The Deep Beyond: Cuckoo's Egg / Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  (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 babyspots 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 though 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 g
uild 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 off-balance 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-ro
utines. 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?”