The Faded Sun Trilogy by C. J. Cherryh

strange sorrow, as if her last son were somehow lacking in essential understanding; but gently she had spoken to him in generalities of patience and courage, and carefully she had declined to give any direct answer to his question.
    And day by day the regul ships departed, without mri kel’ein aboard. The she’pan forbade.
    He was watching the end. He understood that now, at least that. Of what it was an end he was not yet sure; but he knew the taste of finality, and that of the things he had desired all his life there was left him nothing. The regul departed, and hereafter came humans.
    He wished now desperately that he had applied himself with even more zeal to his study of human ways, so that he could understand what the humans were likely to do. Perhaps the elder kel’ein, who had such experience with them, knew; and perhaps therefore they thought that he should know, and would not reward ignorance withexplanation. Or perhaps they were as helpless as he and refused to admit the obvious to him; he could not blame them for that. It was that he simply could not admit that there was nothing to be done, that there were no preparations to be made, while the regul so desperately, so anxiously sought safety. He knew, with what faith remained to him in his diminishing store of things trustworthy, that the Kel would resist in the end; but they were to die, if that were the case. Their skill was great, greater than that of any kel’ein living, he believed; but the nine were also very old and very few to stand for long against the mass attacks of humans.
    The imagination came to him over and over again, as horrid and unreal as the departure of regul from his life—of humans arriving, of human language and human tread echoing in the sanctity of the edun shrine, of fire and blood and ten desperate kel’ein trying to defend the she’pan from a horde of defiling humans.
    Brothers, sister,
he longed to ask the kel’ein,
is it possible that there is some hope that I cannot see?
And then again he thought:
Or, o gods, is it possible that we have a she’pan who has gone mad? Brothers, sister, look, look, the ships!—our way off Kesrith. Make our she’pan see reason. She has forgotten that there are some here who want to live.
But he could not say such things to his elders, to Eddan; and he would ultimately have to account for those words to Intel’s face, and he could not bear that. He could not reason with them, could not discuss anything as they did among themselves, in secret: they, she—all save Melein and himself—remembered Nisren’s days, the life before the war. They had taken regul help once, escaping the ruin of Nisren, and refused it now, resolved together in councils from which he, not of the Husbands, was excluded. He insisted on believing that his elders were rational. They were too calm, too sure, to be mad.
    Forty-three years ago, the like had come to Nisren. A regul ship, rescuing she’pan Intel, had carried the holy Pana and the survivors of the edun to Kesrith. The elders did not speak of that day, scarcely even in songs: it was a pain written in their visible scars and in the secrecies of their silence.
    Shame?
he wondered, heart-torn at thinking ill of them.
Shame at something they did or did not do on Nisren? Shame at living, and unwillingness to survive another fall of Homeworld?
Sometimes he suspected, with dread growing and gnawing in him like some alien parasite, that such was the case, that he belonged to a she’pan that had wearied of running, to an edun that had consciously made up its mind to die.
    An edun which held the Pana, the Revered, the Objects of mri honor and mri history, to behold which was for the Sen alone, to touch which unbidden was to die; to lose which—
    To lose the relics of the People—
    It betokened the death, not alone of the edun, but of the People as a race. He held the thought a moment, turned it within his mind, then cast it aside in haste, and fearfully picked it up