He stared helplessly at Niun, even this made distant by the drag. “I didn’t risk my neck getting you free only to kill one of you. No.”
“You would not kill me,” Niun said.
It set him off-balance. “I am not your enemy,” he protested.
“Do you want to take service with the she’pan?”
“Yes.”
He said it quickly; it was the only sane answer. When things were quiet, at some later time, then it would be the moment to reason with them, to explain why he must be set free with the ship: it was their own protection they considered.
But Niun remained still a moment, staring at him as if he suspected a lie in that consent.
“Niun,” said Melein, her back still turned; Niun went to her, and they spoke in low voices. For a moment then Niun was still; the dusei shifted restlessly: one moaned and nosed at Niun’s hand. He caressed it absently to silence, then came back to the side of the room where Duncan stood.
“Kel Duncan,” he said, “the she’pan says that we are going home. We are going home.”
It did not register.for a moment came then with a dull, distant apprehension. “You called Kesrith home,” Duncan said.
“And Nisren. Kel-truth. The she’pan knows. Duncan ” The eyes above the’veil lost their impassivity. “Perhaps we are the last; perhaps there is nothing left; perhaps it will be too long a voyage. But we are going. And after this, I must forget; so must you. This is the she’pan’s word, because nothing human can stay with us, not on such a voyage. The she’pan says that you have given the People a great gift; and for this service, you may keep your name, human though it is; but nothing more. We have gone from the sun into the Dark; and in the Dark, we forget, the whole of what we have been and seen and known, and we return to our ancestors. This is what you have entered, Duncan. If ever you stand on the homeworld of the People, you will be mri. Is this understood? Is this what you want?”
A dus crowded them, warm and urgent with emotion. Duncan felt a numbness; sensed, almost, Niun’s anxiety. Violation of privacy, of self-control: he edged back and the dus shied off, then returned obstinately to its closeness. There was no lying to the dusei; none, eventually, to the mri. They would learn one day what humans meant to do to them, what he had aimed at their home: a second, deadlier gift. It was irony that they asked him to share it.
“It’s what I want,” he said, for he saw no other choice.
Niun frowned. “A mri,” he said, “could not have chosen what you have chosen.”
The distance that the drug lent was leaving, deserting him to cold reality. He heard what Niun said, and it twisted strangely, forebodingly in his mind. He looked at Melein’s back, wondering whether she would now deign to notice him, since he had yielded to all their terms.
“Come,” said Niun, gesturing to the door. “You have given up the ship. You do not belong here now.”
“She cannot manage it,” he protested, dismayed to think of Melein, desert-bred, regul-trained, setting hands on human-made machinery. Niun’s entire body stiffened; the frown reappeared. “Come,” he said again. “Forget first how to question. You are only kel’en.”
It was mad. It was, for the moment, necessary; Melein’s ignorance could kill them, but she surely had sense enough to refrain from rashness. The ship could manage itself. It was a hazard less immediate than quarreling with Niun.
There were the dusei.
There was the plain fact that did he defeat the mri, hie must kill him: and he had not broken with Stavros’ orders, cut himself off from Kesrith, to finish the reguls’ job for them. In time he could learn the mri enough to reason with them, wherever they were, mri world or regul.
He yielded, and with Niun, left the control center, the dusei in their wake. The door closed behind them, sealed: he heard the lock go into place.
CHAPTER Nine
TWO WARSHIPS, six rider-vessels.