Are you all right? Aiela persisted, trying to feel what she felt.
I believe so. She was numb. There was plasmic restruct on her right hand. The flesh was dark there. And hard upon that assessment came the realization that she, like Daniel, like Tejef, was trapped on the surface of Priamos. Aiela could be lifted offworld. She could not. Aiela would live. At least she had that to comfort her.
No! and with Aiela’s furious denial came a vision of sky with a horizon of jagged masonry, the cold cloudy light of stars overhead. He hurt, pain from cracking his head on the pavement, bruises and cuts beyond counting from clambering through the ruins to escape—Escape what? The ship inaccessible? Isande began to panic indeed; and he pleaded with her to stop, for her fear came to him, and he was so overwhelmingly tired.
Another presence filtered through his mind—Daniel. Although his thoughts reached to Weissmouth and back, he stood in a room not far away. A pale child—Arle, her image never before so clear—slept under sedation: he worried for her. And in that room was a woman whose name was Margaret, a poor, broken thing kept alive with tubings and life support. A dark man sat beside the woman, talking to her softly, and this was Tejef.
Rage burned through Isande, rejected instantly by Daniel: Murderer! she thought; but Daniel returned: At least this one cares for his people, and that is more than Chimele can do.
Blind! Isande cried at him, but Daniel would not believe it.
Chimele would be a target I would regret less.
And that disloyalty so upset Isande that she threw herself off the bed and staggered across the little room to try the door, cursing at the human the while in such thoughts as she did not use when her mind was whole.
I cannot reason with Daniel, said Aiela; but he knows the choice this world has and he will remember it when he must. Humans are like that.
Kill him, Isande raged at Daniel. You have the chance now: kill him, kill him, kill him!
Daniel foreknew defeat, weaponless as he was; and Isande grew more reasoning then and was sorry, for Daniel was as frightened as she and nearly as helpless. Yet Aiela was right: when the time came he would make one well-calculated effort. It was the reasonable thing to do, and that, he had learned of the iduve—to weigh things. But he resented it: Chimele had more power to choose alternatives than Tejef, and stubbornly refused to negotiate anything.
Iduve do not negotiate when they are winning or when they are losing. Isande flared back, hating that selective human blindness of his, that persistence in reckoning everyone as human; and that Tejef you honor so has already killed millions by his actions; by iduve reckoning, his was the action that began this. He knew what would happen when he sheltered here among humans.
Tejef has given us our lives, Daniel returned, with that reverence upon the word life that a kallia would spend upon giyre. Tejef was fighting for his own life, and that struck a response from the human at a primal level. Still Daniel would kill him. The contradictions so shocked Isande that she withdrew from that tangle of human logic and fiercely agreed that it would certainly be his proper giyre to his asuthi and Ashanome to do so.
The thought that echoed back almost wept. For Arle’s life, for this woman Margaret’s, for yours, for Aiela’s, I will try to kill him. I am afraid that I will kill him for my own—I am ashamed of that. And it is futile anyway.
You are not going to die, Aiela cast at them both, and the stars lurched in his vision and loose brick rattled underfoot as he hurled himself to his feet. I am going to do something. I don’t know what, but I’m going to try, if I can only get back to the civilized part of town.
Through his memory she read that he had been trying to do that for most of the night, and that he had been driven to earth by human searchers armed with lights, hovercraft thundering about the ruined streets, occasional shots streaking the dark. He was exhausted. His knees were torn from falling and felt unsure of his own weight If called upon to run again he simply could not do it.