The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Ships?"

  "Like he said," said Byrd, "some fellows just can't turn loose. And some can. So we got this far."

  "We can get as far as this," Earhart said. "Easy."

  "Further than this takes ships," Byrd said. "That's what we're here for. That's what we're looking for."

  "You wouldn't be a flier yourself," Earhart asked, "would you?"

  "I've got a short-hop license," Amir said.

  A couple of hands landed on his shoulders. He looked from one young face to the other—guys in blue coveralls, who grinned at him. "We got us a pilot," one said, and the other: "A modern pilot—"

  "One dead," Station Chief Babbs heard, and dropped her head into her hands, shaking it slowly. "Glasses and spilled drinks all over," the aide continued remorselessly. "The meds think he was just passed out drunk when the alarm went, just never heard it—"

  "God," Babbs said, and reached for a bottle of pills, fumbling the lid off.

  "The chief auditor's asking to see you," the comm said. "He's pretty upset."

  Pills spilled. Babbs popped a couple, started gathering up the rest.

  "Chief?"

  "Send him in."

  Babbs capped the bottle again, shoved it in the desk, looked up as the white-haired Auditor General stormed into the office, and shoved herself to her feet, leaning on the desk with her knuckles.

  "It's your damn staff!" she yelled before the auditor got a word out. "Your damn staff was occupying mine when an emergency broke out, which is why we have a fatality, mister, which is what's going on my report."

  The auditor shouted back, "What's going on mine is a station riddled with security problems, communication problems, and staff incompetency! I'm finishing our work on our ship, which thank God! is under our own lock and key, with its data, with enough evidence to see you broken, Station Chief Babbs! When we send what we've documented down to Earth, I assure you, there's quite enough there to file charges on you and eleven other culpable parties on this station—"

  "Chief?" the comm said. "Chief? Can you come out here?"

  "I'm in conference!" Babbs yelled at the comm. .

  "Chief. . ." the aide said, his voice hushed and agitated.

  "Excuse me," Babbs said with a small exhalation of breath, and went out to the anteroom; closed the door behind her.

  The aide, white-faced, gave Babbs a little scrap of paper with a written note.

  Upon which Babbs surprised the aide by grinning ear to ear.

  "I dunno how it happened," the dock chief said, standing in Station Control, beside an apoplectic Chief Auditor and a politely apologetic Isadora Babbs. The dock chief looked at the screen—which showed a shiny new government ship on a heading and at an acceleration nobody was in a position to intercept—and looked around at Babbs as if to ask was he supposed to keep his mouth shut on possibilities any long-term resident of the Station did know—

  Babbs made a little frown. The dock chief shrugged and said, "I guess it was the automatics just got some bug in them. Undocked that gal and at that point, there ain't no other answer, she just kicked in some kind of program—must've had a whole sequence punched in—"

  "No such thing!" the Auditor said.

  The dock chief shrugged a second time and prudently kept his mouth shut.

  While the EFS Liberty II, without a soul alive at her helm streaked toward deep space, outbound from the world, the station and all.

  1990

  A MUCH BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME

  Long ago a microbe decided to be god. It fissioned and became polytheistic. Rapidly the pond filled with gods fissioning and dividing until a passing rainstorm carried a number of the divinities downstream. They fissioned and filled a lake, which fed a river, which fed the sea. Within a billion years only isolate bodies of water lacked divinity. The microbes teleologically evolved bipedal colonies as transportation—which had drawbacks: these mobile colonies proved self directed and schismatic. The free swimming microbes (equally teleologically) maximized their reproductive potential by infiltrating mobile colonies which, responding to selective pressure, developed a space program.

  1991

  GWYDION AND THE DRAGON

  Once upon a time there was a dragon, and once upon that time a prince who undertook to win the hand of the elder and fairer of two princesses.

  Not that this prince wanted either of Madog's daughters, although rumors said that Eri was as wise and as gentle, as sweet and as fair as her sister Glasog was cruel and ill-favored. The truth was that this prince would marry either princess if it would save his father and his people; and neither if he had had any choice in the matter. He was Gwydion ap Ogan, and of princes in Dyfed he was the last.

  Being a prince of Dyfed did not, understand, mean banners and trumpets and gilt armor and crowds of courtiers. King Ogan's palace was a rambling stone house of dusty rafters hung with cooking pots and old harness; King Ogan's wealth was mostly in pigs and pastures—the same as all Ogan's subjects; Gwydion's war-horse was a black gelding with a crooked blaze and shaggy feet, who had fought against the bandits from the high hills. Gwydion's armor, serviceable in that perpetual warfare, was scarred leather and plain mail, with new links bright among the old; and lance or pennon he had none—the folk of Ogan's kingdom were not lowland knights, heavily armored, but hunters in the hills and woods, and for weapons this prince carried only a one-handed sword and a bow and a quiver of gray-feathered arrows.

  His companion, riding beside him on a bay pony, happened through no choice of Gwydion's to be Owain ap Llodri, the houndmaster's son, his good friend, by no means his squire: Owain had lain in wait along the way, on a borrowed bay mare—Owain had simply assumed he was going, and that Gwydion had only hesitated, for friendship's sake, to ask him. So he saved Gwydion the necessity.

  And the lop-eared old dog trotting by the horses' feet was Mili: Mili was fierce with bandits, and had respected neither Gwydion's entreaties nor Owain's commands thus far: stones might drive her off for a few minutes, but Mili came back again, that was the sort Mili was. That was the sort Owain was too, and Gwydion could refuse neither of them. So Mili panted along at the pace they kept, with big-footed Blaze and the bownosed bay, whose name might have been Swallow or maybe not— the poets forget—and as they rode Owain and Gwydion talked mostly about dogs and hunting.

  That, as the same poets say, was the going of Prince Gwydion into King Madog's realm.

  Now no one in Dyfed knew where Madog had come from. Some said he had been a king across the water. Some said he was born of a Roman and a Pict and had gotten sorcery through his mother's blood. Some said he had bargained with a dragon for his sorcery—certainly there was a dragon: devastation followed Madog's conquests, from one end of Dyfed to the other.

  Reasonably reliable sources said Madog had applied first to King Bran, across the mountains, to settle at his court, and Bran having once laid eyes on Madog's elder daughter, had lusted after her beyond all good sense and begged Madog for her.

  Give me your daughter, Bran had said to Madog, and I'll give you your heart's desire. But Madog had confessed that Eri was betrothed already, to a terrible dragon, who sometimes had the form of a man, and who had bespelled Madog and all his house: if Bran could overcome this dragon, he might have Eri with his blessings, and his gratitude and the faithful help of his sorcery all his life; but if he died childless, Madog, by Bran's own oath, must be his heir.

  That was the beginning of Madog's kingdom. So smitten was Bran that he swore to those terms, and died that very day, after which Madog ruled in his place.

  After that Madog had made the same proposal to three of his neighbor kings, one after the other, proposing that each should ally with him and unite their kingdoms if the youngest son could win Eri from the dragon's spell and provide him an heir. But no prince ever came back from his quest. And the next youngest then went, until all the sons of the kings were gone, so that the kingdoms fell under Madog's rule.

  After them, Madog sent to King
Ban, and his sons died, last of all Prince Rhys, Gwydion's friend. Ban's heart broke, and Ban took to his bed and died.

  Some whispered now that the dragon actually served Madog, that it had indeed brought Madog to power, under terms no one wanted to guess, and that this dragon did indeed have another form, which was the shape of a knight in strange armor, who would become Eri's husband if no other could win her. Some said (but none could prove the truth of it) that the dragon-knight had come from far over the sea, and that he devoured the sons and daughters of conquered kings, that being the tribute Madog gave him. But whatever the truth of that rumor, the dragon hunted far and wide in the lands Madog ruled and did not disdain to take the sons and daughters of farmers and shepherds too. Devastation went under his shadow, trees withered under his breath, and no one saw him outside his dragon shape and returned to tell of it, except only Madog and (rumor said) his younger daughter Glasog, who was a sorceress as cruel as her father.

  Some said that Glasog could take the shape of a raven and fly over the land choosing whom the dragon might take. The people called her Madog's Crow, and feared the look of her eye. Some said she was the true daughter of Madog and that Madog had stolen Eri from Faerie, and given her mother to the dragon; but others said they were twins, and that Eri had gotten all that an ordinary person had of goodness, while her sister Glasog—

  "Prince Gwydion," Glasog said to her father, "would have come on the quest last year with his friend Rhys, except his father's refusing him, and Prince Gwydion will not let his land go to war if he can find another course. He'll persuade his father."

  "Good," Madog said. "That's very good." Madog smiled, but Glasog did not. Glasog was thinking of the dragon. Glasog harbored no illusions: the dragon had promised Madog that he would be king of all Wales if he could achieve this in seven years; and rule for seventy and seven more with the dragon's help.

  But if he failed—failed by the seventh year to gain any one of the kingdoms of Dyfed, if one stubborn king withstood him and for one day beyond the seven allotted years, kept him from obtaining the least, last stronghold of the west, then all the bargain was void and Madog would have failed in everything.

  And the dragon would claim a forfeit of his choosing.

  That was what Glasog thought of, in her worst nightmares: that the dragon had always meant to have all the kingdoms of the west with very little effort—let her father win all but one and fail, on the smallest letter of the agreement. What was more, all the generals in all the armies they had taken agreed that the kingdom of Ogan could never be taken by force: there were mountains in which resistance could hide and not even dragonfire could burn all of them; but most of all there was the fabled Luck of Ogan, which said that no force of arms could defeat the sons of Ogan.

  Watch, Madog had said. And certainly her father was astute, and cunning, and knew how to snare a man by his pride. There's always a way, her father had said, to break a spell. This one has a weakness. The strongest spells most surely have their soft spots.

  And Ogan had one son, and that was Price Gwydion.

  Now we will fetch him, Madog said to his daughter. Now we will see what his luck is worth.

  The generals said, "If you would have a chance in war, first be rid of Gwydion."

  But Madog said, and Glasog agreed, there are other uses for Gwydion.

  "It doesn't look different," Owain said as they passed the border stone.

  It was true. Nothing looked changed at all. There was no particular odor of evil, or of threat. It might have been last summer, when the two of them had hunted with Rhys. They had used to hunt together every summer, and last autumn they had tracked the bandit Llewellyn to his lair, and caught him with stolen sheep. But in the spring Ban's sons had gone to seek the hand of Madog's daughter, and one by one had died, last of them, in early summer, Rhys himself.

  Gwydion would have gone, long since, and long before Rhys. A score of times Gwydion had approached his father King Ogan and his mother Queen Belys and begged to try his luck against Madog, from the first time Madog's messenger had appeared and challenged the kings of Dyfed to war or wedlock. But each time Ogan had refused him, arguing in the first place that other princes, accustomed to warfare on their borders, were better suited, and better armed, and that there were many princes in Dyfed, but he had only one son.

  But when Rhys had gone and failed, the last kingdom save that of King Ogan passed into Madog's hands. And Gwydion, grief-stricken with the loss of his friend, said to his parents, "If we had stood together, we might have defeated this Madog; if we had taken the field then, together, we might have had a chance; if you had let me go with Rhys, one of us might have won and saved the other. But now Rhys is dead and we have Madog for a neighbor. Let me go when he sends to us. Let me try my luck at courting his daughter. A war with him now we may not lose, but we cannot hope to win."

  Even so Ogan had resisted him, saying that they still had their mountains for a shield, difficult going for any army; and arguing that their luck had saved them this far and that it was rash to take matters into their own hands.

  Now the nature of that luck was this: that of the kingdoms in Dyfed, Ogan's must always be poorest and plainest. But that luck meant that they could not fail in war nor fail in harvest: it had come down to them from Ogan's own greatgrandfather Ogan ap Ogan of Llanfynnyd, who had sheltered one of the Faerie unaware; and only faithlessness could break it—so greatgrandfather Ogan had said. So: "Our luck will be our defense," Ogan argued with his son. "Wait and let Madog come to us. We'll fight him in the mountains."

  "Will we fight a dragon? Even if we defeat Madog himself, what of our herds, what of our farmers and our freeholders? Can we let the land go to waste and let our people feed this dragon, while we hide in the hills and wait for luck to save us? Is that faithfulness?" That was what Gwydion had asked his father, while Madog's herald was in the hall—a raven black as unrepented sin . . . or the intentions of a wizard.

  "Madog bids you know," this raven had said, perched on a rafter of Ogan's hall, beside a moldering basket and a string of garlic, "that he has taken every kingdom of Dyfed but this. He offers you what he offered others: if King Ogan has a son worthy to win Madog's daughter and get an heir, then King Ogan may rule in peace over his kingdom so long as he lives, and that prince will have titles and the third of Madog's realm besides. . . .

  "But if the prince will not or cannot win the princess, then Ogan must swear Madog is his lawful true heir. And if Ogan refuses this, then Ogan must face Madog's army, which now is the army of four kingdoms each greater than his own. Surely," the raven had added, fixing all present with a wicked, midnight eye, "it is no great endeavor Madog asks— simply to court his daughter. And will so many die, so much burn? Or will Prince Gwydion win a realm wider than your own? A third of Madog's lands is no small dowry and inheritance of Madog's kingdom is no small prize."

  So the raven had said. And Gwydion had said to his mother, "Give me your blessing," and to his father Ogan: "Swear the oath Madog asks. If our Luck can save us, it will save me and win me this bride; but if it fails me in this, it would have failed us in any case."

  Maybe, Gwydion thought as they passed the border, Owain was a necessary part of that luck. Maybe even Mili was. It seemed to him now that he dared reject nothing that loved him and favored him, even if it was foolish and even if it broke his heart: his luck seemed so perilous and stretched so thin already he dared not bargain with his fate.

  "No sign of a dragon, either," Owain said, looking about them at the rolling hills.

  Gwydion looked about him too, and at the sky, which showed only the lazy flight of a single bird.

  Might it be a raven? It was too far to tell.

  "I'd think," said Owain, "it would seem grimmer than it does."

  Gwydion shivered as if a cold wind had blown. But Blaze plodded his heavy-footed way with no semblance of concern, and Mili trotted ahead, tongue lolling, occasionally sniffing along some trail that crossed theirs.
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  "Mili would smell a dragon," Owain said.

  "Are you sure?" Gwydion asked. He was not. If Madog's younger daughter could be a raven at her whim, he was not sure what a dragon might be at its pleasure.

  That night they had a supper of brown bread and sausages that Gwydion's mother had sent, and ale that Owain had with him.

  "My mother's brewing," Owain said. "My father's store." And Owain sighed and said: "By now they must surely guess I'm not off hunting."

  "You didn't tell them?" Gwydion asked. "You got no blessing in this?"

  Owain shrugged, and fed a bit of sausage to Mili, who gulped it down and sat looking at them worshipfully.

  Owain's omission of duty worried Gwydion. He imagined how Owain's parents would first wonder where he had gone, then guess, and fear for Owain's life, for which he held himself entirely accountable. In the morning he said, "Owain, go back. This is far enough."

  But Owain shrugged and said, "Not I. Not without you." Owain rubbed Mili's ears. "No more than Mili, without me."

  Gwydion had no least idea now what was faithfulness and what was a young man's foolish pride. Everything seemed tangled. But Owain seemed not in the least distressed.

  Owain said, "We'll be there by noon tomorrow."

  Gwydion wondered, Where is this dragon? and distrusted the rocks around them and the sky over their heads. He felt a presence in the earth—or thought he felt it. But Blaze and Swallow grazed at their leisure. Only Mili looked worried—Mili pricked up her ears, such as those long ears could prick, wondering, perhaps, if they were going to get to bandits soon, and whether they were, after all, going to eat that last bit of breakfast sausage.

  "He's on his way," Glasog said. "He's passed the border."

  "Good," said Madog. And to his generals. "Didn't I tell you?"