C. Cherryh: Cuckoo's Egg

Thorn shut his eyes. There were tears. ("Don't you know by now I can't?") They ran when he blinked and shattered Duun's image when he looked at Duun again. 'You're maneuvering me."

"I'm hatani. Of course. I always have been. I told you that."

"The way you maneuvered Tangan. Gods- why? What do you want?"

"You're the world's long nightmare. A bad dream. Everything earth has went to build Gatog, to build that other ship- You understand what it is to jump that far that fast in industry? New materials, new processes, new physics-new fears and new money and all that goes with it. Politics. Companies. A world that had just reached out into space-and all of a sudden- discoveries that shatter it. Energies that, gods help us-we're still unraveling, technologies with potentials we're not ready to cope with, with all that means. We didn't know, when that ship transmitted, how long we had before an answer might come. We know now that ship came from a star nine light-years out. That's when the first message came-nine years after that ship first transmitted. We don't know how fast the ship traveled. We're beginning to understand that. It's fast. It's very fast. Translight. I was naive at first. I imagined we had years- half of a century-to get here. Duplicate the ship. Teach them a lesson. Send the kosan guild to deal with them and hatani to settle matters. We know a lot more now-what the cost of a ship like that is when you have to develop each part and joint as a new technology; the social cost of changes. It's made us rich. It's made us capable of blowing ourselves to hell. The tapes, minnow, the tapes-we salvaged off the ship. The machine that runs them, the drug that we found with them. A whole new category of drugs; a new vice. Gods, I had to be so careful with you. Every substance, every damn plant you touched-drove the meds crazy. Livhl you could take; sjuuna and mara; dsuikin, never-"

("Try this, minnow, try it on your tongue, never swallow first-off-")

"-you tolerate most things; we tolerate most of yours. Thank the gods that's so, or you'd have lived in virtual isolation."

(Sheon, the leaves moving in the summer wind, green and fragrant-)

(The stinging smell of high-flowers on the long road down from home to exile-)

"Am I the only one, am I all, Duun?"

"Yes. There was argument on that point. A lot of it. All they could see was the tapes; read the tapes; if he doesn't live, if he should meet with accident… But there was only one of me, minnow; and I had to teach you, my way; learn from you, my way. If you'd been in isolation, I would have been too. We were bound together. To make you what you are took me, and it took those tapes, minnow- Some of them, gods know, maybe simple entertainment for the crew-the one that was the key. There are others. The audio you heard-that's from Gatog. The messages come regularly. You know what I imagine they say? 'Here we are. You killed our messenger.' But I don't know what they say after that. I don't know how long they'll wait. They know we've got a ship. They know whatever that pilot told them. They're killing me. I can't leave. They're poor primitives. They're not worth much. But look out for them.' "

"You think they're going to attack." "I planned to be capable of coming to them- whatever they're doing. But the way that ship works-the way they think it works- We guess wrong and we might lose Gatog. We might lose everything. The irony is, minnow, we can push it out to some safe distance and try-but we'd be flying that ship with no knowledge how to do it. Even if it works. And we can't start that kind of engine near anything else. And not from a standing start, they tell me. The awful truth is we don't know the last things. We don't know how to fly it. If we did we could have saved Ganngein and Nonnent . It's that fast- even inside a solar system. Outside-gods help us, we don't know."

"Am I supposed to do something about this?" Thorn trembled, a brief convulsion. "Am I what the ghota want to stop?"

"There are three kinds of people I've found: those who think the universe is good, those who believe it's corrupt, and those who don't want to think about it any more than they can help. I prefer the first two. The last can be hired by anybody. Dallen Company wants you stopped because they're scared of you: so do others; the ghota are just damn scared of your being hatani and not theirs, and of more and more knowledge in hatani hands and not theirs. They're dying and they know it. The world can't afford them anymore. It can't afford ignorance. The tanun, the kosan guilds-you're their hope."

"To do what? Fly that ship?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Someday. What would you do?"

"O gods."

" Now you know what you're for."

"Don't ask me this! Duun-"

"Haras-hatani, what will you do?"

Thorn walked off across the floor, raised his hands to his head, dropped them. There were no thoughts. Nothing but a tumbling of images. (The boulders in the sand, each with a hatani.

Tangan's aged mask and Sagot's blurred. Manan's impersonal voice: "That's a miss on their side, a hit on ours. It's down." Ganngein 's: "This isn't a trip we want to share.")

He looked back at Duun. At a quiet shadow against the vast illusion of the windows.

"Well?" Duun asked.

"I'm not even eighteen years old!"

"I didn't say it was all in your lap. You're not responsible for the ghota. You're not to blame for the world's foolishness; but it's burning, Haras-hatani. And maybe that eighteen years is all the world is going to have. What will you do to stop it?"

(Go back to earth? How could I stop it? Who would hear me? Hatani. Tanun guild; kosanin would hear Duun.)

(A room with a bed, a bath, a fire, and hidden tricks. What is my room? This place. This world. How do I put out the fire but with my bare hands? Am I twice a fool?)

( Now you know what you're for.)

Thorn looked about him, the windows, the glittering sprawl of Gatog; the computer banks. (The ghotanin are afraid of something. This. Of its use.)

(The tapes. The voices.)

"I see," Thorn said. "You already know what you want me to do. You think you know. You wonder what I think. Pathways? Is that it?"

"Maybe just the hope of something better. Tell me your solution."

"The ship transmitted. Did the message go out translight?"

"No. Lightspeed."

"The pilot knew they wouldn't be in time then. He wasn't asking them to save him."

"No. There was no hope of that. So what did he want, hatani?"

"How can I know? You taught me."

"Perhaps you can't. A great deal of you is shonun."

"But the messages started nine years later. They say, 'hello; here we are.' And they go on saying it. And he said: 'I'm dying; they're killing me and they have such little ships.' They know we can't come to them. Don't they?"

"They've known at least since that message got to them, seven years, nine years after he was dead. And nine years after that attack on their ship their first messages came to us. And still come."

"How long have you been getting them now? Five years?"

"Near seven."

Thorn shut his eyes a moment. Opened them. "People should have been relieved."

"Some were. Some were simply reminded. Others said the ship wasn't really translight, that nothing could do that, that the message was a trick and timed to take us off our guard: that ships would be arriving sublight. And soon. And they hired the ghota, who saw only money and a chance to stop the hatani guild from getting control of the war they believed would come. The war they've already started."

"To see who meets those ships."

"That, yes."

"Is it so simple, then? The ship out there could transmit."

"Even simpler. Gatog can."

"They wouldn't hear me for nine years!"