“I am not your enemy, Aho’Va.”
She measured him so thoroughly that he felt her gaze as a touch up and down his body, arousing him as before. “Perhaps not,” she said, “but please don’t make any more promises. You maintain this claim that you don’t remember how you got here?”
“Yes.”
“When we get back to the ship, Zheng, do another full brain scan on our guest. If he’s telling the truth, there must be some reason for these blackouts. Zheng, Montague, carry on. I’ll take Ronan into the galley.” She glanced at her wrist. “One hour to planetfall. Inform me when you’re ready to begin final descent.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Cynara holstered the sidearm and waved Ronan through the door. He preceded her into the galley, furnished with two small tables and three times as many seats.
“Sit,” she ordered. “We didn’t get the chance to finish our previous conversation, and that was a mistake. I’ve made the possibly hazardous assumption that you really are human.”
Ronan laid his hands on the table. “I am.”
“Outwardly, yes. But I think, no matter how much you reject it, you are still part shaauri.”
“I had to become like them in order to survive.”
“I understand.” She kept her hands out of sight under the table, as if she was afraid to let him see them. “But I find it very hard to believe that they taught you how to pilot their ships.”
It was a question he had expected, and yet he still had no answer, no explanation to make her trust him. “I was not shut out from all learning—the Kalevi House that took me in accepted me under their protection. It was other Houses on Aitu that wished me gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead.”
“They would have killed you, even as a child?”
“It was necessary for me to learn to defend myself and discover how not to provoke attack. When I was very young, Ain’Kalevi protected me. But when I reached the age of Selection, they could not.”
“Because you should have been entering adulthood, and they forbade you what you needed to achieve it.”
“They feared the tales I might carry to humans, if I were allowed to run free as be’laik’in.”
“Then why didn’t they kill you? Who brought you to Aitu, and where did you come from? Why did the shaauri take you in?”
As he had done so many times in the past, he tried to remember the days of his childhood before he had first come to be among the shaauri. One morning he had awakened in a shaauri dwelling on a shaauri world, understanding almost nothing of what went on around him, or of these great beings who were to be his guardians. Even when he learned to speak the tongue as fluently as any human could, the Kalevii had refused to tell him what he had lost.
So he had learned to stop asking. He had learned, very quickly, how to watch and listen. He had discovered that three Houses of Line Kalevi lived on Aitu, along with several Houses of allied Lines.
At first most shaauri of Ain’Kalevi had treated him with casual indifference, even indulgence, as they did their own young. But when he had ventured away from the settlement, he had learned how much shaauri hated humans.
“You haven’t answered my question, Ronan.”
“I do not know the answer. It is not the shaauri way to murder children.”
“Defending the people who did that to you?”
He followed her fierce stare to the back of his hand. Discipline alone kept him from withdrawing it, and he remembered with shame how he had made a display of himself to win her sympathy and trust.
“Shaauri believe,” he said slowly, “that all humans are uncivilized barbarians. Humans never return from Walkabout, and so remain unselected and without place or purpose all their lives. Shaauri regard this as a form of insanity, and humans as purveyors of madness. They breed much faster then shaauri, since all may mate where and when they choose. There is much fear… that the shaauri way will be infected and devoured by the human.”
Cynara sighed and closed her eyes. “Then they are wrong, Ronan. Not all humans are alike. On Scholar-Commander Adumbe’s world, learning for its own sake is the great achievement, and all rank comes from academic testing throughout life. Zheng’s world, Anvil, is high-gravity, and her people have adapted by altering their bodies both genetically and technologically to cope with the environment. On Sirocco, women hold all property and men gladly cede leadership to them.”