Shonjir By C.J. Cherryh

He waited on Melein; and she said nothing.

“You have two kel’ein,” he reminded her at last, on the day that there was hardly any darkness left in the starscreen.

Still she said nothing.

“Ask him, Melein.”

Her lips made a taut line.

He knew the stubbornness in her: they were of one blood. He set his own face. “Then let us fall into the world,” he said, staring elsewhere. “Surely there is nothing that I know to do, and your mind is set.”

There was long silence between them. Neither moved.

“It would assure,” she said at last, “that one danger did not reach our destination. I have thought of that. But it would not stop the other. And in us is the knowledge of it.”

Such a thought shook at his confidence. He felt diminished, who had thought only of their own survival, who have been forward with her. “I spoke out of turn,” he said. “Doubtless you have weighed what we ought to do.”

“Go ask him,” she said.

He sat still for a moment, finding her shifts of mind as unsettling as transit, and his nerves taut-strung at the thought that the matter did indeed come down to Duncan.

Then he gathered himself up, called softly to his dus, and went.

Duncan sat, beneath the screen that held the scanner image, eternally whetting away at the blade of an av-tlen that he had made out of scrap metal: it was laser-cut and of a balance that Niun privately judged would never be true, but it kept Duncan’s hands busy, and perhaps his mind, whatever darkness hovered in it. The dus lay near him, head between paws, eyes following the sweep of Duncan’s hands.

“Duncan,” Niun said. The noise of the steel kept its rhythm. “Duncan.”

It stopped. Duncan looked up at him with that bleak hardness that had grown there day by day.

“The she’pan is concerned,” Niun said, “about our near approach to this world.”

Duncan’s eyes remained cold. “Well, you do not need me. Or if you do, then you can find some means to work around me, can you not?”

“I respect your quarrel with us.” Niun sank down on his heels, opened his hands in a gesture of offering. “But surely you know that there is no quarreling with the world that is drawing us into it. We will die, and you will have no satisfaction in that. As for your cause with us, I do not want to quarrel at all on this small ship, with the dusei in the middle of it. Listen to me, Duncan. I have done everything I know to give you an honorable way to put aside this grievance with us. But if you threaten the she’pan, then I will not be patient And you are doing that.”

Duncan went back to his task, sweeping steel against steel. Niun fought with his temper, knowing the result if he laid hands on the tsi-mri: a dus that was already precariously balanced on the verge of miuk, and the ship plummeting toward impact with a world with some things indeed there was no quarreling. It was likely that the human was no more rational than the dus, affected by the ailing beast. If the dus went over the brink, then so did the mind that held knowledge of the ship.

Melein’s handiwork. Niun clenched his arms about his knees and sought something to say that would touch the man.

“We are out of time, Duncan.”

“If you cannot deal with this,” Duncan said suddenly, “then you certainly could not land safely when you reach your home. I do not think you ever intended to be rid of me. You two seem to need me, and I think the she’pan has always suspected that. That was why she let you have youft way. It was only a means of making me less an inconvenience than I would have been, a way of getting past my guard and getting from me what she wanted. I am not angry with you, Niun. You believed her. So did I. She had what she wanted. Only now I am needed again, am I?” The ring of steel continued, measured and hard. “Become like you. Become one of you. I know you tried. You armed me but you never reckoned on the beast. Now you cannot deal with me so easily. It and I… make something new on this ship.”

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