Duncan shrugged, human-fashion, gave a faint, tired twist of the mouth. Naked-faced as he was, he looked like a man long without rest either of body or of spirit. He was nai’ve at times, this man Duncan, but he was capable of having guarded himself, and knew surely that he ought to have done so. Niun momentarily put aside his thoughts of violence.
“I meant,” Duncan said, “to get you out of the hands of the regul.”
“You simply asked your people, and they gave you this for your own pleasure. Are you so great among them that they are that eager to please you?”
Duncan did not rise to the sarcasm. His expression remained only tired, and again he shrugged. “I’m alone. And I don’t plan to contest the control of the ship. You can take it. But I will point out that this is not a warship, we are not armed, and we are possibly doing already what you would wish us to do. I don’t think you can take actual contrbl; we are on taped navigation.”
Niun frowned. This, in his inexperience, he had not taken into account. He stared at Duncan, knowing his own strength limited, even to go on standing. He could loose the dusei; he could take the ship; but the thing that Duncan said made Duncan’s calm comprehensible, that neither of them could manage the ship.
“Where are we going?” Niun asked.
“I don’t know,” Duncan said. “I don’t know. Come with me to controls, and I will show you what I mean.”
The ovoid rested in a case lined with foam, a shining and beautiful object, unique, holy. Not a flaw was on its surface, although Niun knew that it had tumbled down rocks and withstood the gods knew what afterward to come here. He knelt down, heedless of Duncan’s presence, and stretched out a reverent hand, touched that slick, cold surface as if it were the skin of a sentient being.
A piece of the mri soul, this object, this pan’en, this mystery, that he had carried until he could carry it no longer. He would have died to keep this from tsi’mri hands.
And from tsi’mri it had.come to them, touched and profaned.
Duncan’s doing. There was none other who could have found it.
Niun stood up, eyes blurring, the membrane betraying him for the instant; and before a stranger of the People, he would have veiled himself in anger, but Duncan had been closer to him than many another of his own kind. He did not know what manner of grace or threat was intended by this gift. He felt a counter at his back, welcome; his legs were foundering under him. The dus came, great clumsy-seeming creature, careful in this place of delicate instruments and tight spaces. It lay down at his feet, its warmth and steadiness offered to him at need.
“You know the mri well enough,” Niun said, “to know that you have been very reckless to touch this.”
“It is yours. I got it back for you; would you rather it had been lost out there, left?”
Niun looked down again at the pan’en, up again at Duncan, still trying to reckon what lay behind that veilless face; and slowly, deliberately, he fastened the veil across his own face a warning, did Duncan chance to have learned that mri. gesture, that severed what was personal between them. “Humans are mad with curiosity. So my elders taught me, and I think that they were right. It will not have been in your hands without your scholars looking into it; and it is even possible that they will have learned what it is. Being only kel’en myself, I am not entitled to know that. Perhaps you know. I do not want to.”
“You are right in your suspicions.”
“Being human yourself, you knew that this would happen if you brought it to your people.”
“I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know that it would be more than a curiosity to them.”
“But it is,” Niun surmised; and when Duncan did not answer: “Is that why we are here? One thing the mri had left, one treasure we had, and here it rests, and here are you, alone, and suddenly we are given rewards, and our freedom a ship for our leaving, at great cost. For what service to humanity is this a just reward, kel Duncan? For the forty years of war we waged with your kind, are we given gifts?”