Shonjir By C.J. Cherryh

By the side of a red star, for five days without a jump, they played at shon’ai, and spoke together, unveiled. There was a chant to the Game, and a rhythm of hands that made it yet more difficult to make the catch. Duncan learned it, and it ran through his brain even at the edge of sleep, numbing, possessing his whole mind; for the first time in uncounted nights he slept deeply, and in the morning he ate more than he had been able.

On the sixth day by that star, they played’ a more rapid game, and Duncan suffered a bone-bruise from a hit, and learned that Niun would not hold his hand with him any longer.

Twice more he was hit, once missing by nervousness and the second time by anger. Niun returned a cast with more skill than he could manage when he had thrown the mri a foul throw in temper for the first hit. Duncan absorbed the pain and learned that to lose concentration from fear or from anger was to suffer worse pain, and to lose the game. He cleared his mind, and played in earnest at shon’ai, still with wands, and not yet as the Kel played, with edged steel.

“Why,” he asked Niun, when he had words enough to ask, “do you play to harm your brothers?”

“One plays shon’ai,” said Niun, “to deserve to live, to feel the mind of the People. One throws. One receives. We play to deserve to live. We cast. Hands empty, we wait. And we learn to be strong.”

There was a threshold of fear in the Game, the sure knowledge that there was a danger, that there was no mercy. One could be secure in it a time, while the pace stayed within the limits of one’s skill, and then one realized that it was in earnest, and that the pace was increasing. Fear struck, and nerves failed, and the Game was lost, in pain.

Play, Niun advised him, to deserve to live. Throw your life, kel’en, and catch it in your hands.

He understood, and therein another understanding came to him, how the mri could take great joy in such a game.

And he understood for the first time the peculiar madness in which the mri could not only survive, but revel in the unnatural feel of the jumps, by which the ship hurled herself at apparent random from star to star.

Twice more they jumped, and Duncan stood still and waited as the bell rang and the dissolution began. He watched the mri, knew the mind of the kel’en who stood opposite him knew how to let go and cast himself utterly to the rhythm of the Game, to go with the ship, and not to fear.

A wild laugh came to him on that second emergence, for the teaching of the Service had been survive, but that of the Game was something complexly alien, that careless madness that was the courage of the mri.

Kel’en.

He had shed something, something he once had valued; and as with the other possessions that he had cast into oblivion, the sense of loss was dim and distant.

Niun gazed at him, silently estimated, and he met that look directly, loss still nagging at him. One of the dusei, the lesser one, nosed his hand. He jerked it back, turned his face from Niun’s critical stare, and went to the corner that was his limbs steady, senses trying to deceive him and denied the power to do so.

He was not what Stavros had launched.

He sat on his pallet and stared at the scratched reckoning of days that he had begun, and that he had omitted to do. It was no longer the time that passed that mattered, but that which lay ahead, time enough that he could indeed forget.

Forget writing, forget human speech, forget Kesrith. There were gaps in his past, not alone in recent days, those fevered and terrible hours; there were others, that made strange and shifting patterns of all his memory, as if some things that he remembered were too strange to this ship, this long voyaging.

The Dark that Niun spoke of began to swallow such things up, as it lacked measure, and direction, and reason.

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