Dushau

Flash of yellow, indigo, silver. She blinked. Jindigar sat in a silver chairmobile, dressed in the yellow sickbay gown and robe, a white bandage wrapped thickly about his chest. As he came up to the side of her bed, he was gri

Her throat constricted. A projection? She forced herself up and reached to touch him, gasping as her fingers met warm Dushau nap, silken-textured, real. "Jindigar?" His hand closed over hers, firm, living flesh. "But you were dead. I know you were dead."

"I thought so at the time and regretted it." With a puzzled frown, he asked, "Krinata, if you thought I was dead, why did you risk your life to drag me into the lander?"

She said the first thing she thought of. "Because I promised Arlai to bring you back." But that wasn't the whole reason. She could still feel her infinite relief at obeying the imperial trooper's order to come out of the water. At the same time, her nerves still screamed with the shock of amputation at seeing Jindigar dead at her feet, because she'd obeyed. "Besides, I guess you weren't dead."

Arlai said, 'Technically, he was. Minutes—seconds even– and I wouldn't have been able to revive him short of Renewal, and even that would have been chancey. Jindigar owes you his life—everyone aboard does—and so do I."

"Krinata," said Jindigar, "I never meant for you to risk your life like that. Arlai's right. We owe you more than we can ever repay. It's a debt—"

She waved that aside, subliminally uncomfortable about it. "It's enough for me that we all survived."

And with that, she felt an overwhelming weakness drag her back to the bed. "Are you drugging me?"

"No," answered Arlai. "Your body demands rest. Everything is in order. We will care for you."

Over the next few days, Krinata slept a lot. At odd intervals, she heard Grisnilter and Jindigar talking in the next room. She could never follow the gist of it, but the tone was clear. Jindigar held the old Dushau Historian in deep affection, but steadfastly refused to do whatever it was Grisnilter wanted of him. Once, just once, she heard the old Dushau's voice soften with affection. But just after that, Jindigar played Lelwatha's last composition. That evening, she heard Arlai banishing Grisnilter from Jindigar's room. She cursed the weakness preventing her from going to him.

But then Jindigar was released from sickbay, and there were hours of solitude in which to brood over the events of the last few days. She made many discoveries about herself.

She was astonished how quickly she came to chafe at Arlai's insistence on bedrest. Between naps, she'd force herself to stagger about the room from bed to drawers to closet to chair and back to bed. Forcing her strength to the limit was an adventure. She was always sweating and shaking when she returned to the bed, but the exhilaration of that small triumph echoed the heady feeling of being awake, alive, and real to the self she'd known during those moments of heightened terror or all-out striving.

In a perverse way, she was looking forward to their next planetfall, if only for that tremendously alive feeling. She wasn't going to be left out because her body was weak.

Yet at the same time, whenever she lay still, the ugly scenes of carnage played through her mind, no matter how she squirmed away from them. When she told Arlai her nightmares, he explained he'd spread a sensor disrupting dust over the battle field, harmless in itself. He hadn't expected any pilot to be crazy enough to try to land in it.

"But you were!"

"I was using a different sensor system, and there was a risk, Krinata. But it was within acceptable limits."

She hoped, but refused to ask, that Jindigar had set up those risk limits. No Sentient should be free to make such judgments alone. And that brought back all she'd seen of Jindigar's Sentient. Sentients weren't supposed to be able to break the law, either.

Later, when Jindigar strolled into her sickbay room, looking more fit than ever, and saw her stagger across the floor to fall onto the bed, panting, he helped her lie down and asked, "What do you think you're doing?"

"Getting ready for Khol." But she knew it was this activity alone that kept the mounting conflict within her manageable, but she wasn't going to tell him that.

"Khol?!" he repeated, offended. "Krinata, I can't ask anything like that of you again."

She pulled herself up, folded her arms across her chest, and said, "Why not? You can ask anything of me; I can always say no. In this case, I agreed to help you rescue your friends. Are you giving up like Grisnilter wants you to?" It was a stab in the dark; she hadn't understood their private arguments, only the tone.

"Grisnilter?" He eyed the open door to the adjoining room where he had stayed. "That's the least of what he wants of me. He wants me to become a different person. He has good reasons, but I have rights."

"What kind of a different person?" / like him as is.

"Well, for one thing, less interested in the kind of a person you are. Krinata, do you want to go down to Khol with me? Or is it your sense of honor?"

She couldn't answer the question. Part of her remembered how good it felt to obey that imperial trooper's order. Her i

She'd never been a philosopher, never been very introspective. She had no tools to grapple with this land of conflict.

Jindigar sprawled across the bottom of her bed, propping himself up on his elbows seemingly without pain. He regarded her in silence as she thought. The image of him lying dead at her feet flashed, vividly enough that she was surprised when there was no mud left on the sheets. But that bereft, dead feeling was back full force. She couldn't send him off to face troops again, while she sat in orbit and waited.

"Yes, I want to go," she answered at last. "If you're not going to give up on your friends—"

"No. I'm not giving up. Arlai intercepted a news traffic-capsule, read it, and returned it to its route. The situation on Khol is desperate. Several hundred Dushau were stranded there. They've either all been executed, or perhaps spirited away by a mysterious resistance movement. But they've only just begun hunting down my associates.

"Krinata, you know there's always been a large Dushau population on Khol. It's a prime jumping-off place for expeditions, and it has some of the finest Corporate League libraries and museums left in existence. Fully a third of the population must be acquainted with at least one Dushau."

"Well, then maybe it won't be so bad there. Maybe your friends will be safe."

He shook his head. "Nothing could save her even four years ago. It'll be worse now."

"Her?"

'Terab. She was a space liner captain. My eldest son was deadheading to Khol—he's a freighter captain—to meet his ship. In deep space, alone among Ephemerals, he went into Renewal. She made a nonscheduled stop to drop him at Dushaun. She was cashiered for it, and blackballed. Now, she and her husband run a souvenir pottery shop."

The terse recital raised a thousand questions for Krinata, but above that curiosity, she felt Jindigar's sense of responsibility for this Holot, Terab. She was willing to bet Jindigar had provided the money to set up the shop. "Jindigar, I want to help you rescue Terab. But I have to ask you something first." She stopped, not knowing how to phrase a question that wasn't also accusation.