“Quiet,” Niun hissed at him.
And if the human thought to cry out, he thought better of it with the edge of the av-tlen near his face; he struggled up to his knees and, with Niun’s help, to his feet, and went silently where he was compelled to go. He coughed and tried to smother even that sound. His face was a mask of blood and sand in the dim light that shone from the field, and he walked as if his knees were about to fail him.
Onto the edge of the flats they went, and slow, ominous shadows of dusei stood watching them from the dunes, but gave them no threat. There was no sound of pursuit behind them. Perhaps the regul were still in shock, that a kel’en had raised hand against the masters.
Niun knew the enormity of what he had done, had time to realize it clearly; he knew the regul, that they would take time to consult with authority, and beyond that he could not calculate. No mri had ever raised hand to his sworn authority. No regul had ever had to deal with a mri who had done so.
He seized the human’s elbow and hurried him, though he stumbled at times, though he misstepped and cried out in shock when a crust broke under him and he hit boiling water. They went well onto the flats, where neither regul nor regul vehicles could go, into the sulphuric steam of geysers that veiled them from sight. By now the human coughed and spat, bleeding in his upper air passages if not in his lungs, Niun reckoned.
In consideration of that he found a place and thrust the human down against the shoulder of a clay bank, and let him catch his breath, himself glad enough of a chance to do the same.
For a moment the human lay face down, body heaving with the effort not to cough, correctly reckoning that this would not be tolerated. Then the spasms eased and he lay still on his side, exhausted, staring at him.
Unarmed. Niun took that curious fact into account, wondering what possessed the humans; or what had befallen this one, that he had lost his weapons. The human simply stared at him, eyes running tears through sand: no emotion, no other expression than one of exhaustion and misery. Unprotected he had come into Kesrith’s unfriendly environment; unwisely he had run, risking damage to his tissues.
And he had run from regul, with whom his people had made a treaty.
“I am Sten Duncan,” the human whispered at last in his own tongue. “I am with the human envoy. Kel’en, we are here under agreement.”
Niun considered the volunteered information: human envoy, human envoy—the words rolled around in his mind with the ominous tone of betrayal.
“I am kel Niun,” he said, because this being had offered him a name.
“Are you from the edun?”
Niun did not answer, there seeming no need.
“That is where you’re taking me, isn’t it?” And when again the human had no answer of him, he seemed disquieted. “I’ll go there of my own accord. You don’t need to use force.”
Niun considered this offer. Humans lied. He knew this. He had not had experience to be able to judge this one.
“I will not set you free,” he said.
It was not the custom of humans to veil themselves; but Niun was sorry, all the same, that he had so dealt with a human kel’en, taking dignity from him—if he was kel’en. Niun judged that he was: he had handled himself well.
“We will go to the edun,” he said to Duncan. He stood up and drew Duncan to his feet—did not help him overmuch, for this was not; a brother; but he waited until he was sure he had his balance. The man was hurt. He marked that the human’s steps were uneven and uncertain; and that he walked without knowledge of the land, blind to its dangers.
And deaf.
Niun heard the aircraft lift from the port, heard it turn in their direction; and the human had not even looked until he jerked him about to see it—stood stupidly gazing toward the port, malicious or dull-witted, Niun did not pause to know. He seized the human and pulled him toward the boiling waters of Jieca, that curled steam into the night; and by a clay ridge, their lungs choked with sulphur, they took hiding.
Regul engines passed. Lights swept the flats and lit plumes of steam, fruitlessly seeking movement. Heat sensors were of limited usefulness here on the volcanic flats. The boiling springs and seething mud made regul science of little Value in tracking them.
“Kel’en,” Duncan said. “Which one are they looking for? Me or you?”
“How have you offended the regul?” Niun asked, reckoning it of no profit to give information, but of some to gain it; and all the while the beams of light swept the flats, lighting one plume and another. “Were you a prisoner?”
“Assistant to the human envoy, to come—” A burst of fire lit their faces and spattered them with boiling water. They made a single mass against it, and as the firing continued and the water kept splashing, a rumble began in the earth and a jet of steam broke near them, enveloping them, uncomfortably hot but not beyond bearing.
“Tsi’mri,” Niun cursed under his breath, forgetting with what he shared shelter; and as the barrage kept up he felt the human begin trembling, long, sickly shudders of a being whose strength was nearly spent.
“—to come ahead of the mission,” the human resumed doggedly, still shaking. “To see that everything is as we were promised. And I don’t think it—”
A near burst threw water and mud on them. The human cried out, smothered it.
“How many of you are, there?” Niun asked.
“Myself—and the envoy. Two. We came on Hazan—back there.”
Niun grasped Duncan’s collar and turned his face to the light that glared from the searching beams. He saw nothing to tell him whether this was truth or lie. This was a young man, he saw, now that the face was washed clear by the moisture that enveloped both of them—a kel’en of the humans: he shrank from applying that honorable title to aliens, but he knew no other that applied to this one.
“There was a kel’en on Hazan,” said Niun, “who died there.”
For the first time something seemed to strike through to the human: there was a hesitancy to answer. “I saw him. Once. I didn’t know he was dead.”
Niun thrust him back, for the moment blind with anger. Tsi’mri, he reminded himself, and enemy, but less so now than the regul. I saw him. I didn’t know he was dead.
He turned his face aside and stared bleakly at the rolling steam and the lights that crisscrossed the flats, searching.
Forgive us, Medai, he thought. Our perceptions were too dull, our minds too accustomed to serving regul or we could have understood the message you tried to send us.
He made himself look at the hateful human face that had not the decency of concealment—at the nakedness of this being that had, unknowingly perhaps, destroyed a kel’en of the People. Animal, he thought; tsi’mri animal. The regul-mri treaty was broken, from the moment this creature set foot on Kesrith; and that had been many, many days ago. For this long the People had been free and had not known it.
“There is no more war,” Duncan protested, and Niun’s arm tensed, and he would have hit him; but it was not honorable.
“Why do you suppose that the regul are hunting us?” he asked of Duncan, casting back his own question. “Do you not understand, human, that you have made a great mistake in leaving Hazan?”
“I am going with you,” the human said, with the first semblance of dignity he had shown, “to talk to your elders, to make them understand that I had better be returned to my people.”
“Ah,” said Niun, almost moved to scornful mirth. “But we are mri, not regul. We care nothing for your bargains with the regul, much good they have done you.”
The human stayed still and reckoned that, and there was no yielding at the implied threat. “I see,” he said. And a moment later, in a quiet, restrained tone: “I left the envoy down there in town—an old man, alone with regul, with this going on. I have to get back to him.”
Niun considered this, understanding. It was loyalty to this sen’anth for which he endured this patiently. He gave respect to the human for that, touched his heart in token of it.
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“I will deliver you alive to the edun,” he said, and felt compelled to add: “It is not our habit to take prisoners.”
“We have learned that,” Duncan said.
Therefore they understood each other as much as might be. Niun considered the flats before them, reckoning already what might have been done to familiar ground by the bombardment: what obstacles might have been created on the unstable land, where they might next find securest shelter if the regul swept back sooner than anticipated.
It was well that he and the human had come to an understanding, that Duncan considered his best chance and most honorable course was to cooperate for the moment. A man unburdened could make the journey by morning, all things in his favor, but not with regul blasting away the route about them; and day would show them up clearly, making it next evening before they could reach the edun if things kept on as they were.
A sick dread gathered in Niun’s stomach: for very little even so, he would have killed the human and run for the edun at all speed.
He cursed himself for his softness, which had put him to such a choice between butchery and stupidity, and gripped the human’s arm.
“Listen to me. If you do not keep my pace, I cannot keep you; and if I cannot keep you, I will kill you. It is also,” he added, “very likely that the regul will kill you to keep you from your superior.”
He slipped from cover then, and drew the human with him by the arm, and Duncan cape without resisting.
But the regul craft, lacing the area, swept back, and they made only a few strides before it was necessary to hurl themselves into other cover.
The barrage began again, deafening, spattering them with boiling water and gouts of mud.
The edun would be aware of this. They were doubtless doing something; perhaps—Niun thought—Duncan’s sen’anth likewise knew and was doing something; and there was also Ahanal, independent of Intel.
He understood the human’s helpless terror. Of all who had power on Kesrith, they two had least; and the regul, who did not fight, had taken up arms, impelled by malice or fear or whatever driving motive could span the gap between cowardice and self-interest.
Chapter Seventeen
There was firing, a sound unmistakable to a man who had lived a great part of his life in war.
Stavros turned his sled to view the window and saw the lights of aircraft circling under the clouds. His fingers sought the console keyboard, adjusted screens with what had grown to be some expertise: simple controls, a phenomenal series of coded signals, each memorized. The regul had provided him the codings with an attitude of smug contempt: learn it, they challenged him with that look of theirs that rated beings of short memory with sub-sapients.
Stavros was not typical in this regard, had never been typical, not from his boyhood on remote Kiluwa, to his attachment to the Xen-Bureau to his directorate on Halley during first contact. He found nothing difficult in languages, nor in alien customs, nor in recognizing provincial shortsightedness, whether offered by humans or by others.
He was Kiluwan by allegiance, a distinction the regul and most humans did not appreciate: remote, first-stage colony, populated by religious traditionalists, among whom writing was a sin and education an obsession. He had been born there a century ago, before peaceful, eccentric Kiluwa became a casualty of the mri wars.
A number of Kiluwans had distinguished themselves in Service; they were gone now, among casualties forty years ago, retaliation for Nisren. Stavros survived. It was characteristic of his Kiluwan upbringing that he should be driven to understand the species that had ordered Kiluwa obliterated. Regul had done this, not mri. Therefore he studied the phenomenon of regul—minds much like the perfection Kiluwa had sought; and they had destroyed all that Kiluwa had built. There was, as the university masters had once said, a ‘rhythm of justice’ in this, a joining of cancelling forces. Now a Kiluwan came to displace regul, and the rhythm continued, binding them both.
He learned regul ways, looking for resolution to this; he observed meanness and coldness and self-seeking ambition, as well as reverence for mind. He had come from fear of regul to a yearning over them—not a little of sorrow for Kiluwa, whose dream in the flesh had come to this flawed reality; and there were truths beyond what he had been able to grasp, vices and virtues inherent in the biology of regul. He saw these, began to understand, at least, constraints of species perpetuation and population control—division into hive structures, breeding-elders and younglings, the docha that answered roughly to nations: he acquired suspicions about the value of treaties, which bound and yet did not bind docha which had not been party to the agreement.
They had contracted with Holn and suddenly found themselves dealing instead with Alagn; and Alagn honored the agreement.
Outwardly.
It had come to the point of truth. He had sat the long hours through the day and into dark and covered for Duncan’s absence and committed every deception but the outright lie which the regul would not forgive. In the hours’ passage he had grown more and more certain, first that Duncan had found something amiss or he would have returned quickly, certainly by the time dark gave him concealment—and when the fall of night did not bring him back, he became well sure that something amiss had found Duncan.
The pretenses with the regul became charade bitterly difficult to maintain. They could murder the SurTac and blandly fail to mention it with the morning’s reports. And there was not a human going to land on Kesrith without Stavros’ clearance: not in peace, at least, not without removing all possible resistance.
The regul surely understood this.
He sat and listened to the firing, knowing while it continued that Duncan was likely still alive.
He had been a shaper of policy in his day, had settled a new world and founded a university; had plotted strategies of diplomacy and war, had disposed of lives in numbers in which ships and crews were reckoned expendable, in which the likes of Sten Duncan perished in their hundreds.
But he heard the firing, and clenched his right hand and agonized in a desperate attempt to move his unwilling left with any strength at all. He was held to the sled. He was constrained to be patient.
There was new catastrophe at the port. There were hints in regul communications, into which he had intruded, that a ship had come down, that it was not friendly to regul.
Human, rival regul, or mri. He could guess well enough what had drawn Duncan to overstay his leave. Create no incident, he had told the lad, knowing then that there was little Duncan could do to create anything: it waited to happen, all about them. He had felt it increasingly, in the silences of the regul, the tension in the atmosphere of the Nom.
The regul were trying something illicit. Human interests were endangered. And there was no word of approval going from him to the human mission when it arrived, no matter what the coercion.
If that was not what had already happened.
Stavros was not a man of precipitate action: he thought; and when he had concluded chances were even, he was capable of rashness. He found no need to cooperate further with hosts that would either kill them or not dare to kill them: it was time to call their bluff.
He fingered the console, whipped the sled about and opened doors. He guided it through Duncan’s apartment and with a smooth, well-practiced series of commands, and a turn to the right, locked it into the tracking that ran the corridors.
Youngling regul saw him and gaped, jabbering protests which he ignored. He knew his commands, calculated the appropriate moves, and locked into a turn, whisked into the side of the building that faced the port. There he stopped and keyed into the window controls, brightening windows, commanding storm shields withdrawn.
A new ship, indeed.
And lights glared over the countryside, flaring garishly in the haze of smoke and steam, aircraft lacing the ground with their beams.
Ah, Duncan, he thought with great regret.
A youngling puffed up to him. “Elder human,” it said, “We regre
t, but—”
Bai Hulagh. Where? he demanded via the screen, which took the youngling considerably aback. Youngling, find me the bai.
It fled, at least with what dispatch a regul could manage, and Stavros whipped the sled about and took it to the left, engaged a track and shot down the ramp, whipped round the corner and entered the first level of the Nom, from which they had been carefully excluded.
Here he disengaged and went on manual, edging through the gabbling crowd of younglings. Mri, he heard, and: mri ship; and: alert.
And they made way for him until one noticed that the sled, the symbol to them of adult authority, contained a human.
“Go back,” they wished him. “Go back, elder.”
Bai Hulagh. Now, he insisted, and would not move, and there was nothing they dared do about it. When they began to murmur together in great confusion, he directed the sled through them and toured the ground floor in leisurely fashion, with the air vibrating with the attack out on the flats and the building vibrating to the shocks. Mentally he noted where doors were located, and where accesses were, and where it was possible to come and go with the sled.
A message flashed on his receiver.
It was Hulagh’s sigil. Hulagh’s face followed. “Esteemed elder human,” Hulagh said. “Please return at once to your quarters.”
I am unable to believe that they are secure, Stavros spelled out patiently. Where is my assistant?
“He has disregarded our advice and is now involved in a situation,” said Hulagh with remarkable candor, such that Stavros’ hopes abruptly lifted. “Mri have landed, I regret to admit, honorable representative. These mri are outlaws, bent on making trouble. Your youngling is somewhere in the midst of things, quite contrary to our warnings. Please make our task easier by returning to the safety of your quarters.”
I refuse. Stavros keyed a window clear. I will observe from the windows here.
Hulagh’s nostrils snapped shut and flared again. “This lack of cooperation is reprehensible. We are still in authority here. We do not lose this authority until the arrival of your mission. You are here only as an observer, on our agreement.”
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