He fired back indignation. “Games,” he reminded her.
Vaikka, she whispered into his consciousness. And you do not want to tell me to go away, do you?
He did not, but he screened, and headed himself deliberately toward the darkness of sleep.
CHAPTER 5
ISANDE WAS THERE in the morning. Her cheerful presence burst in enthusiastically while Aiela was putting his boots on, and it was as if a door had opened and someone were standing behind him—where there was neither door nor body.
“Must you be so sudden?” he asked her, and her joy plummeted. He was sorry. Isande had never been so vulnerable before. He was concerned about last night and out of sorts about time wasted and a tight schedule with Daniel.
“I would try to help,” she offered.
His screens tightened; he knew her opinion of the human, her dislike of the creature. If it were not unlike her, he would have suspected her of wishing to harm Daniel: her feelings were that strong.
What do you expect of me? she asked, offended.
Answers. What do they want with him?
And a strange uneasiness was growing in him now that Daniel was on his mind; Isande’s thoughts grew hard to unravel. Daniel was waking; Aiela’s own heart began to speed, his breathing grew constricted in sympathetic reaction.
“Calm!” he cast him. “Calm! It’s Aiela. It’s all right.”
Isande—who is Isande?
Daniel perceived her through him. Aiela’s impulse was to interrupt that link, protecting both of them; but he sensed no harm from either direction, and he hesitated, suffering a strange double-passage of investigation as they probed each other. Then he received quite an unpleasant impression as the human realized Isande was female: curiosity reached for body-sense, to know.
Violently he snapped that connection, at once prey to the outrage of them both.
“I can fend for myself,” Isande voiced to him, seething with offended pride. “He is not of our species, and I’m sure his curiosity means nothing to me.”
But Daniel was too angry to voice. He was embarrassed and furious, and for a moment his temper obscured the fact that he was not equal to a quarrel either with Aiela or with his situation.
Aiela fired back his own feelings upon the instant: frustration with the ungovernable Isande, revulsion at having been made the channel for an alien male’s obscene curiosity— male, not man, not fit to touch a kalliran woman.
Barriers went up against him, fell again. Aiela felt the human’s despair like a plunge into darkness, a hurt mingled with his own guilt. He was too disoriented to prevent its flow to Isande. Her anguish struck him from the other side, coldly doused as she flung up a screen.
“Aiela! The echo—stop it.”
He understood: mind-linked as they were, each brain reacted to the other’s emotions. It was a deadly self-accelerating process. His reaction to Daniel’s offended masculinity had lowered a screen on an ugliness he had not suspected existed in himself.
“Daniel,” he sent, and persisted until the unhappy being acknowledged his presence. It was a terrible flood he received. All screens went, asuthithekkhe, mind-link, defense abandoned. The images came so strongly they washed out vision: amaut, cages, dead faces, grief upon grief. Daniel’s mind was the last citadel and he hurled it wide open, willing to die, at the end of his resistance.
I am sorry, Aiela hurled into that churning confusion like a voice into a gale. Daniel! I was hurt too. Stop this. Please. Listen.
Gradually, gradually, sanity gathered up the pieces again, the broken screens rebuilt themselves into separate silence; and Aiela rested his head in his hands, struggling against a very physical nausea that swelled in his throat His instincts screamed wrong, his hands were cold and sweating at the proximity of a being unutterably twisted, who rejected giyre and kastien, who loathed the things most kalliran.
Aiela. Daniel reached the smallest tendril of thought toward him. He did not understand, but he would seal the memory behind a screen and not let it out again. Dying was not worse than being alone. Whatever the rules Aiela set, he would conform.
I’m sorry, Aiela replied gently. But your perceptions of us are not exactly without prejudice; and you were rude with Isande.