Fear came, nightmares of Khasif, chilling and sexual at once. Few things could cause an iduve to act irrationally,- but there was one outstanding exception, and iduve when irritated with kamethi were prone to it.
He stopped square in the doorway, blood leaving his face and returning in a hot rush. Her urgency prodded him into motion again, her anger and her terror like ice in his belly. No, he insisted again and again. Isande had been terrified once and long ago: she was scarred by the experience and dwelled on it excessively—it embarrassed him, that he had to express that thought: he knew it for truth. He wished her still.
“It happens,” Isande insisted, with such firmness that it shook his conviction. “It is katasukke—pleasure-mating.” And quickly, without preface, apology, or overmuch delicacy, she fed across what she knew or guessed of the iduve’s intimate habits—alienness only remotely communicated in katasukke with noi kame, a union between iduve in katasakke that was fraught with violence and shielded in ritual and secrecy. Katasukke was gentler: sensible noi kame were treated with casual indulgence or casual negligence according to the mood of the iduve in question; but cruelty was e-chanokhia, highly improper, whatever unknown and violent things they did among themselves. But both katasakke and katasukke triggered dangerous emotions in the ordinarily dispassionate iduve. Vaikka was somehow involved in mating, and it was not uncommon that someone was killed. In Isande’s mind any irrationality in the iduve emanated from that one urge: it was the one thing that could undo their common sense, and when it was undone, it was a madness as alien as their normal calm.
He shook off these things, hurried through the corridors while Isande’s anxious presence thrust into his mind behaviors and apologies, fawning kameth graces meant to appease Chimele. Vaikka with a nas kame had this for an expected result, and if he provoked her further now he would be lucky to escape with his life.
He rejected Isande and her opinions, prideful and offended, and knew that Isande was crying, and frustrated with him and furious. Her anger grew so desperate that he had to screen against her, and bade her leave him alone. He was ashamed enough at this disgraceful situation without having her lodged as resident observer in his mind. He knew her hysterical upon the subject, and even so could not help fearing he was walking into something he did not want to contemplate.
With Isande aware, mind-bound to him.
Leave me alone! he raged at her..
She went; and then he was sorry for the silence.
Chimele was waiting for him, seated in her accustomed chair as a tape unreeled on the wall screen with dizzying rapidity: the day’s reports, quite probably. She cut it off, using a manual control instead of the mental ones of which the iduve were capable—a choice, he had learned, which betokened an iduve with mind already occupied.
“You took an unseemly amount of time responding,” she said.
“I was asleep.” Fear added, shaming him: “I’m sorry.”
“You did not expect, then, to be called?”
“No,” he said: and doubled over as the idoikkhe hit him with overwhelming pain. He was surprised into an outcry, but bit it off and straightened, furious.
“Well, consider it settled, then,” she said, “and cheaply so. Be wiser in the future. Return to your quarters.”
“All of you are demented,” he cried, and it struck, this time enough to gray the senses, and the pain quite washed his mind of everything. When it stopped he was on his face on the floor, and to his horror he felt Isande’s hurt presence in him, holding to him, trying to absorb the pain and reason with him to stay down.
“Aiela,” said Chimele, “you clearly fail to understand me.”
“I don’t want—” the idoikkhe stung him again, a gentle reproof compared with what had touched him a moment before. It jolted raw nerves and made him cringe physically in dread: the cowardice it instilled made him both ashamed and angry; and there was Isande’s anxious intrusion again. The two-sided assault was too much. He clutched his head and begged his asuthe to leave him, even while he stumbled to his feet, unwilling to be treated so.