C. Cherryh - Cuckoo's Egg

"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."

"I was taught by the best."

(Second attack.) Duun's mouth tautened on the scarred side. "Let me tell you a story, minnow."

"Is it a good one?"

"It's how I lost the fingers. You've always wondered, haven't you? -I thought you had.

No one asks the questions of their relatives that they really want to know-after they grow up. And they never discover the good questions until it's far too personal to ask."

"Was it my fault?"

"Ah. I got through your guard."

"Tell me the story, Duun."

"We were rank beginners-I'm sure Sagot told you most of this: tanun guild took us into space, just the merest foothold. The moon. A station. The companies moved in. We had scientific bases here and there. Hatani guild, ghota, tanun-kosan here and there; not many. A lot of ordinary folk, doing what ordinary folk do- making money, mostly; or learning things. The world fared pretty well in those days. Then a ship turned up." Duun's face lifted slightly, a gesture toward the window, toward the lights. "The one out there."

"Not shonun," Thorn said.

"Not shonun. It was pretty badly battered when I first saw it. It's not clear what happened at first: it scared hell out of the Dothog mission and someone started shooting, it's not clear which side. They were ghotanin, of course. There wasn't much left to question to fix responsibility. But the ship didn't leave the solar system then-too heavily damaged. It moved off, faster than anyone wanted to believe; ghotanin and kosanin chased that thing where they could-we could at least tell each other where it was heading. And for the next two years we chased that ship and battered at it. We. Tangen sent me up. I wasn't chief of the mission then, but I survived longer. We battered away at it; we lost ships. Its maneuvers got slower. We knew it was transmitting. We knew it was transmitting to someone outside the solar system, and we finally silenced that. We chewed away at it and finally we got it at a speed we could match. We boarded. There was one of them still alive. We tried to take him that way. That was my mistake." Duun lifted the maimed hand, palm outward. "He got all the rest of us. One blast. I got through it and got to him. I killed him. We found out later the ship was rigged in a way that might have destroyed it. But he never did that. We found four others frozen in vacuum. And this one. Maybe he was crazy by then. Maybe he thought he could live a little longer. Maybe he was afraid to use that last trick. But I got back; we hauled that ship in with all it contained.

"It changed the world, Thorn. Until that time we thought we were alone. And this thing was a nightmare. Two years. Two years of throwing everything we had at it and it was five of these people. Just five. They nearly wrecked the world. They cost us-O gods. Nothing was the same. And there was panic. They came to me, the council did. I was very famous then. It was those first days: we'd stopped it damn close to the earth. That was why we fought like that, and why it cost so much. The council asked me to do something: Tangan had refused them. Hatani judgment? I asked them. Is that what you want? We'll give you anything, they said, any help. All our backing. I told them they were fools. They had all the provinces hammering at their doors demanding action, they had the companies, they had the guilds all pulling in different directions, and kosan and ghota at odds. You've been out there, they said; give us a solution. And I took them up on it." Duun motioned to the window. "I knew there were transmissions that went out from that ship while we hunted it. I thought there might be answers we couldn't hear. I called in scientists. I ordered Gatog built. I ordered that ship studied. I ordered it duplicated if we could. I ordered you-created. You're him, Thorn; you're the man on the ship. Born from his blood, his cells. You are my enemy. I made you over again. You are my war, my way to fight a war we didn't know how to fight. You're my answer. I knew what you would look like-what you will look like, in another ten-year. I knew what you'd grow into-physically. But now I know what I killed. What he might have been. If he were my son."