“Niun, stop it. It’s Duncan. It’s Duncan with you. Be still and look at me.”
“Duncan?” The mri was suddenly without strength, chest heaving from exertion, as if he had run from some impossibly far place. “The dusei are lost.”
Such raving was pitiable. Niun was a man of keen mind, of quick reflexes. He looked utterly confused now. Duncan held his arm, and, knowing the mri’s pride, drew a corner of the sheet across the mri’s lower face, a concealment behind which the mri would feel more secure.
Slowly, slowly, the sense came back to that alien gaze. “Let me go, Duncan.”
“I can’t,” he said miserably. “I can’t, Niun.”
The eyes began to lose their focus again, to slip aside. The-muscles in the arm began to loosen. “Melein,” Niun said.
“She is all right.” Duncan clenched his hand until surely it hurt, trying to hold him to hear that. But the mri was back in his own dream. His breathing was rapid. His head turned from side to side in delirium.
And finally he grew quiet again.
Duncan withdrew his hand from Niun’s arm and left, walking slowly at first, then more rapidly. The episode distressed him in the strangeness of it; but Niun was fighting the sedation, was coming out of it more and more strongly, had known him, spoken to him. Perhaps it was alien metabolism, perhaps, the thought occurred to him, Luiz had adjusted the level of sedation, more reasonable than he had shown himself in argument on the subject.
He went to the main lock, to the guard post that watched the coming and going of all that entered and left the ship. He signed the log and handed the stylus back.
“Hard session, sir?” the night guard asked, sympathy, not inquisitiveness. Tereci knew him.
“Somewhat, somewhat,” he said, blinked at Tereci from eyes he knew were red, felt of his chin, that was rough. “Message for Luiz when he wakes: I want to talk with him at the earliest.”
“Recorded, sir,” said Tereci, scratching it into the message sheet.
Duncan started through the lock, expecting it to open for him under Tereci’s hand. It did.
“Sir,” Tereci said. “You’re not armed. Regulations.”
Duncan swore, exhausted, remembering the standing order for personnel out at night. “Can you check me out sidearms?”
“Sign again,” Tereci said, opened a locker and gave him a pistol, waiting while he put his name to another form. “I’m sorry,” Tereci said. “But we’ve had some action around here at night. Regulations aside, it’s better to carry something.”
“Regul?” he asked, alarmed at that news, which he had not read in the reports. Regul was all that immediately occurred to him, and had he not been so tired, he would not have been so impolitic.
“Animals. Prowling the limits of the guard beams. They never get inside them, but I wouldn’t go out there unarmed. You want an escort, sir? I could get one of the night security ” “‘ “No need,” he said wearily. “No need.” He had come in from the open, and though armed then, he had never thought in terms of weapons. He had walked the land in company with mri. He regarded no warnings of these men that were bound to the safety of Flower and the Nom, who had never seen the land they had come to occupy.
They could stand in the midst of Sil’athen and never see it, men of Galey’s breed solid men, decent.
Unwondering.
He belted on the gun, a heavy weight, an offense to a weary back, and smiled a tired thanks at Tereci, went out into the chill, acrid air. A geyser had blown out irreverently close to Flower. The steam’made the air moist and clouded. He inhaled it deeply, not minding the flavor of it, found it grateful to walk the track by himself, in silence, without Galey. His head ached. He had not realized it before this. He took his time, and found nothing but pleasure in the night, under the larger of Kesrith’s moons, with the air chill and the stars glittering, and far, far across the flats, lights illumined the geysers that spouted almost constantly. The land had become a boiling and impassable barrier, guarding the approaches to the ruins of the mri towers, that only the most intrepid of Boaz’ researchers had scanned from the air.