C. Cherryh - Cuckoo's Egg

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 arid 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?"