Cuckoo's Egg

VII

They were five: Elanhen, a youth whose back had black tipping on the gray, broad of shoulder, with a wary eye turned to the world and a diffident and ready grin; he was first and easiest in his manner (wisest, Thorn thought: the manner is all he gives the world, he keeps all the rest reserved.) There was Cloen, a smallish fellow whose belly-fur had dapples-("Don't remark on it," Duun warned Thorn in advance when Duun described Cloen that way. "His baby-mark's still with him.") And Cloen was least outgoing, and quickest to frown. (He has a wound, Thorn thought; it bleeds into the water. Cloen would be an easy mark. If I were after him.)

And Sphitti, lank, unkempt Sphitti. They called him that, which was a kind of weed (like Thorn). Sphitti would sit and think and think and he hardly talked.

Lastly there was Betan-who was female; who moved with a wide-hipped stride, whose grin was sudden and whose wit was quicker than the rest. Betan smelled different. Betan wrinkled her nose at him and grinned in a way no one had ever looked at him, which frightened him. (Confidence. She knows things. She knows things I don't and knows she knows and she knows she can take me.) If Duun had looked that way at him and laughed inside like that Thorn would have gone cold to the soles of his feet. He would have eaten nothing and drunk nothing Duun could have dreamed of touching and not dared sleep in his bed. That a stranger looked at him this way was devastating. He stood staring back the first time that they met and put on his most frozen, expressionless face.

(They don't have the moves, Duun had insisted. But Duun had lied before.)

They met, all five of them, in a room Duun took him to, on a floor above the floor where they lived. "Go inside," Duun said, and under the eyes of a watcher at the door, made to leave him, which prospect alone filled Thorn with panic. "Mind your manners." Duun did not say, mind what I told you. It was what Duun did not say that always weighed heaviest. Thorn was expected to remember those things without being told. "Yes, Duun," Thorn had said, and committed himself on his own, as the watcher opened the door to let him in. The touch of Duun's hand in the middle of his back was a dismissal, not a shove.

Four strangers got up off their seats when he passed the foyer, four strangers whose commingled scent was artifice and flowers, in a white-sanded room as large as the gymnasium: it had five desks; and the windows in this white sterility showed a thicket like Sheon's woods, a tangle for eye and mind. He would smell of fear to them. He stopped still. "Hello," said the one he discovered as Elanhen. "Hello," Thorn said, and put the best face on he could, a face he had seen in Duun when he met the meds. "I'm Haras." Haras he was to outsiders, his hatani-name. They told theirs. That was how it started. "We're a study-group," Elanhen said. "They say you're good."

He might have been furred as they were, four-fingered, with ears and eyes like theirs. (I'm different. They shot at me at Sheon. Aren't you shocked, the least bit?) But no one affected to notice.

(Duun, Thorn thought, Duun knows them. Duun set this up. Duun arranged it, all.) He felt the walls of a trap about him. He let them invite him to the desk that was to be his and show him the computer. "You have to catch up with us," Elanhen said. "Sit down, Haras-hatani."

He did. He took the keyboard onto his lap and tried. He had trouble with the keys, but not with the math. He fouled the machine once and he was ashamed, looked up at Sphitti, thinking to meet scorn.

"Try again," Sphitti said. "From the beginning." Without rancor.

The others watched him. Thorn centered his mind, recalled Sphitti's instructions and got it right this time.

"That's good," Betan said, and Thorn looked guardedly her way. Good was not that easy a word to win. He suspected humor at his expense. (What are they up to, when will it come? What game are they playing?)

He tried not to make mistakes. He listened to things and remembered them.

Duun did not mention the matter of the school that day or the next. (When will he move?) Thorn slept lightly, feared his food and ate with attention to taste. (He won't warn me the next time. He won't. He'll move. How? And when?) A panic had settled on him, a sense of things slipping away from him, the chance that Duun himself might go, now that there were so many others to take care of him.

(What is your need, Haras-hatani?)

He might wake one morning and find Duun gone, only because Duun knew how desperately he needed him, and needing him was wrong.

Perhaps Duun was waiting for something. (For me to attack him, for me to start it this time…) But Thorn would lose. Events had proved that. And he nursed a more dreadful suspicion: that if he did not he would lose all the same-for Duun would not abide defeat. Duun would go. He would be alone finally, utterly alone, among all the meds and the strangers they foisted off on him. So he wished only to hold his own. Forever. And not to displease Duun, which seemed mutually impossible.

He played the dkin for Duun. He sat on the riser. ("We're in the city now," Duun said, "and cityfolk don't use the floor except to walk on." It seemed unreasonable to Thorn. He liked the warmth of the sand and the ability to shape himself a place in it. But Duun said; and he did as he was told.) He played the songs he knew. Duun played him others. This had not changed, and it soothed him and made Duun smile.

I one day wandered down a road that I had never known;

I one day came upon a path that I was never shown.

It wended up and down the hills

And wandered through the dell,

And there I met a clever man

Whose like no song can tell.

I never met a man his like:

I never hope to say

How he was like and unlike me,

This man I met that day.

He had my look, he had my eyes,

He had my ways, for true.

Why, fool, he said, and sang the song

That I've just sung to you.

Thorn laughed when Duun had sung it. Duun smiled and adjusted a string. "Let me have it," Thorn said.

"Ah, there's no revenge. My repertoire is endless." The scarred lip twisted. It did that in such a smile. "Damn." The string had snapped. Thorn winced. "It's old," Duun said. "Quite old. I'll get another tomorrow." Duun gave the dkin to him to put away, and Thorn took the instrument and put it carefully in its case. "Get some sleep," Duun said.

"Yes," he said. And turned, again, on his knees on the riser, for Duun had gotten up and come up behind him, and Thorn was wary of that. He looked up. Duun stared at him a long moment and turned and walked away. The silence left Thorn cold. He snapped the case shut.

(He was thinking something. He was planning something. He meant me to know. Gods, what?)

Duun stopped in the doorway that led back to the other rooms. Looked back again. Walked on.

(Waiting for me to do-what?)

(Does Duun ever do anything without a reason? Does he ever make the least move without a reason?)

(I'm scared of those people. Does he know?)

A confusion of white light and white sand- the gymnasium spun and the sand met Thorn's back: he rolled and came up on his feet with lights exploding in his eyes.

"Again," Duun said.

Thorn's left knee buckled and went out from under him. He landed on his knees in shock, feeling the abrasions. The skid had cost his shoulders too. Sweat stung there. He knelt there and lifted a hand to signal a wait till the daze should pass.

Duun walked over and took his face between his hands, pulled his eyelids back to face the light, felt over his skull.

"Again," Thorn said. Duun shoved his head free with a force that rocked him, cuffed his ear and backed off.

Thorn got to his feet and stood there wide-legged and wobbling.

"So you haven't learned it all, minnow. Slow, this time. Step by step again."

Thorn came, reached out his hand in the slow dance Duun wanted, turned and turned and ended up again in the way of Duun's slow-moving arm.

"That's how. Do it, minnow."

There was a counter for it. It arrived against Thorn's ribs in slow-motion and he evaded the feigned force of it. Sweat flew from him and spattered the sand, flung from his hair as he snaked his body back. Duun faced him, hands on knees. Duun did not sweat. His tongue lolled at times, his mouth open and showing his sharp teeth. But it flicked and licked the saliva clear. Duun bent now and invited attack. "Keep it slow, Thorn. I've still got tricks."

Thorn had thought he knew them. The light that danced in Duun's eyes alarmed him. He had never seen Duun extend himself against him. Not truly. He understood that now.

Duun's hand flicked out and touched him on the cheek when he came in. "You're dead. Dead, Haras-hatani."

Thorn wiped his face. His centering was gone. He recovered it. (Don't be bluffed. Turn off the fear. Turn it off, minnow.)

Duun got a grip on him. Bent him back, holding him from falling. Duun let him go; but Thorn rescued himself from that shame with a tumble up again, sand coating his sweating skin.

Duun turned his back on him and walked off.

"Duun. Duun-hatani." His face burned.

Duun turned. "You don't have to say can't. You are that thing. The world doesn't wait for your moods, minnow."

"Try me!"

Duun came back and laid him straightway breathless on the sand, then stood looking at him. "Well, it wasn't can't that threw you that time. Did I promise you a miracle?"

Thorn rolled over and tried to cut Duun's ankles from under him.

Thorn ended on his belly this time, spitting the sand that glued itself to his face and hands and body; Duun's knee was in his back, his arm twisted painfully. Duun let him up and sat down on the sand.

(Invitation?) But Duun held up his hand. "No." Duun said, "not wise." Thorn knew where that attack would have taken him-into Duun's grip when he refused to go sailing over Duun and halfway to the wall. And Duun's teeth at his throat. Never grapple, Duun had hammered home to him. Nature shorted you, not me. And Duun had grinned at him that day to make the point.

Thorn tucked his knees up and locked his arms about them, panting. Sweat ran into his eyes and he wiped a gritty hand across his brow, flexed the fingers and held them out.

"You're pulling your claws, Duun-hatani." Pain welled up and hurt his chest and it was not all the pain of several meetings with the floor. "You'd have me in tatters. You'd tear my throat out. Anybody normal-would."

"Eyes," Duun reminded him, with a touch at his own brow-shadowed eye. "That's worst. You let me at your face. Never."

"I'm sorry, Duun."

"You wouldn't be sorry. You'd be blind. Damn right I pull it. You do that again I'll scar you. Hear?"

Thorn rocked his body in something like a bow. He hurt. His bones ached as if they had all been reseated.

"Yes, Duun."

"But as for the claws-they might take you if they could touch you. If you were a fool. I'm very good, Thorn. Doesn't that tell you something?"

Thorn paused a long time. The ache got into his throat and stuck there, embarrassing him. "That I might be."

"Did you touch me?"

"No, Duun-hatani."

"Do I hear can't now?"

"No, Duun-hatani."

"The outsiders have gotten into your head. Their moves have infected you. Do you let them touch you?"

"They touch each other. Not me."

"They touch you-here." Duun touched his brow. "You lose your focus. Youth, Thorn. Give that up too."

Thorn drew another painful breath. (They're yours. Aren't they? A hatani dictates the moves others make… Duun-hatani.) "What can they teach me you can't?"

"What is ordinary. What the world is."

(The world is wide, minnow.)

"Duun-they act like I was nothing unusual."

Duun shrugged.

"They're lying, aren't they?"

"What does your judgment tell you?"

"They're lying. They're pretending. You sent them. You're in control of all of it."

"Tkkssss. You have a suspicious mind, Haras-hatani."

"You've always been. Is that close enough to beating you? No one's like me. There aren't any. I'm different. And they're so busy not noticing it they shout it. Why, Duun?"

"You build bridges in the sky."

"On rock. On what I see and don't see." Thorn's muscles began to shake; he clenched his arms about his knees the harder and tried not to show the shivering, but Duun would see. Duun missed nothing. "What's wrong with me? How did I turn out this way?"

"Doubtless the gods did it."

The blasphemy shocked him, from Duun. He piled one atop it. "The gods have a sense of humor?"

Duun's ears went back. "We'll talk about it later."

"You'll never give me my answer. Will you?"

A long silence. Yes and no trembled on a knife's edge. For the first time Thorn felt Duun was close to answering him and a breath might tip the balance. He held that breath till his sides ached.

"No," Duun said then. "Not yet."

"He's intelligent," Ellud admitted. Duun clasped his crossed ankles and returned a stolid stare. "Did I say not?" Duun asked. "What else do your young agents say?"

Ellud laid back his ears. "I handed them over to you."

"Come, Ellud. How many sides do you face at once?"

Ellud shifted uncomfortably on his desk. "I'm fending rocks, Duun; you know that."

"I know that. I want to know who you're talking to."

"The council. The council wants to talk to him."

"No."

"You say no. They get no from you and come to my back door. I'm getting supply shortages; I'm getting delivery delays; I'm getting records lost."

"Not coincidence."

"Not at this rate," Ellud said. Duun drew a deep breath and straightened his back; Ellud held up a hand. "I'll take care of it, Duun. I'd have come to you if I couldn't."

"How does Tshon report me?"

Ellud's mouth dropped. "Duun-"

"I'm not offended. How does she report me?"

"I-told Council you're quite stable. Her report was an advantage. To both of us."

Duun smiled. With all the horror that expression had for the beholder; and he was always, with Ellud, aware of it. "I sent council a letter. If they want a hatani sanction individually and singly-let them forget their contract. The government made it. They've got it to my dying day."

"Or his."

"Are you telling me something, Ellud?"

"I don't remember telling you anything. I'd have to swear I didn't."

Few things disturbed Duun's centering. This was one. Ellud grew very still, hands loose in his lap, for a long while staring at that stare.

"If there were to be an accident," Duun said.

"I don't know how it would come. He's hatani, you said. He wouldn't be easy. Duun-you have to understand. It's not just council; it's public pressure: the matter at Sheon-got out."

Duun said nothing and Ellud lifted a modifying hand, sketched diffident explanation. "They called the magistrates, the magistrates called the province head-back when they thought they'd run afoul of the Guild, when they thought they'd hatani troubles up to their armpits-well, the matter got blown up larger: a few offices got onto it, and a few wealthy landholders at some dinner party- Well, a note went out to political interest here. And Rothen's successor-"

"Shbit."

"Shbit. Exactly. Wants to play politics. On the issue the whole thing's gone sour." Ellud made a helpless motion. "Duun, hard as it is to think anyone could be shortsighted enough-

"I don't find it hard at all. "I have a very fine appreciation of venality. And stupidity. Tomorrow doesn't come and a stone cast up doesn't come down. For a renunciate, I'm a very practical man, Ellud. You should remember that."

"I remember." In a small, hoarse voice. "Duun, for the gods' own sake-they're trying to get between you and the Guilds. You know that's how they'll work. They're trying to slow my office down with their paper-delays. They want documentation of malfeasance. I'm making duplicates of everything. I've got them in a packet in hands that will get them to the Guild-if- anything should happen."

"Wise."

"People are frightened, Duun."

"Go on guarding the back door. I'll take care of the front. I will."

"For the gods' sakes-"

Duun gave him a cold stare. "Calling on Shbit would solve it."

"You couldn't get to him."

"Couldn't?" Duun pursed his mouth. He drew in air that stank of politics and his blood ran faster. "Watch me."

"Gods. Don't. Don't. Ammunition's all I want. Listen-Duun. Just let me take it awhile. Let me handle it. What happens to me when the pieces start hitting the ground? You've got the Guild. I've got no cover. You think I can't manage it? I managed it while you were rusting in the hills for sixteen years. For the gods' sake, leave politics to me and get me what I need.

You've got enough in your lap. Trust me for this."

Duun scowled. "Meaning?"

"Just-let me pile up data. Awhile."

"The Guild's another answer. He might make it."

"Gods. You don't mean that."

"We're very catholic."

Ellud's ears sank in dismay.

"I'm working on it," Duun said. "I tell you that. But he's not ready yet."

"You know what that would cause?"

"And prevent."

There was a long silence. Then: "The tapes, Duun. For the gods' sakes, start them. Can you do that?"

Duun stared and thought about it. "Yes."

They sat together, Elanhen and Betan and Sphitti and Cloen: "This is the way it is," Elanhen said. "We get scored together. All of us. You're the one they threw into the group. If you don't learn, we fail together."

"We get thrown out of our jobs," Betan said.

"What's your job?" Thorn asked, because everything they said puzzled him.

Their faces went closed to him then, on secrets they would not share.

"You've got a problem," Betan said, leaning over his shoulder while he plied the keyboard in his lap and watched the window across the room become a glowing display. Lines blinked and intersected. "That's the trajectory. With that acceleration where will you intercept?"

Sometimes the problems made vague sense. And sometimes they did not.

(What in the world comes in two hundred twenty-fours?)

(Stars. Trees. Kinds of grass. The ways of a river. The stubbornness of a child.)

(I can reckon the speed of the wind, name the stars, the cities of the world-)

"… in order, the particles-"

Betan brushed his arm as she bent above him. She smelled of something different. She had no reticence with him. She took no care how she leaned past him. The column of her throat was undefended, her body sleek coated and ripe with musk-

"You got it right," Sphitti said as they clustered about his desk sitting on its edges. "Here's an application now. If you were drifting in midair-no friction and no gravity-"

(They're trying to trip me.) "You can't."

"Say that you could."

Betan flicked an ear at him. Perhaps it was a joke at his expense.

"Write it down," said Cloen.

"I don't have to."

"Let him do it his way," Sphitti said. Then he had to get it right.

"That's right," Elanhen said then, checking what he said.

"Damn hatani arrogance," Cloen said when he was not quite out of earshot, when he and Elanhen were off together at Cloen's desk.

It hurt. Thorn was not immune to that.

(Duun, what do I do when people insult me? When they hate me? How do I answer, Duun?)

But he never asked it aloud. The shame of it distressed him. And he thought that he should come up with that answer on his own.

"Just the sounds," Betan said. "It doesn't matter what it means. It's a test of your recall. Listen to the tape and memorize the sound."

"It's not words at all!"

"Pretend it is. Just try. Record it. Play it back till there's no difference."

Thorn looked at Betan, at Sphitti. At two gray pairs of eyes. He felt indignation at this, as if they had made this one up. But they had never joked with him, not on lessons.

"He put the plug into his ear and listened. Tried to pronounce the babble. (They'll be laughing. It sounds like water running.) He looked around at them, but they found other things to do, with the computer and with their own studies. He turned back to his work, put his hands over his eyes to shut out the world.

(Remembering days on Sheon's porch, the hiyi blooms-)

He mouthed the noises. He slowed down the machine and ran it fast and memorized the sequences. It was harder than Sphitti's physics. The plug gave him an earache.

"I've had enough of that," he said after he had gotten the start of it down and they gathered about to hear it. He would never have said that to Duun, but they accepted such things.

"That's all you're supposed to do in the mornings," Elanhen said. "You keep at that."

Thorn sat there amid his desk. He thought that he could beat any of them (even Betan, because Duun had made him believe that he was good).

"Get to work," Cloen said.

"I'm going home," Thorn said.

"You can't. The door's locked. The guard won't let you."

"Shut up, Cloen," Betan said. "Thorn, do the work. Please. I'm asking."

Thorn glared at Cloen. At Betan too. (But it was pleasant that they said please to him. No one did. It occurred to him that they had to worry what they would do if he grew recalcitrant; and that they had to fear him (even Betan) the way he had to fear Duun. And that was a pleasant thought.)

He cut off the tape, found his place in it again as the others drifted back to their places; and he did what Betan had asked until his ear hurt and his head ached.

But when they were leaving he contrived that Cloen should brush against him.

He sent Cloen against the foyer wall with a move of his arm. And stood there, in a shocked tableau of fellow-students and the guard outside the open door.

"I'm hatani. Lay a hand on me again and I'll break it."

Cloen's ears were back. His jaw had dropped. He stood away from the wall and looked at Elanhen. "I never touched him!"

Thorn walked out. An escort always came to bring him home. Duun's idea, Duun's direction. Thorn swept a gesture at the man waiting for him outside and never looked back.

"Go to the gym," Duun said when he came out of his office; and this was not habit, but Thorn went, and stopped and turned. Duun shoved at him.

"I think you hit me," Duun said, with a darkness in his eyes; and sudden fear washed over Thorn like icewater. Thorn backed up. He had not hit Duun; and one thing came to him at once: that someone had been on the phone when he came in. "What should I do about it?" Duun asked. "Well, Haras-hatani?"

"I'm sorry, Duun." Thorn sweated. (Gods, move on me! Come on!) His concentration shredded. He dared not back out now. And he had never faced Duun in temper; he had never looked to. (O gods, Duun, don't kill me!)

"The knife, minnow. Lay it down. Do you hear me? I'm telling you-lay it down."

Thorn went off-center, shifted his balance back with a lifting of his head. Stood there with his arms loose and a quaking in his knees. "That's good." Duun patted his cheek. "That's very good." (O gods, Duun, don't!)

The clawtip traced a gentle path down to his jaw. "I want to talk to you." The hand dropped to his arm and took it, hurling him staggering to the center of the floor. "Duun-hatani, I'm sorry!" "Sit down."

He sat down on the fresh-raked sand. Duun came and hunkered down in front of him.

"Why are you sorry?" Duun asked. "Because of Cloen or for me?"

"You, Duun-hatani. I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry. He-" "What did he do?"

"He hates me. He hates me, that's all, and he's subtle about it."

"More subtle than you? Haras-hatani, I am confounded by his capacity."

Heat rushed to Thorn's face. He looked at the sand. "He tries to be subtle. Anything I do is wasted on him."

"You're different; just like Cloen with his baby-spots. And you suspect everyone's noticing. And you want to make sure they respect you. Am I halfway right?"

"Yes, Duun-hatani."

"You have a need, Haras. Do you know it? Can you say it to me?"

"Not to be different."

"Louder."

"Not to be different, Duun-hatani."

"Was it reasonable, what you did?"

"He won't despise me!"

"Is that so important? What do you own? What does a hatani own?"

"Nothing. Nothing, Duun."

"Yet here we live in a fine place. We have enough to eat. We don't have to hunt-"

"I'd rather hunt."

"So would I. But why are we here? We're here because of what we are. You own nothing. You have no self-interest. If this Cloen should ask you to remove him from a difficulty you would do it. He would have no right to dictate how you did it; or when or where-but Cloen is your charge. The world is your charge, Haras-hatani. Do you know-you can walk the roads and go from house to house and no one will refuse you food or drink or a place to sleep. And when someone comes to you with a thing and says: help me-do you know what to warn him: Do you know, Haras-hatani? Do you know what a hatani will tell him?

"No, Duun-hatani."

"You will say: 'I am hatani; what you loose you cannot recall; what you ask you cannot unask; what I do is my solution.' There was a wicked man once who called a hatani. 'Kill my neighbor,' he said. 'That's not hatani business,' the hatani said and went away. The wicked man found another hatani. 'My life is wretched,' the wicked man said. 'I hate my neighbor. I want to see him die.' 'That is a hatani matter,' the hatani said. 'Do you give it into my hands?' 'Yes,' the wicked man said. And the hatani struck him dead. Do you understand the solution?"

Thorn looked up in horror.

"Do you understand?" Duun asked. "His problem was removed. And the world was eased. That's what you are. A solution. The helper of the world. Do you want my solution for your problem?"

Thorn's heart beat very fast. "What should I do, Duun-hatani?"

"Tell Cloen to hit you once. Tell him to use his judgment in the matter."

He looked at Duun a very long time. His gut ached. "Yes," he said.

"Remember the lesson. Do as you're told. Someday you'll be wise enough to solve problems. Until then, don't create them. Do you hear?" Duun reached out and closed his hand on Thorn's shoulder. "Do you hear?"

"I hear."

Duun let him go.