It stopped here; everything stopped here, at the Edge. She lay on her back staring up, her arm intertwined with Jim’s. The storm had passed and the stars were clear in the skylight: Achernar’s burning eye and all, all the other little lights. The loneliness of the Reach oppressed her as it never had. The day crowded in on her, the Outsider ship ghosting past them in the morning, the presence of them in the house.
What’s out there, she wondered, where men never changed? Or do we all . . . change?
Perspective shifted treacherously, as if the sky were downward, and she jerked. Jim half-wakened, stirred. “Hush,” she said. “Sleep.” And he did so, head against her, seeking warmth.
Tropism.
We created the betas, built all their beliefs, but they refused to live us we made them; they had to have azi. They created them, they cripple them, to make themselves whole by comparison. Of what did we rob the betas?
Of what they take from the azi?
She rubbed at Jim’s shoulder and wakened him deliberately. He blinked at her in the starlight. “Jim, was there another azi on the Jewel, more than one, perhaps, that you would have liked to have here with you?”
He blinked rapidly, perplexed. “No.”
“Are you trying to protect them?”
“No.”
“There was none, no friend, no—companion, male or female?”
“No.”
She considered that desolation a moment, that was as great as her own. “Enemy?”
“No.”
“You were, what, four years on that ship, and never had either friend or enemy?”
“No.” A placid no, a calm and quiet no, a little puzzled.
She took it for truth, and smoothed his hair aside as Lia had done with her when she was a child, in Kethiuy.
She at least . . . had enemies left.
Jim—had nothing. He and the majat azi, the naked creatures moving with will-o’-the-wisp lights through the tunnels of the hive—were full brothers, no more nor less human.
“I am blue-hive,” she whispered to him, moved to things she had never said to any human. “Of the four selves of majat . . . the gentlest, but majat for all that. Sul sept is dead; Meth-maren House is dead. Assassins. I’m blue-hive. That’s what I have left.
“There was an old man . . . seven hundred years old. He’d seen Istra, seen the Edge, where Kontrin won’t go. Majat came here to live, long ago, but Kontrin wouldn’t, only he. And I.” She traced the line of his arm, pleased by its angularity, mentally elsewhere. “Nineteen years ago some limits were readjusted; and do you know, they’ve never been redone. Someone’s taken great care that all that not be redone.
“Nineteen years. I’ve lived on every hive-world of the Reach. I’ve caused the Family a minimum of difficulty. Not from love, not from love, you understand. Ah, no. There’s an old woman in Council. Her name is Moth. She’s not dictator in name, but she is. And she doesn’t trouble me. She does the nothing she always preferred. And the things let loose nineteen years ago—have all come of age.
“The Houses are waiting. Waiting all this time. Moth will die, one of these days. Then the scramble for power, as the Reach has never seen it.”
“Sera—”
“Dangerous listening, yes. Don’t call me that. And you have sense enough to keep quiet, don’t you? The azi down in the azi quarters . . . are not to be . Never confide in them. Even Warriors knows the difference, knowing you were with me before they were. No, trust Warrior if ever you must trust anything; it can’t tell your face from that of any other human, but hail it blue-hive and give it taste or touch, it or any blue. I’ll show you tomorrow, show you how to tell the hive-markings apart. You must learn that and show Max and Merry. And if there’s ever any doubt of a majat kill it. I mean it. Death is a minor thing to them. Warrior—always comes back. Only humans don’t ”
“Why—” From Jim, question was a rarity. ” Why did they attack us at the port?”
“I don’t know. I think they wanted Warrior.”