Thorn looked at it and looked at Duun. And Duun walked away, himself in search of those things he had named.
It was not, ultimately, safe: Duun knew this. There were always, where shonunin existed, ways to corrupt and ways to strike at a target. The ghotanin had thought at Gatog One they had chosen the most vulnerable target in the shuttle; at Gatog Two the fight was likely to be closer to the station itself, but ghotanin might change their minds and divert their attention here. Dallen Company was not funding them anymore. There was a likelihood they would try to hold the earth station now, and stalemate Tangen, who with kosan and tanun allies held the shuttleports and the earth-based controls of satellite defense. No great number would get into space in those few shuttles. Space was out of reach for most of earth now, perhaps for years and years, and the earth-station would be deprived of ships, if ghotanin risked the few they had left still outside the zone of the conflict.
Duun padded into the darkened bedroom, taking no great care for quiet; and exhausted as Thorn was the boy likely waked. “It’s Duun,” Duun said. “Go on sleeping. “I’ve business to take care of. Hatani are at every entrance to this place and I know them. Go on sleeping.”
Thorn stirred in the bed, turned on his back and looked up at him in the twilight. Thorn smelled mostly of soap now. He had scrubbed and shaved. “You’ll be back.”
“Oh, yes.” (So he perceives something.) “Deep sleep, Thorn: you can do that here. With them outside. Relax.”
Duun left and closed the door this time.
Duun was back and there were visitors. “Who?” Thorn asked Duun at breakfast. “People who want to see you,” Duun said, looking at him across the unfamiliar table in a guarded, critical way. “Finish your breakfast and make yourself presentable. I don’t want to be ashamed.”
Thorn laid down his plate in front of his ankles and put the spoon in it. “No, finish,” Duun said. “You have time. You’ve lost weight.”
“I never liked this.” It was the green mince that was on his plate every day at home. It tasted like the fish oil that was in his pills when as a child he had bitten down on one. “My stomach’s queasy as it is.”
“Do people worry you?”
(Do you have a need, minnow?)
“Their faces shout at me,” Thorn said. It was the best way he could explain it.
Duun looked at him, still as a pond in winter. “Too many needs coming at you, is it, Haras-hatani?”
“Duun, how is earth? Have you heard?”
(He doesn’t want that question. He doesn’t want it at all.)
“Sagot wishes you well,” Duun said.
(He’s lying, surely he’s lying, his face is so good at it.) But it looked like truth. (Sagot in her room, Sagot waiting for me-O gods, I want to go home, Duun!)
“I’m glad,” Thorn said. “Tell her that from me.”
“I’ll relay that. Eat your breakfast.”
Thorn turned on the riser and put his feet off, missing the teapot.
“Thorn.”
Thorn stopped; it was reflex.
“Wear your cloak,” Duun said.
They were mostly old, the visitors, two very old, with the pale mask of age on them: one was hatani and another kosan guild. There were a scattering of shonunin of middle years, one with the dark crest of the Bigon; one with the silver-tip of the icy isle of Soghai: Thorn had heard of such people and never seen one. It was a woman, a hatani, and she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Sogasi, Duun named her, and Thorn stored away that name the way he stored the names of the others, in their sequence and their guilds, which were hatani and tanun and kosan. The tanun gazed at him with that frankness he had seen in Ghindi and Weig and the others; the kosan with something of dread and longing. The hatani shielded him from such things and he was grateful.
The visitors never spoke to him. Few even looked him directly in the eyes, but the hatani did. (Thank you, Thorn sent to them in a little relaxing of his face, and got that message in return, the mere flicker of the muscle above an eye.) “We’ll talk later,” the old kosan said to Duun. “Tell him we’re glad to have seen him,” a tanun said, and Thorn was even gladder of the hatani cloak that gave him some protection, that lent him something to be besides smooth-skinned and different in their eyes. “Thank you,” Thorn said softly for himself, without a hint of pain. “It was a long trip, Voegi-tanun. I wish others could have made it here.”