The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "If I was lucky," she said, and held up a cautioning finger, "only if I was lucky, wouldn't it be, Master Toth? And your books will tell you what's luckiest for you and me and all—won't they?" She smiled at him, a cheerful, believing smile. "I'm what you was born for, me, Melot Cassissinin, and I'm the luckiest woman alive."

  1985

  THE UNSHADOWED LAND

  God turned his left eye to the earth and it shone like silver and burned the land with cold; he looked on the world with his right eye and that eye blazed like gold at melting heat: like the refining of gold it burned. He spread his wings and the wind of them scoured the sands with heat and broke the very stone. He flew, and the shadow of his wings was the sandstorm: so vast were those wings that there was nothing but that shadow in the world. So terrible was the wind of those wings that it mingled earth and sky to the depth and the height and hurled great stones from their seats.

  And when God had folded away those wings and looked out again from his white-hot right eye (he watched his brothers and sisters with the other, warily, knowing their ways)—When God looked out on the world it was not the same world; and it was not the same Akhet who walked a crooked line over the sands, for this Akhet was burned, and the sound of the wings of God had entered into her skull, so that she heard them continually in the stillness of the sands, and communed with nothing else, not even memory.

  It was the whim of God to turn up old secrets in the sands, in each re-making of the world, curiosities which he had collected and now brought beneath his gaze. Some were mirthful, smiling as they gazed eyelessly upon the eyes of God; some were dried wisps of leather and bone, bizarrely contorted as if they sought in their motionless way to sink into the depths again; others still had an anguished look, as if they protested such violence. Rarest and most amazing, a few gazed upward with profound solemnity, sere flesh almost indistinguishable from bone: they smiled the inward smiles of ancient kings and queens, in their rags or their nakedness. There were beasts also, and stalking carnivores of polished bone, some of twisted horror, others of gaunt, wind-scoured nobleness. There were stones which God had made and his creatures had shaped in imitation of him and his brothers and his sisters. There were the remnants of places which had had great names among such creatures, but God himself gave them no names and they had none now, like Akhet, who had forgotten that she was Akhet, or what direction she moved.

  She walked among these treasures. Sometimes it was one way and sometimes it was another: she forgot. But she found fellowship with these memories of God, and laughed with them, for she saw that the skin of her flesh became like their flesh, seamed with fine lines; and she fancied that her face was the face of the kings and queens she found, sere-lipped and hollow-cheeked and terrible as God.

  She laughed; and was alone with that laughter in her skull, which rang in sudden silence, for the roar of the wings, which had never yet ceased in her ears, did cease. She stood in the white-hot sight of God, in the light of his right eye that left no shadows on the land, in his terrible light that left no color but its own, and shone round the rocks so that they cast no shadow. There was no dark place in all the land. The eye of God looked into Akhet's heart, and the light of his eye shone all round it as it did the stones, and it was one color with the stones and the land, as all things were. The silence became that color and that taste, which was like the smell of molten copper in the nostrils; and that silence drank up her laughter and gave it back again.

  Aaaa-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ket, akhet, akhet, Akhet.

  Her voice had become the voice of God, and that voice called her name, so that she turned and came, trusting as a child.

  "Akhet!" she cried now and again, seeking herself. Or she was God, seeking Akhet. God's voice forever called her name, in a voice multiplied and strange.

  "Akhet, Akhet, Akhet!"

  She had thirsted; she had water and had forgotten this, when the wings had left her deaf. Now it made a small welcome sound as she walked, like the river-song. (Indeed she trod on the stones of another of God's forgotten secrets, the very mummy of a river, which was sere as the forgotten dead. The stones of its bed clicked beneath her feet, and the shreds of her sandals caught and made her stumble.) She carried other things she had forgotten. They burdened her, but she did not let them go, having recalled that they were Akhet and Akhet was these things. She drained the stagnant heat of the waterskin and let it fall empty at her side. She laughed and God laughed, redoubled her laughter, and slowly closed his eye.

  It was the moment of shadow, of half-real things.

  She saw cliffs. And those cliffs were red as blood. And they echoed with the voice of God—Akhet, Akhet, het, het—

  "Aiii," she cried in this blindness, when the eye of God had left her, and in the shadow-world she suspected God's mirth, and delusion.

  Aiii, ii, ti! the cliffs gave back. She walked, and the delusion of a river became moisture under her feet, and the pain and the moisture grew— it was a river of blood in the dying of the light; and the cliffs were stained with it; and the shadows multiplied and moved.

  "God!" she cried. (And God—god—god—, the stones.)

  A jackal came to meet her, beside the riverbed. This was God's brother, and she was uneasy, for the brothers of God were his enemies, and this one was sly. He knew how to steal a soul away in his jaws, and take it down among his shadows before his brother saw. He laughed, and she walked on the blood, sure that she knew the river now, that it was the Dark River she had found; and the jackal-god would wish to lead her if he could.

  She bent and gathered up a stone.

  "Go away!" she cried. (Go away-way-way, the cliffs gave back.) She hurled it, and the god jumped aside, then trotted off a few paces and stood in recovered solemnity, his great ears pricked up, with which he hears his brother's thoughts and every counsel in the world. He smiled, and his jackal's teeth were sharp.

  She threw another stone, and it became a spear in mid-flight; it became a spear in her mind, and flew with the noise of voices and the sound of waters. She wept when she had cast it, and stood still and shocked, in a place of rocks, in the blindness of God.

  A stone turned and clicked. Another moved. She spun about to see, and the stones betrayed her, and she crashed down to her knees, blinking at this stranger the shadows made, this pale shape on whose breast a pectoral glittered in the wan last light: and on whose wrists the sheen of night-wrapped gold. Gold lapped her waist and spilled like flood on her thighs, and the linen of her robe was night-bound white; and the smell of her was like the smell of myrrh and smoke.

  "Goddess," said Akhet, in the blindness of God, when he searched the worlds for his brothers and sisters, their doings. But one of the gods was surely here; and another was there, the jackal in the shadows; and Akhet forgot the stone on which her hand had fallen. Her knees quaked under her, for the goddess walked the trail of her blood and her face was the hollow-cheeked face of the queens of the dust. Her eyes were the pits of their eyes; and her mouth held the sere, fixed pleasure of their mouths, which hold secrets and do not share.

  "What is your name?" that mouth asked.

  "Akhet," said Akhet.

  "And again: what name?"

  "Akhet."

  "Again: what name?"

  It was a spell, Akhet was sure, and her bowels went to water and the wounds of her feet stung. She stank of sweat and trembled, and remembered the stone in her hand, so that her hand began to shake. She wished to throw that stone. But her own name froze in her mouth and stopped in her throat and barred her breath, or her soul would have come out into the night that moment, into the goddess' hands.

  "It is not your name," the goddess said, and it was not. She was robbed and desolate and shivered in the cold. She had no hope then, that God would look and drive her Death away. God would open his silver eye but she would have no more name than the other secrets of this plain, and she would be no more than that to him.

  "Mine is Neit," the goddess said.

  It wa
s a Death. There were many. This was hers; and she became calm then, and put her stone neatly back among the other stones. She remembered she carried things. One was an empty waterskin. One was a sheathed sword. One was a quiver of arrows, but she had lost the bow. She gathered these things into her lap, against her knees, and held to them as hers.

  But the goddess sat down before her, her fine linen and her gold glimmering in God's blindness. Her smell was sweet attar and lotus amid the myrrh. "Why have you come here?" the goddess asked.

  She tried to recall. She hunted this memory through her wits and it turned and leapt on her, black and sudden, so that she shook and hugged the remnants of herself.

  "I came to die," she said; and a portion of herself came back to her, so that she winced and rocked with the grief of it, clutching at the sword. Red blood ran on sand and swirled in river currents, scarlet thread in brown. Cities burned. Tombs stood desolate. "Where have I come?" She blinked and lifted her eyes and gazed about the cliffs. There was no river, only a dry bed of stones between dead banks. "Goddess, where have I come?"

  "Where you are. Lift up the sword. Lift up the sword, child."

  She blinked, clenched the hilt to draw it closer. It was her defense. This alone she had. But the hilt slid from the sheath and the blade was broken.

  —had broken, in her hand. The children wailed, wailed in the fire and smoke; the chariots swept down on the morning gates—

  She shook and trembled. The quiver spilled arrows of spoiled fletch-ings and dulled points. The sheath fell empty at her knees. She cast the blade after it and bowed her head and wept.

  "What happened, daughter?" The voice came gently from those sere, awful jaws. "What became of the children?"

  "O Neit, the chariots, the bitter swords—"

  "Iron," the goddess named them. "The swords are iron." And the word went through her bones.

  "No," she cried, and pressed her hands against her eyes. "O goddess, my children—"

  "You fought."

  "They killed my children!"

  "They burned your cities."

  "My cities. . . ."

  She shuddered and wiped her eyes. There were bracelets on her wrists. They were an archer's bracelets. Her right hand had an archer's calluses. And some of herself came back. Her back went straighten She stared at her death with her chin lifted and her heart beat stronger. "Can we not be done with what you have to do?"

  "What is your name?"

  A pain struck her heart, bleak and terrible.

  —the jaws of crocodiles, the dead devoured, the mummies of kings hurled into the waters with the lately dead, stripped of all their gold—

  "I lost," she said to the goddess. "I lost. Is there more name than that?"

  "Bronze swords," the goddess said, "are no match for iron. Weak metal breaks."

  "We had no iron."

  "They gave your children to the crocodiles."

  "We fought!"

  (—fought, fought, the echoes said.)

  "You fought. You fled. This is the unshadowed land. God burns it with his left eye and his right scours its secrets to the surface. Here is the resting place."

  "This? This is paradise?"

  "For the railed, the lost, those who forget their names. Those who give them up."

  "I gave nothing up!"

  "Would you do battle here?"

  "For what? My soul?"

  "Your name."

  She drew a breath that ached with myrrh and lotus. With the smell of eternity. She let it go and laughed a weak, tearful laugh. Something broke then, like a scar tearing in her heart; but torn, it let the breath gust from her and come in again greater than before. She thought of her dead and her cities, of the thunder of the chariots like the wings of God. She rose to her feet with the sword hilt in her hand, and its pitiful small blade. The goddess rose, and the wind stirred her robes with the scent of dried leaves and sunbaked death.

  "And if I lose, O Neit?"

  "Do you ask?"

  She drew another breath, freer than the last. She shook her head and the weight of braided locks swung about her face. "No." She went to fighting stance. "No need."

  The goddess stretched out her hand. The sword grew cold as the left eye of God himself and shattered in her hand.

  She hurled the hilt, and the goddess flung up her hands to ward it off; in that instant she rushed forward and flung her arms about her death.

  It was utter, bitter cold. And Neit whispered in her ear: "You have won, daughter. I will tell your name. Let me go."

  "Do you swear?"

  "By the left eye I swear." And Neit became like smoke, flowing backward from her grasp, so that she stumbled to her knees. "Dear sister."

  "My name!"

  "It is Sekhmet."

  —temples ravaged, gold spilled, images of the lion-eyed tumbled and stripped of ornament, her name erased and scarred—

  "No," she cried. "I never was!"

  "Sekhmet, my sister. They have burned your cities, slaughtered your babes, and your priestesses—can you forget? Can you forget your land?"

  —priestesses dying in the courtyards, the young man before the walls—

  "Do you not hear them?"

  It was a murmuring, like the river, like the wail of babes and the keening of the doomed.

  —A few struggled in the dark, in the shadow, a few still struck and ran—

  "I have no sword!"

  Goddess! Sekhmet! Lion-headed, lion-hearted, help us or we die—

  "One can always forget again," said Neit. "One can lie down and sleep in this place of forgotten gods."

  "A curse on you!" Sekhmet cried, and picked up the bladeless hilt.

  "With that?" Neit mocked her. "You left your shield. Your bow is broken. You have no sword."

  "Iron," Sekhmet said. She drew a great breath, and hurled the hilt through Neit's insubstance. There came a sweet taint of corruption in the air. And blood. She walked upon it. Her feet slipped upon the stones.

  "Where are you going?" Anubis asked, jackal-headed. He stood in shadows close to the path. His ears pricked up. His voice came strangely from narrow jaws. "What are you hunting, Sekhmet?"

  She turned her face on him and he stepped back. "Follow in my steps," she said; and her voice had changed. Her step had grown softer and catlike sure.

  "What do you seek?" asked Neit, behind her, her voice grown faint and far. "What do you seek?"

  "Worshippers. And swords."

  Then there was no voice. She leapt from rock to rock.

  The wind stirred, for God spread his wings. He turned his left eye to the world, and the silver cold of it spilled down the cliffs and onto the stones and round their edges until there was no shadow anywhere. There was only cold, cold to crack the marrow and break the rocks.

  A lion stalked the unshadowed plain, headed riverward, though that river was long distant. At some distance a jackal followed in the distracted way of his kind, seeking this and seeking that, but never losing the track, not quite. The great terror was loose again; war stalked on lion's feet, seeking lost young, lost prey, and her steps had the smell of blood. He always followed her, did the jackal god.

  1985

  POTS

  It was a most bitter trip, the shuttle-descent to the windy surface. Suited, encumbered by lifesupport, Desan stepped off the platform and waddled onward into the world, waving off the attentions of small spidery surface robots: "Citizen, this way, this way, citizen, have a care— Do watch your step; a suit tear is hazardous."

  Low-level servitors. Desan detested them. The chief of operations had plainly sent these creatures accompanied only by an AI eight-wheel transport, which inconveniently chose to park itself a good five hundred paces beyond the shuttle blast zone, an uncomfortable long walk across the dusty pan in the crinkling, pack-encumbered oxy-suit. Desan turned, casting a forlorn glance at the shuttle waiting there on its landing gear, silver, dip-nosed wedge under a gunmetal sky, at rest on an ocher and rust landscape. He shivered in t
he sky-view, surrendered himself and his meager luggage to the irritating ministries of the service robots, and waddled on his slow way down to the waiting AI transport.

  "Good day," the vehicle said inanely, opening a door. "My passenger compartment is not safe atmosphere; do you understand. Lord Desan?

  "Yes, yes." Desan climbed in and settled himself in the front seat, a slight give of the transport's suspensors. The robots fussed about in in-sectile hesitance, delicately setting his luggage case just so, adjusting, adjusting till it conformed with their robotic, template-compared notion of their job. Maddening. Typical robotic efficiency. Desan slapped the pressure-sensitive seating. "Come, let's get this moving, shall we?"

  The AI talked to its duller cousins, a single squeal that sent them scuttling; "Attention to the door, citizen." It lowered and locked. The AI started its noisy drive motor. "Will you want the windows dimmed, citizen?"

  "No. I want to see this place."

  "A pleasure, Lord Desan."

  Doubtless for the AI, it was.

  The station was situated a long drive across the pan, across increasingly softer dust that rolled up to obscure the rearview—softer, looser dust, occasionally a wind-scooped hollow that made the transport flex— "Do forgive me, citizen. Are you comfortable?"

  "Quite, quite, you're very good."

  "Thank you, citizen."

  And finally—finally!—something other than flat appeared, the merest humps of hills, and one anomalous mountain, a massive, long bar that began as a haze and became solid; became a smooth regularity before the gentle brown folding of hills hardly worthy of the name.

  Mountain. The eye indeed took it for a volcanic or sedimentary formation at distance, some anomalous and stubborn outcrop in this barren reach, where all else had declined to entropy, absolute, featureless flat. But when the AI passed along its side this mountain had joints and seams, had the marks of making on it; and even knowing in advance what it was, driving along within view of the jointing, this work of Ancient hands—chilled Desan's well-traveled soul. The station itself came into view against the weathered hills, a collection of shocking green domes on a brown lifeless world. But such domes Desan had seen. With only the AI for witness, Desan turned in his seat, pressed the flexible bubble of the helmet to the double-seal window, and stared and stared at the stonework until it passed to the rear and the dust obscured it.