The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  He stayed in the mist cabinet a good long while, letting the heat and the steam seep into his pores— leaned against the back wall with eyes closed, willing himself to relax, conscious of nothing but the warmth of the tiles against his back and the warmth of the moisture that flooded down over him. The hiss of the vapor jets drowned all other sounds, and the condensation on the transparent outer wall sealed off all the world.

  A sound came through. . . not a loud one, the impression of a sound. He lifted his head, cold suddenly, looked at the steam-obscured panel, unable to identify what he had heard.

  He had not closed the doors. The shower was open, and while he had been gone—while he had been gone from the ship, the pseudosome standing outside—The old nightmare came back to him. Sax.

  Somewhere in the depths of the ship, wandering about, giving Anne orders that would prevent her reporting his presence. Sax, mind-damaged, with the knife in his hand. He stood utterly still, heart pounding, trying to see beyond the steamed, translucent panel for whatever presence might be in the room.

  A footstep sounded outside, and another, and a gangling human shadow slid in the front panel while his heart worked madly. Leaned closer, and red lights gleamed, diffused stars where the features ought to be. "Warren?"

  For an instant more the nightmare persisted, Anne become the presence. He shook it off, gathering up his courage to cut the steam off, to deal with her. "Anne, is there trouble?"

  "No, Warren. The kit and the sensor box are stowed. Dinner is ready."

  "Good. Wait there."

  She waited. His orders. He calmed himself, activated the dryer and waited while moisture was sucked out of the chamber. . . took the comb he had brought in with him and straightened his hair in the process. The fans stopped, the plastic panel cleared, so that he could see Anne standing beyond the frosted translucence. He opened the door and walked out, and her limbs moved, reorienting her to him, responding to him like a flower to the sun. He felt ashamed for his attack of nerves—more than ashamed, deeply troubled. His breathing still felt uncertain, a tightness about his chest, his pulse still elevated. He cast a look over his shoulder as he reached for his robe, at the three shower cabinets, all dark now, concealments, hiding places. The silence deadened his ears, numbed his senses. He shrugged into the robe and heard Anne move at his back. He spun about, back to the corner, staring into Anne's vacant faceplate where the lights winked red in the darkness.

  "Assistance?"

  He did not like her so close. . . a machine, a mind, one mistake of which, one seizing of those metal hands— She followed him. He could not discover the logic on which she had done so. She watched him. Obsessively.

  Followed him. He liked that analysis even less. Things started following him and he started seeing devils in familiar territory. He straightened against the wall and made himself catch his breath, fighting the cold chills that set him shivering.

  "Warren? Assistance?"

  He took her outstretched metal arm and felt the faint vibration under his fingers as she compensated for his weight. "I need help."

  "Please be specific."

  He laughed wildly, patted her indestructible shoulder, fighting down the hysteria, making himself see her as she was, machine. "Is dinner ready?"

  "Yes. I've set it on the table."

  He walked with her, into the lift, into the upper level of the ship, the living quarters where the table that he used was, outside his own quarters. He never used the mess hall: it was too empty a place, too many chairs; he no more went there than he opened the quarters of the dead, next door to him, all about him. He sat down, and Anne served him, poured the coffee, added the cream. The dinner was good enough, without fault. He found himself with less appetite than he had thought, in the steel and plastic enclosure of the ship, with the ventilation sounds and the small sounds of Anne's motors. It was dark round about. He was intensely conscious of that— the night outside, the night deep in the ship where daylight made no difference. Anne's natural condition, night: she lived in it, in space; existed in it here, except for the lights that burned here, that burned in corridors when he walked through them and compartments when he was there, but after he was gone, it reverted to its perpetual dark. Dark wrapped everything in the world but this compartment, but him, and he dared not sleep. He feared the dreams coming back. Feared helplessness.

  No sign of Sax, out there.

  He drank his coffee, sat staring at the plate until Anne took it away. Finally he shivered and looked toward the bar cabinet at the far side of the common room. He gave himself permission, got up, opened the cabinet, pulled out a bottle and the makings and took it back to the table.

  "Assistance?" Anne asked, having returned from the galley.

  "I'll do it myself. No trouble." He poured himself a drink. "Get some ice."

  She left on the errand. He drank without, had mostly finished the glass when she came back with a thermal bucket full. She set it on the table and he made himself another.

  That was the way to get through the night. He was not a drinking man. But it killed the fear. It warmed his throat and spread a pleasant heat through his belly where fear had lain like an indigestible lump.

  He had not planned to drink much. But the heat itself was pleasant, and the lassitude it spread through him cured a multitude of ills. By the time he arrived at the bottom of the third glass, he had a certain courage. He smiled bitterly at Anne's blank face. Then he filled a fourth glass and drank it, on the deliberate course to total anesthesia.

  It hit him then, sudden and coming down like a vast weight. He started to get up, to clear his head, staggered and knocked the glass over. "Assistance?" Anne asked.

  He leaned on the table rim, reached for the chair and missed it for an instant. Anne's metal fingers closed on his arm and held. He yelled, from fright, trying to free himself. Those fingers which could bend metal pipe closed no farther. "Is this pain?" she asked. "What is your status, Warren?"

  "Not so good, Anne. Let go. Let me go."

  "Pain is not optimum function. I can't accept programming from a human who's malfunctioning."

  "You're hurting my arm. You're causing the pain. Stop it."

  She let him go at once. "Assistance?"

  He caught his balance against her, leaning heavily until his stomach stopped heaving and his head stopped spinning quite so violently. She accepted his weight, stabilizing with small hums of her motors. "Assistance? Assistance?"

  He drew a shaken breath and choked it down past the obstruction in his throat, patted her metal shoulder. "Contact—is assistance enough. It's all right, Annie. I'm all right." He staggered for one of the reclining chairs a little distance across the room and made it, his head spinning as he let it back. "Keep the lights on. Lock your doors and accesses."

  "Program accepted, Warren. This is security procedure. Please state nature of emergency."

  "Do you perceive any form of life. . . but me. . . anywhere?"

  "Vegetation."

  "Then there isn't any, is there?" He looked hazily up at her towering, spidery form. "Obey instruction. Keep the accesses locked. Always keep them locked unless I ask you to open them. Anne, can you sit down?"

  "Yes, Warren. You programmed that pattern."

  The worktable, he recalled. He pointed at the other chair. "Sit in the chair."

  Anne walked to it and negotiated herself smoothly into its sturdy, padded seat, and looked no more comfortable sitting than she had reclining on the worktable.

  "Your median joints," he said. "Let your middle joints and shoulders quit stabilizing." She did so, and her body sagged back. He grinned. "Left ankle on top of right ankle, legs extended. Pattern like me. Loosen all but balance-essential stabilizers. It's called relaxing, Annie." He looked at her sitting there, arms like his arms, on the chair, feet extended and crossed, faceplate reflecting back the ceiling light and flickering inside with minute red stars. He laughed hysterically.

  "This is a pleasure reflex," she observed.


  "Possibly." He snugged himself into the curvature of the chair. "You sit there, Annie, and you keep your little sensors—all of them, inside and outside the ship—alert. And if you detect any disturbance of them at all, wake me up."

  His head hurt in the morning, hurt sitting still and hurt worse when he moved it, and ached blindingly while he bathed and shaved and dressed. He kept himself moving, bitter penance. He cleaned the living quarters and the galley, finally went down to the lock through crashes of the machinery that echoed in his head. The sunlight shot through his eyes to his nerve endings, all the way to his fingertips, and he walked out blind and with eyes watering and leaned on the nearest landing strut, advantaging himself of its pillar-like shade.

  He was ashamed of himself, self-disgusted. The fear had gotten him last night. The solitude had. He was not proud of his behavior in the forest: that was one thing, private and ugly; but when he came home and went to pieces in the ship, because it was dark, and because he had bad dreams. . .

  That scared him, far more substantially than any forest shadow deserved. His own mind had pounced on him last night.

  He walked out, wincing in the sunlight, to the parked crawler, leaned on the fender and followed with his eyes the track he had made coming in, before it curved out of sight around the ship. Grass and brush. He had ripped through it last night as if it had all turned animate. Hallucinations, perhaps. After last night he had another answer, which had to do with solitude and the human mind.

  He went back inside and finally took something for his head.

  By 1300 hours he was feeling better, the housekeeping duties done. Paced, in the confines of the living quarters, and caught himself doing it.

  Work had been the anodyne until now. . . driving himself, working until he dropped; he ran out of work and it was the liquor, to keep the nightmares off. Neither could serve, not over the stretch of years. He was not accustomed to thinking years. He forced himself to. . . to think of a life in more than terms of survival; to think of living as much as of doing and finding and discovering.

  He took one of the exercise mats outside, brought a flask of iced juice along with his biological notes and took Anne with him, with his favorite music tapes fed to the outside speakers. He stripped, spread his mat just beyond the canopy, and lay down to read, the music playing cheerfully and the warmth of Harley's star seeping pleasantly into his well-lotioned skin. He slept for a time, genuine and relaxed sleep, awoke and turned onto his back to let the sun warm his front for a time, a red glow through his closed lids.

  "Warren?"

  He shaded his eyes and looked up at the standing pseudosome. He had forgotten her. She had never moved.

  "Warren?"

  "Don't nag, Annie. I didn't say anything. Come here and sit down. You make me nervous."

  Anne dutifully obeyed, bent, flexed her knees an a/arming distance and fell the last half foot, catching herself on her extended hands, knees drawn up and spine rigid. Warren shook his head in despair and amusement. "Relax. You have to do that when you sit."

  The metal body sagged into jointed curves, brought itself more upright, settled again.

  "Dear Annie, if you were only human."

  Anne turned her sensor lights on, all of them. Thought a moment. "Corollary, Warren?"

  "To what? To if? Anne, my love, you aren't, and there isn't any."

  He had confused her. The lights flickered one after the other. "Clarify."

  "Human nature, that's all. Humans don't function well alone. They need contact with someone. But I'm all right. It's nothing to concern you."

  The motors hummed faintly and Anne reached out and let her hand down on his shoulder. The action was so human it frightened him. He looked into her ovoid face at the lights that danced inside and his heart beat wildly.

  "Is your status improving?"

  Contact with someone. He laughed sorrowfully and breathed a sigh.

  "I perceive internal disturbances."

  "Laughter. You know laughter."

  "This was different."

  "The pace of laughter varies."

  "Recorded." Anne drew back her hand. "You're happy."

  "Anne—what do you think about when I'm not here. When I'm not asking you to do something, and you have thoughts, what are they?"

  "I have a standard program."

  "And what's that?"

  "I maintain energy levels, regulate my circulation and temperature, monitor and repair my component—"

  "Cancel. You don't think. Like you do with me. You don't ask questions, decide, follow sequences of reasoning."

  The lights blinked a moment. "The automatic functions are sufficient except in an anomalous situation."

  "But I'm talking to the AI. You. the AI's something other than those programs. What do you do, sleep?"

  "I wait."

  Like the pseudosome, standing indefinitely. No discomfort to move her, to make her impatient. "You investigate stimuli."

  "Yes."

  "But there aren't many, are there?"

  A delay. Incomplete noun. "They are constant but not anomalous."

  "You're bored too."

  "Bored. No. Bored is not a state of optimum function. Bored is a human state of frustrated need for activity. This is not applicable to me. I function at optimum."

  "Functioning constantly doesn't damage you."

  "No."

  "Use the library. You can do that, can't you? If there aren't adequate stimuli in the environment to engage the AI, use the library. Maybe you'll learn something."

  "Recorded."

  "And then what do we do?"

  The lights blinked. "Context indeterminate. Please restate the question."

  "You could know everything there is to know, couldn't you, and you'd sit with it inside you and do nothing."

  "Context of do indeterminate. I'm not able to process the word in this context."

  He reached out, patted her silver leg. The sensors blinked. Her hand came back to him and stayed there, heavy, on his shoulder. Contact.

  "That's enough," he said, and removed his hand from her; she did the same. "Thank you, Anne." But he was cold inside.

  He relaxed finally, staring out beneath the ship toward the forest.

  There was the fear. There was where it sat. He hurt inside, and the healing was there, not sealing himself into the ship. Sterility. Inane acts and inane conversation.

  If he feared out there, the fear itself proved he was alive. It was an enemy to fight. It was something he did not program. It held the unanticipated, and that was precious.

  Anne, waiting forever, absorbing the stimuli and waiting for something anomalous, to turn on her intelligence. He saw himself doing that, sitting in the ship and waiting for a human lifetime—for some anomaly in the wind.

  No.

  6

  He came this time with a different kind of attack, slowly, considerately, the crawler equipped with sensor box and sample kits and recorders and food and water, rope and directional beeper, anything that seemed remotely useful. With the film camera. With a rifle with a nightscope. Overequipped, if anything, in which he found some humor. . . but he felt the safer for it.

  The raft was still securely tied to the branch, the sand about it unmarked by the passage of any moving creature, even void of insect tracks. On the far bank the forest waited in the dawn, peaceful—dark inside, as it would always be.

  Someday, he promised it. He loaded the raft, trip after trip from the crawler parked up on the bank. Anne was with him, disembodied, in the incarnation of her sensor box, in the com unit. She talked to him, telling him she detected vegetation, and he laughed and snugged the box into the bottom of the raft.

  "Reception is impaired," Anne complained.

  "Sorry. I don't want to drop the box into the river."

  "Please don't do that, Warren."

  He laughed again, in a good humor for Anne's witless witticisms. Piled other supplies about her sensors. "I'll pull you out if I need
you. Take care of the ship. I'm shutting you down. Your noise is interfering with my reception."

  "Please reconsider this program. The river is dangerous. Please reconsider."

  "Quiet." He shut her down. There was a reciprocal turn-on from her side, but she took orders and stayed off this time. He piled the last load in, coat and blanket in case it grew chill on the water.

  He untied the raft then, nudged it out a little, stepped in and sat down, taking up the paddle. It was not one of his skills, rafting. He had read the manual and thought it out. Drove against the gentle current, no great work: he reasoned that he could paddle upstream as long as he liked or wanted to, and return was the river's business.

  He passed the landing site on the far bank, passed an old log and wound along with the grassy bank on one side and the forest on the other. The river was so still on most of its surface it was hard to see in which direction it flowed. Shores turned to marsh on either side, and at some time unnoticed, the trees on the right, which had been growing thicker and thicker, closed off all view of the grasslands where the ship had landed. The banks began to have a thick border of reeds; some trees grew down into the water, making an obstacle of their knobby roots, making curtains of moss hanging almost low enough to sweep his shoulders as he passed. Green lilies drifted, beds of pads through which he drove the raft with shallow strokes, not to tangle the blade of the paddle in their tough stems. In places the navigable channel was no more than three meters across, a weaving of reeds and sandbars and shadows between banks a good stone's throw from side to side. It was a sleepy place, all tones of green and brown. . . no sky that was not filtered by leaves. A certain kind of tree was in bloom, shedding white petals as large as a man's hand on the water: they drifted like high-stemmed boats, clouds of them afloat, fleets and armadas destroyed by the dip of his paddle and the raft's blunt bow. The full flower had long stamens and pistils so that they looked like white spiders along the branches when they had shed, and like flocks of bird's before. Lilies were rife, and a fine-leafed floating weed grew wherever the water was shallow. It was worse than the lilies for tangling up the paddle: it broke off and hung, slick brownish leaves. It was not, he decided, particularly lovely stuff, and it made going very slow in the narrowest channels.