The Faded Sun Trilogy by C. J. Cherryh Page A

again.
    O gods,
he thought, mind numbed by the very concept, Another shuttle lifted. He saw it rise, up, up, a star that moved.
    O gods, o gods.
    It was
shon’ai,
the Passing-game. It was the flash of blades in the dark, the deadly game of rhythm and bluff and threat and reckless risk.
    The Game of the People.
    The blades were thrown. Existence was gambled on one’s quickness and wit and nerve, for no other reason than to deserve survival.
    He felt the blood drain from his face to his belly, understanding why they had looked through him when he asked his vain questions.
    Join the rhythm, child of the People: be one with it; accept, accept, accept.
    Shon’ai!
    He cried aloud, and understood all at once. All over known space mri would react to the throw the she’pan of Kesrith had made. They would come, they would come, from all quarters of space, to fight, to resist.
    The Pana was set in the keeping of Edun Kesrithun.
    The circle was wide and the blades flew at seeming random, but each game tended to develop its unique pattern, and wisest the player who did not become hypnotized by it.
    Intel had cast. It was for others to return the throw.
    The first of Kesrith’s twin moons had brightened to the point of visibility. The stars became a dusty belt across the sky. The air grew chill, but he felt no impulse to return to the edun, to resume the mundane routine oftheir existence. Not this evening. Not upon such thoughts as he carried. Eventually the kel’ein would miss him, and look out and see him in his favorite place, and let him be. He spent many evenings here. There was nothing to do in the edun of evenings, save to sleep, to eat, to study things no longer true. None of them had sung the songs since the day the news of the war’s end came. They frequently sat and talked together, excluding him. Probably, he thought, it was a relief to them to have him gone.
    The geyser named Sochau belched steam far across the flats, a tall plume, predictable as the hours of any regul clock. By such rhythms the world lived, and by such rhythms it measured the days until the humans should come.
    But for the first time in all the days since he had heard of the war’s ending, he felt a suspicion of gladness, a fierce sense that the People might have something yet to do, and that humans might find their victory not an accomplished fact.
    A star grew in the sky as the other had departed, rapid and omen-filled. He looked up at it with quickening interest, enlivened by something, even a triviality, that was not part of the ordinary. The shuttles did not usually descend until morning.
    He watched it grow, cherishing imaginings both dread and hopeful, a mere child’s game, for he did not really believe that it would be anything but a variance in regul schedules for regul reasons, as ordinary as anything could be in the organized routine of Kesrith’s dying.
    He watched it descend and saw suddenly lights flare on at the port in the farthest area, realized suddenly that it was not coming down at the freighter or shuttle berths, but to the area given over to military landings, and it was no shuttle. It was a ship of size, such as the onworld port had not held in many years.
    The ship was nothing in the dark and the distance but a shape of light, featureless, nameless. There was nothing to indicate what it was. Of a sudden he knew his people must have word of this—that doubtless they had already been alert to it and only he had not been.
    He sprang down from his rock and began to run, swift feet changing course here and there at the outset where the fragile earth masked dangers of its own. He did not use the road, but ran crosslands, by an old mri trail, andcame breathless to the door of the edun, chest aching.
    There was silence in the halls. He paused only a moment, then took the stairs toward the she’pan’s tower, almost running up the first turn.
    And there a shadow met him—old Dahacha coming down, Dahacha with his great, surly dus