The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  Silence. He pushed Door-Open.

  It was a slaughterhouse inside. Blood was spattered over walls and beds. Sikutu—lying on the floor among the beds and pallets, red all over his lab whites from his perforated chest; Minnan and Polly and Tom, lying in their beds with their bedclothes sodden red, with startled eyes and twisted bodies. Throats cut. Faces slashed.

  One bed was empty. The sheets were thrown back. He cast about him, counted bodies, lost in horror— heard the footsteps at his back and turned in alarm.

  Anne stood there, facelights flashing, cameras clicking into focus.

  "Captain," Warren said: Anne was a relay herself. "Captain, it's Sax. He's gone. . . everyone else is dead. He's got a knife or something. Is there any word from Abner?"

  "I can't raise him." Burlin's voice came from Anne. "Get a gun. Go to the lock. Abner was in that area last."

  "Assistance." The voice changed; Anne's mechanical tones. The pseudosome swiveled, talking to the dead. "Assistance?"

  Warren wiped his face, caught his breath. "Body," he said distractedly. "Dispose." He edged past the pseudosome, ran for the corridor, for the weapons locker.

  The locker door was dented, scarred as if someone had hammered it, slashed at it; but it was closed. He used his card on it. It jammed. He used it for a lever, used his fingertips, pried it open. He took one of the three pistols there, ignored the holsters, just slammed it shut and ran for the lift.

  Downward again. His hands were shaking as he rode. He fumbled at the safety. He was a navigator, had never carried a gun against any human being, had never fired except in practice. His heart was speeding, his hands cold.

  The lift stopped; the door whipped open on the dark maze of netherdeck, of conduits and walkways that led to the lock.

  He reached for the light switch below the com panel. The lift door shut behind him, leaving him in darkness. He hesitated, pushed the button.

  He walked carefully along the walk. The metal grids of the decking echoed underfoot. He passed aisles, searching for ambush. . . flexed his fingers on the gun, thinking of it finally, of what he was doing.

  A catwalk led out to the lift platform, to the huge circular cargo plate, the lift control panel. The plate was in down-position, leaving a deep black hole in netherdeck, the vertical tracks showing round the pit. He reached the control station, pressed the button.

  Gears synched; hydraulics worked. The platform came up into the light. A shape was on it, a body in a pool of blood. Abner.

  Warren punched the station com. "Captain," he said, controlling his voice with marvelous, reasonable calm. "Captain, Abner's dead. Out on the lift platform, netherdeck. Shall I go outside?"

  "No," Burlin's voice came back.

  He shivered, waiting for more answer. "Captain."

  He still kept it calm. "Captain, what do you want me to do?"

  Silence and static. Warren cut it off, his hand clenched to numbness on the gun. He flexed it live again, walked out onto the echoing platform, looked about him, full circle, at the shadows. Blood trailed off the platform's circle, stopped clean against the opposing surface. Gone. Outside. He hooked the gun to his belt, stooped and gathered Abner up, heaved the slashed body over his shoulder. Blood drenched him, warm and leaking through his clothes. The limbs hung loose.

  He carried it—him; Abner; six years his friend. Like Sikutu. Like Sax.

  He kept going, to the lift, trailing blood, retracing all his steps. There was silence all about, ship-silence, the rush of air in the ducts, the thousand small sounds of Anne's pumps and fans. Two of them now, two of them left, himself and Burlin. And Sax— out there; out there, escaped, in paradise.

  He took Abner upstairs, carried him down the corridor, in the semidark of Power-Save.

  The pseudosome was busy there, carrying Sikutu's bloody form to the destruct chamber. Warren followed it, automaton like the other, trying to feel as little. But the bodies were stacked up there at the foot of the destruct chamber door, a surplus of bodies. Only one was jammed inside. Minnan. Warren's knees weakened. He watched the pseudosome let Sikutu down atop the others, saw it coming back, arms outstretched.

  "Assistance?"

  He surrendered Abner to it, stomach twisting as he did. He clamped his jaws and dogged the door on Minnan and pushed the button.

  They did the job, he and the pseudosome. He threw up, after, from an empty stomach.

  "Assistance?" Anne asked. "Assistance?"

  He straightened, wiped his face, leaned against the wall. "Sterilize the area. Decontaminate." He walked off, staggered, corrected himself, pushed the nearest com button, having composed himself, keeping anger from his voice. "Captain. Captain, I've got the bodies all disposed. The area's being cleaned." Softly, softly, he talked gently to this man, this last sane man. "Can we talk, sir?"

  "Warren?" the plaintive voice came back.

  "Sir?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "Sir?" He waited. There was only the sound of breathing coming through. "Sir—are you on the bridge? I'm coming up there."

  "Warren—I've got it."

  "No, sir." He wiped his forearm across his face, stared up at the com unit. He began to shake. "What am I supposed to do, sir?" He forced calm on himself. "What can I do to help?"

  A delay. "Warren, I'll tell you what I've done. And why. You listening, Warren?"

  "I'm here, sir."

  "I've shut down controls. We can't beat this thing. I've shut her down for good, set her to blow if anyone tries to bypass to take off. I'm sorry. Can't let us go home. . . taking this back to human space. It could spread like wildfire, kill—kill whole colonies before the meds could get it solved. I've set a beacon,

  Warren. She'll play it anytime some probe comes in here, when they do come, whenever."

  "Sir—sir, you're not thinking—A ship in space—is a natural quarantine."

  "And if we died en route—and if someone got aboard—No. No. They mustn't do that. We can't lift again."

  "Sir—listen to me."

  "No animals, Warren. We never found any animals. A world like this and nothing moving in it. It's a dead world. Something got it. Something lives here, in the soil, something in the air; something grew here, something fell in out of space—and it got all the animals. Every moving thing. Can't let it go—"

  "Sir—sir, we don't know the rest of us would have died. We don't know that. You may not, and I may not, and what are we going to do, sir?"

  "I'm sorry, Warren. I'm really sorry. It's not a chance to take—to go like that. Make up your own mind. I've done the best thing. I have. Insured us against weakness. It can't leave here."

  "Captain- "

  Silence. A soft popping sound.

  "Captain!" Warren pushed away from the wall, scrambled for the lift and rode it topside, ran down the corridor toward the bridge. He thrust his card into the lock.

  It worked now. The door slid. And Burlin was there, slumped at the com station, the gun beneath his hand. The sickroom stink was evident. The fever. The minute hemorrhages on the hands. Blood pooled on the com counter, ran from Burlin's nose and mouth. The eyes stared, reddened.

  Warren sat down in the navigator's chair, wiped his face, his eyes, stared blankly, Finding it hard to get his breath. He cursed Burlin. Cursed all the dead.

  There was silence after.

  He got up finally, pulled Burlin's body back off the com board, punched in the comp and-threw the com wide open, because the ship was all there was to talk to. "Anne," he said to comp. "Pseudosome to bridge. Body. Dispose."

  In time the lift operated and the silver pseudo-some arrived, leisurely precise. It stood in the doorway and surveyed the area with insectoid turns of the head. It clicked forward then, gathered up Burlin and walked out.

  Warren stayed a time, doing nothing, sitting in the chair on the bridge, in the quiet. His eyes filled with tears. He wiped at one eye and the other, still numb.

  When he did walk down to destruct to push the button, the pseudosome
was still standing beside the chamber. He activated it, walked away, left the robot standing there.

  It was planetary night outside. He thought of Sax out there, crazed. Of Sax maybe still alive, in the dark, as alone as he. He thought of going out and hunting for him in the morning.

  The outside speakers.

  He went topside in haste, back to the bridge, sat down at the com and opened the port shields on night sky. He dimmed the bridge lights, threw on the outside floods, illuminating grass and small shrubs round about the ship.

  He put on the outside address.

  "Sax. Sax, it's Paul Warren. There's no one left but us. Listen, I'm going to put food outside the ship tomorrow. Tomorrow, hear me? I'll take care of you. You're not to blame. I'll take care of you. You'll get well, you hear me?"

  He kept the external pickup on. He listened for a long time, looked out over the land.

  "Sax?"

  Finally he got up and walked out, down to the showers, sealed his clothes in a bag for destruct.

  He tried to eat after that, wrapped in his robe, sitting down in the galley because it was a smaller place than the living quarters and somehow the loneliness was not so deep there; but he had no appetite. His throat was pricklish. . . exhaustion, perhaps. He had reason enough. The air-conditioning felt insufficient in the room.

  But he had driven himself. That was what.

  He had the coffee at least, and the heat suffused his face, made him short of breath.

  Then the panic began to hit him. He thrust himself up from the table, dizzy in rising, vision blurred— felt his way to the door and down the corridor to the mirror in the showers. His eyes were watering. He wiped them, tried to see if there was hemorrhage. They were red, and the insides of the lids were red and painful. The heat he had felt began to go to chill, and he swallowed repeatedly as he walked back to the galley, testing whether the soreness in his throat was worse than he recalled over the last few hours.

  Calm, he told himself. Calm. There were things to do that had to be done or he would face dying of thirst, of hunger. He set about gathering things from the galley, arranged dried food in precise stacks beside the cot in the lower-deck duty station, near the galley. He made his sickbed, set drugs and water and a thermal container of ice beside it.

  Then he called the pseudosome in, walked it through the track from his bed to the galley and back again, programmed it for every errand he might need.

  He turned down the bed. He lay down, feeling the chill more intense, and tucked up in the blankets.

  The pseudosome stood in the doorway like a silver statue, one sensor light blinking lazily in the faceplate. When by morning the fever had taken him and he was too weak to move coherently, he had mechanical hands to give him water. Anne was programmed to pour coffee, to do such parlor tricks, a whim of Harley's.

  It wished him an inane good morning. It asked him How are you? and at first in his delirium he tried to answer, until he drifted too far away.

  "Assistance?" he would hear it say then, and imagined a note of human concern in that voice. "Malfunction? Nature of malfunction, please?"

  Then he heaved up, and he heard the pseudosome's clicking crescendo into alarm. The emergency Klaxon sounded through the ship as the computer topside registered that there was something beyond its program. Her lights all came on.

  "Captain Burlin," she said again and again, "Captain Burlin, emergency."

  2

  The pulsing of headache and fever grew less. Warren accepted consciousness gradually this time, fearful of the nausea that had racked him the last. His chest hurt. His arms ached, and his knees. His lips were cracked and painful. It amazed him that the pain had ebbed down to such small things.

  "Good morning."

  He rolled his head on the pillow, to the soft whirr of machinery on his right. Anne's smooth-featured pseudosome was still waiting.

  He was alive. No waking between waves of fever. His face felt cool, his body warm from lying too long in one place. He lay in filth, and stench.

  He propped himself up, reached for the water pitcher, knocked it off the table. It rolled empty to Anne's metal feet.

  "Assistance?"

  He reached for her arm. "Flex."

  The arm bent, lifting him. Her motors whirred in compensation. "Showers."

  She reoriented herself and began to walk, with him leaning on her, his arm about her plastic-sheathed shoulder, like some old, familiar friend.

  She stopped when she had brought him where he wished, out of program. He managed to stand alone, tottering and staring at himself in the mirror. He was gaunt, unshaven, covered with filth and sores. His eyes were like vast bruises. He swore, wiped his eyes and felt his way into a shower cabinet.

  He fainted there, in the shower stall, came to again on the floor, under the warm mist. He managed to lever himself up again, got the door open, refused a second dizziness and leaned there till it passed. "Anne."

  A whirring of motors. She planted herself in the doorway, waiting.

  She got him topside, to the living quarters, to his own compartment door. "Open," he told her hoarsely; and she brought him inside, to the edge of his own unused bed, to clean blankets and clean sheets. He fell into that softness panting and shivering, hauled the covers over himself with the last of his strength.

  "Assistance?"

  "I'm all right."

  "Define usage: right."

  "Functional. I'm functional."

  "Thank you."

  He laughed weakly. This was not Anne. Not she. It. Anne was across the living quarters, in controls, all the company there was left.

  Thank you. As if courtesy had a point. She was the product of a hundred or more minds over the course of her sixteen-year service, men and women who programmed her for the moment's convenience and left their imprint.

  Please and thank you. Cream or sugar, sir? She could apply a wrench or laser through the pseudosome, lift a weight no man could move, bend a jointing into line or make a cup of coffee. But nothing from initiative.

  Thank you.

  It was another few hours before he was sure he was going to live. Another day before he did more than send Anne galleyward and back, eat and sleep again.

  But at last he stood up on his own, went to his locker, dressed, if feebly.

  The pseudosome brightened a second sensor at this movement, then a third. "Assistance?"

  "Report, Anne."

  "Time: oh six four five hours ten point one point two three. Operating on standby assistance, program E one hundred; on program A one hundred; on additional pro—"

  "Cancel query. Continue programs as given." He walked out into the living quarters, walked to the bridge, stood leaning on Burlin's chair, surrounded by Anne's lazily blinking consoles, by scanner images no one had read for days. He sat down from weakness.

  "Anne. Do you have any program to lift off?"

  The console lights rippled with activity. Suddenly Burlin's deep voice echoed through the bridge. "Final log entry. Whoever hears this, don't—repeat, don't—land. Don't attempt assistance. We're dead of plague. It got aboard from atmosphere, from soil. . . somehow. It hit everyone. Everyone is dead. Biological records are filed under—"

  "Cancel query. Reply is insufficient. Is there a course program in your records?"

  "Reply to request for course: I must hold my position. If question is made of this order, I must replay final log entry. . . Final log entry—"

  "Bypass that order. Prepare for lift!"

  The lights went red. "I am ordered to self-destruct if bypass is attempted. Please withdraw request."

  "Cancel—cancel bypass order." Warren slumped in the chair, stared at the world beyond the viewport, deadly beguiling morning, gold streaming through cumulus cloud. It was right. Burlin had been right; he had ensured even against a survivor. Against human weakness.

  "Anne." His voice faltered. "Take program. If I speak, I'm speaking to you. I don't need to say your name. My voice will activate your r
esponses. I'm Paul Warren. Do you have my ID clear?"

  "ID as Warren, Paul James, six eight seven seven six five eight—"

  "Cancel query. How long can your pseudosome remain functional?"

  "Present power reserve at present rate of consumption: three hundred seventy-eight years approximate to the nearest—"

  "Cancel query. Will prolonged activity damage the pseudosome?"

  "Modular parts are available for repair. Attrition estimate: no major failure within power limits."

  Warren gazed out at the daybreak. Sax, he thought. He had made a promise and failed it, days ago. He tried to summon the strength to do something about it, to care—to go out and search in the hope that a man could have lived out there, sick, in the chill of nights and without food. He knew the answer. He had no wish to dwell on guilt, to put any hope in wandering about out there, to find another corpse. He had seen enough. More than enough.

  "Library. Locate programming manual. Dispense."

  An agitation ran across the board and a microfilm shot down into the dispenser. He gathered it up.

  There was this, for his comfort. For three hundred seventy-eight years.

  Anne was a marvelous piece of engineering. Her pseudosome was capable of most human movements; its structure imitated the human body and her shining alloy was virtually indestructible by heat or corrosion. Walk-through programming made her capable in the galley: her sensitive vid scanners could read the tapes on stored foods; her timing system was immaculate. She carried on domestic tasks, fetched and carried, and meanwhile her other programs kept more vital functions in working order: circulation, heating, cooling throughout the ship, every circuit, all automated, down to the schedule of lighting going on and off, to the inventory reports going up on the screens each morning, for crew who would no longer read them.

  Warren worked, ignoring these processes, trusting Anne for them. He read the manual, wrote out programs, sitting naked in bed with the microfilm reader on one side and a coffee pot on the other and a lap full of notes.