Aiela looked at the hair-matted face in revulsion, heart beating in panic as the human stretched out his hands. The human’s dark eyes stared, white around the edges, but when his hands could not grasp them he collapsed into a knot, arms clenched, sobbing with a very manlike sound.
“This,” said Chimele, “is your other asuthe.”
Aiela had seen it coming. When he looked at Chimele it was without the shock that would have pleased her. He hardened his face against her.
“And you know now,” she continued, unmoved, “how it feels to experience the chiabres without understanding what it is. This will be of use to you with him.”
“I thought,” he recalled, “that you had regard for Isande.”
“Precisely. Asuthithekkhe between species has always failed. I am not willing to risk the honor of Ashanome by endangering one of my most valued kamethi. You are presently expendable. Surgery will be performed on this being in two days. You had that interval to learn to handle the chiabres. Try to approach the human. Perhaps he will respond to you. Amaut are best able to quiet him, but I do not think he finds pleasure in their company or they in his. Those two species demonstrate a strong mutual aversion.”
Aiela nerved himself to take a step toward the being, and another. He went down on one knee and extended his hand.
The creature gave a shuddering sob and scrambled back from any contact, wild eyes locked on his. Of a sudden it sprang for his throat.
The cell vanished, and Aiela had sprung erect in the safety of the Orithain’s own shadowed hall. He still trembled, in his mind unconvinced that the hands that had reached for his throat were insubstantial.
“You are dismissed,” said Chimele.
The nas kame who escorted him simply abandoned him on the concourse and advised him to ask someone if he lost his way again. There was no mention of any threat, as if they judged a man who wore the idoikkhe incapable of any further trouble to anyone.
In effect, he knew, they were right.
He walked away to stand by the immense viewport, watching the stars sweep past, now and again the awesome view of the afterstructure of the ship as the rotation of the saucer carried them under the holding arm, alternate oblivion and rebirth from the dark, rotation after slow rotation, the blaze of Ashanome’s running lights, the dark beneath, the lights, the star-scattered fabric of infinity, a ceaseless rhythm.
Likely none of the thousands of kallia that came and went on the concourse knew much of Aus Qao. They had been born on the ship, would live their lives, bear their children, and die on the ship. Possibly they were even happy. Children came, their bright faces and shrill voices and the rhymes of the games they played the same as generations before had sung, the same as kalliran children everywhere. They flitted off again, their glad voices trailing away into the echoing immensities of the pillared hall. Aiela kept his face toward the viewport, struggling with the tightness in his throat.
Kartos Station would be about business as usual by now, and its people would have cleansed him from their thoughts and their conscience. Aus Qao would do the same; even his family must pick up the threads of their lives, as they would do if he were dead. His reflection stared back out of starry space, beige-clad, slender, crop-headed—indistinguishable from a thousand others that had been born to serve the ship.
He could not blame Kartos. It was a fact as old as civilization in the metrosi, a deep knowledge of helplessness. It was that which had compelled him to take the idoikkhe. Kallia were above all peaceful, patiently stubborn, and knew better how to outwait an enemy that how to fight
To wait.
There was an Order of things, and it was reasonable and productive. For one nas kame to defy the Orithain and die would accomplish nothing. An unproductive action was not a reasonable action, and an unreasonable action was not virtue, was not kastien.
Should he have died for nothing?
But all reasonable action on Ashanome operated in favor of the Orithain, who understood nothing of kastien.