He looked at the time: it was well past midnight, and Chimele, like Ashakh, did not impress him as one who took the leisure for whimsy. He pulled his sweater over his head, started for the door, but he paused to hurl at Isande the demand that she drop her screening, guide him. He felt her reticence; when it melted, he almost wished otherwise.
Fear came, nightmares of Khasif, chilling and sexual at once. Few things could cause an iduve to act irrationally, but there was one outstanding exception, and iduve when irritated with kamethi were prone to it.
He stopped square in the doorway, blood leaving his face and returning in a hot rush. Her urgency prodded him into motion again, her anger and her terror like ice in his belly. No,he insisted again and again. Isande had been terrified once and long ago: she was scarred by the experience and dwelled on it excessively—it embarrassed him, that he had to express that thought: he knew it for truth. He wished her still.
“It happens,” Isande insisted, with such firmness that it shook his conviction. “It is katasukke—pleasure-mating.” And quickly, without preface, apology, or overmuch delicacy, she fed across what she knew or guessed of the iduve’s intimate habits—alienness only remotely communicated in katasukkewith noi kame, a union between iduve in katasakkethat was fraught with violence and shielded in ritual and secrecy. Katasukkewas gentler: sensible noi kame were treated with casual indulgence or casual negligence according to the mood of the iduve in question; but cruelty was e-chanokhia,highly improper, whatever unknown and violent things they did among themselves. But both katasakkeand katasukketriggered dangerous emotions in the ordinarily dispassionate iduve. Vaikkawas somehow involved in mating, and it was not uncommon that someone was killed. In Isande’s mind any irrationality in the iduve emanated from that one urge: it was the one thing that could undo their common sense, and when it was undone, it was a madness as alien as their normal calm.
He shook off these things, hurried through the corridors while Isande’s anxious presence thrust into his mind behaviors and apologies, fawning kameth graces meant to appease Chimele. Vaikkawith a nas kame had this for an expected result, and if he provoked her further now he would be lucky to escape with his life.
He rejected Isande and her opinions, prideful and offended, and knew that Isande was crying, and frustrated with him and furious. Her anger grew so desperate that he had to screen against her, and bade her leave him alone. He was ashamed enough at this disgraceful situation without having her lodged as resident observer in his mind. He knew her hysterical upon the subject, and even so could not help fearing he was walking into something he did not want to contemplate.
With Isande aware, mind-bound to him.
Leave me alone!he raged at her.
She went; and then he was sorry for the silence.
Chimele was waiting for him, seated in her accustomed chair as a tape unreeled on the wall screen with dizzying rapidity: the day’s reports, quite probably. She cut it off, using a manual control instead of the mental ones of which the iduve were capable—a choice, he had learned, which betokened an iduve with mind already occupied.
“You took an unseemly amount of time responding,” she said.
“I was asleep.” Fear added, shaming him: “I’m sorry.”
“You did not expect, then, to be called?”
“No,” he said; and doubled over as the idoikkhehit him with overwhelming pain. He was surprised into an outcry, but bit it off and straightened, furious.
“Well, consider it settled, then,” she said, “and cheaply so. Be wiser in the future. Return to your quarters.”
“All of you are demented,” he cried, and it struck, this time enough to gray the senses, and the pain quite washed his mind of everything. When it stopped he was on his face on the floor, and to his horror he felt Isande’s hurt presence in him, holding to him, trying to absorb the pain and reason with him to stay down.
“Aiela,” said Chimele, “you clearly fail to understand me.”
“I don’t want—” the idoikkhestung him again, a gentle reproof compared with what had touched him a moment before. It jolted raw nerves and made him cringe physically in dread: the cowardice it instilled made him both ashamed and angry; and there was Isande’s anxious intrusion again. The two-sided assault was too much. He clutched his head and begged his asuthe to leave him, even while he stumbled to his feet, unwilling to be treated so.
She can destroy you,Isande sent him hysterically. She has her honor to think of.Vaikka, Aiela,vaikka!
“Is it Isande?” asked Chimele. “Is it she that troubles you?”
“She’s being hurt. She won’t go away. Please stop it.”
And then he knew that Isande’s idoikkhehad pained her, once, twice, with increasing severity, and the mournful and loyal presence fled.
“Aiela,” said Chimele, “all my life I have dealt gently with my kamethi. Why will you persist in provoking me? Is it ignorance or is it design?”
“It’s my nature,” he said, which further offended her; but this time she only scowled and regarded him with deep dissatisfaction.
“Your ignorance of us has not been noticed: the nearest equivalent is ‘forgiven.’ It will be a serious error on your part to assume this will continue without limit.”
“I honestly,” he insisted, “do not understand you.”
“We are not in the habit of patience with metane-tekasuphre.Nor do we make evident our discomforts. Au, m’metane,I should have the hide from you.” There was self-control; and under it there was a rage that made his skin cold: run now, he thought, and become like the others—no. She would deal with him, explaining matters; he would stand there until she did so.
For a long moment he stood still, expected the touch of the idoikkhefor it; she did not move either.
“Aiela,” she said then, in a greatly controlled voice, “I was disadvantaged before my nasithi-katasakke.” And when he only stared at her, helplessly unenlightened: “For three thousand years Ashanomehas taken no outsider- m’metaneaboard,” she said. “I have never dealt with the likes of you.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“You disputed with my nasithi.Then you turned the same discourtesy on me. Had you no perception?”
“I had cause,” he declared in temper too deep-running to reckon of her anger, and his hand went to the idoikkheon reflex. “ Thisdoesn’t turn off my mind or my conscience, and I still want to know what you intend with the man Daniel.”
Chimele literally trembled with rage. He had never seen so dangerous a look on any sane and sentient face, but the pain he expected did not come. She stilled her anger with an evident effort.
“ Nas-suphres,” she said in a tone of cosmic contempt. “You are hopeless, m’metane.”
“How so?” he responded. “How so— ignorant?”
“Because you provoke me and trust my forbearance. This is the act of a stupid or an ignorant being. And did I truly believe you capable of vaikka,you would find yourself woefully out-matched. You are not irreplaceable, m’metane,and you are perilously close to extinction at this moment.”
“I have no confidence at all in your forbearance, and I well know you mean your threats.”
“The clumsiness of your language makes rational conversation impossible. You are nothing, and I could wipe you out with a thought. I should think the reputedly ordered processes of the kalliran mind would dictate caution. I fail to perceive why you attack me.”
Mad, he thought in panic, remembering at the same time that she had mental control of the idoikkhe.He wanted to leave. He could not think how. “I have not attacked you,” he said in a quiet, reasoning voice, as one would talk to the insane. “I know better.”