“Nevertheless,” said ‘Chimele, “my decision stands.”
“The Orithain cannot make mistakes.”
“But even so,” Chimele observed, “I prefer to proceed toward infallibility at my own unhurried pace, Rakhi. Have you heard from Ashakh yet?”
“He acknowledged. He has left Priamos by now, and he will be here with all possible speed.”
“Good. Go back to your station. Aiela, Isande, if we are to salvage Daniel, you must find him a suitable unit and dispose of that child by some means. I trust you are still keeping your actions shielded from him. His mind is already burdened with too much knowledge. And when I do give you leave to contact him, you may tell him that I am ill pleased.”
“I have already made that clear to him.”
“She is not his,” Chimele objected, still worrying at that thought.
“She attached herself to him for protection. She became his.”
“There is no nasith-tak, no female, no katasathe, no dhisais. Is it reasonable that a male would do this, alone?”
“I am sure it is. An iduve would not?”
That was a presumptuous question. Isande reproved his asking, but Chimele lowered her eyes to show decent shame and then looked up-at him.
“A female would be moved to do what he has done as if she were katasathe and near her time. A male could not, not without the presence of a female with whom he had recently mated. But is not this child-female close to adulthood? Perhaps it is the impulse to katasakke that has taken him.”
“No,””said Aiela, “no, when he thinks of her, it is as a child. That—unworthy thought did cross his mind; he drove it away. He was deeply ashamed.”
He wished he had not said that private thing to Chimele. Had he not been so tired he would have withheld it. But it had given her much to ponder. Bewilderment sat in her eyes.
“She is chanokhia to him,” Aiela said further. “To him she is the whole human race. You and I would not think so, but to him she is infinitely beautiful.”
And he rejoined Isande at the desk, where with trembling hands she began to ply the keyboard again and to call forth the geography of Priamos on the viewer, marking it with the sites of occupied areas, receiving reports from the command center, updating the map. There were red zones for amaut occupation, green for human, and the white pinpricks that were iduve: one at Weissmouth in a red zone, that was Khasif; and one in the continental highlands a hundred lioi from Daniel, which was Tejef at best reckoning.
When Aiela chanced at last to notice Chimele again she was standing by her desk in the front of the paredre, which had expanded to a dizzying perspective of Ashanome’s hangar deck, talking urgently with Ashakh.
It was fast coming up dawn in the Weiss valley. The divergent rhythms of ship and planetary daylight systems were not least among the things that had kept Aiela’s mind off-balance for fifteen days. He thought surely that Daniel would have been compelled by exhaustion to lie down and sleep. He could not possibly have the strength to go much further. But even wondering about Daniel could let information through the screening. Aiela turned his mind away toward the task at hand, sealing against any further contact.
The light was beginning to rise, chasing Priamos’ belt of stars from the sky, and by now Daniel’s steps wandered. Oftentimes he would stop and stare down the long still-descending road, dazed. Aiela’s thoughts were silent in him. He had felt one terrible pain, and then a long silence, so that he had forgotten the importance of his rebellion against Aiela and hurled anxious inquiry at him, whether he were well, what had happened. The silence continued, only an occasional communication of desperation seeping through. It was Chimele’s doing, then, vaikka against Aiela, thoroughly iduve, but against him, against all Priamos, her retaliation would not be so slight.
In cold daylight Daniel knew what he had done, that a world might die because he had not had the stomach to commit one more murder; but he refused steadfastly to think that far ahead, or to believe that even Chimele could carry out a threat so brutally—that he and the little girl would become only two among a million corpses to litter the surface of a dead world.