He was not going to obtain that answer. He had to admit it finally. He rose from his place and walked to the bureau, came back and sprawled into the chair, shaking with anger.
There was something astir among iduve, something which he was well sure Isande knew: something that could well cost him his life, and which she chose to withhold from him. And as long as that was so there would be no peace between them, however close the bond.
In that event she would not win any help from him, nor would the iduve.
No, she urged him. Do not be stubborn in this.
“You are Chimele’s servant. You say what you have to say. I still have a choice.”
Liar, she judged sadly, which stung like a slap, the worse because it was true.
Images of Chimele: ancestry more ancient than civilization among iduve, founded in days of tower-holds and warriors; a companion, a child, playing at draughts, elbows-down upon an izhkh carpet, laughing at a m’metane’s cleverness; Orithain—
—isolate, powerful: Ashanome’s influence could move full half the nasuli of the induve species to Chimele’s bidding— a power so vast there could be no occasion to invoke it.
Sole heir-descendant of a line more than twelve thousand years old. Vaikka: revenge; honor; dynasty.
Involving this human, Aiela gleaned on another level.
But that was all Isande gave him, and that by way of making peace with him. She was terrified, to have given him only that much.
“Aiela,” she said, “you are involved too, because he is, and you were chosen for him. Even iduve die when they stand between an Orithain and necessity. So did Reha.”
I thought they didn’t kill him.
“Listen to me. I have lived closer to the iduve than most kamethi ever do. If Reha had been asuthe to anyone else but me, he might be alive now, and now you are here, you are Chimele’s because of me; and I am warning you, you will need a great deal of good sense to survive that honor.”
“And you love a being like that.” He could not understand. He refused to understand. That in itself was a victory.
“Listen. Chimele doesn’t ask that you love her. She couldn’t understand it if you did. But she scanned your records and decided you have great chanokhia, great—fineness— for a m’metane. Being admired by any iduve is dangerous; but an Orithain does not make mistakes. Do you understand me, Aiela?”
Fear and love: noi kame lived by carefully prescribed rules and were never harmed—as long as they remembered their place, as long as they remained faceless and obscure to the iduve. The iduve did not insist they do so: on the contrary the iduve admired greatly a m’metane who tried to be more than m’metane.
And killed him.
“There is no reason to be afraid on that score,” Isande assured him. “They do not harm us. That is the reason of the idoikkhei. You will learn what I mean.”
His backlash of resentment was so strong she visibly winced. She simply could not understand his reaction, and though he offered her his thoughts on the matter, she drew back and would not take them. Her world was enough for her.
“I have things to teach you,” he said, and felt her fear like a wall between them.
“You are welcome to your opinions,” she said at last
“Thank you,” he said bitterly enough; but when she opened that wall for a moment he found behind it the sort of gentle being he had seen through Reha’s thoughts, terribly, painfully alone.
Dismayed, she slammed her screening shut with a vengeance, assumed a cynical facade and kept her mind taut, more burning than an oath. “And I will maintain my own,” she said.
CHAPTER 3
TWO DAYS COULD not prepare him, not for this.
He looked on the sleeping human and still, despite the hours he had spent with Isande, observing this being by monitor, a feeling of revulsion went through him. The attendants had done their aesthetic best for the human, but the sheeted form on the bed still looked alien—pale coloring, earth-brown hair trimmed to the skull-fitting style of the noi kame, beard removed. He never shuddered at amaut: they were cheerful, comic fellows, whose peculiarities never mattered because they never competed with kallia; but this—this—was bound to his own mind.