Melein’s eyes held to his, painfully intense. “Your mathematics is without reproach, kel Duncan.”
“She’pan,” he said softly, moved by the gratitude he realized in her.
She rose, and left.
Committed the ship to him.
He sat still a moment, finding everything that he had sought under his hands, and suddenly a burden on him that he had not thought to bear. Had he intended betrayal, he did not think he could commit it now; and to do to them again what he had done on Kesrith, even to save their lives—
That was not an act of love, but of selfishness . . . here, and hereafter. He knew them too well to believe it for their own good.
He scanned the banks of instruments, that hid their horrid secrets, programs locked from his tampering, things triggered perhaps from the moment he had violated orders and thrown them prematurely onto taped running.
Or perhaps—as SurTacs had been expended before—it was planned from the beginning, that Fox would not come home, save as a rider to Saber.
There was the pan’en, and the record in that; but under Saber’s firepower, Fox was nothing . . . and it was not impossible that the navigational computer would go down as the tape expired, crippling them.
He reached for the board again, plied the keys repeatedly, receiving over and over again No Record and Classified.
And at last he gave over trying, and pushed himself to his feet, reached absently for the dus that crowded wistfully against him, sensing his distress and trying to distract him from it.
Four worlds.
A day, or more than a month: the span between jumps was irregular.
The time seemed suddenly very short.
Chapter Sixteen
Mlara and Sha and Hlar and Sa’a-no-kli’i.
Niun watched them pass, lifeless as they were, with an excitement in his blood that the somber sights could not wholly kill.
They jumped again, and just after ship’s noon there appeared a new star centered in the field.
“This is home,” said Melein softly, when they gathered in the she’pan’s hall to see it with her. “This is the Sun.”
In the hal’ari, it was Na’i’in.
Niun looked upon it, a mere pinprick of light at the distance from which they entered the system, and agonized that it would be so long a journey yet. Na’i’in. The Sun.
And the World, that was Kutath.
“By your leave,” Duncan murmured, “—I had better go to controls.”
* * *
They all went, even the dusei, into the small control room.
And there was something eerie in the darkness of that section of the panels that had been most active. Duncan stood and looked at it a moment, then settled in at controls, called forth activity elsewhere, but not in that crippled section.
Niun left the she’pan’s side to stand at the panel to Duncan’s right: little enough he knew of the instruments, save only what Duncan had shown him—but he had knowledge enough to be sure there was something amiss.
“The navigational computer,” Duncan said. “Gone.”
“You can bring us in,” Niun said without doubt.
Duncan nodded. His hands moved on the boards, and the screens built patterns, built structures about a point that was Na’i’in.
“We are on course,” he said. “We have no starflight navigation, that is all.”
It was not of concern. Long after the she’pan had returned to her own hall, Niun still stayed by Duncan, sitting in the cushion across the console, watching the operations that Duncan undertook.
* * *
It was five days before Kutath itself took shape before them, third out from Na’i’in . . . Kutath. Duncan guided them, present at controls surely more than reason called for: he took his meals in this room, and entered kel-hall only to wash and to take a little sleep in night-cycle. Restless he would go back before the night was done, and Niun knew where to find him.
Nothing required his presence at controls.
There were no alarms, nothing.
It was, Niun began to reckon with growing despair, the same as the others. Melein surely made her own estimation of the lasting silence, and Duncan did, and none spoke it aloud.
No ships.
No reaction.
The sixth day there were the first clear images of the world, and Melein came to controls to look at them. Niun set his hand upon hers, silent offering.
It was a red world and lifeless.
Old. Very, very old.
Duncan cut the image off the screens. There was agony in his face when he looked at them both, as if he thought himself to blame. But Niun drew a deep breath and let it go, surrendering to what he had known all his life.
That they were, after all, the last-born.
Somewhere in the ship the dusei moaned, gathering in the grief that was sent them.
“The voyage of the People,” said Melein, “has been very, very long. If we are the last, still we will go home. Take us there, Duncan.”
“Yes,” Duncan said simply, and bowed his head and turned to the boards so that he did not have to look on their faces. Niun found it difficult to breathe, a great tightness about his heart, as when he had seen the People die on Kesrith; but it was an old grief, and already mourned. He stood still while Melein went her way back to her hall.
Then he went apart, unto himself, and sat down with his dus, and wept, as the Kel could not weep.
* * *
“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, b
urst 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.”
Chapter Seventeen
Kutath.
Duncan inhaled the air that blew into the hatch, the first breath off the surface of the world, cold and thin, faintly scented. He looked beyond the hatch at the red and amber sands, at the ridge of distant, rounded mountains, at a sun sullen-hued and distorted in its sky.
And he did not go down. This was for the mri, to go first onto their native soil. He stood in the ship and watched them descend the ramp, Melein first, and Niun after her—children returned to their ancient mother. They looked about them, their eyes surely seeing things in a different way than his might, their senses finding something familiar in the touch of Kutath’s gravity, the flavor of its air—something that must call to their blood and senses and say this is home.
Sad for them if it did not, if the People had indeed voyaged too long, and lost everything for which they had come. He did not think they had; he had seen the look in Niun’s eyes when they beheld the world beyond the hatch.
He felt his own throat tight, his muscles trembling with the terrible chill of the world, and with anxiety. If he felt anything clearly, it was a sense of loss—and he did not know why. He had succeeded for them, had brought them home, and down safely, and yet there was a sadness on him.
It was not all he had done, that service for the People.
Across the system a beacon pulsed, a marker on the path incoming ships would use; and on Kutath, the ship itself now served as a beacon. Silent the pulse was, but it was going now . . . would go on so long as power remained in the ship—and that would be beyond their brief lifespans.
Friendship, friendship, the ship cried at the heavens, and did human ships care to inquire of that signal or the other, there was more.
He had not confessed this to Niun or Melein. He did not think they would approve any gesture toward tsi’mri, and therefore he did not ask their approval.
He saw the dusei go, whuffing and sniffing the air as they edged their turned-toed way down the ramp—rolling with fat from their long, well-fed inactivity on the ship, sleek and shining under the wan sun. They reached the sand and rolled in delight, shaking clouds of red powder from their velvet hides when they rose up again. The greater one towered up on his hind legs, came down, playing, puffing a cloud of dust at the mri, and Niun scolded him off.
The beasts went their own way then, circling out, exploring their new world. They would allow no danger to come to the mri without raising alarm about it, and their present manner was one of great ease. Unharmed by the wind of the ship, a clump of blue-green pipes grew nearby. The dusei destroyed it, munching the plants with evident relish. Their digestion could handle anything, even most poisons; there was no concern for that.
Where plants grew, there was surely water, be it ever so scant. Duncan looked on that sparse growth with satisfaction, with pride, for he had found them a place where life existed in this otherwise barren land, had put their little ship down within reach of water—
And close also to the power source that scan detected.
There was no reaction to their presence, none in their descent, none now. The ship’s instruments still scanned the skies, ready to trip the sirens and warn them to cover, but the skies remained vacant . . . both desired and undesired, that hush that prevailed.
He felt the pleasure-feelings of the dusei, lotus-balm, and yielded.
Almost timidly he came down the ramp, feeling out of place and strange, and approached the mri silently, hoping that they would not take offense at his presence: well as he knew Niun, he felt him capable of that, toward a tsi’mri.
“She’pan,” he heard Niun say softly, and she turned and noticed him, and reached out her hand to him. They put their arms about him as they would a brother, and Duncan felt an impulse to tears that a man who would be kel’en could not shed. He bowed his head for a moment, and felt their warmth near him. There was a healthy wind blowing, whipping at their robes. He put his arms about them too, feeling on the one side the fragility that was Melein and on the other the lean strength of Niun; and themselves alien, beast-warm, and savoring the chill that set him shivering.
The dusei roved the area more and more widely, emitting their hunting moans, that would frighten anything with ears to hear.
And they looked about them, and save for the ship’s alien presence, there was nothing but the earth and sky: flat in one direction, and beyond that flatness at the sky’s edge lay mountains, rounded and eroded by time; and in the other direction the land fell away into apricot haze misted with purples, showing a naked depth that drew at the eye and disturbed the senses—no mere valley, but an edge to the very world, a distance that extended to the horizon and blended into the sky; and it reached up arms of cliffs that were red and bright where they were nearest and faded into the ambiguous sky at the far horizon.
Duncan breathed an exclamation in his own tongue, forbidden, but the mri did not seem to notice. He had seen the chasm from above, had brought them down near it because it seemed the best place—easier to descend than to ascend, he had thought when choosing the highlands landing, but he had kept them far from the edge. From above it had seemed perilous enough; but here, themselves reduced to mortal perspective, it gaped into depths so great it faded into haze at the bottom, in terraces and slopes and shelves, eroded points and mounts . . . and distantly, apricot-silver, shone what might be a lake, a drying arm of what had been a sea.
A salt lake, it would surely be, and dead: minerals and salts would have gathered there for aeons, as they had in Kesrith’s shallow, drying seas.
They stood still for some time, looking about them at the world, until even the mri began to shiver from the cold.
“We must find that source of power you spoke of,” said Melein. “We must see if there are others.”
“You are close,” said Duncan, and lifted his arm in the direction he knew it to be. “I brought you down as near as I dared.”
“Nothing responded to your attempts to contact.”
“Nothing,” Duncan said, and shivered.
“We must put on another layer of robes,” said Niun. “We must have a sled packed with stores. We will range out so far as we can—shall we not, she’pan?—and see what there is to be seen.”
“Yes,” said Melein. “We shall see.”
Duncan started to turn away, to do what would be necessary, and finding no better time he hesitated, pulled aside the veil he had assumed for warmth. “She’pan,” he said. “It would be better—that I should stay with the ship.”
Duncan looked from one to the other of them, found pain in Niun’s eyes, realized suddenly the reason for that sense of loss.
“It is necessary,” Duncan said, “that I take the ship—to stand guard for you, she’pan. I will not leave this sun. I will stay. But it is possible that I may be able to stop them.”
“The markers that you have left . . . Are they for that?”
Shock coursed through him, the realization that Melein had not been deceived.
“Yes,” he said, hoarse. “To let them know that here are friends. And it may be that they will listen.”
“Then you will not take the ship,” she said. “What message you have left is enough. If they will not regard that, then there is nothing further to be said. The ship carries no weapons.”
“I could talk with them.”
“They would take you back,” she said.
It was truth. He stared at her, chilled to the bone by the wind that rocked at them.
“You could not fight,” she said, and looked about at the wide horizon, lifted her arm toward it. “If they would seek us out in all of this, then they would not listen to you; and if they would not, then that is well. Come with us, kel Duncan.”
“She’pan,” he said softly, accepting.
And he turned and ascended the ramp.
* * *
There were supplies to find: Niun named what was needed, and together they bolted aluminum tubing into what passed very well for a sled. They loaded it into the cargo lift, and secured on it what stores Niun chose: water containers, food, and the light mats that were for sleeping; aluminum rods for shelter, and thermal sheets—tsi’mri luxury that they were, yet even Niun found the cold outside persuasive.
They chose spare clothing, and a change of boots; and wore a second siga over the first.
And last and most important of all they visited the shrine of the pan’en, and Niun gathered the ovoid reverently into his arms and bore it down to the sled, settling it into the place that was prepared for it.
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