did not move. In time, the lesser dus came halfway and lay down facing him, head between its massive paws. When he stayed still it rose "up again, and halved that distance, and finally, much against his will, came and nosed at his leg.
"Yai!" he rebuked it softly. It settled, not quite touching, sighed.
And from the doorway appeared a blacker shadow, that glittered here and there with metal.
Niun.
The mri stood still, waiting. Duncan gathered himself to his feet and stood still, carefully at the demarcation.
It was not necessary to say overmuch with Niun the mri observed him now, and after deliberation, beckoned him to come.
Duncan walked ahead into that shadow, the dus at his heels, as Niun waited for him at the doorway; and human-wise he would have questioned Niun, what manner of thing was here, what impulse suddenly admitted him to this place. But still in silence Niun swept his hand to the left, directing his attention into the room from which he had come.
Part of the crew's living quarters had been here. The musky smell hung thick in this shadowy place, that was draped in black cloth. The only light within was live flame, and it glistened on the ovoid that rested at the far wall of the compartment, behind a shadowed steel grating. Two conduits rose at the doorway, serving as pillars, narrowing the entry so that only one at a time might pass.
"Go in," Niun's voice said softly at his back.
He felt the touch of Niun's hand between his shoulders, and went forward, not wishing to, feeling his skin contract at the shadow, the leaping flame so dangerous on the ship, the incense was thick here, cloying. He had noticed it before, adhering to the clothing of the mri, a scent he associated with them, thought even natural to them, though he had missed it in the sterile labs.
Behind them the dusei breathed, unable to enter because of the pillars.
And there was silence for some few moments.