Daniel came then, hugged Arle to him and quieted her sobs, saying all the proper and fluent human things that comforted her. “Perhaps,” he said to her insistence, “perhaps they’ll let you come up and sit with her later, when she’s able to know you’re there. But she’ll be asleep in a moment. Now go on, go on back into your apartments and wash your face. Come on, come on now, stop the tears.”
She hugged him tightly a moment, and then ran away inside, into the echoing hall of the dhis where neither of them could follow.
“I will honor your promises to her,” Tejef told Daniel with great restraint. “Now go up to surgery. I want someone with her who can translate for the amaut. Dlechish does not have great fluency in human speech.”
“And what happens,” Daniel asked, “when you lose your temper with Arle the way you just did with her?”
Tejef drew a quick breath, choking down his anger. “I had no wish to harm my kamethi.”
Daniel only stared at him, thinking, or perhaps receiving something from his asuthe. Then he nodded slowly. “You care for them,” he observed, as if this were a highly significant thing.
“M’melakhia does not apply. They are mine already.” He did not know why he felt compelled to argue with a m’metane, except that the human had puzzled him with that word. He felt suddenly the gulf of language, and wished anew that he understood metane behavior. Ariastiethe would not let him ask.
“Call Ashanome,” Daniel said softly. “Surrender. The kamethi do not have to die.”
Tejef felt a chill, for the human’s persistent suggestion quite lost its humor; he meant it seriously. It was human to do such a thing, to give up one’s own arastiethe and become nothing. The inverted logic that permitted such thinking seemed for the moment frighteningly real.
“Did I ask your advice?” Tejef replied. “Go up to surgery.”
“She might take it kindly if you came. That is our arastiethe, knowing someone cares. We also tend to die when we are denied it.”
Tejef pondered that, for it explained much, and posed more questions. Was that caring, he wondered; and did it always demand that one yield arastiethe by demonstrating concern? But if human honor were measured by gathering concern to one’s self, then it was by seeking and accepting favors: the perversity of the idea turned reason itself inside out. In that realization the cleanliness of death at the hands of Ashanome seemed almost an attractive prospect. His own honor was not safe in the hands of humans; and perhaps he wounded his own kamethi—and Margaret—in the same way.
“Will you come up?” Daniel asked.
“Go,” Tejef ordered. “Put yourself in the hands of one of the kamethi and he will escort you there at your asking.”
“Yes, sir.” Daniel bowed with quiet courtesy and walked away to the lift. It was kalliran, Tejef realized belatedly, and was warmed by the fact that Daniel had chosen to pay him that respect, for humans did not generally use that custom. It filled him with regret for the clean spaciousness of Ashanome, for familiar folk of honorable habits and predictable nature.
The lift ascended, and Tejef turned away toward the door of the dhis, troubled by the harachia of the place where Margaret had lain, a dent in the metal paneling where her fragile body had hit. She had often disadvantaged him, held him from vaikka against humans and amaut, shamed him by her attentions. It was not the deference of a kameth but the tenacious m’melakhia of a nasith-tak—but of course there was no takkhenes, no oneness in it; and it depended not at all on him. She simply chose to belong to him and him to belong to her, and the solitary determination of her had an arastiethe about it which made him suspect that he was the recipient of a vaikka he could only dimly comprehend.
He was bitterly ashamed of the grief his perverted emotion had brought her in all things, for in one private part of his thoughts he knew absolutely what he had done, saw through his own pretenses, and began now to suspect that he had hurt her in ways no iduve could comprehend. For the first time he felt the full helplessness of himself among a people who could not pay him the arastiethe his heart needed, and he felt fouled and grieved at the offering they did give him. The contradictions were madness; they gathered about him like a great darkness, in which nothing was understandable.