The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "That's absurd!"

  "Or perhaps they've become more hasty now that your ships are here and their judgment is in question. They have atomics within their capability, lord-navigator. They can disable your shuttle with beam-fire. They can simply welcome you to the list of casualties—a charge of heresy. A thing taken out of context, who knows? After all—all lords are immediately duplicatable, the captains accustomed to obey the lords-magistrate—what few of them are awake—am I not right? If an institution like myself can be threatened—where is the fifth lord-navigator in their plans? And of a sudden those plans will be moving in haste."

  Desan blinked. "Dr. Gothon—I assure you—"

  "If you are my friend, lord-navigator, I hope for your survival. The robots are theirs, do you understand. Their powerpacks are sufficient for transmission of information to the base AIs; and from the communications center it goes to satellites; and from satellites to the station and the lords-magistrate. This room is safe from their monitoring. We have seen to that. They cannot hear you."

  "I cannot believe these charges, I cannot accept it—"

  "Is murder so new?"

  "Then come with me! Come with me to the shuttle, we'll confront them—"

  "The transportation to the port is theirs. It would not permit. The transport AI would resist. The planes have AI components. And we might never reach the airfield."

  "My luggage. Dr. Gothon, my luggage—my com unit!" And Desan's heart sank, remembering the service-robots. "They have it."

  Gothon smiled, a small, amused smiled. "O spacefarer. So many scientists clustered here, and could we not improvise so simple a thing? We have a receiver-transmitter. Here. In this room. We broke one. We broke another. They're on the registry as broken. What's another bit of rubbish—on this poor planet? We meant to contact the ships, to call you, lord-navigator, when you came back. But you saved us the trouble. You came down to us like a thunderbolt. Like the birds you never saw, my space-born lord, swooping down on prey. The conferences, the haste you must have inspired up there on the station—if the lords-magistrate planned what I most suspect! I congratulate you. But knowing we have a transmitter—with your shuttle sitting on this world vulnerable as this building—what will you do, lord-navigator, since they control the satellite relay?"

  Desan sank down on his chair. Stared at Gothon. "You never meant to kill me. All this—you schemed to enlist me."

  "I entertained that hope, yes. I knew your predecessors. I also know your personal reputation—a man who burns his years one after the other as if there were no end of them. Unlike his predecessors. What are you, lord-navigator? Zealot? A man with an obsession? Where do you stand in this?"

  "To what—" His voice came hoarse and strange. "To what are you trying to convert me, Dr. Gothon?"

  "To our rescue from the lords-magistrate. To the rescue of truth."

  "Truth!" Desan waved a desperate gesture. "I don't believe you. I cannot believe you, and you tell me about plots as fantastical as your research and try to involve me in your politics. I'm trying to find the trail the Ancients took—one clue, one artifact to direct us—"

  "A new tablet?"

  "You make light of me. Anything. Any indication where they went. And they did go, doctor. You will not convince me with your statistics. The unforeseen and the unpredicted aren't in your statistics."

  "So you'll go on looking—for what you'll never find. You'll serve the lords-magistrate. They'll surely cooperate with you. They'll approve your search and leave this world . . . after the great catastrophe. After the catastrophe that obliterates us and all the records. An asteroid. Who but the robots chart their courses? Who knows how close it is at this moment?"

  "People would know a murder! They could never hide it!"

  "I tell you, Lord Desan, you stand in a place and you look around you and you say—what would be natural to this place? In this cratered, devastated world, in this chaotic, debris-ridden solar system—could not an input error by an asteroid miner be more credible an accident than atomics? I tell you when your shuttle descended, we thought you might be acting for the lords-magistrate. That you might have a weapon in your baggage which their robots would deliberately fail to detect. But I believe you, lord-navigator. You're as trapped as we. With only the transmitter and a satellite relay system they control. What will you do? Persuade the lords-magistrate that you support them? Persuade them to support you this further voyage—in return for your backing them? Perhaps they'll listen to you and let you leave."

  "But they will," Desan said. He drew in a deep breath and looked from Gothon to the others and back again. "My shuttle is my own. My robotics, Dr. Gothon. From my ship and linked to it. And what I need is that transmitter. Appeal to me for protection if you think it so urgent. Trust me. Or trust nothing and we will all wait here and see what truth is."

  Gothon reached into a pocket, held up an odd metal object. Smiled. Her eyes crinkled round the edges. "An old-fashioned thing, lord-navigator. We say key nowadays and mean something quite different, but I'm a relic myself, remember. Baffles hell out of the robots. Bothogi. Link up that antenna and unlock the closet and let's see what the lord-navigator and his shuttle can do."

  "Did it hear you?" Bothogi asked, a boy's honest worry on his unlined face. He still had the rock, as if he had forgotten it. Or feared robots. Or intended to use it if he detected treachery. "Is it moving?"

  "I assure you it's moving," Desan said, and shut the transmitter down. He drew a great breath, shut his eyes and saw the shuttle lift, a silver wedge spreading wings for home. Deadly if attacked. They will not attack it, they must not attack it, they will query us when they know the shuttle is launched and we will discover yet that this is all a ridiculous error of misunderstanding. And looking at nowhere: "Relays have gone; nothing stops it and its defenses are considerable. The lords-navigator have not been fools, citizens: we probe worlds with our shuttles, and we plan to get them back." He turned and faced Gothon and the other staff. "The message is out. And because I am a prudent man—are there suits enough for your staff? I advise we get to them. In the case of an accident."

  "The alarm," said Gothon at once. "Neoth, sound the alarm." And as a senior staffer moved: "the dome pressure alert," Gothon said. "That will confound the robots. All personnel to pressure suits; all robots to seek damage. I agree about the suits. Get them."

  The alarm went, a staccato shriek from overhead. Desan glanced instinctively at an uncommunicative white ceiling—

  —darkness, darkness above, where the shuttle reached the thin blue edge of space. The station now knew that things had gone greatly amiss. It should inquire, there should be inquiry immediate to the planet—

  Staffers had unlocked a second closet. They pulled out suits, not the expected one or two for emergency exit from this pressure-sealable room; but a tightly jammed lot of them. The lab seemed a mine of defenses, a stealthily equipped stronghold that smelled of conspiracy all over the base, throughout the staff—everyone in on it+++

  He blinked at the offering of a suit, ears assailed by the siren. He looked into the eyes of Bothogi who had handed it to him. There would be no call, no inquiry from the lords-magistrate. He began to know that, in the earnest, clear-eyed way these people behaved—not as lunatics, not schemers. Truth. They had told their truth as they believed it, as the whole base believed it. And the lords-magistrate named it heresy.

  His heart beat steadily again. Things made sense again. His hands found familiar motions, putting on the suit, making the closures.

  "There's that AI in the controller's office," said a senior staffer. "I have a key."

  "What will they do?" a younger staffer asked, panic-edged. "Will the station's weapons reach here?"

  "It's quite distant for sudden actions," said Desan. "Too far for beams and missiles are slow." His heartbeat steadied further. The suit was about him; familiar feeling; hostile worlds and weapons: more familiar ground. He smiled, not a pleasant kind of smile, a parting of lips
on strong, long teeth. "And one more thing, young citizen, the ships they have are transports. Miners. Mine are hunters. I regret to say we've carried weapons for the last two hundred thousand years, and my crews know their business. If the lords-magistrate attack that shuttle it will be their mistake. Help Dr. Gothon."

  "I've got it, quite, young lord." Gothon made the collar closure. "I've been handling these things longer than—"

  Explosion thumped somewhere away. Gothon looked up. All motion stopped. And the air-rush died in the ducts.

  "The oxygen system—" Bothogi exclaimed. "O damn them—!"

  "We have," Desan said coldly. He made no haste. Each final fitting of the suit he made with care. Suit-drill; example to the young: the lord-navigator, youngsters, demonstrates his skill. Pay attention. "And we've just had our answer from the lords-magistrate. We need to get to that AI and shut it down. Let's have no panic here. Assume that my shuttle has cleared the atmosphere—"

  —well above the gray clouds, the horror of the surface. Silver needle aimed at the heart of the lords-magistrate.

  Alert, alert, it would shriek, alert, alert, alert—With its transmission relying on no satellites, with its message shoved out in one high-powered bow-wave. Crew on the world is in danger. And, code that no lord-navigator had ever hoped to transmit, a series of numbers in syn-taxical link: Treachery: the lords-magistrate are traitors; aid and rescue—Alert, alert, alert—

  —anguished scream from a world of dust; a place of skulls; the grave of the search.

  Treachery: alert, alert, alert!

  Desan was not a violent man; he had never thought of himself as violent. He was a searcher, a man with a quest.

  He knew nothing of certainty. He believed a woman a quarter of a million years old, because—because Gothon was Gothon. He cried traitor and let loose havoc all the while knowing that here might be the traitor, this gentle-eyed woman, this collector of skulls.

  O Gothon, he would ask if he dared, which of you is false? To force the lords-magistrate to strike with violence enough to damn them—is that what you wish? Against a quarter million years of unabated life—what are my five incarnations: mere genetic congruency, without memory. I am helpless to know your perspectives.

  Have you planned this a thousand years, ten thousand?

  Do you stand in this place and think in the mind of creatures dead longer even than you have lived? Do you hold their skulls and think their thoughts? Was it purpose eight million years ago?

  Was it, is it—horror upon horror—a mistake on both sides?

  "Lord Desan," said Bothogi, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Lord Desan, we have a master key. We have weapons. We're waiting, Lord Desan."

  Above them the holocaust.

  It was only a service robot. It had never known its termination. Not like the base AI, in the director's office, which had fought them with locked doors and release of atmosphere, to the misfortune of the director—

  "Tragedy, tragedy," said Bothogi, standing by the small dented corpse, there on the ocher sand before the buildings. Smoke rolled up from a sabotaged lifesupport plant to the right of the domes; the world's air had rolled outward and inward and mingled with the breaching of the central dome—the AI transport's initial act of sabotage, ramming the plastic walls. "Microorganisms let loose on this world—the fools, the arrant fools!"

  It was not the microorganisms Desan feared. It was the AI eight-wheeled transport, maneuvering itself for another attack on the cold-sleep facilities. Prudent to have set themselves inside a locked room with the rest of the scientists and hope for rescue from offworld; but the AI would batter itself against the plastic walls, and living targets kept it distracted from the sleeping, helpless clones—Gothon's juniormost; Both-ogi's; those of a dozen senior staffers.

  And keeping it distracted became more and more difficult.

  Hour upon hour they had evaded its rushes, clumsy attacks and retreats in their encumbering suits. They had done it damage where they could while staff struggled to come up with something that might slow it. . . it lumped along now with a great lot of metal wire wrapped around its rearmost right wheel.

  "Damn!" cried a young biologist as it maneuvered for her position. It was the agile young who played this game; and one aging lord-navigator who was the only fighter in the lot.

  Dodge, dodge, and dodge. "It's going to catch you against the oxy-plant, youngster! This way!" Desan's heart thudded as the young woman thumped along in the cumbersome suit in a losing race with the transport. "Oh, damn, it's got it figured! Bothogi!"

  Desan grasped his probe-spear and jogged on— "Divert it!" he yelled. Diverting it was all they could hope for.

  It turned their way, a whine of the motor, a serpentine flex of its metal body and a flurry of sand from its eight-wheeled drive. "Run, lord!" Bothogi gasped beside him; and it was still turning—it aimed for them now, and at another tangent a white-suited figure hurled a rock, to distract it yet again.

  It kept coming at them. AI. An eight-wheeled, flex-bodied intelligence that had suddenly decided its behavior was not working and altered the program, refusing distraction. A pressure-windowed juggernaut tracking every turn they made.

  Closer and closer. "Sensors!" Desan cried, turning on the slick dust—his footing failed him and he caught himself, gripped the probe and aimed it straight at the sensor array clustered beneath the front window.

  Thum-p! The dusty sky went blue and he was on his back, skidding in the sand with the great balloon tires churning sand on either side of him.

  The suit, he thought with a spaceman's horror of the abrading, while it dawned on him at the same time that he was being dragged beneath the AI, and that every joint and nerve center was throbbing with the high-voltage shock of the probe.

  Things became very peaceful then, a cessation of commotion. He lay dazed, staring up at a rusty blue sky, and seeing it laced with a silver thread.

  They're coming, he thought, and thought of his eldest clone, sleeping at a well-educated twenty years of age. Handsome lad. He talked to the boy from time to time. Poor lad, the lordship is yours. Your predecessor was a fool—

  A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.

  "Get off," he said.

  "He's alive!" Bothogi's voice cried. "Dr. Gothon, he's still alive!"

  The world showed no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.

  Desan gazed on the world from his ship: it hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one had seen them more often than any since their launching.

  Home.

  The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority— "Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate," Desan decreed, "at some further world of the search." Let them hear this event as history.

  When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.

  "Lord-navigator?"

  "You'll wake your brother after we're away. Six. Directly after. I'll be staying
awake much of this trip."

  "Awake, sir?"

  "Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I'll be talking to you and Seven both."

  "About the lords-magistrate, sir?"

  Desan lifted brows at this presumption. "You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You'll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?"

  "No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!"

  "Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post. Six. Be grateful you don't have to cope with a new lordship and five new lords-magistrate and a recent schism." Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the Captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince— the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI's tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: the arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they caused him more pain than all the rest.

  A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station's computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observations. Those were redirected.

  Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.

  "Lord-navigator," the communications officer said. "Dr. Gothon returning your call."

  Good-bye, he had told Gothon. I don't accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don't profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.