“Why should we be sorrowful?” asked Melein, when they had met again that evening, for their first common-meal in many days, and their last, before landing. “We always knew that we were the last. For a time we believed otherwise, and we were happier, but it is only the same truth that has always been. We should still be glad. We have come home. We have seen what was our beginning, and that is a fit ending.”
This was something the human could not understand. He simply shook his head as he would do in pain, and his dus nosed at him, disconsolate.
But Niun inclined himself wholly to Melein’s thoughts: they were true. There were far worse things than what lay before them: there was Kesrith; there were humans, and regul.
“Do not grieve for us,” Niun said to Duncan, and touched his sleeve. “We are where we wish to be.”
“I will get back to controls,” Duncan said, and flung himself to his feet, veiled himself and left their company without asking permission or looking back. His dus trailed after him, radiating distress.
“He can do nothing there,” said Melein with a shrug. “But it comforts him.”
“Our Duncan,” said Niun, “will not let go. He is obsessed with blame.”
“For us?”
Niun shrugged, pressed his lips together, looked aside.
She put out her hand and touched his face, recalled his attention, regarding him sadly. “I have known that it was possible, that it might have been too long. Niun, there have been above eighty Darks, and in each more than one generation has passed; and there have been above eighty Betweens, and the most of them have lasted above a thousand years.”
He attempted a deprecating laugh, a shake of his head: it did not come out as a laugh. “I can reckon that in distance but not in years. Twenty years is long for a kel’en. I cannot reckon a thousand.”
She bent and pressed her lips to his brow. “Niun, the accounting is no matter. It is beyond my reckoning too.”
That night, and the night after, Niun slept sitting, his head against her chair. Melein did not ask it. He simply did not want to leave her. And when Duncan came from his lonely watch for what few hours of true sleep he sought, he curled up against his dus in the corner here, and not in kel-hall. It was not a time that any of them wanted to be alone. The loneliness of Kutath itself was overwhelming.
On the eighth day Kutath swung beneath them, filling all the screen in the she’pan’s hall angry, arid, scarred with its age.
And Duncan came to the she’pan’s presence, burst in like a gust of wind and swept off mez and zaidhe to show his face: it was aglow.
“Life!” he said. “The scan shows it. She’pan, Niun your World is not dead.”
For an instant neither of them moved.
And of a sudden Melein struck her hands together and thanked the several gods; and only then Niun dared to draw breath and hope.
Behind Duncan, Melein went to controls, and Niun followed after, with the dusei padding behind them and blowing great puffs of excitement. Melein settled on the arm of the cushion and Niun leaned beside her, the while Duncan tried to make clear to them what his search had found, showing them the screens and the figures and all the chattering flow of data that meant life.
Life of machines; and very, very scant, the evidence of growing things.
“It looks like Kesrith from space,” said Duncan softly, and sent a chill over Niun’s flesh, for often enough the old she’pan had called Kesrith the forge that would prepare the People… for all that would lie before them. “The dusei,” said Duncan, “should fare well enough there.”
“One moon,” Niun read the screen, remembering with homesickness the two that had coursed the.skies of Kesrith; remembering his hills, and the familiar places that he had hunted before humans came.
This world of their ancestors would hold its own secrets, its own graces and beauties, and its own dangers.
And humans soon enough.
“Duncan,” said Melein, “take us down.”