The Faded Sun Trilogy (60 page)

Niun could not bear to look at her, for it was true, and it was painful to them both.

“What shall we do?” he asked. “May the Kel ask permission to ask? What shall we do for ourselves?”

“I have no power to stop this ship. Would that I did. Duncan says that he cannot. I think that it is true. And he—”

There was long silence. Niun did not invade it, knowing it could bring no good; and at last Melein sighed.

“Duncan,” she said heavily.

“I will keep him from your sight.”

“You have given him the means to harm us.”

“I will deal with him, she’pan.”

She shook her head again, and wiped her eyes with her fingers.

The dusei came: Niun was aware of them before they appeared, looked and saw his own great beast, and welcomed it. It drew close in the wistful, abstracted manner of dusei, and sank down at Melein’s feet, offering its mindless solace.

Afterward, when Melein breathed easier, Niun felt another presence. Astonished, he saw the lesser dus standing in the doorway. It also came, and lay down by its fellow.

Melein touched it; it offered no hostility to the hand that had caused its hurt. But somewhere else in the ship there would be pain for that touching. Niun thought on Duncan, of his bitter isolation, and wondered that his dus could have been drawn here, by her whom Duncan hated.

Unless he had brutally driven it away—or unless his thoughts had turned the dus in this direction.

“Go see to Duncan,” Melein said finally.

Niun received back his veil from her hands and flung it over his shoulder, not bothering to wear it. He rose, and when his own dus would have followed him he bade it stay, for he wanted it by Melein, for her comfort.

And he found Duncan, as he had thought he would, back in kel-hall.

*   *   *

Duncan sat still in the artificial dawning, hands loose in his lap. Niun settled on his knees before him, and still Duncan did not look up. The human had veiled himself; Niun did not, offering his feelings openly to him.

“You have hurt us,” Niun said. “Kel Duncan, is it not enough?”

Duncan lifted his face and stared toward the screen, where the world that had been called Nhequuy was no
longer in view.

“Duncan. What else will you have of us?”

Duncan’s dus was with Melein, touched and touching; he was betrayed. When his eyes shifted toward Niun there was no defense there, nothing but pain.

“I argued,” said Duncan, “with my superiors, for your sake. I fought for you. And for what? Did she have an answer? She knew the world’s name. What happened to it?”

“We do not know.”

“And to the other worlds?”

“We do not know, Duncan.”

“Killers,” he said, his eyes fixed elsewhere. “Killers by nature.”

Niun clenched his hands, that had gone chill. “
You
are with us, kel Duncan.”

“I have often wondered why,” His dark eyes returned to Niun’s. Of a sudden he pulled the veil away, swept off the tasseled head-cloth, making evident his humanity. “Except that I am necessary.”

“Yes. But I did not know that. We did not know it before.”

It touched home, he thought; there was a small reaction of the eyes.

And then Duncan turned, a wild, distracted look on his face as he looked to the door.

Dus-feelings. Niun received them too, even-before he heard the click of claws on tiling. Senses blurred. It was hard to remember what bitterness they had been about.

“
No!
” Duncan shouted as it came in. The beast shied and lifted a paw in threat, then dropped it and edged forward, head slightly averted. By degrees it came closer, settled, edged the final distance to Duncan’s side. Duncan touched it, slid his arm about its neck. At the door appeared the other beast, that came quietly to Niun, lay down at his back. Niun soothed it with gentle touches, his heart pounding from the misery that radiated from the other—schism between man and dus: the very air ached with it.

“You are hurting it,” Niun said. “Give way to it. Give it only a little.”

“It and I have an accommodation. I do not push it and it does not push me. Only sometimes it comes too fast.
It forgets where the line is.”

“Dusei have no memories. There is only
now
with them.”

“Fortunate animals,” Duncan said hoarsely.

“Give way to it. You lose nothing.”

Duncan shook his head. “I am not mri. And I cannot forget.”

There was weariness in his voice; it trembled. For a moment there was again the man who had been long absent from them. Niun reached out, pressed his arm in a gesture he would have offered a brother of the Kel. “Duncan, I have tried to help you. All that I could do, I have tried.”

Duncan closed his eyes, opened them again; his fingers at the dus’s neck lifted in a gesture of surrender. “I think that, at least, is the truth.”

“We do not lie,” he said. “There are the dusei. We cannot.”

“I can understand that.” Duncan pressed his lips together, a white line, relaxed again, his hand still caressing the dus.

“I would not play at
shon’ai
with a man in your mood,” Niun said, baiting him, searching after hidden things. They had not, in fact, played in some time.

The dus began slowly to give forth its pleasure sound, relaxed to Duncan’s fingers as Duncan eased his arm about its fat-rolled neck; it sighed, oblivious to past grief, delighting in present love.

The human pressed his brow to that thick skull, then turned his face to look at Niun. His eyes bore a bruised look, like one long without rest. “It has no happier a life than mine,” Duncan said. “I cannot let it have what it wants, and it cannot make me over into a mri.”

Niun drew a deep breath, tried to keep images from his mind. “I might destroy it,” he said, hushed and quickly. The human, in contact with the beast, flinched, soothed the dus with his hands. Niun understood; he felt soiled even in offering—but sometimes it was necessary, when a dus, losing its kel’en, could not be controlled. This one had never gained the kel’en it wished.

“No,” Duncan said at last. “No.”

He pushed the animal away, and it rose and ambled over to the corner. There was peace in the feeling of the beasts. It was better than it had been.

“I would be pleased,” said Niun, “if you would send to the she’pan your apology.”

Duncan sat quietly for a moment, arms on knees. At last he nodded, changed the gesture for a mri one. “When she needs me,” he said, “I will come. Tell her so.”

“I will tell her.”

“Tell her I am sorry.”

“I will tell her that too.”

Duncan looked at him for a moment, and then gathered himself up and stood looking at the dus. He gave a low whistle to it; it whuffed in interest and heaved itself up and came, followed to the corner where the pallets were.

And for a long time the human sat and worked over the dus, grooming it and soothing it, even talking to it, which seemed to please the beast. The dus settled, slept. In time, the man did.

Three days later the siren sounded, and they left Nhequuy and its sun. The next world was also without life.

Duncan turned from the screen that showed the stars and found his dus behind him—always, always the beast was with him, shadow, herald, partaker of every privacy of his life. He found no need to touch it. It sighed and settled against his back. He felt it content.

It was strange, when a pain ceased, that it would be gone some considerable time before it was missed.

And that when that pain was gone, it could not be accurately remembered.

Duncan had known in this place, in kel-hall, upon a certain instant, that he was no longer in pain: he had realized it, sitting here upon the floor; and he could remember the moment, the details, the place that the dus had been lying, the fact that Niun had been sitting exactly so, across the room—sewing, that day: odd occupation for a mri warrior, but Duncan had learned well enough that a man tended all his own necessities in the Kel—save food, that was taken in common.

Niun’s face had been intent, the needle pursuing a steady rhythm. He had worked with skill, as Niun’s slender hands knew so many skills. It would take years to learn the half of what Niun’s native reflexes and the teaching of his masters had done for him.

Not an arrogant man, Niun: prideful, perhaps, but he never vaunted his abilities . . . save now and again when they practiced a passage of arms with the
yin’ein
that Duncan had made to match the beautiful old weapons that were Niun’s. Then Niun was sometimes moved, perhaps from the sheer ennui of practicing with a man with whom he could not extend himself—to make a move so fast the eye could not follow it, so tiny and deft and subtle that Duncan hardly knew what had happened to him. Niun did such things, Duncan had noticed also, when he himself had almost settled into smugness in his practice with Niun. The mri subtly informed his student that he was still
restraining himself.

Restraint.

It governed the kel’en’s whole being.

And Niun’s restraint made peace where there was none: extended to a human who provoked him, to dusei that at times grew restive and destructive in their confinement—extended even to Melein.

There was none of them, Duncan reflected with sudden grim humor, that wanted to disturb Niun, neither human, nor dusei, nor child-queen who relied on him.

It was Niun’s peace that was on them.

The most efficient killers in all creation,
Stavros had said of the mri.

He spoke of the Kel, of Niun’s kind.

He had spoken before humankind even suspected the waste of stars that now surrounded them.

The record would be traced out, human ships tracking them to dead world after dead world; and there was no other conclusion that could occur to the Haveners manning those ships, but that they were tracing something monstrous to its source.

Duncan absently caressed the shoulder of his dus, thinking, as the same fearful thoughts had circled through his brain endlessly in the passing days—staring helplessly at Niun, whose imagination surely was sufficient to know what pursued them.

Yet there was no mention of this from Niun; and Melein, having asked her questions, asked nothing more; Niun went to her, but Duncan was not permitted, continuing in her disfavor.

The mri chose to ignore what pursued, to ask no further, to do nothing. Niun lived with him, slept beside him at night in apparent trust—and cultivated only the ancient skills of his kind, the weapons of ritual and duel, as if they could avail him at the end.

The
yin’ein,
ancient blades, against warships, against the likes of
Saber.

Niun chose, advisedly.

An image came: night, and fire, and mri obstinacy. Duncan pushed it aside, and it came back again,
recollection of mri stubbornness that would not surrender, that would not compromise, whose concept of
modern
was lapped in Darks and Betweens and the ways of tsi’mri who were only a moment in the experience of the People.

Modern weapons.

Duncan felt the taint of the word, the scorn implicit in the hal’ari, and hated the human in him that had been too blind to see.

The last battle of the People.

To meet it with modern weapons—if it came to that—that the People should come to a hopeless fight . . . .

Niun would not, then, plan to survive: the last mri would choose the things that made sense to his own logic, which was precisely what he was doing.

To seek his home.

To recover his ancient ways.

To be mri until the holocaust ended it.

It was all Niun could do, if he chose to think about it, save yield to tsi’mri. Duncan reckoned the depth of the mri’s patience, that had borne with an outsider under such conditions—even Melein’s, who endured Niun’s tolerance of a tsi’mri, even that was considerable.

And Niun only practiced at duel with him, patiently, gently practiced, as if he could forget the nature of him.

The
yin’ein.
They were for Niun the only reasonable choice.

Duncan rested his arm on his knee and gnawed at his lip, felt the disturbance of the dus at his back and reached to settle it—guilty in his humanity, that troubled Niun. And yet the thought worried at him and would not let him go—that, human that he was, he could not do as Niun did.

That there were for him alternatives that Niun did not possess.

Perhaps, at the end, the mri would let him go.

Or expect him to lift arms against humankind. He tried to imagine it; and all that he could imagine in his hand was the service pistol that rested among his belongings—to deal large-scale death for his death: the inclination
came on him. He could fight, cornered; he would wish to take a dozen of the lives, human or not, that would take his. But to take up the
yin’ein
 . . . he was not mri enough.

There were means of fighting the mri would not use.

Human choices.

Slowly, slowly, shattered bits of what had been a SurTac began to sort themselves into order again.

“Niun,” he said.

The mri was shaping a bit of metal into a thing that looked like an ornament. For several days he had been working at it, painstaking in his attention.

“
A?
” Niun answered.

“I have been thinking: we suffered one failure in instruments. If the she’pan would permit it, I would like to go back to controls, to test the instruments.”

Niun stopped. A frown was on his face when he looked up. “I will ask the she’pan,” he said.

“I would like,” Duncan said, “to give her the benefit of what skills I do have.”

“She will send if there is need.”

“Niun,
ask her.
”

The frown deepened. The mri rested hands on his knees, his metalwork forgotten, then expelled a deep breath and gathered up his work again.

“I want peace with her,” Duncan said. “Niun, I have done all that you have asked of me. I have tried to be one of you.”

“Other things you have done,” said Niun. “That is the problem.”

“I am sorry for those things. I want them forgotten. Ask her to see me again, and I give you my word I will not offend against her. There is no peace on this ship without peace with her—and none with you.”