Shonjir By C.J. Cherryh

“They’re domestic?” Boaz asked him.

“They seem to be. They are, for the mri. They’re I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Boaz looked at him critically. “You’re through for the day,” she said. “No more questions. If they’re bedded down and secure, no questions.”

“No one goes down there. They’re dangerous.”

“No one is going to go near them.”

“They’re halfway sapient,” he said. “They found the mri. Across all that desert and out of all these buildings, they found them.”

He was shaking. She touched his arm, blonde, plump Boaz, and at that moment she was the most beautiful and kindly creature in all Kesrith. “Sten, go home,” she said. “Get to your own quarters; get some rest. One of the security officers will walk you. Get out of here.”

He nodded, measured his strength against the distance to the Nom, and concluded that he had enough left in him to make it to his room without staggering. He turned, blindly, without a word of thanks to Boaz, remembered nothing until he was out the door and halfway down the ramp with a security man at his side, rifle over one arm.

The mental gaps terrified him. Fatigue, perhaps. He wished to believe so.

But he had not consciously decided to enter Flower with the dusei.

He had not decided.

He tore his mind away, far away from the dusei, fighting a giddy return to the warmth that was their touch.

Yes, Niun had said, I feel them.

I feel them.

He talked to the security man, something to drown the silence, talked of banal things, of nonsensical things with slurring speech and no recall later of what he said.

It was only necessary, until he was within the brightly lighted safety of the Nom, in its echoing halls that smelled of regul and humans, that there not be silence.

The security guard left him at the door, pressed a plastic vial into his hand. “Dr. Luiz advised it,” he said.

Duncan did not question what the red capsules were. They killed the dreams, numbed his senses, made it possible for him to rest without remembering anything.

He woke the next morning and found he had not turned off the lights.

CHAPTER Four

STAVROS, SEATED outside his sled-console, in the privacy of his own quarters, looked like a man who had not slept. There was a thick folder of papers on the desk in front of him, rumpled and read: the labor of days to produce, of a night to read.

Duncan saw, and knew that there was some issue of his work, of the hours that he had spent writing and rewriting what he was sure only one man would ever see, reports that did not go to Boaz or Luiz, or even to security: that would never enter the records, if they ran counter to Stavros’ purposes.

“Sit down,” Stavros said.

Duncan did so, subject to the scrutiny of Stavros’ pale eyes on a level with his own. He had no sense of accomplishment, rather that he had done all that was in him to do, and that it had probably failed, as all other things had failed to make any difference with Stavros. He had labored more over that report than over any mission prep he had ever done; and even while he worked he had feared desperately that it was all for nothing, that it was only something asked of him as a sop to his protests, and that Stavros would discard it half-read.

“This mri so-called shrine,” said Stavros. “You know that the regul are disturbed about it. They’re frightened. They connect all this mri business in their thinking: the shrine, the artifact, the fact that we’ve taken trouble to keep two mri alive and your influence, that not least. The whole thing forms a design they don’t like. Do you know the regul claim they rescued you and Galey?” Duncan almost swore, smothered it, “Not true.”

“Remember that to a regul your situation out there may have looked desperate. A regul could not have walked that distance. Night was coming on, and they have a terror of the dark in the open wilderness. They claim they spotted the grounded aircraft and grew concerned for your safety that they have been trying to watch over our crews in their explorations, for fear of some incident happening which might be blamed on them.”