Cuckoo's Egg

VIII

"It certainly didn't help matters," Ellud said, with the report aglow in his lap. He flung it aside and the optic draped itself over the stack of real paper and went on glowing with ghostly, damning letters. "I chastised my staffer. I don't know why I picked him. But, dammit, Duun-you passed him."

"For his faults," Duun said. "As well as his virtues. I never expected perfection. I didn't want it. That's why I stayed by your choices." "Damn hatani tricks," Ellud said after a moment. "I understand what you're doing. But I don't like it with my staff. Cloen could have been killed."

"I didn't judge so. In that, I was right."

"It's in the record what happened. It was too well witnessed. I can't get rid of it. And with all the sniffing about the council's doing, I wish to the gods I could."

"What did happen was my fault. Power without restraint. I counted on two more years at Sheon. Haras was restrained. I'll tell you something which should be evident. Hatani solutions are too wide for young minds. His morality is adequate to hold his power back. It isn't adequate to use it."

"To make him hatani-Duun, that's what's sent the wind up the council's-"

"I know."

"I took it for a figure of speech. That it was all you could teach. It was what you knew how to teach."

"Come now."

"Well, that it was easier. But you mean to go all the way with this. When they get that rumor-"

"Try to be discreet."

"If the Guild could just devise something- clever, if they could find a halfway status-"

"There's no halfway. To give him what I've given him-with nothing but restraint to manage it? No."

Ellud reached and turned off the recorder. There was dismay on his face. Terror. "For the gods' sake, Duun. Have you lost your senses? What are you after? What are you after, Duun?"

"Shbit will have gotten my letter by now. Things should be quieter, from council quarter."

A brief silence, no more comfortable. "What did you tell him?"

"I offered him salutation. I felicitated him on his council appointment. I wished him health. I signed it. It was a simple letter. He hasn't answered. I expect your supply difficulties to clear up slowly, but I do expect them to clear up."

"You're not the man I knew." Ellud fidgeted with the hem of his kilt. "I don't know how to understand you."

"Old friend. You had courage enough to stay in office this long. I trust you'll keep on with it."

"I have to. Without this office I'm a naked target. They'd go for me. Shbit and his crew. Dammit, I've got no choice. They'd eat me alive."

"I'm here. Trust me."

Ellud stared at him.

"Did Cloen hit you?" Duun asked when Thorn got home. Duun leaned easily in the doorway of his office, ears pricked.

"No," Thorn said. There was no satisfaction in that tone. (How much do you control, Duun? Do you know already? Do you always know?) Duun gave him no clues. " 'Cloen,' I said. 'I was wrong in what I did. I'll let you hit me once.' Cloen stood there with his ears back and he raised his hand no then. And walked off across the room and got busy."

Duun turned and went back into his office.

"Duun?" Thorn pursued him as far as the doorway. Duun sat down and turned on the computer. "Duun, did I do what you wanted?"

"Did you do what I wanted?"

Thorn was silent a moment. "I tried, Duun."

"Do I hear can't?"

"No, Duun."

The sounds grew less hard. Thorn worked, his eyes shut, his lips moving in repetition of the tape. When it played back it was the same.

"It sounds identical," Cloen said. "I can't tell a difference."

Cloen was careful, since that day. Cloen's face never betrayed anything but respect. And fear. There was that too.

"I've finished it then."

"That one." Cloen licked his lips and looked diffident. "They sent another one. It's not my doing," Cloen said quickly.

It had to be believed. Cloen did not have the look of lying. Cloen drew the cassette from his pouch and offered it.

"I like chemistry better," Thorn muttered. He felt easier with them since the day Cloen had not hit him. He could say such things and hint at everyday needs, the way they did. He put that manner on and off at the door. It occurred to him that it made them easier with him. He could laugh with them, sometimes, because he had convinced himself he was not the object of laughter. Or if he had been, it was of little consequence.

(But I hate these sound-lessons. I hate this nonsense. I think they like giving them to me. Like a joke on the hatani they can't beat any other way. I play jokes too. I can make the computer give Sphitti a readout he never expected. He'd think it funny. I wish I could do more physics and less of this.)

(I wish Betan would sit here with me instead of Cloen.)

(I daren't think that. Duun would break my arm.)

"Thanks," he said dryly and pushed the new cassette into the machine.

Cloen let him alone. They were growing apart. Thorn's shoulders widened. Poor Cloen's baby-spots persisted.

Betan was absent a time. ("It's spring," Elanhen said, and sent heat to Thorn's face.

"She's been taking a suppressant but she wants to take a holiday. She'll be back.")

"It's spring," Duun said that evening. "I understand Betan's gone on holiday."

"Yes," Thorn said. He had the dkin on his knee, tuning it. He went all cold inside, for reasons he could not plainly define, except the matter of Betan was a place he protected from the others like some galled spot. And Duun knew unerringly how to find these things. "They said she was on suppressants but she wanted to go on holiday. I think she has some friend."

"Probably," Duun said matter-of-factly. "I'll warn you to be polite at school. Men don't have seasons. But their sisters and their mothers and half their friends do. And Elanhen and Cloen and Sphitti do have lives outside of the school, you know. Don't put any pressure on them."

(What about on me?) -You're hatani, Duun would say. If Thorn were fool enough to ask. Hatani don't have needs.

(Gods, I don't want to get into that with him, not today.)

Betan did come back. She came sailing in one day all smiles and what had been an all-male society of careful courtesies and few pranks became lively again.

(As if the heart came back into the place.)

Thorn felt something expand in his chest, as if some anxiety had let go. Spring was over.

"Have you missed me?" Betan asked.

The others flicked ears and rolled their eyes in a way that they would do when they talked about forbidden things. So it had a ribald flavor.

"Yes," Thorn said simply. Dignity seemed best. (They're joking about her being in season. I'll bet none of them got close to a woman this spring.)

(Neither did I. Neither will I. A hatani has nothing. Owns nothing. Betan has property in the city. She doesn't have to marry. She could have all her children to herself.) Between Duun and the ribald jokes Thorn had learned some few things. (But I'll bet someone will make her the best offer he can.)

"When Ghosan-hatani came to Elanten there were two sisters who asked her to judge between them and their husband. They had married the same man for a five-year, each in succession. They all three were potters and he was promised a potter's shop from his mother's heritage, so a marriage seemed profitable. But during the fourth year of the first sister the second sister bore a child which was only hers. The husband refused to consummate the second marriage if the woman did not disinherit this child. And both women would lose all they had invested in this shop. 'This is a small matter,' Ghosan-hatani said when the sisters came to her. 'Judge it yourselves.' Of course the husband was not there. He had no desire to have it judged. And the second sister looked at Ghosan and lost her courage. 'Come away,' she asked her sister. 'We were mad to ask this hatani.' And that sister ran away. But the first sister stayed. 'I want a judgment,' that sister said. So Ghosan-hatani went door-to-door in Elanten and asked everyone in the village what they knew. And she asked the magistrate. And everything confirmed what the sisters had said. 'Give me a pen,' Ghosan said. The magistrate gave the hatani a pen. And Ghosan wrote in the village records that the shop belonged to the child and to his descendants; and if not to them it belonged to the village of Elanten."

"They would hate the child," Thorn objected.

"Perhaps they would," Duun said. "But when the child was grown and the husband was beyond his prime, what would keep him from turning the husband out? The husband not only consummated the marriage, he wanted to marry the women for good, but they only married him one year at a time for the rest of his life, even through he was very kind to them and to the child. The industry still exists in Elanten, and exports all over the world."

"Do hatani marry?" Thorn asked. He was thinking about Betan. His heart beat fast. (Ought I to have asked that? It wasn't the point of the story.) But there was a feeling in him that came in the night, when he had a vague and disturbing dreams, when he waked ashamed of himself. But Duun said nothing about these times, Duun only looked at him with that guardedness that did nothing to reassure him. (Does Duun do these things in the night? Something is wrong with me. Why shouldn't it be? Who was my mother and father? Was I like that child?)

(Did some hatani judgment take me away from my mother? Was it Duun's?)

"There are instances," Duun said.

"Were you ever married?"

"Several times."

It shocked Thorn. (He's done-that-with a woman.) Thorn's face went hot. (I might.) He thought of the foenin in the woods. And shifted restlessly, and hugged his knees. (Think of something else. What else has Duun done? What made his scars? Is it all one story?)

"There was a hatani named Ehonin," Duun said. "He had a daughter with a woman not his wife. This daughter when she was grown trekked to another province where Ehonin was by then. She asked him to judge between him and her since her mother had married and disowned her. Ehonin made her hatani. She died in her schooling. This was her patrimony. Ehonin knew she was not able. She was weak. But he gave her what he had. To kill the wife wouldn't have helped."

"He could have made the daughter marry."

"That would have been another solution, but there was no other participant. He could hardly drag someone into the situation who wasn't involved. That's never right. When the hatani himself is involved in the case, the judgments are never what they ought to be: the fewer people the hatani has in the case to judge, the fewer solutions are available."

"He could have made the woman's husband adopt the girl!"

"Indeed he could, and there was a husband. If the girl had asked him to judge between herself and her mother's husband he might have done that. That was also how Ehonin suspected she would not be hatani. She asked in haste even when she'd had ample time to think. Or she didn't want anything to do with the husband. That's also possible. In any case he had nothing to work with: to have gone to the mother and asked her truth would have been pointless. There was no recourse in her. And the daughter had asked none. That left himself and the daughter for principals. He had no other answer."

"If she hadn't asked him a hatani solution he might have helped her."

"Indeed he might."

"She was a fool, Duun-hatani."

"She was also very young and angry. And she hated her father. None of those things helped her."

"Couldn't he warn her?"

"She was old enough to have walked across a province. What point to warn her? But perhaps he did. Anger makes great fools."

"This is the velocity of the system through the galactic arm."

"Is it absolute?" Thorn asked. He had learned to ask; and Elanhen looked pleased. "No," Elanhen said. "But consider it so for this problem…"

They were back to physics. At least two of every five-day set.

There was history. "… In 645 Elhoen calculated the world was round. This was his proof…"

"… in 1439 the hatani took down the shothoen guild and set up the merchant league in its place-"

"… in 1492 the Mathog railway joined the Bigon line and cities grew along the route-"

"… in 1503 Aghoit made the first powered flight. By 1530 Tabisit-tanun flew across the Mathog… He crashed in the attempt at a polar crossing. His son and his daughter inherited his interest in the guild and the daughter was lost in a second attempt when ice on the wings forced her landing in Gltonig Bay. That was the last radio message. The plane was found abandoned and no one knew what became of her. The son made the flight successfully in 1541."

"… Dsonan became capital…"

"… The Dsonan League took the Mathog. Bigon resisted. The hatani refused to involve themselves without an appeal from Bigon and there was bloodshed until both sides appealed for settlement. It was the first use of aircraft-'

"… Rocket-bombs were first developed-"

A great unease stirred in him. He turned and looked for help… not Cloen's. About the room the others were at their desks. He held the keyboard on his lap and put in Betan's name.

"W-h-a-t?" the reply appeared white-lettered at the bottom of the screen.

Thorn hesitated. Typed. "W-h-a-t y-e-a-r a-r-e w-e i-n?" His face burned. He waited for an answer with his heart pounding. Nothing touched the screen. He looked up and saw Betan leave her desk and walk across the sand to him with a puzzled look on her face.

"I don't need your help," Thorn said. "It's just a question."

Betan looked at the screen and looked at him. Her ears flicked down and up and her fine mouth pursed. Standing this close, she smelled of warmth, of flowers, and he wanted Sheon back, he wanted the world as simple as it had been, and the smells of earth and dust and the answers he used to know. "It's 1759," she said. And gulfs opened up about him. Doubtless Betan thought him a fool. Of course they had all grown up in the world and he had had only Sheon. She laughed at him. "Why?"

"It never came up, that's all." He sent the screen on another scroll. It stopped at 1600. Ended. "I need a new cassette."

Betan sat down on the edge of his desk, rested her hand above his knee. The touch burned him. He looked desperately elsewhere, searching with the tail of his vison for where the others were, but they were all on their desks.

"I'm sorry," Betan said. "I shouldn't have laughed." And she smelled of difference and warmth and his heart pounded against his ribs. She pressed against his ribs. She pressed on his knee and strained his leg and he wished he could get her hand off before something else happened. "Sheon's not quite the world capital, is it? Look, if you need help with that I'd be happy to stay."

"Duun wants me to be in the gym by noon."

"Ah." She gave his leg a pat and got up. "But it's 1759. The 19th of Ptosin. It's summer out."

He was suddenly, overwhelmingly conscious of the blankness of the school's white walls. The falsity of the windows behind which (sometimes) was the noise of machinery. The world closed in on him like the clenching of a fist about his heart.

In Sheon the leaves would be green and the hiyi pods opening; the foen-cubs would come tottering out and hiss at the-

– curious country-folk children. Mon was the name of one. They owned his house now. They lived in its rooms. Sat by the fireplace on the warm sand, all together.

Mon. Mon. Mon. He hated that person.

The city closed about him. Imprisoned him. But it was his fault. All his fault. His difference caused it.

"Haras?"

"I can't."

Betan gave up and wandered off, went back to her desk and sat down cross-legged with her back to him. Thorn picked up the keyboard again and looked at the screen.

A message came to him. "BETAN: Well, tomorrow, then. I could answer questions, things that bother you."

He watched it scroll by three times. His heart beat faster and faster. "B-e-t-a-n," he typed, addressing the response. "Y-e-s."

Thorn picked himself up and dusted the sand off. He bowed. "Yes. I see."

"Again," Duun said. It was not always that Duun stripped down to the small-kilt for practice. Duun did that today, so that his scars were evident, like lightnings through the gray and black hair of his body and his maimed arm, of one fabric with the scars on his face, so that they acquired a fearsome symmetry which Thorn had sensed in those years before he knew that they were scars, or knew that every man in all the world was not marked as Duun was marked, or had not but half a right hand, or did not smile after that permanent fashion, which Thorn knew now was enough to daunt any opponent Duun ever faced. It daunted him now. (He means to put me to it today. He has something in mind.) And it came leaping into his mind in one fatal rush that it had been a very long time that Duun had left him in peace. (Not to interrupt my studies-surely that was why. Or I've gotten better and he won't try-)

That thought vanished in one missed attempt, in the far too lengthy offbalance moment he had to fall as Duun took his feet from under him.

Duun often grinned at such moments. This time he stood there with a dour face, signed no attack and watched with hands on hips as Thorn recovered himself from his drop-and-rise.

"Again."

"Duun-hatani, show me that move to the side again."

Patiently Duun showed him. Thorn bent himself to it and tried a trick in the midst of it, a joke.

Duun's hands closed on him and dumped him to the ground. (He saw it.) Duun might have laughed, but Duun's face never changed. Thorn hesitated on the safety of the floor a moment, looking up at him. (Gods. He's got something in mind. Something's wrong.) Thorn shook the dazzle and the thoughts and the day from his head and brought himself to his feet again, centered in the tightest possible focus, no thought to anything, no thought, no heartbeat but the beat of the dance, the light and the dust. It was not the city, it was Sheon's noon, and the yard about them, and Duun faced him in purest simplicity.

Pass and evade, strike and recover and pass and turn.

"Better," Duun said, and that one word ran down his nerves like fingers on the dkin. "Better. Take the offensive."

No hesitation. Thorn struck and caught and Duun spun off across the sand, up again in a move that never stopped.

Counter again and attack.

Again.

Again. Thorn floated out of a kick aimed at his hip and struck.

His hands met flesh and he spun again in distress, in time to find Duun coming up again from the sand and a kick coming at him he only scantly evaded.

Time, Thorn called, lifting his hand. Thorn's breath came in great gasps. Duun straightened not quite entirely, breathing no easier, and put his hand to his left side. (Gods, I hit him, I hurt him, O gods, his ribs-)

"That was good," Duun said. "You got through my guard."

(He wasn't going to stop. If I hadn't called halt-)

(-he'd have kept coming. He'd have taken me.) Thorn found himself trembling in the knees when he understood that.

(Not another pass, please, Duun, not another-)

The darkness ebbed from Duun's eyes. Reason came back. Duun straightened, pricked his ears up and gave a left-sided smile that with the permanent quirk of the right side, held a deceptive innocence. "Hot bath," Duun said. "Both of us. You're shaking, minnow."

"I didn't pull that. I thought-"

"We'll do simple figures tomorrow. I thought you were getting to that stage. We can hurt each other. No more ungoverned practice. It's gotten too dangerous."

(I didn't win, I didn't beat him, there's no beating him without killing him-)

Duun walked away from him. Duun was limping, but not much. Thorn wiped sweat from his face and found his hand shaking.

(In everything he ever promised me-he always knew that.)

He was abysmal in his lessons. The figures floated past without meaning. He studied his history and the dates settled into his mind but the names eluded him.

"Something's bothering you," Sphitti said. "Do the sound-routines. You can do that."

It insulted him. (I'm hatani, he wished to shout at Sphitti; things don't bother me.) It was the worse because it was patently true. Cloen walked warily around him. Elanhen worked silently at his own console on something abstruse and statistical, while Betan gave Thorn looks over her shoulder and said nothing.

Can I help? the message said in the bottom of his screen.

After, he sent back, and nothing else.

(Duun had cheated him. Duun had maneuvered him all his life. But why did Duun spend his life on one student? Why did Duun have so much wealth and the countryfolk live in a tin-roofed house-but now they had Sheon; and Duun had this place, which was at the top of one of the tallest buildings in Dsonan, in the capital of the world, where power was. Why me? Why Duun? Why all this effort?)

(Why do I know so little about the things I want and so much I never wanted to know, and why do they lock the doors and guards take us where we go in this building? Guards for what? What do they guard? Us? Someone else?)

(I used to live here, Duun had said.)

(Ellud's an old friend.)

(I grew up at Sheon. So did Duun. Where did he know Ellud from?)

The numbers blurred. Thorn keyed in letter function.

Betan Betan Betan, he wrote, and again, Betan, and filled the screen with the repeat key.

The hours dragged. The clock came up noon and in silence they shut down terminals and got up off their desks. But Thorn kept his terminal alive. He had told the guard who walked with him that he would have extra work to do. "I have to catch up in my history," he said when Sphitti asked. The others passed him without a word to him, talking to each other- perhaps Betan had changed her mind, perhaps Betan would forget, it had only been a casual thing to her. He heard the door snick shut and turned about on his desk and saw Betan come back in.

Thorn stood up. Betan walked to his desk and they both sat down knee-to-knee on the side of it. She was grave and looked at him in a quiet way no one but Betan used, not even Duun. She sensed something amiss. He knew. His heart sped and his breath grew tight; but she smelled of flowers and herself, she always did, like sun and warmth. "Something's wrong," she said, but it was different the way she said it. Her face was vastly concerned, open in a way no one else was with him. "What is it?"

"I almost beat Duun yesterday." Thorn was dismayed by the way the exaggeration leapt out so easily and then he could not take it back.

"Was he angry?"

"I don't think so." His breath grew tighter. "Betan, I lived at Sheon-" (but she knows that, this is a stupid way to start) "-I don't know the city, I've never been outside, except once, when I flew in- You do, a lot, don't you?"

"Oh, yes. I go to the coast every spring."

(Conjuring ribald jokes and student humor and mystic somethings every male in the world knew but him, more marked than Duun, scent-blind and naked as something newborn.) Betan sat close, knee touching his knee. Her eyes were wide and dark. "I never learned," he said, and lost track of what he was saying, (not hatani, no: she was not; he did not need to be, for once he did not have to be complex, only simple, with Betan, who used to frighten him and now set her hand on his knee and slid it up.) He put his on hers, and felt the silkenness of her fur and felt the muscles slide, alive and taut as she leaned and stretched and came up against him with her hand on his body. "I never learned-"

He felt things happening to him all at once, felt things vastly out of his control and brought it back again. It was all very clear suddenly what he wanted and what his body was doing on its own, and he held her against him and maintained that good feeling as long as he dared, until he felt everything slipping again, and he took her belt and unfastened it quickly. She unfastened his. Her head burrowed underneath his chin and she leaned on him, all warm, and her smell had changed.

It was fear. He flinched, jerked her back by both arms and she twisted in his grip-"Betan!"

The door opened beyond her. A man walked out into the foyer. Betan jerked out of Thorn's hands and scrambled off the riser.

Duun.

Betan stopped, of a sudden crouched and backing away. Thorn got to his feet. "Dammit- Duun!"

Duun stepped marginally out of the doorway and waved Betan to it. She hesitated.

"Get out!" Thorn cried. (Gods, he'll kill her-) "Betan! Get out!"

She skittered out the foyer doorway and through the outer door like escaping prey. Duun glanced after her and looked back at Thorn.

Thorn shook. He stood with one foot on the sand and one knee on the desk and shook with reaction as he put his clothes together. Duun stood there as if he would wait forever.

"Leave me alone," Thorn said. "Duun, for the gods' sake leave me alone!"

"We'll talk later. Let's go home, Haras."

"I haven't got a home! A hatani doesn't have anywhere! He hasn't got anything-"

"We'll talk later, Thorn."

Thorn shivered convulsively. There was no choice. (There's never been a choice. Come home, Haras. Give up, minnow. Pretend nothing's wrong.)

(But she was scared. She panicked. Scared of me-)

"Come on," Duun said.

"I wish you'd been a little later!"

Duun said nothing. Held out his hand toward the door. Thorn left the desk and the room blurred. (Your eyes are running, Thorn.) He walked out and in a vast blurred haze Duun walked beside him down the hall to the elevator. The silence lasted all the way to their door and past the guard there. That watcher was noncommittal, as if he read them both.

Duun closed the door behind them. Thorn headed for his room.

"There was no choice," Duun said. "You know what you'd have done to her?"

"I wouldn't have hurt her!" He spun about and faced Duun squarely, at the distance of the hall. "Dammit, I wouldn't have-"

"I have to be more plain to you about anatomy."

"I wouldn't have hurt her/ I'd have-I'd-" (I can't; couldn't; but touching her, but her touching me-)

"I can imagine you'd have tried." Coldly, cooly, from age and superiority. "Common sense was nowhere in it, Thorn. You know it."

"Tell me. Lecture me. Gods, I don't mind what you do to me, but you came in like that on her-What do you think you did to her, Duun-hatani? Is that your subtlety?"

"I promised you an answer. Years ago you asked a question and I promised you an answer when you could beat me. Well, you came close yesterday. Perhaps that's good enough."

Shock poured over Thorn. Then reason did. He flung up a hand. "Dammit, dammit, you're maneuvering me! I know your tricks, you taught them to me, I know what you're doing, Duun!"

"I'm offering you your answer. That's all. What you are, where you came from-"

"O gods, I don't want to hear it." Thorn turned. He ran. He shut the door to his room and leaned against it shaking.

The intercom came alive. "When you want, you can come out, Thorn. I don't think badly of you. Not in this. Even a hatani can take wounds. This is a great one. Come out when you can face me. I'll wait for you. I'll be waiting, Thorn."

He was dry-eyed when he came out. He unlocked the door and walked out into the hall, and down the hall into the main room. Duun was there, sitting on the riser that touched the wall. The windows were all stars and dark. Nightview. Perhaps it was. Duun did not look at him at once, not until he had crossed the sand and sat down on the riser in the tail of Duun's view.

Then Duun turned his face to him; and there was no sound except something mechanical behind one window and a whisper of air from the ducts.

"Have you come for your answer?" Duun asked.

"Yes," Thorn said. He sat upright, hands on his thighs, ankles crossed. He looked unflinchingly at Duun.

"You've studied genetics," Duun said. "You know what governs heredity."

(Be quick. Drive the knife in quickly, Duun.

O gods, I don't want to sit through this.) "Yes. I understand."

"You understand that genes make you what you are; that every trait you manifest is no matter of chance. A harmonious whole, Haras."

"Are you my father?"

"No. You had none. Nor mother. You're an experiment. A trial, if you will-"

Thorn was strangely numb. Duun's voice drifted somewhere in the half-dark, in the timelessness of the view. The night went on forever and he went on hearing it.

"I don't believe this," Thorn said finally. Not because he did not believe it was something equally terrible. But that he saw no way to accomplish it. "Duun. The truth. I'm something that went wrong-"

"Not wrong. No one said wrong. There are things right about you. But you're different. An experiment. You know how conception takes place. You know genetic manipulation's done-"

"I don't know how it's done." (Clinically. Precisely, like a lesson. It could not be him they discussed, a thing in a dish, a mote floating in a glass.) "I know that it is done. I know they can put things together and come up with something that didn't exist before."

"You know when someone wants a child and there's a-physical impediment-there's the means to bring the embryo to term. A host.

Sometimes a volunteer. In other cases a mechanical support system. An artificial womb. That was so in your case."

(A machine. O gods, a machine.)

"There's nothing remarkable in that," Duun said. "You have that in common with a thousand, two thousand ordinary people who couldn't be born any other way. Medicine's a marvel."

"They made me up."

"Something like that."

He had struggled not to cry. The tears welled up out of nowhere and ran down his face, endless. "When they were putting me together in this lab-" He could not talk for a long time and Duun waited for him. He began it again. "When they made me did they bother to do it twice? Is there anyone else like me?"

"Not in all the world," Duun said. "No."

"Why? For the gods' sake why?"

"Call it curiosity. There are undoubtedly reasons adequate for the meds."

"The meds-"

"They're your fathers if you like. After a manner of speaking Ellud is. Or others in the program."

"What are you?"

"A hatani solution."

Small warnings went off. A prickle of alarm. (Self-preservation. Why should I bother? Why should I care?) But there was fear. "Whose?"

"I might have done many things. I chose to give you the best chance I could give. The only chance I'm equipped to give. Like Ehonin and his daughter."

"Who asked for it?"

Duun was silent for a long time. "The government,"

"Asked a hatani solution?" The enormity of it washed over Thorn like a flood. Duun's stare never gave him up.

"You are one of my principals. I gave you all I could give. I'll go on giving that. It's all that I can do."

The stars glittered on, awash. "I wanted to love her, Duun."

"I know."

"I want to die."

"I taught you to fight. Not to die. I'm teaching you to find solutions."

"Find this one."

"I've already been asked."

Thorn shuddered. All his limbs shook.

"Come here," Duun said. Held out his hands. "Come here, minnow."

Thorn went. It was a pathetic thing Duun offered, shameful for them both. Duun took him in his arms and held tight till the shuddering stopped. After that he lay still against Duun's shoulder for a very long time, and Duun's arms cradled him as they had done before the fire, in Sheon, when he was small.

He slept. When he woke Duun had fallen asleep over him, and his back ached, and it was all still true.