others should not stand in the way of the full outfolding of that spirit
which lay in the Race …
A spirit often hard and harsh, perhaps, but bone-honest with itself;
possessed of an astringency that was like a sea breeze after the psychic
stench of what Djana had known; not jaded or rootless, but reaching for
infinity and for a God beyond infinity, while planted deep in the
consciousness of kinship, heroic ancestral memories, symbols of courage,
pride, sacrifice … Djana felt it betokened much that the chief of a
Vach–not quite a clan–was called not its Head but its Hand.
Were those humans who served Merseia really traitors … to anything
worth their loyalty?
But it was not this slow wondering that made the solid world recede from
her. It was Ydwyr the Seeker and his spells; and belike they had first
roused the questions in her.
To start with, he too had merely talked. His interest in her background,
experiences, habits, and attitudes appeared strictly scientific. As a
rule they met à deux in his office. “Thus I need not be a nephew of the
Roidhun,” he explained wryly. Fear stabbed her for a second. He gave her
a shrewd regard and added, “No one is monitoring our translator
channel.”
She garnered nerve to say, “The qanryf–”
“We have had our differences,” Ydwyr replied, “but Morioch is a male of
honor.”
She thought: How many Imperial officers in this kind of setup would dare
skip precautions against snooping and blackmail?
He had a human-type chair built for her, and poured her a glass of
arthberry wine at each colloquy. Before long she was looking forward to
the sessions and wishing he were less busy elsewhere, coordinating his
workers in the field and the data they brought back. He didn’t press her
for answers, he relaxed and let conversation ramble and opened for her
the hoard of his reminiscences about adventures on distant planets.
She gathered that xenology had always fascinated him and that he was
seldom home. Almost absent-mindedly, in obligation to his Vach, he had
married and begotten; but he took his sons with him from the time they
were old enough to leave the gynaeceum until they were ready for their
Navy hitches. Yet he did not lack warmth. His subordinates adored him.
When he chanced to speak of the estate where he was born and raised, his
parents and siblings, the staff whose fathers had served his fathers for
generations, she came to recognize tenderness.
Then finally–it was dark outside, the hot still dark of summer’s end,
heat lightning aflicker beyond stockade and skeletal trees–he summoned
her; but when she entered the office, he rose and said: “Let us go to my
private quarters.”
For a space she was again frightened. He bulked so big, so gaunt and
impassive in his gray robe, and they were so alone together. A fluoro
glowed cold, and the air that slid and whispered across her skin had
likewise gone chill.
He smiled his Merseian smile, which she had learned to read as amicable.
Crinkles radiated through the tiny scales of his skin, from eyes and
mouth. “I want to show you something I keep from most of my fellows,” he
said. “You might understand where they cannot.”
The little voicebox hung around his neck, like the one around hers,
spoke with the computer’s flat Anglic. She filled that out with his
Eriau. No longer did the language sound rough and guttural; it was, in
truth, rather soft, and rich in tones. She could pick out individual
words by now. She heard nothing in his invitation except–
–the father I never knew.
Abruptly she despised herself for what she had feared. How must she look
to him? Face: hag-thin, wax-white, save for the bizarrely thick and red
lips; behind it, two twisted flaps of cartilage. Body: dwarfish,
scrawny, bulge-breasted, pinch-waisted, fat-bottomed, tailless, feet
outright deformed. Skin: no intricate pattern of delicate flexible
overlap; a rubberiness relieved only by lines and coarse pores; and
hair, everywhere hair in ridiculous bunches and tufts, like fungus on a
corpse. Odor: what? Sour? Whatever it was, no lure for a natural taste.
Men! she thought. God, I don’t mean to condemn your work, but You also