“You have to think of somewhere I can put you. Stop that sniffling and think.”
“I want to go home,” she cried, at which he looked at her strangely and his grip lessened on her arm. He smoothed her hair and touched her face.
“I know you do. I know. You can’t.”
“Let me go.”
“They’re dead back there, can’t you understand that? If they catch either one of us now they’ll skin us alive. I have to get rid of you.”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Then she thought he would hit her. She screamed and flinched back. But instead he put his arms about her, picked her up, hugged her head down into his shoulder, rocking her in his arms as if she had been an infant. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Aiela took the corridor to the paredre, his mind boiling with frustration and smothered kalliran and human obscenities, and raged at Isande’s gentle presence in his thoughts until she let him alone. For fifteen precious days he had monitored Daniel’s every movement. The human language began to come more readily than the kalliran: human filth and human images poured constantly through his senses, blurring his own perception of what passed about him, cannibalizing his own life, his own separate thoughts.
Now, confronted by an iduve at the door of the paredre, he could scarcely gather enough fluency to explain his presence in any civilized language. The iduve looked at him sharply, for his behavior showed a mental disorder that was suspect, but Chimele had given standing orders and the man relented.
“Aiela?” Chimele arose from her desk across the room, her brows lifted in the iduve approximation of alarm. Aiela bowed very low. Courtesy demanded it, considering the news he bore.
“Daniel has encountered a difficulty,” he said.
“Be precise.” Chimele took a chair with a mate opposite and gestured him to sit.
“The Upweiss raid,” Aiela began hoarsely: Chimele insisted upon the chronological essentials of a thing. He forced his mind into order, screened against the random. impulses that fed from Daniel’s mind and the anxious sympathy from Isande’s. “It went as scheduled. Anderson’s unit hit the Mar estate. Daniel hung back—”
“He was not to do so,” Chimele said.
“I warned him; I warned him strongly. He knows Anderson’s suspicions of him. But Daniel can’t do the things these men do. His conscience—his honor” he amended, trying to choose words that had clear meaning for Chimele—”is offended over the killings. He had to kill a man in the last raid.”
Chimele made a dismissing move of her hand. “He was attacked.”
“I could explain the human ethical—”
“Explain what is at hand.”
‘There was a child—a girl. It was a crisis. I tried to reason with him. He shut me out and took her away. He is still going, deserting Anderson—and us.”
There were no curses in the iduve language. Possibly that contributed to their fierceness. Chimele said nothing.
“I’m trying to reason with him,” Aiela said. “He’s exhausted—drained. He hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He lay awake last night, sick over the prospect of this raid. He’s going on little sleep, no water, no food. He can’t expect to find water as he’s heading, not until the river. They can’t make it.”
“This is not a rational human response.” That was a question. Chimele’s voice had an utter calm, not a good sign in an iduve.
“It is a human response, but it is not rational.”
Chimele hissed and rose, hands on her hips. “Is it not your duty to anticipate such responses and deal with them?”
“I don’t blame him,” he said. Then, from his heart: ‘Tin only afraid I might have done otherwise.” And that thought so depressed him he felt tears rise. Chimele looked down on him in incredulity.
“Au, by what am I served? Explain. I am patient. Is this a predictable response?”
Aiela could have screamed aloud. The paredre faded. He shivered in the cold of a Priamid night, the glory of spiraling ribbons of stars overhead, the fragile sweet warmth of another being in his arms. Tears filled his eyes; his breath caught.