The Faded Sun Trilogy (82 page)

Niun was silent a moment; disturbance jolted through the dus sense. “I believed,” Niun said, “you had gotten through when there were no more attacks; but—not that you would have gone among them. And they let you go. They let you go again.”

“Regul have come,” Duncan said, and felt the shock fed back to him. The membrane flashed across Niun’s eyes. A human might have cried aloud, so intense that feeling was.

“Regul and not humans?”

“Both.”

“Allied,” Niun said. Anger fed through. Despair.

“No more firing. Regul did the firing; humans have realized by now . . . Niun, they have listened. The she’pan—they sent a message. She can contact them. Talk with them.”

Again the membrane flashed across. Duncan shivered in that feeling.

“Have you taken hire?” Niun asked. It was a reasonable question, without rancor. The Kel was mercenary.

“I take no hire.”

The dusei caught that feeling too, and wove them together. Niun reached out and caught the wrong arm, let it go at his flinching . . . rubbed at the blood on his fingertips.

“I thought,” Duncan said, “I could reason with someone. The hao’nath kel’anth came up on me. He knew something was wrong. Knew it; and he or the dus moved before I did.”

“Dead?”

“I left him against the pipestalks; dus poison, broken bones or not—I stayed to keep him out of the sand: no more than that.”

“Gods,” Niun spat. He faced him away, took the pack from him, hooked a strap over his own shoulder and started them moving. Duncan blinked, blear-eyed with relief at having that weight gone, and tried to keep his pace, staggering somewhat in the loose sand. Niun delayed and flung a fever-hot arm about him, hurrying him.

“What are they likely to do?”

“I would challenge,” Niun said. “But that would suit them. It is the tribe that is in danger now.”

“Melein—”

“I do not know.” Niun pulled at him, for all his efforts to keep stride. “Gods know who is with the she’pan at the moment. I am here; Hlil, in the city . . . The hao’nath have gone back to their own she’pan; they will not challenge the kel’anth of a tribe without her consent, not if she is available . . . But they will not stop that long. If—” He caught his breath. “If they take us here, I can challenge, aye, but one after the other. The meeting of she’panei . . . is different. The she’pan is our protection; we are hers.”

He said nothing else, hard-breathing with a human burden. Duncan took his own weight, cupped the veil to
his mouth with his hand to warm the air, went blindly, by sound, by dus-sense, at last with Niun dragging at him.

*   *   *

They found a place to rest finally, hard ground, a ridge which stretched a stone’s cast along the sands. Duncan flung himself down in an aching knot and fumbled anxiously after the canteen, trying to ease his swollen throat . . . offered to Niun, who drank and put it away. The dusei crowded as close to them as possible as if themselves seeking comfort, and for the time at least there was no intimation of pursuers. Duncan leaned against his dus, his sides heaving harder than those of the beast, wiped at his nose beneath the veils and wanted nothing more than to still and breathe, but Niun disturbed him to see to his wound, soaked a strip torn from his veil in the saliva of his dus and bandaged it. Duncan did not question; it felt better, at least.

“These tsi’mri in the ships,” Niun said. “You know them?”

“I know them.”

“You talked with them—a very long time.”

“No. A day and a night.”

“You walk slowly, then.”

“Far out of my way. Not to be followed; and I walk slowly, yes.”

“Ai.” Niun sat still a moment, nudged finally at the pack he had carried. It was question.

“Food.” Duncan reached for it, to show him. Niun caught his wrist, released it.

“Your word is enough.”

Duncan took it all the same, opened it and pulled out an opened packet of dried meat. He put a bit in his mouth, tugging the veil aside, offered the packet to Niun. “Tsi’mri, you would say. But if they were offering—I took. Food. Water Nothing else.”

Niun accepted it, tucked a large piece into his mouth, put the packet into his own pouch; and by that small action Duncan realized what he had perceived in deeper senses, that Niun himself was almost spent, quick-tiring . . . hungry, it might be. That struck panic into him. He had thought the tribe a reachable walk away. If
what they had yet to face had undone Niun, then for himself—

He chewed and forced the tough bits down a throat almost too raw to swallow. “Listen to me. I will tell you what happened. Best both of us should know. The beacons I left when we landed . . . to say that there was no reason of attack—regul came in first, took out the beacons and our ship; humans never heard the message. Regul were determined they should not.”

Niun’s eyes had locked on his, intent.

“Regul attacked,” Duncan said, “and city defenses fired back; humans came in and were caught in it, and believed the regul; but now they know . . . that they were used by the regul, and they do not like it. The regul elder tried to silence me; I killed her. Her younglings are disorganized and humans are in command up there. They are warned how they were misled.”

The membrane flashed.

“I told them, Niun, I told them plainly I no longer take their orders, that I am kel’en. They sent me with a message to the she’pan: come and talk. They want assurance there will be no striking at human Worlds.”

“They ask
her.
”

“Or someone who would be her voice. They are reasoning beings, Niun.”

Niun considered that in silence. There was—perhaps—a desire in Niun’s expression that he would never have shown a human.

“The landing site,” Duncan urged at him. “They will be waiting there for an answer. An end to this, a way out.”

“The hao’nath,” Niun said hollowly. “Gods, the hao’nath.”

“I do not think,” Duncan said, “that humans will go outside that ship. At least—not recklessly.”

“Sov-kela—the comings and goings of ships, the firing over An-ehon—are the tribes deaf and blind, that they should ignore such things? They are gathering, that is what is happening. And every tribe on the face of the world that has seen cities attacked or passings in the skies—will look to its defenses. An-ehon is in ruins; other cities may not be. And now the hao’nath know it centers on this plain; and that its name is ja’anom.”

City armament. Duncan bit at his lip, reckoning what in his dazed flight he had never reckoned . . . that some city in the hands of a desert she’pan might strike at warships.

That through the city computers, messages could pass from zone to zone with the speed of comp transmission, not the migration of tribes.

He had rejected everything, everything security might have tampered with: cast gear into the basins, kept only food and water, only the things he could assure himself were safe and light enough to carry. He made a tent of his hands over his mouth, a habit, that warmed the air, and stared bleakly into the dark before him.

“Your thought?” Niun asked.

“Go back; get to that ship—you and I. Put machines on our own side. And I know we cannot.”

“We cannot,” Niun said.

Duncan considered, drew his limbs up, leaned against the dus to push himself to his feet. Niun gathered up the pack and also rose, offered a hand for support. Duncan ignored it. “I cannot walk fast,” he said. “But long—I can manage. If you have to break off and leave me, do that. I have kept ahead this far.”

Niun said nothing to that; it was something that might have to be done: he knew so. He doubled the veil over his lower face, left the visor up, for the wind had slacked somewhat: there were stars visible, the first sky he had seen in days.

And after a time of walking: “How far?” he asked.

“Would that I knew,” Niun said. A moment more passed. They were out on open sand now, an occasional burrower rippling aside from the dusei’s warding. “Cast the she’pan for the dusei. The storm, sov-kela . . . I am worried. I know they will not have stayed where I left them; they cannot have done that.”

“The tents—”

“They are without them.”

Duncan drew in a breath, thinking of the old, the children, sick at heart. He shaped Melein for the dusei, with all his force. He received back nothing identifiable before them, only the sense of something ugly at their backs.

“I sensed you,” Niun said. “And trouble. I thought to turn back in the storm; but there was no getting there in
time to help anything . . . and this . . . the dus gave me no rest. Well it did not. Even the wild ones. I have never felt the like, sov-kela.”

“They are out there,” Duncan said. “Still. They met me on the way.” An insane memory came back, an attempt to reach them, to show them
life,
and choices. Survival or desolation. He shuddered, staggered, felt something of his own dus, a fierceness that blurred the senses. Both beasts caught it. Somewhere across the flat a cry wailed down the wind, dus.

Melein,
Duncan insisted.

Their own beasts kept on as they were heading; it could be answer; it could be incomprehension. They had no choice but to go with them.

Luiz appeared in the doorway of
Flower’s
lab offices, leaned there, his seamed face set in worry. “Shuttle’s down,” he said. “Two of them. They’re coming in pairs.”

“The dispatch is nearly ready.” Boaz made a few quick notes, sorted, clipped, gathered her materials into the pouch and sealed the coded lock: Security procedures, foreign to her. She found the whole arrangement distasteful. In her fifty-odd years she had had time to learn deep resentment for the military. Most of her life had been wartime, the forty-three-year mri wars. Her researches as a scientist had been appropriated to the war in distant offices; on
Flower
they had been directly seized. She had to her credit the decipherment of mri records which had led them here, which had led to the destruction of mri cities, and the death of children; and she grieved over that. A pacifist, she had done the mri more harm with pick and brush and camera than all of
Saber’s
firepower and all the ships humans had ever launched; she believed so; and she had had no choice—had none now that she was reduced to writing reports for security, reckonings of yet another species for military use.

She had had illusions once, of the importance of her freedom to investigate, the tradeoff of knowledge for knowledge, for a position in which she, having knowledge, could sway the makers of policy; there had been a time she had believed she could say no.

She put the pouch into Luiz’s hands, looked beyond him to the other men who had come into the lab: Averson, Sim Averson, a balding fellow who walked as though he might break. He came, and she offered her hand to him. Three years Averson had worked aboard
Flower
before the Kesrithi mission, which made him one of the seniors of the present staff, a sour, fretsome fellow who took his work in Cultures and his library more seriously than breathing, and lived for the increase of data and systems to his personal credit in libraries back home. Averson
had taken naturally to specialization in regul, as slow and methodical as they, pleased with the mountains of statistics which regul tended to accumulate. He had taken over Aldin’s office with a sour intimation of satisfaction, as if Aldin’s death had been fate’s personal favor to him . . . appropriated Aldin’s notes and materials and immersed himself in more cataloging. It likely did not occur to Averson now that the military might have interests wider than specific questions, that what he did might have moral implications . . . or if it did, it did so at a distance outside Averson’s more vivid concerns. He looked now only annoyed, roused out of his habits and his habitation and his work.

“Be careful,” Boaz urged him. “Sim, something’s wrong up there.”

Dark eyes blinked up at her, somewhat distantly. Averson had grown into the habit of looking down. He shrugged his bowed shoulders. “What can we do? When they ask, we come, however inconvenient it happens to be. My tapes, my programs, everything disarranged. I told them. Of course it’s wrong. I’ll be a week putting things in order. Can I explain this to them? No. No. Security has no comprehension.”

“Sim, I mean that there’s something wrong with the regul.”

Averson’s brow fractured into different wrinkles, distant recognition of a fact both germane and foreign to his research: he was slow of habit, but not slow-witted.

“I queried about the overflights,” Luiz said. He folded his arms and set his back more firmly against the doorframe . . . his knees troubled him; he had gotten old, had Luiz, fragile as Averson . . . .
We have all grown old,
Boaz thought desperately.
None of us will live to reach humanity again, not with all our functions intact. I will be near sixty, Luiz seventy-five if he makes it through the jumps again: Koch seventy at least; and some of us are dead, like Aldin.
“Koch went silent on me in a hurry. Now he wants you up there. And files on the regul. Boz is right. Something’s astir up there with our allies.”

Averson blinked slowly. “Metamorphosis. We reckoned . . . a longer time required.”

“Stress conditions,” Luiz surmised.

“Possibly.” Averson chewed at his fingernail and frowned, staring at nothing in particular the while he followed some train of thought.

“Sim,” Boaz said, “Sim, watch out for security.”

Averson blinked at her, drawn back from his musing.

“Don’t trust them,” Boaz said. “Don’t trust what they do with what we give them. Think.
Think
before you tell them something . . . how ignorant men could interpret it, what they could do with it. They aren’t objective. We daren’t trust that. People want statistics to justify what they
want
to do. That’s the only reason we’ve ever asked.”

“Boz,” Luiz protested, with a meaningful glance at the intercom.
Flower’s
operations staff was all military.

“So what do I care? What can I lose? Promotion? Assignments in the future? None of us are going to be fit for another after this one; and it’s dead certain they’re limited on replacements for us.”