Dushau

"All my resources are at your disposal. Arlai and I will provide any information we can. But I can't encourage you to risk your life again. I will go down to Khol alone."

She didn't feel up to arguing, but knew she wouldn't rest until she could judge him. "Jindigar, societies must have codes of law to function. One who refuses to abide by its codes can't belong to that society, and thus is treated with under the rules for strangers or enemies. I've always thought of myself as an Allegiancy loyalist. At heart I still am, though I've committed political crimes. But on Cassr, imperial troops died, a moral crime as well as political. I've become an enemy of the Allegiancy."

She paused to fight back-tears, and he asked calmly, "What was your question?"

"Were you and Arlai always enemies of the Empire? Some of the things you've done are simply illegal, some—like giving Arlai such freedom—seem unmoral. What code of law do you obey? Is your society an enemy of the Empire?"

His face underwent several transformations as he considered. "Are you asking if Dushaun is an enemy of the Empire?"

That was her question, but she prompted, "Is it?"

"No."

That quiet statement gave her no clue to his sincerity or to the answer to her question. "Are you?"

"No." Into her silence, he added, "Neither are you."

"People have died!"

"I mourn."

She knew how much more Dushau suffered from death than Ephemerals, but she had to ask, "Is that enough! Are we blameless because we mourn?"

"No. And no. Krinata, you're asking me the purpose of life, the nature of death, the spiritual and material structure of reality, the origin and end of existence, and my identity within that structure and process. And you're expecting me to expound all of this in one breath."

"Can you?"

"Not so that you'd understand what I meant."

"Try me," she challenged.

He regarded her with a light of speculation growing in his wideset indigo eyes. Inexplicable thrills rushed up and down her spine as she perceived doors opening into his soul. Finally, he gave a deep sigh and sat up in his whule playing position, back straight, head slightly bowed as he breathed slowly and deeply. "Arlai, show her the Oliat signature."

Beside the bed a shaft of gray and white smoke lit an area from ceiling to floor. The lights in the room dimmed. After a long silence, a hologram of a strike of lightning etched down the column, seemingly as bright as the real thing, branching and rebranching until it reached ground and doubled back on itself, lashing up and down several times in slowed motion. It was accompanied by the unmistakable crack of a nearby lightning strike.

Warned, Krinata only flinched at the sound and squinted into the sudden brightness. The flash ended and the frame froze showing the fully branched tree of lightning. When hearing returned, she noticed Jindigar was humming. It was a low, gravely sub-musical sound, nasal, hardly articulated. The sound engulfed her and she felt as if she were inside a powerbeam. She realized he'd begun just as the lightning flashed. It went on a long, long time, until she thought she could feel the surging, churning of protoplasm in every cell of her body. She imagined she could feel every photon impinging on her skin. She could see with her whole body, which was the ship. Endless, infinite space dotted with seething life habitats, radiant beauty surrounded her. She became one with life everywhere, organizing matter into more and more complex forms, exulting, enraptured.

As his breath ran out, the sound ended, his eyes drooped closed, and he continued to sit, head bowed. As far as she could see he wasn't breathing. She stared, vaguely guilty, as if a high priest had revealed a sacred mystery to a noninitiate. She didn't have the capacity to take that initiation. She didn't have the will. Yet, spellbound, she wished she did, imagined she did. Buried within that simple experience were vistas of reality she had never dreamed existed. The more she saw of Jindigar's spiritual world, the more she realized the vastness of her ignorance, and the more she hungered to experience his reality. Yet, even if she lived a thousand years, she could never even scratch the surface. And humans rarely lived two hundred ears.

At last. Jindigar looked up, head tilted inquiringly. "That's the best I could do, not being in Renewal. You're the best debriefing ecologist I've ever worked with. If any Ephemeral could glimpse it, you could."

She held her breath, oddly reluctant to dash his obvious hope, peculiarly warmed to gain such a compliment from such a consummate professional Oliat officer. But she called herself to the brutal honesty she was asking of him, and said, "I'm sorry, even though you made me imagine what it would be like to understand, I still don't see a relationship between music, lightning, space, planets, the origin of life, ecstasy and whether you're an outlaw or a hero."

He seemed slightly disappointed, but chiding himself as if he'd expected the letdown. "I'm certainly no hero, Krinata, but if I were an enemy of the Allegiancy, would I not attempt to interfere with the Allegiancy's self-determination rather than ru

"Then why aren't you doing those things? Is it only because we lost Trassle's proof in that viewer?" She felt she was on the trail of her answer.

"There were ten copies. One of them will be brought to light soon, I'm sure. But there would have been nothing we could have done with ours. Coming from a Dushau or a known collaborator with Dushau, such evidence would be too easily dismissed as sedition."

Disturbed, he rose and paced the room, his old grace returned so that every move was a song. "Yet, even when the truth comes to light, it won't change anything. Zinzik may be deposed, but someone else—probably worse—will come to power. It's the Allegiancy itself that has decayed beyond saving. Zinzik is only a symptom, not a cause."

"I don't believe that," she challenged.

He faced her again, speaking with a trembling reverence he reserved only for the elder Dushau. "Grisnilter has seen six Ephemeral civilizations die of old age, and he carries memories of even older cycles reaching back before the human species' ancestors discovered the club. Our tangible, incontrovertible facts are only a hypothesis to you. I hope you won't find it condescending if I point out that, because of our differing lifespans, your values must be based on a different view of reality than ours? I respect your view, Krinata, but I can't live inside it."

"I think that's what's bothering me. I've seen you doing illegal things, and that disturbs me. I don't know why. It didn't bother me when I broke a prisoner of the Emperor out of jail after the Emperor had as much as declared me an outlaw. What else could I have done, gone happily to execution?" If I'd had Trassle's document then, I'd have taken it to the College of Kings, and none of this would have happened. But Jindigar was right, if they had it they couldn't use it now.

"Some people are going to their deaths, dutifully if not happily. I've always sensed a, well, a kinship in you. That you chose, in a snap decision, to defy an insane imperial decree merely confirms my judgment. That element in you which recognizes and acts is an Aliom ideal few Dushau ever achieve. Your misgivings show me you've achieved that ideal, if only in your unconscious life."

"Aliom ideal?" Again, she felt she was on to something.

But there was a pained sadness flickering through his wide-set eyes as he nodded, and paced another circle. "The philosophy or life system I adhere to is called Aliom. There is no Dushau philosophy, Dushau religion or culture, any more than there are human ones. Many human systems contain elements lauded by one or another of our systems."