The Deep Beyond: Cuckoo's Egg / Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  Yet another turn, and Weig and the others were there, their backs to them, their faces toward a great lighted scaffolding prisoning something from which the lights could not utterly remove the darkness— it looked older than the shining girders which embraced it: a cylinder of metal no longer bright.

  “That’s a ship,” Duun said, “The ship.”

  Thorn said nothing. He hung there, lost, held only by Duun’s hand. He had no more wish to be inside, wherever inside was, than to hang here forever in the blaze of these lights. (Is this the place? Is this what cost so much? Do I go beyond this place or is this the stopping-point for us? Duun, Duun, is this your Solution?)

  Duun held him by the hand and dived down (or up) into the well, which was green as Sheon’s leaves. The walls spun and turned about them.

  In the heart of the well in the hub, was a hatch that flowered with gold light. They came into it, and Weig and the others did.

  Then it closed and delivered them to another chamber with several metal poles in it and a sign that told them where down was. Duun grabbed a pole holding onto Thorn; Mogannen and Chindi did; Spart and Weig took the other; there came a great shock that made them sway and then rise.

  “Hang on,” Duun said when Thorn grabbed the pole for himself. “It does it one more time. We’re bound for the rim.”

  It was like a ship moving; down began to feel alarmingly sideways, and the cylinder seemed slowly to change its pitch before it jolted into contact and the door opened.

  There were attendants, men and women wearing ordinary kilts, all white; Duun pulled his helmet off and Thorn did so with the rest.

  (Look your fill. Stare at me.) Thorn kept his eyes from them and handed the helmet to a woman he never looked at. “Sey Duun,” a man said, “they’d like to see you in the office.”

  “They’ll have to come to me,” Duun said. He peeled his suit off, sat down and removed the boots. One attendant started to touch the baggage and Thorn moved and stepped on the strap. The attendant changed his mind. And Duun smiled with the twisted side. It was right. After drifting so long Thorn knew something, if only so small a thing. They did not touch him and they did not touch Duun and they kept their hands off the baggage.

  Weig and his crew took their leave. “Duun-hatani,” Weig said, nothing else. He seemed moved. “Weig-tanun,” Duun said. “Appeal to me if things don’t go right.” And Duun gave a twisted smile: “Not all my solutions are so cursed difficult.”

  “I’ll remember,” Weig said, and took his crew away; but Ghindi looked back once, and Thorn paused.

  “Come on,” Duun said, standing up. Theirs was another door, that opened narrowly.

  (Tubes. The spinning place. Tubes and people like me—)

  But there were no such people. Thorn picked up the baggage and followed Duun, along the deserted corridor which bent upward and brought them to another room.

  Hatani waited for them there, three of them; Thorn saw the gray cloaks and felt profound relief. “Tagot, Desuuran, Egin,” Duun said. “Haras.”

  There were courtesies. Thorn bowed, looked up into careful hatani faces which did not intrude their passions into anyone’s view. He held the baggage with hands to which the last shreds of the gel still clung, and it was as if he had stood in a battering gale of others’ feelings, others’ fears; others’ needs— and found a sudden calm.

  “We’ll rest.” Duun said.

  “Duun-hatani. Haras.” Tagot’s hand indicated the way, and he walked with them, the others at their backs, and that order was all settled with the slightest of signs that left no doubt Duun would let them at his back. Thorn slung the carry strap to his shoulder and walked a little at Duun’s heel, rumpled and with his knee abraded raw again, with the red scars of burns on his hands, his hair loose and tending to fall into his eyes; but so was Duun scarred; but so was Duun’s silver hide stained dark with sweat at his shoulders and the small of his back.

  (Have we found a place, finally? Hatani live here. Is this a place we won’t be driven from?)

  They passed doors; they rode down two levels in an elevator; they walked down a bowed hallway that might have been the city tower in some distorted mirror.

  They opened one door; a hatani waited there in a short hall and opened yet another for them, on a large bare-floored room to which they had to step, as if it were all one riser on which other risers were built. The walls were barren and white. An elder hatani waited here. “Your rooms are safe,” that hatani said, and walked out, quietly, economically, with everything said that needed saying.

  “Food, bath, bed,” Duun said. Thorn set the baggage down and Duun opened it and took out his cloak. It wrapped another one. “This is yours.” Duun laid it on the riser. “When you need it.”

  Thorn looked at it and looked at Duun. And Duun walked away, himself in search of those things he had named.

  • • •

  It was not, ultimately, safe: Duun knew this. There were always, where shonunin existed, ways to corrupt and ways to strike at a target. The ghotanin had thought at Gatog One they had chosen the most vulnerable target in the shuttle; at Gatog Two the fight was likely to be closer to the station itself, but ghotanin might change their minds and divert their attention here. Dallen Company was not funding them anymore. There was a likelihood they would try to hold the earth station now, and stalemate Tangen, who with kosan and tanun allies held the shuttleports and the earth-based controls of satellite defense. No great number would get into space in those few shuttles. Space was out of reach for most of earth now, perhaps for years and years, and the earth-station would be deprived of ships, if ghotanin risked the few they had left still outside the zone of the conflict.

  Duun padded into the darkened bedroom, taking no great care for quiet; and exhausted as Thorn was the boy likely waked. “It’s Duun,” Duun said. “Go on sleeping. I’ve business to take care of. Hatani are at every entrance to this place and I know them. Go on sleeping.”

  Thorn stirred in the bed, turned on his back and looked up at him in the twilight. Thorn smelled mostly of soap now. He had scrubbed and shaved. “You’ll be back.”

  “Oh, yes.” (So he perceives something.) “Deep sleep, Thorn: you can do that here. With them outside. Relax.”

  Duun left and closed the door this time.

  • • •

  Duun was back and there were visitors. “Who?” Thorn asked Duun at breakfast. “People who want to see you,” Duun said, looking at him across the unfamiliar table in a guarded, critical way. “Finish your breakfast and make yourself presentable. I don’t want to be ashamed.”

  Thorn laid down his plate in front of his ankles and put the spoon in it. “No, finish,” Duun said. “You have time. You’ve lost weight.”

  “I never liked this.” It was the green mince that was on his plate every day at home. It tasted like the fish oil that was in his pills when as a child he had bitten down on one. “My stomach’s queasy as it is.”

  “Do people worry you?”

  (Do you have a need, minnow?)

  “Their faces shout at me,” Thorn said. It was the best way he could explain it.

  Duun looked at him, still as a pond in winter. “Too many needs coming at you, is it, Haras-hatani?”

  “Duun, how is earth? Have you heard?”

  (He doesn’t want that question. He doesn’t want it at all.)

  “Sagot wishes you well,” Duun said.

  (He’s lying, surely he’s lying, his face is so good at it.) But it looked like truth. (Sagot in her room, Sagot waiting for me— O gods, I want to go home, Duun!)

  “I’m glad,” Thorn said. “Tell her that from me.”

  “I’ll relay that. Eat your breakfast.”

  Thorn turned on the riser and put his feet off, missing the teapot.

  “Thorn.”

  Thorn stopped; it was reflex.

/>   “Wear your cloak,” Duun said.

  • • •

  They were mostly old, the visitors, two very old, with the pale mask of age on them: one was hatani and another kosan guild. There were a scattering of shonunin of middle years, one with the dark crest of the Bigon: one with the silver-tip of the icy isle of Soghai: Thorn had heard of such people and never seen one. It was a woman, a hatani, and she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Sogasi, Duun named her, and Thorn stored away that name the way he stored the names of the others, in their sequence and their guilds, which were hatani and tanun and kosan. The tanun gazed at him with that frankness he had seen in Ghindi and Weig and the others; the kosan with something of dread and longing. The hatani shielded him from such things and he was grateful.

  The visitors never spoke to him. Few even looked him directly in the eyes, but the hatani did. (Thank you, Thorn sent to them in a little relaxing of his face, and got that message in return, the mere flicker of the muscle above an eye.) “We’ll talk later,” the old kosan said to Duun, “Tell him we’re glad to have seen him,” a tanun said, and Thorn was even gladder of the hatani cloak that gave him some protection, that lent him something to be besides smooth-skinned and different in their eyes. “Thank you,” Thorn said softly for himself, without a hint of pain. “It was a long trip, Voegi-tanun. I wish others could have made it here.”

  He shocked them somehow; he intruded himself with politenesses he thought were right and at least were true, and refused to care whether they spat on him or thanked him. He had missed saying that to Ghindi and Weig; to the woman at the hatch; to the pilots and to Sagot. He frightened Voegi. (That man was not supposed to talk to me, and now he thinks he did something his guild will disapprove.) Tanunin shouted everything in their movements, the little step back, Voegi’s drawing near his senior with a worried backslant of his ears. The other tanunin moved and made vague bows and showed every sign of leaving; the kosanin were more definite. The eldest hatani looked at Duun and got his dismissal. So the hatani turned and showed the others out.

  “What was that about?” Thorn asked.

  “Take a walk with me,” Duun said.

  • • •

  They passed through a huge room, after many halls, where a handful of workers in white, body-covering garments labored over terminals in their laps. It was all computers, row upon row of mostly empty risers. The few workers that were there turned in curiosity and stared in shock, and one by one began to get up. “Stay seated,” Duun said. His quiet voice went to the walls of that vast place, stopping all such movement. And more quietly still: “This is the control center. Nothing’s coming in now: this is all housekeeping.”

  “What do they do here?” Thorn asked, since questions seemed invited.

  “They monitor the equipment.” Duun brought him to the nearest corner of the room and used a card to open an elevator door: it was the sort they had ridden into the wheel. Thorn seized on the nearest support pole as the door shut; and they both held on.

  “Where are we going?” Thorn asked. Duun’s reticences maddened him. (But what would I know if he told me? He can’t tell me. He can only pose me riddles and let me get there as best I can.)

  “To the future,” Duun said. (Truth and untruth.) The elevator shifted and the strongest force was the grip of their hands on the pole, while other forces seemed more and more ambiguous. “You’ve seen the earth, from its simplest to its most complex. Its past, its present; you’re in Gatog, do you see no paradox?”

  “I’m helpless, Duun. Am I supposed to see?”

  “Change is your world. Flux and shift.”

  “Will we go home again?”

  “Is that your question?”

  The car shifted yet again, a violent sway, and seemed to have changed direction. Thorn clenched the pole and looked at the control panel and back to Duun. “We passed the core.” Duun said. “Now we’re going out again.”

  “Why did they make me, Duun?”

  Duun met his eyes belatedly. There was dreadful amusement on Duun’s face. The scarred mouth tautened on that side. “Is that the question? I’m answering it.”

  “In this place?” Thorn’s heart sped. Panic afflicted him. “Is this where I come from? This?”

  “I’ll show you something. We’re almost there.”

  (I don’t want to see. Stop it, Duun. Duun, tell me, don’t show me anything!)

  The car slowed again, turned, slammed home. The door opened on another room much like the last, but all the risers were vacant, their in-built monitors dark. Thorn walked out into it in Duun’s wake. The floors were bare and cold as all floors in this place. Like a ship. Like a laboratory. No foot left traces. There was no record of passage, no hint of time or change: it afflicted him. There were windows. Duun touched a wall-switch and they came alive clear across the far wall, showing the lights, the girders, the strange shapes that were Gatog.

  “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Duun said. “Don’t you see discrepancies?” Duun walked to a counter and pushed a button.

  Sounds began, static-filled, a sputtering crackle. “ . . . stop . . .” a voice said; it was a voice. “ . . . you . . . world . . .”

  (Gods. Gods. The tapes.)

  Duun pushed another button. (One beep. A word. Two. Word. . . .) Thorn came as far as the console and leaned on it beside Duun. His heart slammed against his ribs. “It comes from here.”

  Duun cut all the sound. The silence was numbing. Duun walked away, up the aisle toward the illusion of the windows and Thorn followed, on the trackless floor and stopped when the windows were all the view. Duun lifted his arm and pointed. “That’s what the ear picks up. It listens, minnow, it’s turned beyond this solar system. What does it say to us?”

  “Numbers.” Thorn looked and lost all sense of up and down. The vision reeled among lights and Gatog’s shape and the occasional bright stars, and Duun a gray-cloaked shadow against that bottomless void. “It talks about the stars, the elements— Stop playing games, Duun! What’s sending it?”

  “People.” Duun turned toward him. “People like you, minnow.”

  The room was very still. There had never been such a voice. There was nowhere such a voice. The windows were illusion and the world was.

  “No, Duun.”

  “Do you know differently?”

  “Dammit, Duun—don’t do this to me!”

  “You wanted your answer. There’s one more question. Do you want to ask it?”

  “What am I?”

  “Ah.” Duun walked to the window rim, eclipsing a light. “You’re a genetic code. So am I. Yours is different.”

  “I’m not shonun?”

  “Oh, gods, minnow, you’ve known that for years.” Duun faced him, twilight shadow against the glare, gray against the void. “You just didn’t know what else you could be. The world held all your possibilities. I created you. A code into an egg, not the first trial; there were thousands of tries till the meds got the right of it. A technology had to be built: we had the most of it, our own doing; but you were a special problem. And you— were the success. They brought you to me: they didn’t want to. They’d labored so hard to have you. Do you believe me, minnow? Am I telling the truth?”

  “I don’t know, Duun.” Thorn wanted to sit down. He wanted to go somewhere. There was no refuge, on this floor, beneath these windows.

  “It is the truth,” Duun said. “The ear picks up those messages. Perhaps there’s something in the pathways of the brain; perhaps it’s knowing one’s own face; perhaps both these things. You duplicate the sounds on the tapes perfectly; no shonun can manage all those consonants— no shonun could read the faces on that tape— except maybe myself; except Sagot sometimes. You taught me. You taught me your reflexes and your inmost feelings; and when we gave you the vocabulary we’ve been able to guess for ourselves— perhaps it’s pathways, gods know— you
began to handle it. That’s what you were made for.”

  “To live here? To work with this?”

  “It doesn’t appeal to you?”

  “Duun— take me home. O gods, take me home again.”

  “Haras. Don’t break down on me. You haven’t come this far to beg me like a child.”

  Thorn came over to the window and turned his back to it. It took the sight away. It put light on Duun’s face and hid his own. “Don’t play me tricks. I can’t—” (“Can’t, minnow?”) There was silence.

  “The transmissions come at regular intervals,” Duun said in a calm, still voice. “They repeat, mostly. What do they say?”

  “I told you what they said.”

  “You encourage me.”

  “To what?” Thorn looked up at the window; perspective destroyed the illusion, made it only glare and dark, meaningless. He flinched from it and looked back. “Is that why they’re afraid of me?”

  “I took an alien, I held it, fed it, warmed it— it was small, but it would grow. I took it up on a mountain and lived with it alone. I slept under one roof with it, I made it angry, I encouraged it and pushed it and I had nightmares, minnow, I dreamed that it might turn on me. There were times I held it that my flesh crawled; I did these things.”

  (Duun— o gods, Duun—) It was beyond hurt.

  “. . . I was more than fair with it. I gave it everything I had to give; I went from step to step. I made it shonun. I taught it; argued with it; discovered its mind and step by step I gave it everything I knew how to teach. Every chance. You grew up shonun. No one knew what to expect. When I told Ellud I would make you hatani he was appalled. When the world knew— there was near panic. No matter. It never reached you. When I told Ellud I would bring you to the guild— well, hatani was bad enough: their judgments were limited. But to put you in the guild— That was earthquake. And you won it. You won Tangen. You did it all, minnow.”

  “Do you love me, Duun?”

  (Thrust and evade.) Duun’s scarred ear twitched and he smiled. There was sorrow in it and satisfaction. “That’s a hatani question.”