“Why?” Daniel asked, though Isande tried to prevent him. “What exactly do you want to know?”
“M’metane, I am informed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that your people have been attacked. If this is so, we did not order it. We pursue our own business, and your asuthi will advise you that I am being extraordinarily courteous. Now as you hope for the survival of your species, I advise you not to insult that courtesy by being slow in your answers.”
Does she mean that against all humanity—a threat? Daniel asked them, shaken. Would they declare war? Have they?
In the name of reason don’t try to bargain with her, Aiela flung back. Iduve don’t bluff.
Daniel folded, sick inside, a simple man out of his depth and fearing both alternatives. He took the one advised and began to tell them the things they wanted to know, his origin on a world named Konig, beyond the Esliph, his life there, his brief service in the military, his world’s fall to the amaut The iduve listened with unnerving patience even interrupting him to ask more detail of the history of his people, particularly as it regarded the Esliph frontier.
“We never consented, sir,” he told Rakhi, who had asked about the human retreat from the Esliph worlds. “Those were our farms, our cities. The amaut drove us out with better weapons and we went back to safe worlds across the Belt.”
Rakhi frowned. “Most unfortunate, this human problem,” he said to his nasithi. “Our departure from the metrosi seems to have thrown the amaut and kalliran powers into considerable turmoil. We appear to have served some economic purpose for them. When we withdrew, the amaut seem to have found themselves in particular difficulty. They drew back and abandoned the Esliph. Then the humans discovered it. And, under renewed population pressures, the amaut return, reclaim the Esliph—it is altogether logical for them to use force to take land they already considered theirs, or to use force in meeting competitors. But m’metane, were there not agreements, accommodations?”
“Only that we were let off with our lives,” said Daniel. Of iduve that questioned him, Rakhi drew the most honest responses; and upon this question, centuries ago as the event was, Daniel allowed anger to move him. Amaut, iduve, even kallia blurred into one polity in his image of the forced evacuation of his people, for the invaders had been faceless beings in ships, giving orders; and to the human mind, all nonhumans tended to assume one character. “We were pushed off before we could be properly evacuated, crowded onto inadequate ships. Some refused to board and commit themselves to that; they stayed to fight, and I suppose I know what became of them. The ones that migrated and survived to reach the other side of the belt were about twenty out of a hundred. We landed without enough equipment, hardly with the means to survive the winter. The worlds were undeveloped, bypassed in our first colonization, undesirable. We scratched a living out of sand and rock and lost it to the weather more often than not. Now they’ve come after us there.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Khasif, “as the abandoned humans did not fit the amaut social pattern, indenture became the amaut’s solution for the humans. Beings that cannot interbreed with amaut could not exit indenture by normal legal process, so the humans remain in this status perpetually.”
“Yet,” objected another of Khasifs order, “one wonders why the other humans did not eventually seek better territories, if the worlds in question were so entirely undesirable.”
Answer, Isande flashed, for that was a question to Daniel, stated in the often oblique manner of iduve courtesy. “The Esliph was ours,” Daniel replied, “and we always meant to come and take it back.”
“Prha,” said Chaikhe to that person, “vaikka/tomes-me-lakhia-sa, ekutikkase.”
“We did not so much want revenge,” Daniel responded to the comment, for he had caught the gist of it through Isande, “as we wanted justice, our own land back. Now the amaut have come looking for us, even across the Belt. They’re murdering my people.”
“Why?” asked Chimele.
The sudden harshness of her tone panicked the human; his own murder flashed to mind—the easy, gentle manner of the others’ questions some game they played with him. No! Isande sent him. Stay absolutely still. Don’t move. Answer her.