I dropped the hand I had lifted toward the control studs in the arm of my chair. With the illumination from the balcony behind her, she could see me better than I could see her. She sat down in the chair Michael had occupied a short while before.
“I told myself I’d step over and see if you were sleeping all right,” she said. “Ian has a lot of work in mind for you tomorrow. But I think I was really hoping to find you awake.”
Even through the darkness, the signals came loud and clear. My geas was at work again.
“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.
“If I reach out and haul you in by the scruff of the neck, are you intruding?” Her voice had the same sort of lightness overlying pain that I had heard in Kensie’s. “I’m the one who’s thinking of intruding—of intruding my problems on you.”
“That’s not necessarily an intrusion,” I said.
“I hoped you’d feel that way,” she said. It was strange to have her voice coming in such everyday tones from a silhouette of darkness. “I wouldn’t bother you, but I need to have all my mind on what I’m doing here and personal matters have ended up getting in the way.”
She paused.
“You don’t really mind people spilling all over you, do you?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“I thought so. I got the feeling you wouldn’t. Do you think of Else much?”
“When other things aren’t on my mind.”
“I wish I’d known her.”
“She was someone to know.”
“Yes. Knowing someone else is what makes the difference. The trouble is, often we don’t know. Or we don’t know until too late.” She paused. “I suppose you think, after what you heard just now, that I’m talking about Kensie?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. Kensie and Ian—the Graemes are so close to us Morgans that we might as well all be related. You don’t usually fall in love with a relative—or you don’t think you will, at least, when you’re young. The kind of person you imagine falling in love with is someone
strange and exciting—someone from fifty light years away.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Else was a neighbor and I think I grew up being in love with her.”
“I’m sorry.” Her silhouette shifted a little in the darkness. “I’m really just talking about myself. But I know what you mean. In sober moments, when I was younger, I more or less just assumed that some day I’d wind up with Kensie. You’d have to have something wrong with you not to want someone like him.”
“And you’ve got something wrong with you?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. I grew up, that’s the trouble.”
“Everybody does.”
“I don’t mean I grew up, physically. I mean, I matured. We live a long time, we Morgans, and I suppose we’re slower growing up than most. But you know how it is with young anythings—young animals as well as young humans. Did you ever have a wild animal as a pet as a child?”
“Several,” I said.
“Then you’ve run into what I’m talking about While the wild animal’s young, it’s cuddly and tame; but when it grows up, the day comes it bites or slashes at you without warning. People talk about that being part of their wild nature. But it isn’t. Humans change just exactly the same way. When anything young grows up, it becomes conscious of itself, its own wants, its own desires, its own moods. Then the day comes when someone tries to play with it and it isn’t in a playing mood—and it reacts with ‘Back off! What I want is just as important as what you want” And all at
once, the time of its being young and cuddly is over forever.”
“Of course,” I said. “That happens to all of us.”
“But to us—to our people—it happens too late!” she said. “Or rather, we start life too early. By the age of seventeen on the Dorsai we have to be out and working like an adult, either at home or on some other world. We’re pitchforked into adulthood. There’s never any time to take stock, to realize what being adult is going to turn us into. We don’t realize we aren’t cubs any more until one day we slash or bite someone without warning; and then we realize that we’ve changed —and they’ve changed. But it’s too late for us to adjust to the change in the other person because we’ve already been trapped by our own change.”
She stopped. I sat, not speaking, waiting. From my experience with this sort of thing since Else died, I assumed that I no longer needed to talk. She would carry the conversation, now.
“No, it wasn’t Kensie I was talking about when I first came in here and I said the trouble is you don’t know someone else until too late. It’s Ian.”
“Ian?” I said, for she had stopped again, and now I felt with equal instinct that she needed some help to continue.
“Yes,” she said. “When I was young, I didn’t understand Ian. I do now. Then, I thought there was nothing to him—or else he was simply solid all the way through, like a piece of wood. But he’s not. Everything you can see in Kensie is there in Ian, only there’s no light to see it by. Now I know. And now it’s too late.”
“Too late?” I said. “He’s not married, is he’”
“Married? Not yet. But you didn’t know? Look at
the picture on his desk. Her name’s Leah. She’s on Earth. He met her when he was there, four years ago. But that’s not what I mean by too late. I mean—it’s too late for me. What you heard me tell Kensie is the truth. I’ve got the curse of the first Amanda. I’m born to belong to a lot of people, first; and only to any single person, second. As much as I’d give for Ian, that equation’s there in me, ever since I grew up. Sooner or later it’d put even him in second place for me. I can’t do that to him; and it’s too late for me to be anything else.”
“Maybe Ian’d be willing to agree to those terms.”
She did not answer for a second. Then I heard a slow intake of breath from the darker darkness that was her.
“You shouldn’t say that,” she said.
There was a second of silence. Then she spoke again, fiercely
“Would you suggest something like that to Ian if our positions were reversed?”
“I didn’t suggest it,” I said. “I mentioned it.”
Another pause.
“You’re right,” she said. “I know what I want and what I’m afraid of in myself, and it seems to me so obvious I keep thinking everyone else must know too.”
She stood up.
“Forgive me, Corunna,” she said. “I’ve got no right to burden you with all this.”
“It’s the way the world is,” I said. “People talk to people.”
“And to you, more than most.” She went toward the door to the balcony and paused in it. “Thanks again.”
“I’ve done nothing,” I said.
“Thank you anyway. Good night. Sleep if you can.”
She stepped out through the door; and through the window wall I watched her, very erect, pass to my left until she walked out of my sight beyond the sitting room wall.
I went back to bed, not really expecting to fall asleep again easily. But I dropped off and slept like a log.
When I woke it was morning, and my bedside phone was chiming. I flicked it on and Michael looked at me out of the screen.
“I’m sending a man up with maps of the interior of Gebel Nahar,” he said, “so you can find your way around. Breakfast’s available in the General Staff Lounge, if you’re ready.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
I got up and was ready when the bandsman he had sent arrived, with a small display cube holding the maps. I took it with me and the bandsman showed me to the General Staff Lounge—which, it turned out, was not a lounge for the staff of Gebel Nahar, in general, but one for the military commanders of that establishment. Ian was the only other present when I got there and he was just finishing his meal.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
“I’m going ahead on the assumption that I’ll be defending this place in twenty-four hours or so,” he said. “What I’d like you to do is familiarize yourself with its defenses, particularly the first line of walls and its weapons, so that you can either direct the men working them, or take over the general defense, if necessary.”
“What have you got in mind for a general defense?”
I asked, as a bandsman came out of the kitchen area to see what I would eat. I told him and he went.