The Faded Sun Trilogy (54 page)

The human quieted; the dusei snuffed loudly and rocked, still uneasy. But Duncan’s naked face assumed a calm, untroubled look that was more the man they knew. “All right,” he said. “But, Niun, I needed those medicines. I needed them.”

Fear. Niun still felt it in the room.

And he was troubled after Duncan had gone away, whether he had in fact done murder. He had thought as mri, forgetting that alien flesh might indeed be incapable of what mri found possible.

And was it then wrong that aliens needed what mri law forbade?

It was not a kel-thought, riot right for his caste to think or to wonder. He dared not even bring it to Melein in secret, knowing the thought beyond him and disrespectful to a young and less than certain she’pan, even from her kel’anth, senior of the Kel—such of a Kel as she possessed.

He hoped desperately that he had not killed Duncan.

And in that thought he realized clearly that he wanted Duncan to live, not alone for rightness’ sake, but because two were a desolate sort of House, and because the silence in kel-hall could become very deep and very long.

He called the dusei to him, soothed them with his hands and his voice, and went to find where Duncan had gone.

Four days.

Duncan held them as a blur in his mind, a moiled confusion out of which he remembered little of reason. He worked to fill his hours, exhausted himself deliberately to cast himself to sleep of nights without long thought, without dreams. Niun did nothing except to exercise, quietly and often:
I am not a bearer of burdens
, the mri had insisted stiffly, when Duncan suggested he might well exercise by assisting him; and the mri then compounded the affront by reminding him that the dusei wanted tending.

Neither am I
, Duncan had retorted, and bit off the oaths that rose into his mouth: the mri were not tolerant; they would kill or die for small cause, and there was time later to reason with Niun, whose limbs’ weakness doubtless fed his temper, and whose uncertainty about his total situation likely hardened his attitudes.

The dusei, in fact, did want tending; and after a suitable delay, Duncan went and saw to their wants—rewarded by their pleasure-impulse, he felt shame for having put them off in spite—and fled it, for he could not bear much of it.

It was not the last crossing of purposes with Niun; the mri asked things and insisted he should understand the mri language—understand he did, in some words, with gestures—and at times Niun affected not to understand until he used a mri expression, though the mri was fluent.
Starve, then
, he was tempted to say; and did not, for there was later for quarrels, and the dusei that hovered about were becoming unpleasant and upset, contributing to the situation. In the end, Niun had his way.

It made sense, Duncan thought late, upon his bed, while the mri chose the floor. Niun fought to keep what was his, a way and a language that had almost entirely perished. It was a quiet battle, waged against him, who had most
helped them and now most threatened them. It was something against which guns and skill did not avail, but life and death, all the same. It was why they were here at all, why they had been unable to live among humans, why he had argued with Stavros to free them. There was no compromise possible for them. They could riot bear with strangeness. A human could; a human could adapt, facile as the jo, who looked like sand or stone, and waited. He considered this, and considered the sleeping mri, who lay with his head against his dus, unveiled as he would not unveil to an enemy.

Jo-fashion, a human could change and change again; the mri would obstinately die: and therefore it was inevitable that Niun should have his way.

In the morning Duncan set about his routines, and utterly bit back objections with Niun, went so far as to ask what he would have done.

Niun’s amber eyes swept the compartment; a long-fingered hand made an inclusive gesture. “
E’nai
,” he said, “
i.
”—
Remove it all.
Duncan stared, drew a long breath, and considered the matter.

The ship grew cold in the passing days, the air gradually resembling Kesrith’s dry chill. Duncan was glad of the warmth of the mri robes that he wore from the skin outward. He learned the veil and the manners of it; he learned words and courtesies and gestures, and abandoned his own.

Niun sensed, surely, how far he was pressed, the frustration that welled upward in him at times, and averted his face and resumed the veil when matters came too close to impasse. There would be silence for a time, and finally words again. Niun named the things of which he did not approve: comforts and furnishings of all sorts. Duncan acquiesced, yielded up such of his own belongings as still remained, for the attachment he had to them seemed distant in this place, faced with what misery lay ahead of him; and as for damage to the ship, that seemed insufficient revenge on those that had sent him here. He worked at it, bewildered at first by what Niun asked, then grimly pleased in it. He stripped the accessible compartments of all furnishings, disassemble the furniture and stored what parts were useful metals and materials, and cast the rest out the destruct chute. After that went all machinery the mri considered superfluous, medical and otherwise, and all goods in storage that were counted luxuries.

It was madness. Duncan abandoned himself to it, began in his own frustration to seek out things to cast away, destroying for the joy of it, making of the ship only a shell, in which he did not have to remember Stavros, or humanity, or any other thing that he had cast away to come here. The loss of everything dulled all sense of loss.

The labs were mostly stripped already, back at station: all that had been reckoned unnecessary to the mission had already been taken, and all that he would desperately have saved, Niun had already destroyed. Duncan finished the job, down to the cleats that had held the furnishings, chem-scrubbed the floors, the walls, rendering the place acceptable—for this largest compartment on the ship Niun had chosen for their own.

Thereafter Duncan slept on a pallet no thicker than a folded blanket, and wakened stiff and fell to coughing again in the chill air, so that he began to brood over his health, and thought desperately of the medicines that Niun had destroyed, for that and for other purposes.

But Niun looked at him with some concern, and tacitly forgot his objection to work, and took on himself that day the preparation of meals and the care of the dusei. Niun flourished in the chill, thin air—had lost that frail, tottering movement in his step, and ceased to tire so quickly.

“You rest,” Niun wished him when he persisted in trying to keep his schedule; Duncan shrugged and avowed the machinery would not run without him, which it would; but he was panicked now at the thought of idleness, sitting endlessly in the shell that he had left of the labs, of the rest of the ship, without books—Niun had cast out the reading and the music tapes in his quarters—without any occupation for hands or mind.

And when he was forced, he returned to the lab, that featureless white room, and settled in the corner, where at least his pallet and Niun’s and the joining of the walls gave him some feeling of location. There, as he would do late at night to fall asleep, he sat and added chains of figures, did complex calculations of imaginary navigation, anything to fill the hours—watched the unchanging starscreen that was the lab’s only feature. There was for sound only the whisper of air in the ducts, the steady machine noise of the ship’s inner workings.

And nothing.

Nothing.

Niun was long absent that day—with Melein, Duncan reckoned, in that part of the ship that was barred to
him; even the dusei were gone, constantly attendant on Niun. In idleness Duncan found a bit of metal and made a design on the tiles next his pallet, and then, with a certain grim humor, made marks for the days that had passed, ship-time, desperately reckoning that there could come a time he would lose track of everything in this place.

Nine days, thus far. Even of this he was marginally uncertain.

He began a chain of figures, thrusting his mind away from the lattice-gaps he had begun to have in his memory, trying to lose himself in regularities.

Unlike the jo, he was not successfully camouflaging, he reckoned; even the jo, cast into this sterile cubicle, given nothing to pattern from, could not find a place. It would blacken like a wretched specimen he had seen in Boaz’ lab, going through color change after color change until it settled on the most conspicuous of all—a method of suicide, perhaps, death wish.

He thrust his thoughts away from that, too, but the image kept returning, the black winged creature in the silver cage; himself, from godlike perspective, sitting in the corner of a white and featureless room.

Nine days.

*   *   *

The afternoon of the tenth, Niun came back earlier than previously, banished the dusei to the far corner of the room, and unveiled, settled crosslegged on the floor a little removed from Duncan and facing him.

“You sit too much,” Niun said.

“I am resting,” Duncan said with an edge of bitterness.

Niun held up two metal rods, slender, and no more than a hand’s length. “You will learn a game,” Niun said, not:
I will teach you
; not:
Would it please you?
Duncan frowned, considered taking offense: but that the grim mri had entertainments: this pricked his interest, promised comradeship, a chance to talk with the kel’en as he had not been able to talk with him since the desert.

And it promised something to fill the silence.

He bestirred himself on his pallet, assumed carefully the position the Niun held, crosslegged, hands on knees.
Niun showed him the grip he had on the end of the rod in his right hand.

“You must catch,” said Niun, and spun the rod toward him. Duncan caught it, startled, in his fist, not his fingers, and the butt of it stung his palm.

The second followed, from Niun’s left hand. Duncan caught it and dropped it. Niun held up both hands empty.

“Both at once,” Niun said.

It was difficult. It was exceedingly difficult. Duncan’s work-sore hands were less quick than Niun’s slender fingers, that never missed, that snatched the most awkward throws from midair, and returned them always at the same angle and speed, singly until Duncan could make the difficult catch, and then together.

“We call it
shon’ai
,” said Niun. “
Shonau
is
pass
. In your language, then, the Passing game. It sings the People; each caste plays in its own way.” He spoke, and the rods flew back and forth gently between them, Duncan’s fingers growing more sure than they had been. “There are three castes of the People: Kath and Kel and Sen. We are of the Kel, we black-robes, we that fight; the Sen is the yellow-robes, the scholars; and the white, the she’pan; the Kath is the caste of women neither Kel nor Sen, the blue-robes, and the children—they are Kath until they take caste.”

Duncan missed. The rod stung his knee, clattered to the floor. He rubbed the knee and then continued, back and forth, back and forth in turn with Niun. It was hard to listen and concentrate on the rods; in recklessness he tried to answer.

“Men,” he said, “neither Kel nor Sen. What of them?”

The rhythm did not break. “They die,” said Niun. “The ones without skill to be Sen, without skill to be Kel, the ones with no heart, die. Some die in the Game. We are playing as the Sen plays, with wands. The Kel plays with weapons.” The throws became harder, faster. “Easy, with two players. More difficult with three. With larger circles, it grows most difficult. I played a circle of ten. If the circle becomes much larger, it becomes again a matter of accidents, of chance.”

The rods flew hard this time. Duncan flung his hands up to catch them, deflected one that could have injured
his face, but could not catch it. It fell. The other he held. The rhythm ceased, broken.

“You are weak in fee left hand,” said Niun. “But you have the heart. Good. You will learn the skill before I begin to show you the
yin’ein
, the old weapons. The
zahen’ein
, the modern, you know as well as I; I have nothing there to teach you. But the
yin’ein
, one begins with
shon’ai.
Throw.”

Duncan threw. Niun held up his hand, easily received the separate rods cast back to him—with one hand, sweeping them effortlessly from the air. Duncan blinked, dismayed at the skill of the mri, and measured his own.

“There is a time to rest,” said Niun then. “I would not see you miss.” He tucked the rods back into his belt. “It is time,” he said, “that we begin to talk. I will not speak often in your language; I am ordered to forget it, and so must you. You know a few words of the mu’ara, the common speech; and even those you must forget, and stay to the hal’ari, the High Speech. It is the law of the Darks, that all the Between be forgotten, and the mu’ara that grows in the Between must die, too. So do not be confused. Sometimes there are two words for a thing, one mu’ara, one hal’ari, and you must forget even a mri word.”

“Niun,” Duncan protested, holding up a hand for delay. “I haven’t enough words.”

“You will learn. There will be time.”

Duncan frowned, looked at the mri from under his brows, carefully approached what had already been refused. “How much time?”

Niun shrugged.

“Does the she’pan know?” Duncan asked.

The membrane flicked across Niun’s eyes. “Your heart is still tsi’mri.”

It was a mri kind of answer, maddening. Duncan traced the design he had scratched on the flooring, considering what he could do to reason with the mri; of a sudden Niun’s hand stopped his. He jerked free, looked up in deep offense.

“Another matter,” said Niun. “A kel’en neither reads nor writes.”

“I do.”

“Forget.”

Duncan stared at him. Niun veiled himself and rose, an unbending upward that a few days ago he could not have done, a grace natural to a man who had spent his life sitting on the ground; but Duncan, in attempting to rise and face him, was less graceful.