The Faded Sun Trilogy (74 page)

It was; it very much was, Koch reckoned. He had a sour taste in his mouth for the necessity.

One covered all the possibilities.

*   *   *

A private office: that was status. Someone had put a card on the door, the temporary sort: LT COMDR JAMES R GALEY, RECON & OPERATIONS. Galey keyed open the lock, turned on the light, finding a bare efficiency setup, barren walls, down to the rivets; and a desk and a comp terminal. He settled in behind the desk, shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar chair, keyed in library.

ORDERS: the machine interrupted him with its own program. He signaled acceptance. SELECT COMPATIBLE CREW OF THREE AND RESERVE CREW, GROUND OPERATIONS, REPORT CHOICE ADM SOONEST.

He leaned back, hands sweating. He little liked the prospect of taking himself down there; the matter of selecting others for a high-risk operation was even less to his taste.

He made up a demanding qualifications list and started search through personnel. Comp denied having any personnel with dry-lands experience. He erased that requirement and started through the others, erased yet another
requirement and ran it again, with the sense of desperation he began to understand that Koch shared.

They were Haveners on this mission, and for all the several world-patches on his sleeve, won on this ship, there was nothing they had met like this save Kesrith itself; there was no time at which they had relied on themselves and not on their machines.
Saber
had not been chosen for this mission: it had gone because it was available. As for experience with mri—none of them had had that, save at long range.

Devastation from orbit: that had been their function until now. Now there was the barest hope this would not be the case. He was not given to personal enthusiasm in his assignments; but this one—a means of avoiding slaughter—that possibility occurred to him.

Or the possibility of being the one to call down holocaust: that was the other face of the matter.

He did not sleep well. He sat by day and pored over what data they could give him, the scan their orbiting eyes could gather, the monotone reports of comp that no contact had been made.

Flower
descended to the surface. Data returned from that source. Day by day, there was no reply from Duncan, no sighting of mri.

He received word from the admiral’s office: SELECTIONS RATIFIED. SHIBO, KADARIN, LANE: MAIN MISSION. HARRIS, NORTH, BRIGHT, MAGEE: BACKUP. PROCEED.

The days crawled past, measured in the piecing of maps and vexing lapses in ground-space communication as Na’i’in’s storms crept like plague across its sickly face. He took what information Saber’s mapping department would give him, prowled Supply, thinking.

The office became papered with charts, a composite of the world, overlaid in plastics, red-inked at those sites identified in scan, mri cities, potential targets.

He talked with the crew, gave them warning. There was still the chance that the whole project would be scrubbed, that by some miracle
Flower
would call up contact, declaring peace a reality, the matter solved, the mri willing to deal.

The hope ebbed, hourly.

Windshift had begun, that which each evening attended the cooling of the land, and Hlil tucked his black robes the more closely about him as he rested on his heels, scanning the dunes, taking breath after his long walking.

The tribe was not far now, tucked down just over the slope by the rim, where the land fell away in days’ marches of terraces and cliffs, and the sea chasms gaped, empty in this last age of the world. Sen-caste said that even that void would fill, ultimately, the sands off the high flats drifting as they did in sandfalls and curtains off the windy edges, to the far, hazy depths. Somewhere out there was the bottom of the world, where all motion stopped, forever; and that null-place grew, yearly, eating away at the world. The chasms girdled the earth; but they were finite, and there were no more mountains, for they had all worn away to nubs. It was a place, this site near the rims, where one could look into time, and back from it; it quieted the soul, reminded one of eternity, in this moment that one could not look into the skies without dreading some movement, or reckoning with alien presence.

The ruins of An-ehon lay just over the horizon to the north, to remind them of that power, which had made them fugitives in their own land, robbed of tents, of belongings, of every least thing but what they had worn the morning of the calamity. There was the bitterness of looking about the camp, and missing so many, so very many, so that at every turn, one would think of one of the lost as if that one were in camp, and then realize, and shiver. He was kel’en, of the warrior caste; death was his province, and it was permitted him to grieve, but he did not. There was a dull bewilderment in that part of him which ought by rights to be touched. In recent days he felt outnumbered by the dead, as if all the countless who had gone into the Dark in the slow ages of the sea’s dying ought rather to mourn the living. He did not comprehend the causes of things. Being kel’en, he neither read nor wrote, held nothing of the wisdom of sen-caste, which sat at the feet of a she’pan alien to this world and learned.
He knew only the use of his weapons, and the kel-law, those things which were proper for a kel’en to know.

It had become appropriate to know things beyond Kutath; he tried, at least. The Kel was the caste which veiled, the Face that Looked Outward. That Outward had become more than the next rising of the land; it was outsiders and ships and a manner of fighting which the ages had made only memory on Kutath, and pride and the Holy the Kel defended forbade that he should flinch from facing it, since it came.

They had a kel’anth, the gods defend them! who had come out of that Dark; they had a she’pan who had taken them from the gentle she’pan who had Mothered the tribe before her . . . young and scarred with the kel-scars on her face; fit, he thought, that the she’pan of this age should bear kel-marks, which testified she once had been of Kel-caste, had once attained skill with weapons. A she’pan of a colder, fiercer stamp, this Melein s’Intel; no Mother to play with the children of the Kath as their own Sochil had done, to spend more time with the gentle Kath than with Sen-caste, to love rather than to be wise. Melein was a chill wind, a breath out of the Dark; and as for her kel’anth, her warrior-leader . . . .

Him, Hlil almost hated, not for the dead in An-ehon, which might be just; but for the kel’anth he had killed to take the tribe. It was a selfish hate, and Hlil resisted it; such resentments demeaned Merai, who had lost challenge to this Niun s’Intel. Merai had died, in fact, because gentle Sochil had turned fierce when challenged: fear, perhaps; or a mother’s bewildered rage, that a stranger-she’pan demanded her children of her, to lead them where she did not know.

So Merai was dead; and Sochil, dead. Of Merai’s kinship there was only his sister left; of his tribe there was a fugitive remnant; and the Honors which Merai had won in this life, a stranger possessed.

Even Hlil . . . this stranger had gained, for kel-law set the victor in the stead of the vanquished, to the last of his kin debts and blood debts and place debts. Hlil was second to Niun s’Intel as he had been second to Merai. He sat by this stranger in the Kel, tolerated proximity to the strange beast which was Niun’s shadow, bore with the grief which haunted the kel’anth’s acts . . . which could not, he was persuaded, be distraction for the slaughter of a People the kel’anth had not had time to know—but which more attended the disappearance of the kel’anth’s other alien shadow, which walked on two feet.

That the kel’anth at least grieved . . . it was a mortality which bridged one alienness between them, him and his new kel’anth. They shared something, at least; if not love . . . loss.

Hlil gathered up a sandy pebble from the crumbling ridge on which he rested, cast it at a tiny pattern in the sands downslope. It hit true, and a nest of spiny arms whipped up to enfold the suspected prey. Sand-star. He had suspected so. His hunting was not so desperate that he must bring
that
to the women and children of Kath. It wriggled away, a disturbance through the sand, and he let it. A pair of serpents, a fat darter, a stone’s weight of game; he had no cause to be ashamed of his day’s effort, and there was a stand of pipe growing within the camp, so that they had no desperate need of moisture, certainly not the bitter fluid of the star. It nestled into safety next to some rocks, spread its arms wide again, a pattern of depressions in the sand. He did not torment it further; it was off the track so, and offered no threat. Kel-law forbade excess.

And in time, with the sun’s lowering, kel’ein came. Hlil sat his place, sentinel to the homecoming path, and marked them in, as he had known by the fact that this post was vacant, that none had come in before him. They saw him as they passed, lifted hands in salute; he knew their names and put a knot in the cords at his belt for each—knew them veiled as they were, by their manners and their stature and simply by their way of walking, for they were his own from boyhood. Had there been one of higher rank than he that one would have come and relieved him of this post, to take up the tally; there was none, so he stayed, as they entered the perimeter of the secure area of the camp.

They came in groups as the Sun touched the horizon, appearing like mirages out of the land, so well they judged their time, to meet at homecoming after hunting apart all day: black-robed, like drifting shadows, they passed in the amber twilight, while the sun stained the rocks and touched the hazy depths of the sea basins, going down over the far, invisible rim as if it vanished in midair, drawing out shadows.

The knots filled one cord and another and another, until all the tale was told but two.

Hlil looked eastward, and of certainty, at the mid of sunfall, there came Ras. He need not have worried, he told himself. Ras would not be careless, not she—kel’e’en of the Kel’s second highest rank. No reasoning with her, nothing but ordering her outright, and he could not, even if it were wise.

Ras s’Sochil Kov-Nelan. Merai’s truesister.

Of that too, Niun had robbed him. They had been a trio, Hlil and Merai and Ras, in happier days; and he had dreamed dreams beyond his probabilities. He was skilled: that was his claim to place; he had had Merai’s friendship; and because of that—he had been always near Ras. He had taught her, being older; had gamed with her and with Merai; had watched her every day of her life . . . and watched her harden since Merai’s death. Her mother, Nelan, had been one of those who failed to come out of An-ehon; of that Ras said nothing. Ras laughed and spoke and moved, took meals with the Kel and went through all the motions of life; but she was not Ras as he had known her. She followed Niun s’Intel, as once, as a kath-child, she had followed him; where Niun walked, she was shadow; where he rested, she waited. It was a kind of madness, a game lacking humor or sense; but they were all a little mad, who survived An-ehon and served the she’pan Melein.

Ras arrived, in her own time, paused on the path below the rocks—began, wearily, to climb up to him. When she had done so, she sank down on the flat stone beside him, arms dropped loosely over her knees, her body heaving with her breaths.

“Did you hunt well?” he asked, although he knew what game she hunted.

“A couple of darters.” It was not, for her, good. And it was a long walk that brought Ras back out of breath.

Hlil looked out, and in the darkening east, there were two dots on the horizon. The kel’anth and the beast, strung far apart.

“East,” Ras said beside him, finding breath to speak. “Always east, along the same track. He would have brought back no game at all, but the beast routs things out for him. He delays only to gather it, and he takes long steps, this kel’anth of ours.”

“Ras,” he objected.

“He knows I am there.”

He gathered up another stone, rolled it between his fingers. Ras simply rested, catching her breath.

“Why?” he said finally. “Ras—let him be. Anger serves no purpose; it dies unless you go on nursing it.”

“And you do not.”

“I am the kel’anth’s second.”

“So you were,” she said, which was a heart-shot; and a moment later she looked on him with something like her old fondness. “You can be. I envy you.”

“I have no love for him.”

She accepted that offering in silence. Her fingers stole, as they would, to one of the many Honors which hung from her belts. Merai’s death gift, that one, from Niun’s hand.

“We cannot challenge him,” she said. “Law forbids, if it were revenge for Merai; but there are other causes. Just causes.”

“Stop thinking of it.”

“He is very good. If I challenged him, he would kill me.”

“Do not,” he said, his heart clenched.

“You want to live,” she accused him. And when he did not deny it: “Do you know how many generations of Kel-birth lie behind me?”

“More than mine,” he said bitterly, heat risen already to his face: his plain birth was a thing of which he was deeply conscious.

“Eighteen,” she said. “Eighteen generations. It comes to me, Hlil, that here I sit, last of a line that produced kel’ein and she’panei. Last. They are dead, all the rest; gods, and they would never understand such times as these. I look around me; I think—maybe I do not belong here; maybe I should go too, end it. And I think of my brother. Merai saw it standing in front of him—saw just the edge of the horizon waiting for us. And I think . . . he
died,
Hlil. He was not himself against this stranger; he missed a blow he could have turned. I know he could have turned it. Why? For fear? That was not Merai. It was not. So what do I believe? That he stepped aside—that he let himself die? And why so? At one word from these strangers that they are the Promised, the Voyagers-out? Could he stand in the way of such a thing?”

Hlil swallowed heavily, “Do not ask me what he thought.”

“I ask myself. He could not see ahead. And then I think:
I see.
I am here. I am my brother’s eyes. Gods, gods,
he died knowing it was for a thing he would never see or understand. To clear the way, because he was set where this man had to stand. And I am desperate to see—Truth, Hlil: this kel’anth of ours will live under my witness; and if he cannot bear that, if he feels guilt, it is his guilt, let him bear it; and if he turns and strikes me—you will know. And what you do about that—I leave in your lap, Hlil-my-brother.”